Quote:
Originally Posted by Gelfarin
This is going to be a bit of a rant here and I probably just misunderstand the way this works. I get the clear impression that Hero Lab is really just a tool for Pathfinder and the rest of the gaming systems are just lucky enough to use it. Since I've been paying attention to the Savage Worlds forum, it appears that anything we want, we generate ourselves. We then submit it and then it gets sold back to the rest of us? I'm having to constantly update for Pathfinder (and DnD) which I wrote off a few years ago (as an unwieldy dinosaur) but next to nothing for Savage Worlds. Many of the online/digital tools find that this is the second most used system after Pathfinder/DnD (all versions). Yet we're really red headed stepchildren here.
Since I starting playing Savage Worlds a little over a year ago (specifically Savage Rifts), I've not used Hero Lab as it's really pretty useless for that setting. I've found great joy in doing manual character sheets again. And, although Savage Rifts is the number one popular setting for Savage Worlds, we continue to wait for our own community to generate a working character sheet.
Again I'll state that I probably misunderstand the nature of how Hero Lab is supposed to function. It's probably intended to be a Pathfinder program first and I missed that when I purchased it with additional licenses. I really appreciate the group that works so hard here for Savage Worlds, however wonder if there's any point in using Hero Lab to play it.
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As someone new to the forums, I think you are partially correct. The problem stems not from HL itself, but in the content source licenses. HL started as a generic tool which had few licensed products due to the draconian nature of the original content companies. I GET that they want to project their intellectual property and I can agree with them on that point, but they did not come up with quality solutions(if any at all). That all changed in the past few years with Pathfinder agreeing to allow HL to directly develop a settings file and for at least many of their expansion products. Of course, plenty of people BEFORE the license agreements came into being "rolled their own", and that's exactly what the SW fans did to a much greater extent.
I suspect as others have mentioned that there are LOADS of people who purchase HL explicitly because it has PF and 5e rule elements built in and they can easily new content for a fee with no manual coding. On the SW side, I would doubt that many people really care that much about a builder simply because the SW ruleset is, well... fairly simple. There are not 800 spells or 75 skills or 50 classes to keep track of. That's not a knock in SW's by any means and frankly, this is one of the reasons why I am switching from a stalled 4e campaign to SW. I wanted HL for several reasons:
- Character validation(making sure only stuff I wanted would apply)
- Consistent character sheets and stuff for my players and myself
- Extendability(this is key for me)
on the latter, this is key. The ability to easily edit a program and add items, or give extra starting skills, or whatever is something I EXPECT any such software to have. For 4e, I used the original CB and liked it a LOT. However, I fell in love with it after finding the "thing" that decompiled and let me add my OWN rules to it(for the most part) in ways that work way things from the original base application worked(and how HL mostly works).