Upgrade Sneak Peek: Combat Board, Part 1
As announced in the last newsletter, a major upgrade to DM's Familiar is in the works. Still not quiet ready to give an estimated release date but I can give you a sneak peek at some of the things I am up to. (Still haven't puchase DMF? Purchase today!)

Show below is the new and improved combat board:

The basic combat board grid looks the same as it used to (though the column widths remember their sizes now if you change them!). You do probably notice though that there is now a Board and Creature tab. First, let's talk about the Board.

Down at the bottom, you'll see some fields in red. These are the new reminder fields from the creature form. They remind you of all that important stuff that you need to remember for a monster but are always forgetting. Things like Reach, Spell Resistance, Damage Resistance, special saves, and such. You'll never forget a special ability in the heat of combat now (man, will your players hate this new feature!).

Those of you with really sharp eyes will notice that the Attack combobox looks a little different. The way you enter an attack in DMF has been completely overhauled - I'll talk about it more in an upcoming newsletter (your current data will convert to this new format automatically).

The "Creature" tab on the Combat Board now shows you info for the current creature:

I'm sure your eye immediately jumped to the "Buff" column next to the ability scores. That's right, DM's Familiar will now track things like Bull's Strength, Cat's Grace and other spells. Changes to these values get automatically taken into account with the new attack system. Sweet!

Next to that you'll see the notes field from the creature showing the Feats, Special Attack, and Special Qualities of the creature. This makes it easy to see the detail for a creature without having to open monster forms all over the place!

Next newsletter I'll talk about the changes to the attack system.