HeroLab at the table

[lpye]

I used HeroLab for a Pathfinder game a couple of nights ago and it worked better than I had anticipated. Primarily I wanted it for turn tracking during combat but I'm also liking the integration of the rules for purposes of leveling up and especially for in-combat status tracking when applying buffs and effects.

That said I do have a few questions:

- In preparation for the adventure, I had created a portfolio for the players, a portfolio for the long term NPCs for the campaign, and a portfolio specifically for all encounterable NPCs/monsters for the specific adventure. Then when combat was to start, I would "Import Hero From Portfolio..." for the pertinent critters and go into the Tactical Window. Is that the normal method for handling this? Does anyone else have any other suggestions? It just seemed a little klunky.

- Bless provides a +X bonus to the caster and all allies for the duration. Is there a way to apply an Adjust buff like a Spell Adjustment for Bless to all allies currently loaded in the portfolio? Or do I have to add it one at a time?

- When the last combat ended, several members of the party still had buffs active. I found that I needed to manually go back in and remove all temp buffs and also heal all hp back to full, the idea being to have everything ready for the next session. Is there a way to do that for all members of the portfolio? i.e. heal all damage and remove all Adjust values on the Adjust tab?

[chiefweasel]

For the portfolios, that is a way to handle it.

for the other issue, I would let the players run their own characters and track the buffs themselves. Save the GM all the time of making adjustments to all the player characters.

[lpye]

With regard to the players tracking things themselves, for the most part they were. But at one point they enlarged one of the characters and that player was new, so they were walking through the various changes along with the bless. When they saw I could just click a couple of checkboxes and get the bonuses straight ... well, we were all pleased as punch. So while I imagine there will still be player tracking going on, I think the entire group appreciates the idea of tracking things in HL.

And while I recognize that your comment:

"that is a way to handle it"

is of course true, I was hoping to get some other ideas on how to handle it, seeing as this was literally my first use of it in an actual gaming situation.

[Thazar]

The way you have the encounters set up is how we run our games. The DM is the only person that needs to track the monsters and players run their own characters on their copy of Hero Lab.

We have gone to an all Hero Lab table with our group. Each player has a mini laptop and they run their character live at the game. Everyone can check their buffs/conditions and what not as the encounter moves forward. At the end of a fight I give everyone their EXP and treasure then and characters are updated live.

For things that are not divided up, the party tracker has a notepad until it is either sold for coin, or given to a player or NPC.

[Nikmal]

What I normally do is to take all the NPC's and Creatures I may use for an encounter and then I take in to consideration all the spells that they may or may not case. If any of them is a buff I preset that entire encounter with that spell adjustment in the "adjust" tab so I do not have to take the time and search for the spell and then select it. If a PC were to cast something on an NPC or creature.. I try to take in to consideration what they have cast in the past and add that to the adjustment tabs too.
While I can not account for all the spells that the PC's may or may not use in their arsenal I have been fairly decent so far where I can cut the fight down by almost 10 minutes and we are at 12th level now. So this can be significant.

But as others have mentioned I would let the players take care of their own mods and buffs. A cheap way of doing this for them is to have the buff card deck.. this takes care of most of the buff's that they may get during an encounter and save time looking them up. Especially if not all of them own the Hero Lab Software.