Pathfinder + Hero Lab

I have been playing in two separate Pathfinder games recently and I really like the system.  But the one thing that I didn't have that 4e gave me was a kick-ass character builder program.

I love character builder programs,   I think I have tried them all over the years.  I had the Core Rules CD-Rom, I had the character builder from Wizards for 3.0 and back in the day my DM and I built one for our Tandy Color Computers.  And I love DDi.  I know some people complain about it and others even claim that Wizard's or Hasbro are looking for more ways to make money.  To that I say how dare they give me an awesome product that does exactly what I want it to do for a fair and reasonable price! ;)  Seriously what is up with people.  Don't like the DDI, then don't pay for it.  I happen to love it.  I can play around with it and try out different characters, multi-classes and hybrids.  Yes I can do that with paper and pencil and books, but I don't alway have my books with me, say at work on my lunch break or relaxing in front the TV on the couch, or at the airport waiting for a plane.  The DDi is fantastic.

It's just too bad that I can't use it with Pathfinder.
I can't use it with Unisystem either, but that is not the point.

So I went out and I tried Hero Lab, from Lone Wolf development.  I remember getting a free CD from them one Gen Con and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I just downloaded it and tried it out.

Here is what I liked:
- I like that there are multiple games for this product.  Currently I use DDi, Uniforge, Simpson's M&M sheet, and Metacreator installed on my computer.  I like flexible systems.
- The interface is nice.  Not fantastic, but nice.
- Using it is rather easy after a few times.

Here is what I didn't like:
- Not 100% sold on the pricing structure here.  I think the d20 SRD derived content should be cheaper.
- I would like more systems, Unisystem is the top of my list.
- The interface, while nice, is old looking.

Comparing this to DDi though is not really fair.  They are designed to do similar, but different things.  Comparing it to Metacreator though is a better choice.

The pricing structure is about the same.  Metacreator though only charged 15.00 per module download, Hero Lab charges 20.00.  The core product is also priced similar with Hero Lab at about 30.00 (with a module) and Metacreator at the same with one module.
Both have the d20 SRD, Savage Worlds, and Call of Cthulhu.   Metacreator has Unisystem as well some others.  Hero Lab has WoD and Cortex.
Despite my nit-picking on the interface, Hero Lab is slightly better than Metacreator.  Both though look like "older" technology.  Metacreator in fact looks like something for Windows 95.
Both produce very function character sheets for printing or PDF.  Metacreator gets a not here since it produces sheets that look like the ones from the game itself.
Hero Lab is easier to navigate and the tabs are very nice.

In the end it depends I guess on what game you want to play.  If you play World of Darkness, Cortex, Ars Magica, Unisystem or Fudge then your choices are made for you.

Same with D&D4.  Yes, Hero Lab can do D&D4, but you need a DDi account to get the updates and if you are  going to do then just the D&D Character Builder.

Both have sizable fan-related content and forums.

So I broke down I bought Hero Lab because I wanted Pathfinder support.
I have to admit that some of the concerns I first had about Hero Lab changed after I bought it.  Now that could be because I had been playing around with more and knew the program better.

Side by side Hero Builder does actually compare nicely to the DDi Character Builder.
Here is a screen shot of my new Pathfinder Paladin and his D&D 4 alter-ego.  (big screenshot).

Having access to the new Pathfinder classes is nice too.
What would totally sell me on this of course is Unisystem support.  I would love to be able to put my Ghosts of Albion characters into something like this.
Chance are good I'll be getting the Cortex and maybe the SavageWorlds one in the future.  If/When I do I'll review them here.

As a GM I don't like to kill characters, but...

But I have.

Details in a bit, but first more on character death and the great battle, the Shadow War.

Many notable and non-notable personages made the ultimate sacrifice in the war against the demons.  Skie Iskatarian, who claimed to be the great-great-granddaughter of Kas the Destroyer, died on the field of battle.  She was given a heroes funeral by the Queen she would have rather seen dead, not visa versa.  She was found next to a man that by all accounts she hated more than anyone, Kiev Scorpious.  They were found back to back, fighting off the hordes that stormed the walls of the city.

Kurt, the affable monk that everyone seemed to like, had also been found.  The great warrior Jar Tearn. Not felled by any weapon, his great age was his doom and he died on the field when his heart failed him.  His wife Victoria, rushed to his side, but never quite made it.  Kara Foke, King of the neighboring country offered his son to aid Glantri, and lost that son.  Leaving his second oldest betrothed to the Queen.  She was 9 he was 8.

Some speak of the great dark warrior Absom Sark how he was never seen again after the war.  Others speak of Arachnia, the drow female warrior that roamed the lands prior to the war, but never after.  They have statues as well, even if their bodies were not found.  (they ran off together after the war. sometimes love is more important than honor).

But the greatest loss some say was the King's son, Johan III.  Lost, and he had disgraced his family and the faith by bedding not just a common girl, but a supernatural one (she was a psychic...and something else), he had returned from the Nightmare Lands (Ravenloft) in his country's darkest hour.  But the girl that was his undoing in life was his undoing in death....

--
The cool thing about being a tech-head was this great little program that my then DM and I had written for the Tandy Color Computer.  It was a combat simulator.  We could load ten characters and ten monsters in it at once and they would go after each other till all of one side was dead.  I used that and in some cases, I also rolled up the combats on my own.  Something to pass the time to be sure.

So, lots of people died so that the new generations, Quenn Celene and her future Husband Kara Werper could take center stage.  And they will, or rather would have, had it not been for that troublesome girl.

Morgan.

Morgan began in my game with only her nick-name, Raven, though she did have other names.  Raven Ebonflame, Raven the Hunter of the Dead, Raven the Daughter of Death (her father was nicknamed "Death Blade").
She was psychic, which was a strict taboo in my game world.  Sure magic is fine, because the mage schools and guilds control that. Random psychic power?  Bad juju.

So what does this girl do?  She gets herself hired in the mercenaries guild and eventually hooks up with John the 3rd, future king of the land, and gets pregnant.  When I was coming up with ideas to start my war, I decided that she ran off to have the kid rather than cause her lover any more grief.  Trouble was Johan loved her too.  Had he married her things might have been fine, but he ran off after her only to get pulled into Ravenloft.  She thought he didn't care and gave birth to their daughter.

There is one other thing about Morgan.  Something I decided on her first outing as a character back 1985 or so.  Morgan was a killer of Vampires.  She killed one at 1st level.  And then proceeded to go after more.
Morgan, Raven Ebonflame, was the very first Slayer.

And then I killed her.

She was in the war and played a minor part.  I remember being out on my bike one day thinking about what she might have done.  Then it came to me.  Morgan fought Yoln Shadowreaper, the general of the Armies of Hell.  She fought him and killed him.  By herself, single-handed, the girl that everyone in the game hated, changed the course of the War.  She gave them victory.  But it cost her her life.

Her lover, Johan went crazy and was soon killed in battle, not before taking out several dozen demons.  The priest said he could not raise her, her soul was gone.  A pact was made by the three most powerful remaining characters, the guild master (her father), the advisor (her teacher) and the King (father of her lover).  Her father went to Hell to find her soul.  In the 3rd Edition years, I worked that into the great Reckoning of Hell.

Her death was the most powerful scene I played up to that point.  But years later I so regretted killing her. I thought it was a waste (and I had more personal reasons too).

Then I began The Dragon and the Phoenix.

This was a Willow and Tara centric season for the Buffy game.  In the fifth episode, Heaven Bleeds, Willow, Tara, and Buffy travel back in time to this battle.  There they meet Willow and Tara's past lives, and all three witness Morgan's battle with Yoln.  I did retcon her into a Slayer, but it was not much of a change.

Now I redid the scene of her death as before, this time using the Cinematic Unisystem rules.  And this time Buffy was there to help.  I had players that played Tara, Willow, and Buffy, but I still played Morgan out. She still defeated Yoln, this time with her sister Slayer's help.  But she still died.  Somethings can't be changed I guess no matter how much you try.

As Morgan dies, she touches Tara and asks her to remember her.  Morgan's soul does not go to Hell as everyone thought, but instead, it is in Tara.  When the season ends she lets go of Morgan's soul to her final rest.  I have a scene in later games, Season of the Witch, to be exact, where Morgan's father meets up with Tara and is given peace.

As a DM I don't like to kill characters.  People invest way too much of themselves into their personas.
Kurt, Skie. Kiev, Jar, Victoria, Sebastian, Fjalar, Johan II and Johan III.  They all had memorable deaths and that had meaning.

But Morgan, Raven Ebonflame, the Daughter of Death, Hunter of the Dead, had the most important death of all.  Her's changed two worlds. Set things into motion that I am still using in my games. And changed how I think about characters and how I write this stuff I do.
And hers was the hardest to do and deal with and the one I have always and will always regret the most.

To pull out my comics metaphors, she is though more of my Barry Allen than Tora Olfsdotter or even Tara herself.  She died and saved the world and to bring her back now would give the character less meaning.  She died well and now deserves her well earned rest.  Tora and Tara died too (and came back) but their deaths were meaningless and meant to shock people and ultimately empty.  Mark Waid, who wrote the issues in which Tora died has since admitted it was a huge mistake as a typical and clichéd Women in Refrigerators moment.  Too bad Whedon has not had the same insight and maturity as Waid.  But I took care of that on my own.

So GMs/DMs/Directors/Story Tellers?
Do you kill characters?  Do you try to save them even if the dice fall on the side of the Reaper?

Yes...yes I can already here the Call of Cthulhu Keepers out there.  I know your point and I know there are worse things than death.

iPad for gaming. Not yet for me.

I have blogged about my love for tech in the past. I raved about my HP laptop till it died on me recently. So today I get to try something new. An iPad.

It it about the size of the old TRS-80 palm top. Which is kind of cool really. The screen is really nice and typing is not too bad. typing got faster towards the end. Logging in to blogger was easy.

But...well the rich-text/HTML editor is flaky, same as my phone. Logging into DrivethruRPG was a pain and I could not download any books. Oh and I had to completely mess with my router to even do this little.

Without network it is little more than a big iPod with no music.

I was really excited about this thing too, but right now I can't recommend it at all. At least not right now. There are not a lot of reasons to bring this to game table.

I guess I'll need to wait for the Google tablet.

It was…a good death.

I started a new campaign this last weekend. It has all the potential of one of those long-running campaigns that will feature heroics that the players will be talking about years to come. But of late it is endings that I have been thinking of the most. The end of my long-running “Willow and Tara” Unisystem game a few years back, the end of my epic AD&D 1st edition game that spanned my high school years.

The end of that game ended in the deaths in many characters, but they were all good and heroic deaths. Well except for one, but I’ll talk about her later.

The deaths were honorable, heroic and did what they were supposed to do. Clear the slate for me fo when I went to college (and unknown to me at the time, pick up 2nd Edition AD&D).

That final battle was part of a war that had been building for a long time and finally exploded across the globe. It destroyed my DM’s own countries (he had some areas outside of the former Suel Empire) and tore mine to near shreds, I was HQed in Glantri on the other side of the world. Everywhere knew war. We called it the Shadow War. On my side of the world, the armies of Hell were marching in in an attempt to take the magical artifacts we were protecting. The war was long and it claimed the life of the King, his oldest son and their chief advisor. The head of the mercenaries’ guild vowed to stay uninvolved till his wife was killed and he disappeared. His son pledged his loyalty to the new 9-year-old Queen. It was a dark time.

The game took a little over two years in real time from say about May/June 1986 to mid-1989. Once I learned there was 2nd Edition coming (hard to believe we lived in a time where we didn’t know everything about a game line) I extended it. I took the individual battle scenes and played them all out. The return of the King’s son from Ravenloft (he wasn’t dead), the advisor, the guild master with an army of his own. Also, all my “lesser” characters that I may have rolled up and used once or twice in games got a chance to take center stage.

Here is one.  More to come.

Fjalar Snowcrest, was a dwarf thief. Kicked out of his homeland and disgraced and dishonored. He was in the city when the armies of hell overran the settled areas inside the walls. He was running, looking for a fight or to get away when he heard screaming. A few bearded devils (hamatula) had broken into a school, killed the teacher and were making their way to kids. Fjalar, never a brave dwarf, still hated bullies. When the war was over, Fjalar was dead. But all the children were alive. They told a tale of this dwarf with an axe of fire and muscles of stone who protected them from the monsters. Even when he was wounded and losing blood he continued to chop at the devils. Fjalar’s broken body was discovered, on top of 20 (though the children would later say 50 if not 100) Hamatula. At the end of the War of Shadows statues were raised to all the lost heroes. Fjalar’s was set in a public square where the dwarf stood majestically with several children behind him and his axe in front of him. The Queen herself invited his father and mother to come to see, they finally came 10 years later. She told them the story and said she knew of his dishonor, which is why his hands had been placed covering his family crest on the axe. The family said nothing till dozens of young adults and their collected scores of children came to the square. They had been the children saved that day and with them were their own children. Many children who bore names similar to Fjalar and Snowcrest.  The Snowcrest parents were moved. They said that they could not undo the dishonor their son had done and his name was still cursed, but that they were proud of their brave and honorable son.

Test Post: Willow and Tara vs. Purgatori

Just a test post.


Willow and Tara vs Purgatori 0 by ~WebWarlock on deviantART

Trying out linking my Deviant Art account to Blogger.

Willow and Tara battle the vampire hell goddess Purgatori.

Part 2:  Tara has a solution!


Willow and Tara vs. Purgatori by ~WebWarlock on deviantART

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Thanks to Trollsmyth for the link (and then on to his friend Jeff).

Pathfinder, Game 2: The Big Kids

We started what will hopefully be a long running Pathfinder game with the "big kids".  This is my normal play-test group of the last few years, plus some guys that my DM Greg knows.  So far it has been a lot of fun.  Some of our players are missing the over the top acrobatics and "cinematic fantasy combat" of 4e and we are still making references to 4e in the game, I think it will go over well.

Our DM Greg is posting the play reports over on his blog, Rhonin's Ramblings, so some of my discussion about the game might end up over there as well. http://rhoninsramblings.blogspot.com/2010/04/pathfinder-campaign-chapter-11.html

We call it the "Big Kids" game since it is not the Pathfinder game I am currently playing with our kids; Greg's three boys and my two. In both games I am playing very different characters.  A witch in the "little kids" game and a paladin in the "big kids" one.  It is working out well I think.  I have made "mirror" versions of them in 4e and it will be interesting to see how they evolve together, but separate.  Or rather I made the 4e versions first and am now playing the Pathfinder versions.  One day I'll come up with a crossover adventure that involves all four characters in one world.

I still have my D&D 3.x (3.0, 3.5, BESM d20 and other d20 stuff mixed in) that I play with my two sons and we are supposed to get a 4.0/1st Ed cross-over game going sometime too.

That's a lot of D&D.

The cool thing is it gives me a chance to really get a feel for all the versions of D&D.  When my 3.x games ends I have to decide where to take it next.  The choices are continue with the hybrid 3.x game (throwing a bit of Pathfinder in), move up to 4e or even try something "new" like Labyrinth Lord or the D&D RC.

Our Big Kids game is once a month (or so) and the Little Kids game is about the same.  Advancement will be slow, but I am looking forward to it all.