Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 maplealmond Nov 01, 2009 18:44:00	I love the compendium lately.  Especially for monsters.  I'll constantly be grabbing stuff, and since I'm on OSX, I can use it from the web for standard monsters. Normally I have a few tabs open with the various monsters, and I can grab and print magical items with ease, which makes treasure handouts go smoothly. Here's a few basic things I wish the compendium had. 1.) The online printing needs styling.  Right now I copy-paste into my text editor and print from there.   2.) Some javascript to autoroll attacks would be brilliant.  Check on the d20srd.org monsters.  Whenever an attack says +9 you can click on it to get a roll, and whenever there's 2d8+4 damage, click on that as well.  It would be fantastic if the HTML output of the builder had a javascript parser. 3.) On that note, is it possible to get the monster data in a standard XML format?  Some kind of API?  Because that way various third party apps could use the compendium as a digital backend.  I would love it if the various third party initiative trackers could be given my user name, passkey, etc, and then grab the monster data straight from the compendium to import it into the world.
#2 poseidon88 Nov 03, 2009 15:22:49	Yeah, for some reason when you print anything from the compendium site, the style sheet doesn't carry over, so you get straight formatting tags like title, h1, etc.  I have no idea why this is.  It annoys me because I like to give my players little handouts with their magic item stats on them.  Right now, in order to make them pretty, I copy them out to word, and paste the text into a table to format it. WotC has intentionally made exporting of compendium data to XML a hassle because they think it will protect their copyrighted data from pirates.  They're wrong, but whatever.  There's a workaround using the monster builder Some apps you might want to check out (if you haven't already): The Adventure Tools Monster Builder will print or copy monster stat blocks with full formatting.  You can export custom monsters in XML format for importing to other tools (see below).  It doesn't take much imagination to realize that you can use the copy/edit functions to create exportable copies of any monster in the compendium. MasterPlan (www.habitualindolence.net/masterplan/):  I just started using this tool last week, and I love it already.  It's more intended for campaign management, but it has a slightly hidden feature that will let you login to the compendium web site, then it uses the cookie to download and import all of the stats blocks for monsters, traps, and hazards.  It's still just html, but they apply a custom stylesheet so it looks nice.  It will also import XML from the Monster Builder.  The built-in combat manager is still a little thin.  It will track things like conditions, but I don't think it automates attack/damage rolls in the way you're looking for. Dungeon Master Battle Screen (dmbattlescreen.com/): A 4e combat manager that's a little more full featured than the one in MasterPlan.  It won't download data from the compendium (yet) but it will import XML from the Monster Builder and character files from the character builder.  I really like the interface for this one, and the developer has been actively working on making it feature rich. There are several other tools out there, but these are the ones I've found most useful. I think a lot of these issues will eventually be handled by the upcoming adventure tools.  Expect to see things like a trap builder, item builder, and possibly an official WotC combat manager.
#3 Phobos Nov 04, 2009 13:32:13	Dungeon Master Battle Screen (dmbattlescreen.com/): A 4e combat manager that's a little more full featured than the one in MasterPlan.  It won't download data from the compendium (yet) but it will import XML from the Monster Builder and character files from the character builder.  I really like the interface for this one, and the developer has been actively working on making it feature rich.   You are my hero for listing this, what I use is good, but this is amazing!
#4 Marandahir Nov 17, 2009 14:51:29	The compendium could use Backgrounds.
#5 lucas_longthorn Nov 21, 2009 9:08:38	It could use negative filtering in addition to positive. Also, it should auto-distinguish between Rituals and Alchemy!