CONSTANT WORK LOSS AND CRASHES AFTER FUNNELING IN $$$ – Encounter+ Review

I want to love this app. I really, really do. It’s arguably the most professional, fully-featured suite for dungeon and campaign management I’ve seen on iOS or ipadOS. When it works well, it works great. But it has repeatedly taken hours from me. This breaks my heart. Especially since I’m on a fully-updated iPad 2018 running this at its latest version. I’ve funneled in countless hours adding maps, setting fog of war and lighting, meticulously drawing out the walls or setting floor tiles, writing in complicated encounters, and adding in my players’ character sheets, line by line (that alone is NO easy task). Speaking of, the save button for inputting info for a player character is right near the edge of a window corner—and I cannot tell you how often I’ve tried to input a full spell sheet only to try to save, tap barely outside the window, and watch it dump all my work. Today alone, it did that to me four times. I also spent nearly 3 hours drawing out the wall boundaries of a single large, round dungeon vault with maybe two dozen offshoot rooms. It kept crashing 15 minutes in when I tried to draw the same wall spot; it crashed once or twice on other spots while drawing these walls, usually scattering at least the past few minutes of work. I gave up, moved on, and came back to them and finally got it. I saved it appropriately, under two names even. I paused to put in a waypoint marker, moved it around—it crashed. This time, all of that work was completely gone. It remembered one filename (not the other) but had no info tied to it. I sat there, horrified, staring at 3 hours of work that had just been wrenched from me. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt a complete fool. That is the last straw. I have bought every in-app purchase; I have a premium account; I have been diligently trying to use this app for two months—even considering upgrading from Mojave to Catalina on macOS just to be able to use it there (which is a very recent change)—and it has consistently forgotten files or crashed or deleted info. I’m sure others don’t have these experiences, but I have faced the numb horror of lost work one too many times. The promise it offers has wasted far too much of my time watching or reading the sparse tutorials, manually implementing data and content, and far too much of my money. I regret pumping over $20+ into this mirage that has ruined countless nights of DM prep.
Review by Raizaiel on Encounter+.