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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 1959826" data-attributes="member: 20741">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:<img src="http://www.dladventures.com/gallery/public/project_2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />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.<img src="http://www.dladventures.com/gallery/public/project_1.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> 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:<img src="http://www.dladventures.com/gallery/public/project_3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />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.</blockquote>

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