Jason's Favorite iOS Apps for DnD Players (and DMs!)

0:20 Hello Adventurers, guys, bluffing to another episode of the podcast. I'm Jas Bortizo, I am Jim Crocker, and I'm Joe McCall, and we talk about D and D topics near and dear to role players. Hearts super psyched to get back in this episode. This is stuff that back when we were doing our older show Comergons and Dragons, that Jim and I started really getting into was giving like very specific apps and software and things that like really really really help new and season DM. This is not a new DM centric episode. This is something that everybody can benefit from. So we're going to revisit some of those that we've done before, a lot of new things have come out since then. But today's episode is going to be I'm sorry to the Android users out there, but this is going to be a very specifically iPhone episode. A lot of these apps before you before you click away, before you hit the stop, A lot of these apps are on both platforms.

1:07 I wouldn't know. I don't have an Android anymore. And there's at least an equivalent of dressed about all of these that should be available on Android. And if you're an are an Android user and you have favorite apps, I'd love to know them and talk about them on the show. Hello Adventures podcast at gmail dot com. Tell us your favorite Android apps to use for dming, because I have no way of researching them, and I'd love to tach you to do the work for me. Be fantastic if you do that for me, please and thank you. But today we're gonna be talking about iPhone and iPad iOS specific apps and how they are useful not only too my game, but these were suggested to me by other dms I'm friends with and make these a regular part of their game. So if we're good, let's jump right in. You know what, I have a question that our audience might have, which is, are these going to be resources that apply exclusively to running stuff online? Or are they going to be things you have at the table with you when you're running it's a physical game with your of these and ixctly a fantastic question that I really should have addressed much earlier on Thank You.

2:07 These are all stuff that I use at the table. Not a single one of these are are really even that useful for online games. Online games will have their own We can do a whole separate episode on virtual tabletops and stuff like that, thoughts and plug ins and and stuff that's even just built into the app itself. You don't even have to add a whole lot through Yeah yeah, yeah, but using like extensions to to enhance that there, we're not talking about any of that today. These are things that lighten my load and my backpack by making sure that I have things at the ready or even in my back if I didn't expect to play D and D today and I just need some stuff, it's on my phone. Yeah. So this, combined with episode three new DM resources should really get you being one of the top dms in your area, right, So let's jump right in.

2:53 So number one, let's get the big bear out of the room, and that is D and D Beyond. It's no secret that this is the premier resource for players and dms. So this might be obvious for a lot of our audience, but we are kind of catering towards new players as well, so if you're not oftenmiliar with D and D Beyond. It is now owned by Words to the Coast, it wasn't always that way. It is a website that you can purchase your your resource books through and kind of get social PDFs through. But most importantly, the character creation from D and D Beyond is it's the best I've ever seen. I don't know really much many ways to improve that part of the website. It's their official proprietary character creation software.

3:37 Yes, no, it is, but even before I mean it was the official licensed one before. Yeah, before Watts you bought it. It was just it was. It was incredible. Yeah, I was run by real players, real nerds, like real either one of the original I'm not sure if she was a programmer. I don't know her exact role in D and D Beyond, but she was on shows like I'm actually on Dropout and then she was just awesome, remember her name Off Hambish. She was fantastic. But for make up a character quickly and going through all the proper steps and like really making the character, not just a quick character creation like fact character dot com or any of those sites I'll talk about another time, but for really creating your character and making like a real working character sheet and upgrading and your level up and stuff. Yeah, to the point where like I don't even print a character sheet anymore. No, I just have my laptop in front of me, and it is not only it's not just as good, it's better if you purchase the resources to have the access to the stuff that your character needs. And that's yeah, and we can debate that another Well, we'll save that for another show. Yeah, but unfortunately I have a DM who did buy most of them, thanks Joe, and then I have access to everything that I need mostly. Actually there's even a couple of things that I don't have access to, and I've I've built characters around those restrictions. But we're not here to debate D and D Beyond if you're if you're unfamiliar with D and D Beyond, it really is the best, and it's not even close the best character creation online. Yeah, for a basic

5:10 character absolutely without purchasing anything else, right on the on the on the D and D Beyond website for a free account. Even with a free account, you can you can build a pH B. You've got the three core books there, yeah, pretty much ready. Yeah, And that's and that's just the character creation. There are lots of other things that that the site does with having resources and PDFs and just a ton of things you can do, plus a very active user forum. So those are all things you have access to. They do have an app. I don't super love the app, but the information is all there, and it does sync across the board with your desktop version. I think the desktop version is a lot better. The app's not bad by any means. It's just a couple extra taps and clicks to do most things. More than I like that being said, you can still do everything. Yeah, you were talking about Android. If you're one of the people who's bringing like a Windows tablet to the table, you're all set, are you saying that? Because Joe has this Windows tablet right in front of us at this table. That's not a tablet, that's a laptop.

6:10 It's both. Yeah, there we go, that's a laptop. Yeah, we're talking about iPads. But I mean, but like joking aside it is. It's a website, so you can run out on anything that you have a browser on. Now, the mobile version of the website is worse than the app. Okay, yeah, yes, that all right. If you have an iPad, I would just do it through through Chrome on there. If you have a laptop like I bring to the table, just do it on there. But if all you have is your phone, the app is usable. It's definitely usable, and the fact that it still sinks across the board, so you can still create your character on your laptop at home and then just bring your phone to the table. In fact, having it being a little clunky might even get your face out of your phone and back into the game a little bit more so that actually it might accidentally make you a better player. It's good on the floor. That's the app is good on the fly, but for mostly everything, especially for a DM, like if you're gonna run encounters through D and D Beyond or anything like that, if you want to level up your character in line at the d m V or something. It's great for reading up the dead. Yeah, but I'm super recommended for dms, But for players, I think it's a must have if you're using D and D Beyond for character creation, which really almost everyone's doing right now, because it's all there, there's no reason for character for quick creation. I mean, it's still it's still despite its flaws. I'm not going to say D and D Beyond is perfect, and that's a whole other episode and a whole other thing we can get into. But I think the app gets what it needs to get done, and it does the most

7:42 important thing, which is tying to D and D beyond. All right, So that is we'll just we'll just get the elefan out of the room. D and D Beyond app number one, all right, My next app that I think everyone needs to have. I have a couple of these, and I like some for some reasons and others for other reasons. I'm still kind of deciding which one I'm going to make my main. But you need some sort of spellbook app. So I have one called Spells, and I will have links to the app store for all of these. But Spells is a very nice visual spell book that you can save your favorite spells and kind of have your your spell book that way, and gives you the the real game text or what that spell does. It is missing some it is it is beholden to the OGL. So pretty much all of these apps are going to be missing a few spells here and there that are OGL proprietary. And a very brief primer on on OGIL proprietary. So there's the official gaming license that allows third party works to have access to a watching material, and some of that is kept under locking key for wizards. So one of the most one of the most common examples that I can think of that I run into issue a lot. It's a spell thorn whip. It's just it's I never have a card for it. It's D and D beyond that because it's wots.

9:11 So if you have stuff that specific to wats E, then that's what is going to do for you. But so that stuff aside, and that's going to be across the board, you're gonna be missing those spells on any on any reputable one. If they have it in there, they're probably shirking the the O g L and they'll probably right. So I found a couple of them that like spells is one of my favorite ones, and spell slots five E. It's not as nice looking as as spells. However, you can have multiple characters and multiple spell books saved so you're playing in a few campaigns, or if you have something you just want to make up for a one shot and not disturb the spells you have saved for the other one, or if you're a d M, if you want to have a couple of bad guys in there, that's yeah. Or if you're a DM and your your players keep misreading spells conveniently or none more forgetting whatever that's an option. There, So some sort of spellbook gap I think is something having on there spells and spellslots five of the ones that I have. Hello Adventurers, just stepping in here to remind you guys that we're actively looking for submissions for our Hello DMS episode that gets recorded every month. Send us your burning D and D questions to Helloadventurers podcast at gmail dot com, or send us a voicemail by visiting Helloadventurers podcast dot com slash voice. Don't forget to begin your message with Hello DMS. You can't wait to get your questions and talk about them on the show. Send us your questions today. That's Helloadventurers podcast at gmail dot com or the voice at helloadventurers podcast dot com slash voice. Now let's get back to the show. If you are a DM that likes having ambience music

10:50 sound effects, I know, Jim, you're not a fan on Beyond. Yes, I'm not a fan. I mean I have by a processing difficulties to make it. Think like if there's music going on at the same time I'm trying to run the game, I just I get lost. But some people love it. Some people love to have the little something in the background when it's done right. Yeah, And I've had some dms that just have it too loud or have the raw music on. And it's a skill in itself because you're already very busy as another thing to manage, just another thing. I will say, playing I R O with with Tony from DNB four or four, he had a playlist of medieval sounding hip hop covers. Wow, and like, if that's the exact vibe you want for your game, that's great. But if it's not, I could see that that that was cool. That was great. What are they are they playing? Green?

11:43 That was It was so cool. However, so choosing the song and having the song change and finding the right mood for the song is a completely different skill, and to balance that on top of already being a d M is extremely difficult. You almost want to have like a second DM to be your DJ. There is an app aptly called dm DJ. I was actually on the beta tester program for this app and it is now in full form. There's some entire drop down menus. What type of environment are you in? So anything from a forest to castle to town square, to under dark, like it'll have stuff that is thematic for that scenario. And then you have an intensity level, so a forest at are low intensity, and you can have sound effects. You can have no hoofs clopping, and then you can crank up the intensity and the music and the sound effects will ramp up.

12:35 So I want to fight is coming? Just start slowly bringing it up. And I've had a lot of fun with this, Joe is it just mirrors that. Like the most jacent thing ever that the second app he recommends is to like audio, not taking or anything like that yet, but just know you can you want to if you want to. If it's like you're at the club while you're playing d D, We've got this for you. That's that's fantastic. On my phone, I would have an app for it, okay, but because I think that that would really come my way. But you want to note taking app? This is called This is called docs is met by Google. It is the premiere note taking app that I have on my phone. Tastic, happy Jim. Okay, fine, we'll get back into actual plane Jim. Right, yeah, right, So I have a couple of these apps. Some are very very simple, some are very very complex. It depends on what kind of mood I'm in. I have one called D twenty calc It is literally just looks at a calculator app and I'll just show it to you guys here now you can't see it on the podcast.

13:31 It does not look very different than my standard calculator app, except you see things like a D four D sixty eight, and I can I can punch in the equation for what kind of dice I'm rolling. So for example, if I let's say I create on a on a crossbow attack that I then get sneak attack on and there was also the the wild magic barbarier gave me the plus D three for the damage, and there's just like all these things in there. I can just punch in the whole equation. I can save the equation for future recall, so I can punch it all in one hundred times. Yeah, and this is great for if you don't have dice on you as you're in an environment where you can't really roll dice if you're playing, if you're on a long flight and you just want to play D and D without chucking dice all over your plumber. So that's D twenty calc, which is the very simplified version. It's it looks like a calculator and it feels like you're using a calculator. Then there's Sophie's dice. Sophie's dice is like fullief three D rendered. That's like a you have to it's a really hard choice to decide which dice you're going to use, right, yeah, that's yeah, you get to keep one D four case yeah yeah dark real quick. Sophie's dice so well, I'm sure, I'm sure she's very nice and I had nothing to do with that. But Sophie's dice is like fully rendered, fully like physics engine, Like you're punching all the dice that you wanted to keep. And not only does it have like your standard set of seven, there's a wacky dice in here too, some that are just like shaped different, some that have all kinds of I think you can be custom dice. You can even like have the side say whatever you Since it's an iPhone app, you roll it once and half your battery's gone. This

15:03 was pretty. This one's pretty for you. And I will say this app is pretty resource intensive. You're pull Mike Gill Little Hot exclusively. Then you go back to D twenty cocktail cools down. But the app looks spectacular and it is available on the iPad and it looks even better on the bigger screen. So if you're playing a short game, you just want to, like, you know, have that or maybe for the big rolls the above, the table rolls, the ones that like really have some weight to them, this is the one you can show off like roll like, yeah, have the player roll for the table. If you're the DM, bring it out, bringing out the iPad. Yeah, and have them roll. If you're not using physical dice side tracking into what do you call it, dungeon crawl classics, you can roll those D sevens and you can fourteens and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I say, I'm playing a wild magic Barbarian in my game of Joe and there's a class feature where I need a D three. Oh yeah, I'm sure you just take a D six and it's one two three one two three. But I want to roll with the three.

16:00 I don't know where to buy one. I see them advertise on Facebook all the time. Yeah, we got like they're part of a set. I can't just go buy a D three and if I do, it's not going to master the rest of my dice, and that's not okay. I think they also sell a D one and that set the will be a strip. D two is just a coin. Yeah, fifty sent they send your quarter. Yeah that's great. But yeah, so for some wacky dice, you can get Sophy's dice. I think you can skin them however you want to. There's some really cool stuff in there. But joking on the side, the other thing that those are great for is you know you need to pick a random spell from a spell list that has twenty eight spells on it, any of those kind of things. Yeah, where you go down and you can just go, you know, throw it in there, boom, roll it and then you don't have to go okay, that's two D twenty.

16:49 But if I roll a thirty seven to forty, I'm going to re roll it, and yeah, that makes it really easy. I'll say in about two seconds while you were saying that, I was on the twenty calc and I punched into one D twenty eight and roll to twenty three twenty three. All Right, that's like a spell that starts with like probably tea or something like that. So yeah, you so they're both great for running for rolling wacky dice you might not own, so even if you are rolling physical dice, this is just great to have on you. Is a D twenty calc Sophie's dice, and any number of other die rollers. Oh, actually, before I move on, a lot of these dice are huge in the blind and vision impaired community. Very early on in Commercidly Dragons, I was looking into braille dice and just trying to see it because there's a massive blind division impaired community playing D and D. Especially for a game that is largely theater of the mind, you don't really need to see much except what what says on your die. There's braille dice and a there's a resource out there that will give you I believe it is dots Project something like that. I would they give a free STL that you can three D print braille dice, But a lot of blind players will already use dice rollers on their phone and that they can speak voice commands into it. Siri can do some of that already, And I'm just afraid of my phone is going to light up as soon as I said that, but it didn't. She could do some of that, but not all of it. And and complex dice calculations, you know, roll D twenty plus two or you know one D ten plus two D six plus five. She's not gonna do that, but some of these dice roars can. I mean, we're all waiting for the day when we can say, Strie, I just gritted on a blade barrier, roll that

18:22 phone. That's what we want. Yeah, that's a dice roller. Apps one more half on here, and this is where we start getting into this like cool fun DM stuff. So, Jim, how often do your players say, oh, I have find a guy to borrow what's his name? I mean they do that fairly often. There's a website that I have for that, Yeah, that I use. Well, I got one on my phone. This is this is NPC for hire the even for the free version. You get all the ablieviate, all the humans in the in the free version, and you can unlock specific areas for a dollar each. The website that I use is called Fantasy Name General. Sooon and John. Yeah, so that's Don. John is great because Dodge will stipulate backstories and stuff.

19:07 Fantasy Names Generator will just give you the name, but what they say, Okay, what's his deal? What do you look like? What's how's he talking? It looks like me. I mean, it's just like I don't have that part of it. I don't have trouble with. That's not a thing that I need help. Yes, the name, but the names I need help with. And the nice thing. One of the things I love about Fantasy Name Generator is that it has you know, fantasy names, but it also has a vast array of you know, different, you know, regular modern Earth cultures. And so if I decide, Okay, these people here, I want their names to be Indonesian, I can do that and call that up. These people here are going to be you know whatever, Catalonian, we can we can do that and call those up, and you you know, you click it, you can go you know, male coded, female coded, or you know, androgynous, and it will generate a list of ten As you click it again, it generates ten more names that I think it's just an amazing website. Because I play a lot of kind of indie games that use more modern names, I find it more useful than some of these D and D specific ones, you know, like I would have to dig to find drown names on that site, I think. But but it is a great site that's you clicks to get there. Yeah.

20:18 Yeah, that being said, so what we can do on f PC for hire? So I got it in my hand right now. We can look for an adventurer, or a clergy or an entertainer. There's a bunch of jobs here, or we can have any job. So let's say we're in a tavern and I'm looking for I want to talk to the band. Yeah, so we're just going to tap entertainer and it will just give me a random one with a with a photo. Oh that's it's got a little character portrait with a name, raised her job, and a quick little one sentence on what's her deal? So I just clicked on entertainer and I got Joanna White, a human entertainer. If Joanna sends his carelessness or a lack of forethought, she is sure to point it out, just in one sentence. One tap I've got for the day. I can keep refreshing until I find someone interesting enough. I can save the ones that I end up using.

21:02 So to have to start at the bottom, you get to recall those like I said, it's all humans. For the free app, there are seventeen that you can additions to it at dollar each. I think for a couple of bucks, just get the ones that you need and I might get this a track and folcus they go into an area where dragon boards are are common. Does that have a provision to allow you to add your own notes to it as you find out more about those characters or it wouldn't be in the app. However, you can create your own that does have DM notes the on the ones that make yourselves if you want to keep them all in the same place. I don't see a place for you to add notes to existing ones, but then that's where your your DM notes would come in. This is to get you started. So this isn't all the apps that I use, but these are the ones that I can really recommend for players to start with. You'll find the ones that end up working for you better. There's a couple of different ones for character sheets that I've had mixed results with, and it really depends on how you handle your part of the game, but I think these are usable for for anybody. So to recap we've got the old classic D and D beyond. I've got spells or spell slots five E, D M, d J, D twenty cock or Sophie s Dice and NPC for hire. And we don't have links to the app store for all of those. I believe they are all free. Actually I don't know if they are all free of D M DJ might cost something. I believe the rest of all are. I'm glad I got to thut you guys my phone for a bit. It is almost dead now because I this episode took a while, so we're gonna we're gonna call it here today. Thanks for thanks for joining me, Thanks for listening. This has been Hello Adventurers with your

22:33 host Jason Portiso, Joe McCall, and Jim Crocker, Producer, editor and engineer Jason Portiso. Our music is by Nick Spurrier, artwork by Kristin Roderick, and with nothing else to add, we're just gonna say goodbye. Editor