[rob]

Originally Posted by Koro76

As a whole, I sincerely hope that this isn't the beginning of a trend of "use the custom _____ and enter whatever you want" for a lot of customization options. If this does end up being the case, I'd like to see some more fleshed out custom entry tools, like tagging, a way to add actions and bonuses onto custom items that get added to the Play sheet, and some kind of saving/sort for user-created things across characters or NPCs in HLO. Particularly, for the purpose of creating custom intelligent items, I'd like a place to break out the attributes (alignment, skills, ability scores, etc.) that isn't a plain text box.

We gotta walk before we can run. One thing we've begun doing is to surface all the individual abilities and whatnot for items. The goal is to ultimately allow users to cobble together whatever they want from the component elements. With everything on our plate, that's gonna show up incrementally.

Originally Posted by Koro76

I think that having these valuables, their rarity levels, and their approximate values is a great tool to help GMs to adjudicate what valuables are appropriate to give for a batch of treasure. Also, as it stands, the valuables list only contains "custom art object", "custom gem", and "custom valuable". It would be great to see the selection fleshed out more. Even cooler if there was a button to input a value and "roll" valuables for that amount.

The question then becomes whether HLO should completely replace the book or provide a means to enter whatever the GM chooses from the book. At the moment, we've opted for the latter, but we could potentially circle back and do the former. My guess is that somebody will create a website that provides a whole bunch of random tables, which will include a myriad additional options beyond those in the book.

Originally Posted by Koro76

Glad to hear that these will be coming soon! The GMG product description only mentioned that custom hazards and NPCs were on the way.

We kept the marketing text brief and only hit the most important items.

Originally Posted by Koro76

I'm actually an owner of Realm Works, and have used it for campaigns in the past. With the announcement that Realm Works is no longer being worked on, I had hoped that things like this might find a home in a tool that is actively being worked on, and is more integrated into the new web model. Perhaps I was mistaken.

Realm Works remains a very powerful and flexible tool. The original goal was to evolve both HLO and RW in parallel until both ultimately blended together down the road. That proved to be too big of an effort for us to attain, though. So now we're focused on HLO. I would very much like to see HLO evolve into a tool that combines both RW and HL features, and you'll definitely see a few bits of that in not-too-distant future. But that end goal is far off at this point, so I'm not going to actively say "that's coming" when it's not envisioned anytime soon.

Originally Posted by Koro76

This answer is a bit disappointing to me, especially since vehicles in PF2 are SIGNIFICANTLY less complicated than say, building a starship in SF. They're basically an item that has a mini monster stat block.

No argument on them being relatively simple. But even a relatively simple mechanism requires a non-trivial chunk of development time. Please note that I said we're holding off until there's a meaningful level of interest demonstrated. In the meantime, I'd much rather focus our very limited resources on things that LOTS of users want instead of something only a few users want.

Originally Posted by Koro76

The main reason I brought this up is because something extremely similar existed in HLC for PF1 (the "History" tab). It also seems to occupy about as much practical application use as Item Quirks. I understand if you no longer want to support this kind of feature.

The tables for Deep Backgrounds are something that just about every GM I've ever known would throw out and tailor to fit their own world. So what we did instead was make every ability from those backgrounds available to be chosen, allowing GMs to define the combinations that make sense in their worlds and then let the players use those combinations freely. This seemed to be a vastly more flexible approach than an assortment of hard-wired options to choose from. Is there something here than we're overlooking?

Originally Posted by Koro76

I'd also like to take this opportunity to suggest a greater amount of documentation or some kind of instructional video on the ins and outs of HLO. As complexity increases (As it did with GMG), so does the learning curve, and hopefully this kind of thing will reduce the number of "how do I...?" questions in the forums, and maybe even increase adoption, by making HLO more approachable.

No arguments on the benefits. Unfortunately, our resources are severely limited and we don't have the ability to generate good videos. In fact, this is why we just launched a contest asking users to come up with cool videos (announced in our newsletter this past weekend). We'd love to see great tutorial videos, and the winners may find themselves commissioned to create more such videos!