We hope everyone enjoyed playtesting the latest edition of Pathfinder and that all early adopters are now enjoying the final Pathfinder Second Edition rules. Sadly, all good things must eventually come to an end and playtests by nature are meant to retire. While you certainly have some time to print out your playtest characters and make copies of them in the new edition, Pathfinder playtest will be retiring in the fall and all created content will be retiring with it. We’re sure your characters will have a luxurious retirement in the halls of their gods as they watch over all the new heroes being born in the official second edition of Pathfinder.

Not at all! Your Hero Lab is the same as it’s always been, it just has a new sibling.

Hero Lab still has plenty of life left and will continue to evolve in various ways. To distinguish the two, we’ll be referring to the “old”, desktop incarnation as Hero Lab Classic and the new one as Hero Lab Online.

We know many of our users love Hero Lab Classic just as much as we do, and we will continue to actively support and enhance the program.

Everyone’s welcome at the party! Hero Lab Online is a browser-based solution that’s been specifically designed for all common devices. We support all the major browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and IE. This means users have character creation at their fingertips from a wide range of devices, including PCs, Macs, Linux, smartphones, iPads, and yes even Android tablets.

Hero Lab Online prices aren’t much different than Hero Lab Classic! The cost of game systems and packages remains the same across the two environments, and there’s a nominal fee of roughly $2 a month ($24.99 a year) for using the online service so we can keep the lights on for you.

If your payment lapses, character creation and upgrade will no longer be possible. But don’t worry, all your purchased content will be there waiting to resume use when you renew your account! And you’ll always be able to get your characters out in their current state, even with a lapsed account.

Hero Lab Online caches everything locally and only transmits the data that has changed, allowing us to be very conservative in how much data we’re actually consuming. Use of Hero Lab Online will typically consume less data over the course of a game than browsing your favorite websites for a few minutes, making it extremely realistic to use via mobile connections.

Additionally Hero Lab Online supports Offline View which allows you to view your character in the state it was in when last connected. You won’t be able to make changes, but this will at least allow you to play until you are reconnected. You can also print your character for backup play if so desired.

Bringing Hero Lab to an online environment allows us to support a diverse range of devices all over the world! It also has a plethora of added benefits that we simply cannot provide in desktop software. We love Hero Lab Classic just as much as you do, but to provide many of the awesome features our consumers want, we must be in a connected environment with a central server to manage things. Most of the new capabilities we’re pursuing with Hero Lab Online are simply not possible in Hero Lab Classic. Starship combat involving the whole party, for example, would be impossible to manage in the current incarnation of Hero Lab.

Additionally, party loot management, interaction between players and GMs, and player-to-player collaboration are not possible in Hero Lab Classic (e.g. applying buffs, damage, effects, conditions etc.). When complete, Hero Lab Online will provide a robust, interactive experience, centered around these capabilities, that everyone can enjoy!

That’s a core objective for Hero Lab Online. Having a central server orchestrate everything means that every device can “talk” to each other. Not like a chat system but items like the GM assigning damage for a fireball to four of the five PCs caught within it, with one taking half damage (save made) and another taking none (save made with Evasion). Or a player hitting an Orc that’s run by the GM and assigning 8 damage to it. With the fireball, the player simply acknowledges the damage received. With the Orc, the GM acknowledges the damage. [Note: Examples use Pathfinder, as that game system is by far the most popular among our users, but the concepts apply to any game system.]

Let’s take this a step further. The bard buffs the entire party (e.g. Inspire Courage) and applies that buff to everyone. There’s no need for each player to individually add and configure the buff on their PC. The wizard buffs a few members of the party (e.g. Haste) and chooses which PCs gain that buff. Again, there’s no need to individually add and configure the buff on each PC. Now the bard switches to a different song. Everybody gets swapped over with the new buff instantly. No need for each player to reconfigure things.

The same logic applies to conditions and effects. The wizard casts a spell that causes a group of creatures to be Dazed, so he designates them appropriately and the GM simply confirms them. Another PC uses an ability to trip a creature, assigning it the Prone condition. The GM has a creature use an ability to Stun a PC. It all works smoothly and streamlines the experience for all involved, letting everyone focus more on the game than the fiddly details.

Party loot is another great opportunity here. How does your group currently manage all the extra stuff they’ve acquired? Imagine having a simple repository where that’s all tracked. All the players/PCs can view it. At the end of an encounter, everything the party finds goes into the “stash”. Gear can then be assigned from the stash to individual PCs, and PCs can put stuff back into the stash. Let’s say the party finds a +2 Longsword that gets assigned to the Fighter. Now the +1 Longsword that the Fighter used to have can be assigned to a different PC that is still using a non-magical weapon. With a non-online version of Hero Lab, the stash has to be managed by a single person, and each assignment of gear must be manually handled by each player or the GM. That’s all readily doable for a simple +1 weapon. But what if the gear involved is more complex and needs to be constructed properly by each user? That gets to be quite a hassle. And what if the gear is such that only certain aspects of the item have been revealed by the GM? That’s entirely possible with the online model and utterly impossible without the central server.

Starfinder introduces the concept of a communal starship for the party. That can be easily shared with an online model. And Starfinder combat has different PCs taking on different roles on the ship. With the online model, there are many opportunities to do things that simply can’t be done with a disconnected desktop model.

We have a variety of other new features planned as well, but this should give you a sense of the opportunities that exist with Hero Lab Online and that we’re planning to bring to life within the product.

The end goal is for Hero Lab Online to have all the core Hero Lab Classic features plus an impressive array of new abilities. You won’t see everything in place on day one, but they’re on their way!

Absolutely not! Classic users will have the option to migrate any content we duplicate in Online. Migration will incur a nominal, flat charge, to set up your account with the appropriate content, which we anticipate will be less than $20 dollars. This amount will be the same, regardless of how many add-ons you own. It will also include 6 months of server access ($14.99 value) as a thank you for supporting us in the past .

You won’t have to leave at all! Even if you migrate to Hero Lab Online, you’ll be able to continue using everything you have in Hero Lab Classic.

The reality is that there’s no practical difference between a Classic “license” and an Online “account”. HLO has a login and password instead of using a license number and email address like HLC, thereby making your account more secure. You’ll login to your Online account to access everything instead of Classic verifying your license and key file when you launch it. You’ll similarly login to your Online account to purchase add-ons instead of using the license number and email address. All in all, the basic principles will be the same.

Absolutely!

Our intention is that you will be able to add your own custom content. Support for user-created data files to augment existing game systems has been designed into everything. The details of exactly how and when that will be made available within Hero Lab Online are still being worked out. This primarily impacts the existing game systems in Hero Lab Classic, so we’ll address this topic in detail when we migrate those game systems to Hero Lab Online.

Yes! With Classic, the only integration option for VTTs was to import the Hero Lab portfolio, with no ability to get anything back out and into Hero Lab. This approach will still be supported with Hero Lab Online. However, Hero Lab Online also provides a RESTful API that VTTs (and other tools) will be able to leverage for direct access to and manipulation of characters that persist on the Hero Lab Online servers.

We would love to offer official D&D content but do not have a license to do so at this time.

We sure do! We’re still trying to work out the details with Paizo but will make an announcement when we know more.