This weekend I used HLO live for the first time (in a Starfinder Society game), and loved it!
I've used HLC (for Pathfinder) for a couple of years, but have been playing Starfinder on pencil-and-paper up till now. Compared to HLC, the HLO interface felt *much* better organized and intuitive, with all the info I needed for common situations right there on the Play tab. I loved being able to make most of my rolls right in the program, with all my modifiers added automatically. (Although I still had to borrow physical dice a couple of times, for example when adding extra damage dice from a spell cast on my character. Hopefully a generic dice roller will get implemented in the future
)
At one point my char contracted a disease-- Starfinder diseases are pretty complicated, and it would have been a real headache with just a paper charsheet-- but in HLO it was super simple to activate and advance along the disease track. Adjusting for conditions like that is where HLC always shone, and HLO made it just as easy.
I did run into a couple of technical snafus: When I first got to the game store, it turned out the wifi was down that day. For a second it seemed like game over for HLO, but the GM just set her phone on wifi hotspot mode for me and all was well. Later on the site did crash and kick me out with a cascade of red error messages, but I closed my browser and re-opened it, logged back in and kept going.
Those issues aside, I thoroughly enjoyed playing on HLO and am glad I pulled the trigger on buying it, even at this early stage in its development. This game was played exclusively on my laptop, but next time I plan on trying it on a tablet and/or phone to see how that goes. Maybe I'll post another mini-report afterward, if anyone is interested.
You're doing good work, LW devs! Keep it up!
I've used HLC (for Pathfinder) for a couple of years, but have been playing Starfinder on pencil-and-paper up till now. Compared to HLC, the HLO interface felt *much* better organized and intuitive, with all the info I needed for common situations right there on the Play tab. I loved being able to make most of my rolls right in the program, with all my modifiers added automatically. (Although I still had to borrow physical dice a couple of times, for example when adding extra damage dice from a spell cast on my character. Hopefully a generic dice roller will get implemented in the future
) At one point my char contracted a disease-- Starfinder diseases are pretty complicated, and it would have been a real headache with just a paper charsheet-- but in HLO it was super simple to activate and advance along the disease track. Adjusting for conditions like that is where HLC always shone, and HLO made it just as easy.
I did run into a couple of technical snafus: When I first got to the game store, it turned out the wifi was down that day. For a second it seemed like game over for HLO, but the GM just set her phone on wifi hotspot mode for me and all was well. Later on the site did crash and kick me out with a cascade of red error messages, but I closed my browser and re-opened it, logged back in and kept going.
Those issues aside, I thoroughly enjoyed playing on HLO and am glad I pulled the trigger on buying it, even at this early stage in its development. This game was played exclusively on my laptop, but next time I plan on trying it on a tablet and/or phone to see how that goes. Maybe I'll post another mini-report afterward, if anyone is interested.
You're doing good work, LW devs! Keep it up!
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