The DM's Best Friends

[Ghaerdon Fain]

So I think there are many DM's like me searching for aids to help smooth the 4E DM experience. What's out there, what's been "Fan Created" and what should be created?

Thanks

 

[pdoconnell]

The Asmor.com 4e Monster Math Cruncher has been useful given the lack of alternate tools for doing monster generation math. The overall missing piece is something that WoTC should have released right away, and I sure as hell would have purchased: a complete encounter generator and tracker.

This is something I have been working on for the last month or so, and is annoyingly complex I've found. A tabbed GUI for tracking initiative in a battle, with each tab representing another character/monster. Would have each monster power be interactive, so if I click a monster power, it'll roll the to-hit and damage for that power, and notify you if it is a critical hit. It'll have a dropdown menu for every monster from every source available, as well as ways to modify them (for instance, changing a lvl 4 human bandit into a lvl 14 elite bandit by adjusting stats, damage, etc). It would even allow you to select one of the "encounter types" from the DMG.

I've been working on this for about a month now, and am finishing up the initial design stuff. At this point it's just for personal usage, and I highly doubt I'll be able to get approval to release it from WoTC. Best case scenario for its public release is probably if they like it and want it, and it ends up part of the DND Insider Suite. Beyond that I haven't read the new licensing agreement stuff yet so don't ask for it. But I would prefer if it were just available, either from WotC or another licensed company.

 

[Wolf88]

The Asmor.com 4e Monster Math Cruncher has been useful given the lack of alternate tools for doing monster generation math. The overall missing piece is something that WoTC should have released right away, and I sure as hell would have purchased: a complete encounter generator and tracker.

This is something I have been working on for the last month or so, and is annoyingly complex I've found. A tabbed GUI for tracking initiative in a battle, with each tab representing another character/monster. Would have each monster power be interactive, so if I click a monster power, it'll roll the to-hit and damage for that power, and notify you if it is a critical hit. It'll have a dropdown menu for every monster from every source available, as well as ways to modify them (for instance, changing a lvl 4 human bandit into a lvl 14 elite bandit by adjusting stats, damage, etc). It would even allow you to select one of the "encounter types" from the DMG.

I've been working on this for about a month now, and am finishing up the initial design stuff. At this point it's just for personal usage, and I highly doubt I'll be able to get approval to release it from WoTC. Best case scenario for its public release is probably if they like it and want it, and it ends up part of the DND Insider Suite. Beyond that I haven't read the new licensing agreement stuff yet so don't ask for it. But I would prefer if it were just available, either from WotC or another licensed company.

You could release the basic groundwork app, only instead of monster descriptions, powers and whatnot you could just put in blank text boxes to be filled by dm's, that in itself would be an useful tool!

Also, i dont know jack about application design, but couldn't it be designed to download info from the DnD compendium itself if the user has a subscription? that in itself doesn't look like anything illegal or in need of permission to me!

 

[pdoconnell]

I would not be opposed to releasing the program sans all the data for DMs to plug into on their own. I may end up doing exactly that, but if I can figure out how to query the DNDI database I'd love to do that. I'm going to have to check to see about any licensing issues, because sometimes there are rules in the user agreement forbidding such actions.. I'm coding it in java so it'll be cross-platform (theoretically) too, since I'm running Ubuntu at home so I may as well code it in a language usable by people on any architecture that will support java.

If I end up expanding this for popular consumption, what would people like to see the program do, what features are 1) needed, 2) desired, and 3) lusted after but understandable if far too difficult.

 

[tempor]

Quite interesting what you are doing. Especially the Java part. I suppose you are using a DB behind, correct? It would be great to have a free DB behind, or even better (albeit quite difficult) to have it open and let people decide their DB between choises (MySQL, Oracle, etc.).

It would definitely be nice to have a "Random" button. No options. Everything random. It comes up with an encounter of whatever type/level/difficulty. We should not forget that 30th level characters could pump into a couple of 1st level minion Kobolds (as well as the lowly 1st level character to catch a glimpse of a 15th level Death Knight). Of course being able to automatically create encounters based on criteria would be excellent.

An empty framework with input screens so that the DM can build his own DB would be excellent because I do not see the possibility of direct connection to the Compendium.

If you need any help I could be able to help.