I also just had my first go at this today, and I'm impressed with how well this works. I'll need to tinker with it more to be sure, but I can see using this in the future, even if only to make centralizing my Character Builder files a little easier. That said, there are a few things that didn't quite click with me. The easy ones:
Thanks for the compliment - but even more for the feedback. Comments follow.
- Wizard powers are a bit clunky. Everything in their spell book shows up as an active power even though half of their stuff isn't actually available. You can use the "Use/Unuse" buttons to get rid of the spellbook'd powers, but short rests will restore any non-daily utility powers. Extended rests will of course restore everything.
This isn't quite as easy as you'd think - nor is it a problem just for wizards. Multi-use cleric powers like Healing Word aren't well-handled, psionic power points are absent, and so on. Basically, anything that breaks the mold.
In some cases, it's clear in the dnd4e file what should be happening. In others, not so much. We have a "power customization" feature that addresses all these issues pretty highly prioritized on the roadmap:
Issues - iplay4e - Project Hosting on Google Code
(Look for issue 90, a High priority Enhancement)
- When I select a single-target power and press "Roll All", it rolls 1 damage roll and 8 attack rolls; I don't understand why the latter is happening. It'd be great if the app automatically rolled the maximum number of attack rolls possible for the power (ex: burst 1 rolls 9, blast 5 rolls 25, etc.), but right now I'm getting 7 more calculations than I need.
The "Roll All" button is a recently added feature, and it's about the best we can do for the moment. Despite appearances, we don't actually have all of the information about each power; we are able to
display compendium data, but are not able to
read it. We're stuck with what is in the dnd4e file, which doesn't let us differentiate between single-target and multiple-target powers. The Roll All button provides what we believe is a sufficient number of rolls to cover 95% of power use scenarios - and it's awfully easy to ignore the rolls you don't need.
As we move forward into the web-based tabletop space, we'll of course roll the appropriate number of times based on the number of targets selected. We're just not there yet.
I guess my biggest question at this point is "How do you expect this program to actually be used?"
Well put. While the answer to this will expand over time, it is currently: "Use iPlay4e to have a character sheet that you can never lose, that you can access from any device connected to the web, and that automatically includes the most recent compendium data."
There are other answers (iplay4e is awesome for play-by-post, is a great way to share characters with your group, etc...) but that's the core of it.
It doesn't seem like it's quite at the point of being used by the players and the DM simultaneously; with my testing earlier (I had my current GMail account on Firefox and an old one on Chrome), it didn't look like changes that player A makes to his PC were visible to player B until B refreshed, which seems like a bit of an issue, especially for a DM trying to track everyone.
You're absolutely right about that. We're moving towards a networked combat manager, but we're not there yet. It's non-trivial to do so in a way that won't entirely swamp the server with requests. It's like a carful a kids all saying "did it change yet?" "did it change yet?" every couple seconds...