Candid thoughts on pixels, polyhedrons, and paper.
Once a week we invite everyone over into our home to play D&D. Everyone just walks right on in, takes their shoes off and we sit down together for a good friendly game – hell my players don’t even knock. My gaming group has remained the same for some time now; my wife, my best friend, his fiance, his dad and his fiance’s dad whom both have been playing since their teenage years. More often than not on game night we provide food and beverages for everyone, and most of the time someone brings beer or something else to drink or eat, it’s communal and no one keeps tabs or anything and there’s never been a problem.
Everyone really gets along swimmingly and the party plays well together – they always manage to find a less than obvious way around things and I’m never prepared however good times always ensue. I prepare our campaign with heart and soul each week, I have no co-dm and I painstakingly set up our game to be as fun as efficient as possible, and I’m always looking for ways to bring the experience to a new level. I attempt to cater to my players needs and wants to achieve maximum fun for all.
I wish all of the above said was true, which actually it is mostly with the exception of one of those players. They are downright rude there’s no other way to put it, at first their demeanor was a minor snag in the flow of our game sessions. I can put up with a few comments here and there or shrug off the inappropriate mentions of my wifes breasts.
Recently I posted about going 3D with papercraft dungeons and dungeon tiles, another thing I’ve been playing around with lately is the idea of eliminating mini’s and maps and such and just trying to emulate my own Microsoft Surface setup without spending $15k. So last night I ran a session completely off of Masterplan, a very robust and feature filled app that you can grab for free. I hooked my 22″ widescreen up as a secondary display for the players, I know this is no “surface” like the fancy table, but I’ve yet to give this a whirl using a projector to put the images down onto a table (more on that next week).
I crafted a semi elaborate encounter prepared for them, complete with traps and multiple floors as well as dynamic line of sight as their markers moved around the ‘board’. The combat/initiative tracker is very very intuitive and makes short work of a lot of arduous DM record keeping. You can even display video-game style health bars under each PC and Monster that shows their hitpoints – transitioning from green to red as HP is lost. You can even ‘roll’ monsters saving throws for ongoing effects right there in the DM controls. I was prepared for the new apex of my tabletop experience, the holy grail of homebrew nerd-dom but I found myself feeling empty and superficial like I’d stolen the soul of ‘friendly game at the kitchen table’ right outta’ D&D.
