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Is Hero Lab Online worth it?

N

Nightstar

Member
I've been a huge fan and supporter of Hero Lab Classic, but I'm just not sure about the online version and it's subscription costs.

Online still doesn't support a house rule/customization file that I can create my own races, classes, etc in and apply to any character I create, like Classic does. And that is just one of the issues making me hesitant to renew my subscription.

Another is, I've found an app, Pathbuilder 2E, that effectively does everything Hero Lab Online does, but without a subscription, and it actually uses Pathfinder's character sheet. The only down side is, there isn't one for Starfinder... And those are the only 2 systems I'm currently playing.

So help me justify renewing my subscription to Hero Lab Online, instead of just using the app Pathbuilder... I want to love Hero Lab again.

As a side note, why on earth did Lone Wolf decide to make Hero Lab Online a glorified web page that isn't compatible with Hero Lab Classic, instead of making an android version of their Apple app? That way I could have still used Classic on my desktop, and use the app on my phone, and not worry about them not syncing.

Was someone at Lone Wolf that in love with HTML? :confused:

Khasalianus
 
Nightstar said:
As a side note, why on earth did Lone Wolf decide to make Hero Lab Online a glorified web page that isn't compatible with Hero Lab Classic, instead of making an android version of their Apple app? That way I could have still used Classic on my desktop, and use the app on my phone, and not worry about them not syncing.
Click to expand...

They have said in the past that since HLO is web-based then you can have it on your PC, Apple, Android, Chromebook, anything else with a web browser; all from a single code base.

Implementing something for phones is very different from implementing for desktop.
 
Actually, I've developed apps for iOS, Android, and MacOS with a single code base and minor formatting changes. Windows takes a little bit more, but not much. And, FWIW, I find HLO difficult on a phone.....a tablet, sure, but not a phone.
 
I find it a pain on the phone too.

Plus, Pathbuilder was created by a single stay at home father that self taught programming. So yeah...
 
I do have to give Lone Wolf a lot of credit for just how flexible their app is. After doing some work in the Authoring Kit in HLC, I'm impressed at how much forethought they gave for different systems they could support. Which does, unfortunately, mean that it's bound to take more development to produce a product, even if it's only initially supporting a handful of systems.
 
I recently renewed my subscription and like some of the recent improvements, though it feels kind of bad to pay for the campaign theatre I really can't use.

My personal use case might be unusual, I basically use hero lab online as a character generator and to test builds, unfortunately, due to downtime (planned or unplanned) catching me at a bad time - I can not depend on the service working while I game.

Internet is often not an issue but I GM and play at some locations where it is just not a real option for me.

Of course, I mostly GM and play Paizo organized play for an often changing group of players and GMs, offline and using Roll20. Using the campaign theatre is really not a viable option for me, as an I have little control over what my players are using, and I have never used to option to roll something via hero lab.

If there was a slightly discounted option for a personal subscription without the theatre, that would be very interesting, I really don't mind paying to for server cost (and honestly depending on the discount, it would help me justify to purchase more products I might not use a lot).

Alternatively getting some added month ob subscriptions when you buy a new AP, or book could help with the perception of paying for something I have a harder time to justify.
Of course, that's just me I GM a lot more than I play some any subscription that only applies to my rare play opportunities is harder to justify
EDIT: I don't want to sound unfair, and I like some of the long term features and hope that they come sooner rather than later ^^
 
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I agree that phone usage is difficult, but would be a great supplementary interface for doing simple stuff like changing HP without leaving the view on your computer if you could log in two devices at once. But since we are limited to a single log-in, the phone interface is basically almost wasted.

That's the only thing that is giving me pause, frankly. The single-device log-in seems overly restrictive and very non-customer-centric.

I understand that there are many gamers who will cheat the system and share their account (thinking how smart they are to have figured that one out), but perhaps limited to a single creature view-at-a-time on an account, or only allowing it for Patron accounts might work?
 
flyteach said:
Actually, I've developed apps for iOS, Android, and MacOS with a single code base and minor formatting changes. Windows takes a little bit more, but not much.
Click to expand...

It depends on the app. There are plenty of apps that can be readily created as cross-platform using various toolkits. Those apps don't rely on having 250,000 lines of C++ code drive them (aka the Hero Lab engine). When you add that requirement into the mix, the available options vaporize. In fact, the lone viable option becomes a web-based product where that engine lives on compute-focused servers.
 
Nightstar said:
I find it a pain on the phone too.
Click to expand...

How about constructive criticism, please? How would you like things done differently to improve the interface?

You know what? I'm gonna create a separate thread for exactly that purpose. So please reply within that thread instead of here. :)
 
Nightstar said:
Plus, Pathbuilder was created by a single stay at home father that self taught programming. So yeah...
Click to expand...

What will be interesting is how Pathbuilder evolves as the game does. That was a huge factor with PF1. There were a BUNCH of tools created for PF1 in the earlier years. As the game system got progressively more complex, those tools were unable to handle it or the developers were unwilling to spend the massive amounts of time to support those new features. Hero Lab thrived, primarily because it's engine was capable of supporting all that complexity.

The Game Mastery Guide is the first really interesting book for PF2, and it's gonna be a ton of work for a "single stay at home father" to fully tackle. Especially one that "sell taught programming". No offense is intended here - it's just an objective observation. It was a ton of work for our TEAM to tackle, using a framework that was already designed to handle most of the new mechanisms that GMG introduced. So one person is gonna have a steep mountain to scale.

For everyone's sake, I hope he continues. Competition is good. From a business standpoint, it keeps everyone on edge and ensures nobody gets complacent. From a consumer standpoint, choice is a wonderful thing. Especially when there's a free option available. With the apparent demise of PCGen, the gaming community benefits by having a tool like Pathbuilder as an alternative to what we've got with HLO. Only time will tell how this all unfolds...
 
Banpai said:
unfortunately, due to downtime (planned or unplanned) catching me at a bad time - I can not depend on the service working while I game.
Click to expand...

We had some major problems with reliability and server performance due to code written by a former employee. I spent six months completely rewriting most of the server backend to address those issues, and that rewrite went live just over a month ago. We've also addressed many other bugs that resulted in stability issues. At this point, everything is in pretty good shape. There are still bugs that crop up, but they aren't debilitating ones like we had before. So I encourage you to give it a try again during your next game - with the character sheet ready as a fallback, of course. Hopefully, you'll find that we've vastly improved things. And if not, please report what is still giving you problems.

Banpai said:
Of course, I mostly GM and play Paizo organized play for an often changing group of players and GMs, offline and using Roll20. Using the campaign theatre is really not a viable option for me, as an I have little control over what my players are using, and I have never used to option to roll something via hero lab.
Click to expand...

We've recently added some mechanisms to make it much easier to manage a mixed group of players that don't all use HLO. With the new Stand-In PCs, you can create placeholders containing just the bits of information you care about for the PCs not directly in HLO. This makes it possible to use the Campaign Theater capabilities, such as managing the stage, enacting pre-made scripts, etc. I believe you could also have your players effectively create "stubs" for their PCs with only demo accounts, having them managing those basic details for you.

The CT features will be continuing to evolve over the upcoming months, so there's gonna be even more stuff to potentially leverage there, even when running games for PFS and/or over VTTs.
 
Micco said:
I agree that phone usage is difficult, but would be a great supplementary interface for doing simple stuff like changing HP without leaving the view on your computer if you could log in two devices at once. But since we are limited to a single log-in, the phone interface is basically almost wasted.
Click to expand...

Just in the past month, we've introduced a bunch of "shortcuts" for directly updating things like HP, status conditions, and the like. So the need to navigate to different view to accomplish frequent operations like that is becoming significantly less of an issue. I encourage you to take a look at these recent additions to see if they solve the problem for you. If there are still situations we could handle better, let us know and we'll see what we can do to address them.
 
Rob, I just want to take a minute to say thank you for responding so thoroughly in this thread. I know it takes time away from coding and development but this is the kind of interaction with your customers that originally built LoneWolf's stellar reputation for support.
 
Maidhc O Casain said:
Rob, I just want to take a minute to say thank you for responding so thoroughly in this thread. I know it takes time away from coding and development but this is the kind of interaction with your customers that originally built LoneWolf's stellar reputation for support.
Click to expand...

I'm really trying and appreciate the vote of support! Shortly before I got really sick, I was told by someone I trusted that I should NOT be doing this. Once I got sick, I really didn't have much of a choice, and once I finally got off the brutal meds, we were in such a deep hole that I listened to that repeated advice and stayed away. I continued listening to that advice while I tried to dig us out of the hole on the tech side, but that didn't help on the public relations side. We've been making headway on the development side, and I'm now venturing back out here (in a very limited capacity) in the hopes of starting to rebuild the reputation on the consumer side. As you pointed out, it definitely takes away from all the tech stuff, which there is no shortage to be working on, but I'm hoping that I can keep it limited and still have it be constructive overall. <fingers crossed>
 
rob said:
The Game Mastery Guide is the first really interesting book for PF2, and it's gonna be a ton of work for a "single stay at home father" to fully tackle. Especially one that "sell taught programming". No offense is intended here - it's just an objective observation. It was a ton of work for our TEAM to tackle, using a framework that was already designed to handle most of the new mechanisms that GMG introduced. So one person is gonna have a steep mountain to scale.
Click to expand...

And by tackle you mean all the (supposedly - I didn't check it) subsystems and options still missing from the HLO implementation of the GMG?
(see: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=63996 )

I don't get it. What's the difference?
 
Inglorin said:
And by tackle you mean all the (supposedly - I didn't check it) subsystems and options still missing from the HLO implementation of the GMG?
(see: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=63996 )
Click to expand...

That post was rather disingenuous in its presentation. It detailed a bunch of individual items that it even admitted were in many cases likely not within the scope of HLO and/or didn't check their presence (some are definitely the former and others are definitely already included). It also merely copied our brief marketing summary as what we DO already included instead of providing a similarly detailed list of the numerous capabilities that exist today.

I only noticed that post this weekend, since I've focused my limited attention here on the general stuff about the product. So I'll get a detailed response to that post after consulting with the team to get concrete details about it all. Some of the items are definitely outside the scope of what Hero Lab covers, some items will ultimately be incorporated through already planned capabilities of Campaign Theater, and others are small things that we still have planned to include.

Inglorin said:
I don't get it. What's the difference?
Click to expand...

Well, if you just limit yourself to all the stuff from GMG that is ALREADY present in HLO, that's a TON of work that anyone else still has to implement. So I'm definitely sensing this post may have been intended as flame bait. If that's the case, please tread carefully...
 
Rob, thank you for the detailed and honest replies, I appreciate it. Few things make me as frustrated as silence from the staff of a product, or when they have a condescending attitude. So thank you.

Now you mentioned things that Hero Lab Online won't be able to handle from the GMG... Do you think Hero Lab Classic could handle those issues? My dream would be for PF2 and SF to come to Classic, and integrate with Online. Say, you create a character in Classic, but can open it in Online and make changes, etc. Any chance of that?

And how does the future look with integrating Online with a VTT, like Fantasy Grounds? That is a feature I sorely miss.
 
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