I’ve been busy lately, what with writing and work, and I haven’t had time to try getting into Dungeons and Dragons. I choose this time to start getting into it for two reasons: Dark Sun and Gamma World coming for 4e later this year. I’ve been interested in getting into those settings since I first learned about them (admittedly, not too very long ago) and want to get comfortable with 4e before they come out. This means I’ve got to brush up on my rules knowledge and find a group… online. I know of no-one around my area that plays D&D or any tabletop RPG, which makes getting into the game a bit harder. In preparation (OK, while I was surfing the app store for cool games) I decided to find some apps that might help a session of D&D. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

D&D Compendium:

This app provides a tap into Wizard’s own D&D Compendium.

It’s easy enough to use. For the first launch make sure you click

on ‘Settings’ and input your ddi user-name and password. After that

You just click on the search bar and enter the text you want to look

up. It’ll bring up a list similar to what’s pictured. Click one of the results

and you’ll pull up the info. It’s simple and easy. Price: Free.

Dicenomicon:

The Dicenomicon is a dice roller app with some bonus features.

It has several pre-programmed scripts that allow for various

rolls to be performed quickly — like the full stat rolls pictured

(4d6 per stat, drop lowest). It seems to support several different

popular RPGs (4e and the WoD branches of Mage, Werewolf and

Vampire) with some pre-built functions. It’ll serve your dice-

rolling needs, whatever they are, at a cost. Price: 4.99

DMs Tracker:

This app is quite useful for tracking initiative, health, and effects during combat.

When you first open it up you’ll find a screen that lets you add an encounter

situation and add characters to it (the characters you have to set up yourself,

on the ‘Characters’ tab — it’s easy). Once you’ve got the encounter set up you’ll

click on the dice icon under each character’s screen (like the image below) and

the different characters will take their places in queue. Simply open up the character

screen for each player in the encounter — you’ll have the basic character info pictured –

and click ‘Save and end turn’ when they’re finished. If any damage or effects are applied

to other characters — open up their windows and edit it in, then hit ‘Save’. Once everyone

has had a turn, the order will reset and you can go through again. If someone or something

dies and needs to be removed — hit the shiny, red ‘remove’ button. One thing you will want to

remember: each encounter should only be used once with each created Group.

Price: 2.99

i4e:

i4e is a character sheet app that you can upload sheets created in Wizard’s Character Builder

to. It’s easy to get them on — there’s a web-address you can go to, upload the sheet, have the

device check for, and retrieve, them. The app isn’t perfect — keep that in mind — and the data

won’t be all there or correct. Most of mine was, with the exception of Powers not being detailed

and, if I remember correctly, some of the values like AC not having all the bonuses, or correct

bonuses, being applied. I had to go back and manually edit all that in, but it was pretty well

worth it, I think. If you notice on the bottom picture, Infernal Wrath is grayed out — meaning

it has been used. The character sheet is pretty interactive, as you might expect, and it helps

to keep track of the various things players use regularly. Also nice is the inclusion of short rest

and extended rest buttons under the ‘Combat’ tab — letting you use them and automatically

resetting the appropriate stats and powers. All with one click. This app is likely going to be more

useful for players than DMs (I don’t know if the DMs want to go through the process of editing

every character in their campaign), so keep that in mind. Price: 3.99

GMToolKit:

This app has a few useful features for a GM, though not all of them are as high

a quality as can be found elsewhere. You can tell, by the tabs, that it has built-in

dice rollers (for small numbers and large numbers of dice), a name generator,

room generator (pictured right) and place generator (pictured below). I like it for

the random rooms — as a warning, it can spout out the same items over and over

so you’ll just want to use it as an influence to what you really want in the room. It

can give some decent tips or influences. The place generator is pretty self-explanatory

with the picture — you take two English root words and get some fancy-looking

fantasy-esque variations of them. It, like the room generator and most in this app,

you’ll want to take lightly — I wouldn’t just copy directly. It’s all great material for

inspiration. Taking the place gen example here — isolated stream — you can imagine

a small village in the middle of a forest/mountain setting where a single stream provides

their sustenance. Perhaps being isolated from the rest of civilization gives them unique

quirks. Perhaps they isolated themselves for a reason — religious, magical, supernatural?

I think I’ll have to use that for an adventure… Price: Free.

GoodReader:

This isn’t solely a gaming app, it’s a document reader. It is, however, the best

PDF reader I’ve seen on the iPhone (and on the iPad, so I’ve heard). It’s fast,

has numerous means to upload files (Dropbox is my favorite) and it’s cheap.

To the right you can see  the first page of a Dungeon magazine adventure. While

small in the original setting, you can zoom in and move all over the document

which makes reading easy. Storing your entire rulebook and sourcebook

collection in GoodReader is very possible and very nice. As you can see in the

bottom picture, the app supports bookmarks that are apart of the PDF. That particular

PDF is the Player’s Handbook — something used quite often, I’m sure — with full bookmarks

that allow for very fast information gathering. I’d say it may even be faster than using

a desktop or laptop PC. In conjunction with the D&D Compendium, you can easily

look up information on something, find the page number and book it’s in, then flip

over to GoodReader and look it up. All in just a few minutes. Time saver? I think so.

Price: .99.

There’s more apps out there, some that I can think of right now, that I haven’t covered but need to. I’ll get to those another day.