Reducing clutter at the table?

[MadLordOfMilk]

I did my sheets up in Word. I just made them for my own use, so they're ugly as sin. Functionality killed form and left its stuff in the gutter.

The pdf and the doc files attached are identical - except of course for the fact that you can edit the doc!
-blarg

I like it! Thanks I'll probably end up coming up with something similar.

 

[blargney the second]

I'm glad to help!

 

[jmucchiello]

I bet you could get a lazy susan mechanism fairly cheaply at Home Depot or whatever, and combine it with a round tabletop and some sort of base. Trim your battlemat to fit, and I bet you get to this solution for less than $50.

Actually you are probably better off attaching some plywood to an actual lazy susan. It gives you some extra height and if the plywood gets chipped you can rip it off and attach a new piece far easier than if you were working directly with the mechanism.

Regardless, craft stores definitely sell the mechanism if they sell wood crafting supplies. (You have to look at something while the wife is looking at scrapbooking supplies.)

 

[Thasmodious]

As awesome as having a raised area in the middle of the table would be, my group rotates what houses we play at and even at times where in those houses we play. It'd be an awesome idea, but given how much variance we have in where we play it's not too viable an option.

Make a portable version. Get a flat, smooth square of wood a bit bigger than your battlemat and attach wooden planks about 6-8" wide with l-brackets on one side in an X or + (to make it stable and leave as much space up under the raised battle area as possible. This piece should be easy to bring by car from location to location and just sat down in the middle of whatever table you're playing on.

While my group plays at my house and doesn't move around, I did this same thing because I set up and take down my gaming table from week to week. My gaming room is also my other hobbies room, home office, PC gaming lair... I took a folding portable poker table and bought two smooth pieces of wood cut in the same octagonal shape as the poker table and clamped them on either side of it to create the tabletop. This sets on top of a regular folding legs card table. The raised platform described above goes on the tabletop, and comes back off for putting the whole thing away in a closet. The clamps come off for poker games. All in all, works quite well, and since the poker tabletop was a gift, it only cost me a few bucks for the wood, hardware, some sandpaper and some finish to do the whole thing.