New feature: Encounter tool (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Alex here!

Recently I've been working on a feature for the website that can help you during your games: The Encounter Tool. As with every new feature we want to test it out a bit before making it available to everyone so right now the Encounter Tool is only available to Tier3+ Patrons.

What is the Encounter Tool?

If you're anything like me, the following situation might sound familiar:

You prepared your session and printed all the minis. During the session combat starts, you set up the table with all the minis everything is looking great! But then everyone has to roll initiative and the chaos starts. Everyone rolls for initiative. While you're looking up the initiative modifiers for your monsters all the players start shouting numbers at you, excited to start. You grab a piece paper or a spreadsheet and hastily start writing down the names of the player's characters and goblin 1 through 5. You ask your players again for their initiative because you already forgot. You write down the numbers. Now you roll for the monsters. Oh no: the initiative order differs from the order you wrote it down! But there's no time to redo it, so you just roll with it. Every turn you subtract the damage from their current health, cross out the previous hp and write down the new hp.

I wanted to build something that could streamline this whole process to make it easier and quicker to run your combat encounters. So I built a tool into the Printable Heroes website to help with this. It's designed to work on mobile so you can always have it with you.

Let me show how it works:

Step 1: Create a new encounter

Press the green "New" button to create your first encounter on the Encounter Tool page.

Step 2: Start the setup process

Press the blue "Setup encounter" button to open a setup wizard (pun intended) that will guide you through all the steps and features to get you started as quickly as possible.

Step 3: Add the miniatures

You can add new miniatures to your combat encounter the same way you would add miniatures in the PDF Creator or to a Collection.

In the future you'll be able to add miniatures straight from your own Collections - This will make it possible to always be able to quickly add your PC's Miniatures to an encounter and/or add miniatures for

Step 3: Set health points

Enter how many health points every creature in the encounter has.

Step 4: Set initiative

Enter the initiative every creature rolled.

Step 5: Name your Encounter

Give your encounter a name so you can easily find it again later.

As you can see below there are two additional options available. Clamp HP prevents health from going below 0 or above the creature's max health. Group non-players will group the enemies together in the initiative order. This allows the Dungeon Master to take all their turns in one go which can speed up combat.

Step 6: Run the game!

Now you can run your game! All the creatures will be sorted based on their initiative. Each creature has their own health bar. When a creature takes damage, press the red button with the sword icon.

A popup will appear where you can type how many damage points the creature took.

The damage will be automatically subtracted from the creatures health.

Try out encounters for yourself!

This is a new feature and we're really excited to hear what you think of it. What works well? What doesn't work so well? Do you have any ideas for future functionality? We welcome all feedback in the PrintableHeroes Discord server in the #website channel or in the comments below this post!