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rob
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232

Old March 28th, 2020, 03:58 PM
The Tactical Console in HLClassic was a mainstay for LOTS of GMs. There was even a separate tool named Combat Manager that a user wrote for that sole purpose alone (and included things that our Tactical Console lacked). So I can understand that you may not personally have a need or desire for such a tool, but a large number of GMs actually DO. And a big complaint of the Tactical Console was that it was a tool that ONLY the GM could use.

As for why we launched Campaign Theater before "completing" character management, there are two main reasons. One character management is ever evolving, so it's never going to be "complete". More importantly, though, pieces of character management are inextricable linked to features we're adding for CT. Many of the things we're now doing for characters are built upon mechanisms that are shared with Campaign Theater. Please also keep in mind that CT is only in a fledgling state. There are numerous things we've got in the pipeline that will benefit GMs, individual players, and the gaming group as a whole.

The focus with CT isn't simply as an initiative tracker. Far from it. That's simply a core mechanism that - based on the popularity of the Tactical Console in Classic - we launched first. However, CT enables much more than what we could do with Classic by virtue of its connectedness via the internet. GMs can have one view of what's going on, while the players have another that only shows appropriate details. Changes made by the GM or a player can be immediately seen by everyone else. When a PC takes damage or apply a buff (or whatever else), the GM can see the updated state in real-time - and vice versa. When combat plays out, everyone knows who's up next, the state of everyone else, and everything can progress efficiently. For some gaming groups, they may already run like a well-oiled machine, but that's certainly not true of most gaming groups I've witnessed, so tools that boost that efficiency are a welcome benefit by many groups.

HLO is definitely moving towards being a replacement for pen & paper. That's because an increasing number of gamers want that. They want to tap an icon to roll the dice. They want all the "crunch" to be abstracted away and automatically handled for them. That way, they can focus more on the "role" playing aspects than the "roll" playing aspects of the game. For evidence of this, just look at how successful D&D has become by switching to a much more streamlined set of mechanics.

That said, the internet isn't quite ubiquitous enough to achieve the above goal yet. So we still support traditional character sheet output, exactly as we did within Classic. And there should be a variety of improvements and refinements coming to the character sheets shortly, driven largely by the feedback provided here on these forums and through support requests.

As I've already said in other threads, we weren't in a position where we could simply rewrite the entire product. The HL engine is 250,000 lines of C++ code. It's fast, flexible, and incredibly powerful. So whatever solution we chose required that we find a way to continue using that engine. Users want to be able to access the product from whatever device they choose, whether it be a desktop computer mounted in their game room or a tablet at the local game store or a phone on public transportation. The only way we found to address those two requirements was to develop a browser-based product. And in so doing, we've also made it possible to leverage the connectedness of everyone in the gaming group through a common server.

When it comes to conventions, we had many users reporting that they had solid connections throughout GenCon last year while using HLO. There were also some users who reported problems. So are things perfect yet? Nope. But progress on that front has been rapid, and the internet IS well on its way to becoming ubiquitous. Gamers are more and more reliant upon it, and they are wanting products that leverage what the internet offers. So that's where our primary focus lies, while we also strive to maintain "the old way" (e.g. character sheet output) for users who prefer that approach. We've made some mistakes along the way, but many of those have now been corrected, and HLO is now a pretty solid, reliable product that continues getting better with every new release each week.

The bottom line is that we're striving to give the majority of users what they want. And we're looking to the future with how best to leverage technology to achieve that basic goal. Just as Classic wasn't a fit for everyone, neither will HLO. We can't be everything to everyone - that's a fool's errand. And it's even more critical that we stay focused due to how tiny our team is. I would love to be able to create the perfect product for everyone, but even companies with billions of of dollars to spend can't achieve that goal. So we've chosen our path - support any device and connect users to each other - and we'll find out soon enough whether we've chosen well or poorly.
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