i4e – Review

Our rating:

By: i4e

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2009-09-17

Developer: Cordax Software LLC

Price: 3.99

User Rating:

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If you know anything about me, you know I love me my gaming. Most of all, I love traditional tabletop roleplaying, including the genre’s juggernaut representative, Dungeons and Dragons from Wizards of the Coast. When I’m not dropping rocks on player characters for every insubordination in my own game, I moonlight as the wizard Archael Anaiis, a mage so powerful, his name is intentionally difficult to pronounce. Well, Archael is a first among my D&D characters, in that he’s never been on a character sheet; not a paper one, anyways. He was born and raised in a character sheet replacement app called i4e, and he’s only the first of many.

The fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons introduced us to characters with mounds upon mounds of information. A basic first-level fighter could expect to have four or five different exploits, all with different damage values, keywords, attack bonuses, and other special effects. Keeping track of all this information would require a lot of writing, or continually referring to the book. All of this besides your character’s other stats, such as class features, ability scores, feats, defenses, resistances, saving throw bonuses, trained skills and associated bonuses, and so on.

Well, i4e handles ALL of that. It’s a comprehensive character sheet replacement tool that not only records all of your character’s vital stats, but also allows you to update those stats easily, and to track resources used over the course of an encounter or the adventuring day. Using up an encounter or daily power grays it out, so you know you can’t use it again until it recharges. When you hit a milestone, i4e gives you an Action Point and increases your item daily power allotment by 1. When you take a short rest, i4e recharges all your encounter powers for you, and of course, when you take an extended rest, it resets everything.

But it doesn’t just track stats, it also helps you calculate your bonuses to hit and damage based on keywords and ability scores. It automatically incorporates the half-level bonus to your attack rolls, skill checks, and ability checks, and it has a myriad of fields in which to enter all your miscellaneous bonuses for any given value. The level of automation is impressive, but it doesn’t override manual input. Almost everything in the app can be manually set to any given value, to account for feats, class features, or house rules.

i4e can also import or export characters in .dnd4e format, allow you to build a character on WotC’s Character Builder, and then track the character’s condition, abilities and resources dynamically on your iPhone. I have yet to find any reason to go back to using paper character sheets, and my printer is thanking me for it.