Tabletop Aids

[Thurbane]

Modeling clay (for creating stuff)

*smacks forehead* I can't believe I never thought of that before, that's brilliant! I'm off to but a few tubs of Play Doh for my next game!

Another few things Im working on are think plastic or stiff cardboard cutouts of spell areas, as well as cutouts for mounts and wagons...

 

[Emirikol]

A clear plastic cutout for spell areas might be useful, however I've found the cardboard ones to be pretty useless.

jh

 

[Rokes]

Tact-Tiles - How I love thee.
Metal Miniatures - about 10% actually painted!
Index Cards for Initiative. These are preprinted with vital stats of NPC, Monsters and PCs. There's enough info to run characters that don't show up, and clear enough to highlight special attacks and qualities of monsters.
Scratch Pad - Nothing is more valuable.
ToB cards for the Warblade.

We've been toying with the idea of using a timer. Not just to speed up combat, but to a) force people to pay attention, and b) not let players overthink a situation. Comments welcome!

 

[kigmatzomat]

My main game tool is my Palm Pilot. Technically a Treo650, it stores my game setting in copious detail. If you're a PalmOS user do yourself a favor and get a copy of megawiki (http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=software.showsoftware&prodid=36156).
or palmwiki (http://pitecan.com/PalmWiki/index_e.html) Having wiki-like linking between documents makes organization so much better.

Add a die roller app, copies of the xSRD and I'm ready to roll.

At the table we use minis but I've found the clear dice boxes are the best prop. We use them to indicate flying people (since you can now "hover" over another character), odd magical effects, creatures targeted by blindsight, gelatinous cubes, wagons, horses, etc, etc.

 

[Emirikol]

We've been toying with the idea of using a timer. Not just to speed up combat, but to a) force people to pay attention, and b) not let players overthink a situation. Comments welcome!

We don't have that problem anymore. Players arent' allowed to talk to each other in combat unless it's in character or they're making a correction. NO player is allowed to tell another player what to do or advise them what to do unless it's in character (and during their turn). Plenty of players sit there and act like a football coach and take 20 minutes per turn. Yea. We banned that kind of unethical play.

The DM has every right to say, "OK, go. Not ready. Ok you haeve 4...3....2...1... OK, youre skipped."

jh

 

[Oryan77]

I don't think anyone has mentioned using those plastic pronged pizza protectors that come in the middle of your pizza when you order it. I went to Pizza Hut & asked for a bagful of them

I glued a couple on top of each other, 3 at most, and you can place minis inside them to stack them on top of each other for arial or underwater combat. Works good.

 

[ronin]

We use the large d6s we bought at Gen Con one year for "flight" dice. The number facing up is multiplied by 5' to see how high up in the air you are currently. If someone is so high they need too many d6s then we'll multiply by 10'. This has worked well for us, so well in fact we don't even use the little magnetic discs we bought last Gen Con to replace the flight dice.

 

[countgray]

checkers work really well for us to indicate flight and how high up. They stack nice and they are easy.

 

[dpmcalister]

I don't think anyone has mentioned using those plastic pronged pizza protectors that come in the middle of your pizza when you order it. I went to Pizza Hut & asked for a bagful of them

I glued a couple on top of each other, 3 at most, and you can place minis inside them to stack them on top of each other for arial or underwater combat. Works good.

I've got a selection of these as well. They don't get much use at the moment, but they're in my minis box

 

[Baumi]

A Tablet-PC might be expensive but it is awesome for taking freehand notes, pdf-viewer, die rolling and Note-tools!