Entering Established PCs into HeroLab
 

It seems to take a long time to enter an established player character into HeroLab. Is it reasonable to expect this will change when the new data sets come out, allowing among other things the build of PC's using the KarmaGen character system?

Right now it seems like the program is built to generate a starting character and advance him/her/it from ground zero.

This isn't a major breaking point for me, I'm just curious if I'm alone in this feeling or are others sharing my pain?

Yeah I agree with you there. Adding an already established character for me results in a bunch of invalidations in Hero Lab. I don't necessarily know how much Karma the character spent on this, that, or the other.

As a GM I just want to enter my player's character, plug in how much total Karma he has, how much Karma he's spent, and hit the "done" button. There may be a way to do this, but I haven't found it.

simply make the advances you need to get the character were you want it to be then add the right amount of karma. Adjust streetcred/not/public as needed to make it all even out at the proper starting point.

I guess I'd like to be able to add all my skills at once, sort of like populating the fields on a table and same with other traits like spells and whatnot....this is probably just the way the interface is set up and I doubt they'll change that at any point. Again, not a big breaking point for me but it makes the interface a little clunky when you're adapting it to existing games.

HL appears to function much like an accounting package in this respect. Yeah, you can pop all of the end values in, but you have to show where they came from in order to keep the books legit.

You can adjust the number of build points for your characters via the config character feature at any time. If you do 1 BP = 2 Karma from the runner's companion you can put the character in, ignoring the validation errors for your existing characters, and then edit the total when your done to get rid of the validation errors, that is how I handled existing characters for my campaign.

Another thing you can do to handle existing character equipment is use the journal tab to enter the total nuyen you need to match up the character's equipment. Using that and the method I described above you should be able to get an existing character into the system and have a good idea of how many build points your characters are at.

Hmmm I don't think I found the option for adjusting starting BP yet. I'll give that a try.

He means the adjustable 400 on the first screen you see while you're creating a new character (or select the Character menu ... configure hero to get back there for an existing character).