Realm Works without Hero Lab

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by Conandy

Thanks, guys. And daplunk that is pretty much what I thought an NPC or monster would look like. Basically just using the RW infrastructure to paste in all the stats. Better than nothing, for sure. That is about what I would end up doing in Scrivener. But not as powerful as integrating with HeroLab, by a long shot, I can tell.

My main concern with the character sheet is that I just don't see my players having a device at the table to use HeroLab. If it made a sweet printed character sheet, at least a couple of them might invest the $30 to keep track of their characters, but they would probably bring the printed sheet to the game. We are pretty old school at the moment. I guess I could take the initiative (pun intended) and just store all my players' characters in my own version of Hero Lab in order to help automate the process at the table.

To the topic of automating things: we use the "speed factor initiative" option from the 5e DM's guide (tweaked a bit), and have a few house rules that, if I could incorporate into the tool, would make it awesome. Other than just having my players roll their own initiative and calling it out to me to put into the encounter tool (right now I don't even have to write it down, I just start counting down from 30 and players or monsters jump in and take their turn on their initiative count), would there be a way to mod Hero Lab to figure in weapon speed factors to the initiative rolling and encounter ordering process? I know it is advertised to allow for customizing and home-brewing.

Another example is that I use some alternative "medicine" skill rules and allow the medicine skill to operate off of INT or WIS and use a modified "Advanced Healer" feat. I also have incorporated some of the community home-brew content for some available feats, class options, etc. I have downloaded and installed the community 5e pack from these forums, so I know lot of this is possible.

Thanks again for the help. This community seems to be very supportive and helpful, and the tool(s) have some awesome potential.

PS: It is mind-boggling how much content daplunk has put into RW. One wonders if you have a day job. Here's hoping that the content sharing and marketplace will be up soon. That might swing me right there.

It does print a nice default character sheet, and there's at least one, if not two, user created character sheets that are pretty nice as well.

Another thing that is often overlooked is that a Hero Lab portfolio can contain multiple characters. It's not limited to one character per file. When I play, I have the full party loaded up on my notebook. We have one player who is still adjusting to understanding the rules, so when she has a question, I can check her character sheet and her abilities and powers (she's a psionicist) and help her out.

We have another player who makes assumptions about the rules, so I can always switch to his character and double check his claims. It's not so much that he tries to cheat, as that he just has his own internal logic. If x is true about my character, then y should be true as well. Some of his claims may work as house rules for some people, but our GM always wants to know the actual rule before he makes a judgment. So I can help out with that.

Otherwise, I just let people create, modify and print their characters.

[Conandy]

Originally Posted by gaffneyks

Just my opinion and some of the posters here have more experience than I...

But if you are focusing on the Hero Lab/encounter part of Realm Works, you are looking at the wrong thing. The very last thing i try and fill in in the Mechanics Reference section(but I also use Hero Lab to build the encounters).

Where realm works shines is the campaign management piece. Nothing else equals it.

Are your players having issues keeping track of a complicated plot line? See the videos on Storyboards. Problem Solved

Are you sick of numerous maps, handouts? Problem Solved, Look at all the videos on Maps and fog of war.

Is the player character who keeps the journal always having to ask, "How do you spell King Whatshisname from where? Add NPCS in Realm Works and with the players version. Problem solved.

Just my thoughts, but really helped with Role playing especially for the guy who had to worry about keeping the journal, now he just keeps smalls notes and used the Players version after the session to do a journal and everyone can view plot lines that are revealed between games and plan.

That is what attracted me to Realm Works in the first place. The Hero Lab stuff is just icing on the cake. But if I can quickly make NPC's who have real stats just in case the party decides to be murder hobos and try to kill them, all the better. Same with access to all the monster stats. Less materials at the table means my life is easier. I started using 3x5 cards for monsters, and when the encounter includes 4 or 5 monster types, keeping track of all of them is a headache. I think HL will alleviate that, after I get it fully populated.

The journal and player access stuff won't start benefiting my players much (except as I use it as a tool to present at the table) before the web access goes live. But that is OK. The tool is for me. Letting them access it is just more icing.

Now I need to buy a laptop so I can use this at the table....dang it.

[MNBlockHead]

Before the SRD and community material was available in Hero Labs, I only used RW. I used a text exander (Phrase Express) to create macros to make it quick to at stats to monsters and NPCs in RW.

Now that I'm using HL, I can't imagine going back. It is so easy to build an NPC or create some por files for monsters / encounters and link to them from RW. I don't bother entering stats directly in RW any more.

[Thaldon]

Too bad hero labs is not an option for GURPS

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by Thaldon

Too bad hero labs is not an option for GURPS

They wanted to. Steve Jackson Games said no.

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by EightBitz

They wanted to. Steve Jackson Games said no.

Really? I know they have a e character sheet they sell so maybe they have some sort of exclusive deal.

But it is my understanding that nothing would prevent the fans from doing it themselves.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by kbs666

Really? I know they have a e character sheet they sell so maybe they have some sort of exclusive deal.

Nothing so complicated, at least according to the folks at LWD.

ObTopic: I own Hero Lab for playing Pathfinder, but I don't use it at the table as a player or GM. I've got plenty of printed character sheets and PDFs, though.

On my main computer Hero Lab won't work with Realm Works because I've moved HL's folders off of my boot drive (via the command line switches described in the documentation) and Realm Works can't handle that. It hasn't been much of an issue for me since the main system for which I use RW isn't supported anyway, but if you plan to use the integration it's something you should avoid.

[ibecker]

Originally Posted by kbs666

Really? I know they have a e character sheet they sell so maybe they have some sort of exclusive deal.

But it is my understanding that nothing would prevent the fans from doing it themselves.

Unfortunately, there *is* a problem with fans doing it themselves. There is no equivalent to the OGL for GURPS. Per my comment in the "GURPS Lite" Hero Lab thread I asked Steve Jackson Games about it, and they said that they would consider a fan-created GURPS addition to Hero Lab to be "piracy", since they sell their own character generator.

I'd love to help out with adding GURPS support to Hero Lab (since that game could certainly use it, and I think that their own character generator program leaves a lot to be desired), but I think that LWD would have to work out a deal with SJGames before it could legally happen.

[Silveras]

Originally Posted by Parody

[url=http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?p=30890#post30890]

On my main computer Hero Lab won't work with Realm Works because I've moved HL's folders off of my boot drive (via the command line switches described in the documentation) and Realm Works can't handle that. It hasn't been much of an issue for me since the main system for which I use RW isn't supported anyway, but if you plan to use the integration it's something you should avoid.

Have you reported this as a bug? The recent change to HeroLab to add a selector for cases in which the user has more than one "folder" for specific versions of the same Game System (Pathfinder in my case) was sparked because I mentioned that HeroLab "assumed" the main copy of the Game System on launch from a portfolio or Realm Works.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by Silveras

Have you reported this as a bug? ...

Yes, a long time ago. Given the recommended workaround, general development path of Hero Lab, and (presumably) few users affected, I doubt either application will be changed to support it.