Improved Initiative Tips and Tricks (Patreon)

The dad life is treating me well; it's a lot of work and a lot of fun! Of course, I am exhausted and, as expected, have not had time to work on Improved Initiative. In the meantime, I thought it would be helpful to share some tips on lesser-known features in the app.

Combatant Multi-Select

You can select multiple combatants by holding down the control key (command on OSX) when clicking their entry. You can apply the same damage or tags to multiple combatants at once. 

Player View Settings

You can open a Player View in another window, or even on a separate device, so your players can keep up with initiative and see who's on deck. A rough indicator of enemy HP is shown, and you can adjust the indicator to be more or less specific.

Hidden Add

You might want to add a combatant to initiative without immediately revealing it in the player view. If you hold the alt key (option on OSX) when adding a creature, they will be hidden so you can reveal them at the opportune moment.

Concentration Checks

I try not to add too many features that are specifically for the 5e ruleset, since the app is designed to also be useful for systems like 3.5, 4e, and Pathfinder. This one was too useful to pass up, though: a creature tagged with Concentrating can automatically prompt you for the appropriate DC concentration check when it takes damage.

Kobold Fight Club Integration

Kobold Fight Club has been around almost as long as 5e, and is an excellent statblock directory and encounter-building tool. If you prefer their richer feature set for encounter building, you can import encounters directly from there to track in Improved Initiative.

It will be a while yet before I can devote more energy to the project; our baby won't start sleeping through the night for a few months. There are a few outstanding bugs that I'll try to address before then. In the meantime, thank you all so much for your continued support.

Happy DMing!