I was wondering if anyone has used any of the following (or similar) and what you think about them:

DM Minion
4e Turn Tracker
Masterplan
Virtual Table Top Beta

Interesting points. I DM at my own house and am thinking that I could put some spare parts together to have a computer dedicated to my D&D needs and just leave that out in the game-room. All I really need is something to keep my monsters nice and organized. Being able to switch between them and have it keep track of hitpoints would be enough. Everything else would just be icing on the cake (as long as it didn't get in the way).

Hero Labs works well for tracking hit points depending on the system you use. Pathfinder is covered. I use NBOS The Keep for notes and such, it interfaces well with Fractal mapper, of course. If only my netbook hadn't self destructed.

I tried using MasterPlan at one time, too. In theory, it is great. In reality, though, I found I spent more time making things organized in there than was necessary. And that killed my enthusiasm for it.

I've also tried to use . My experiences were about the same as MasterPlan. It took so much extra time to setup stuff in there and most of my players are too lazy to spend ANY time outside of the game on game-related reading. (for example: in my Eberron game, one player wanted to play an Artificer. He finally dropped it after several sessions, though, 'cuz he never could manage to take the time to even read what the class could do in the Eberron books.)

Do your players make use of your Obsidian Portal game pages?

I do have a forum for keeping fluf and I update my website with scenarii summary and NPC/places description.

As for keeping up during play, I use two softwares, not at all dedicated to roleplay:
First is Freemind : it's a mind-mapping software. I use it primarily to write scenarii and to take note during play
Second one is... Excel... sorry... but it's just so easy to write a NPC name in a cell and nb of hp in the next cell...

I got pretty adept at remembering what was happening where.

I use a Game Mastery magnetic board to track real time stuff.
http://paizo.com/products/btpy7y0z/disc ... agnet-Pack

After that, I found that status cards were really helpful for both me and the players. When the player has an ongoing 5 in front of them, they tend to remind you of that.


I have found that 4e was very cumbersome to prepare for because you need to have multiple monsters to fill multiple roles in the fight. Its best if you have stat blocks for each monster printed into a document for each fight.