How much can you generate?

[Rhyus]

Ok, maybe my title is a little general. I'm trying to find a character generator for Pathfinder that will allow me to do something specific. I've been using the sCoreForge excel generator for a long time now, both for Pathfinder and D&D 3.5. I've gotten what I wanted from both of these, but, they seem to have stopped development of it for around 3 years now and the newest campaign my group is going to be starting soon has certain aspects that it doesn't cover. So, here is what I'm want to know if Hero Lab will allow me to do:

Hybrid classes?

Gestalt classes?

NPC classes?

Art of War classes and races?

All races on the d20PFSRD?

Mythic abilities?

If Hero Lab doesn't do this, does anybody know of any character generator that will do all of those? Or maybe even most of them?

 

[TheIronGolem]

Hybrid classes?

Yes.

Gestalt classes?

Kinda-sorta-not-really. ShadowChemosh has a Gestalt plugin, but it's not under active development and as a result tends to be pretty buggy and doesn't often play nice with newer content. This is because Paizo has no official rules for gestalt play and therefore LWD has little reason to do the groundwork it would take to make HL support it natively. Without that groundwork, it's really hard for any third-party modder to make it work.

EDIT: I forgot that while there's no clean way to implement Gestalt without LWD's support, one thing you CAN do is create "gestalt classes" from scratch that combine the features of Class A and Class B. Or you could create an Archetype for Class A that basically gives it the class features of Class B without replacing anything from Class A. This is obviously time-consuming and would have to be done for each combination of classes you intend to use, but it's possible.

NPC classes?

Yes.

Art of War classes and races?

If you mean Path of War, then yes. That's part of the Community Pack, a user-created add-on created and maintained by ShadowChemosh (and contributed to by various members of the HL community). There's actually a lot of good stuff in there. I encourage you to check it out if you haven't already.

If you do mean Art of War, then I don't know what that is (apart from the classic text by Sun Tzu, which I assume you don't because he was more of a GURPS guy from what I hear).

All races on the d20PFSRD?

It has all the first-party Paizo races (provided you own the data packages they come from). It's certainly capable of handling whatever race(s) you care to create with the editor.

Mythic abilities?

I think so, though I don't have any Mythic content myself and so I haven't used it.

 

[Rhyus]

Yes, I did mean Path of War, sorry.

Ok, so, it seems that they do have everything I need to create my characters for my group.

So with races, I was also talking about the races from Path of War, like half-giant and so forth.



Does Hero Lab include Psionics?

 

[TheIronGolem]

If you mean Dreamscarred Press's Ultimate Psionics, then yes that is included in the Community Package. I don't think it's 100% complete yet, but it's on its way there.

If you mean Paizo's take on psionics ("psychic magic" from the Occultist's Handbook), then also yes (though of course you have to pay for that).

 

[Rhyus]

Ok, thank you very much for all the answers.

Now, the last thing I need to know is I use to subscribe to Hero Lab a while ago and if I remember correctly, you have to renew every so often. Is there a process for returning users or do you just have to purchase it like a new customer?

 

[TheIronGolem]

What might have given you that impression is how HL requires you to reactivate it whenever you put it on a new computer - and sometimes OS or hardware updates can trick it into thinking it's on a "new" computer. When that happens, you might need to contact support to request a license transfer.

But it's not a subscription; once you purchase HL (or any data package for it), it's yours for life.

 

[Rhyus]

Hhmmm...that is definitely different than I remember several years ago. I thought I had read something that you had to "renew" the licenses like every 3 years or so. I'll have to check to see if I still have things. How would I go about checking if I still have things active?

 

[Mathias]

One of our other programs, Army Builder, had a subscription model for payment (the subscription got you program updates - you could still use the program as is if your subscription lapsed), but that ended half a dozen years ago or so - it's also now pay once, keep as long as you want, like Hero Lab.

 

[charlieluce]

Hhmmm...that is definitely different than I remember several years ago. I thought I had read something that you had to "renew" the licenses like every 3 years or so. I'll have to check to see if I still have things. How would I go about checking if I still have things active?

As long as you have your license number you should be able to download the latest Hero Lab, enter your number, and activate it.

 

[Valdacil]

Our campaign is using Gestalt and I started with SC's community Gestalt pack. I then modified it for certain house rules and it works fine for the most part. There are a few things that are a little glitchy with the way LW implemented level detection using different methods. For instance, I had to adjust Gestalt so that level detection for Secondary Classes (VMC) worked properly. So far I've been able to account for everything I've needed to related to Gestalt rules.

 

[Dischord]

I would be interested to see the adjustments you made to Gestalt. We are about to start a new game and love using the Gestalt rules but noticed the last time we played the level issue.

 

[Valdacil]

From my changelog for my gaming group (yes, I'm that much of a nerd that I have a website where I keep a changelog of all the edits I make to our homebrew files), these are the changes I made within the Gestalt files. Except for the level detection fix for VMC, the rest of these are house rules as far as I know:

(Mechanic) Override Secondary Class (VMC) level detection to correct for Gestalt
(Mechanic) Gestalt HD Bonus: HD is calculated by high HD of 2 classes + a bonus if 2nd class HD is d8 or higher. Adds (2ndClassHD-6)/2 to 1st class HD: d6=0, d8=+1, d10=+2, d12=+3.
(Mechanic) Gestalt Save Bonus: Any "Good" save shared by both classes receives a +1 misc bonus
(Mechanic) Gestalt Class Skill Bonus: Any Class skill shared by both classes receives a +1 misc bonus
(Mechanic) Gestalt Skill Point Bonus: Skill points are calculated by class with higher number + 1/2 2nd class number of skill points
(Mechanic) Gestalt Attribute Bonus Progression: +1 to 2 attribute points at 4, 8, and 16 (default +1 to 1 attribute) and +1 to all attribute scores at 12 (instead of +1 to 1 attribute).
(Mechanic) Background Skills Correction: Adjusted background skills to 3 per level (2 for first class + 1 for second) vs 3 per class (6 per level)

If I remember correctly, all of the changes are in the PFRPG_Gestalt_Class.user file. I don't think I ended up needing to alter the Mechanic or Adjustments file.