[daplunk]

Last night was one of those sessions where I really really wished HL and RW would birth a hybrid online baby.

2 of my players didn't turn up. Both of those players use Hero Lab but no one had a copy of their portfolios.

I had an old copy. But all of the spells and ability tracking had changed from my copy.

Now we have a ring in player who comes in and plays when someone is absent. She turned up and obviously needed a sheet to play the character (Hero Lab is awesome at making this possible btw). I quickly ran through my options.

1. Print off the 3 different pdfs required for her to play. Not really efficient when you consider I had a table of 8 waiting for this.
2. Print the pdfs off, merge them and put them on a tablet. This is the option I went with. It was efficient enough and got us up and running.
3. Let her screen share the Hero Lab session running on player's laptop that was next to her.

This allowed us to start, albeit with an incorrect character sheet. The player kept notes on scrap paper of all the changes to the character that was uploaded to our facebook group so the owning player can do the updates before next session.

Everyone leveled up during this session also which was a major PITA. Now all of my characters are out of date. I really wish there was a way for their updates to just flow into my system instead of them having to do the updates on their machine and then do the updates on my machine.

How I wish this would work...
Hero Lab should have some form of cloud support that is linked to the DM's game. When a player creates a character they can choose to connect that character to a game and that character then stores on the cloud.

Any changes to the character sync back to the cloud and the character sheet can be added within RW allowing the DM to come along and see an up to date version of the player sheet.

When the Web Portal is implemented it should have options for both Hero Lab and Realm Works. The players should be able to view and make limited (I doubt web can handle full functionality?) changes to the sheet. Any changes made here sync back to the cloud.

At the start of a session the DM can add the Heroes from the cloud / RW into a HL session. This creates a link that can be set to both read and write. At the table, the players use the web version above. Any changes they make flow back to the DM's seat.

Implement a log system so the DM can see changes as they are made by the players. This enables verification that players are updating as they should.

Include an option to award X amount of XP to all players and have the Journals all update.

Anyway... I'm sure you see where I am going with this. It's a dream and one that I understand requires quite a bit of change on both Hero Lab and Realm Works.