The DM Tool Kit project aims to provide several quality-of-life services for DMs to reference during sessions. It's currently a work in progress, but as more time passes, more features will be added! This is essentially me knocking items off my DM wishlist.
In an ideal world, you would host this on a server and connect to it, but in reality you're probably running this locally. You can install all the required dependecies using poetry (poetry install) and then run the server by running wsgi.py from within the virtual environment. Then, navigate to localhost:8080 in your web browser.
DMToolKit includes a initiative tracker to use during combat rounds. My biggest issue after using multiple trackers online is that none of them seemed to allow you to view the statblock of a creature alongside the initiative list. As someone who frequently references statblocks during combat, this was really annoying! I decided to roll my own, and this is the result.
Alongside statblock rendering, the tracker also has the following features of note:
- Renamable Creatures
- I use this to give nicknames to enemies based on their mini's differentiating features. If my players are facing a trio of goblins, I can use 3 goblin minis with different weapons and nickname each statblock in the tracker with the weapon on the mini; i.e. Sword, Whip, and XBow
- Automatic Initiative Rolling
- Because we already have the statblock information for every creature, we can dynamically roll initiaitve for all creatures with the appropriate modifiers!
- Encounter Saving
- DM's can set up their encounters ahead of a session and quickly load them up if/when their players trigger them. This helps streamline combat during a session as you aren't wasting time adding in a bunch of enemies to the tracker.
- XP Totalling
- The tracker keeps count of the total XP to award for each encounter!
- Persistant Players
- You can input specific players to your encounters and have them persist across encounters.
- HP Calculation
- Nobody likes mental math. When editing the HP of a player/enemy, you can simply type +/- before the amount to add/subtract and let the tool handle the calculation. If you need to explicitly set a creature's HP to a specific value, it's easy: just don't include the +/- sign!