• Please note: In an effort to ensure that all of our users feel welcome on our forums, we’ve updated our forum rules. You can review the updated rules here: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=5528.

    If a fellow Community member is not following the forum rules, please report the post by clicking the Report button (the red yield sign on the left) located on every post. This will notify the moderators directly. If you have any questions about these new rules, please contact support@wolflair.com.

    - The Lone Wolf Development Team

Does Hero Lab have a player friendly initiative tracker?

I

icantfallasleep

Active member
We run our games on a TV/table setup and we currently use Combat Manager. However I just bought Hero Lab and a subscription to most it's content. i'd like to run my games off of Hero Lab if possible, especially since I can design and tweak encounters better and more granularly on Hero Lab ...

I have the tactical console which shows monster stats and PC stats. However I cannot seem to find a player friendly (does not show monster stats) initiative window I can put on our second monitor (the TV) for everyone to queue up their turns.

Can you please help me find it? Maybe there is a setting to hide that information on the tactical console?
 
Maybe export encounters into Combat Manager? I seem to recall hearing you can import HL PCs into Combat Manager, maybe you can do that with Monsters and Encounters?
 
Maybe combat manager but really Initiative tracker is really meant for DM's not players. I can see how it could help but also bet many DM's would feel that it was to metagaming or giving away too much info.

Can't think of a way to do this with HL currently that does not give away all the info...
 
With combat manager you can remove the window/pane with all the monster stats. But, you will still have all the names of the monsters etc... I think in most games, even that would be revealing too much information. As such, I think combat manager should only be a GM tool as well but whatever works for you I guess.

I just recently purchased hero labs and tried using tactical console and found it very difficult to use and lacking in many features in comparison to combat manager so I still have to use combat manager.

Are there any plans to make the tactical console more user friendly and more feature rich/customizable? Would really love an all in one solution.
 
We would love to make improvements to the tactical console, but haven't been able to find the time yet. It's certainly on the radar though.
 
I'm the DM in our games, and use Combat Manager in conjunction with Hero Lab. You can save encounters in Hero Lab and open them with Combat Manager. Occasionally, hit points don't transfer across, but those can be entered fairly easily.

I liked the combat options from an older program, DM Genie. Combat Manager is a lot closer to that functionality, and I'm a lot more comfortable with it now than initially... and Hero Lab, as much as I love it for the building of characters, it wasn't what I was looking for as far as running combats go.
 
Any updates on a player-friendly initiative window? My setup is similar to the OP, where I run Hero Lab and Combat Manager on my laptop and display player info on the TV via the extended portion of my desktop. I would use Hero Lab exclusively if I could display a player-friendly initiative window, which currently only Combat Manager seems to allow.
 
You could try the Initiative Tool for Map Tools. It is pretty fair. You can set up the PC party and each encounter before hand.
 
Do any of the tools hide enemies from the players? Without this feature I would never want to show the initiative to the players. Things I do not want the players to know:

1. When they go in relationship to the enemy (until the monster has had a turn)
2. How many enemies there are, i.e. enemy out of sight and is moving/sneaking in.
 
Toblakai said:
Do any of the tools hide enemies from the players? Without this feature I would never want to show the initiative to the players. Things I do not want the players to know:

1. When they go in relationship to the enemy (until the monster has had a turn)
2. How many enemies there are, i.e. enemy out of sight and is moving/sneaking in.
Click to expand...

Combat Manager has an initiative window that can be configured to:

1) Show all participants, names included.
2) Show all participants, enemy names obscured.
3) Show only party members.
 
alientude said:
Combat Manager has an initiative window that can be configured to:

1) Show all participants, names included.
2) Show all participants, enemy names obscured.
3) Show only party members.
Click to expand...

So not quite what I want. I would only want to show enemies that the party is aware of, and be able to toggle enemy names on a per enemy basis. Hoping HLO can do this eventually!
 
Toblakai said:
So not quite what I want. I would only want to show enemies that the party is aware of, and be able to toggle enemy names on a per enemy basis. Hoping HLO can do this eventually!
Click to expand...

You can individually hide enemies so that they show on the GM initiative tracker but don't show up on the player-visible one. I don't think there's a way to individually obfuscate enemy names, however.
 
Would love to know if any updates are in the works for the tactical console to make it player-friendly? Like some of the earlier posters, I use HL to generate characters and monsters and then import them into Combat Manager, as I can project a separate initiative window from Combat Manager onto my TV that just shows the initiative order, without any creature stats, etc.

AFAIK, HL's tactical console can't do this. Unfortunately, Combat Manager doesn't import a character's spells from HL, which means I have to retype that info if I want to use it to run combats and use its initiative tracker.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top