For Christmas some dear friends gave us a $100 Amazon gift certificate. We held on to it for a whole because we wanted to put it on a tablet we’d use for tabletop gaming. We wanted something large enough to comfortably read our many PDF games, so in the 10-in. (25cm) range and with enough memory; and we wanted to be able to play sound effects and soundtracks. We lurked on Amazon waiting for sales and also for enough free spending money in our budget.
Finally, a few weeks ago we decided on an Android tablet, the Tivax MiTraveler 97D16w, a 9.7-in. tablet with 16GB of Flash memory and 1GB of RAM, running on Android 4.2.2. We picked this one , and not the 10-in. model, because of its 0.744 aspect ratio (3:4), which is well suited to reading books while the 10-in. model had an elongated aspect ratio optimized for watching movies. Since I had an 8MB MicroSD card I wasn’t using in an old phone, I popped it in immediately to expand storage space.
While I use an iPhone for work, this was my first introduction to Android, and I still have much to learn. I’m currently collecting related manuals and resources, and I appreciate any good ones people can suggest.
I’ve also been adding apps related to tabletop gaming, but as usual it seems very hard to find ones that are not designed so tightly around D&D/Pathfinder as to become useless for other games. This post is intended to be a repository and mini-review for useful apps I find. Once again, feel free to post about your favourites! Here is what I have so far:
Gaming Tools Proper
Dice Roller RPG: Free, with small ads. It offers the classic 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-sided dice, plus two-sided (coin), 30-sided, percentile, and Fate dice. You can select the number of dice and the modifier to apply, and even roll combinations of different dice.
Fate Dice: Free, with small ads. Another dice roller. Offers a graphic roll of four Fate (a.k.a. Fudge) dice, that’s it. Displays well in portrait format, but shows only three of the dice in landscape mode.
Fiasco Mobile: $1.99. This is SO worth the two bucks! It puts all the basic official Fiasco playsets and a large number of fan-made ones at your fingertips.
RPG Initiative Manager: Free. This initiative tracker was built for Pathfinder, but it can be used fairly easily for a number of other games. It does not show in my list of open apps if I switch to another while gaming, but when I reopen it from the desktop icon, it’s still in the right place and has kept all my info. It lets you enter character names, initiative modifiers, and initiative dice rolls for each encounter; you can then click on “Next Turn” to update the dice rolls. It sorts the list in order of highest to lowest initiative every time, and saves sessions.
Sound & Multimedia
Sound Effects Soundboard: Free, with small ads, and a nag screen asking you to rate the app every once in a while. I believe there is a paid version that offers more choices of sounds. There are multiple categories such as “Animals,” “Weapons,” “Vehicles,” etc., each offering multiple sound effects. Most effects are very short, a few are surprising long. You can pick up to nine sound effects you want at your fingertips at any one time and assign them to shortcut buttons, which is probably enough for several scenes. Seems to display only in portrait format.
Syrinscape Tabletop RPG Sound: Free, with two or three free soundscapes; a paid version offers many more choices of soundscapes at $4 per soundscape or $20 for packs of six soundscapes. Each soundscape is an extended track, like in a video game, each comprising multiple segments or “moods” that offer different atmospheres, such as “Something’s Out There” or “The Battle Is Joined.” Moreover, each segment includes multiple sound sources like “Distant wildlife” or “Battle music,” with mixer sliders so you can adjust each component to suit. You can save your custom moods. Finally, I like that when you switch from one sound to another or just turn it off, the app transitions smoothly. If you like playing with sounds and having a custom soundtrack, this is really neat and the purchase of extra sets probably well worth it.
Skype: For virtual face-to-face gaming, though we have yet to use it on the tablet.
Reading & Writing
PDF readers: I tried a number of PDF readers; I’m not sure I’m settled on this, but I’m currently using Foxit. It seems faster and easier to use than many others, although it doesn’t give access to advanced features like the ones in Void Star Studios’ Nova Praxis RPG.
Google Drive, of course. It’s my most used collaboration tool.
Dropbox, also very useful to share documents and images.
The Reef 