DM Minion for 4th Edition

★★★★★ Extremely good app for the modern DM As someone who is more a tech-savvy DM than a lot of people I hang out with, this app is amazing; Encounters took only minutes to set up, and all the monster stats and abilities are right at your fingers, instantly available. Those fiddle things like status and initiative are now very easy to follow, as are player abilities, so you can answer your player questions on their abilities, and know when a player may have already used their daily. Intuitive and easy combat flow through, saves on having a lot of clutter around the DM area, which incidentally also seemed to send chills up my players' spines, since they couldn't very easily see what pages I was flipping to in the manuals. Love the Dropbox interface, too, since it means that my games are safe, even if my device is destroyed. Also makes it easy to switch between devices, if I need to borrow a friends' laptop or tablet for the evening. Only issue that I am having is that, Google Play won't let me put it on my new phone, even though it supports the recommended resolution, but I can't fault them for that.

★★★★★ Good app This is really solid for running encounters, but I have a couple of suggestions. Mainly, it would be great to see monster powers and descriptions at a glance without having to tap through each one. Even just including the full list of powers with descriptions in the stat block would be a huge help. Also, I've noticed that when monsters have secondary movement speeds (such as flying or burrowing) they don't show up in the stat block. I've had to look those numbers up in the books during combat, which kind of defeats the purpose. Otherwise, great app!

★★☆☆☆ Went from Great to Worse I've been running a long campaign, and suddenly it looks like crap and acts even worse. Problem 1. Now the notes section has all the notes piled on top of each other from all the different encounters, so you can't make heads or tails and when you select one to edit the content (or read it separately) the window doesn't have word wrap, so you have to scroll over with no scroll bar to use. And even then it's not able to reach the end of my notes. Problem 2. As I'm entering conditions it won't let me select the player the condition ends with. Problem 3. Removing HP during combat has become very finicky, and it's easy to add double the amount of HP causing you to slow down the game to redo what had to do in the first place. Problem 4. You can't remove monsters from an encounter while you're playing it. And number 5 the one that ticks me off the most is the cheap look it has now. If you're going to add graphics make it look more high end. I find them more distracting than anything. The black simple look worked great and far less distracting. I think a little more work is needed before the next update.