DMTools

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By: Score Studios LLC

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Date Released: 2010-06-23

Developer: Score Studios

Price: 0.00

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As an old-school gamer, I’ve spent many an hour behind the proverbial DM screen, finding ways to make my friends on the other side squirm. I’ve pulled the ever-cliched "you meet in a tavern", the lich arch-villain that refuses to die, and the inevitable, "unbeatable" dragon encounter that the party stomped in two rounds. I’ve been engaged in traditional tabletop RPGs since the middle of 2003, and roleplaying freeform since long before that. The majority of my experiences in tabletop gaming has, predictably, been with Dungeons and Dragons, from Wizards of the Coast. However, ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve kept a wary eye out for any apps that would make my gaming experience easier. I’ve had limited success in this regard.

I was recently pleased to find an app called DM Tools, which claimed to be a notekeeper, a quick way to view and edit monster stats, and a "powerful initiative tracker." This was enticing for me, mostly because tracking initiative and monster hit points is the most tedious part of running a D&D game.

Setting up the app for use at the table is a little confusing at first, because there are no instructions, and some of the buttons are not where you would expect them. Once you get the hang of it, though, it takes all of 10 seconds to enter a monster or player character’s relevant stats into the app, and then add it to the initiative list. This is mostly because there is very little information tracked by this program; only a creature’s defense scores, hit points, and initiative bonus. Why it has a field for initiative bonus, I’m not certain, since you have to manually arrange the characters in the initiative order anyways, and initiative bonus doesn’t even show up in the initiative list. I was also deeply disappointed by the lack of a "roll initiative" button that would automatically roll everyone’s initiative bonuses and arrange them for me.

Once you have all the data input, and the initiative list organized, it’s a fairly straightforward app that actually does a really good job of tracking hit points. It notifies you when a monster is bloodied, and it’s a quick and simple matter to delete a creature from the list when it perishes in glorious combat (or when the rogue gets in a cheap shot). It also has a function for adding status effects, but I found the method to be unwieldy, and the status effect doesn’t even show up unless you go back to that window to edit it anyways, so it doesn’t make much difference.

Although this app can easily replace your normal scratch paper for jotting down initiative and tracking hit points, it does not replace monster stat-blocks altogether, since it has no way to record attacks of any kind, or any other statistics beyond defenses and hit points. However, those two things, and being a rudimentary initiative tracker, it does acceptably well. Could it be more? Certainly, and in the future, who knows what features may come with updates. However, as it stands, this app is little more than digital scrap-paper.