Glorantha...drooool...iPhone apps for gaming...drooool...

While I devour my copy of the RuneQuest II edition of Glorantha: The Second Age (which is awesome!), I wanted to share the below link to a massively brilliant effort by Morrus at EnWorld, indexing the iPhone gaming apps available:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/274552-iphone-ipod-applications-rpgs.html

iPad and D&D - the enworld thread, and my take

There's a good thread going on at enworld.org right now about using the new iPad in gaming.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/271168-ipad.html

A few good ideas, to be sure, but I'm not sold. The iPad won't make reading PDFs any easier at the gaming table than a 10" net book - if anything things will still be shrunken down too much. Had they made the thing as big as apple's tablet-style laptops oh 5 years ago, this would be a slam dunk of a device. But at the size of a large iPhone, I really don't see this changing things all that much. One idea posted on the thread that was neat was laying the iPad flat and putting minis on it, but in practicality being able to use a real - much larger - actual battlemat seems to be more useful for combat in rooms wider than 5 squares by 7 squares or so... (and if you're playing 3rd or 4th edition d&d, those scenarios will be rare at best...)

No native support for a camera or SD card for PDF's... That's kind of the piece that seals it for me. I like the idea of integrating technology with gaming - heck, that's the point of this blog - but this device seems like form over substance for me, as it relates to my hobby.