Benefits of Vault Viewer?

[Shadowfoot]

I'm struggling to understand why I would use the vault. I have the PDFs, which I usually read on my iPad when not in a game. During a game, I open the PDF on my laptop or search Archives of Nethys. My players who benefit from my Patreon Account also search Archives of Nethys. Within Hero Lab Online I have all the game books and the character options for the current adventure paths.

Switching tabs or applications is quicker because when the information has been found, there is no delay in switching back to the Campaign Stage.

What is the use case for me?

• Is it to let my players experience a set of rules with more context and related matter than Archives of Nethys offers?
• Does it bring back the additional details that used to be available when looking at skills such as Athletics?
• Will it allow me to annotate the documents with interpretations of rules, or annotate APs to customise them (and keep notes in a single place)

I like Hero Lab Online and want to support Wolf Lair in its continued development, hoping that GM material for APs will soon be available (Age of Ashes and Kingmaker as my priority) but should I support the Vault if it has no benefit for me? I'm concerned that such support will focus more effort there and may cause the GM material to be deprioritised further. (Even just getting the unique NPCs would be very helpful.) I realise the GM material will have a smaller target audience than the player material for APs.

So as I say, what is the use case for me?

 

[haibane]

It was created to compete with Pathfinder Nexus. That's it. If they had a reason to do it before, they would have. They are simply copying what Nexus did so that they are on an equal playing field.

 

[Daniel V]

The intent being to give an in-app rules reference, and ideally provide easier reference in-game than swapping over to open a PDF or to navigate AoN. With the Vault itself, for someone reading through a given section the links provide ease of reference within a pdf-viewer like format, without having to flip pages to a different section in the pdf. So somewhere between the pdf and AoN really, where you have AoN-like links, in a pdf view with sections in full context rather than just individual sections.

And no, it was already in development for a while before Nexus was even announced, not "simply copying" what they did. It's like it's a generally nice feature to include lol, and we're trying to give it some pretty robust functionality.