[Seerah]

that last part confused me, where assigning a new value to the existing var still returned the old value, but...

I will look into metatables. I haven't worked with them yet. Just to clarify, my issue was with creating new options during development. Say I had

defaults = {
     scale = .9,
     fontsize = 14
}

Then, in my PEW function I put

MYMODDB = MYMODDB or defaults

That would make

print(MYMODDB.scale)

return .9

After playing with the code for a while, I decide I want to add an alpha option as well. So my defaults table changes to this

defaults = {
     scale = .9,
     fontsize = 14,
     alpha = .7
}

...

MYMODDB = MYMODDB or defaults

And somewhere in the code I have

f:SetAlpha(MYMODDB.alpha)

But, upon reloading the UI to pick up the changes made to the lua, I would get an error for

f:SetAlpha(MYMODDB.alpha)

because

print(MYMODDB.alpha)

would return nil


I probably didn't need to explain myself, as I'm sure you knew what I meant, and I will read up on metatables. Thanks, Slakah.