This forum has been amazing help, thanks to all of you. Your clarification on Mage spell dice and the limit imposed on spell force was a U TURN on how we were playing the game. We had no idea that what we were doing was completely wrong!

Now, I really like Chummer but I am getting errors when I start it up. Its like it want to update and I am not able to. I get a microsoft.net error. When I click out of it..chummer then starts up fine..(very odd).

With that said is Hero Lab worth the 30 dollars to download and pay for?

Thanks

Do all your players want to pay the $30 dollars and download it or are you willing to do all character updates for them? If not, then no, it isn't worth it. The license is for 1 machine only and you have to buy the additional books at $10 a pop. The base system just supports the core book. So to get all the books out so far it costs $30 + $90 for the added books. $120 for the whole set. To me, not worth it when Chummer does all this for free.

That said, Hero Labs offers a demo version of the software you can try out. So maybe grab it and see if it is worth it to you to spend that money.

Chummer5 has a pretty active community I think, on Catalyst's forum page, probably under community projects or something so post your error there and see if they have a solution.

I have had occasional hiccups with Chummer5 like the one Larsenex describes. In each case, I have managed to resolve it by deleting Chummer5 (set aside your .chum save files first!) and doing a fresh install from a new download off the Chummer5 website. An annoyance, but a minor one as the program is small and installs quickly.

Edit: See this post for an explanation for why you've been having issues updating. A massive update was released over the weekend.

The first License can be used on 2 machines.

I have the full Hero Lab and SR5 add-ons. IMHO, it's worth it if you're a GM and run games regularly at a FLGS. I'm not an Agent, but I occasionally run Missions at my store and it's handy being able to make LEGAL pre-gens (book pre-gens are garbage and not legal) tailored for the mission.

You can do the same thing with Chummer and it would a heck of a lot cheaper.

Unfortunately because Chummer is really the work of a succession of individuals, every time one has stopped working on it for whatever reason, it goes on hiatus until someone else can take up the torch.

Hero Lab has the benefit of an entire company behind it, and it shows. It also was built from the ground up to be a multi-game product, so in many ways it is far more robust in dealing with major rules changes.

They're both good products. Chummer has the benefit of being free, but is a fan-made product with all the pitfalls (and benefits!) that entails. Herolab costs money but because it does it has a lot more resources supporting it.

Herolab is also the only officially licensed product, but I don't think everyone finds that necessarily super important. (Licensing a character generator is a little weird since rules mechanics are a little bit of a grey area in regards to intellectual property - many courts would might not recognize the 'numbers' part of RPGs to be 'creative work', and as such may be un-copyrightable in a similar way that phonebooks are un-copyrightable*. It's also the same reason things like Open Gaming Licenses are kinda weird - technically rules mechanics are properly covered by patent law, not copyright. How many tabletop RPG developers patent their creations?)


-k

* - It's a thing. Look it up.

As unappealing as the purchase cost may be, in my opinion it's worth it. I've used Chummer for both SR4 and SR5 and had frequent issues that required me to resort to building characters on paper, which is far less appealing than the cost of Hero Lab.

A friend who owns a Hero Lab license allowed me to test out the product on a laptop and I was immediately sold. Hero Lab does occasionally have some minor issues, but they pale in comparison to what I encountered in Chummer. If you pick up Hero Lab, be mindful of the fact that it will occasionally allow players to do things that are not compatible with RAW such as allowing more than five Initiative dice.

Herolab is totally worth it.
I started with Chummer but was disappointed with it's....many flaws.

Herolab allows me to generate characters very quickly and accurately with minimum of fuss and consequently has really improved my understanding of the game.

It's no comparison imho.

Disclosure: Do not play SR5, will not touch SR5, only have experience with SR4 and Chummer 4.


That having been said... Hero Lab sounds like a fucking scam to me.
Okay, so they want you to pay $30 to get the program. Okay, that might be fair, I suppose. By way of comparison, you can get the Legendary Edition of Skyrim on Steam for $40 right now, so that doesn't seem so bad.

But wait, hold on, they want you to spend $10 to unlock each book's worth of content? So not only do you need to buy Chrome Flesh, for example, for $25-50 dollars, but you need to tack on an extra $10 "license to use the content I just bought in my program" fee.

Which, of course, you will, because you sure as shit didn't pay $30 for Hero Labs in the first place just to go back to using pencil and paper (or, more likely, some kind of ordinary electronic character sheet manager,) because your new book has stuff you can't plug into Hero Lab. So basically, you're increasing the price of all future Shadowrun splat purchases by $10.

And of course, because you're only buying for you, not your whole gaming group, this means that either all character sheet updates go through you, your players are compelled to buy Hero Labs (and all applicable sourcebook plug-ins,) with you, or you're back to square one of having to deal with manual sheets, or sheets in other formats, or kicking the players from your group for failing to have the financial freedom to invest in the same program they have.

So you're chasing a sunk cost fallacy, basically.


So, in conclusion: If you're the kind of wealthy person who can think nothing of dropping $150 extra on the facilitating add-on to the game system you already bought, good for you, go right ahead. I hope your whole group is similarly wealthy and/or you have the time to manage their sheets as well as your own and/or you have the disposable income to buy licenses for them, too.

If you're not, stick with Chummer, because you're literally getting the same thing for free.

And if you pirated SR5 anyway, you might as well go whole-hog and pirate Hero Labs to boot, because you're already sailing under the black flag so what's one more copyright infringement to you, you scurvy bastard.

Pretty much how I felt about it too. I've seen the sheets it produces and while they are a little prettier, I understand enough xml to make mine nicer than the standard Chummer sheets. And for me, the fact I can do that, modify Chummer however I wish (and I have), makes Chummer a clear winner in my books. I can (and have) modified Chummer to accommodate nearly any house rule I want. This is something I can't do with Hero Labs because it is closed software rather than open like Chummer (I can get the source code for Chummer and edit the xml data sets). I've also never run into an insurmountable error in Chummer (probably because I'm willing to dig into the code).

It's more work, but I've always preferred my custom-made character sheets that I assemble in MS Word, carefully constructing pages of integrated tables with stat entries and specific font types/sizes exactly where I want them.

This, exactly... CUstom Word docs for the win.