Kickstarter

Hey everyone!

Last weekend myself (as the DM) and a number of others used Track Initiative in a live D&D game! This game was very helpful in that it illustrated what worked well, and what still needed some fine tuning.

As the DM, I loved how simple it was to use in game. I applied some effects when it came up, removed participants when they were defeated and re-arranged the order when need be. The setup pre-game was pretty simple, taking less than 10 minutes to input the players, the stats I needed to see and the mobs for the encounter I had planned.

I was running Track Initiaitve (as the DM) on my iPad at the table, but I had the tracker open behind me on my computer monitor (as a Viewer). It was fun to turn around and see (on my monitor) the Player/Mob selection change, right after hitting "Next" on my iPad.

This trial run also allowed us to see some things we needed to update. One example was that when you add mobs, you select a mob you built and then choose a quantity. Once you get to the tracker, it creates one listing for each mob with an incremented number next to the name. For example, I had "Orc" and I chose to add "4", so in the tracker I had "Orc 1", "Orc 2" etc. This worked great - "Orc 3" was killed and was removed from the tracker. However, when I put the #3 token back into the encounter as a new Orc it worked fine on the battlemat (at the table), but in Track Initiative we needed to be able to bring in a new "Orc 3" which wasn't possible. So, one of the things we quickly learned was we need to indicate that a mob is "defeated" rather than remove them from the tracker entirely, that way they can be re-introduced into the encounter as a new mob (and then placed in the appropriate order) without having to create a new number for them. This is important as many tokens are numbered, and we (as DM/GM's) tend to re-use the numbers of previously fallen mobs, etc. Additionally, we want to be able to look back at past trackers and see all participants in an encounter - not just the PC's, as they defeated the encounter.

Anyway, it was a great run and went very well for being in such an early stage. We hope you are as excited as we are to see this application launch. If you have already helped us with funding I would like to thank you again - we really appreciate it! If not, please consider doing so, but also know that we are trying to get the word out about Track Initiative, so any sharing of this project with others who might be interested would be very much appreciated as well!

Thanks again everyone!

Mike "Weem"