I’m a software geek. I’m several other shades of geek as well, but my love for delicious focused quality software to aid me in gaming is a top 5 obsession. This passion is where the increasing amount of video reviews you’re seeing on the site comes from.
I’m always on the lookout for good software, and I love to evangelize on software that other people can use. So, I’ll ask: What software do you use to aid you in the running of your 4th edition D&D games? What software are you curious about that you’d like to see in action?
Here’s the software I’m using at the moment:
- Campaign Cartographer -I love making overland maps with this tool.
- Dundjinni -as previously noted, just picked this up and I love it for battlemaps in my on-line game.
- The Journal -I keep my campaign notes in here. Very easy to organize multiple campaigns and do some freewriting/brainstorming in.
- Evernote -a great tool for collecting info on the web and doing what I call ‘imagestorming’.
- Irfanview -a fast quick image editing tool that I use for resizing and cropping. Also make use of the command line interface for batch processing.
- Fantasy Grounds -did I mention that this program is awesome? Talking about this more than that will require a full post of its own. It was well worth the money I paid for it.
- Skype -the second half of my online combo, I needed to get my router upgraded to an Airport Extreme which I have become enamored of and did some portmapping and other tweaks, but now Skype runs like a dream.
- D&D Insider Compendium -I’m using this instead of my books more and more when building encounters and adventures. It’s just so much easier and so much faster, and I get to cut and paste what I find into my documents.
- Itunes -when building adventures, one needs the proper tunage.
- D&D Insider Character Builder -you know that I love this thing. I think it’s the best character generation program I’ve ever used. It’s definitely the best D&D has had. I use this to make PCs when I should be writing adventures.
- Crawl Notes -My new tool for mocking up dungeons. I can draw up everything here before I get to creating the battlemaps out of tiles and such.
What I’m still looking for:
- An Initiative Tracker -I’m stilling looking for an initiative tracker to call my own. I’ve played around with some, but still haven’t found the one I really want to use. Fantasy Grounds has a great combat tracker, but I’m not going to open that up for my tabletop games.
- Fonts and a Font organization program -I need this to help make some props, but it’s touchy. I don’t want to spend a million dollars for fonts or the font tracker program. Anyone know good and cheap solutions?
What are you using? What are you curious about? What can you recommend?
Similar Posts:
- Dundjinni for fun and … battlemaps.
- The Slaughtervale trio: a logo, a map and a wiki
- Tools of the Trade: iplay4e
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
Follow gamefiend on 
Inkscape to draw maps.
http://inkscape.org/
Campaign Wiki for my campaign.
http://campaignwiki.org/
(I run Campaign Wiki.)
Nice list! I’ll have to check some of these out this weekend as I prep my next session.
What kind of Skype setup do you use when you run someone remotely? I have a player 500 miles away and we’ve been tossing ideas around for weeks, but I’m not sure what works best in terms of map visibility, player visibility (ideally we’d be able to see him, too), and sound.
TiddlyWiki, in particular Berin Kinsman’s TenFootWiki and WorldBuilding101, from http://unclebear.com/?p=1910
U can find a lot of tools in http://www.rptools.net
a initiative tracker or the all good maptool
I’m with Arael, rptools.net has some great resources. My group uses Maptools every week. We often have 1 or 2 players who play online while the rest of us are at the table. I believe the newest beta release has their initiative tracker built into the maptools interface. You are also able to do some great macro’s so players who aren’t present don’t need to worry about their dice rolls being called into question.
We use Teamspeak for our voice connection which has always worked well for us.
Thanks for the list, there are a few sites there I’m not familiar with. I’ll be checking them out.
Hey guys!
@Joshua –I’ll have to check those out.
@RPG Ike –Let me know what you think! I haven’t myself done a remote player into a live group. I use it for my game that’s a 100% online, but we don’t use video.
@Alex –I’ve toyed around with Inkscape a little bit, but never for maps. What’s the ease of use like? As for Campaign Wiki, I will check that out!
Inkscape is basically the open source version of Adobe Illustrator. Ease of use depends on your comfort with a Bezier pen tool. It takes some getting used to.
I haven’t done much map making, but I would think a bitmap based program would be better; like gimp or photoshop.
Dundjinni for maps.
Google Sites for campaign wiki.
Teamspeak or Ventrilo for voice chat.
MapTools for online play (includes an initiative tracker, macros for abilities, etc – you need to look at this and all the development that has been done on it specifically for 4E)
TokenTool for making tokens for MapTools
Gimp for making tokens for my live game.
I haven’t pimped the tools I’ve written much recently, but since one of them is an init tracker I’ll put a link here
http://home.earthlink.net/~evildm/dd3e/tools/index.html
I’m pretty proud of my Dice Tray. I used it religiously when I played 3e, but so far the math in 4e is so simple (or at least easily read off power cards) that I’m back to physical dice.
I use InitTool currently for initiative, combined with a dice roller (DiceChucker from Asmor), and OneNote for note taking and tracking.
I’d love to find something more along the lines of a combat manager to do everything (or as much as possible) but the note taking. There are several interesting candidates out there each with their pros and cons. The candidates include Turn Watcher, Virtual Combat Cards, InitTool (using custom properties), and Trackwork.
*sigh* No love for Obsidian Portal
For me, it’s:
Obsidian Portal
Hypertext D20 SRD (still the best)
AutoRealm (very rarely, I almost never make maps)
@Wimwick –what is the setup you’re using to host the remote players? Do you have video? I’m very curious to know more details on that.
@Tom –welcome! yeah, I suck with Bezier. I could get used to it, but I need to spend my time with other things these days.
@JackofHearts — will definitely take another look at MapTools. I’ve used TokenTool in the past, and will be using it for my new online game definitely.
@Gregor — welcome! Pimp away! I’ll check these out. The Dice Tray does look cool.
Now, one piece of software I forgot is freemind. I use this for brainstorming and mocking out adventures. Between this and crawlnotes, I can flesh things out pretty rapidly these days.
Thank you so much for this post! I just stumbled upon your blog this evening and like what I see. Admittedly, I do not use a whole lot of software at this time for my paper-based games. The one bit of software that I absolutely can’t live without, however, is “Personal Brain.” It can be found at http://www.thebrain.com/. I use it to keep my addled mind in order. Even the free version is useful for mind-mapping. The paid version lets you attach files, images, etc..
Thanks again.
What requirements do you have for an initiative tracker? What do you want it to do?
Other than the GIMP, which I use for editing world maps, I mostly use software I write for myself. Once in a while, one of those tools ends up online. I don’t have any initiative tracking utilities, though, so I figured I’d ask what you would want out of such a tool and see if there’s any set of features I’d find compelling enough to want to write my own.
For initiative tracking software, you may want to take a look at the most recent version of “Trackwork”:
http://www.playwrite-blog.net/tag/trackwork/
I will check that out. Thanks!
Gamefiend, our sessions are interesting as most of us have our laptops out on the table when we play. One of us hosts the server and we all connect and view the maps via our laptop. On rare occassions someone will borrow a projector from work and we’ll display the map on the wall. Our group has never really embraced the mini movement.
Whoever is playing remotely just connects up via maptools. We use Teamspeak for voice communication. It works out rather well, though the individual playing remotely gets the short end of the stick as they miss most of the jokes told at the table.
I believe the new beta release for maptools has an initiative tracker built in and the macro features are fairly robust.
We should be writing a review on it within the next month or so. It’s a big part of how our group games and some really neat software.