Character Sheets

[bromleylaerchenheim]

Hi - just use HL since a week. I ll find HL great and easy to use but two things strikes me:

- Why are all the lists (weapons, armors, feats...) not sortable? Finding a specific feat is a time-consuming thing. Why not just providing a few more columns to sort for combat, racial, class feats etc...?

- The character sheet output is creepy. Why does Lone Wolf not just provide sheets following the rulesystem standards? Otherwise it would be great to just have a simple editor to move things around and customize sheets.

[Nikmal]

Customizable Character Sheets are coming soon. They just sent out a newsletter explaining:

We continue to work on updating Hero Lab and the latest update, V3.7, is coming soon. Hero Lab 3.7 adds a variety of highly requested features, including:

* Customizable output: By writing an XSLT file, you can generate totally customizable game-specific output for your heroes. Now you can work on that custom character sheet that you've always wanted!
* Output multiple heroes: As well as just outputting the current hero, you'll be able to print or generate statblocks for all heroes in the portfolio at once. This is ideal for GMs running encounters, or players who have sidekicks, companions or familiars.
* Scrollable tabs: Running Hero lab on a netbook or laptop is easier than ever before, with new scrollable tabs - instead of trying to squeeze more and more information into the same tiny space, tabs will now scroll when necessary.

And more! This update also includes more bug fixes for issues uncovered by you, our users, and includes other stability updates.

[tatteredking]

bromley,

welcome aboard. While HL feats/spells, etc are not easily sortable, if you are looking for a specific feat, you can search on it. Take, for example, feats. Open the Feat tab, click the Add New Feat link. In the pop-up window at the top, right under the "Add a Feat - 0 of 1 (1 left)" line, there is an empty box, and then a pulldown menu that currently reads Everything.

In the empty box, start typing the specific feat you are looking for.

But I know what you are saying. It would be nice to be able to pull up, all the metamagic feats, for example.

[CapeCodRPGER]

I would like more custominzation with the HL sheet. Here are some things I like, feel free to add so the HL people can see. I use HL for Pathfinder.

1. Page numbers for the spells.

2. Able to add gems, jewlery to the tresure list so it gets added in enc.. I know you can add it with custom treasure or write it in the the journal. Be nice to just add it in.

3. The option to print out certin weapons as combat stat blocks. The way it is now every weapon you carry has a stat block. A couple of my players in my game were just carrying weapons that they knew they would not use. A few of the weapons were even in a portable hole. Yet all the weapons print out as combat stat blocks. This wastes ink and makes it harder to to find the weapon attack you are using as you also don't have any way to tell HL what order you like the weapons printed out.

4. A breakdown on the different bonus' for different things. IE, Initiative should have the total modifier, the DEX, and feats, armor, magic, ect.. Not just the total modifier. Easier to adjust when you know the breakdown.

What do others think?

[gypsyxot]

Originally Posted by tatteredking

bromley,

But I know what you are saying. It would be nice to be able to pull up, all the metamagic feats, for example.

because each feat lists the type of feat you CAN. simply type metamagic in the search box. I've also had good luck typing in what I'd like to have the feat modify such as, "saving throw", or "bardic music".

[toddlower]

I didn't get this newsletter that you referenced, so . . . when is soon? I love HL for creating characters but the output is so bad as to be unusable. It doesn't display any of the variable bonuses for things like power attack or rage. I currently have a mid level two weapon fighter with rage, power attack, two weapon rend, none of these show on the weapon's stat block. I have five attacks per round. One of the things that I hate most when playing at a table is when I (or others) can't find or compute their attack/damage bonuses in a timely manner.

[Adam.Ormond]

I'm also curious when more flexible output will become available. I'd especially love to see a more verbose XML output, so I could write my own XSLTs. The existing XML output contains a bunch of information that is only useful to HeroLab itself.

I considered writing a parser for the Stat Block output text, but it'd require a lot of hacks to properly differentiate everything, and I'm not even sure it's possible. For example, the spells are separated by commas, but spells have commas in their names as well.

[rob]

The newsletters are all available on our website (www.wolflair.com) and include answers to most of the questions being asked.

Hope this helps....

[CapeCodRPGER]

How easy is it going to be for people like me with no programing skills and very basic computer use skills be able to customize the new sheets? I have no idea what an XLST file is.

[Adam.Ormond]

Originally Posted by CapeCodRPGER

How easy is it going to be for people like me with no programing skills and very basic computer use skills be able to customize the new sheets? I have no idea what an XLST file is.

A brief description of XSLT can be found here.

You don't need programming skills to figure out how to write an XSLT, and if the XML to be processed is available outside of HeroLab, there are a number of free applications that exist to make writing XSLTs more accessible to the non-technical.

I'm really looking forward to this capability -- I have been for over a year. There's so much I could do with the XML, beyond creating pretty character sheets. Like create an HTML5 character sheet that I could use directly on my iPad, and offline.