Import Gear into Hero Lab Hero

[pyremius]

I'm not sure about how doable this one is as it crosses apps. Would it be possible to create a "Hero Lab Snippet" (for lack of a better term), consisting of one or more pieces of equipment or treasure? These could be linked to Realm Works Topics just as the Hero Lab Portfolios are, and then imported into a running copy of Hero Lab in almost the same way - the big difference being that you would have to go one step deeper and specify which Hero they are added to.

Additional information which would be needed in Realm Works would be a modification to the original entry documenting which Portfolio/Hero the Snippet was added to, along with the game date.

The documentation would be most useful with unique items so that you can easily figure out where they went for future reference. A later modification to Hero Lab would be the ability to export gear collections so they can be traded among party members, added to Realm Works as future loot (a character's body was never recovered, so their gear gets exported and becomes part of the location's Topic for future adventurers.)

I know this is big in programming terms, as you'll have to either rewrite Hero Lab, or as a short-term hack create a new program that does nothing but access the existing data sets to create gear Portfolios.

[Bidmaron]

I'll go you one step further:

I want to be able to store a 'frequency' field for most instantiable items (a monster, a piece of gear, a 'peasant home') along the lines of non-existent, very rare, rare, uncommon, common, and mundane that govern how likely they are to appear somewhere, and I want to be able to vary these by region and/or time (thus in Kansibar a scimitar is very common, but in Okbosh, they are very rare).

I know (well, maybe I don't but I haven't seen any discussion of it) RW isn't going to be an NPC equipper or be able to automatically generate the inventory of the general store in the capital of Kansibar (although I hope RW can at least store it), but it is my hope that we can export such a list with frequency information to HL, varying the nominal price of an item according to its frequency.