Hero Lab Design Journal #2

Welcome back! This week's we're going to take another look at Hero Lab's support for Mutants & Masterminds. Last time we gave you a general overview of Hero Lab — this week we're going to look at printed output.

There are several interesting issues to consider when you come to the subject of printing character sheets. The first is simple - printed output should be familiar to the user. When a player looks at something Hero Lab prints out, their first reaction shouldn't be "What on earth is this?" - it should be something like "Hey, this is a pretty nice M&M character sheet". Here's our first pass at a 2-page character sheet (click to view PDF):

Each stat is shown with exactly the same breakdowns as the normal sheet, and we're showing all the same details, including powers, feats, attacks and movement types on the front page. Skills and equipment are listed in the back, just like the standard sheet. We've made the title backgrounds grey instead of black - this saves your poor printer from using all its ink on a single sheet, while still “popping” on the page.

We have made some changes from the "normal" sheet - for example, we can drop stuff that isn't used. If your hero has only 5 feats, do we need to include space for 15? If your hero has no powers and 25 feats, like the Martial Artist archetype, can we drop the space that would be used for powers and use it for feats instead? Hero Lab makes it easy for us to skip these unused sections to better allocate available space. Further, we can use as many pages as necessary to print everything. If your hero has 30 different alternate powers and you're tired of cramming them all onto a single sheet, Hero Lab will spill your powers onto a third or fourth page as necessary to print all the data.

Sometimes, many players and DMs are going to want a simple, one-page summary of a character - you might need a full 2-page sheet for your main character or the campaign's archvillain, but your sidekick, 3 minions, and the lieutenant the PCs are going to beat up can be summarised to save paper and space on the game table.

It's also valuable to have a "cheat sheet" to introduce a new player to the game, or just to refresh your memory once in a while. Towards this goal, we have an optional play-aid sheet that can be printed with your hero. This example shows the one-page sheet with the play aid sheet appended to it (click to view PDF):

Finally, if you have sidekicks, minions or can shapeshift into other forms that alter your statistics, Hero Lab will summarize those on the sheet for you. Here's an example sheet with a sidekick and several shapeshift options listed (click to view PDF):

That's all for this week! If you have any feedback on the look of the printed sheets, please let us know!

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.