Evan Bailey
patreon
Improved Initiative 3.8: Reaction Tracker
🕑 Added 2023-09-20 03:17:53 +0000 UTCHello DMs,
Hope you're well! Here's an update for Improved Initiative. I took some time off this summer, I hope you've all been able to play a lot of RPGs recently. I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3, and it inspired me to build this Reaction Tracker feature for the combat tracker.
You can enable the indicator on the Options tab on the Settings pane. There is also a Combatant Command (and Hotkey) you can enable on the Commands tab. A Combatant with a spent Reaction will automatically recover it when their turn begins.
This update includes various bug fixes, including a one in particular that affected some users on the Epic Tier Free Trial. If you've held off on pledging, now is a great time; new pledges can try Epic Tier for one week for free!
Comments
MuertenDM
I used ChatGPT for this the other day actually. Fed it an image and asked it to export in json and provided an example of a blank monster statblock from II. I was surprised it turned out so well!
Evan Bailey
Thanks for the feedback, always nice to hear that my work has boggled a mind or two! I'll see about adding this in a future update.
HoratioDrank
To be honest, it is really surprising to me that the status of reactions is not available on the player view. Knowing which characters and monsters still have their reaction available is an ESSENTIAL piece of information to planning one's turn. This...boggles my mind.
everett
I pray so. If it does bro I will actually cry. This would cut my work time in half if not more.
Evan Bailey
I would bet someone will have something like this working with ChatGPT within a year. I read today that their premium tier can ingest and reason about PDFs now.
everett
If somehow you ever do get it working you are the greatest hero to ever live.
everett
I feel that. I wish or hope someone makes one I have so many monsters and it's just like mannnnn I will go insane trying to copy and paste that many things over.
Evan Bailey
This is a cool idea, but I think scraping from arbitrary sources (e.g. PDFs) is a really tough challenge. The D&D Beyond StatBlock Importer works because it's not too difficult to write a script to read from a webpage, but a PDF is an entirely different animal. I'm not sure if anyone has built a PDF scraper like you're describing for other D&D tools, the closest thing I found is this module for Foundry, which basically just has you copy and paste the text out of the PDF yourself: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/foundry-vtt-content-parser
everett
Feature Request: could we somehow some day get an add on that lets it read pdfs and add statblocks from them? i have so many homebrew pdfs ive bought like the monster manual expanded among others that it would take me forever to try and copy and paste them all. im not sure this is something that could be done but if it could be it could save me an endless amount of time. as i probably have over a thousand monsters i could add but it would take forever to try and copy and paste them in. thank you for all of your hard work!
Zach Hunt
Feature Request: Could you add a second stat that can be tracked/displayed like HP, for Spell Points? My group is experimenting with the OVA system for an anime-inspired campaign, and it uses HP and Endurance where 5e just uses HP. Yours is still the best initiative tracker around, it just doesn't allow for tracking that extra stat easily, and I figured there might be other GMs that want something similar for any number of reasons. We don't need the field to be renamable, unless you feel like it. Whether or not it happens, thank you for all the work you put into this lovely tool :)
