Laptops at the Gaming table: worth it?

[Blackfish]

Hello all,

I have some cash burning a hole in my pocket and have been considering getting a laptop(cheap, refurbished, $400-$500) to use at the gaming table. I am trying to think ahead of how much use I can get out of it, aside from having the srd at my finger tips and etools.

I'm not the most computer literate guy out there, so I'm not sure how much I could prepare ahead of time & use during the game.

I do plan to look into d&d insider eventually, but our current game won't be switching to 4e, so I am looking at straight 3.5 for atleast a year or 2.

I would like to know what some other DMs out there use there laptops for before and during the game. I'm not sure I'll have internet connection at the house we play at, so on & offline suggestions would be great.

Thanks ahead of time.

 

[Grymar]

I like using it as a DM so I have all sorts of resources at hand. Access to emails that we have sent, access to the wiki site that we have set up for the game (www.pbwiki.com), the SRD, etc.

I am NOT keen with players having laptops. It ends up being a distraction for them.

 

[Mark]

I like having the laptop at the table if for no other reason than to have my SRD 3.5 Revised (Full) Bundle handy. Being able to also have additional materials beyond what I am running, in case the group takes a left turn, without the group thinking I have had to utterly switch gears is a big plus. I like the game to feel more seamless and not too modular. That's harder to do when you have to sift through a bunch of papers or books rather than just glance toward a screen and casually tap a mouse pad a few times.

 

[Jackelope King]

When I ran games with my face-to-face group, I used my laptop as my "GM Screen" for the most part, since I have a lot of .pdfs of books and have gotten pretty quick at using search functions to locate problematic rules quickly. I also tend to be more organized with my files on my computer than I do with hard-copies, so storing NPC has been a piece of cake (though these days, I tend to use a wiki, see below). If you like to roll dice in secret, there's plenty of random dice rollers available out there for your game. I also love being able to punch in a really quick Google Image search and then flip the computer around to show people what an area or NPC might look like (especially if the character/place has a real world counterpart, such as the mayor of the city in our supers game looking like Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Since I've been gaming online more as my exclusive outlet these days, I've come to rely on online services more and more (as one might expect). One that I've found that I really like are free wiki servers that let you and your players have a shared space, extremely helpful for campaign setting notes and storing character sheets, since the whole group can read and edit them when they need to, and it provides a "safety net" where the documents will always be available. Barring that, you might consider a similar storage scheme with something like Google Documents. Being able to access a character sheet anywhere at any time is huge for those players who religiously forget their character sheets. (However, these last suggestions really are only worth it if your group is good at getting online and keeping their sheets updated... if your group isn't computer-savvy or doesn't like to look at character sheets between games, it's definitely not worth the effort.)

 

[Urlithani]

I am NOT keen with players having laptops. It ends up being a distraction for them.

This needs to be stressed. It's a BAD idea. We had 4 laptops at my gaming table once, out of 8 people.

 

[Morrus]

Over the years I've used one, then not used one, then used one, then not... at present I don't, and have no plans to change that.

 

[blargney the second]

When I'm DMing, my laptop gets used for the SRD, music, PDFs, and pictures.

 

[Corsair]

This needs to be stressed. It's a BAD idea. We had 4 laptops at my gaming table once, out of 8 people.

The problem is the players, not the computer. These are the same players who will be reading spell descriptions when they should be paying attention to role playing. I've used my laptop for years as a replacement for all of my books, as well as note taking and scratch paper. It is definitely useful.

 

[demiurge1138]

Personally, I don't like DMing from behind a laptop. I find it usually distracts me a bit too much. I still use it, though - off to the side, playing music.

Demiurge out.

 

[Zoatebix]

Robin Laws just started using one (read about his experience there), and I've been considering getting one.