Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Oak Harbor, WA, USA
Posts: 616
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Hero Lab calculates a lot of things that makes our gaming a lot easier. But I don't understand why it won't make GMs gaming easier. The Tactical Console is great for remembering the order of initiative, who's actually in the battle and who's not, damage and healing, circumstances and combat actions and conditions. It even knows what round the battle is in. But it drops the ball on the duration of conditions. With all that Hero Lab does it won't turn off a condition when it expires or at the very least alert me that a condition has expired. With everything a GM has to maintain being able to have conditions automated like everything else in the program would be so helpful to a busy GM.
Another condition that would be helpful to include and also be automated is bleed. I actually had a player accuse me of being too lazy to activate bleed condition during combat. I nearly leaped across the table to choke him as I explained to him that it's not a feature of the program. But I'm also fine with telling him every time he causes that condition it's up to him to remind me on his round. However, having the other conditions automated would be a huge help. Thanks. Ruhar |
#1 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2011
Posts: 6,793
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It's a good suggestion, and one we've heard before. As always, the trouble is time. Starfinder is coming next year, perhaps we'll be able to improve on the tactical console for that, though I can't be sure.
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#2 |
Senior Member
Volunteer Data File Contributor
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Chicago, IL (USA)
Posts: 10,729
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Quote:
After installing turn on "ShadowChemosh Adjustments" and you will also get: Catch on Fire, Bleeding, Climbing, Swimming/Underwater, & Deal Nonlethal Dmg (-4H). Hero Lab Resources: Pathfinder - d20pfsrd and Pathfinder Pack Setup 3.5 D&D (d20) - Community Server Setup 5E D&D - Community Server Setup Hero Lab Help - Hero Lab FAQ, Editor Tutorials and Videos, Editor & Scripting Resources. Created by the community for the community - Realm Works kickstarter backer (Alpha Wolf) and Beta tester.- d20 HL package volunteer editor. |
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#3 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2015
Posts: 435
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Yes, but does your Bleed condition automatically apply damage every round? Does Fast Healing automatically heal damage each round? And so on. If it does, I think my Gm would be more motivated to install and use the Community Pack. As it stands, he gets a bunch of warnings when he loads my character's portfolio because I have it installed (and use it) and he doesn't.
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#4 |
Senior Member
Volunteer Data File Contributor
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Chicago, IL (USA)
Posts: 10,729
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Quote:
If he installed it he would not have those warnings when loading your character. So he "should" install it just for that feature. Hero Lab Resources: Pathfinder - d20pfsrd and Pathfinder Pack Setup 3.5 D&D (d20) - Community Server Setup 5E D&D - Community Server Setup Hero Lab Help - Hero Lab FAQ, Editor Tutorials and Videos, Editor & Scripting Resources. Created by the community for the community - Realm Works kickstarter backer (Alpha Wolf) and Beta tester.- d20 HL package volunteer editor. |
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#5 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 1,528
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Well, I had planned to eventually post this as a new thread, but since this one is here, I will just post my prepared text for discussion:
Tactical Console Improvements In the spirit of my prior "Spellbook Functionality" thread, I am opening this one to try to get some community feedback on various features that might help the Tactical Console. This includes brainstorming alternatives (such as the "The Party" Hero type mentioned below) that might make it easier to do some things. Part of the discussion should also be to try to rate how important various features would be to the community, in order to give LoneWolf some input there in a coordinated fashion. Alterations (probably all at the core HeroLab level, not something a single Game System can implement)
New Base Functions
New Advanced Functions
New Extremely Advanced Functions
Conditions These new conditions are not all called out in the Glossary in the Core Rulebook, but keeping track of these (especially if a session ends mid-combat) can be useful. Some of these have been added to the Community Pack since I began this listing, but supporting them in the core would be good.
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#6 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2015
Posts: 435
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Quote:
As to proposed TC upgrades, I'll post on that separately. I've already written a couple posts on this topic, as well as submitting a bug report that describes both necessary and nice-to-have features for the TC. |
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#7 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Quebec, QC, Canada
Posts: 464
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At least, if the various DRs, ERs, fast healing, bleed effects etc.. currently applying to a character were listed under HPs on the In-Play tab, that would help not forgetting some of those. My Storm Druid has had ER Lightning forever, and I tend to forget that...
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#8 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Sep 2015
Posts: 435
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Well, it's going to be some time before I can post a wish list for the TC. I will add some overall observations here now and do something more complete towards the end of the week.
First and foremost, can a scripting language be used for the TC? This would likely be a major risk ("risk" as defined in software development simply means it involves a potentially large investment in resources that may not pay off). There could be some huge payoffs for this: ability to customize the TC logic for each game system (the initiative used by PF is not the same as used by Savage Worlds, for example), the ability to add themes to the TC (most scripting languages provide a GUI layer that allows CSS, or something like CSS, to control component layout, colors, fonts, and so on), and the ability to include event handling for user-defined features (imagine a TC that fires a "turn completed" event that can invoke user-written code; now expand that to "round completed", "spell cast", and "damage taken", and allow for user-defined events). I believe HL is written mostly in C (and Obj-C on the Mac platform?), and both have been successfully extended with scripting languages. Examples that immediately come to mind are Perl, Python, and Lua, but I'm sure there are many more. JavaScript and Go would be good choices, as they are very well-known languages with a lot of easy-to-find resources such as tutorials. Ideally, HL would be able to spin off a new thread to handle the TC, leaving the main window available to continue to manipulate individual heroes, but if HL is not already multithreaded this will be a huge amount of work. There's no doubt that it would be a significant investment. But the payoff would be similarly large! Users could write their own TC for their game system, similar to the Community Pack by SC. But this would go beyond myriad small tweaks to heroes and step into the realm of implementing actual game mechanics. And a scripting language would be immediately cross-platform if the language implementation is cross-platform (as the languages listed above are). Otherwise, users have to rely on LW to produce updates and those updates tend to get bogged down in a development pipeline with no transparency to users. In addition, LW gets free script development, since a share-alike license (see CreativeCommons.org) means LW could leverage what users produce and add it to the next release of HL... More later. |
#9 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Mar 2014
Location: Germany, so please bear with my English
Posts: 378
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To all of the suggestions: Yes please!
I only use HL as a GM and while it does its job, there's definitely room for improvement and anything to make my life as GM easier is welcome. Right now, I only use very few of the options, as it takes more time and distracts me to manage everything in the tactical console than just using pen and paper to track hp and conditions. |
#10 |
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