What tools do you use during pen-n-paper RPGs?

[Thorin]

Made this its own thread since it didn't really fit in the existing thread.

I actually purchased a license for Parallels due to the mixed desktop.  I use it at our RPG sessions to run Excel and OneNote.

I'm interested in hearing what you, Shayne, use Excel and OneNote for during RPG sessions.

I'm also interested in what other people have used in the past during sessions (not before or after, but specifically during).

I've used DM's Familiar in the past, and especially enjoy the Combat Board in it.  The other parts of DM's Familiar let you drag and drop monsters, NPCs, and PCs onto the Combat Board, as well as track when spells or special effects expire.  Most of all, I liked the Combat Board for being able to show all the attacks and easily roll them.  This was very useful at 8th to 11th level (the group disbanded at 11th level), when monsters had a *lot* of abilities.  DMF definitely requires a separate mouse if you're using a laptop, though.

[Melbosa]

Pencil, paper, dice, books.... sorry someone had to say it.

eTools is really the first electronic tool I've ever used with Paper RPGs.  Didn't even use a PDF reader before.

[Shayne]

TheDruid and I have created a pretty powerful Excel spreadsheet to track our characters, adventure, enemies, load out, etc.  Each player still uses the paper version but its much easier to control 20 NPCs when they are all laid out nicely in Excel.  Take for instance you're battling a group of storm troopers, you knock the weapon out of the hands of one, you can change their weapon to unarmed and all their stats, movement, damage, etc are all updated.  Just makes things flow faster.  TheDruid has even taken to pre-rolling their initiatives and such before we even start.

OneNote is really the Microsoft killer application.  I haven't seen anything as powerful as that mighty application.  I use it to keep track of important events (names, places, dates), my characters abilities, how many dice i should be rolling for certain skills, combining parts of different books into one place, etc.  All high school/college students should swear by OneNote.

Some screenshots...

[Lazybones]

Hmm I hadn't thought of using OneNote like that.. It is sure one of those under used apps... To bad they dumbed down the Windows Mobile version of it so much...

[Shayne]

Ya it really is a mystery to me why Microsoft doesn't pimp out OneNote.  Its so freaking powerful its insane.  typing in something like 2+2= the application even fills in the answer   It does a pretty good job converting images to text (scan a document, get the words).  Its got a totally free form design standard too in that you just click where you want to type or add pictures.  If you are anal about layouts then OneNote inst for you, but as a dumping ground for notes, pictures, info, and such it really cant be beat.  Fantastic application.

I could see it being useful at the very least for Thorin or Analog to have a laptop and OneNote going.  At our SW session 3 of us sport laptops.  Sometimes its easier for certain things.

[Thorin]

Did you type all the rules out yourself into OneNote?  What made you use OneNote over, say, Word or static HTML files?

[Thorin]

Oh, you answered my question as I was trying to post it

[TheDruid]

Basically the whole idea was hatched because we find that the StarWars handbook is horribly laid out. One section will talk about a particular topic, then you could be in a totally different section and it will reefer back to the original topic with a "oh by the way" this adds a bonus to this topic, or this overrides what we told you in that topic.

As a first time GM, I needed a way to re-organize this into a quick access format.

Shayne had found all of the StarWars RPG books in PDF format, but they have one small caveat, every page is an image (rather then searchable text). So pulling data from it would be painfully manual. So obviously taking screenshots of tables etc. and reorganizing them with other related tables under an organization structure that makes since to us would be preferable.

We considered lots of applications: Word, WebPages, Wiki's etc.
Webhosted came with the pain in the ass of having to manage a directory of hosted images, Word is just to linear, wiki would be great for organization, but again the images would be a pain to manage.

That?s when i stumbled across OneNote, its 3 tiered tab structure is a great way to organize topics, its screen clipping capabilities to capture data from the book is the easiest and quickest way to collect data. And its free form absolute positioned information capture is almost like a paint canvas, so you spend less time trying to format the information (like you would have to in word or any "flow" style rendering app). In short it was the best tool for the job.

However OneNote is the tool that Shayne has invested the most into so far, my tool has been Excel. I created a d20 GMAssistant spreadsheet (geared towards StarWars RPG of course). Its goal is to collect and organize character and NPC related data, and assist with the ever changing calculations and rules that might affect the status of a player character or NPC. Sounds simple until you realize that everything from core abilities to skills, feats, weapons, armor, species, classes, size, carried equipment, etc can affect the given stats of a character at a given time.

This means that all this data has to be tracked and stored in the spreadsheet. A daunting task since you basically got to invest a little time upfront to get all the basic data entered (Species, classes, skills, feat, basic equipment, weapons and armor.

I originally planned on building a custom app to do this for me, but after spending 6hrs just painting the controls of a character sheet in WPF I decided it was too ambitious of a task (considering I did the same thing in excel in less than an hour). I needed an app that handled custom calculations well, and can support simple data entry with the ability to host lists and dropdowns, and reference the data of dropdown selections to include into calculations. Excel fit the bill perfectly, not only can it do all these things, it?s so quick and easy to add new functionality too and maintain tables of data. To program this same behavior even using something like access would have taken me months of dedicated evenings, not to mention adding extra functionality would be a lot of work.

In my current spreadsheet I?m tracking all my players data which includes everything you find on a character sheet. It automatically handles all calculations, including figuring out encumbrance and adjusting your speed and armor check penalties etc. I can do things like adjust temporarily ability boosts (like a strength enhancer) and all affected stats will update to reflect the change (including skill checks etc)  I got similar pages for NPCs and hostile characters, including vehicles. A database (in progress) of NPCs which tracks all their stats, skills equipment (DC checks for finding that equipment if you happen to search their bodies), their current campaign status (where did you first encounter them, are they unique, are they dead, what?s their attitude towards you {hostile, indifferent, helpful etc.}). I can organize NPCs into encounters and track current battle status and initiative. The list goes on; it?s a work in progress. Basically I?m at the point now where I just add data as I need it.

Here is an attachment of my latest copy. Note that this is built in Office 2007 saved in compatibility mode, however it?s full of 2007 specific functionality, so some of the calculations might not work in 2003. The ?NPC Details? tab is still under heavy construction, as im still hooking up a lot of the calculations (it was a copy of the player?s character sheet, being converted to handle NPC?s who might not have things like playable species or classes, which affect the calculations)
With a little elbow grease it could probably be updated to handle and d20 game you want.

hmm .xls is not an uploadable file type 

[Tom]

I might have to borrow that sheet heh.

[Thorin]

Electronic tools that automatically calculate various bonuses and penalties based on situational modification are a great boon!

There is a side effect, of course: not having to think about the math, the players no longer know why they have the modifiers they do.  This can be a problem when the electronic tool is not available for some reason or when the player is levelling the character and trying to decide what feats or skills to invest in.  This side effect can be offset by reading the rulebook and keeping the rules fresh in your mind, of course, but it does continue to exist.

Now, it totally depends on each individual player in the group whether this is a problem or not.  Some players read the rules twice and have them memorized for life while others read them a hundred times and still don't remember the details.  I've played with both kinds, and in the past I've found that if one or more players has trouble remembering the details of the rules it helps them to have to figure it out themselves every time.

If it works for you (and it appears to since you put so much effort into that spreadsheet) then Yay!

[Thorin]

Oh, and welcome back to posting on RW

[Tom]

I have to tell you, doing all the calculation by hand for Jack did help, even for Eriol! I should probably go back and do the same for eriol, but who knows what etools (and I) may have messed up along the way..

[TheDruid]

At present time the players have been using their paper sheets and did all their own initial calculations.

I?m using this as a GM assistant tool so that i can keep my own copy of their sheets and quickly update stats as ongoing things change. Having to go through the exercise of researching all the calculations / rules and programming support in for them has given me a good understanding of how things work. It was a great exercise for me. But being a technologist it's a problem I?ve solved already and i rather let a machine do it for me now.

I've tried to assign notes to cells to give little calculation hints as to what?s going on. So you can even use it as a teaching tool. For example, what happens when i change my strength value, you see right always that your modifier changes which affects your melee attack, certain skills, and you can carry more / less which affects your load, which affects your speed and armor check penalty. e-tools doesn?t do a good job of giving you this real time input, so you might not notice some of the changes.

It also does not calculate miscellaneous bonuses, but it gives you a field to enter them in, with a note hinting at what types of things might be recorded as a miscellaneous modifier.

Its other goal is to give quick access to common data. Like what are the size modifiers, what is the cost for this armor. What type of damage will a character do if they equip a heavy blaster. If you have a laptop with this spreadsheet open, chances are you can also have the Handbook PDF open, and with all these items we?ve also been recording the page number. So in one second you can type the page number into the PDF and get instant access to it in the book. Very handy, allows me to run a smoother game with less page seeking time. Although, I try to stay away from the book as much as possible in a session so as to not slow down and break pace of the session.

But the most handy thing i find is the load calculations. For example, Shayne buys 8 fragment grenades which push him to a medium load which drops his speed to 8, makes him think twice about his purchase and maybe he only buys 3 instead.
Basically, I invested the time in the out of session hours under the theory that I?d rather pay the time price out of session then in session. It?s been working pretty good for me so far.

[Thorin]

Sounds like it works well for you.  I agree that eTools is no good as an in-session electronic tool.  It works alright for character generation and updating, but ultimately it's aimed at producing a paper character or monster sheet.

Recording the page numbers is an excellent idea.  Now if only you could hotlink it, eh?

For D&D, there's a program called Player Genie/DM Genie (Player is a lightweight version of DM) that allows essentially the same as what you describe; real-time updating of your character.  There's a lot of options, though, and it can look pretty confusing to a player initially.  Unfortunately, all these tools only ever ship with SRD data, so you have to enter anything extra by hand.  Same as you had to do with your spreadsheet.

So how's your Star Wars campaign progressing?  Are you the only GM?  I'd heard rumours that you guys might be doing rotating GM duty...

[Shayne]

Ah but you can hot link to a pdf.  its as simple as pointing to the location and picking the page... C:\blah.pdf?page=23 i believe works just fine.  For the most part though I just screen capture and paste into OneNote (takes less time and i can have portability with the document).

The campaign just finished its second session and things are progressing well.  Curtis has used 2 canned missions found online from WotC and they have allowed us to learn the works but not get bogged down into players wanting to go there own way.  We will be branching out after this mission I believe.

We do plan to do a rotating GM system with Kelly, Curtis and myself taking over the role from time to time.  We hope to run it in episodes of sort.  3-4 sessions each and then switch.  Lots of time to prepare and remove the GM fatigue that often presents itself.

[Mr. Analog]

To be honest, as good as stuff like eTools (etc) are I find 3" by 5" cards work great as does a dry erase surface. In most cases I use the core books of a given system and I will often spend a day or more concocting adventure materials (mapping, designing traps, picking monsters or building foes for the players to fight). This way I get much more intimate with the details. I know more about monster / npc abilities when I have to pencil them in. I think the only other tool I use is the Encounter calculator, but that's because I'm lazy...

Ultimately the best tools are the ones that work.