DMing from a Laptop

[Steel_Wind]

Our entire group uses laptops at the game now. Characters are on them as well as seldom referenced rule books.

With usually 6-8 laptops chugging away, the noise is rearely an issue, but the gaming room does heat up.

The biggest thing I use my laptop for, however, is projecting our maps for use on to the tabletop during play.

These three pictures should suffice to explain how and why and how amazingly cool this is:

1. The first is our DLP projector our gaming circle got off of ebay. It cost us $600 CDN for 1024x768 and close to 2000 ANSI Lumens. Resolution is excellent, brightness is fabulous. It rocks!

We have it set up over the gaming table like so, using a portable pole and suspension rig:

With this hooked up to my laptop, I can display any map, have it fully scrollable in game, mask down areas and reveal on the fly with TableTop Mapper, lay down animated spell effects, what have you.

No map to print off. My color ink level has never been higher.

The miniatures just go over top.

In this shot, I did up a quickie random encounter zone (wilds, winter area) in the NWN toolset in about 1 minute, then had it ready to go for use in play. I didn't skip a beat.

Of course, my pre-planned encounter zones and dungeons are more detailed and more time is put into them ahead of the gaming session. You can scan any map from a module or Dungeon mag and display it for this purpose as well.

So that's a taste. We dimmed the lights for these shots. Let me assure you, it is extremely bright to use in normal lighting during a game. We don't even bother with a white projection surface - it's bright enough we just project over our old brown Megamat. With a white surface, it's *avert your eyes* bright.

Megamats and overhead pens? Pre-assembled dry erase tiles? Forget it. That's dinosaur tech.

And one more:

We got this for our group at the cost of about 2.5 hardcovers per player. Best gaming money I ever spent - and it's not even close.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

That is just awesome.

 

[Mark]

We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

 

[IronWolf]

Now that is awesome! ::hastily plotting how to talk my gaming group into a similar setup....::

 

[nopantsyet]

That...is....so...cool.

I will have it...

When I have a house with a dedicated gaming room, that is.

(sigh) One can always dream, can't one?

 

[BlueBlackRed]

Ok, I have a new goal for this year...
I've been wanting a projector for my PC...but never even thought about putting it on the table...

I'm going to go cry now.

 

[Mark Oliva]

- Where do you put the "adventure" (event and location descriptions)? Word? Other?
- How do you manage NPC's and Monsters? Excel?
- How do you manage (unidentified) magic items?
- What about maps (for you)?
- What about visual aids (for the players)?
- What other programs/aids do you have installed
- Do you use a Dice roller instead of dice?
- Do you still use a DM's screen?

As the game master, I have all of my adventure material in bookmarked PDF form. It was one of the best things I ever did. I can get to whatever information I need in seconds, even if my PCs unexpectedly teleport to a city they were in a year ago all the way across the continent. At the most, it takes opening a new file within Acrobat and mouse clicking the bookmark.

I maintain PC and campaign data with an Access database. Its background tables calculate everything for me and reduce hours of work into a few minutes of data input.

The PDF bookmarks take me to the info on unidentified magical objects.

My campaign is completely mapped with Campaign Cartographer 2 Pro from ProFantasy Ltd. The maps have game master and PC layers, so I can quickly print two different versions of the same map. At present, my maps are on paper, but the idea of using a projector (above) is interesting.

I sometimes scan pictures and photos as visual aids, but not often. They're on paper, but again, a projector could be interesting.

I use a freeware die roller, but I don't know what or from whom it is anymore. It has no menu option for info or any other identification it. But it works well. I use it exclusively and never roll dice anymore. The die roller is much faster.

I made my own version of a game master's screen as an HTML file with hyperlinks to the different types of data. Again, it's much faster than paper.

 

[Umbra]

The biggest thing I use my laptop for, however, is projecting our maps for use on to the tabletop during play.

Amazing!

What do you with the mini's when you scroll the image? Move them all by hand so they are in the same place? Move the mat?

 

[Steel_Wind]

Amazing!

What do you with the mini's when you scroll the image? Move them all by hand so they are in the same place? Move the mat?

Just slide em over. No big thing.

It's not like we are playing a scrolling video game. You try to minimize the amount of scroll you do unless it's necessary. For most combats it is not.

But it's no biggie to adjust. *slide* done. Very intuitive.

What you do not pick up from the shots is that the grid lines from the underlying Megamat are still visible to use as measurement guides and the reference points within the projected art image make it very easy to move things if you do want/have to scroll. (If you need to mark a player's position - just drop down a waypoint marker in the toolset.)

Probably a better setup is to use a square grid Crystalmat lying over a white piece of foamcore for a more "high gain" surface. But this is bright enough we don't trouble ourselves too much.

The other thing is that when using NWN, you can use area lighting. So with a high gain bright surface, animated lights and torches and fire flicker show up clealy and dynamically in game on your tabletop. It's very cool.

I am going to create a number of proper sized animated 3d VFX placeables for spell effects so I can drop down a fireball, etc. in the toolset (this is not something you would normally do in the NWN toolset) Note, you can do this already with Tabletop Mapper, but the flames and firey outline stuff is very cool in game when you use the NWN toolset instead.

I must say that the NWN Toolset is about 300 times faster to use than Dundjiini is though and dynamic lighting wise, it looks *much* better. I bought Dundjinni Platinum to use with this projector, but I wish I had not. NWN is my preference - scanning maps is a secondary choice. I'd rather save the hours of Dundjiini map creation and put it into adventure design.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I had a real group six or seven months ago. By real I mean people physically gathering at a said location to game. The DM had a laptop and he was an avid fan of Dundjinni. He had everyones characters at his fingertips and had scanned up his core rulebooks plus some additional information. The only real 'tools' he used for roleplaying was a real set of dice. Everything worked out quite smoothly. Every game went smoothly and without problem.