Ipad first impressions

[Unseelie]

Originally Posted by Colen

Ooh, that's a good idea! We may not be able to do a 3d animation of dice bouncing across the table, though.

A roll log is one of the items on our to-do list - I actually had one in a previous version of the dice roller I implemented, but it was way too clunky, so it got scrapped in favor of the simpler dice roller we have now. It should find its way back in at some point.

Fair... and yeah, I don't need to see a die animation, but I would like to hear that the player rolled (and didn't roll more than once). I can see where some users might not like the sound, so maybe have the audio cue optional if UI permits.

[Unseelie]

Originally Posted by mirtos

in my opinion the key to this is determining whats the best way to show the data, is it making a user click, or scroll? im of the scroll camp. i think on an ipad app, scrolling is perfectly reasonable, and expected to get to the portion of the sheet we want, but clicking, on the other hand isnt.

Actually, that raises a good point... those buttons at the bottom of the character sheet. I'd really like to be able to swipe left or right to move between them.

[Unseelie]

One more thought... after I have rolled to hit, it would be nice if I could then roll for damage without having to go back to the previous screen.

[mxyzplk]

I used the app "in earnest" at our Jade Regent game this last weekend. Worked very well. A couple notes for improvement though.

First, I was doing a lot of full attacks, and at level 13 Hasted I get a lot of stuff like this:

34, 40, 20, 30

10 (1d20)+24; +16 (1d20)+24; +1 (1d20)+19; +16 (1d20)+14

With a sword critting at 15-20, it is SUPER hard to pick crit threats out of this list of +X's. (I'm not really sure why the subsequent rolls have +'s on the d20 value, actually.) And then it's a lot faster to pick up a 'real die' to roll the confirms rather than remember the +whatever and go find wherever the stock dice roller is. At a bare minimum, bold the actual die rolls in there so they're easier to pick out:

34, 40, 20, 30

10 (1d20)+24; +16 (1d20)+24; +1 (1d20)+19; +16 (1d20)+14

But ideally identify crit threats and roll confirms. Maybe columnize the rolls too.

34: 10 (1d20)+24
40: 16 (1d20)+24, crit threat, confirm 41: 16 (1d20)+24
20: 1 (1d20)+19
30: 16 (1d20)+14, crit threat, confirm 21: 2 (1d20)+14

definitely being able to roll damage in this same popup too would be nice.

[Globetrotter]

Bolding the die is genius!

[Colen]

Originally Posted by KiwiChris

Just played first game last night with the iPad app.
One glaring bit missing:
Nowhere to record in game free form notes
EDIT: Just found the notes button (pen icon) on the Journal

Really want to be able to see all notes at once so either promote the notes field to the main journal record or
{better suggestion} New page for free form notes accessed from main character page and has add new note, edit note and delete note options

Thanks, this is a really good idea! What if there was a button on the main form that accessed the notes on the most recent journal entry?

I've put this on the todo list to think about for a future release.

[Colen]

Originally Posted by Globetrotter

I was playing the journal on Sunday and found it a little difficult to pool through notes. I think having a note pad would be a great idea. They could model it after the gear tab, but instead of adding rope, you are added in an NPC or a Point of interest, with a editable description to put info.

It ends up being a small wiki on your ipad of things you need to know, while the journal lets you write about the adventure.

This is another really interesting notes idea, thanks! Maybe a notepad button at the top of the screen?

One thing to keep in mind is that we're not going to do anything too complex with a notes feature; if you're looking for something complex and full-featured, you'd be better looking up a separate note-taking program, or using something like Realm Works on your laptop.

Originally Posted by Globetrotter

I am surprised that your group used the die roller more than dice, did the algorithm seem to be natural?

Your mistrust of my dice roller offends me, sir! I look forward to implementing a dice roller report mode where it rolls 10000 times and then sulks until you tell it how well it did.

[Colen]

Originally Posted by Jamz

Regarding color, please consider it anyway with an accessibility choice of icons as an option. Real estate is bad enough.

Can you expand on what you mean by this?

Moving weapons to the gear section is an interesting idea. We definitely want to do something more flexible with weapon ordering, it's just that we want to do it correctly the first time rather than implementing a bad solution and then having to live with it forever.

[Colen]

Re Shadowchemosh's big post, which I'll link here instead of quoting in its entirety:

http://forums.wolflair.com/showpost....9&postcount=46

Firstly, thanks for taking the time to type all this up! We appreciate the feedback, and I'm glad everything went so well at the game.

We're definitely planning to make some improvements to the dice roller, such as critical threats, etc. We may not automate everything to the extent your DM software does, but it's definitely important to show "critical threat" and make sure that people know they need to do whatever manually.

Are any damage dice (from Bane, flaming weapon, sneak attack, etc) multiplied as a result of a critical hit? From what I've read none of them are, but I want to double-check that. If that's the case, that would make it easier to correctly roll crit damage in Hero Lab.

Their was some confusion with subtracting values out of which value was which. Which was the + bonus and what was the rolled Extra Damage.

Sorry, I'm not quite following here - can you give me an example?

Thoughts where that the adjustments on the "Personal" tab should NOT be displayed with the list of adjustments on the front page. Most of these get used as permanent adjustments or DM adjustments so once on a player can forget about these.

Permanent adjustments shouldn't be getting displayed on the front page, and aren't in my tests. If you're experiencing this, can you email me a saved portfolio?

With the new app players would like "more" things that can be turned ON/OFF not less. Many different combat abilities need to be able to be clicked on. In example Barbarian Superstition which applies specific bonus types to saves. The purpose of the software is to do this kind of math and we would like to be able to simply turn these on now in the app. With this the feeling was almost no paper use would be needed at the game.

Superstition gives you situational bonuses, and our prefered method for those is simply to show them as part of the "tap info" for the saving throw. It's likely that a character will often have several conditional bonuses that might apply - isn't it better to show the base score for them and have the user add them up him/herself?

I would think that'd even be quicker than activating an ability from the list, looking at the value, then deactivating it - having to do that also increases the risk that you forget, and end up with a bonus to the save that you shouldn't have.

Thanks again for your feedback!

[Globetrotter]

Originally Posted by Colen

One thing to keep in mind is that we're not going to do anything too complex with a notes feature; if you're looking for something complex and full-featured, you'd be better looking up a separate note-taking program, or using something like Realm Works on your laptop.

My friend beta tested Realm Works, so I am eager to view it once completed.

I am not looking for anything too complex, more like something to jog the memory... I do have word processors on my ipad, so I can always go there. It's pretty easy to switch back and forth.

Your mistrust of my dice roller offends me, sir! I look forward to implementing a dice roller report mode where it rolls 10000 times and then sulks until you tell it how well it did.

Poor little die roller...