I'm looking at Hero Lab as a possible addition to my gaming arsenal - in fact I'm downloading the demo right now. I was wondering, how many of you fine, fine people have actually used the program? How is the versatility? What of adding new classes? Feats? Spells? How user-friendly is it?
I'm coming of e-tools which always seemed like a good idea that didn't ever quite gel, and with code monkey appearing to be in dire straits, I'm not sure I want to wait for their RPG Foundry to maybe or maybe not be out sometime in the nebulous future.
So, I know that WotC seems to be holding back licensing for character gens and such, so right now anythings a crap shoot. However, I really need to find a good (expandable) set of tools for NPC generation. Any thoughts?
I’ve been making the rounds downloading every character generator I could find (Redblade, RPGXplorer, PC Gen, etc.) trying to find the one that “fits,” and so far my incredibly fantastic taste has me definitely leaning Hero Lab’s way (though they all have stuff to recommend them), to the point I even got the upgrade. I’ve been using it more than any of the other ones so far, mainly for NPCs, but it’s held up pretty well no matter what I’ve thrown at it – race, class, cross-class, spells, whatever—with no glitches, at least in my experience, so it’s been pretty versatile in that regard. Gimme a couple more months with it and I’m sure I’ll smoke pouring out of hard drive (I will BREAK you, Hero Lab!).
I think it’s still pretty new, so there’s a lot of room for new races, classes, and spells, though so far the developers have been pretty good about issuing updates (they just had one this last week that added a bunch of the demi-human races, classes, and fixed some niggling things from the previous version). There’s a “custom” option under gear and spells, plus an editor. The editor’s documentation is still incomplete (clearly “in-progress”) but it looks like all the info is there if you’re willing to give it a go; presumably (hopefully) more complete instruction on the editor is forthcoming.
Also in its favor is that I can figure out what the hell I’m doing pretty easily (a lot of the freeware stuff is obviously made by programmers in their spare time who have the technical know-how but not the design sense), so I’d recommend it almost for the interface alone.
Code Monkey’s been down a while, it looks like; I never got the ooportunity to download ETools so I’m a little annoyed I never got the chance to try it out, though I, too, heard things were going downhill for them (not sure how bad a sign I should take their site being down as).
I'm bumping this because I know from other forums lots of folks are using this. Anyone have another take on it?
I'm looking at Hero Lab as a possible addition to my gaming arsenal - in fact I'm downloading the demo right now. I was wondering, how many of you fine, fine people have actually used the program? How is the versatility? What of adding new classes? Feats? Spells? How user-friendly is it?
I'm coming of e-tools which always seemed like a good idea that didn't ever quite gel, and with code monkey appearing to be in dire straits, I'm not sure I want to wait for their RPG Foundry to maybe or maybe not be out sometime in the nebulous future.
So, I know that WotC seems to be holding back licensing for character gens and such, so right now anythings a crap shoot. However, I really need to find a good (expandable) set of tools for NPC generation. Any thoughts?
I like Heroforge because it's free and they seem to keep pretty update with the new sourcebooks as they come out. I can also to some degree tweak the spreadsheet if I need to. I have a buddy who loathes heroforge but loves PC Gen, which for me is a mystery because it only has core rules.
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I have been using Hero Lab for many months now. "I love Hero Lab" comes out of my mouth at least twice every gaming session. This is because I love the program. Is it perfect? No, but is perfection a realistic expectation? If you've experimented with various RPG software programs you already know the answer is a resounding "no!" It's easy to use and all the wonderful functionality it offers begins to emerge with practice.
For example, I'm running my players through a module. I prepare whole encounters with numerous NPCs and/or monsters in advance and combine them in a single portfolio (file). With a few clicks of the mouse my encounter is open when needed and the initiatives are rolled. Tracking HP and effects is a breeze. I even have a group of friendly NPCs I can import and track simultaneously with ease. Almost all my players now have the program too. I have one of them track initiative for the PCs, Monster 1, Monster 2, etc.
Customizing is NOT user friedly. I am not an IT professional or programmer. The guy who does my customizing for me, however, IS a programmer. I pay him with Paizo gift cards. Other users also post custom files on the web.
The program supports Pathfinder and other games too! Quite simply, gaming without Herolab would be like living without email or microwave ovens at this point.
Yes, they're listed under the Class tab, Archetypes for those with the APG dataset.
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I've got a few players who use this for their characters and, it might just be user error or old software, but we've wasted a lot of time at the table trying to figure out what they can can and can't do. I often hear these players saying that "Herolab doesn't do that," or "Herolab doesn't have that class/feat/spell/etc/." Character creating software just doesn't seem very necessary to me so I've never used it.
I use the D&D 3.5 version Hero Lab extensively defiantly worth the $20. The only gripe I have with it is that it only includes the classes, items, spells, feats, ect. from the DMG and PHB.
Though I have heard that you can add in your own classes I haven't really messed with it.
I hope they will add the classes, spells, feats, and items from at least the "complete" series. but seeing as 3.5 is out of print they seem to have stopped supporting 3.5. Guess I need to convince my group to see the light and upgrade.
EDIT: one bug I have noticed is that the program will randomly not total skill bonuses correctly (by not adding stat bonuses or not including armor check) but a few seconds and a pencil fixes this so so big deal.
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'They' cannot add anything from the 'Complete' line of books because those books aren't Open Content. If you go to the Lone Wolf Development Forums, you can probably find links to fan made content. They also have threads for bug reporting.
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How is Hero Lab with the new APG data added? I tried Hero Forge with the newest updates, but it didn't appear to include the
"new" kits for the core classes. Does Hero Lab cover those?
Yup as modus0 has said, they have it, though you may have to buy for the additional stuff for the APG. can't remember, I did pay some extra for all the other extra books to be added.
Anyway, about over half of my group now uses hero lab. the remaining guys, well, we just make their characters onto our portfolios so its all available for us. We don't have to worry about guys forgetting their character sheets anymore.
the great part is how much easier it is to track encumbrances, what items are where, etc... The other thing is keeping track of conditions, particularly important in situations such as the Serpent's Skull campaign we're going right now (with all the diseases and their effects).
At PaizoCon, the Hero Labs folks indicated they'd be coming out with a Mac-compatable version this fall. Does anyone know if that's the case?
This post on their forum would imply that they are still working on it.
Greg
Greg, that post also makes it seem that, even once they get a version that runs on the Macintosh, I'll have to buy a Windows laptop to download the program, and then transfer it to the Mac. That seems like a high first-use expense.
Really? I didn't get that at all. What it says to me is that if you want it now, then you can download the Windows version (to a Windows PC), buy a license for the Windows version and then copy over the license to the Mac application when it's ready. You may have to pay an extra cost to get the Mac version of the license if things are 100% compatible.
Mind you, I'm completely green when it comes to HeroLab. I've heard of it before, but it was your post that had me looking on their forums (I'm also a Mac user).
Here's another thread on the Mac development. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see why one would have to download a Mac application to a Windows PC first. Considering the Mac application won't even run on the Windows PC, there shouldn't be a need for that.
Greg
I love HeroLabs. I haven't yet figured out how to work the human favored class bonus for sorcerers correctly yet, but I haven't really done any research into the problem yet either.Once you select "+1 Spell Known: 0" for your Sorcerer, a new table pops up just under the classes list, and "Human Sorcerer: +1 Spell Known: 0" is in that table. Take a look at the ? in a circle icon to the right of that name - like almost everything in HL, that icon is where you can go for more information about that thing. Moving your mouse over it in this case tells you how to change the level of spells this favored class bonus is assigned to.
I have been very pleased with HL and the Bestiary and APG expansions. I mostly DM, and I get a tremendous amount of use out of HL. I think it's worth every penny.
In context, the original poster was saying that he wanted HL, but with the Mac version in progress, was it worth buying it now for his PC, or should he wait.
Sorry, didn't mean to post out of context. I wanted to get at the "Mac in progress" part. Thanks for the clarification.
Greg
We have been using HeroLab for a few months now and really love it. I have always had notes and NPC/Monster Sheets that I had used as a GM. Now I have 85% of what I need as HeroLab Portfolios. I love having the PC information in front of me. Makes keeping track of skills, feats and abilities much easier. I can ask the players to "roll a d20" without having to give away why I may be asking. My only beef is a small one. We are currently playing Kingmaker. There are a few critters/bad guys that cannot be easily reproduced. Anything that comes from the Advance Bestiary or Tome of Horrors is not available. These I have had to attempt to cobble together using the editor feature. I have had some success for the most part, given my very limited programming skills. The biggest issue for me is the time it takes, which I have very little of.
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I've been really happy with Hero Lab. I find the editor easy to use if you can think of a similar item, class, race, whatever you are trying to make, so that you can analyze how it was put together.
There have been occasional mistakes but they get corrected quickly in the next update. I use it primarily to quickly stat up PCs or NPCs. I wish it had a little more flexibility in terms of output.
I'm very happy with the feature that allows me to just print out a quick stat block for an NPC or PC. I don't use it to manage battles, but I'm considering going to that next step.
If you like the demo, you'll like the full program. Don't be scared away by the editor. If I can figure it out, you can.
I have recently purchased the Pathfinder core and Bestiary programs and I have been very pleased.
As far as I can see, it is accurate. I only use custom material - no printed adventures or anything like that...so this cuts down on prep time.
It probably has cut my prep time in HALF getting ready for game night.
Yes...it's that good.
I would recommend it...a 7 or 8 out of 10
DISCLAIMER: I have only been using it for a week.
Are the employess that work for Lonewolf full time employees or do you do this work on your free time. Kind of like how PCGEN is run, not referring to the open source part. Know of another company that was producing a character gen, but real jobs and real life started to interfeer and the project kept getting delayed and delayed.
Lone Wolf Development currently has five full-time employees and two part-time employees. So this is definitely not a "side job" for any of us. We also have some other folks help us out at times on an informal basis. However, for the core development team, including Mathias and myself, Lone Wolf's products are our livelihood and top priority.
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Are the employess that work for Lonewolf full time employees or do you do this work on your free time. Kind of like how PCGEN is run, not referring to the open source part. Know of another company that was producing a character gen, but real jobs and real life started to interfeer and the project kept getting delayed and delayed.Lone Wolf Development currently has five full-time employees and two part-time employees. So this is definitely not a "side job" for any of us. We also have some other folks help us out at times on an informal basis. However, for the core development team, including Mathias and myself, Lone Wolf's products are our livelihood and top priority.
All I can say is you guys have done a fantastic job with it! I've only been using it for a few days, and already I'm convinced it's a hundred times better than HeroForge. The pdf output leaves something to be desired (it tends to run feat and ability descriptions off the page and cut them off mid-sentence instead of showing the whole field), but for those of us who take our laptops with us to game night, that's not a problem - the stat blocks do quite nicely!
Hero Labs is pretty good; takes a bit of learning to add custom stuff, but is getting easier to use with each update. It does have a few things that require workarounds for no readily apparent reason (WHY can't I copy and paste from the statblock view, for instance?), but so far I haven't run into anything that was a real deal-breaker.
-The Gneech
Along the top of the statblock window are the various types of output HL can generate - the default is "Print" - switch to one of the other styles, and the "Print" button at the bottom will be replaced with "Copy"
Hmm ... I was looking for something like that this weekend but couldn't find it for anything! I'll go back and check again tonight. (What I ended up doing was saving to PDF and then copying from the PDF, which seems very much the going-around-your-elbow route.)
Thanks for the tip!
-The Gneech
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Along the top of the statblock window are the various types of output HL can generate - the default is "Print" - switch to one of the other styles, and the "Print" button at the bottom will be replaced with "Copy"Hmm ... I was looking for something like that this weekend but couldn't find it for anything! I'll go back and check again tonight. (What I ended up doing was saving to PDF and then copying from the PDF, which seems very much the going-around-your-elbow route.)
Thanks for the tip!
-The Gneech
In the stat block, there are five tabs at the top - Print, Plain Text, HTML, BBCode and Wikitext. Selecting any of the latter four will give you the "copy" option.
Yup, found that last night. Thanks for the heads-up, all!
-TG
Just purchased Hero Lab and I am loving it. In combination with Kyle's Combat manager program it is pure awesome.
Just one request - for searching lists where you want to compare stuff
For example on the traits list.
Take the Everything and Only valid items out of the drop-down and put a radio button at the bottom with those options.
In the drop down have things like Combat, Faith, Social, Regional...
I think that Hero Lab is, on the whole, an excellent program. That said, it's biggest weakness is that it's extremely difficult for users to add or change content. If you don't play with a lot of house rules or non-Paizo content, though, you should have no problems.
I am currently trying to work out how to create boots of lesser regeneration....
Bought it for D20 V3.5 on version 1.0. Started using it for PC sheet immediately, began adding custom stuff almost straight away. Steep learning curve.
Purchased Pathfinder core rules dataset as soon as it was available, then both Bestiaries and the APG data sets!
The community forums have links to the Complete series of books custom added by myself and others for both D20 and PFRpg rules. Although as HL is officially licensed by Paizo for PF the new stuff would hopefully be implemented by Lone wolf anyway!
On the whole I've never regretted buying this program, I don't use it to it's full potential but it's worth the $40+ dollars I've spent already!
One way to find out is to try it out under the demo mode- everything is fully functional, as if you had just got the basic starting package, with the exception of printing out hardcopies/pdf of the character sheets (previewing is perfectly fine, though).
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I've only recently ran across Hero Lab. $40 starting package and almost $20 for every book, makes it hard to swallow. Comparing Hero Lab to characters that I've done from the books and I've found the numbers don't always match. Is it worth the hundred plus dollars?
You might want to do your research on this instead of just assuming it is 40 for the initial program and 20 a book. That is not even CLOSE to what it costs. Go to the hero lab page for Pathfinder and find out.
Is Herolab worth the money?
YES!!!!!
0 problems so far, touch wood.
Helpful staff and community.
Me not having to spend hours of my life doing data entry.
Being able to work on character concepts and NPCs any time and quickly.
Makes it worth it.
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I've got a few problems with Hero Labs and I'm wondering if anyone here has solutions.
I've begun running the SavageTide AP and my players are using HL for their PCs while I'm using DMGenie (old, unsupported product now AFAICT) to actually run my encounters and manage the campaign.
1. DMGenie uses the older D20 statblock format -- you paste a statblock into it and it creates the matching creature so it can be used in combats and for awarding XP purposes. Anyway, the stock Hero Labs statblock is the newer (and IMO, much friendlier) PF statblock. The problem is, that does me *no good*. My question: does anyone have a link to a custom output sheet for HL that will generate the older statblock format? (I'm currently writing a Perl script to convert the HL statblock to the older style, but my players will be using HL and I'd much prefer to have them do this on their end!)
The format for this older style of statblock is:
Name; Race Cls1/Cls2: CR #; hp ##; Init +#; Spd ## ft.; AC ## (## Touch); BAB +#/+#; Atk: +# melee (1d8 + 2, WeaponName), +# ranged (1d6 - 1, WeaponName); SA SpecialAttacks; SQ SpecialQualities; SR ##; PR ##; AL XX; SV Fort +#, Ref +#, Will +#; Str ##, Dex ##, Con ##, Int ##, Wis ##, Cha ##.
Languages spoken: FirstLanguage, SecondLanguage.
Skills and Feats: SkillOne +#, SkillTwo +#; FeatOne, FeatTwo.
Clr Spells Per Day: #/#/#.
Spells Known: SpellOne, SpellTwo.
Spells Memorized: SpellOne, SpellTwo (#).
Powers Known: PowerOne, PowerTwo.
Possessions: ### gp, ItemOne, ItemTwo, ItemThree (## gp, ## lb).
2. The way weapons are handled in HL is broken. There doesn't appear to be a way to group weapons together for different types of full attacks. For example, say a fighter has four groups of weapons that he uses in different situations: a greatsword in two hands, a greatsword in one hand with a buckler shield, a longsword in his primary hand and a dagger in his offhand, and two daggers (for those times when you're grappled!). It appears from the HL demo that it has no way of representing this within the program. In addition, the statblock that it generates is correspondingly wrong (for the above fighter it lists a greatsword, a longsword, and a dagger, and doesn't/can't take into account offhand weapon penalties).
3. I can't seem to find any documentation on the XML output format used by HL. If I had it, I could write my own parser that pulls the pieces I need and formats them correctly. Even better, I'd write that in JavaScript and give my players a link -- they could post their PC's XML file to a form and it could convert it and send it to me automatically. I realize that this document is going to change regularly as new features are implemented or bugs are fixed, but surely there is an internal XML Schema document used for verifying that the output sheets are producing the correct results? Or even just a DTD? Worst case I'll have my players send me their XML data and I'll reverse engineer it, but that will be a huge waste of time when someone must already have such a document...
Thanks for any help you can provide!
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Wow, fast response. Thank you, Mathias. :)
Okay, I'll grab the DTD. It sounds like there's no XML Schema though? DTDs are (in some cases) not very detailed about what to expect in the document...
Bummer about the weapons. Making the change and generating four sheets might be workable on my end because I've mostly got my Perl script working. I could have the players send me all four sheets and then concatenate them together, telling my script to append multiple weapon blocks together.
I've also considered having the players manually specify the weapon groups in a "notes" section. Something like "Wpn groups: greatsword(P), greatsword+buckler, longsword+dagger, dagger+dagger." Then I could create those weapon groups when I create my D20 statblock. We'll see.
Thanks again for the quick reply.
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Okay, so now I'm finding a few other issues. :( I realize I should probably take this to the HL forums but I'm not a user or licensee of the software so creating a forum account seems a bit excessive to me. Anyway...
One player created a Gnome illusionist and the HL statblock says his BAB is +1. It's not. His BAB is +0 and he gets a +1 attack bonus for being Small. While this doesn't matter much in most cases, it's going to throw off my statblock converter and, as written, that 1st level illusionist can now draw a weapon as part of movement and qualify for feats that require BAB +1 or greater. I'm hoping this is just the output sheet and not how the data is stored in the XML file.
Sigh. I'm going to have the players send me their XML file and maybe extracting the data from there will be more reliable. Thanks to Mathias I found the DTD just where he said it would be (although the Help menu item was "d20 System Manual" for me instead of Pathfinder).
I'm doing this so that I can track the PCs at a high level (XP, basic combat statistics like AC and hp) and NPCs in more detail (CR for XP calculations, full combat statistics, movement, items, feats, spells).
Anyone with experience manipulating the HL data or its output, please join in! I'd like to hear from anyone else who's tried to do any kind of processing with HL character data. After I finish this I'll be expert enough (!) that I can do the same kind of statblock importer for MapTool...
Thanks all!
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No, I haven't. I'll take a look at the demo version...
I'm pretty heavily invested in DMGenie (or I wouldn't be using such an old program). I have scripts that automatically handle wands, potions, and scrolls for all spells that are scriptable. For example, a potion of cure light wounds is scriptable (roll 1d8+3 and add to current creature's hp). I also have scripts for entangle, web, and so on.
It's entirely possible that HL can do all of that, but if I have something that works...
In any case, the BAB +1 I will correct by subtracting out any size modifier so I get the correct value.
I'm almost done with my converter. I need to parse the attack strings and I'm done. I also need to parse the spell information but it's not critical to track that at 1st level so it's on the back burner for now.
I'll take a look at the combat tracker in HL although I don't expect to switch to it.
Thanks for the reply. :)