Most recently, however, I’ve found the iPad is EXCELLENT GM device — I can drop notes, pics, etc. onto Dropbox for later use, I have a dice program, a PDF reader for game books, and it’s an excellent platform for showing maps, pics, etc. when needed. With the right programs you can draw on maps and the like. The battery life will make it through all but the most lengthy of marathon sessions. And it weighs under 2 lbs.

I had a look at the DMGenie website that theEmrys mentioned above… It looks like a great resource! Does anyone know if something similar is available for 4th Edition?

As a player I don’t use a laptop at the table. All I have is my character sheet, a pad for some notes and the PHB

I have a question though. I would like to start using my laptop for combat tracking and stuff like that. What software is out there besides Excel, PCGen and HeroForge. Are there any that support Magic of Incarnum?

I generally allow players to have laptops with a couple of conditions. Those are space and whether or not the players having a laptop will add something to the game or take away from the game. If there’s no space, they’ll have to do without. If there is space, then as long as they aren’t taking away from other people’s enjoyment or derailing the game due to distraction and inattentiveness, they can have them. If it really helps them organize their characters and play them in such a way that the group has fun, then it’s worth it.

When I’m a player, it depends on the system, how many house rules the GM has, and of course whether or not the GM is cool with it. In general, I’ll keep it handy for D&D, but there’s certainly no need to have it around for Toon.

Yes. This too will sound like an advertisement.

HeroForge will automagically calculate all of your buffs, and includes just about every D&D 3.5 book that WotC has published.

So a 30th level Fiendish Half-Dragon Drow Cleric-Sorcerer-True Necromancer Lich with 8 magic items and 6 buff spells will have her stats calculated, and will properly adjust when she gets hit with a Dispel Magic.

(Warning, talk that may sound like product plugs to follow)

I use Microsoft OneNote to organize encounters, much in the same way as the tactical encounter format WotC was using near the end of 3.5′s run. I put stat blocks, a picture of the scene, and notes on tactics on a page and have everything at my fingertips. For tracking HP damage, I use a sum function in MS Excel, having the total turn red to let me know when the creature is toast. Using WotC’s dice-roller, I have not yet had to crack open a book while at the table and combat has sped up immensely.

I still track initiative on Gamemastery’s Initiative dry-erase board – too many people hold their actions or make other initiative-adjusting decisions for any of my computer tools to handle it at present. I’m also a big fan of Obsidian Portal, though my Ptolus campaign has not gotten as much attention there as some of the other games I participate in.

Regarding laptop instability, I was primarily referring to the issues that are unique to laptops. (In a past life, I did corporate laptop call center support for a large computer company based near Austin.)
- Heat management: I’ve seen how dusty some of your heatsinks and intakes are! Air is cheap; use it.
- Chip creep: #1 cause of laptop failure; easily fixed by reseating the memory.
- Sensitivity to drops or bumps: Yes, the new hard drive ‘drop sensors’ help, but a good bump can still hose a HDD.
- Auto-save of large or complex files. A laptop’s HDD is usually much slower than a desktop’s, and when Excel tries to auto-save your open spreadsheets, it can seem to lock up the entire system for minutes.
- Synchronization: When 80+ GB of “Offline Files” would try to sync over the wireless network, it would bog down my system to about half speed.

I’m already working on Part 2, and should have it by next week.

As far as a laptop being unstable, you must have been burned in the past, my friend. Running spreadsheets, looking up details in text files and flashing pics is old hat to most laptops, really low-resource stuff. With even a low-mid range laptop, you can do any of the things you mentioned without any real risk that you wouldn’t have playing solitaire (uless you use some dodgy third-party software to enhance your game, but that’s always downloader beware, isn’t it?)

I will admit that the distraction factor can be high. Sometimes I have to switch off my wireless so I’m not tempted to check on my email, facebook, etc etc.

Laptops have the down-side of being a terrible distraction at times. When more than one laptop is present, pornography is usually difficult for my players and me to keep away from.

The internet is a beautiful place.

On the player side, I imagine it would still be remarkably useful for D&D, even though I wouldn’t need as many materials. Right now, though, I’m a player in Mage. I don’t have PDFs of all the books which contain spells I use, so I still ending up hauling a bunch of books. Even with PDFs, White Wolf layout is pretty bad, and it wouldn’t be too easy navigating those files.

All that said, I still find it a useful tool to have. I type faster than I write, so I can be taking notes without eating up too much of my attention.

However, since my laptop runs Windows (Vista, unfortunately), I was thinking about making an alternate User account with a different desktop background and only desktop icons I would use at the table. Mostly shortcuts to PDFs or programs or whatnot. My laptop is my gateway to the internet and a great deal of my entertainment, if I’m staring at the same old backdrop with the same desktop icons (I’m looking at you FireFox), I’ll be tempted to StumbleUpon until I show my group an adorable puppy De-motivational poster (which would raise some questions since I’d most likely be GMing).

So maybe creating a “Gaming Account” specifically for the weekly grind would veer one away from the distractions of a computer, but be a computing tool for gaming. Just an idea.