| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Hello everyone, I am an occasional player and a frequent GM of Pathfinder 2e since its official release. During the years, the way I GM changed, since I started RPGs I was always an advocate of "full pen and paper" and no electronics at the table. But after having tasted a fully remote and "assisted" GMing style with Foundry during the lock-down, I was more inclined to introduce more electronic tools to assist me during the encounters in my physical games. I tried a lot of stuff but as I didn't find anything that perfectly met my needs for the way I GM, I decided to make my own android application and published it on the playstore.
I posted several months ago about the first release of this application and promised the integration of conditions tracking in it *soon*. However, life happened and it took me half a year to finish it. But the latest version include a lot of other changes since my initial post.
tl;dr
Pathfinder 2e battle tracker is an Android application for Gamemasters. It helps you keep track of the turn order, hit points, conditions and more during your encounters and gives you tools to make your encounters smoother and focus on the important part of the game instead of book-keeping, number tracking or doing math.
So, what is it?
It's a simple initiative tracker with some additional features to make it a "encounter/battle" tracker. The main goal of the design was to have a clear interface with the most important information always displayed in an easy to read layout, without too much bloating. And limit as much as possible the time spend in menus and the number of clicks to do actions *during* the encounter.
A presentation video is available here
What does it do?
Well it tracks initiative, duh ... More seriously once you set up an encounter it displays a list in initiative order of all the characters involved. With the currently playing character highlighted and navigation button to move the turn. For each characters it always displays:
* Display initiative order and keep track of the current turn and total number of rounds
* Load NPCs from a bestiary including all published Paizo's books
* Track HPs
* Add/substract damages or heals to HP, with buttons to double or halve the value automatically
* Track reaction use
* Define custom additional reactions
* Track conditions, update their remaining duration and current value
* Update the AC and saves score depending on the penalties applied by conditions
* Track persistent damage, automatic but optional roll for damages and recovery check
* Open quickly full NPCs statblock on Archives of Nethys
* Apply weak/elite templates
* Roll initiative from Perception, stealth, or define it manually
* Save and manage party of PCs
* Load PCs from Pathbuilder 2e
* Define different colors for the characters, usefull with duplicated NPCs to keep track of the minis or tokens used
* Save and load any number of encounters
* Export current state of the tracker as text format (Markdown). This feature was request by someone who do play-by-post.
It also does math for you and you can update hit points by adding damage or heal value directly.
You can easily rearrange the turn order by editing manually the initiative value, or by drag and drop of a character. Dying PC may also be moved automatically just before the initiative rank of the currently acting character.
But how do I build an encounter ?
I'm sure it's going to take time to do that during a game session?
That's where you are wrong ! You have several options for this.
* First, you can find all the NPC from books published by Paizo in the application. You can add them to the encounter and either let the application roll the initiative with Perception or Stealth score, or set up yourself the initiative value if you roll the dice. You may also edit the stats of the NPC before adding it to the encounter if needed. You can also apply weak/elite template.
* For the PCs you can prepare them beforehand in a specific menu. Save their stats and everything and then add them with 2 clicks to any encounter. Same as above for setting up the initiative. You can also import PCs from Pathbuilder 2e.
* Last option is to create a character manually. This indeed takes a little bit more time to inputs all the stats, but most of them are optional. And once it's done you can save it forever in your phone (forever = until I break the API for loading stat blocks ...)
* Finally, you can save a whole encounter with all its characters, their initiative, current HP, etc. And load it at a later time. With this you can prepare beforehand a "library" of encounters for the next session and just load them up when needed.
But why do you need this application?
How do you use it?
Well, for a bit more than a year I started to automate things behind the GM screen during encounters. My main goal was to speed up "my" turns during battle and to free my mind from math and number tracking. Don't judge me, I love this as a player. But as a GM I want to spend all of my brain and time focusing on the narrative part, the descriptions, and also the strategic decisions of all of my NPCs.
First step was to remove most of the dice rolls for my NPC using pf2 easytools on my tablet (amazing tool btw). But I still needed to write down the initiative order and track the HP (oh damn, scary subtractions and additions! Mock me, but I'm sure your brain also stop doing math after 11pm) and all various conditions.
Then I found out about the BattleTrack application on my phone. It allowed me to roll initiative automatically and update the HP without doing math, incredible!
It's nearly what I wanted, but it's made for DnD 5e and missing some major features for me. The main one being condition and persistent damage tracking. I still tracked them on paper like in the antique time before electricity and screens were invented. And how many times have I forgotten to add/substrate something from a condition to a save or to the AC ? How many times did I forget to roll the persistent damages ? … You don't know ? Hopefully, neither my players …
That's why I decided to make my own application. I still have pf 2 easytools on my tablet but replace battleTrack on the phone with my own application
What do you want from us ?
Nothing ? Actually, maybe that you give it a try … I'm making a self promotion of the app in the hope that you will find it useful too, and maybe it will help you in your games like it helps me !
I'm also of course looking for feedback. Unfortunately my previous post didn't attract much beta-testers, so most of the features and design choice were made according to only my own tastes and needs.
You can leave feedback directly on this post, on the playstore, or you can write them here to have more tracking and follow up discussions here
But it's not free!
Yes, indeed. And for two main reasons:
1) I hate advertisements with all my heart and vowed to myself when I started programming outside of work that I will never include any ads in my applications for money.
2) I've spend a significant amount of my time in this application. Even though it started as "just a tool for myself and my own games" it evolved beyond that and I've spend much more effort on it that I had if it was just for me.
I've put the price at what I believe is fair with regards to what it provides, and what I would accept to pay if someone else made this application.
You can always try it and ask for refund if you are not happy with it. If you missed the time for refund but really don't like the app, send me a message.
Cheers everyone, thanks for your time reading this wall of text !
|
Sounds great, but I won't be trying it personally. Without a free version to try before you buy it just doesn't appeal. I don't NEED it, it is more of a nice to have and those apps should really give an option to test it out first.
As for asking for a refund if I don't like it...well that is a crapshoot and not something I would typically do.
Take a lesson from Pathbuilder and build a free and paid version. I paid for that a week after trying it. Or put together a trial period.
Keep it up though, sounds interesting.
Hello. Will you be supporting the Remaster?
I purchased the app to look around and I have atleast 1 feedback immediately. It doesn't support landscape mode. I use a tablet and being stuck in portrait is not great.
The link you provided for feedback goes to a not found error on git.
Hello. Will you be supporting the Remaster?
Hello, this is something I am considering indeed. I didn't follow much because I have two ongoing long campaign where we decided to not switch, and no plan to start a new one before one of these is done. But AFAIK it will only change the bestiary and some conditions. It should be feasible to add an option to switch between both.
I purchased the app to look around and I have atleast 1 feedback immediately. It doesn't support landscape mode. I use a tablet and being stuck in portrait is not great.
Yes, someone else request it https://github.com/314r-app/pf2eBattleTracker_issues/issues/8. I will work on it.
The link you provided for feedback goes to a not found error on git.
Sorry, the formatting of the forum added some / in the middle and it's too late to edit my post. Here it is: https://github.com/314r-app/pf2eBattleTracker_issues/issues
Incredible tool for live table play. Just bought it for when I run PF2e games at the table again.
Thanks a lot of the feedback!
Sounds great, but I won't be trying it personally. Without a free version to try before you buy it just doesn't appeal. I don't NEED it, it is more of a nice to have and those apps should really give an option to test it out first.
As for asking for a refund if I don't like it...well that is a crapshoot and not something I would typically do.
Take a lesson from Pathbuilder and build a free and paid version. I paid for that a week after trying it. Or put together a trial period.
Keep it up though, sounds interesting.
Thanks for the feedback. The issue with free trial period of a complete version is that it's quite easy to trick/cheat it. I will check to implement it correctly with the playstore. Offering a free "reduced" version with less features and a premium version would not really make sense for this application I think.