Roll N' Write 4+

I really do like it a lot

But it is quite a bit buggy. I found this app mentioned on Reddit and came straight to the App Store and downloaded it because it is exactly what I’ve been looking for to play my games without the distraction of being on the computer. It’s a great concept, and it is useable, but not without some frustrating hindrances.

Pros:
it’s beautifully set up, I can navigate my pdfs from within the app, there is a side by side view with the journal so I don’t have to switch back and forth for reference. With the paid add on I can grab pages of my pdf to insert into my journal (this is the main reason I purchased, also for unlimited dice sets). It’s made to work with Apple Pencil, which is nice. The dice roller is nice as well and I love that it has a card deck feature with the option to upload custom cards but I have not yet used it.

Cons:
- there is no elegant pdf navigation. It would make life easier if I could input page numbers for navigation (especially when using pdfs that aren’t hyperlinked). As it is right now, it seems I must just scroll through the pdf until I find what I’m looking for. I did try using the page preview navigation along the bottom but that seems hit or miss, as I have tried to navigate pages with it and at times it does not respond.
- Sometimes when navigating between views/documents or, more specifically, toggling the dice roller sidebar, my artifacts I’ve loaded into my journal seem to disappear. I usually have to cycle to a different doc and then back to journal and they reappear, but that really puts a hindrance on my gameplay.
- my most favorite thing about this app, being able to write directly on my pdfs, is also one of the buggiest things.
— For one, it seems like the app when in dark mode inverts the colors after selection, so when I choose white, it writes in black and vice versa.
— the second issue is that writing with the Apple Pencil is laggy. Very laggy. Like almost to the point of unusable. It is not like this all the time however, even on one journal page with three artifacts and just a handful of other written characters on the page, I cannot maintain any sort of flow of writing without it lagging and I have to wait for the writing to render to continue.
— the biggest issue is that writing for any continued amount of time crashes the app. I will be writing some notes in the journal and all of the sudden the app lags then closes. This is borderline unacceptable, especially when the app has paid features.

Overall, I do love it. I want to use it and I will continue to try. I did pay for the additional features before I had really given the app a stress test. If I had experienced the issues above (most notably, writing causing the app to crash), I would probably have held off from purchasing until the bugs were fixed.

That being said, I love the concept, it is workable enough, but I really do hope the developer will look into these issues. I have an iPad Air 3rd generation that can run some intensive applications with no lag, so I suspect the issues must lie within the inner workings of this app.

Developer Response ,

Thanks so much for the super detailed feedback! Highly suggest joining the Discord and getting on the TestFlight as a lot of these items are already fixed. I’d love to get this review up to a 5 star and I’ll personally fix each one with you over chat!