{"id":326873,"date":"2010-02-16T13:00:41","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T18:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theappleblog.com\/?p=40857"},"modified":"2010-02-16T13:00:41","modified_gmt":"2010-02-16T18:00:41","slug":"manage-your-dd-4e-characters-on-the-iphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/326873","title":{"rendered":"Manage Your D&D 4E Characters On the iPhone"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Every Friday night, I get out from my Mom’s basement<\/span>, um, my wife lets me get out for a night<\/span>, err, I get together with my old High School gaming group for a fun night of D&D 4th Edition.<\/p>\n

One of the things that was a bit of shocker in 4th edition is how much administration there was. Gone are the days of just whacking creatures and getting healed. Now I need to deal with healing surges, at-will powers, encounter powers, dailies, etc. It can get to be a bit much. To help with a lot of the back-end creation I subscribe to the excellent Wizards Insider<\/a> (sadly, this is Windows-only). Among its core features is a very handy character builder that uses all of Wizard’s published source material — even if I don’t own that volume — and creates a very handy, easy to read character sheet.<\/p>\n

However, by the end of a gaming session, that sheet of paper looks like the crib notes to a physics final exam. The hit points section is a blur of eraser marks. The encounter powers have been checked, unchecked, rechecked, and double-checked. I was originally hoping that viewing a PDF (and maybe even annotating it) on an iPad might be an ideal solution to outsource the administrative details, but then I stumbled upon i4e<\/a> in the app store. <\/span><\/p>\n

This handy program either lets you input your character by hand — not recommended since it stores none of the powers and items from the game, so you’ll be entering in a lot of stuff on a small keyboard — or you can simply import your character from the Character Builder. Naturally, this is the option I chose.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it wasn’t 100 percent successful. Most of the abilities are missing some of the descriptive text and it wasn’t taking into account the bonus to hit from my +2 sword and the base damage to the full-blade. According to the developer’s web site, this is a limitation in what is stored in the file<\/a>, so there’s not much that can be done about it. At this point, if I wanted to, I’d have to input a lot of this data by hand. For now, though, I’m simply shrugging and keeping a printout of my character in front of me. Also, to check something I created a weapon within i4e\u00a0and it still didn’t use the proper values.<\/p>\n

That may seem like a complete deal-breaker, but the areas I wanted it to shine — handling the administration — it does. For example, the below screenshot is what happens when I select the hit points field. From here, I can either take damage, get healed (and say if that heal uses a healing surge), or add temporary hit points. This is very handy if you completely suck at math like I do.
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I’m also impressed with how it handles powers. In 4th Edition, there are three types of powers you have: at-will powers than can be used at any time; powers that can be used only once per encounter; and powers that can be used only one a day. In i4e, I can click a power, tap the “use power” button and that power will appear gray in the powers list. When we’re done with an encounter and take what’s called a “short rest” (which resets the encounter powers) I can press the “short rest” button and, you guessed it, it resets all my used encounter powers. Naturally, there’s an “extended rest” button that’ll reset my all used powers.<\/p>\n

\"\"After a full night’s game session, I asked myself: can I run a nightly gaming session using only i4e and an imported Character Builder file<\/em>? Right now, with not having all the powers descriptions there, that answer is no (the character builder file gets updated too much for me to keep re-entering all the missing data). But, it’s not by missing the mark by much. I make PDFs of my character each update to send to the other players. Using Dropbox and the new Quickoffice Connect, or the Dropbox App, I can store the PDFs on the iPhone without needing to sync to iTunes. Sure, it’s not ideal with the small screen, and I’ll at least need a PDF of my main sheet, but once I get an iPad, I predict a paperless D&D night is in my future.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

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Every Friday night, I get out from my Mom’s basement, um, my wife lets me get out for a night, err, I get together with my old High School gaming group for a fun night of D&D 4th Edition. One of the things that was a bit of shocker in 4th edition is how much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}