In my DnD group we've always tracked initiative on a white board, and it's always been a pain in the ass. We'd write down the names of everyone in the encounter, take note of their initiative scores, rewrite the whole list in order, and then we'd do all damage calculation by hand. It took way too long, and was always very anticlimactic. We'd be rushing through a cave to some epic music and, at the peak of excitement, the DM shouts "You're greeted by 5 viscous ancient dragons!!" and then we'd have to pause for 5-10 minutes while we fumble around with our white board, and even then the encounter itself would be a bit clumsy as we haphazardly try to figure out damage and whose turn it was.
No more! Now there's a tool which will do all of that for you! (though soon after finishing this program I found out there are dozens of free mobile apps that do the same thing...)
This tool is Object Oriented, and it keeps track of Mob objects in a linked list.
Here is a screenshot:
Clicking the bottom 3 buttons creates popup dialogues that you can use to enter the information.
Here is the code:
Main.java:
GUI.java
Mob.java
There are some small limitations:
There is no healing button. What you can do instead is just enter a negative number for damage. I could have easily added a healing button with only a few lines of code overall, but I felt that it would clutter the UI a bit for something that is virtually identical to the damage button.
The program does not distinguish between NPCs and players. The only downside of this is that if a player "dies" then it doesn't prompt them to do their death saves. Hopefully your DM can pay enough attention to notice when the player is skipped in the order and just ask them to do it themselves though.