The DM's Laptop: what should be on it?

[Buttercup]

For running your game at the table, DM's familiar is absolutely the best thing I've ever seen. It doesnt' have any generation capabilities, it doesn't have any fancy mapping programs, but it does keep track of everything needed for an adventure.

The combat boards are fantastic, the ability to drag and drop NPCs and Monsters into a battle at any time, and the quickly searchable reference are all so cool it'll change your DMing style.

Does DM's familiar allow you to enter custom classes? I looked at their website, but couldn't find any information on this. I use Monte's alt.sorcerer, so the fact that the SRD sorcerer is in there wouldn't help me a bit.

Anyway, it seems to me that I might be able to get by with just Word, Excel and a dice rolling program. And Acrobat reader, of course.

So what other suggestions do you folks have?

 

[Buttercup]

Email me, please...

Should already be in your in-box.

 

[Sam Witt]

>>Does DM's familiar allow you to enter custom classes? I looked at their website, but couldn't find any information on this. I use Monte's alt.sorcerer, so the fact that the SRD sorcerer is in there wouldn't help me a bit.<<

DMF doesn't care what the classes you use are. It tracks information for you, and displays the information in incredibly useful ways. It doesn't do calculations (though it will perform attack rolls with the modifiers you feed it when you enter a character or monster in the database), it helps you track the information you have.

Download the demo and try it out - with a very little practice I think you'll find it makes a huge difference at the table.

Sam

 

[ThoughtBubble]

I'm about to run my first game using it this friday.
The programs I'm planning on using are just microsoft word and excel. Word has my NPC names, orginizations, and adventure notes. Excel has stats for the NPC's and monsters, a space for combat notes (HP, AC, initiative, saves, and spot/listen checks), and finally an xp chart.

I'm looking forward to the list of responses on this too.

 

[The It's Man]

A picture of the Hot Italian Beef-couple as background .

Internetconnection and a bookmark/favorite to enworld.

 

[rounser]

MyInfo - Much, much better than a word processor for storing campaign notes, because you can organise notes in a hierarchy and access them with a couple of clicks.

Jamis Buck's NPC Generator and Jonathon Jacob's NPC Equipment Generator - Until replacements for these come out, 3.5 won't be as user-friendly as 3E.

Arr Kelaan Software's Hexmapper - Good for creating wilderness and world hex maps in minutes.

Autorealm - I've found it particularly useful for mapping urban areas and dungeons which don't fit a grid of 10 x 10 ft squares.

Graphics tablet - Not software, but works great with the mapping programs if you can justify the expense. (I had one around already.)

 

[Gnarlo]

Second the recommendation for DM Familiar. Was a godsend during my face to face games, and even now that most of my gaming is online, it works wonderfully to help get me organized and keeps all my info easily sorted and right at my fingertips.

/gnarlo!

 

[The Kender]

-Campaign Suite
-PCGen
-OpenRPG

 

[Crothian]

Internet Arcana

 

[Nifft]

-OpenRPG

Woah! It does Hex maps, and it's written in Python! I think I'm in love...

-- Nifft