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wess
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Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 5

Old December 22nd, 2013, 10:37 AM
I would love it if there was better support for Hero lab. I would love for the information stored in Hero lab would automatically populate information in Relmworks.

I would love to be able to:
Import Toons
Import Items
Import NPC
Import Monsters

Basically I would love to use Hero Lab to create my stuff and have RealmWorks import the information and then I can use RelmWorks to manage it and create relationships and track its information.
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Caraldur
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Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Northeast Pa
Posts: 36

Old December 24th, 2013, 04:38 PM
I think this would be an excellent feature. +1 from me.
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Aleslosh
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Join Date: Oct 2013
Location: Pennsylvania
Posts: 52

Old December 25th, 2013, 07:04 AM
I'm a Hero Lab user also and would love to see that level of integration into the Realm Works platform.... V5.0?

However...

I don't have the RW software yet so can't play around with it to know for sure, but Linking may solve this request? I know you can import material from Hero Lab (as per the tutorials) but am not sure to what degree. And once imported, I would think you could edit it and establish links to other items, etc.
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Hiaasen
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Join Date: Apr 2014
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Old April 5th, 2014, 09:51 AM
I would also like to see better integration with Hero Lab. Most of the "snippet" fields are duplicates of fields already populated in HL automatically during the character creation process. Entering this information manually a second time is cumbersome and feels unnecessary. As a new user and a new GM already in the middle of a campaign, I was looking forward to using Realm Works to lighten my load with respect to data entry and ongoing management. I still look forward to this, but I am finding it's going to take a long while to get there.

Here is my ideal scenario for starting a new campaign: Use Hero Lab to generate PCs and NPCs quickly. Use Realm Works to import character data from HL files quickly. To me, this would mean individuals in the People Group in left-hand navigation would already be created with as many snippets as possible already filled in and Tags already generated. I would then use Realm Works to create the world and drop the characters into it. As I am a Pathfinder user, I would also be excited to see content supplements for Adventure Paths to fill in the rest of the content (Places, Events, etc.) in Realm Works in the same way that I can purchase supplements in Hero Lab for character details from core books.

Lone Wolf rightly determined that character generation and management is a powerful tool that most gamers need first and foremost, which they did with Hero Lab. Their execution on Hero Lab was and is exquisite. They have developed a very powerful campaign management engine with Realm Works. The downside of campaign management is the sheer amount of data entry involved. Speaking for myself, I'm not sure I have the time to do Realm Works justice from a data entry standpoint. There are far too many fields to flesh out in any given Group (People, Groups, Places, Things, Events, and Other) for me to "get it all in" in the 2-3 hours per month I can dedicate to game prep (our game is monthly). I am sure there are plans to offer licensed content supplements that have been made available for Pathfinder through Hero Lab. Until this content is available, I worry that I have wasted my $50.

The feature I see myself using the least is the cloud server feature, unless my players can get user licenses for free. I don't see them paying even half price to read what I can tell them out loud at the table for free. This is largely something I will be using to keep myself organized. So far it has proved itself a bit too cumbersome.
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ryntak4536
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Posts: 63

Old April 11th, 2014, 11:17 AM
Having RW create people based on imported hero lab portfolio's would be AWESOME!
However, for now what I've been doing is creating merely the people (with little/no snippets completed), and importing their HL portfolio.
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Farling
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Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Greater London, UK
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Old April 12th, 2014, 01:38 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ryntak4536 View Post
Having RW create people based on imported hero lab portfolio's would be AWESOME!
However, for now what I've been doing is creating merely the people (with little/no snippets completed), and importing their HL portfolio.
Especially since you can view the imported HL file in a statblock format from within RW without having to start HL.
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disqman
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Join Date: Oct 2014
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Old October 2nd, 2014, 11:45 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hiaasen View Post
Here is my ideal scenario for starting a new campaign: Use Hero Lab to generate PCs and NPCs quickly. Use Realm Works to import character data from HL files quickly. To me, this would mean individuals in the People Group in left-hand navigation would already be created with as many snippets as possible already filled in and Tags already generated. I would then use Realm Works to create the world and drop the characters into it. As I am a Pathfinder user, I would also be excited to see content supplements for Adventure Paths to fill in the rest of the content (Places, Events, etc.) in Realm Works in the same way that I can purchase supplements in Hero Lab for character details from core books.
I am in complete agreement with Hiaasen here. I get it that RW is still really in its 1st Gen form, but after the players' edition gets released, I'd really like to see LWD go back and "fix" this piece (even though I thought for sure it would have been there from from the beginning).

Not only would tighter integration make it easier to populate our realms, but it seems to me that it would also do a good job of driving people to purchase Hero Lab if they knew they could "drag-n-drop" their HL portfolios into RW and have them appear in RW's native format.
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ibecker
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Join Date: Oct 2013
Posts: 87

Old October 3rd, 2014, 08:01 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hiaasen View Post
I would also like to see better integration with Hero Lab. Most of the "snippet" fields are duplicates of fields already populated in HL automatically during the character creation process. Entering this information manually a second time is cumbersome and feels unnecessary. As a new user and a new GM already in the middle of a campaign, I was looking forward to using Realm Works to lighten my load with respect to data entry and ongoing management. I still look forward to this, but I am finding it's going to take a long while to get there.

Here is my ideal scenario for starting a new campaign: Use Hero Lab to generate PCs and NPCs quickly. Use Realm Works to import character data from HL files quickly. To me, this would mean individuals in the People Group in left-hand navigation would already be created with as many snippets as possible already filled in and Tags already generated. I would then use Realm Works to create the world and drop the characters into it. As I am a Pathfinder user, I would also be excited to see content supplements for Adventure Paths to fill in the rest of the content (Places, Events, etc.) in Realm Works in the same way that I can purchase supplements in Hero Lab for character details from core books.
Definite +1 to this! Hero Lab and Realm Works are each excellent for their domain; it would be fantastic if they could be used together like this.
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Exmortis
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Join Date: Sep 2012
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posts: 781

Old October 3rd, 2014, 08:55 AM
I am sure thsi is somehwere down the roadmap, LWD has a lock now on the eletronic frontier of RPG gaming.

However it cannot come soon enough, my group al use computers, and we have a dedicted wifi network just for our game sessions with internet access.

So add +10 for me.
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rob
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Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232

Old October 5th, 2014, 06:13 AM
There's a very complicated hurdle involved in this that I believe is being overlooked. Realm Works is completely generic with regards to game systems and knows nothing about the specifics of GameA vs. GameB. Hero Lab is very specifically tailored to each game system, and the contents of a portfolio for GameA are radically different from a portfolio for GameB. So there would need to be a custom mapping of content from Hero Lab to Realm Works for every game system.

This gets even more complicated, though. Except for the statblock, which is just a big blob of text, the format in which content is represented in a Hero Lab portfolio does not have all the final, resolved calculations. Instead, it has all the basic elements of the character, which Hero Lab then loads in an fully processes to yield the resolved results it displays. So we would need to modify Hero Lab to identify each piece of information that would be put into Realm Works and have it save out that information specifically into the portfolio file.

And now for the final gotcha. Every single user is going to have a different opinion of how the content for GameA should be translated into Realm Works. Should a particular piece of information be put into Realm Works as a tag or text? Should it live in SectionA or SectionB within the topic in Realm Works? Should InfoA be combined with InfoB or should they be separate snippets? So users are going to want to control how things are done.

Combine all three of these things together and you can see that this is far from easy. It's a hefty chunk of work that will involve both the Realm Works and Hero Lab teams to get involved and coordinate their efforts. That adds yet another piece of complexity, since the Hero Lab team has its own priorities and objectives, so everything needs to be juggled across teams now.

This is definitely something we're looking at doing. However, it's a much bigger undertaking than it may at first seem, and there are other features and capabilities that are much higher priority for us at the moment. So this is a capability that will likely work its way into the mix sometime next year.
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