Gaming Paper in use.

[darjr]

It is inexpensive. Just enough so that I don't mind ruining some of it in the process and throwing it away. It's just durable enough that I'll keep the maps I've drawn for later. I don't know if it's recyclable yet. I hope so.

Each roll is a 30inch 12foot roll.

It rolls up easy for transport and lays flat easy for play.

It isn't a big pad, the blank paper is just another roll that I can easily transport to cons and in store events and at a friends house.

 

[darjr]

I just went to amazon for easel paper and I can't find pregridded or hexed paper.

 

[darjr]

$11.64 - Easel Pads - 27 x 34 - 1 Grid Ruled - 50 Sheets-Pacon - home schooling - HomeschoolingSupply.com

A pad of 50 sheets for $11.64.

Anywhere else?

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Anywhere else?

I got mine at OfficeMax, I think. About the same price. (That is significantly cheaper than the gaming paper, right?)

Still waiting on those Dire Hula-Hoop stats, dammit.

 

[falcarrion]

the rolls are 4 bucks a piece. 30 feet for 4 bucks is a deal.

 

[darjr]

11.64 for 50 sheets at 27x34. Is the whole sheet 27x34 or does that include the 'tab' at the top?

The pad works out to what? 3c a square foot, the gaming paper to 13c a square foot.

10c is pretty good. I'll have to try it. I couldn't find any at my office depot, the only thing I could find had quarter inch squares and though the inch squares were a thicker line it all blended together.

The things I'll want are portability, rolling them up is the win, my battle mat is for that. Also I'll bet I'll waste more since it isn't a roll. They stay curled up at my side and stay flat when I unroll em.

Look in your 4e dm screen, the far right inside panel has most of those stats.

I so much want to talk about that session, that spicked avenger died the good death, kept his shaman alive to save the party at the end. Almost killed em all. Coup de grace for the win. And he wouldn't take the grandma clause.

 

[darjr]

Shipping for that pad is $13.63. I hope my office depot has it.

 

[Jdvn1]

Shipping for that pad is $13.63. I hope my office depot has it.

It looks like a sort of thing that a teacher supply store might have, too. It's worth a try, at least, if you can't find it at your Office Depot.

 

[Noumenon]

(1) What makes this stuff superior to the (far less expensive) easel pads?

I am running Castle Whiterock and the maps are very large -- level 3 is about 60 squares by 90 squares (300 feet by 450 feet). So it takes about six easel pads to draw out the maps, and you have to switch between them. (Unless you have room to spread out a five-foot by eight-foot map, and even so, how would you reach your minis in the middle?) So I thought gaming paper would do it in just two giant strips, each of which would be the width and length of my table.

Unfortunately, one roll of gaming paper is 144 inches long. Meaning I can make one 85-square map and then come up short at 58 inches on the other one. I thought the roll would be longer -- didn't really do the math.

The easel pad is 30 usable inches times 27 times 50 sheets -- that's 40,500 square inches. At 30*144 inches, Gaming Paper is 4,320 square inches, about 10% as much.

I personally paid $21 for my pad of office paper in Madison, so I guess it's like shipping was included. But note that Gaming Paper costs $8 to ship four rolls also. Say you get 12 rolls. Then the easel pad costs $21/40,500 = .051 cents/square inch and the gaming paper costs $56/51,840 = .108 cents/square inch. So it's just twice as expensive.

Switching between the easel pads is sometimes less of a problem than I thought when I bought the gaming paper. In dungeons, you don't always get in situations where the party should be able to see across the borders. You usually don't have enough table for more than one paper anyway. And in my last session, the party split up when the fighters were captured and the rogues slipped away, and we just cut back and forth between two maps: "Now, back to the interrogation room!" (whisk out that map from underneath and put it on top).

I guess my new solution is going to be just taping the easel papers together for big maps. I didn't think of that at first because I had planned to keep them all on the easel and just flip back and forth, but in practice they tear off in the breeze.

 

[Noumenon]

It isn't a big pad, the blank paper is just another roll that I can easily transport to cons and in store events and at a friends house.

I ended up ripping the maps off the pad, rolling them up and putting them in a $3.50 shipping tube from the post office. (I wish Amazon had just sent my gaming paper in a tube -- they sent two 12x24 boxes taped together, full of peanuts, and the roll still bent a little, which caused a row of crinkly divots all the way down its length.)

Either way, I dearly love predrawing my maps on paper instead of a battlemat. Look how much detail Chris Perkins puts on a battlemat -- why not do that in a form where a) you can reuse it later, and b) if your party decides to zig instead of zag, you don't have to erase it or set it aside for a week while the markers stain? And when you run modules with great, nonlinear maps like Goodman Games' DCC line, having the whole thing drawn out makes for zero load times, no telegraphing where an encounter will happen, and zero arbitrariness over who's in the trap radius.