Herald Combat Tracker

You know the moment. "Roll initiative!" — and then three minutes of "wait, who's after the goblin?" while you shuffle index cards behind the screen.

Herald ends that. It's a standalone Windows app built for tables that play in person: you run the whole encounter from the DM screen, and your players watch a beautiful, always-current display — turn order, whose turn it is, and their own party's health — on a second monitor, a TV at the table, or their own phones.

For the table

• Live player display — a big, readable turn order with the active combatant highlighted, a round counter, and a "holding" strip. During combat it also shows a party status board: each hero's HP bar, temporary-HP overshield, and current conditions at a glance. Drag it to any screen.
• Phones & tablets join in seconds — start the built-in LAN server, players scan a QR code, enter a 4-digit code, done. No apps to install. Nothing ever touches the internet.
• Real dice, your way — type in rolls from your own dice, or use Herald's built-in 3D physics dice on whichever screens you want.
• Character portraits — drop in art for each hero (and your monsters); faces show up on the turn banner, the initiative list, and the party board.
• Secrets stay secret — hide monster names ("Large creature", or "???") and reveal them on your call. Monster HP is never shown to players — no numbers, no "bloodied." Hidden info is stripped before it ever reaches a player's device.

For the DM

• Two rule systems, switchable per party — fifth edition and Pathfinder Second Edition (Remaster). For fifth edition you choose 2014 or 2024 rules per party, and surprise handling, long-rest hit dice, and edition-correct monster stats all follow that choice. For Pathfinder: Perception-based initiative, alternative-skill initiative (Stealth, Deception, and the rest), fortune/misfortune, adversaries-win-ties.
• Full combat, not just turn order — track HP, temporary HP, and conditions on every hero and monster. Deal damage by type and Herald does the math: immunities, resistances, and weaknesses applied automatically for the clear-cut cases, suggested with one-tap accept for the conditional ones ("nonmagical", "from silver") — and you can always override the final number. Fifth edition's halve/double and Pathfinder's flat resistance/weakness values are both handled correctly.
• Spell slots, in combat and out — a pip panel for slot casters, named per-day pools for innate casters, and the same tracking available on a character's row outside of combat too, so downtime casting and combat never disagree.
• Rests, in each system's own terms — short and long rest for D&D, Treat Wounds for Pathfinder, and a camp view your players can watch between fights.
• Prepared encounters — build a fight ahead of time and save it; start it with one click on game night, resolved against your current characters and bestiary.
• 788 creatures ready to roll — a full 5e bestiary for both 2014 and 2024 rules, plus a Pathfinder core creature set, all built from the open SRD with attribution in the app. Type "Goblin ×8", check Group for one shared roll and one slot with per-goblin defeat tracking, and go.
• Your monsters too — add homebrew in-app, or import Open5e / 5e-API / Herald JSON with skip / overwrite / keep-both conflict handling.
• Real initiative rules — Alert, Jack of All Trades, advantage sources, surprise, holds (delay or ready behavior), mid-fight reinforcements, tie rules per system, and a full session log.
• Undo & crash-safe resume — reverse the last damage or heal exactly, ten deep; if the app or Windows ever closes mid-fight, relaunching puts you right back where you left off.
• Backup & restore — export everything into one dated file, restore it any time, with your prior data always kept as a safety copy.
• Your data is yours — everything lives in local files on your PC. Buy once, own forever, play in a dungeon with no Wi-Fi if you like.

Pairs with Herald Pavilion Control Center

Putting scenery, maps, and video on the table screen too? Herald Pavilion Control Center stages this player display as one of its sources, so you can flip between the initiative board, a battle map, and a cutscene with one click. Each is sold on its own; neither needs the other.

Try before you buy

Herald Combat Tracker Demo is free: everything above, with encounters capped at 5 combatants and without remote phone/tablet displays (the second-monitor player window still works). If it makes your table better, the full version is one purchase.

Windows 10/11. Herald is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or approved by Wizards of the Coast LLC or Paizo Inc. Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC. Pathfinder is a trademark of Paizo Inc. This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.1 ("SRD 5.1") and the System Reference Document 5.2 ("SRD 5.2") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.1 and SRD 5.2 are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.