Runners Companion and house rules support?

[wilcoxon]

I have not yet bought Hero Lab and have some questions about Runners Companion and house rules support...

Runners Companion:
* Does HL fully support all of the "race" options from RC (metavariants, sapient critter, AI, free spirit, infected, drake, shapeshifter, etc)?
* Does HL support KarmaGen?
* Is race cost setable for KarmaGen? By the book (except possibly the latest printing), race had no cost. I believe it's been errata'd to race karma = race BP (but Catalyst has yet to release the RC errata). I've also seen games where race karma = 2x race BP.

common house rules:
* Does HL support the common house rule of adjusting karma costs for attributes based off race? In other words, when buying 7 in a stat with racial min of 6, it should cost 10 ((7-6+1)*5).
* Does HL also do this for racially lowered stats (eg buying 4 if that is racial max costs 30)?
* Is it possible to enable the high (first) mod without the low (second) mod? I've played in games where karma cost was only modified for higher stats and where it was modified for both.
* Does HL support free contacts (as per older versions of SR)?
* Does HL support free knowledge skills under KarmaGen (as per BP build rules)?

 

[velinion]

Answering these as a user... I might be wrong in some instances.

* Does HL fully support all of the "race" options from RC (metavariants, sapient critter, AI, free spirit, infected, drake, shapeshifter, etc)?

Yes, it does. You have to purchase the Runners Companion add-on to the base HeroLab+Shadowrun Licence. Need it for KarmaGen too.

* Does HL support KarmaGen?
* Is race cost setable for KarmaGen? By the book (except possibly the latest printing), race had no cost. I believe it's been errata'd to race karma = race BP (but Catalyst has yet to release the RC errata). I've also seen games where race karma = 2x race BP.

It does currently support KarmaGen. The last two versions have been bugged, making race free in KarmaGen, not Karma=BP as in the latest printing (Which I own in deadtree). I assume that they will fix this eventually.
To achieve the Karma=BP and Karma=2xBP results, you can add a Karma adjustment under the Personal tab, and manually enter either the BP or 2xBP cost. This is easy since the BP cost is still displayed.
Even if they fix the bug, you will still be able to do free race if you want through this adjustment.

common house rules:

No built-in support for house rules, save for the fact they include an editor, which can be used to add a whole bunch of (Though not necessarily all) house rules. It has a bit of a learning curve, but other users on these forums are helpful, and the developers will even help out here sometimes.

 

[Mad Hamish]

I have not yet bought Hero Lab and have some questions about Runners Companion and house rules support...

Runners Companion:
* Does HL fully support all of the "race" options from RC (metavariants, sapient critter, AI, free spirit, infected, drake, shapeshifter, etc)?
* Does HL support KarmaGen?
* Is race cost setable for KarmaGen? By the book (except possibly the latest printing), race had no cost. I believe it's been errata'd to race karma = race BP (but Catalyst has yet to release the RC errata). I've also seen games where race karma = 2x race BP.

It supports pretty much everything in Runner's Companion if you buy the rights to use it (It looks like the cost of race has been lost though)

common house rules:
* Does HL support the common house rule of adjusting karma costs for attributes based off race? In other words, when buying 7 in a stat with racial min of 6, it should cost 10 ((7-6+1)*5).
* Does HL also do this for racially lowered stats (eg buying 4 if that is racial max costs 30)?
* Is it possible to enable the high (first) mod without the low (second) mod? I've played in games where karma cost was only modified for higher stats and where it was modified for both.
* Does HL support free contacts (as per older versions of SR)?
* Does HL support free knowledge skills under KarmaGen (as per BP build rules)?

short answer is kind of for all of them.
There aren't (AFAIK) direct options to make hero lab behave as you want you can work around most of them by making adjustments to the character
modifying build points spent would work for most of them
if (figures pulled from nowhere) Hero Lab charges you 55 karma for a stat and your adjusted cost is 25 you can add an adjustment so that you've spent -30 build points.
If you want free contacts you can add them after you lock the character for advancement (you might have to reduce the minimum number of contacts in generation as well but you can do that)
You can add free knowledge skill build points as well (but you set the total rather than having hero lab calculate it.

So there's nothing you want to do that you can't do for hero-lab but it isn't always elegant