The *potential* for the iPad or something like it is pretty phenomenal. With a front-facing camera, which we'll see in the next rev, you could run the whole table using ARG. Though most of the ARG apps I've seen so far are pretty dodgey.
If the
Combat Manager ran on the iPad, that would be colossal. A genuinely unbeatable combination of app functionality and form factor.
Right now, as a PDF reader, it's good. One HUGE advantage is searchable PDFs. I have my Ptolus PDF on my iPad and it's 1,000 times more useful than the actual Ptolus book. Not only is it, obviously, lighter and easier to carry around, but the ability to search for whatever you need means you could really RUN Ptolus with it and trick your players into thinking you'd read the book.
UNFORTUNATELY and I put that in app cap to draw attention to it, there are problems with the Dungeon PDFs.
IF you are running D&D via a VTT like Fantasy Grounds, then the Dungeon PDFs are great. Tactical maps can just be dragged into the appropriate folder, and viola! Instant battlemap!
Since the tokens
are stored in a separate, transparent, layer, when you copy the image you just get the battlemap, not the tokens. Which is what you want. Otherwise the players would SEE the tokens and you'd have to photoshop them out first. Brilliant. Really, really useful for us playing online.
However, that same PDF will look balls on the iPad because the iPad can't render those transparent layers. Doesn't matter if you're using Dropbox's PDF Reader, Goodreader, FastPDF, it's an iPad problem.
So on the iPad--if you were trying to use it to run the game in person--all you see are a bunch of tokens floating in whitespace. You can't see the tactical map behind it.
Adding to this is the annoying fact that WotC has not used the same method across all issues. Sometimes the map and tokens are baked into the same image, sometimes the tokens are in their own transparent overlay.
I can't really think of a fix, other than to just publish both Player and GM tactical maps in every Dungeon mag. If they do all the tactical maps with transparencies, then it's awesome for VTTs but bad for iPads. If they bake all the layers into one image, it sucks for VTTS but is great for iPads.
Maybe someday we'll get a better PDF engine on the iPad, solve the problem.
Edit: sorry, didn't mean to embedd a video. Just wanted to post the link. /sadface.
