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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6204691" data-attributes="member: 1165">Would these tools help though? I'm running 4e right now, and my electronic tools consist of:A laptop and key drive.An Excel sheet giving me shorthand info (AC, defenses, passive Insight and Perception) of the PCs.What amounts to a Word File of a DM screen I made myself. It has the skill DC and page 42 info, plus stuff I might need to know such as the Climb DC of a stone wall. (Or rather, it should. Turned out I forgot to update that last session. Oops!)A gigantic list of monster stats that I've compiled and pasted into a Word file, which is currently 1.2 MB in size, over 900 pages, and takes forever to save whenever I edit it. (I have the Monster Builder, which I use to make new monsters, but afterward apply edits because the Monster Builder is too limited and buggy to handle some tasks. My laptop, unlike the computer I'm using now, cannot run the Monster Builder anyway.) For the battle, I open another file called "Holding Pen", which is just an empty Word file that I copy what monsters and NPCs I need, because trying to play with a 900+ page file would take too long.And that's it! I finally bought a laptop earlier this year because carrying around seven boxes filled with index cards holding all my monster stats felt stupid. (I had five boxes, and when I needed to buy two more, it was such a pain in the behind to get more of them in Toronto that I gave up and bought a laptop instead.) I don't even use my wireless "key" at the game, leaving it in my pocket.When it comes to actually running a battle, I simply write down on a piece of paper the initiative order, and beside monsters their hit points and defenses, plus add conditions as appropriate. (For instance slowed [player A] means this monster is slowed until the end of player A's turn.) I use one sheet every two battles. While there's software that can handle that too, I don't think I need it.I don't need software to run a campaign either, and I'm not sure if it would help.Another 4e DM in my group uses a few more tools. For instance, he uses Excel sheets to keep track of monster initiative, and he has a DDI account so he can look up rules pretty quickly.Compared to when I was running 3.x (I didn't have a laptop then), I also had my collection of monster cards, but the real limitation was the difficulty of balancing monsters, building NPCs and dealing with spellcasting. All of this was taking place away from the table, between sessions. I don't think a computer can actually handle that. Even the stacks of pre-generated NPCs in, say, the NPC Codex (an amazing product, by the way) wouldn't help much, as I have little reason to believe those NPCs are optimized nearly to the extent of the PCs they would have to go up against.An area where computer programs probably would help was treasure generation though. That sucked up so much time and energy in 3.x, and unlike 4e (inherent bonuses for the win) there was no getting away from that. (There was an inherent bonus system in 3.x, but it didn't work properly.)</blockquote>

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