Pen, Paper, and Cell Phones questions

[Tokuhara]

Before I begin, I'm an old-school player. I believe players should bring dice and legit roll them, have paper character sheets, and books. But with technology reaching where it is in this day and age, players can have the SRD, Character sheets, initiative order, and roll their dice through smart phone applications. Recently, I found a couple apps for the Pathfinder RPG, and am asking my GM if they are available.

My question is how does the Playground feel about phone apps to streamline player loads?

[Bloodgruve]

Nothing beats the PHB and your bowler on the table. If math challenged players are taking an inordinate amount of time looking up skill modifiers and pulling piles of d6's out I'm all for having preset dice bags and RNG's available to help game play move forward.

I play on a virtual tabletop and have the common rolls setup but my bag of dice sits next to me for all the other stuff.

Blood~

[VGLordR2]

You have to be careful with some of the dice apps. I had a player once who had a bad habit of quickly rerolling any low rolls before showing his device to the rest of us. After we found out about that, we had him place his phone flat in the center of the table when he used it.

[Tokuhara]

You have to be careful with some of the dice apps. I had a player once who had a bad habit of quickly rerolling any low rolls before showing his device to the rest of us. After we found out about that, we had him place his phone flat in the center of the table when he used it.

That was my concern, but personally, I feel that manual dice are liable to be sleight of handed to be a "favorable" roll. Personally, I have two different dice roller apps: one that is a manual roll ("actual" dice) and one that is numbers. I actually prefer the manual roll version, since it makes a helluva racket and hard to cheat with. however, the slightest jolt causes it to roll.

I'm also wondering about digital character sheets and srds on the phone. Are these "dangerous" in a player's hand, or are these useful?

[Namfuak]

I actually made a program for myself to roll dice, and it comes in handy since we have a shortage of d4s. Funny enough, we use a regular old battle-mat and figurines but all of us use computers (though we try to avoid using them for anything but looking up stuff in SRD/DnD tools while playing).

I suppose you could have problems like the one VGLordR2 had, but we trust each other for the most part. I find that initiative tracker type things tend to end up more trouble than they are worth though, it's usually faster to just get all the initiatives and take 3 seconds to order them. Prerolling initiative for DM-controlled characters can be useful as well.

[Tokuhara]

Our group has a "No laptops minus GM" rule, but I asked him about things like using an app to do Party Funds, Looking up rules, Dice Rolls (we have a couple new players, so I may loan out my dice), and tracking initiative (my party tends to not write this stuff down, so I can help my GMs by keeping a secondary tally and make life easier)

[vrigar]

We are using as many online tools we can, not to replace dice and books but to help manage our party pool, initiative and other shared stuff. I'm actually in the process of writing a web application which will allow everyone to do some of the stuff.

[Novawurmson]

When I DM, I keep a copy of my player's character sheets on a site like Mythweavers, and I keep a copy of my own sheet on Mythweavers and keep it up on my Kindle when I play. I keep a tab open to the Pathfinder SRD at all times for easy rules resolution, and with a monk in the party being our first optimized grappler, we need the SRD frequently to make sure we're doing everything by the book :P

However, I vastly prefer using physical dice to online rollers. Combine analog and digital as you see fit!

[Diarmuid]

While I love the feel of a book and flipping the pages...searching for the rule is just plain faster and having a phone or tablet on the table just takes up far less real estate.

My group routinely has 6 players and a DM. Between the screen, map, sheets, drinks, etc...not having a stack of books at each player's station helps immensely.

I still roll my dice by hand, cuz I just think it doesnt "feel" right to press a button to roll. I still print out my character sheet off from http://www.dndsheets.net/ , but I certainly use it to keep the sheet neat and orderly.

[Tokuhara]

In my situation, I will also let my phone double as my calculator, since I'm a Goblin Gunslinger with Killer and Anatomist, and math can get ugly (1d6+Dex*4+4)

[Downysole]

First time I used my phone to roll my dice was when I had to roll 7d12 for a Bolt of Glory. I mean, who has that many d12s anyway? Yeah, I can roll them all over and over, but it was way faster.

It's also useful when you have a ton of dice of any kind to roll...12d4s or so can get to be cumbersome on the addition side of things.

The other thing that I find my phone dice roller good for is for playing DnD away from my dice. I can pull out my phone and tell the DM if I hit or not from two rooms away as I get out the Mountain Dew.

[molten_dragon]

I'm very torn on this one. On one hand, I really like having laptops/tablets/smartphones at the table. I use my laptop a lot at the table. I have books I don't have physical copies of on there, I track items we've found and figure out treasure shares from an excel sheet. I have my spell list set up in an excel sheet, and I have another excel sheet that auto-updates my character's stats when I buff myself.

On the other hand though, it can lead to players getting distracted easily. We've had several players who, when it's not their turn in combat, will surf the internet, and it makes it hard to keep the group focused on the game.

I've found it can help to not give out my wifi password so people can't get on the internet.

[GeekGirl]

We play "No technology except for the DM." The DM (me mostly) usually keeps a laptop up. I only really use me laptop for looking up rules, and we have at least one other laptop on hand for a backup to look something up if I am already finding something. All rolls are with actual dice on the table. Character sheets can be saved digitally but printed out for the game (some of my player have really bad handwriting). They also usually email me a copy so I have it. Small things like calculators are ok, if the player is slow at math.

[nedz]

We use

Out of Session
email for arranging sessions
Word Processors for Char Sheets and DM notes. (These are brought to the table in hard copy)

In Session
One player uses a laptop with spell databases (he is running a Cleric with a Wizard Cohort). He also has another database for the party loot.

and that's it, though back in the days of 1E we did have a BBC micro running the party initiatives :smallcool:


You have to be careful with some of the dice apps. I had a player once who had a bad habit of quickly rerolling any low rolls before showing his device to the rest of us. After we found out about that, we had him place his phone flat in the center of the table when he used it.

An App which beeped every time it rolled a result would be good, just have to watch out for the slight of hand (Turning down the volume). I'm sure there are ways around this, but real dice solve this issue.

[SiuiS]

Before I begin, I'm an old-school player. I believe players should bring dice and legit roll them, have paper character sheets, and books. But with technology reaching where it is in this day and age, players can have the SRD, Character sheets, initiative order, and roll their dice through smart phone applications. Recently, I found a couple apps for the Pathfinder RPG, and am asking my GM if they are available.

My question is how does the Playground feel about phone apps to streamline player loads?

I find it to be a zero-sum. Having digital copies increases shuffle time while decreasing space occupied. Unorganized players or DMs are unorganized with or without more advanced technology. In the same way, cheaters gonna cheat; sure it's easy in a dice roller, but it's just as easy to roll your favorite, faded die and call out 14 instead of 4.

In general, you don't need to worry about it. It won't change anything except accessibility.

[whibla]

There is one huge advantage of using a dice roller, and that's when you need to roll a large number of dice, or essentially the same number of dice repeatedly (eldritch blast, I'm looking at you).

However, there is a potential downside to this. I wrote my own dice roller, using some quick and nasty vb, and it would have been trivial to change the odds slightly, for example instead of rolling 1d20 all the time I could have changed it to roll 1d10+10 half the time and 1d20 the other half the time*. It would be very difficult indeed, without examining the source, for anyone to notice any discrepancy.

In general, I find a mixture of dice and dice roller to work out best. Single roll required, use a real die. Full round of attacks, huge number of damage dice or repeated multiples of dice, use the program.

I find electronic books a godsend when creating adventures, or for just reading new material, but for actual play you simply cannot beat a hardback copy. I find it far quicker to flick to a relevant rule page in a book than I do on my netbook (plus screen real estate is limited - it's not practical to take a 22"+ monitor round to our usual venue :smallannoyed:). Of course, in an ideal world there's no need to look something up mid-game, as it tends to disrupt the flow, but that would be a rare session indeed.

The majority of the group I play with have long used different electronic versions of character sheets, either self created, which has the advantage that you can structure them to suit yourself, or third party. Either works fine, and all have the advantage that you can send a copy to the DM whenever something significant changes, so he can keep track of relative power levels etc. And, even if there's an electronica ban at your table, you can always print them out for the actual session.

For DM'ing I do find my custom spreadsheet incredibly useful. I do ask for player initiatives, rather than some linked / online system, only takes 10 seconds, and record them in the pre-arranged rows. The sheet allows me to easily keep track of those, spell, buff and debuff durations, magic item charges, session based experience, total experience, names of important and / or current npcs, the date, phases of the moon, and so on. But, while adventures are created on a pc, I print out the scenario to refer to as we go along. It comes back to quick reference, and also being 'social' with your players. There comes a point when interacting with your laptop / phone / w/e detracts from the game. Hard to make eye contact when you're fiddling with a track pad, tabbing between programs, squinting at a screen...

*I'd just like to add that I didn't do this, though it was joked about one session when I was playing.