Maiden’s Head Games Games, Powered by the Imagination

Dungeon Mastering from the iPad

So was Santa kind this winter and brought you a tablet? Whether it be an iPad or one of the various Android flavors of tablets, these great little devices have certainly provided those of us that game with an arsenal of tools to bring to the gaming table. I have recently acquired an iPad and while the novelty of the device was present early on, I quickly got down to business with the device and found uses for the device at the game table.

Having read early on about several other early adopters, I found myself gravitating and circling around several great and innovative solutions to the early adopters. I migrated my game from a laptop to the iPad over the course of three months using these solutions.

The Apps
The iPad obviously lends itself to an environment of "silos of data". This means that due to the nature of the device, most information in one "app" is not always readily available to other apps. Thankfully there are many Web 2.0 services that have quickly found their way in to a growing number of apps. Key among these Web 2.0 services include Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs. Each of these apps has helped lay the groundwork for me being able to effectively run a paperless game. Here in this article, I will go over the ways to get your own iPad up and running in a similar environment.

The first, and most potent of the apps in my electronic dungeon master's toolkit is GoodReader. This app lets me view PDFs that are loaded via iTunes, or better yet, downloaded to the device from my Dropbox or Google Docs accounts. On a side note, if you're interested in becoming a "paperless" dungeon master, I would seriously recommend both Dropbox or Google Docs for syncing in documents to your iPad. Once my documents are loaded in Dropbox or Google Docs, I can then pull them down from the cloud on to my iPad. This gives mean effective way to pull in the books or docs that I need to run my game.

Another great feature within GoodReader is that it lets me annotate my PDF documents. What does this mean? Well, I can add bookmarks, underline text, highlight and even draw on my PDFs as I would a regular physical book. The great thing about the app though, is that the app is creating a new copy of the document to work with, rather than the original copy.

Next, I have taken in to using Evernote. This catch-all app allows me to bring in images, text and format them into a series of "articles" for my game. I can take screen captures of maps, images from web pages, or even full web pages and import them in to Evernote directly. Evernote allows me to organize my game sessions, as well as letting me bring together inspiration from all corners of the web. Evernote and I have had a bit of a rollercoaster of a relationship. I use the app and desktop versions in spurts when organizing and searching for inspiration in my various games. The app also comes with built in OCR (character recognition), that helps you search photos and PDFs that have been loaded via the desktop version of the app, or even the mobile version (more on the mobile version of the app later).

As for the final piece of the puzzle, I have been using Keynote to build small "presentations" for my players as refreshers prior to each game session. These help give the players some memory joggers and focus them on the upcoming session. These "cliff notes" are a great tool for my players to understand where we left off in our previous game and what goals wehad left open at the close of our last session.