Crappy hand-drawn beats downloaded photo / artwork every time

[Sunseeker]

I think lets use "simple" instead of crappy, everyone's gotta start somewhere right?

I think for a lot of "simple" quick drawn stuff it conveys more pertinent information than more high quality and detailed imagery.

The players are capable of imagining a beautiful ornate mechanical clockwork mechanism just fine in their hand. The quickly drawn image of it conveys that one of the gears is broken, and that's all the information it needed to convey.

 

[Eltab]

Tangent:
To help set the mood for one session, I told the group I was going to read a poem. They groaned because they thought I meant "I'm going to read a poem I wrote myself".
I used a historical poem from the Revolutionary War - a pastor gives a militant sermon in church - as short-hand for an Order of Paladins inspiring their members before marching off to war.

 

[pogre]

I find myself particularly attracted to hand drawn maps. Not necessarily "crappy" ones, but there is something very cool about a hand drawn map that I cannot quite capture in the digital media.

It is probably just nostalgia...

 

[woonga]

In addition to hand-drawn aids for the players, I'm also a big fan of empowering PCs to draw their own stuff. When I DM in-person I like to throw down a big sheet of butcher paper over the entire table for PCs to doodle on. It's awesome not just for seeing how they envision their own characters like someone else mentioned, but I've had some go so far as to doodle out the session in real-time so we're left with these great hand-drawn comic recaps.

I also really like having players draw out maps of environments as I describe them. We play mostly ToTM, but for combats having a sense of relative positioning can be helpful, so players will draw rough layouts. This ends up leading to very cool emergent moments when they interpret things differently than I've envisioned them, giving me opportunities to adjust on the fly to incorporate their vision.