Electronic DM Aid?

[Dausuul]

Recently I've been thinking about electronic aids to DMing. Being a software developer, I got all excited about some ideas I had, and started whipping something up. Then it occurred to me that maybe I was reinventing the wheel here and somebody had already done it. I did some Googling, but most of what I found wasn't really what I was after.

So, here's what I'm looking for. Does anyone know of something like this? If not, would you be interested in it?

• Tabletop DM aid. I am not looking for a virtual tabletop; I don't mind if the tool has VTT capability, but I'm an old-school DM who runs on an actual tabletop with minis and battlemats and dice and pizza. Not looking to get rid of any of that.
• Usable with 5th Edition D&D.
• Quick, easy access to my materials--monsters, notes, et cetera--during the game. I'm less interested in tools to help me create those materials (I can do that in Google Docs) than in tools to help me retrieve them efficiently. I don't want to have to stop the game and spend a lot of time hunting for the thing I want.
• Support for rapidly putting together encounters on the fly. I don't mind doing a bunch of one-time work to enter monsters into the system; indeed, I'm sure I'll have to, since 5E won't have any 3PP licensing for a while. But once they're entered, I would like to be able to throw together an unplanned, unscripted encounter in less time than it would take me to do it with a Monster Manual and a pencil.
• Once the encounter is built, I want to be able to view statblocks and track initiative, hit points, and so forth... again, in no more time than it would take to do it with a pencil. And I'm fast with a pencil. If an orc has taken 5 damage, and a player hits it for 7 more, I can track that in the time it takes to spot the orc's hit point column on my scratchpad, write "7," add 7 and 5 in my head, and write "12." If tracking damage in the app takes any longer than that, I'm not going to use it.
• Works well on a tablet. I've found the form factor of a laptop is something of a problem at the table. It takes up too much room, and I feel like staring at an upright screen disconnects me from the players. The tablet is more book-like. Plus, it's less distracting to tap a tablet screen than it is to slide my hands into home position on a keyboard or fumble with a trackpad.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

[GX.Sigma]

Once the encounter is built, I want to be able to view statblocks and track initiative, hit points, and so forth... again, in no more time than it would take to do it with a pencil. And I'm fast with a pencil. If an orc has taken 5 damage, and a player hits it for 7 more, I can track that in the time it takes to spot the orc's hit point column on my scratchpad, write "7," add 7 and 5 in my head, and write "12." If tracking damage in the app takes any longer than that, I'm not going to use it.

I think this will be the main difficulty. Even the minimum amount of time that could possibly take (click/touch the hp field, type one character, hit enter) is like 400% slower than a pencil.

Works well on a tablet. I've found the form factor of a laptop is something of a problem at the table. It takes up too much room, and I feel like staring at an upright screen disconnects me from the players. The tablet is more book-like. Plus, it's less distracting to tap a tablet screen than it is to slide my hands into home position on a keyboard or fumble with a trackpad.

That's a pretty tall order, too: putting it all on a single screen (without the laptop's ability to have multiple windows open) seems like an Apple-level UI design challenge.

I'm imagining an app that displays images (of stat blocks) from a user-made library; along with an initiative tracker and an HP tracker; and a random encounter building algorithm; all with a clean, intuitive, gesture-based interface. Example: the main screen is the initiative tracker. Touch a monster and swipe left to pull up its stat block full-screen. Swipe right to pull up its HP/condition tracker.

Most importantly, it needs to do all these things without having to load for even a second, and never crash. That's what it takes to be better than a pencil.

 

[Dausuul]

I think this will be the main difficulty. Even the minimum amount of time that could possibly take (click/touch the hp field, type one character, hit enter) is like 400% slower than a pencil.
That's a pretty tall order, too: putting it all on a single screen (without the laptop's ability to have multiple windows open) seems like an Apple-level UI design challenge.

I'm imagining an app that displays images (of stat blocks) from a user-made library; along with an initiative tracker and an HP tracker; and a random encounter building algorithm; all with a clean, intuitive, gesture-based interface. Example: the main screen is the initiative tracker. Touch a monster and swipe left to pull up its stat block full-screen. Swipe right to pull up its HP/condition tracker.

Most importantly, it needs to do all these things without having to load for even a second, and never crash. That's what it takes to be better than a pencil.

Never said it would be easy.

The last item is actually the simplest to solve--just write the combat portion of the app entirely in jQuery/Javascript. Run it all client-side. That way, you have zero network lag. Even if you lose connection to the Internet completely, you can keep running your combat like nothing happened. The app can update the server each time its state changes (so it can persist your encounter if you have to stop halfway through or something), but it doesn't wait on a response.

The interface design is a major challenge though.

 

[GX.Sigma]

The last item is actually the simplest to solve--just write the combat portion of the app entirely in jQuery/Javascript. Run it all client-side. That way, you have zero network lag.

I wasn't talking about network lag--my tablet can take multiple seconds to load a given page of a PDF.

Why do you mention network stuff, though? Why would any of this use the internet?

 

[Dausuul]

I wasn't talking about network lag--my tablet can take multiple seconds to load a given page of a PDF.

Hmm... that would certainly be an issue. I didn't have the impression tablet performance lagged that far behind PCs. Obviously no tablet is going to come close to matching a desktop or laptop in speed, but I'd have thought they could handle basic tasks without choking. I suppose I ought to dig a little deeper into tablet capabilities before getting too far into this project.

Of course, it's also possible that most tablet PDF readers just suck.

Why do you mention network stuff, though? Why would any of this use the internet?

Ease of support, multiple platforms (don't have to port the app for iPad, Android, Windows/Surface, and whatever other tablet OSes you want to run on), rolling out new features, the ability to provide databases of open source material, easy transition from one device to another... basically, all the reasons people build web apps instead of native ones. The main reason to build native is that you're doing something which requires a lot of processing power on the client side, and that wouldn't be the case here. From the computer's point of view, it's just displaying text and doing simple math.

Plus, all the adventure material used in the app has to be created and loaded somehow, and hosting the app online is by far the simplest way to handle that. I certainly wouldn't want to have to write adventures directly on the tablet.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

I've never found a truly RPG-centric electronic aid, but use very happily several programs at the table.

Full disclosure: I'm a Mac guy.

1. Curio by Zengobi software. A "binder" for everything you might need about your campaign. Its "pages" are completely expandable, you can type or draw with a tablet anywhere on the page, add files of any type, and you can organize the pages of your document into sections and subsections. Fantastic search feature. Integrates with Evernote, so if you store anything in Evernote (random plot ideas captured on your phone, pictures) you can just drag it right into your idea space (what the program calls its pages/canvases.

2. OneNote
Similar idea to Curio, but for PC. Doesn't hook into Evernote, but OneNote is multiplatform nowadays and you can access your files on the go. The upside? It's free! The desktop PC version is hands down the best program Microsoft has ever made. (The Mac version recently released is a nice start but it's lacking some of the polish of the PC version)

If people are curious I'm happy to share some screenshots/more descriptions of how I organize my campaigns.

 

[DM Howard]

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If people are curious I'm happy to share some screenshots/more descriptions of how I organize my campaigns.

Lay on, MacDuff!

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

Alright, sure!

Disclaimer: I've made a similar post before, so cribbing from that old post heavily, and I'm sharing some screenshots that I took several years ago. Curio has seen two or three upgrades since then, and is a much, much better program as a result of the changes. I'd just take some more screenshots, but I'm actually using a beta version at the moment and I want to respect my NDA.

Disclaimer 2: Do spoiler tags not exist anymore? I usually like to hide big images when I'm flooding a thread with them, but they don't seem to be working.

Curio is basically where my entire campaign lives, other than an Obsidian Portal wiki. It works well with the way I think and organize my thoughts, and it's really easy to get information into it. It's also handy because it has a built-in Evernote viewer, so you can see everything in your Evernote account and drag it right into your "idea spaces" (pages).

You can also export your projects to PDF, so you can store them in a cloud service of your choice and always have access (albeit read-only) on the go from wherever.

I have two projects (what Curio calls its files) for my primary game: my journal/encounter planning one, and my campaign notebook, where all of the details about locations, NPCs, and other world-building stuff lives. I split these into two files because I'll often want to reference things about the world quickly, and I can keep both things open and quickly swipe back and forth between the full-screened project files using Mission Control on my Mac like so:

It might actually make more sense to keep everything in one project, but I've done it this way for a while so I haven't bothered to change it.

This is a zoomed out view of a page in Curio. It can hold pretty much anything--text images, multimedia stuff, but also is very good at mindmapping. I'll often just sort of brainstorm a session and then work from the mind map during the game, filling in details as I go. I make one page (on the left of the window) per adventure plot (roughly). The shelf on the right holds tags I've made--clicking on them will take me right to whatever page the tagged item lives on:

Spoiler

You can also just type text on the page, then click somewhere else, and type more text, and sort of make your own concept map / flow-chart for an adventure. If you command-click while you're doing this, it'll actually draw a line in between each to really make a flow chart, which is by far my favorite way to sort of plot out an adventure.


Not shown above are sections. You can divide up the left-hand list of pages into sections based on whatever you want.

Here's an example from the newer version with most of the interface cropped out, but showing the above-mentioned sections. Bear with my crappy Campaign Cartographer drawing and my interpretation of the Nentir Vale from the 4e DMG. I keep a copy of the map laid out on its own idea space because you can add little text boxes or graphics to a map temporarily to remind you of locations/encounters, etc.

This is my improv page. I found names in various generators and stole some from minor NPCs in a few video games. They're listed with checkboxes so I can check them off when I use them. Left table is a picture I took of a table in the DMG. Top links are to a few PDFs, including AEG's awesome Ultimate Toolbox.

Spoiler

Notebook: I forgot about this in my post this morning. I don't use Notebook as often as I used to, but it's a neat program (just recently updated with a new version) and has an iPad version. Made by a company called Circus Ponies.

This is the automatically generated table of contents for Notebook. It's updated on the fly and makes getting to certain information quick.

Spoiler

This is why notebook is really snazzy. In addition to ridiculously good search features (the multidex shown in the TOC image above will literally make a list of everything--text, numbers, highlighting keywords etc--and hyperlink you to where it exists in the notebook. Pictured below is a list of things with the keyword "service" which is basically any place the PCs might do business. Each item will link back to whatever I have written about the place.

Spoiler

A lot of what I do could generally be replicated nicely in Microsoft OneNote.

 

[Thaumaturge]

Here's an example from the newer version with most of the interface cropped out, but showing the above-mentioned sections. Bear with my crappy Campaign Cartographer drawing and my interpretation of the Nentir Vale from the 4e DMG.

I thought Campaign Cartographer was Windows only. Has that changed, or do you use Parallels or something?

Thaumaturge.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

Yes, still only for windows-I have a windows partition just for games and campaign cartographer.