This would have been so freaking handy when I was in high school.

Dungeons & Dragons isn't the easiest game to lug around, thanks largely to its reliance on heavy hardcover books. D&D Reader, a new app from Wizards of the Coast, endeavors to fix that by letting you access all of it from your smart device.

Basically: It's Kindle, except you can only use it for D&D books.

Plenty of ardent fans have picked up PDF versions of different books over the years. The Reader app is a bit more robust than that, however, to make hunting down a piece of information easier for the rules-heavy game.

Each book is broken up into different sections. So with, say, the Player's Handbook, you can tap on little thumbnails in your library to check out the introduction, a step-by-step guide to character creation, a rundown of races, individual sections for each character class, equipment, and all the other pieces that, together, form the D&D Player's Handbook.

Once you're in a particular section, you can swipe left and right to turn pages and swipe up/down to scroll through whatever page you're on. Tapping the screen brings up a master list of all the pages in that section, as well as a button that allows you to favorite whatever you're reading.

Say, for example, you create a human cleric as your character. It might be helpful to favorite both the Basic Races and Class sections of the Player's Handbook for quick and easy reference whenever you're playing.

It's worth noting that some of this stuff is completely free. Even if you don't own the Player's Handbook, you can still look at the sections that teach you about character creation, basic classes, gear, ability scores, combat, spellcasting, and all the other sort of ground-level features that everyone needs to understand in order to play.

Similarly, the app lets you purchase any paywalled parts of each book piecemeal. If, for example, you'll only ever care about rolling a bard, you can just buy that. Prices for individual sections are $3 or $5 (depending on what you buy) and the three full rulebooks -- Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide -- are $30 apiece for everything.

A Wizards of the Coast rep told us that the cost of these full books gets pro-rated if you end up buying one or more sections before deciding to purchase the whole thing.

Overall, the app is quite a bit more user-friendly than scrolling through a 100-plus page PDF. The ability to single out favorite sections promises to make shuffling through pages and pages of documentation significantly easier, as does the app's built-in search feature.

You'll find out when D&D Reader hits Android and iOS app stores this fall.



