A Hero Lab converter

[snupy]

This thread is a call to the arms for the development of an extension able to import characters/NPCs from Hero Lab. Most people here probably know what HL is better than I do, but I give a summary below for those who don't.

My coding skills unfortunately fall quite short of the task, but I hope there are interested people who can do it, it would be a really useful tool. If there are other ways I could contribute to the project I'd be happy to.

There used to be an importer in FG classic, but support for it has been discontinued some time ago. Moon Wizard has kindly provided XSLT sheets and XML templates as a starting point for this extension. They are attached to this post, the original post being here.

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What is HL
First and foremost, Hero Lab is a (paid) character creator. It supports a few rulesets (among which DnD 5E and Savage Worlds), but i have only used it for Pathfinder 1E, so my description will be about its uses for PF1 - I assume functionality is similar for the other rulesets but can't be sure. The developer Lone Wolf has switched to an online version (which has got mixed reception I think), but the importer would be for the older offline converter, which seemed to be pretty popular at the time, now known as Hero Lab Classic. It feels as if most of the development efforts are now focused on HL online. While that may not be great news for HL Classic, it also means that the format used in data files should be pretty stable.

As a character creator HL is definitely more powerful and easier to use than FG. It is remarkably complete, makes creating a build easier (for example will show which feats you can take according to prerequisites and the like), and will validate your build. I have heard that not everything it produces is (was) PFS legal even if selecting the option to do so, and that there still are things missing, but I think it does a remarkably good job (keep in mind I'm relatively new to PF). I'd say it becomes the more useful the more PF1 content you want to use - unfortunately getting all or most of the PF1 content for it is definitely not cheap, but sales make things a bit better. It can also be used as a digital character sheet. It also has GM tools for encounters creation, and e.g. applying a template to a monster is really easy.

It is of course possible to create a PC or NPC in HL and then manually recreate it in FG, but an importer would speed up things a lot, and use each toll for what it is best at.