I am the creator of the Combat Tracker for PFRPG iPad application and wanted to describe what motivated our company, Failed Will Save Productions, to build this app, detail its features, and discuss some upcoming changes.
MOTIVATION:
For at least the past decade my gaming group has been using The GameMastery Combat Pad. You probably use one too in your sessions. It's a dry-erase magnetic tablet that tracks initiative. You scratch down monster names on little magnetic bits and move them around on the initiative tracker. For years I had been using this in conjunction with a module and several Bestiaries open in my lap or behind a DM screen. Space was at a premium at our gaming table and so this was all a very taxing and complex balancing act (literally) as I flipped between bookmarks in multiple books / modules while maintaining initiative tracking and rolling dice. In all, I found it difficult to evoke an appropriate mood given the tasks I was juggling as a DM in combat.
The Combat Tracker for PFRPG iPad application was made to address these complications. Since early implementations of Combat Tracker we have been using the app at our gaming table and literally I do not even open my bestiaries anymore - instead leaning back with my iPad and managing combat with ease.
DESIGN GOALS:
- Ease tedious and often long Pathfinder combat, especially for a lot of NPCs and PCs
- PC dice rolls are NOT emulated. This is important to understand. This is a GM aid, it is not a replacement for players. Your players still roll to attack, roll damage, roll initiative - you are provided with easier-to-access views and manipulation of monster hit points, AC, etc (more below).
- Provide digital searching and manipulation of NPCs and monsters from standard sources (more below on what this gives you)
FEATURES:
- Deployment tracking - PCs and NPCs can be added to the 'deployment' area - a staging area of PCs and NPCs you might use or need in a coming session (easy access).
- Initiative tracking:
- ---->PCs and NPCs can be dragged and dropped onto the initiative tracker. For NPCs, their initiative values are automatically rolled. For PCs, you as the GM enter a player's rolled value.
- ---->Initiative order is tracked including who's turn it is, what is the round number
- ---->NPCs and PCs can hold their actions. This causes them to be placed into a holding area, ready to jump into the fray when they choose to take an action.
- Combat:
- ---->NPCs added to the initiative tracker automatically roll their hit points. Remember those complex hit point rolls such as 12d6 + 18? Rather than take the average (as is provided by Paizo), instead Combat Tracker actually rolls those numbers.
- ---->GMs have the final say and can manipulate monster hit points, kill NPCs, and change their turn order.
- ---->When damage is to be applied to an NPC, you as GM pull up a damaging screen which lets you apply this damage. If an NPC has DR that is reminded to you here and you can choose to bypass it (DR: 10/silver but your fighter is using a silver sword? Tap to bypass the DR) or let it apply the DR (in which case it subtracts off the DR from the damage you apply).
- ---->NPCs hit points are managed and when they are reduced to 0 they are automatically moved to the 'graveyard' area.
- ---->---->The graveyard tracks the amount of experience awarded this session (or since the last time the graveyard was cleared).
- ---->---->Can automatically divide this evenly by the number of PCs in the campaign for easy GM math
- NPC and Monster Management:
- ---->Inclusion of all of the monsters from the Open Gaming License (OGL) Paizo sourcebooks (Bestiary 1,2,3, Ultimate Magic, GM Guide, etc). This is over 1,000 monsters.
- ---->GMs can search for monster names. Any letters typed will return all monsters with those characters in them (not just starting with). So typing "were" will return all the "were<wolf/badger/etc>" monsters as well as "meowwere" if that monster, perhaps, existed.
- ---->Each monster has a monster "card" with multiple "tabs":
- ---->---->There are tabs for attack, offense, defense, statistics, abilities, ecology / environment, and more
- ---->---->The "attack" tab parses the melee and ranged attacks of a monster, automatically rolls their ENTIRE attack strings, and puts information for you to read about their attack roll and damage. As a GM, you would just ask if the attack value hit and then read off the damage. This makes rolling combat damage super fast. It even handles critical threats and critical hits (including crit multipliers), different attack values (+20/+15/+10 is rolled separately) and reminds you about special effects ("plus grapple", "plus curse of lycanthropy", "plus poison").
- ---->---->Simply tapping the "attack" icon rerolls everything if you want to "fudge" some GM dice (ack! That string of lucky crits is going to kill that PC!)
- ---->---->All the attack, defense, stat blocks, everything from the monster stat block is presented broken out into categories.
- ---->---->The description you might read to your PCs is provided as well
WHERE CAN I SEE IT?
- The official Apple store link is here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/combat-tracker-for-pfrpg/id532579558?mt=8. Be sure to scroll to the right in the screenshot section to see all the screenshots.
- Our company site, Failed Will Save Productions is here: http://www.failedwillsave.com/
- To see some videos of the app in action check out these on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/FailedWillSave
You will notice that the colors, backgrounds, etc are different from the first link and the following two. The first link, the Apple Store link, is the released colors and the earlier versions are from beta screenshots. You can certainly see the functionality in these 2nd and 3rd links, however. Also notice that the earlier versions did not include the background images and icons that you can see in the released version.
WHAT'S NEXT?
The review process for IOS apps is particularly long. This app spent about 30 days in the queue until approved. As such, the next version is well underway and we expect to submit it in early to mid August (unknown how long it will sit in queue, especially with some of the feature changes below). Its features include:
- The ability to add your own databases:
- ---->This is the big feature in the next release. If you want to add your own NPCs, other monsters from adventure paths you have purchased, etc you can now do that.
- ---->We are releasing scripts that help you manipulate Excel spreadsheets (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-filter/ and http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-db for example) and convert them into the Combat Tracker database format.
- ---->These databases are then added to your iPad by file transfer using iTunes. The Combat Tracker app then just "sees" them and lets you add all the monsters from each database you add
- More font options (than the 3 we ship with)
Further off goals include:
- Graphical "skinning" so you can change the background images, colors, etc.
- While you can add player-controlled summoned monsters to the tracker at this time, they are identified still as NPCs. This is nice since you as GM can roll their damage for your player(s) instead of them having to look up how to attack with a Fiendish Dire Bat. However, we intend to add a "summoned monster" colorized template in the future to differentiate between enemy monsters and player-controlled monsters.
- Condition tracker to track effects (poison, stunned, hypnotized, etc) that includes reminders of what the effects are, the amount of time until they go off, DC, amount of rounds in effect and round tracker, etc.
- GM assistance for other dice rolls (saves, CMB)
- GM dice rolling for spell effects cast by monsters / NPCs
QUESTIONS:
Why not do this with just drop-down menus, radio buttons, and normal features?
We wanted to create a game-like pleasant to look at interface. As such there are animations, fades, pulses, and colors. We felt that the other combat trackers out there lacked an interface that a GM would want to use.
Why iPad only?
Real estate. I haven't yet redesigned the application to fit onto an iPhone and worry that the real estate (literally, screen dimensions and resolution) will not be sufficient for what we want to do. However, this is a stretch goal.
What about Android tablets?
Sadly, porting from IOS to Android is not simple and is more complex than we have the manpower to tackle at this time. Efforts instead will be placed into new features. We understand the appeal of Android, particularly for the Paizo / OGL community, but it is not the target platform at this time.
What does it cost?
$4.99.
Why isn't it free?
This project took us over a year of coding and several tens of thousands of lines of code to produce. Apple also requires a developer license fee and we used a few pieces of not-particularly-expensive but not-trivially-free software packages. And secondly, as myself a purchaser of several for-pay Pathfinder community generated iPhone and iPad apps, I realize there is a market. Furthermore, the app is really only of use to a GM so the volume is particularly low for this app.
What if I have an idea or bug?
We'd love to hear from you. We are players too and poured a lot of our heart and energy into this app. If you have suggestions, complaints, ideas, we want to hear it so that we can make the app better for everyone. Contact us at support@failedwillsave.com.
Sold me. I look forward to the August update.
Sold me. I look forward to the August update.
The August update, version 1.1, has been submitted to the Apple store and hopefully will be approved shortly. To see a taste of the main feature of this update, you can check out this HOWTO page we created to explain how to use this new feature.
That feature is - adding custom NPCs/monsters and databases / spreadsheets of monsters.
http://www.failedwillsave.com/combat-tracker/custom-databases/
You can read about it and see screenshots of this feature in action at the above link.
Thanks everyone for the support!
Version 1.1 was approved today and should appear on the iTunes store soon (it takes a while to get pushed out and will vary based on region - given the fact that I can see we have people using the app from around the world, I can't promise you when you'll see the update other than "soon").
It took us a month to get Apple to approve this version and we had to eventually go through an appeals process with a review board. This new version has some pretty cool tech in it that allows you to add your own databases (see previous post from July 31st about custom databases). Apple didn't like the way we were doing some things so we went back and forth and got something through that they accepted.
We're already submitting the next version since we know how long the lead times can get to get things approved (/grumble).
Version 1.1 update is now available.
I've been using the combat tracker on my Ipad for a few game sessions, and it's working well. I find the interface works smoothly even if it is portrait only.
Condition trackers would be nice, currently I just use the rename function to add the condition to the name. It auto-sizes the name field to fit within the tracking token field so all the text is there just smaller.
Auto numbering would be great when adding multiple creatures, but again the rename feature works very well so only takes less than a minute to add numbers to each creature.
another feature that would be nice, is the able to select the background color of tracking token on a per token bases. Useful for say you have two groups of foes, or to mark summoned monsters to look more like PC tags.
I have had an occasional issues that causes it to stop, but it has always started back right where it it was before.