Rainysundays.net

My group played our third session of D&D last weekend and I think it was our best session yet. The party had finished up at the Dragon burial site and after refreshing themselves in town they headed to the old keep.

The reason this was the best session yet was because of a number small factors and one larger factor. The smaller ones are that the party had some fun encounters in the keep and that we have got a play flow going as everyone knows most of the basic rules now.

The large factor was due to using the “DM Tracker” iPhone app. The app allows a dungeon master to track initiative, hp, effects, party members and monsters in an encounter.

You start by adding in character stats such as hp, movement, initiative, perception, insight and defenses.  From there you can “clone” a character which is great for making multiple monsters quickly. After you have created your characters and monsters you can add them into groups for each encounter.

There’s a inbuilt dice so you can roll initiative (It also adds their ini modifier on automatically!) for each character and after you save they will move to their order in the initiative list. I roll all monster initiative before our session and add in the players rolls once we start the encounter. It takes a fraction of the time doing it this way rather than doing it all on paper. In combat you can set status on characters, set damage and healing surges.

So basically this app does all the messy combat stuff quickly and easily. I don’t have to spend time writing onto sheets of paper or looking around for someones basic stats. Which allows me to devote more brain power to other things such as monster tactics etc.

DM Tracker is like having your own little dm assistant for every game, allowing you to focus on more important things like story, monster tactics and seeing if your pc’s are having fun or not.

Though the app does a lot already, I do however have a wishlist for features I’d like to see in future updates.

• The ability to make groups on the character screen in order to sort monsters and characters etc.
• A feature to automatically track on-going damage and what kind of damage it is.
• To be able to add icons or pictures into character/monster profiles to find a certain character easier and because it would look cool!
• To be able to do heals on character as you can only use healing surges at the moment.
• Customizable backgrounds, such importing pictures from your camera roll  (The blue wood is cool but I’d like some variety at least).

You can read more about the DM Tracker here at the Kbar apps website.