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Jun
Pen and Paper (and iPhone)23
posted by Paul Caristino
(D&D nerd warning!)
Every Tuesday I make the trek to my mate's place for some old fashioned dice rolling. Since our last DM went back to America I have taken over his duties and started a new campaign. Being el Dungeon Master Supremo is a lot of fun and is rewarding in ways that differ when playing as a character. Unfortunately it also brings with it a bit of hurt as I constantly have to look up adventure notes, monster stats and especially tracking pretty much everybody in an encounter. I don't have a small laptop so took to my primitive drawing tools to scratch our monster HP and initiative order. I tried to print out cheat sheets for monsters to make it easier but everything still took too much time. After several sessions of fumbling through encounters I though "Hey, i've got an iPhone, maybe there's an app for that", thus I hit the Appstore. I downloaded a couple free and cheap D&D apps and waded through them. Some of them had what I needed but missed a vital feature which made them pretty much useless for me, others were nothing like what I wanted or were hard to use. I was a sad panda, forever doomed to scribble out numbers into my notepad... but wait!
Lets get this party started
The best thing about being a programmer is being able to DIY, so I set off to make my own basic initiative tracker. I jotted down some of the basic things I needed, track initiative scores, track monster names and HP, highlight whose turn it is and also be able to keep some simple notes for quick reference. I made what I thought were easy to use input methods for all the numbers using the iphone's scrolling picker controls, it automatically sort based on initiative numbers, and even kept track of bloodied monsters for me. Armed with my new DM Tool of Awesome+2 I was ready to test it in a real session. Oh the humanity T_T
Original DM Tools Prototype
Tis better to have tried and failed...
Wow, turns out it wasn't as easy to use as I thought. There were so many things that I hadn't considered or at first thought would be really easy to manage that just fell apart in practise. Having to enter everybody's initiative scores at the start of the encounter, dealing with people with the same initiative score, having to re-order based on held actions, entering the same damage to several monsters for burst/blast attacks.... all took way more time than they should have. There were also other annoying things like still spending a lot of time looking up monster sheets for defenses whenever someone attacked which really slowed things down. It was still much faster than before where I was writing everything down myself but the interface left a lot to be desired, so back to the drawing board I went.
I brutally ripped out the current initiative tracker replacing it with a far simpler list that can be reordered by dragging rows. Each monster now shows all their defenses right in the list and I can edit their notes for effects and whatnot. Now you can tap a monster to add damage using a simple calculator style set of buttons, also remember the last input to easily apply similar damage/healing to multiple monsters. You can add multiples of the same monster into the encounter and the "current turn" marker also groups like-monsters if they're next to each other in the initiative order. I also added a "notes" system that allows me to prepare quick and ordered lists for each session as well as add them quickly during gameplay. Tuesday hits as I'm adding some final UI adjustments, this time for sure...
Revised Interface
Take Two
Success! After a disappointing first attempt I finally realized what I ACTUALLY needed in an app. Not something that I put all the numbers into and calculates who is next, and what does who and how/which/where/when, but an app to complement the table top experience allowing the game play to be fast and fun. I also learned that sometimes what I think I want isn't actually what I want at all.
I am curious to see what other D&Ders think of my approach and so after a few more tests and a bit of UI cleanup we put it on the Appstore. I do have plans for future features such as being able to prepare and store multiple encounters, easier editing of effects on monsters as well as perhaps syncing information with a website for easy editing, but as with all our products, suggestions and feedback is of course always welcome!
Comment in our forums ...
Every Tuesday I make the trek to my mate's place for some old fashioned dice rolling. Since our last DM went back to America I have taken over his duties and started a new campaign. Being el Dungeon Master Supremo is a lot of fun and is rewarding in ways that differ when playing as a character. Unfortunately it also brings with it a bit of hurt as I constantly have to look up adventure notes, monster stats and especially tracking pretty much everybody in an encounter. I don't have a small laptop so took to my primitive drawing tools to scratch our monster HP and initiative order. I tried to print out cheat sheets for monsters to make it easier but everything still took too much time. After several sessions of fumbling through encounters I though "Hey, i've got an iPhone, maybe there's an app for that", thus I hit the Appstore. I downloaded a couple free and cheap D&D apps and waded through them. Some of them had what I needed but missed a vital feature which made them pretty much useless for me, others were nothing like what I wanted or were hard to use. I was a sad panda, forever doomed to scribble out numbers into my notepad... but wait!
Lets get this party started
The best thing about being a programmer is being able to DIY, so I set off to make my own basic initiative tracker. I jotted down some of the basic things I needed, track initiative scores, track monster names and HP, highlight whose turn it is and also be able to keep some simple notes for quick reference. I made what I thought were easy to use input methods for all the numbers using the iphone's scrolling picker controls, it automatically sort based on initiative numbers, and even kept track of bloodied monsters for me. Armed with my new DM Tool of Awesome+2 I was ready to test it in a real session. Oh the humanity T_T
Original DM Tools Prototype
Tis better to have tried and failed...
Wow, turns out it wasn't as easy to use as I thought. There were so many things that I hadn't considered or at first thought would be really easy to manage that just fell apart in practise. Having to enter everybody's initiative scores at the start of the encounter, dealing with people with the same initiative score, having to re-order based on held actions, entering the same damage to several monsters for burst/blast attacks.... all took way more time than they should have. There were also other annoying things like still spending a lot of time looking up monster sheets for defenses whenever someone attacked which really slowed things down. It was still much faster than before where I was writing everything down myself but the interface left a lot to be desired, so back to the drawing board I went.
I brutally ripped out the current initiative tracker replacing it with a far simpler list that can be reordered by dragging rows. Each monster now shows all their defenses right in the list and I can edit their notes for effects and whatnot. Now you can tap a monster to add damage using a simple calculator style set of buttons, also remember the last input to easily apply similar damage/healing to multiple monsters. You can add multiples of the same monster into the encounter and the "current turn" marker also groups like-monsters if they're next to each other in the initiative order. I also added a "notes" system that allows me to prepare quick and ordered lists for each session as well as add them quickly during gameplay. Tuesday hits as I'm adding some final UI adjustments, this time for sure...
Revised Interface
Take Two
Success! After a disappointing first attempt I finally realized what I ACTUALLY needed in an app. Not something that I put all the numbers into and calculates who is next, and what does who and how/which/where/when, but an app to complement the table top experience allowing the game play to be fast and fun. I also learned that sometimes what I think I want isn't actually what I want at all.
I am curious to see what other D&Ders think of my approach and so after a few more tests and a bit of UI cleanup we put it on the Appstore. I do have plans for future features such as being able to prepare and store multiple encounters, easier editing of effects on monsters as well as perhaps syncing information with a website for easy editing, but as with all our products, suggestions and feedback is of course always welcome!
Comment in our forums ...
