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Creationism vs. Science: A review of Hero Games' Creation Workshop RPG character creation software

Creation Workshop 1.6.2 is the latest in RPG character creation software from Hero Games. It comes with a template for creating characters in Hero's new Fuzion system, but is fully customizable to work with other RPG systems, for which you can build your own templates. Hero will also sell you a template for the original Hero system or, if you already have a registered copy of Hero Creator, you can upgrade to Creation Workshop. The idea here is to make it faster and easier to create RPG characters by having the computer do all the calculation and cross-checking for you and print the results as an attractively formatted character sheet. Easy, right?

Wrong.

Let me say right up front that as far as I can tell, everything in Creation Workshop seems to work just fine. The Hero Creator template is very comprehensive, and most of the limitations of Heromaker, its venerable progenitor, have been eliminated. If you're the sort of person who enjoys engraving the lyrics to "Alice's Restaurant" on a human hair with a chainsaw, Creation Workshop may be just your cup of radioactive sludge.

Creation Workshop 1.6.2 does have several nifty features. There's a handy die-rolling utility. There's a huge database of names, just in case you can't decide what Spudboy ought to call himself in his secret identity as a mild-mannered skate punk. The Random option is especially useful for GMs who need to come up with an NPC on the spot and already have one named "Johnny". There's also a Random option for Skills, Powers, and Disadvantages (but, annoyingly, not for power modifiers), and you can use the die-rolling utility to generate random characteristics. For the busy GM, this might be a godsend.

That said, who the hell designed the interface for this thing? Did somebody lock an infinite number of monkeys in a room with a copy of Visual Basic and a kilo of that cheap brown Mexican shit my friend Josh is always smoking? Because I'd rate using Creation Workshop right up there with trying to remove my own appendix with a butter knife and a pair of rusty tweezers.

I won't even bother to complain about the poorly-designed Hero Games website (http://www.herogames.com) from which I purchased this software. Actually, I should thank them. Had I been more alert, I might have realized that any company with a website this unprofessional is not overly concerned with providing a pleasant user experience. I could go on about confusing departures from the standard online buying model, but instead let's move on to the actual product, which is so inscrutable that by comparison the website parties like it's 1999.

Once I'd downloaded Creation Workshop, I installed it and started it up. So far, so good. The problems didn't begin until I selected "New" from the File menu. I chose the appropriate character template from the dialog menu, clicked "OK", and was presented with a disembodied window labeled "Untitled". It was a nice enough window, I suppose, with the usual sort of text fields for entering a character name and characteristic values. The expected sections for Powers, Skills, and Disadvantages, however, were nowhere to be seen.

After poking around in the menu bar, I discovered that the menu from which I could choose to view these separate windows was not labeled View, as one might reasonably expect from Windows software, but Data. I could go on about departures from standard Windows interface terminology -- but no. I'll just complain about the windows themselves instead. These appeared in arbitrary sizes and positions, and would not all fit on the 800x600 screen of my laptop without overlapping. I have a 10-point fear of overlapping windows (common, moderate), having once been frightened by one as a child, so I dragged a window partially off the bottom of the screen, assuming a scrollbar would appear.

I'm sure you know what happens when we assume. That's right -- Hero Games makes an ass of 'u' and 'me'. I just know that some evil programmer is chortling with glee in his Mom's basement as I write this. "So, they want SCROLL BARS, do they?" he cackles. "Well, we'll just SEE about THAT! Muahahahahahaha!" Not only is there no scrollbar in the main window, the "Tile" function places windows with a whimsical irregularity that leads me to suspect the person responsible had spent the better part of that day admiring the rustic Mexican tile floor at El Torito while sucking down Margaritas like Gatorade.

I could continue in this vein, but what it all boils down to is that Creation Workshop has a GUI that not even a programmer's mother could love. The terminology is nonstandard and counterintutive. The Power, Skill, and Disadvantage lists, by default, show only the item name and value; you have to double-click the list item to bring up a separate dialog box that lists any modifiers. It's tidy -- especially by comparison to the "Tile Windows" feature -- but also inconvenient for someone like me who really piles on the power modifiers. I don't like having to open yet another window to review that information.

If I'm reading the woefully inadequate and incomplete documentation correctly, Creation Workshop will let me customize those lists to show all the information my black little heart desires. There's not much point, however, since the list text truncates rather than wrapping if it's too wide for its window. For all I know, I can change that too, but if that's the case, I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it. Here's a hint for aspiring software developers: don't advertise your product as "customizable" if you have to be an experienced programmer to understand the customization process. Ten years ago I was able to figure out the format of Nethack's data files and make extensive changes without knowing a thing about C programming, but I can't make heads or tails of Creation Workshop's "easy" customization options.

Speaking of incomplete documentation, Creation Workshop's pdf-format manual ends so abruptly that I'd be willing to lay odds it was hijacked and released unfinished by software pirates while the writer was in the kitchen reheating leftover meatloaf for lunch.

A list of features I'd like to see, in no particular order of importance:

Dockable windows - I'm not comfortable with this multiple floating windows business. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth and I first learned the Hero System, we used pencil and paper to create our characters. (And we liked it!) I'd like the option to have my screen look a little more like the familiar paper character sheet. Besides, wasted screen real estate burns my ass.
Scroll bars in the main window - enough said.
Easier configuration - I'd appreciate scrolling lists, pull-down menus, or some other user-friendly way of selecting configuration options, rather than text fields that require me to enter things in code the NSA would have trouble deciphering.
Wrapped text in lists - or at least the option to wrap text, so those of us with poor short-term memory and RSI don't have to keep opening all those annoying little boxes.
A random superhero name generator - this is so easy I could whip one up in perl in about five minutes, and it could be hours of entertainment all by itself. This is a job for... the Pink Potato?

I enjoy playing around with character concepts. I've been known to spend hours curled up in a chair with my laptop and the right mood music, endlessly balancing points just for the pleasure of hearing my friends' strangled cries of horror at the resulting creations. Heromaker's "outmoded" DOS interface is so simple and straightforward to use that inventing people has become one of my favorite ways to unwind.

I bought Creation Workshop hoping that the jazzed-up GUI interface and expanded capabilities would make it even more fun, but it's going to be a long time before I'm comfortable enough to snuggle with it in my jammies. At a minimum, it's going to have to buy me several expensive dinners and box seats for the symphony before it can even think about getting a kiss goodnight.

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