iPlay4e & Masterplan

While Wizards of the Coast provide official tools with their D&D Insider subscription, there are also many unofficial third-party tools available. Some tools are created by professional companies while others are fan-made, some are for profit and others are free. I'm constantly on the lookout for new tools and resources that can improve my games and the sheer volume and range to be found is impressive.

One site that my players use is iPlay4e, which is essentially an online character sheet. It requires a Google account and is free to use, but requires you to upload character files created by the D&D Insider Character Builder. Once characters are uploaded, you can share the link with friends or create and join a campaign with them for a handy overview of the entire party. The character sheets are also interactive and can be used to keep track of things like hit points, healing surges, action points and power consumption. Dice rolling is also built-in; simply clicking the boxes next to the appropriate stat, skill or power will roll a dice and automatically include any relevant modifiers. If you have an active D&D Insider subscription, iPlay4e has a built-in Compendium browser that will look up details of anything on your sheet without requiring you to open another window. The icing on the cake with iPlay4e, is the mobile view; players can easily use their iPhones and other mobile devices as a small, interactive character sheet.

Another tool that I recently discovered is Masterplan. Primarily for dungeon masters, Masterplan is an "Adventure Design Studio". Once again, this tool is free to download but can optionally make use of a D&D Insider subscription to download creatures, traps and treasure from the Compendium for quick use in your campaigns. With Masterplan, a DM can easily create a flowchart of the campaign plot and connect encounters, quests and maps to each plot point. Creating encounters is simply a matter of dragging and dropping creatures, traps and skill challenges from a library, then Masterplan will calculate the total XP values and display the difficulty for the party level; an auto-build feature will even generate encounters for you based on a few criteria that you set. Building encounter maps is equally simple, just drag and drop dungeon tiles from your library or use auto-build to generate a map from the tile libraries that you select. If you have a separate display available, you can even use Masterplan to display information to your players; it's possible to run a full encounter with maps and tokens while tracking initiative, hit points, conditions and ongoing damage for each player and creature. Even if you don't use the player view feature, Masterplan is still an amazing tool to help dungeon masters design their campaigns.