Ipad (or likewise) and gaming...

By Spivo, in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Never owned an Ipad, or likewise gadget. But seems to me, that as a GM having such one would make many things a great deal easier.

Of course, I'd never spend that kind of money on something, just to GM... but apart from the other uses, GM'ing seems to be something it could help do. Now I know people will think that it's a bit excesive, and that the feel of books etc... but I for one play at a friends house, with very very very limited room, and I'd also like to be able to transport everything, AND my laptop to my work while riding a bike, without the bike collapsing due to the weigth of it all happy.gif

- Especially now that the guides are comming, you can now have all the rules in one small gadget, easy to flip through, and search for them. I assume they're releasing them as PDF as well... I'd buy those anyway.

- Applications. They allready have the dice roller (which could use an update, for example with a roll-button...). Apart from that being able to fill out creature/NPC cards, like some allready do with that Strange Aeon (spelling...), so you can have all that easy accesible as well. So if we'd see more applications like that, for warhammer, many things would be smoother for the disorganized GM...

- Also would be nice to have all action cards/talents there as well, and with char sheets that you could attach the talents to, all sorts of stuff!!!

Of course, this would not be possible if the guides were not sold as pdf (I refrain from pirated downloads, apart from 1st editions, which... well... not sold, so to me the only way of getting them), and if they had no more plans for applications dedicated to this.

Any thought/comments?

I have an ipad. For gaming material it's fantastic. The form factor handles pdf rulebooks masterfully. I find it much easier to read them on the ipad then I have on my laptop or computer. For other gaming aids I use it for note taking, playing some background music, I don't really use the wfrp dice roller because frankly it needs an update to make it at all useful. About the only time I touch it is if we need more dice. Seriously with so much potential for the app it is horribly underwhelming. But anyway enough about that.

While it's hard to justify the price just for gaming if you have one it's great. I was fortunate enough to win one, but now that I have it I can't imagine going without.

I've been working with Windows Tablets since 2002 (professionally), and I have to say I love using them for gaming.

For me, they really make using PDF's awesome. I ran a Vampire the Masquerade game using PDF's I got from Drivethrurpg.

I use a lot of the PDF reference materials for running my current Warhammer game. Being able to write and take notes directly on PDF's is awesome...zooming in and around maps is so much nicer than doing that with a regular mouse or touchpad. Searching PDF's is quicker than lookingg stuff up inn a book. I can see Gitzman's character sheet being handy if everyone had one.

I used the D&D 4.0 character creater with Tablets also and that seemed like it was made for the Tablet.

For Windows Tablets, get PDF Annotator, Cute PDF, One Note and DropBox.

Sounds good, think I'll purchase the guides as pdf then.

Oh, and get everyone in my gaming group a tablet... dedicated GM?

Not Dedicated. But probably 50%. I am kind of spoiled since I probably have 3 or 4 tablets laying around most of the time. cool.gif

Yeah I'd love for them to release some nifte GM tools for the tablet.

Just imagine being able to build your NPCs on the tablet complete with stats, action cards etc. Then you could assign wounds, fatigue, use cards etc. Just press a button when they are done. The program would track everything. It would even allow for nemesis cards and everything else.

All cards should be available for use so you could create in depth NPCs. It would be super smooth even when running bigger encounters because you would just have the program track everything for you.

I'd love that. It could really speed up combat.

Any way to get the deice roller to work offline?

Heretek said:

Any way to get the deice roller to work offline?

You can download the entire web page. That should work.

The rumor I heard is that there are around 54 'slate' (no keyboard) tablets being announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.

So I hope publishers like FFG take a note of that and seriously start developing for them. Even though it might be hard picking which platform. Between iOS, Chrome, Android and Windows it would be hard to develop for all of them.

This week, I'm going to hook one up to my TV and run the maps from there. I have a Wi-Fi to VGA connection I've been dying to try out.

:)

We make extensive use of the iPad (and iPhone to a lesser degree) in my Pathfinder group - especially for PDF reading and accessing the online system reference documents.

Sadly, I don't have a WFRP 3e group at the moment.

frycook said:

  • In the link above for the "complete dice roller", what are Nemezis orange dice?

It was created during some old debate on Defence.

No idea if anyone uses it, but in general it is a backup dice you can design by yourself (edit its faces with Dice Editor link on top of that page) in case you needed something special not covered by official dice.