Trapdoor Tech is Back With A Pathfinder iOS Application!

If you remember Trapdoor Technologies from last year (DungeonScape; Codename: Morningstar), you may be interested to hear that they're back! They've just released Playbook for PRD for iOS devices -- PRD, of course, meaning Pathfinder Reference Document. "With Playbook, everything is at your fingertips from rulebooks, adventures, characters, and maps to the most specific character customization - even a hard-earned badge from an epic homebrew campaign. Rolling up characters, running adventures, tracking campaigns and compiling logbooks are no longer chores, but an integrated, shareable experience."

If you remember Trapdoor Technologies from last year (DungeonScape; Codename: Morningstar), you may be interested to hear that they're back! They've just released Playbook for PRD for iOS devices -- PRD, of course, meaning Pathfinder Reference Document. "With Playbook, everything is at your fingertips from rulebooks, adventures, characters, and maps to the most specific character customization - even a hard-earned badge from an epic homebrew campaign. Rolling up characters, running adventures, tracking campaigns and compiling logbooks are no longer chores, but an integrated, shareable experience."


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Last we heard of Trapdoor was their unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign for a Pathfinder version of their Codename: Morningstar software, which followed the unfortunate cancellation of their D&D 5th Edition license with WotC. This release appears to be a version of that vision - it has 7 modules:

Home Module -- Game Night mode to synchronize all Playbook modules for the evening's adventure; display your hard-won badges and honors; and keep updated with the latest Playbook announcements.
Character Module -- Build and manage characters; character generation from novice to expert; customize your character sheet; and quickly generate NPC’s.
Adventure Module -- As a GM, manage your adventure, track encounters, share maps and take notes. Links in the adventure allow for instant information lookup. If you’re a player, a customizable logbooks keeps notes, maps and your adventure exploits organized and sharable.
Campaign Module -- The big picture of an RPG setting is sometimes lost in the details. This module keeps the campaign story arc organized and available with campaign maps, major world events and notable places and people easy to find.
Party Module -- Share information, pass secret notes, and muster your own game nights.
Library Module -- Read your own creations or browse through an expanding library of content from small publishers and our prolific community of homebrew and indie authors!
Forge Module (in development) -- A powerful toolkit for easily creating your worlds. Everything from modifying monsters to making maps - edit existing content or start from scratch.


There's more information on their web page. You can find the application on the iTunes app store here.


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Lord_Blacksteel

Adventurer
So this is considered "officially released" now? The comments above make it look more like the ever-popular "paid-beta". It's going to be hard to come in new to the universe of Pathfinder support products charging for something in this state. It will be interesting to see if they can make a long term go of it.
 

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Still, with a lot of polish and content (and I mean, a LOT of polish and content), I think there's potential. Search needs to be smarter, and, as others have posted, they really need to sharpen/brighten the text in a lot of places as it's hard to see.
Which would be fine if it was a 5e app, as they'd be on equal footing. Trying to go PRD is problematic in that everyone else is farther along.
They should have gone system neutral or 13th Age.
 

hardvice

First Post
Which would be fine if it was a 5e app, as they'd be on equal footing. Trying to go PRD is problematic in that everyone else is farther along.
They should have gone system neutral or 13th Age.

Exactly this. The Hero Lab iOS app may not be all that pretty to look at, but they've implemented every nuance of every feature from everything Paizo's ever released. It's there and it actually works… class features are activatable and modify your character as they should. It's certainly not cheap, especially if you're buying modules for it on top of buying physical and electronic releases of the books, but it's nearly perfect in giving you an actually usable character. And you can add custom content, though it's a bit hermetic to do so.

Why anyone would take that on — to say nothing of lots of other perfectly serviceable options — with a product that's just not that complete or ready to go is beyond me.

I will say this for Trapdoor's app: I went back and tried rearranging the sheet using the pinch gesture, and it's better: you can get it down to about 4 pages. It's a bit awkward, as the boxes like to move around kind of unpredictably as you're moving them, and accidentally expanding half-height boxes afterwards can totally wreck your layout, but it's more usable. Or would be, if it actually did anything other than sit there looking pretty.
 


turkeygiant

First Post
Exactly this. The Hero Lab iOS app may not be all that pretty to look at, but they've implemented every nuance of every feature from everything Paizo's ever released. It's there and it actually works… class features are activatable and modify your character as they should. It's certainly not cheap, especially if you're buying modules for it on top of buying physical and electronic releases of the books, but it's nearly perfect in giving you an actually usable character. And you can add custom content, though it's a bit hermetic to do so.

Why anyone would take that on — to say nothing of lots of other perfectly serviceable options — with a product that's just not that complete or ready to go is beyond me.

I have wanted to like Trapdoors offerings for their GUI from the very beginning but they have just never felt functional, with D&D the beta was just nowhere near ready, it would bug out every time, now with Pathfinder it just doesn't feel like the content/functionality is there. This outing would have been acceptable in the early days of pathfinder when it was a simpler beast but now there is so much more depth to the system I don't think they will ever be able to catch up, especially as there doesn't seem to be any open source way for fans to fill in the gaps.

I just want WotC to finally bite the bullet on a Herolab module for 5e and be done with it.
 

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