This argument runs counter to many of the comments littered across these forums, where users lament how poorly things like dice rollers behave within some VTTs. There is also the question of the level of granularity provided by dice rollers. For example, our dice roller breaks down damage rolls into all of their constituent elements (e.g. 5 point slashing plus 4 point fire). We can also toggle criticals on/off without losing the original roll. This has all been designed with an eye to the future, where we'll be able to automatically detect resistances and apply those appropriately. The VTTs don't even have the necessary information to manage all of that, but we do, so we can leverage it to further streamline all the bookkeeping for a game.

That's just the dice roller. There are many other aspects where CT will be able to do things that VTTs simply cannot hope to do, unless they want to start tracking all of the gory details for each game system they support.

^^^ THIS ^^^ is the driving concept behind HLO, Campaign Theater, and ultimately VTT integration.

This is an unfortunate reality of RPG software. There are the bigger ones that bring in the revenue and the ones that we support simply because we love the games. The ones that pay the bills need to be given priority so that we can later devote the time to the ones that don't. If all we cared about was making money, half the games we've supported over the years never would have been touched.

That's exactly the idea. The same mechanism should support both purposes.

Thank you for your replies.

In regards to prioritization of game setting source books,
is there anyway to crowd source materials? So people could use unofficial 'compilations' from the community or 'home brew' while we wait for the official implementation?

There is currently no user-accessible editor for data files, or content of any sort, which can be used outside of a single character for one user. For a single character, there are a variety of custom items and abilities you can add, along with manual adjustments to the character, but nothing more formal than that yet.

Something which I definitely hope will change in the future since one of the great advantages of Hero Lab (and one of the things that helped let Lone Wolf support some of the less popular systems) was the editing system. It let GMs create their own custom material for their campaigns and it let users submit fixes, expansions, and the like for supplemental material.

I was wondering, do you had a firm release date for the APG yet? I've got my PDF from Paizo and I'm signed up to play GenCon Online in 6 days and I need to make a new character. I really would love to have HLO help me with that. Any update?

This is vastly harder within HLO than Classic for one very simple reason. We need to safeguard against user errors with PERFECT success. HLO is a shared resource on a common server that all users access. If a user error is not caught, it can cause everything to fail for everyone. Within Classic, the only one impacted by a user error is the user himself. Not within HLO.

This gets even more complex due HL scripting being an pretty powerful language. For example, it would be trivial in a script to introduce an infinite loop. It's also quite possible to accomplish that in a non-obvious way that spans multiple scripts and procedures. Obviously, an infinite loop would completely screw all other users on the server at that time, so we'd have to detect such errors and deal with them in some reasonable way that doesn't negatively impact the system while giving reasonable feedback to the creating user.

That's just one basic example of hundreds (perhaps thousands) that need to be dealt with.

We've made some inroads towards this goal, but we still have a LOT of work yet to do. So this is something that's still quite a ways off from being exposed to users.

As an interim solution, we've been providing significantly more flexibility to let users customize elements of characters directly within the product, which I believe has greatly reduced the need for the editing system. We have more enhancements along these lines planned, which should allow users to more readily fill in the remaining gaps.

The street date for the book is this Thursday, so you should be able to get it in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

Based on where things stand today, it looks like we'll have about 95% of the book ready for Thursday. The few remaining bits should be available the following Wednesday in an update.

Just generally disappointed. Was a long time supporter of herolab classic while playing pathfinder 1.
Was not excited to hear about switching to an online supscription based service. But gave you the benefit of the doubt and signed up when we started playing Shadowrun 6.

i understand things are difficult on your end. But understand it from my point. You've happily taken my money and the money of all my players and yet support has dwindled rapidly and I am left in limbo with a character generator that has only partial functionality. Players begging to use equipment and options that have been out for several gaming sessions now but can't unless we go back to manually adding the options with a pen and paper which begs the question, why are we paying you money?