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Suggestion: Content Network

D

Darkholme

Active member
I think Hero Lab would really benefit from a deployment environment such as http://nwvault.ign.com/ for the computer game Neverwinter Nights.

Having a central place for people to post stock NPCs or characters would greatly increase the draw of Hero Lab.

If set up properly, your userbase would serve as additional devs. Instead of manually entering all of the options, you could focus on the rules, and the options would get fleshed out by the community. the ones that are in the official rules could be bundled with the system download for convenience.

Example:
World of Darkness (Currently):
- The core mechanics for Vampire and Changeling are complete.
- The other WoD lines have no rules support right now.
- Vampire is missing some of the bloodlines and other options.
- Changeling is missing some of the options as well.

With this type of system in place instead of the system you have now (no content distribution system), instead of focusing on the data entry of various books, you would focus first on adding support to the other lines, enough that the data entry could be done through the editor. That way, when a new book comes out, you look at which ones the community has already typed up, compile the well implemented ones, and add in the ones nobody has done yet. then you just have to debug them.

That way, if someone wants to do Werewolf, the tribes may not be there yet, but they can type them in themselves.

In short order, the community will end up filling in many of those options (as well as making homebrewed ones). The ones which were transcribed from a WoD book you would just need to go through and include the .user for them by default, drastically reducing your own needs for data entry.

As someone who has a copy of HeroLab, it would make my purchase much better. Having such an extensive community built library of options would also make the program more robust, and easier on LoneWolf's dev team, as well as having the new content come out faster - which means faster updates, and faster updates means Hero Lab is better.

You'd need the option to import/export individual elements, but that would be a small feature to add. So instead of having a dataset with feats from book X, you could download feat Y from book X by itself. Then you could put it in a bundle of sorts like the current user files, and have a book's worth of options. Having the option to merge userfiles would also help greatly.

And (at least for the WoD Editor, as that's the only one I have any experience using), you'd need a way to have it make the whole package enabled at once, instead of one element at a time.
 
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I think it's worth noting that if there was a place like this to upload your content when you're finished, I'd be open to doing some data entry in my spare time to help contribute to it.

The main change would be: You'd be mostly charging for rules, not datasets.

On top of that, there would be somewhere for DMs to dump their monsters / NPCs, and other DMs could then grab them. And if you're short on time, you can grab NPCs from the site.

If you could integrate the content acquisition into HeroLab awesome, otherwise, a link to the site from the program would be enough.

Just make sure they're easy to install/uninstall.

"If you make it, they will come"

Or something like that. Everyone would like frequent updates, and having frequent updates for several games requires many people. I imagine more than you have. I'd guess you're all swamped regularly.

Key features:
- Categorized Search with tags.
- Easy upload feature.
- Recent submissions appear under a main page (for each game line maybe)

I'd say browse NWVault, and look at how you can get monsters, portraits, spells, feats, etc from there.

If this was available, I can think of several DMs who would easily drop 30$ for the sheer amount of time it would save them to have access to such a network. The fact that most of it would be in a Hero Lab only format (except for maybe portraits or printed character sheets) would mean more people willing to shell out for it.
 
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FWIW, if it's company material, there's a decent chance that Lone Wolf has authorization to distribute it if it's built. I did a number of the Mutants and Masterminds books. There have also been a Yahoo Group and a Google Group for distributing builds. Lastly, someone on the AtomicThinkTank recently posted that they're offering hosting for portfolio files. Gneech recently posted a link to Pathfinder material. It's all kind of distributed based on fanbase.

Unfortunately, if it's not material Lone Wolf is licensed to distribute, they need to more or less official distance themselves from the "fan created material" so as to not get themselves into legal trouble.

:) My advice if you have material you'd like to add that you're unsure of is to contact Colen and/or Rob and ask.
 
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