Rolling initiative in groups?

WampusCat43 said:

Question about your use of Maptools - do you use miniatures, and put halos around them, or use digital representations of the combatants?

We use a projector with the miniatures, which is awesome, but it does make it hard to tell individual minion-types apart. Moving the halo and the figure wouldn't help speed, though.

Click to expand...

Ah, that would be an overhead-projector. We use an actual screen-projector, with the map, minis, and everything projecting on a blank wall, the players sitting around it in beanbags and me in the back with the laptop controlling everything... they will throw their die on a coffe table in the middle and call out their moves ("move me two squares to the right and hit the priest", etc) and I'll perform it for them.

You'd think this turns into 'more work for the DM' but we've actually tried physical minis and board and it turns out a lot less hassle for me this way for some reason

I threw in a screenshot of what a fight might look like to illustrate (players can't see the stats in the corner though). It's is also cool because it lets me track all kinds of states easy, for example the yellow triangle on the screenshot means that kobold's been Divinely Challenged by the Paladin below him.

Anyway, thanks again for the tips, will definitely be using them