New features added in v1.3.0

Initiative Bonuses

The live-game encounter tracker now tracks the initiative bonus for each combatant! This value is represented by the 🌀 emoji, and defaults to 0.

You can input a new value by navigating to the combatant of your choice and tapping the b key, then inputting a positive or negative value: e.g. 2 or -1.

Auto Initiative

I've always felt that combat in D&D, while potentially very fun and rewarding, can be a bit of a slog from a managerial perspective. Particularly when playing in an online setting without the use of a Virtual Tabletop Environment, continuously asking players for initiative rolls for each encounter can eat up a non-trivial amount of time.

In the past, I've tried various strategies for ameliorating this, such as setting initiative in the order that the players actually react, or by doing away with it completely; however, both these methods tend to naturally favor more assertive personalities, and since I like to see all types of people have fun in my games, this was not satisfactory for me.

So, I've had the idea to add a feature to live-game for auto-rolling and auto-sorting character initiative. Now that the app tracks initiative bonuses, the auto-initiative feature should retain any advantages held by characters to initiative, while at the same time streamlining the initiative process.

Use of this feature will likely require buy-in from the players in your game, depending on your DMing style, as setting initiative for the players does deprive them of a die roll, and I'm willing to bet that many of us collect great satisfaction from the act of rolling dice. However, the goal is that the time and effort saved via auto-initiative can get the players on to rolling the dice that matter, such as attack and damage rolls, more quickly.

I see this as a win.

Happy dungeoneering.