It occurred to me after writing the previous post that I forgot one important App.
Some time ago, I used to play a lot of Pathfinder, and during that time there was an app called simply “Spells”. This was fantastic! one of my characters was a wizard and the app came filled with the rules for every spell for every class in the game. This was invaluable at the table as it saved a lot of time looking through books for a particular spell, and saved the paper and ink of printing out all the spells that the wizard knew.
As the app was developed more it started to include not just spells, but classes, weapons, and other rules too. this was great for reference, but due to some poor organization of categories, it began to slow things down. Unfortunately the App was not updated when the new “Ultimate” books began to come out, so it quickly became obsolete as many characters took spells, equipment, classes, etc. from the new books.
So sadly this excellent app died a tragic death. I still have it installed on both iPhone and iPad, but it rarely gets used anymore. This was a fantastic application that possibly reached too far in it’s scope. It was called “Spells”, not “The Rules”, and nobody expected anything more from it than that simple purpose. I suspect that when the new books started to come out, the developers were simply overwhelmed with the amount of new stuff they would have to put into their app. there were so many things they would need to update now that it covered not just spells but Classes, Weapons, Equipment, Feats, Traits, Combat rules, General rules, that it was simply to much work for virtually no return.
It’s sad when something like this happens. a great app was destroyed in the name of pointless progress, updates for the sake of updates. they could have built a separate app, all the same application framework, just with different info in it and a different name. I would have bought it. Instead they added so many “improvements” while ignoring their initial core focus, the app couldn’t support it’s own bloat and died. You can still buy it, and it can be useful, but not as useful as it could have been. I’m sure they were trying to do us a favor. giving us more bang for our buck, and that’s awesome of them to actually try and do that, but it didn’t work. And in this case, it’s not the thought that counts.
Never stop gaming!
Steve