I loooves me some Dungeons and Dragons digital tools! My online campaign revolves around them. We’ve seen before how I take full advantage of my setup to maximize available workspace and (attempt to) stay organized at all times while DMing online.

Recently, I came across a new tool that helps me, as the DM, organize and manage my encounters without having to click through several screens worth of info that I just simply don’t use.

Behold! The DM Encounter Helper made by “Insideru”, a D&D enthusiast seen on several message boards.
(Click all the pics for an enlarged version)

And that’s it. Just unzip and run the application. Nothing to install. There are no other screens. Quick and simple. Let’s check out a pic of it fully populated and in mid-encounter. Keep in mind, this is just random data I  made up. Numbers may not add up or be realistic.

Woo. What can we see here? This encounter pits our PCs, seen on the bottom, against 4 magical ceiling mounted Crossbows of equal stats. Crossbow 1 is already taking 5 ongoing fire damage. C3 is bloodied, marked, and blinded. Crossbow 4 is toast, Jamlamin and Belgar are both bloodied. The Initiative order is on the right hand side.  Everything is right there. No screens to flip through. The colored boxes next to the end of the Crossbow data are a big help. The blue one is used to copy Monster data from one creature to another. So if I wanted to have a 5th Crossbow with the same stats, I could click the [+] sign there and drag the blue box down to the blue box of the new blank field..and BLAM! This works great for minions.

Since the players keep track of their damage and HP, I only need to be concerned with the baddies. When they take damage, I simply enter the damage value in that blank box and press enter. The damage dealt is subtracted from their current HP and a new current HP value is shown. If they are bloodied, the program knows and colors their current HP red. If dead, its black and they are moved to the bottom of the Initiative list separate from the others.

For status effects, right click the orange button and choose what you want. To remove an effect, right click and and de-select the item from the list.  Right click on the gray area in the program to bring up a basic menu allowing you to load and save an encounter as well as some log options. Oh. You can also set it Always On Top.

Check the “Keep PCs” box before hitting the Reset/New button to remove only monster data. If you’re interested, you can enter the XP value for each monster and the program will calculate XP per PC for you.

While there are some limitations as to how many monsters/PCs you can have listed, I now fully rely on this program for helping manage my encounters.

To grab the program, hit this link:

http://www.czaralex.com/dmeh_v0.5.0.zip