Olgar Shiverstone said:
I'll miss some things with the advent of 4E, even though my group won't be switching for a while yet (AFAIK, anyway):
- Heroforge. I loves me excel-based character tools.
- Jamis Buck's NPC Generator. This made my DMing life much easier, particularly combined with eTools. I hope fans are quick in coming up with Office-based or other tools that will make game prep and character management easier.
First I'll note that there's nothing definite, and second I'll note that it's not an ideal solution...
However, there's a distinct possibility that something will show up for Hero Lab. What is Hero Lab?
http://www.wolflair.com/index.php?context=hero_lab
I started off way back in the day using another product of theirs called Army Builder (using version 1.0 actually
). A nice way of being able to make my old Ork army for 40k. They seem to do solid work, even if it's a bit slower at times than you might wish.
Anyhow, I won Hero Lab a while back as part of a contest they were doing, and I've been playing around with it a bit. It's a pretty spiffy little program.
Right now you can do a fair amount of editing of their already existing templates. They still haven't managed to release the full authoring package, but hopefully it'll be done in the next couple of months.
Here's the way the cost works...
You can download the product and use it in demo mode. It's got some limitations, but when you purchase the license, it'll unlock it. Currently the two games they've got implemented are 3.x and World of Darkness. You can buy additional games later if you want.
How's this relate to 4E?
First, Lone Wolf has no idea if they'll even be able to officially do a 4E version or not. If they are able to (I'm personally doubting they will be), then they'd likely offer it as a game system just like the current and future systems.
Second, even if Lone Wolf doesn't get the approval to do the game system files themselves, I'm betting that there's going to be some folks that start working on it when the authoring tool is available.
Now, the second bit above is important, because using the files created by the authoring tool is a separate license thing _too_.
You might be thinking "WTF?!?!?", but it's not _that_ bad. See, _all_ the files made using the authoring tool will be covered by the authoring tool license.
Once the authoring tool is released, there's the potential for a whole bunch of other game systems to have files written for. All of these additional game systems will be useable with just the one authoring tool license.
So, in time I believe you'll be able to get a 4e set of files for Hero Lab. You'll just have to wait and see whether it's going to be an official or fan set.
If you're still going to be doing 3.x for a while (or playing both 3.x and 4E) it might be worth it to check out Hero Lab. If it really rocks for you, you can simply get an additional license later to cover the game system (4E or Authoring Tool) and get the d20 version.
There is another product out there called Metacreator, but I haven't done anything with it for a few years. I originally picked it up for Fudge, and it just didn't really click for me. I'm not sure where my update stuff is, and I _hate_ having to rebuy a product, so Metacreator is in the trashbin for me. Having to choose between either of them, Hero Lab just looks like a slicker product, and I haven't struggled with using it like I used to with Metacreator.
