This little application is designed to assist Dungeon Masters in running Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition combats. It’s based on two concepts I use in my game, numbered chips (instead of miniatures) and blank business cards to track battles.

Current version VCC 0.20

Virtual Combat Cards will track the following:

1. Health
   • Damage
   • Temporary Hit points
   • Healing
   • Dying
   • States (Bloody, Dying, Dead)
2. Initiative sequence, including
   • Determining Initiative
   • Ready action
   • Delay
   • Turns taken
   • Combatants in reserve (those that can enter the combat)
3. Provide an area to write down notes on the creatures conditions

Virtual Combat Cards Version 0.20 is out and includes several improvements to the previous version. The main feature is that it now includes a Party/Encounter editor. You can edit and add combatants directly to the battle with no need of editing files. Defense scores is now used in the tracker. Several minor improvements are also included. Visit the download page to get it.

Virtual Combat Cards version 0.20 includes a simple encounter editor. With it you can create encounters and save them to a file or add them directly to the combat sequence window. It also allows you to adjust other information of combatants in ongoing battles.

The package you downloaded includes three sample party/encounter files. These files define the combatants that are taking part of the battle. These are simple XML files, you can copy and modify them to setup your encounters.

To load one of these files simply select menu: File > Load Party; choose one of the files and click open. As an example load party.xml and enc-c1.xml. All combatants will be in Reserve, until you roll initiative.

This is the first version of the application, but there are some plans of improvement. Among them are:

• Undo of actions (so that you won’t regret clicking the wrong button)
• Recording of Actions (this could allows playback for debugging or analysis)
• Including options to edit combatants and parties
• Automatically track conditions
• Apply damage en-masse (for area effects)

If you wish to contribute to the development of this project use this forum for ideas on improvements and new features

Virtual Combat Cards (VCC) was created to replace my real combat cards. These were blank business cards that I used to register HP and other information to run my D&D 4th Edition battles. This is a method recommended in the Dungeon Master guide. I also use numbered chips made of Cold Porcelain. This option is much cheaper than miniatures (though not as pretty), and the number allow for quick reference of each combatant. These two aspects are key to the current VCC design.

Virtual doesn’t have a built-in help system. While it is simple, some information is needed on how to use this tool. On the right side of the page, you have links to some pages exploring VCC usage.

We want to improve this, and contributions are welcome. If you have questions or tips you can post them in the Usage forum. We may move write-ups from there to the manual, so don’t be shy and tell us what you thing and need on the forum .

This application is written in Scala and runs on Sun Java version 1.6.0 on Windows and Linux, but should run on other platforms as well. Most Windows machines will have it installed. You can get it here Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 11

To install it do the following:

1. Download the program: Virtual Combat Cards 0.20 (4.1MB)

2. Unzip it to a directory of your choice;
   

Virtual Combat Cards(VCC) can help you run your combats, but in other to do this you have to create party and encounter files. For the time being VCC does not include a party/encounter editor. This page explores the syntax of these files and describes how you can edit these files manually. This process is not difficult. It involves copy and pasting and changing some attributes (or field) in a XML file.

The StoryEdit and StorySGML projects have changed names. We now call them BARD StoryEdit and BARD StorySGML. Most importantly the new web BARD StoryEdit has a lot of features and has been completely rewritten to include several nice features. This should create a much better visual and usage experience. The key features deal with handling different security accesses, and better handling of chronological information. We are still working to get it all the things working correctly. However we would like to start a Beta program to have some feedbacks in other to improve the product.