Support for Tomb of Battle, Tome of Magic?

[Birmy]

Hello! This was brought up on another forum, and I thought it was worth getting comment from the horses' mouths, as it were. So I thought I'd ask: How customizable is the program, in terms of adding stuff like from Tomb of Battle, Tome of Heroes, spell points, and so on? I've been able to add a lot of custom stuff, no sweat, in the past, but some of that material strikes me as a lot more problematic. How capable is Hero Lab of entering some of those more unconventional rules and options?

[rob]

At 10:45 PM 5/19/2007, you wrote:

Hello! This was brought up on another forum, and I thought it was worth getting comment from the horses' mouths, as it were. So I thought I'd ask: How customizable is the program, in terms of adding stuff like from Tomb of Battle, Tome of Heroes, spell points, and so on? I've been able to add a lot of custom stuff, no sweat, in the past, but some of that material strikes me as a lot more problematic. How capable is Hero Lab of entering some of those more unconventional rules and options?

Hero Lab is pretty good at supporting that stuff right now, but it could definitely be better. This is something that we're currently focusing on within the d20 data files. Allow me to explain...

The HL engine can support everything in those books, but the d20 data files don't currently expose everything in the engine for easy use within the d20 data files. Probably about 80% of the material in the major D&D supplements can be readily implemented within the existing d20 data files. Another 15% can be implemented with a non-trivial amount of work. And the remaining 5% either isn't able to be integrated yet or could technically be done right now, but would be more trouble than it's worth.

In a nutshell, we're in the classic situation of the 80/20 rule. You know the one. The first 80% of the project takes the first 80% of the time and the second 20% of the project takes the other 80% of the time. :-)

Colen and I recently went through the majority of the major D&D supplements, including those you listed, to assess what we need to do to make it relatively easy to add the 20% that isn't currently easy. We mapped out a number of changes and new approaches in the d20 data files that we plan on implementing in the next update (next week) and a second update in June. Those changes should get the numbers up to about 95% of the supplement material being readiliy addable, 4% being a bit of work, and 1% either being not possible or more work than it's worth. That remaining 5% will take a bit longer to fully address, and we'll be working to keep refining things in subsequent updates to systematically reach the 99% mark for readily doable and 1% a fair bit of work. Due to some of the insanity with certain obscure races, feats, classes, and the like, it's unrealistic to think any tool could reasonably reach 100% support for easily adding new material. There will always be a few wacky things that would take days for us to accommodate readily and that no one will probably ever try to add to the data files. So that handful of things will end up being the doable, but require a fair bit of work to accomplish.

-Rob