Huh... I hadn't noticed that the Darting/Flashing feats were only if you were armed with a single melee weapon (I thought it was just for attacking with the same weapon twice).  Looks like if you're a shield-user, the correct answer is to avoid extra-attack feats altogether.

Actually, the obstruction rules seem to imply to me that Bull Rush involves physically shoving someone the entire way along the path, rather than knocking someone flying through the air.  The obstruction rules indicate that if the Bull Rusher rams the target into something stronger than the Bull Rusher, he bounces off (and takes damage either way, even if he successfully plows through it).

An  obstructing  object  makes  a  Damage  save  against  the
bullrusher’s  Athletics  result.  With  success,  all  movement
ends  and  the  bullrusher  becomes  sprawled;  otherwise,  the
Bull  Rush  punches  through  the  obstructing  object  and
continues past it. With either result, the bullrusher and his
opponent both suffer the bullrusher’s unarmed damage.

This still seems to open up a potential mechanic for a "Shoulder Check" sort of trick-- like ignoring any damage and sprawling resulting from mashing an opponent into an obstacle.  Another mechanic (which could probably be rolled into the same trick without overpowering it) might be to allow the Bull Rusher to choose one of three adjacent squares to push the opponent into with each step (the square directly away from the Rusher and the two squares on either side of it).

So, I'm looking at the Rune Knight, and I'm asking, "What the hell is that thing?" It looks like it could be some sort of hunga munga, which of course we don't have stats for.

I'm going with giant-made/upscaled shuriken. Wish you could put the bayonet upgrade on on that too, since that would make the effective even without being thrown.

Chakram will do though.

Under the assumption it works as a nasty fist-load ina addition to being throwable, that would be basically make it a dagger. Maybe a dagger with the orc and keen upgrades?

Chakram with Spike upgrade?  As a bonus, chakrams are already Keen 4.

Path of Fortune II says I can activate criticals "without spending an action die", but does it have any effect on multi-die critical activations?  I'm assuming you can't automatically get a 4-die critical success for free, but does it reduce the cost by one for a multi-die critical?  Thanks!

What if you could activate any time you or a teammate had an action die used against them?

This doesn't seem to really solve anything.  If we leave the cap in place, it essentially becomes a clone of Fortunate, since I think we can assume the GM will use at least as many action dice in a session as you have chance feats, and it probably eliminates any supposed meta-game effect, if there was any to begin with.  If you remove the cap, it gets kind of ridiculous (10+ action dice?).

As far as the "whichever is higher" cap, I don't see it as particularly necessary, but it doesn't really hurt anything apart from the elegance of the mechanic.

Since it looks like this (awesome) tool is still being actively maintained...

1) Is there any difference between the version in the "npc-beta" directory and the one in the "npc-builder" directory?

2) The Bright quality is only costing out at 1 XP/grade in the builder, whereas the book says it's 3XP/grade.

3) I manually built an Elephant in the NPC builder (twice) and came out with a different XP value (79) than the pre-built one in the bestiary (74).  Is the book elephant intentionally discounted, or is there another XP-value discrepancy in the NPC builder?  My cursory examination can't find any problems with the XP values in the NPC builder, so I'm guessing the book XP value is either discounted or an error.

Thanks for putting such a useful tool together, along with the Treasure Generator!

[worst]

I'm in the Morgenstern boat here-- I'm not convinced that leaving Fortune's Fool uncapped breaks it or makes it particularly exploitable, since you basically need GM complicity.  At worst, this feat could cause the GM to stop using action dice on you, but that seems to have nothing to do with whether it's capped or not.  And while immunity from GM action dice would be a fairly big deal if you could reliably assure this would be the case, it's still not what I'd call "broken".

That said, if people object to an uncapped ability on principle, I think it would be better to cap it at something like Starting Action Dice, so that at least it has some appeal to a non-chance-specialist, whereas the chance specialist would still always take Fortunate instead (or at least first).  I'd also grant "normal"/untyped action dice rather than bonus d4 dice for Fortune's Fool, but maybe I'm just not seeing the obvious ways that destroys the integrity of the game.

I can buy that Fortunate may just be "too good".  It strikes me that it would still be worthwhile if it just said "You get 3 bonus d4 action dice", or "...a number of d4 bonus action dice equal to your starting action dice minus one" or somesuch, so that it doesn't encourage the chance-feat-apocalypse builds that get doubly more powerful with each new feat, since their action dice become more potent and plentiful at the same time.  Action dice haven't really been a game-breaking factor for us so far, but then I'm only a level 3 chance-monkey at this point, and our GM almost never bothers handing them out to anyone.  I can see how things can get silly down the road.

And I'm not really looking at FC as 'just another d20', because Spycraft 2.0 was my first exposure to d20-- I'm coming more from the perspective of someone who stopped roleplaying for over a decade and recently came back (to Spycraft 2.0), so I was most familiar with old-school World of Darkness.  Like I said, it wasn't a criticism-- I can see how it's probably part of a larger trend towards making GM'ing more systematic so it's not quite so wide-open and intimidating to a new GM.  I guess I'm still getting used to these new-fangled 21st-century RPGs. : )

You gain quite a bit in actual play. Being able to realistically gamble on NOT having action dice used against you (less damage suffered, fewer critical hits suffered, fewer errors turned into Critical Failures, fewer opposed skill checks lost) means your action dice last you waaay longer. You get to save them for times you KNOW you need them, rather than use them to edge a roll and "be sure" you'll succeed. In practice, the new Fortune's Fool lets you do some old-time poker-style bluff and call staredowns with the GM. That kind of action, playing chicken with fate, is EXACTLY the flavor most of the Chance feats are supposed to be representing.

All that, however, is largely beside the point, which ultimately is this: if you don't like it, do what you want. It's your game. I happen to believe the feat is frickin' awesome, with lasers on its head, but that's just me.

*shrug*  I think you have a weird relationship with your GM. : )  I don't think ours goes through that kind of calculus when deciding whether or not to use action dice.  It's more like "will this screw them over too badly or not?"

Actually, that's one thing I find a bit weird about Crafty games, how the GM is limited and treated almost like he's playing competitively against the players (with the whole GM action dice system, and other parts of the book that "allow" the GM to do things).  I guess I'm used to the GM basically having unlimited power to do whatever the hell he wants in order to, in his judgment, produce a more interesting story and fun experience, even extending to making up rolls behind his screen if he thinks it will further the narrative.  Obviously, it still basically applies, but it seems like the system tries to pretend it doesn't.  I don't mean that to sound like criticism, exactly... it just strikes me as odd, as a newcomer to the system.

I think the Fortune's Fool = a weaker Fortunate is a little flawed. I don't play in a vacuum, against a computer-like GM. I play with a person. With the new Fortune's Fool, the GM has to decide if burning one of his Action Dice against my chance monkey is worth giving me yet another D4-sized AD. Any feat that makes the GM consider his AD use on a character by character basis is an advantage for the character that says "doing that to me has a downside, GM". You aren't giving the "headgame vs the GM" any value in how you see the feat. I do.

Well, you have two cases:

1) GM is averse to giving you action dice: In the extreme case, he burns all his action dice on other players, giving them more grief, since the GM still has the same number of dice to spend (albeit presumably somewhat less "efficiently").  You get almost nothing from the feat except its quality as a Chance feat and the satisfaction of knowing that action dice are being thrown at your companions instead of you.  In a lesser case, it's the same idea, only you get a small benefit, and less pain is shifted to your comrades.

2) GM doesn't care: We're back to "weaker Fortunate".

I guess there's a third case, where the GM actually feels sorry for you taking a feat that could feasibly not do much for you, so he actively spends more action dice against you to try to make it worthwhile.  I suppose that could be a plus from a whole-party perspective if he uses his dice less efficiently as a result and ends up giving you as many dice as Fortunate would.

I don't see why you'd take Lady Luck's Smile over Fortune Favors the Bold, for reasons I've mentioned earlier (you end up getting +1 2/3 or less expected benefit, depending on action die size, vs. +2, though it does improve your chances with desperation rolls). 

Because Fortunate's AD are that sweet, sweet D4 sized. Something that has been awesome since Spycraft 1.0. Lady Luck's Smile allows for those D4 ADs to explode 50% of the time, and Grace Under Pressure is an origin version of Fortune Favors the Bold. Sure I could have taken that feat and had a 25% chance of exploding AD and a +4 bonus, but I like the 50% chance and +2. Now, with the new Fortune's Fool in the mix that'll be more D4s for sagely buddy help. More D4s are more important to me than an additional +2. Chance feat #4 will be Fortune Favors the Bold, though.

Well, what I mean is that if you roll a million d4 action dice with FFtB, vs. a million d4 action dice with LLS, you'll have a higher average result with FFtB.  That said, if you're trying to roll a result so high that you're counting on an action die exploding to have a chance at making it, then yes, LLS gives you a better (though still relatively remote) shot at meeting the DC than FFtB.  It's not as clear-cut a deficiency as Fortune's Fool vs. Fortunate, and I'll still take Lady Luck's Smile-- just later than Fortune Favors the Bold.

Ok... quick question. What feat is more likely to be taken in the unarmed combat feats list than Martial Arts? The Rage tree is the only real contender, and far more people would take Martial Arts over that path. That how Fortunate is seen by chance monkeys. The feat that most of the other feats in the category benefit the most from. How many characters with the Kicking tree don't have the Martial Arts feat? So rare as to be nil. But would you say that the Kicking tree is weak sauce compared to Martial Arts + Master's Art? Or just different sauce?

I don't think this is comparable-- Fortune's Fool/Fortunate is a rare (unique?) case of a feat being strictly worse than another.  As in, Fortune's Fool has the potential to be as good as Fortunate (i.e., produce the exact same effect) if everything breaks right (or wrong, in this case).  The Kicking tree produces a completely different set of effects from Martial Arts that most would probably agree are inferior, but it's not absolutely, in all possible cases, no better than Martial Arts.

However, Fortune's Fool just moved from being stuck permanently in slot 13 out of 13 to being a contender in (almost) everybody's eyes. In fact, it's #3 on my chance monkey's list as of now.

1) Fortunate
2) Lady Luck's Smile
3) Fortune's Fool

(It'd be #4, but Grace Under Pressure from Savvy makes Fortune Favors the Bold less of an advantage than daring the GM to give me AD as he burns his against the new Fortune's Fool. )

I don't see why you'd take Lady Luck's Smile over Fortune Favors the Bold, for reasons I've mentioned earlier (you end up getting +1 2/3 or less expected benefit, depending on action die size, vs. +2, though it does improve your chances with desperation rolls).  

And as I'm plotting out my chance-monkey, I'm still probably going to leave Fortune's Fool out entirely, favoring Fortunate; Fortune Favors the Bold; Lady Luck's Smile; Black Cat; Jinx; Bloodied, Bold, and Resolute; Lucky Break; and Living on the Edge... and then probably diversifying into other chains before considering (the new) Fortune's Fool.  But then I'm still new to FC and probably have an inherent bias against taking a feat that is in every way worse than another.  If you simply changed it to untyped (scaling) action dice, retaining the cap, that would be enough of a change to make it at least plausibly better than Fortunate in some situations.

Fortune's Fool upgrade is in the new errata, which you can find over on the Downloads page.

Fortune’s Fool (page 94): This feat’s benefit is now: “When the GM spends an action die against you, you gain a bonus d4 action die. You may use this ability a number of times per session equal to the number of Chance feats you have.”

Er, not to sound like a serial whiner or anything... but this version still has the same basic issue of being strictly worse than Fortunate, since at best, you can only hope to eventually obtain as many dice as Fortunate gives you up front.  This is just "slightly less bad".  Sletchman's suggestion was uncapped.

A Treasure builder's been built by the Mighty Meadicus already.

Wow, awesome... that's exactly what I was looking for, thanks!