Gamehackery: Eff You, Imagination!

You spent hours making it though...

Wouldn't you be better served playing D&D with something like the Neverwinter Nights construction toolset? You could build a 3d environment for that kind of effort.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

It started about 5 years ago when my employer issued me a projector.

It didn't take more than a few heartbeats from being handed thing before I was thinking about how use it for D&D.

What, you're any different? Ha!

That weekend I built an ugly contraption with modular crate/shelf frames and a wooden platform that would allow me to tilt the projector up at an angle. The other DM in my group one-upped me, purchase his own projector and suspended it from his game room ceiling. Within a week I'd made a few improvements to his design and suspended my projector from my own game room ceiling, and our projector-based gaming rolled on for years to come.

How I Knew I'd Arrived

I was running a 4e campaign set in Eberron. The PCs were in Stormreach, in the docks area, and a Tsunami struck the city. I'd spent hours with Maptools and Photoshop creating the map for the encounter. It included a wave in it's own layer that I could move in from off screen, have it close in on the PCs over the course of a few rounds, strike the docks, then draw back out as the water retreated again.

I could have used a row of dice, or a pen, or a line drawn and redrawn, or any number of things to represent the wave. I could have just described it and let my players imagine it. Instead I found an image of a wave, pulled it out of the picture it was in and cut out what I didn't want, gave it a transparent background and the imported it into Maptools.

(The Wave is a background graphic that moves -- it appears over the existing water and docks, but under the ships, crates and other objects)

My reward? One of my players looked at the wave as it appeared, pointed at it, and said "F*@K You, imagination!"

Sweeter words were never spoken to a gadget nerd DM.

How Far Would You Go?

Now we use a 50" LCD flatscreen TV laid flat. It's now the primary game space, a replacement for the projectors we've been using for years. And it's a huge step up. We've eliminated the fan noise from the projector, the need to dim lights in the game room to see the projected image.

We love it.

And yet, like the projected images, it's not always the best solution. Sometimes, a poster map still makes more sense.

Join The Club

If you're interested, there's not much to this. Take advantage of the Christmas (or post-christmas) deals and buy yourself a battlemat-sized Flat-Screen LCD TV. I won't discuss what you should shop for here -- here's a link to a thread from when I was shopping around.

The Real Question: Is It A Bad Thing?

You know you're out there, looking down your long noses at me, damning me for needing visual aids rather than being able to play the whole game in Theater of the Mind. Why not just play WOW?

And….. I don't want to say you're wrong.

I mean, you are, I just don't want to come right out and say it.

Everyone brings something different to the game, and we all go to different lengths to create the game experience for our players. You might stick to a simple battlemat for the tactical situation, but spend time planning background music for your game. Or you might develop accents and verbal tics for each important NPC to make sure they're living, distinctive characters in the story you're sharing with your players.

We all run our games with our own toolbox. My Tsunami was no better or worse than any other DM's treatment of an environmental effect in an encounter. The players had fun. I had fun. And in the end, that's the most important

So, what's been your biggest moment of success as a gadgety gamer?

 

[Radiating Gnome]

You spent hours making it though...

Wouldn't you be better served playing D&D with something like the Neverwinter Nights construction toolset? You could build a 3d environment for that kind of effort.

That's an interesting idea -- and as I recall the NWN Dm tools were very cool -- but our group still likes using minis -- we've experimented with using an entirely digital game, using Maptools with tokens for PCs and NPCs, but the players really didn't like it. I fear we would really struggle making physical minis work with a NWN-based 3d map.

-rg

 

[dd.stevenson]

I find that there *is* a definite cut-off point, where images do supplant players' imaginative visualization of the scene. Depending on the style of game I'm running, that might be acceptable or even desirable--but it's definitely an important thing to be aware of while prepping.

Personally, the best "bang for the buck" I've gotten with visual/audio aids is when they are used as punchlines to create an "aha!" moment. For example, awhile back I was running a solo game over chat. The player had rolled a barbarian and was cake-walking through one of Paizo's dungeons (I forget which one). So he comes to this smokey room and blunders around for a bit, and then I tell him that cold hands are reaching through the haze to attack him. He assumes he's got more zombies to hack to bits and he's pretty gung-ho about the whole thing. So I say nothing, but just send him a picture of the shadow he's facing. Dead silence. Then he's like "Um.... .... That's not a zombie. Is it?"

The other great use I've found for visual aids especially is when one character sees something that the others do not. Again, sort of a punchline situation, where the effects are a dramatic, shared secret between the player and the DM. The player then has to decide what to make of what he sees, and how (or whether) to relay that information to the other players.