What to put on DM laptop?

[cougent]

I am preparing an old laptop to use as a DM resource for a new game I am starting. I have used a computer as an OOG resource for years but have never brought it to the table before. So I am looking for some insights from those who have done this already. What are the best resources to have loaded, and where can I get them? (Preferably free or cheap) Do you use an electronic dice roller or still use dice? (I like the sound and feel of dice myself, but I can see the advantages of an electronic dice roller for secrecy) Do you use Ebook PDF's? I am not even sure what else to ask, just looking for advice on a good setup for this poor machine. As i said it is old: Toshiba Tecra 8100 P3, 850 MHz, 256MB ram (upgrading to 512) and a 12 GB HDD (another possible upgrade fairly cheap) but aside from the 5 minute boot up for XP it is not too bad. All positive suggestions will be appreciated.

 

[szilard]

• mp3s of background music
• reference images to show players
• the SRD in a hypertext format
• e-books
• random generators (like these)

That sort of thing,

-Stuart

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Are you planning on having an internet connection available when you play? If so this might widen your options a bit. szilard's suggestions were pretty good. A hypertext version of the SRD will be incredibly useful. Looking things up should be much quicker than looking things up in the PHB or MM (although the MM should still be kept handy for showing players pictures or for reading out the monster descriptions.

Some pictures, whether it be of NPC's, monsters, buildings, etc., might be useful to show PC's. Some DM'ing software to help you run combat, keep track of PC's, etc., could also be handy. Most of what's available does cost a bit though.

Other than that, I think that szilard has covered a lot of it.

Olaf the Stout

 

[cougent]

There should be an Internet connection available. The location of the game has WiFi and I have a WiFi card but have yet to actually connect to make sure. I could always drag my 100' cat 5 cable along just in case

Thanks for the above suggestions I will start with those for now.

The DM software is something I want to get anyway, but am not sure what / which to get. I have used Etools in the past to create characters / monsters / races / weapons / treasure but with it being essentially dead now I hate to start with it again. I have played around a little with PC Gen but am not proficient with it yet. Without (hopefully) starting a whole software debate here, does nay one have any suggestions from personal experience of products they really like?

 

[Nyaricus]

Here's a thread with tons of good naming sites. Can never have enough names for NPCs

cheers,
--N

 

[beldar1215]

I use DM's Familiar. It is a very good program, IMO. Check out the site for more info. http://www.paladinpgm.com/dmf/

Beldar

 

[XCorvis]

You NEED access to a searchable SRD. http://www.d20srd.org is good if you're online. A non-searchable version is OK, but you'll waste a lot of time poking through links if you don't know exactly where the thing you want is.

I use a laptop but find it much more fun to roll actual dice, so I wouldn't recommend a die roller for regular usage. That said, if you're tossing a lot of 10-die fireballs and such around, it might not hurt to get a programmable die roller to do some of the heavy lifting for you.

 

[sjmiller]

If I were to use a laptop at the table, and frankly I just don't see that happening, here's some things I would put on it:

• Copies of PC character sheets (we use either eTools or Timpani).
• Character sheets and/or combat data sheets for NPCs and monsters.
• Electronic version of adventure maps (and a map tile index of my SkeletonKey Games map tiles).
• My notes on the adventure and the world in general.
• Some form of either the System Reference Document or ebooks of important books.
• Treasure lists for encounters.
• Some random generators (names, npcs, treasure, etc.) just in case my brain fails me.
• Notepad or Word or anything to allow me to take notes.

You know, that's about it, really. I don't understand the whole background music thing, so that is not an issue. I hate electronic dice rolling. I cannot really think of anything else I would need. Most everything else is something physical that won't work on a computer.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I use my laptop for games - I travel to run, and a laptop is much lighter than all the books I'd have to carry!

On my laptop I have:
-Wireless connection for all the names, generators, etc I can use
-Soverlier-Sage SRD (offline as backup, online as well)
-copies of my D&D folder info - session prep notes going back all the way to session 1, all NPC character sheets, etc.
-Initiative tracker (self-made, simple Excel sheet with Macro to resort order when needed, much faster than using notecards, which was the old method).

I print out my current session notes since its faster to refer to those in game - I don't want to spend my time looking at the laptop screen, as I've seen some DM's struggle with that.

 

[Oryan77]

I use a laptop now when DMing and it's great. Here's what I usually use the most on it:

-Winamp, to play my stored list of MP3 background music
-Excel, to keep all of my campaign notes on, including a list of NPC names I generated and copied into the sheet.
-An XP Encounter Calculator, found a downloadable version on the web. It tells me what the ECL of an encounter will be and what the xp would come out to.
-Adobe Acrobat, to view any pdf files of books that I have (if you can get pdf versions of your books it is very helpful)
-Internet Access, wireless is good in case you need to search on the web.
-Scanned copies of the PC character sheets for my own reference
-Etools, I mainly use it to generate quick NPCs and for the dice roller. The dice roller is a backup only, I still use my real dice.

There's plenty of other things I have installed on it but I don't use them much. They seem like they would be great but I just don't have the time to really use them. Dundjinni is an awesome maping program. PlayerGenie & DMGenie seem like great programs but they are pretty complicated. I would also LOVE to buy a video projector and hook it up to my laptop to use it as a battlemap