GMing With Tech

[LostOne]

Ok fellow GMs, I'm going to start GMing Rifts in person for the first time in a long time and I have a new tool available to me: Chromebook with android app support. So what apps have GMs discovered and like for GMing for palladium games? I'd love an initiative tracker that sorts based on initiative and includes counting the number of attacks left for each combatant. Most apps I see for that are D&D focused and don't seem to care about attacks. But I'd also love something that helps me organize notes, build a quick reference for enemy stats for tracking the stats and their bonuses during combat. So far things I've dabbled with are: google sheets, microsoft excel, straight up .txt files, etc. During minor testing I've discovered the microsoft excel android app only opens spreadsheets as read only unless you have an office365 account (I don't and I'm not looking to pay for that since I have full office on my windows PC). Google Sheets autosaves as it is updated and some of the formulas I've thrown at it (was trying to have some things autoroll to streamline big dice rolls) caused it to crash and while crashing it saved the file corrupted so nothing can open it again, not good during combat. Text files are annoying to build because tabs are handled differently from app to app and nothing seems to treat them the same as windows notepad does so I'd be looking at using spaces instead of tabs which is doable but annoying. So far text seems the most functional/stable for my needs. I'm hoping someone has more/better suggestions. Also I'm looking to have this be an offline operation so I'm not relying on a cloud service or internet in case the service has an outage or internet has an outage on gaming night.

[eliakon]

To be honest I use google doc/google sheets a lot.
I love the spreadsheets for so many things...
Need a list of what rifles are available that you can instantly sort by range, damage, kind, maker? Spreadsheet
Need to keep track of all those NPCs that pop up so you can always recall their name, race, class, where they were, description and what hook they have? yep, spreadsheet again.

For safety I routinely simply copy the sheet and work on the duplicate. once I'm satisfied I can either use the duplicate as the new main, or cut/paste back to the core sheet.
It allows me to avoid accidentally messing around with my 'core' sheet

[Warshield73]

I wish I could help but I haven't really found anything new in a while. I bought my first PC laptop in 2000 and I have used a laptop in almost every gaming session I have done in the last 20 years. As result all of my stuff is in Excel and Word and while I have thought of migrating it over to Google docs it just doesn't seem worth it as both of my tablets can at least read the documents even if they can't edit them. Some of my documents are so old they started out as Microsoft Works documents and spreadsheets.

I like using excel during the games as I can create simple sheets that will keep track of damage and ordinance use.

My current character sheet is combination Word sheet (which contains character history, physical description and any information that remains more or less constant) and Excel (which contains combat bonuses, skills, and any stats that require calculations or change by level) but I always convert each on to a single PDF so that I have the entire character, including vehicle and equipment, in one file.

I did start using one-note to organize my campaign and scenario notes but that is more creating my scenarios / campaigns and I almost never use it when I am running my games.

The biggest change I made recently is I have started collecting all the artwork I want them to see during a game and putting it on my Kindle Fire. I can them show them what a Xiticix, Nightlord Hound or an enemy space ship looks like. It has really sped things up when I am running so I don't have to give long descriptions or flip through books for them to see.

If any of you find some magic tech to make this easier I hope you'll share it.

[Myrrhibis]

My group uses Roll20, and the co-GM & I have been making a sort of compendium of the various critters we've used.

The initiative tracker is nice, about the only thing we haven't figured out how to auto- track is number of attacks.

I still have to do that w a note card off to the side.

[Kraynic]

My group uses Roll20, and the co-GM & I have been making a sort of compendium of the various critters we've used.

The initiative tracker is nice, about the only thing we haven't figured out how to auto- track is number of attacks.

I still have to do that w a note card off to the side.

If you have a pro account on Roll20 for access to the api, then you might consider using this script that was written for me by The Aaron for my Palladium Fantasy games: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6817748/

I have written my initiative macro to add 80 to the d20 roll. The script will allow you to add multiple entries to the tracker for each character, subtracting 20 from the initiative for each successive entry. If you trust your players, you can make the macro that calls the script a global token action that all can see. Then they can all set their number of attacks after they roll their initiative. Otherwise, you can still set it up to be visible as a token action for you and your co-GM.