I recently purchased a Data Package for Player Companion Bundle #3 PF1 (HCPF-PZY803) because one of my players wanted to take a Paladin Mercy from the Healer's Handbook. (I really liked that the package was discounted based on my existing ownership of some of the contents.) After reactivating my Hero Lab Classic license to pull down the rules content, I loaded the party's portfolio to see the following message:
Code:
Errors were encountered when loading the saved portfolio! If you notice incorrect behaviors in your portfolio, please report it to the data file authors (you can contact them from the Help menu).
Hero 'Bazel Fittering' was imported from an encounter, and cannot be loaded on this device. A hero imported from an encounter can only be loaded on devices using the same license as the one on which it was saved.
Hero 'Trinia Sabor' was imported from an encounter, and cannot be loaded on this device. A hero imported from an encounter can only be loaded on devices using the same license as the one on which it was saved.
Hero 'Laori Vaus' was imported from an encounter, and cannot be loaded on this device. A hero imported from an encounter can only be loaded on devices using the same license as the one on which it was saved.
Hero 'Commander Sabina Merrin' was imported from an encounter, and cannot be loaded on this device. A hero imported from an encounter can only be loaded on devices using the same license as the one on which it was saved.
The four characters identified there are correctly flagged as having been imported from encounters from the CotCT Encounter Libraries (Bazel first encountered the party as a cookie-cutter Gray Maiden NPC from Chapter 2 in the AP); all of these characters are ones that my players have had their characters befriend, and Bazel and Trinia are cohorts to two of the Heroes, with significant level advancement recorded compared to their encounter stats.
I understand the copyright-driven need to block the ability to import characters from encounters from an adventure on one system (in a Hero Lab that has purchased those data packages), export the portfolio, and then load it on another system (in a Hero Lab instance that has *not* purchased those data packages). In this case, though, I'm not doing that, I'm just trying to load the portfolio for my adventuring party on my own system that still has access to the relevant data packages. I've successfully imported the four NPCs into the resulting stripped portfolio, but they do not possess any of the experience, levels, gear, journal entries, etc. that the unloadable character records do. I had the presence of mind to save the resulting NPC-less portfolio under a different name, and I therefore have both portfolios (the one with just my player's characters and the one with their NPC allies that I can't load). I've applied all of the available updates to everything that I can find to update, and the problem persists. I was not aware that purchasing a Data Package via the new PF1-Hybrid-supporting store would update my Hero Lab Classic license in a way that would break my ability to import these characters into my unchanged Hero Lab Classic install on my desktop.
I know that I can rename the portfolio files to a .zip extension and get at the XML Stat Blocks for the NPCs I can't load, so it's not like the raw character-mechanics data is permanently lost. I just wanted to ask if I had any recourse other than reading the non-herolab-format Character Stat Block data and reconstructing the NPCs as non-encounter-import hero records in the NPC-less portfolio.
I'm hoping that there is some other option, though, for a few reasons...
For one, I believe (I obviously can't check right now) that there is data in the Journal entries for some of these NPCs that won't be in any of the Stat Block data, and is therefore unrecoverable as far as I can tell, but that pertains to unresolved side quests (some of which my players know nothing or very little about).
The other, and much larger reason I hope there's some other solution is that my players and I play our games in the Dragonlance setting, and make use of extensive 3rd-party Rules Packages to do so properly. Dragonlance does not have Halflings, Orcs, Half-Orcs, or some other races, for example, and has several of its own races like Kender, Draconians, and medium-sized Minotaurs, as well as a totally different Pantheon and a bunch of other things. The upshot of this is that any time I'm using pre-published adventure material, I make significant alterations to some encounters (especially those involving Halflings, Half-Orcs or Orcs) to make the NPCs match the setting. I prefer to invest the work ahead of time compared to trying to "wing it" on unaltered stat blocks.
I've done this for a number of encounters in the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP Chapter 6 already, and I've started working on encounter NPCs for the War for the Crown AP (as that's the adventure I'm running next for my group), and I'd really rather it not be the case that my purchase and inadvertent license upgrade has wiped out all of that work.
The only other post I could find on the forums that seemed at all similar to this issue indicated that a rather different issue (the inability to import encounter NPCs at all) was resolved by applying the HLC 8.9 update from April, 2020, but when I attempted that, HLC warned me that I had a more recent version installed and that installing the patch might break things, which would potentially put me worse off than I currently am, so I aborted.
Any help or assistance would be welcome, thanks!