Hero Lab Design Journal #1

Welcome! This week's design journal takes a look at Hero Lab, the character creation and management tool from Lone Wolf Development. As you may have heard, Hero Lab will soon offer full Mutants & Masterminds support!

Unlike much of the software that came before it, Hero Lab allows character creation and advancement for many games using a game-independent engine. The "data files" for each game system are developed by Lone Wolf, each set customizing Hero Lab for a different game system. For Mutants & Masterminds, here's what Hero Lab is going to look like:

To start off our first Hero Lab design journal, let's look at where Hero Lab can help you the most: creating powers, calculating their costs, and then applying their effects.

Let's start with a simple enough power: 10 ranks of Blast. Our hero has inexplicable control over gravity, so we'll call this a "Grav-Lance". We'll take a couple of power feats - "Split Attack" so we can zap two people at once, and "Homing" so it can hit more often. Then we'll make it a Burst power with the "Area" extra. That all sounds like it'll cost quite a lot, so we'll make it "Distracting" to use.

Now let's get interesting; we'll add an alternate power of Gravity Control and boost its rank a little. Based on the rank of Gravity Control, Hero Lab calculates everything for you: radius, effective strength, and the force that can be applied using the terrible power of gravity.

Hero Lab also calculates the maximum Alternate Power cost based on the base power cost, and warns you if you exceed it. Let's add another alternate power: a Deflect that lets us redirect ranged attacks made against us to our enemies, and we're done with this power. Here's what the final version looks like:

As you can see, Hero Lab lays everything out for you—alternate powers are listed with their effects, descriptors can be added to describe the power, and at the top-right of the form, the total cost is broken down so you can see exactly what you're spending points on.

As a master of gravity, our hero is clearly from a high-gravity world, so let's also give him 6 ranks of "Density" and turn it on. Hero Lab automatically adds and applies the effects of Immovable, Protection and Super-Strength when our Density power is activated.

If you later increase the Density power in rank, the Immovable, Protection and Super-Strength powers increase along with it. Hero Lab also calculates the basic improvements from the Density power (+12 strength and a x100 weight multiplier) and applies them to your statistics when the power is turned on.

That's all for this week! In our future design journals, we'll look at some of Hero Lab's other features, including printed output, sidekicks and minions, complex powers like Alternate Form and Shapeshift, in-play support, and more!

If you want to find out more about Hero Lab, you can visit the Lone Wolf website. You can also ask questions and provide feedback in this thread on the Atomic Think Tank.