Thinking of Buying Herolab

[3catcircus]

So I'm considering purchasing Herolab. I've got pcgen and it works good for what it does, but I am frustrated by the inability to quickly take something from 3.5 and quickly create custom data for Pathfinder (I've no problems doing the actual conversion from 3.5 to PF by hand prior to making it electronic). Even something as simple as adding a new monster is a pain in the butt with pcgen.

An example of this is a template called "Beast of Bane" from Forgotten Realms. It is a pretty straight-forward template: Animals/vermin become magical beasts but other types remain the same; natural weapon damage steps up one size level; it gains some special attacks and special qualities (some of which already exist for other stock Pathfinder creatures); and boosts to INT and CHA.

I've no idea how to do this in pcgen other than cut-n-paste from existing data and some wishful thinking that the math will work.

How easy could I enter custom feats, classes, races, templates, etc. in Herolab? Could I simply enter stuff using plain english or would I need to figure out some arcane scripting language?

 

[Morrus]

I definitely like it for Pathfinder, but I've never actually tried to add custom content to it. There's a lot of custom content packages (some free, some not) that you can add to it, though.

Sorry, that's not really much help, is it?

 

[SkidAce]

In my opinion it is easier than writing lst? for PCGen, BUT...when using their custom item creator it can be hard to figure out where to type in your plus one, or what class to "attach" the new thing to etc.

Once learned I assume its easy.

 

[SkidAce]

To add to the above, I created a custom bow for a character that was also a a magical focus.

I have not created a class or a race yet. Yet.

 

[Nylanfs]

[MENTION=16077]3catcircus[/MENTION] Putting stuff into HeroLab is "marginally" better than PCGen. But AFAIK PCGen's documentation is better. Unless there's some special HeroLab documentation that I don't know about. If you click on the Help > Documentation in PCGen then look at the sections called LST classes they walk you through a pretty good basis for creating PCGen datasets. You can also ask questions on the yahoo group we have dedicated to helping people make their own data.

 

[3catcircus]

So it sounds like the answer is to use the Heroforge spreadsheet...

 

[Wycen]

The DM for one of my games uses it, and at least 2 players in that group use it. I recently found that one of the guys using it was having to create custom stuff and it wasn't working correctly. He had a 7th level sorcerer casting 4th level spells. It had something to do with mixing sorcerer levels with custom racial levels.

I tend not to use character generating software, ever since the Heromaker program for Champions. I've turned a suspicious eye on these tools because they give players the tools to break the rules. Sometimes by accident, but not always.