Hero Lab Design Journal #3

Welcome back! This week's we're going to take another look at Hero Lab's support for Mutants & Masterminds. Last time we looked at printed output — this week we’ll go into Hero Lab’s support for GMs.

We’ll start with a screenshot of Hero Lab that looks similar to the ones you’ve seen before:

But there’s a difference – notice the new window on the right-hand side of the screen, listing all the different hero names? This is the Dashboard. The Dashboard shows a summary of each loaded hero. It displays their saving throws and defense bonus for quick reference, and you can access their other details (powers, skills, abilities and so on) by moving the mouse over the info buttons for each one.

As a GM, you can have your players enter their characters into Hero Lab, then display them all like this. No more shuffling through a pile of handwritten sheets – all the details are right there. You can also use HL to generate quick printouts of players or NPCs – here’s a sample printout of several archetypes, each with their own statblock (click to view PDF):

You probably don’t want to spend a lot of your time entering basic NPCs, so we include some “Stock Heroes” to help you out. You can import these into your portfolio at any time, either as allies or as enemies. Once imported, you can customize them to your needs, just like any other hero. Here’s a very small sample of the stock heroes HL will eventually include:

You can choose how many of each hero to import, and whether they appear as allies or enemies. Let’s import a few enemies – that’ll let us test out Hero Lab’s other major feature for GMs, the Tactical Console.

The Tactical Console appears in a separate, resizable window, and lists all the loaded heroes. It’s rather like the Dashboard, but it includes a lot more information about each hero, as you can see here:

At the moment we’re in noncombat mode, so Hero Lab displays a summary for each character, including their saving throws, defense value and skills. Just like on the dashboard, you can mouse over any of the info buttons on the right to see other information about the hero.

Let’s hit the New Combat button to start a battle. (Sadly we didn’t have time to include authentic special effects.)

When we enter combat. our skill summary for each hero disappears, and is replaced by a summary of attacks. Hero Lab automatically rolls initiative for every hero, and then arranges the heroes in order. (Of course you’re free to change the values for as many or as few heroes as you want.)

For each hero, you can choose to act, delay an action, or ready an action. Let’s have our first hero, the Speedster, act, and our second hero, the Golem, delay his action, and see how that changes the ordering:

The first hero moves to the bottom of the list, since he’s acted. The second hero stays at the top – once he acts, his initiative value is changed to an appropriate value for his new position and he moves to the bottom of the list too. This continues for each hero until everyone has acted, and then the New Round button allows everyone to start again. A small hourglass icon beside a hero indicates that they’re flat-footed, and a red X indicates that they’re unconscious or dying.

Finally, Hero Lab lets you track the damage taken by each hero, as well as make notes about their situation. Clicking the view button beside a hero shows this form:

From here you can set damage conditions, as well as make notes about the hero’s status – for example, who he’s attacking, or maybe the terrible disaster that’ll befall him next turn. BWHAHAHAHA!

That's all for this week!

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.