Using your PDA at the game table

[kigmatzomat]

You can also use PCGen & PCGenView for PalmOS. I've got a program called "die roller" from dahm.com that I like (lets you define die rolls and do mass rolls).

I rely heavily on my Palm as the GM; I load palmwiki to help organize my memos, which hold the vast bulk of the game data. I've got several megs of text files with my game plots, NPCs, treasure, kill lists, plots, etc. It's not too obtrusive (about the size of a notepad) and I can use the search functionality.

There are SRDs for the Palm or if you have Documents to Go you can use the RTF files.

All in all a happy thing.

 

[hexgrid]

Agreed. I've yet to see a laptop speed up gameplay. I have, however, often seen players unnecessarily fiddling around with it or taking up huge chunks of space with the computer, cords snaking between chairs, etc.

Similarly, I've seen players unnecessarily fiddling around with dice (and sometimes constructing towers out of them) and piles of books and papers taking up huge chunks of space on the table...

 

[BullMarkOne]

Similarly, I've seen players unnecessarily fiddling around with dice (and sometimes constructing towers out of them)

Ahhh, dice stacking, sport of champions, and single most important reason not to replace your vast collection of mismatched dice with your PDA.

 

[jdrakeh]

I used my old Palm m130 quite often when before I had to sell it. I had two different dice rollers (neither of the ones linked to earlier), a number of creature pics that I could flash at players (The thing charging forth from the darkness look like this!), and a small selection of PDF files formattted for easy viewing (including the 3.0 SRD, the Modern SRD, a copy of Risus, and copies of my Window material).

 

[Breakdaddy]

No PDA usage here, but as the GM of our group's campaigns I tend to use my Apple Powerbook at the table for keeping my various notes in order. Kills less trees and it's easier to keep up with appended and amended notes.

 

[tetsujin28]

For palm OS
http://www.clubkayak.com/handheld/wolf_dice.html

The best for the Palm is Dice Pro.

 

[Chris Tavares]

I've tried using my PalmOS PDA (Sony Clie T-615) a couple of times. Between the SRD (viewed in WordSmith), a dice roller (DicePro), character in a spreadsheet viewer, and an outline program (ThoughtMaster) you'd think I'd have everything I needed.

It just didn't work. Took me a while to figure out why.

The problem was that the PDA is kind of a slow platform. Every time I switched applications, it took at least 5 seconds. That may not sound like a lot, but switching from character sheet to die roller to rules to notes and back happened constantly, and I felt like I was saying "just a second" far, far too often.

Laptops take more room, but they are SO much easier to use. I'm hoping to justify buying a TabletPC soon, mainly for GM'ing work. That'll be pretty sweet, I think.

The last time I ran d20, I picked up DM's Familiar, and it definiately speeded up play, particularly combat. It made it a LOT easier to keep track of who went when, how many hit points the bad guys had, what was the rule on partial darkness again? That sort of thing.

 

[tetsujin28]

I've found all computer programs that were supposed to speed my work up ended up making things far more complicated and time-consuming than they needed to be. I have yet to even find a character creation program for any game that's faster than me just doing the work by hand...even for Hero.

 

[Rafa]

I've only used my Palm for the SRD, but it does make searching much faster. I think it'll be useful if I ever get that Shackled City Campaign off the ground. Also, it is easier to read in walking or at dinner than the actual books, as it takes up much less space.

 

[farscapesg1]

I originally started using a handspring visor handheld for my summoner. I typed up all his spells in his spellbook and monster stats into Outlook Notes and then synched them to the handheld. That way I had a copy of spells and summoned monsters to match the character. And if I needed to make a change to the monster (say for Augment Summoning) I just made the changes in Outlook and resynched.

The DM has recently added a wireless network to his house, so we usually have 3 laptops at the gaming table (the DM, mine, and one other player). Even though my wireless network card can't seem to connect with his wireless, I still bring it just for the fact that I have all my rulebooks in PDF format. It's a lot easier to bring just the laptop then to bring the core rule books, the Complete series, the "Races of " series, the environment series, etc. I've cut my baggage for gaming down from three bags to one laptop bag, dice, some scrap paper, and a few miniatures.

The DM has started using a laptop and again, this has saved considerable space. Instead of having multiple stacks of books around the table, he has everything on PDF also, so he just pulls up the book he needs and looks up the information. If nothing else, it has made a significant improvement in clutter and space around the gaming table.