Basic DM Advice for Using Combat Tracker

[Wruin]

What is the best way to use the Hero Lab combat tracker as a DM? I just bought it and started playing with it.

I created a portfolio for the player characters and their allies. I plan to have this open during the game to track changes.

I started creating portfolios for each encounter. I will then add a portfolio to the combat tracker each time there is an encounter. After the encounter I will remove the enemies from the combat tracker.

Is this how you do it? It takes a lot of time to create all the encounter portfolios, but I think I prefer to group them before the game rather than find and add each monster during the game, and unique NPCs must be created ahead of time.

I appreciate advice from DMs experienced at using the combat tracker.

[Aaron]

That's more or less how I do it as well.

All the stock monster portfolios are built to match the entry in the Bestiary book that monster's from, and I don't agree with the choices built into most of those. Why should a shark have Improved Initiative? It makes more sense to me that they should have Improved Natural Attack (bite).

[lpye]

Another vote for "portfolio per encounter". Furthermore, I like to create subfolders to help categorize some encounters. For example, I recently ran a session where encounters were semi-random, involving selections of various undead creatures. I created an "avg" and a "chal" folder for average and challenging encounters respectively. Then each average encounter portfolio was placed in avg and likewise for challenging into "chal". Then when I was prepared for pulling up an encounter of the appropriate difficulty, I could easily pick which one I wanted.

Also, when importing from a portfolio, you get a list of all creatures along with an incrementer to select how many of that creature you want. If you are using an encounter with multiple instances of the same creature, you could opt to include that creature once and then when importing simply increment how you like, I would suggest you include as many separate instances in the portfolio for that encounter as makes sense. That way you know you have already accounted for the challenge rating and also have the option to custom tweak each creature as needed.

I also suggest that if your group has any summons (for example, one of my PC's has a Wand of Monster Summons and likes to summon an Eagle from time to time), keep an instance of those summons in your party's portfolio. You can mark those summons as inactive and, if I recall correctly, when the portfolio is saved that will be remembered. Then when summoned, you can simply activate the summoned creature in the combat tracker without having to do a re-import.

[Wruin]

Thanks! This is the kind of advice I am looking for. I created a separate portfolio for creatures I expect will be summoned during one of my encounters. I will look into the inactive setting.

One of my players is playing a summoner. He is REALLY good about working up stats before the game, but with Hero Lab he won't have to.

[freeAgent]

My solution is to use Combat Manager instead of Hero Lab for tracking combat. It's a lot more flexible with managing who is in and out of the combat at any time and you can import Hero Lab .por files easily. It's also free, so there's no reason not to use it IMO.