I’ve been a fan of character generator programs since I booted up my first PC. I love the crispness of a nicely formatted character sheet with all the nerdy goodies like a Character portrait, a character journal, a full inventory of equipment- all that stuff.
My absolute favorite was the AD&D 2nd Edition Core rules set. Core rules was wonderful. It was an editable character generator, A map maker, and had all the core books for AD&D available for instant access. It wasn't perfect but it was as near to perfect as one could find (and I still haven't found it equal).
But Hero lab comes close.
Hero lab was my Christmas present to myself this year. I’m soon going to be playing in a Pathfinder
campaign, and to be honest with you, I really hate number crunching. I love the fleshing out and development of a character, but I hate the math. So I invested $29.99 and picked up Hero lab for Pathfinder. And I can report that I’m very satisfied. I have been playing around with it the last few days and I absolutely love it. Not only is it a breeze to get up and running, but it guides you through character generation so smoothly you're done in no time at all. And it is customizable to official Pathfinder adventure books. This software has features I haven't even begun to crack yet, I’m just having a great time making characters.
You know Legends of Steel for ZeFRS is coming out soon- this would be a really nice tool for that one day.
As soon as I can budget it in I’ll be getting the add-on for Mutants and Masterminds and Savage Worlds!
In the meantime I did up a pair of my Legends of Steel characters as a quick example. here is Anteus the gladiator and his girlfriend Risa the archer, done for Pathfinder.
So the bottom Line- Hero Lab for Pathfinder gets Two Thumbs Up from the Evil DM. If you pick up a copy, tell them I sent you.
Very cool! I'll have to check this out. How long would you say it takes to work up a character (approximately)?
ReplyDeletehow soon before Legends of steel pathfinder edition?? ;)
ReplyDeleteI could get something like this working online quick enough, except maybe for the picture uploading. (I don't have any private scripting-enabled web space.) Any idea what the desktop Hero Lab is written in? I'm tolerably sure I could produce something functional in Java or VB.net.
ReplyDeleteThat would be very cool Mark,
ReplyDeleteI don't know what desktop HL is written in, but they offer a free download. you might be able to figure it out from there. Maybe not. I'm not sure.
But I happen to believe that character creation software helps get people to at least try a system. It worked for me. I bought Pathfinder and Mutants & Masterminds for HL.