What iPhone / iPad apps do you use for gaming?

Question

What iPhone / iPad applications do you use for your gaming? One per answer, please, and vote up ones you have used and like.

Answer 1

GoodReader is the home app for many of my game-book PDFs. It loads quickly, even with art-heavy works, and the bookmarking function is really useful.

Answer 2

Dropbox. I use it to sync my notes, books, and character sheets. For larger books, you can even send files from Dropbox straight to GoodReader if the Dropbox PDF viewer is too slow for your liking.

Answer 3

I just used Evernote at game night for the first time last week and was very impressed.

Using their desktop app on my home computer, I created separate notes for

• encounters (containing maps, monsters (including custom ones), and verbiage)
• Important NPCs
• The details of an artifact I was handing out
• The full text to a poem full of clues that the party would discover (to be emailed out when they found it)
• Images to be shown to the players
• An encounter flow diagram

Evernote took it all and slurped it up into its cloud. During the day I updated and tweaked things on my Android phone, iPad and work computer. When game time finally arrived, it was all ready to go on my iPad. It was the best combination of prepared and organized that I've ever felt. Best of all, the app is free up to 40Meg of upload per month. Unless you are uploading high res images that will be plenty to run a game on.

Answer 4

iPlay4e.com, which has an iPhone optimised website for 4e character sheets. Fantastic tool.

Just go to http://iplay4e.com on your phone.

Answer 5

Dicenomicon is a heavy-duty programmable dice emulator. It has the most extensive set of custom features that I've seen in such an app.

Answer 6

I use Mach Dice. Mach just recently added support for Fudge dice during the great Fudge dice shortage of 2010!

Answer 7

Google Docs is a fantastic reference that is usually iphone renderable. I have my players maintain their character sheets and a time log that are accesable from iphone or laptop at the table.

Answer 8

I have recently started using Notability for my games and prep.

I can type, write, draw, map, annotate, highlight, and record. I can import images and PDFs and web clips.

It can auto sync to a variety of cloud storage services including Dropbox and google drive, in your choice of several formats.

It's super-useful and for $0.99, it's a steal!

Answer 9

GMToolKit provides a basic die roller, a name generator, a room description generator, and a place-name generator based on random root-words translated into a variety of language "inspirations".

The place-name generator is by far the most interesting feature. It first generates a random combination of English words that would be suitable for a place (such as "pine meadow"), then it gives four variations built from a rough translation into German, Gaelic, Latin, and Old English (such as "Kieferwiese", "Cranncluain", "Agerpinus", and "Beamfeld" for "pine meadow".)

The room description generator is alright, but seems to have a limited variety of "pieces" to put together into a fixed skeleton. It's enough to give some inspiration and little bits of dungeon-dressing, but used too often it will get repetitive. I wouldn't use it verbatim.

The name generator is a little more random that I'd like, but is very quick. It might take more than a few taps, but eventually a name will jump out as being good-sounding.

The die roller is pretty basic. Enough for a single die throw of one or more dice of the same size, but nothing to compete with Dicenomicon or Mach Dice.

Answer 10

Ambiance has a huge library of free soundscapes, such as spooky graveyards, sci-fi laboratories, etc. I haven't used it in a gaming setting yet, personally, but you can easily plug it into a stereo or dock and use it to generate atmosphere for your game. It also supports iOS 4 multitasking, so the sounds continue to play even when you exit the app to do something else.

Answer 11

Simplenote is a free, light, bare-bones note-taking app, that syncs between your iPhone, the Simplenote website, various desktop apps, and other devices. Notes can be edited, tagged, searched, and restored to previous versions. While not specifically geared towards gaming, it's useful for pretty much everything, and serves as a much lighter version of Evernote.

Answer 12

I use i4e (nonfree, but cheap) and I'm absolutely delighted with it. It's local to the phone (but with a web-based importer) which means I don't have any lookup time when I'm using my powers. Furthermore, customizable descriptions are remarkably handy.

Answer 13

Pip is a good, simple dice roller with nice graphics and physics and no other frills. Here's a review.

Answer 14

I've been using Tap Counter for tracking Counts in Hackmaster. Simple to use and does the job.

Answer 15

RPGplane is an iOS app featuring 15 maps (some bigger then 6000 pixels) and the ability to set fog density, field of view, and grid size with a finger swipe.

It allows for unlimited checkers with individual size, colour, text, number, and field of view. Avatars and tokens are planned for a later release. There are objects such as treasure chest, coins, and weapons to represent rewards.

The next update will introduce dice rolling and the ability to load RPGplane maps pre-populated with monsters and objects by the publisher, for instant scenarios.

Answer 16

ElvenSpeak is a free reference to Tolkien's elven language and calendar put together by enthusiasts. The language reference includes a searchable English-Quenya dictionary, and an impressive Quenya Language Course of more than 20 sessions. The calendar includes a Gregorian-to-Elven calendar calculator, and a reference article on Elven festival days and seasonal events. It also has a nice interface.

Answer 17

Feudz Dice. I haven't personally used it yet, but I've toyed with the app. I got it based on a friend's recommendation. He showed me how you can set up all kinds of crazy things. You can create a group of dicerolls (for example multiple characters). He set up his current character as a group and then you go in and he had all the various combat rolls he has all in one place.

Answer 18

I really like to use sounds, so I have an app called Resounder that lets me have a pretty huge Soundboard library. It actually lets you import your own sounds (wav, aiff, mp3). Very useful for laugh tracks, drum rolls, and failure sounds (waaa-waaaa).

Answer 19

If I need a simple counter for tallys and such, I use Score.

Answer 20

A custom web app I wrote to do Savage Worlds character sheets and dice rolling. iOS devices do awesomely with HTML5/javascript stuff (except sound playing, which is a giant pain in the ass) and a good framework like jQuery Mobile makes writing your own snazzy thing pretty easy.