Impressions from KotS

[legiondevil]

Best thing I ever bought was a Chessex battlemat and some wipeable pens. I would recommend this approach.

Seconded.

I personally have a 3' by 2' battle mat inside a poster frame (with the plastic pane front). I use dry erase markers to sketch out maps on it, and it works quite well.

 

[drothgery]

$30 is what the average person in America makes at a job after working nearly a whole day.

Err... $30 is just over a half-day's work at US minimum wage (albeit before taxes, but the taxes on minimum wage work aren't much, and are effectively negative or close to it if you're not someone else's legal dependent). Median individual income is over $40K/yr (assuming a standard 2000 hour work year*, that's $20/hr); median family income is over $50K/yr. So closer to two hours of work for an average guy (assuming the goverment's grabbing 1/4 of what he makes).

* That's based on 40 hours of work per week and 50 weeks a year.

 

[Family]

Unfortunately rules lawyers make considerbly less than their counterparts.

 

[LowSpine]

Jack Bauer overcame this little weakness by never sleeping.

I know how it does it. He replaces sleep with a little cry at the end of a busy day and he is all refreshed.

I don't know how he manages to go without weeing all day, though. Hang on maybe that is what he is crying.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Seconded.

I personally have a 3' by 2' battle mat inside a poster frame (with the plastic pane front). I use dry erase markers to sketch out maps on it, and it works quite well.

The frame is a neat idea. Don't know much about frame pricing but our group uses a large battlemap with a big piece of plexiglass laid over top. The plexiglass can be moved and a pre drawn, custom map easily inserted for very involved maps. We use the basic mat for common locations but a complex locale can be used quickly without stopping play to draw it out. You can also mark up the special map without altering the original.

 

[legiondevil]

The frame is a neat idea. Don't know much about frame pricing but our group uses a large battlemap with a big piece of plexiglass laid over top.

I picked up the poster frame for about 7 bucks at Kmart. It helps prevent my one big complaint about using battlemaps with covers...and that's sliding. Yes, it's easily corrected, but it's still annoying.

 

[prismra]

Thanks for the advice. I'm going to go with the 3' MEGAMAT. (That word was just begging for some emphasis).

Now all I need are a few more minis!

Spoiler

I'm looking at you, Blue Slime, Giant Rats, Kruthik adults and man with skull-topped scepter.

Sorry for hijacking this thread!

 

[Alkiera]

$30 will fill up my car completely with gasoline--and that's saying something with today's gas prices.

$30 will feed me, my girlfriend, and her son for lunch at a good quality restaurant.

$30 is what the average person in America makes at a job after working nearly a whole day.

$30 is what I expect to pay for the average full-color hardback D&D rulebook that is a couple hundred pages long.

$30 is not what I expect to pay for a softback adventure printed on tissue paper with smudgy ink and recycled maps.

Unfortunately, though, I did pay $30.

Where I am (western NY), $30 will buy my wife and I dinner at a restaurant, once tax and tip are rolled in. And by restaurant, I mean one step above fast food, aka the Family Diner.

Even at a cheap station, putting 10 gallons of gas in either of my cars is ~$40.

The kid who comes by to help with raking leaves and stuff makes $10/hr, tax free. Even at minimum wage, you can make $30 in 5 hours, after taxes. I've worked minimum wage, for about a year. The good side is you have lots of time to think, and work is pretty low-stress. Bad side is you have little-to-no money to spend in your copious free time. I now make... a fair bit more than that, but with stress and deadlines and overtime.

Heck, $30 is 3 movie tickets at a first-run theater; a nominal 5-6 person-hours of entertainment. You should get that from the first 2-3 encounters, and there's 20+ of them. Also, time spent hanging out with friends is priceless.

EDIT: Mats
I bought ~2 yards of a fabric that has a grid of 1/2" black squares on a white background, with 1" centers. I draw on it with washable markers, and it's big enough I can get half a large adventure's maps drawn out (or all of a big dungeon) before I need to drop it in the wash. It also folds up nicely to fit in my bag of gaming books. Looking forward to 4e, so I can reduce my book-load from my current 3.5/AE/Eberron game.

 

[Family]

That's why I insist on being paid in Astral Diamonds.

 

[77IM]

Hi pukunui, thanks for the comments!

I don't really get what you mean by this. By all accounts, 4e is a much more transparent and less fiddly system than any previous iteration of D&D. And what version of D&D isn't just a "wrapper around a Monster Manual", if I'm understanding that phrase correctly?

I wasn't comparing 4e to any other version of D&D; I was comparing D&D to other role playing games. My group plays all sorts of different games using many different systems, so I was trying to explain (to them) how D&D differs from other systems.

D&D has always been focussed on providing interesting+balanced encounters and I'm glad to see the designers of 4e put this as their first priority. If I, as the GM, have to make everything up myself, there are systems that are much easier for this. If I, as the DM, want to use a ton of off-the-shelf monsters, traps, terrain elements, etc., then D&D is definitely the best, especially now that 4e has such a good balancing system (in the form of the level-based monster construction rules).

Overall, I was very impressed with how well Keep on the Shadowfell embraced the goal of "make things easy for the DM."

-- 77IM