GM/Campaign Support?

Tashtego · January 12th, 2007, 02:19 PM

I was wondering if Hero Lab will offer anything more than character generation in the future to help run RPGs.

I wouldn't mind something that offered GM campaign management support, where you could enter all of your NPCs, ongoing plots, world building ideas and link things to PCs and print out reports. I was quite fond of the GrapeVine program (http://www.grapevinelarp.com/) which acted as a fantasic campaign manager/LARP venue management utility for World of Darkness games. That's what I'd be interested in a commercial RPG product, at least.

Regards,
Belinda

rob · January 12th, 2007, 05:22 PM

Our plan is to develop a GM-focused tool later this year. We have not nailed down the feature set, so please don't ask specific questions at this time (I can't answer them). However, if there are specific features you would want, you are welcome to let us know. Once we've got things mapped out concretely (i.e. in a few months), we'll post an announcement.

Thanks, Rob

At 03:19 PM 1/12/2007, you wrote:

Quote:

I was wondering if Hero Lab will offer anything more than character generation in the future to help run RPGs.

I wouldn't mind something that offered GM campaign management support, where you could enter all of your NPCs, ongoing plots, world building ideas and link things to PCs and print out reports. I was quite fond of the GrapeVine program ( http://www.grapevinelarp.com/) which acted as a fantasic campaign manager/LARP venue management utility for World of Darkness games. That's what I'd be interested in a commercial RPG product, at least.

Regards,
Belinda

Nightchilde · January 16th, 2007, 04:59 AM

Things I'd like to see (for d20 at least) include a treasure generator (along with a data file editor to help add in treasures from the various additional books so that they can pop up in the generator). Definitely something similar to the Journal function of hero portfolios so that XP and treasure handed out can be kept track of.

Monsters from the SRD, and a way to add additional monsters into the program. A bonus would be a way for the program to print out nice, condensed statblocks that don't take up a whole lot of room (to make it simple to print out the beasties you need and look for 'em during games when you don't have Hero Lab available).

Maybe a way to import information from players' portfolios so that you can track/manipulate it on the GM's side of things..like a panel that will display/let you change all of your PCs (and NPCs) important things..hit points, conditions and so on..during an encounter.

Definitely some sort of "notepad" function, possibly tied in to the Journal, to keep track of important events, NPCs and so on.

An XP tracker, which includes a way to grant story awards and additionally lets you apply house rules to how you handle XP (maybe including the Unearthed Arcana XP setup).

I'm sure there's tons more that I could think of...but those are the most important for me now.