Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SnowDog" data-source="post: 1212928" data-attributes="member: 2225">Hi all --I'm finally taking the plunge and going to try DMing with a laptop at the table.  I'm getting tired of balacing a 3-ring binder full of campaign notes, a published scenario, a photocopy of a map, a notebook, and whatever rules book I need ... all behind the DM screen.  Yeesh!What I think I'm looking for is a way to quickly get at 3.5E rules, including spells, monsters, and things like "how to turn undead" or "how to handle grapple."  I want a way to index through my own volumes of text, whether it's house rules or campaign background.  I want the PC's character sheets.  I'd also like something that handles combat rounds (initiative, ticking off spell durations, etc -- I don't want a dice roller).  I want to know the system is extensible enough that I can add my house rules and access them quickly, as if they were real rules.It seems like DM's Familiar is a leading candidate for "solving" this problem.  I've downloaded the trial and plan to use it in my next session, Tuesday.  I've grabbed as much 3.5E stuff as I can, I've entered the PCs, and I've downloaded the codex tree for the adventure I'm running (Banewarrens).  I've adjusted the stuff in the BW codex for what's likely to happen in next session.  I've tinkered with it, and except for a couple crashes and a little lack of polish, it seems like a decent system.So.  Tell me.  What else can I do to make this first session with this as smooth as possible?  I've thought about taking the scattered documents I have and adding shortcuts to them in various Codex nodes (instead of cutting&pasting into the nodes themselves, as a starter).To those that use it, what do you wish people had told you when you first started with it?To those that have used it, hated it, and are using something else, what should I be careful of?  What other products might I want to look at?Thanks for any responses!</blockquote>

Verification