[Decrayer]

Oh, maybe there is a small misunderstanding. Currently, I'm (as the GM) not keeping track of all the data. During a session, for the heroes, I keep only track of their gold and items. They are responsible for keeping track of their hitpoints (because, like my example showed, this is not feasible for me to do) and their spell selection & usage. They also note down stuff they loot, but I do so too, so I have always the current status of their characters. But, of course, I keep track of the monsters hitpoints. And it's really not fun if the wizzard shoots a fireball or black tentacles into a group of 4+ NPC...

During a session, I always have the whole hero group open in hero lab. And when there is an encounter, I import the previously build encounter that I integrated into RealmWorks directly into the already opened hero group. Then I open the tactical console and start a the fight (I don't understand that part of your quote, isn't the tactical console always already starting with the surprise round? At least that's the reason, why all heroes get the flat-footed condition till it's their turn in the surprise round).

If people or other parties join the fight, I just import them and in the tactical console, I select "integrate into running fight" (or something like that, can't remember the exact wording).

After the fight, if the players decide to loot the bodies, I just move the loot from the enemy to the hero who actually looted it. Then I select "remove all enemy" and I usually also hit the save button at that time. It's working quite well, but I still have a hard time to use it's full potential. For example, there are condition flags, where you can just select "grappled" or "sickened". And it applies all value changes to the creature/character. But still, it could be a bit more convenient. For example, if a character gets sickened, I would like to beeing able to enter, that he will be sickened for 6 rounds. And then, after rounds in the tactical console, the sickened condition is automatically removed from the character.

Also, I think it's actually meant to keep the GM in charge of the players stats, because otherwise, the tactical console with it's automatical enemy/ally mechanic and initiative wouldn't be such a big help, if you would have to still keep a separate list of initiative order for the players. Also, my players don't use laptops while we play, they only use printed out paper sheets. And only one of the players has hero lab, the others don't. Therefore, they just tell me their decisions when levelling up and I put them into their sheets.

But the main point of my post is, that I would like to have secret annotations for characters. So that I can keep non-identified items a secret from a player if I print out their pdf. Or cursed items.