Thanks! Yeah I’m sure I could have stood either have more space or focus the story closer on a specific character. I don’t really do this a lot, so I was worried if I didn’t jump around then my story would become vary same-y just due to my own writing ability and lack of creativity. Lol.
I watched a YouTube channel I follow play through this and immediately put it on my steam wishlist. What are the chances this will end up on phone/tablets as well? It seems like the ultimate “I have five minutes at work”/“I’m on an airplane.” Game.
So I had my first session using DM helper the other day. The initiative tracker worked like a charm, and my players and I also liked that it rolls for the health of the monsters rather than using the average amount. I found myself referring to the actual stat blocks in the monster manual/dnd beyond however rather than using the ones within the program. I'm not really sure why. I guess it was just easier for me to read in that format than the way the app presents it.
I ended up displaying maps that way I talked about in my other thread. I uploaded them under the "maps" section of the adventure, and then would manually reveal fog of war sections and hit the "publish" button to update it as my players moved through the dungeon. When required I would just use the manual zoom feature to size the grid to match my TV screen so that the players could put their minis on it. However 90% of the time that wasn't required and the grid was sized properly to begin with. (Which was a surprising coincidence)
I haven't started using the calendar feature yet to track the passage of time, however that is coming up in probably the next two sessions (when the party has to start paying rent every month lol)
The MVP feature for me right now is being able to publish photos of NPCs and monsters to the screen. It's one of those small things I never considered that makes a world of difference.
Right, rather than have the token based line of sight. I want to just be able to edit the fog of war manually. Because I won't be using the tokens. but my own minis placed on the TV screen.
I'll also add here that I put these wish list items in here with no consideration for dev time and difficulty. So I understand if something isn't possible, and right now I can sort of make my own solutions within the framework of what you have developed. (currently I'm planning to just using the map screen, rather than the battle dialogue for displaying the map, and just make my edits, then hit publish and resize as needed)
So I have not yet run the actual game with my players yet. However I did some quick testing last night to see if this app was going to work for running the game from. Here are my findings:
Player view needs some more control. If I want to display a tall map, there's no way for me to rotate the player view to make this fit the screen. If you are using tokens this wouldn't be an issue, however when you are trying to get the zoom to fit in such a way that the players can put physical minis on the screen, this becomes an important feature. In a worse case scenario I could just crop the long portion out of the larger map and rotate the image before importing into DM helper. However if would nice to just be able to upload my mega dungeon map and do any tweaks within the program.
The rotate function would also help, as my players are sat around a table, so if I'm displaying an image of an NPC, or text I want them to read, the ability to rotate the image to make it easy to view for each side of the table would be nice.
The encounter builder seems really reliant on the use of the in game tokens and the built in LOS/FOW features. Since I don't plan on using tokens, but rather my own miniatures. it would be nice if I could just edit the fog of war manually during encounters, rather than having to do the fog of war stuff in the maps window, and then just keep hitting publish to update it.
The initiative tracker is great.
The bestiary is great
I love that I can publish photos of the monsters and NPC's to the player view, rather than just battlemaps (without having to trick the program into thinking the pictures of NPC's are battlemaps).
I would love to be able to have adventure specific NPC's rather than all NPC's going into the "Setting" category. I often have one-off NPC's that are important for an adventure then usually don't return, but might.
I will probably be back with more stuff after I actually run the game with my players. As a planning and running tool this app seems awesome. Running the maps on the table is the big draw for me in using this app, so whether I continue with it or not all depends on how quick and easy it is.
So I am currently working on porting over a campaign module into the app for potentially using to run my games. But its really annoying having to constantly type all the stat block information into the system manually when all I really want to do is take the basic "thug" stat block, or "commoner" stat block and then make like 2 minor changes. It would be nice if when creating a new NPC we could choose a stat block from the bestiary and use it as the "base" before modifying it to suit our needs.
Likewise if you had this option for creating homebrew monsters. Pick a monster that already is in the bestiary and copy it before making changes.
Bonus points if you can make it possible to copy paste directly from DnD beyond into this program. however I have a feeling that could be more of a headache than its worth.
