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Laptop DM - What do I need?
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<blockquote data-quote="drakhe" data-source="post: 1373122" data-attributes="member: 4930"><p><strong>Whatever you decied to use, just remember...</strong></p><p></p><p>Whatever you decide to choose, just remember :</p><p></p><p>As a DM, you will still need to invest time and effort to make any of these applications come through for you. You will need to prep just as before. And maybe even more then before as you have to make shure you typed every correctly. A program is only as good as the data you feed it! So yes they ALL speed up play! And no, they don't remove the need to prep! (having visions of tool X that does ALL in game calculations, has extensive campaign management, includes every feature of every currently existing peice of software AND has a library of campaign modules including all currently in print so prepping would just be an import away ;-) )</p><p></p><p>On a personal note, I bought etools, campaign suite, dmgenie, rpm, metacreator, fractal mapper and screenmonkey. At this time, I'm using etools as my official character sheet generator (specificaly because every one of my players has it) and dmgenie as in game tool. (the other tools I bought will receive due attention). First attention will go to screenmonkey as this will allow me to present my players with an interactive battle environment (the main feature I like is the dmscreen where a battle environment with fog-of-war may be displayed on a secundary monitor)</p><p></p><p>With regards to the tools I bougth, they all take time to get used to, they all have a learning curve (as does any piece of software, heck, anything new you buy will take time to get used to!)</p><p></p><p>What I find very weird (and this is a fenomenon I specificaly noticed concerning the whole mastertools/etools thing) is the number of people that complain about a piece of software (in the widest sence possible, not limited to the tools mentioned in this thread) because it doesn't do what they need it to do or does not contain all the features they think it should have. All software that is in one or other way mass-marketed (be it commercial, freeware, shareware, open license, or whatnot...) is per definition created to be usefull to a large number of people, hence specific/specialised/oddball features must needs make room for the most/more common features.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="drakhe, post: 1373122, member: 4930"] [b]Whatever you decied to use, just remember...[/b] Whatever you decide to choose, just remember : As a DM, you will still need to invest time and effort to make any of these applications come through for you. You will need to prep just as before. And maybe even more then before as you have to make shure you typed every correctly. A program is only as good as the data you feed it! So yes they ALL speed up play! And no, they don't remove the need to prep! (having visions of tool X that does ALL in game calculations, has extensive campaign management, includes every feature of every currently existing peice of software AND has a library of campaign modules including all currently in print so prepping would just be an import away ;-) ) On a personal note, I bought etools, campaign suite, dmgenie, rpm, metacreator, fractal mapper and screenmonkey. At this time, I'm using etools as my official character sheet generator (specificaly because every one of my players has it) and dmgenie as in game tool. (the other tools I bought will receive due attention). First attention will go to screenmonkey as this will allow me to present my players with an interactive battle environment (the main feature I like is the dmscreen where a battle environment with fog-of-war may be displayed on a secundary monitor) With regards to the tools I bougth, they all take time to get used to, they all have a learning curve (as does any piece of software, heck, anything new you buy will take time to get used to!) What I find very weird (and this is a fenomenon I specificaly noticed concerning the whole mastertools/etools thing) is the number of people that complain about a piece of software (in the widest sence possible, not limited to the tools mentioned in this thread) because it doesn't do what they need it to do or does not contain all the features they think it should have. All software that is in one or other way mass-marketed (be it commercial, freeware, shareware, open license, or whatnot...) is per definition created to be usefull to a large number of people, hence specific/specialised/oddball features must needs make room for the most/more common features. [/QUOTE]
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