Programs for New Laptop

[ken-ichi]

DMGenie can import stat blocks as well.
Also entering in new feats and such is not that hard. All it takes is some determination and learning a little bit of VB Scripting. A lot of them can be done with cut and paste with some minor tweaking. There are a couple of good yahoo groups that can help with learning or finding already entered data sets.
I learned to do VB Scripting from scratch (I had only done a very tiny bit of Basic programming many years ago) and have been able to do a ton of scripting and have entered the entire Eberron data for the Campaign Setting, Races of Eberron, and Sharn books.
Let me tell you those Wildshaping scripts are fun to dig into.

One of the nice things is if you play with some home rules like dead at -Con score for example, you can actually edit that scripting to use that home rule.

A recent addition in DMGenie is that you can label bonuses as a Dodge bonus, etc.. So all the bonus stacking works correctly. If you cast a Bull's Strength Spell on someone you select the Spell click Cast. A window pops up to select the target(s) and set duration. The program automatically applys the +4 enhancement bonus to Str to the selected target(s). All the applicable Skills, Attacks, damage, grapple checks, etc... are automatically increased. The character is given a Bull's Strength condition with the existing durations and all the bonuses are removed when the duration runs out.

Check out www.dmgenie.com you can get a free trial demo that I believe is pretty much fully functional.

 

[azhrei_fje]

I'm also a fan of DMGenie. But I have to warn the prospective customer: you'll need at least 1024x768, and 1280x1024 is better. There is a huge amount of information being maintained by this program and the screen real estate is very important.

It does make interesting use of that real estate, though -- things that are not the typical UI. For example, there are 6 ability scores on the Combat Summary tab. Next to those strings, are two text fields where the original and current values are displayed. But double-clicking on the STR label rolls a STR Check. Similarly, double-clicking the WILL label rolls a Will Save. This makes the compact design very ... hmm, "intense" ... would be a good word, I think.

If you decide to try it out, definitely go through the tutorials. They will walk you through the process of using it (little tooltip-like windows will popup directing you where to look or where to click) and if you're the DM, the tutorials are essential to understand how combat management works.

There is also a very active user forum that the author frequents (he was gone a lot over the summer, but is now back). People are suggesting things all the time, and Janik (the author) adds them to the "todo list".

As a separate tool, I'm working on DndMapper. It's not affiliated with DMGenie in any way, except that some of the same folks using DMGenie have been beta-testing DndMapper for me. Basically, my program will help those DMs who have a computer and want to use a second display to project a map onto a battlemat. I'm almost ready to release something "usable", ie. I've been adding functionality and only recently got close to having something that would actually be useful at the table. If you're interested, check the "DM's Corner" board and look for the thread dealing with the "TMapper Clone".

HTH.