I made a thread asking if we can discuss third party products and such. The consensus was it's fine if you're not being shady by trying to push your own products.
The point of this thread is so DM's can share products, home remedies, and tips and tricks that have worked well for them. This can be anything D&D related, such as minis, maps, dice, initiative order, tracking combat, etc. Hopefully we can all benefit off the experience of others. Some ground rules:
o Please do NOT post anything you personally may profit from, or products of a company or seller that you are associate with.
o Please do not post any resource that is an obvious direct competitor to D&D Beyond.
I'm not trying to be preachy, just avoid any problems or conflicts that can get the thread closed.
I'll start.
1. One of my main challenges as a new DM is terrain. For example, I spent a good chunk of change buying a kit where you can piece together floors, walls, doors and such. What I found it is was very expensive for the amount of real estate you can build, and it was also very labor intensive. For a while I just scribbled with dry-erase color pends on a blank mat. While that give you flexibility and there's no prep time, it lacked any of the beauty and realism I was looking for. I appreciate theater of the mind, but wanted more.
Finally I ran across Loke Battle Mats. They have a ton of different map books with all kinds of different settings and terrain. One book will give you tons of options that you can just turn to, and often I get ideas from my campaign just by browsing through them. The quality is really nice and you can use dry erase them with no issue. Does anyone have a good resource for 3D terrain I can just place on top of them?
2. This is just a trick I figured out for running lots of creatures. Like if your players are fighting several rats, or if a druid casts Conjure Animals, etc. What I do is use numbered dice (as minis) to keep track of which one took how much damage. So, let's say a druid conjures 8 Velociraptors. I just get eight 8-sided dice, and number them 1 through 8. Now you can put each one on a sheet of paper, e.g. "V1, V2, V3...V8" Write their hit points below each one. Then your players can say, "I attack Velociraptor 3" and it's much more easy to manage.
3. Lastly, D&D Beyond has been an amazing resource. Being able to build characters so easily and super quick, access monsters in a searchable, filterable manner, essentially ANY information or rule you want to look up, it can be done in seconds without having flip through pages. If you're here I'm probably preaching to the choir, but I just wanted to give them kudos.
I am old school where we would use graph paper and would have a PC assigned as a mapper....then we moved up to drawing out maps on a rolled out map....
Currently, we use the roll out map which cuts down on costs of buying additional tiles, etc. I prefer that since I bring all of my sourcebooks and/or lap top to each session. It is an effective way of producing a visual tool for the plays along with about 6 boxes of minis for the players to use and have minis for the encounters....
I made a thread asking if we can discuss third party products and such. The consensus was it's fine if you're not being shady by trying to push your own products.
The point of this thread is so DM's can share products, home remedies, and tips and tricks that have worked well for them. This can be anything D&D related, such as minis, maps, dice, initiative order, tracking combat, etc. Hopefully we can all benefit off the experience of others. Some ground rules:
o Please do NOT post anything you personally may profit from, or products of a company or seller that you are associate with.
o Please do not post any resource that is an obvious direct competitor to D&D Beyond.
I'm not trying to be preachy, just avoid any problems or conflicts that can get the thread closed.
I'll start.
1. One of my main challenges as a new DM is terrain. For example, I spent a good chunk of change buying a kit where you can piece together floors, walls, doors and such. What I found it is was very expensive for the amount of real estate you can build, and it was also very labor intensive. For a while I just scribbled with dry-erase color pends on a blank mat. While that give you flexibility and there's no prep time, it lacked any of the beauty and realism I was looking for. I appreciate theater of the mind, but wanted more.
Finally I ran across Loke Battle Mats. They have a ton of different map books with all kinds of different settings and terrain. One book will give you tons of options that you can just turn to, and often I get ideas from my campaign just by browsing through them. The quality is really nice and you can use dry erase them with no issue. Does anyone have a good resource for 3D terrain I can just place on top of them?
2. This is just a trick I figured out for running lots of creatures. Like if your players are fighting several rats, or if a druid casts Conjure Animals, etc. What I do is use numbered dice (as minis) to keep track of which one took how much damage. So, let's say a druid conjures 8 Velociraptors. I just get eight 8-sided dice, and number them 1 through 8. Now you can put each one on a sheet of paper, e.g. "V1, V2, V3...V8" Write their hit points below each one. Then your players can say, "I attack Velociraptor 3" and it's much more easy to manage.
3. Lastly, D&D Beyond has been an amazing resource. Being able to build characters so easily and super quick, access monsters in a searchable, filterable manner, essentially ANY information or rule you want to look up, it can be done in seconds without having flip through pages. If you're here I'm probably preaching to the choir, but I just wanted to give them kudos.
Donjon: Random treasure, encounter, city, shop, npc generator
https://donjon.bin.sh/
Fantasy Name Generator: Random names for character and things, its massive.
https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/
I am old school where we would use graph paper and would have a PC assigned as a mapper....then we moved up to drawing out maps on a rolled out map....
Currently, we use the roll out map which cuts down on costs of buying additional tiles, etc. I prefer that since I bring all of my sourcebooks and/or lap top to each session. It is an effective way of producing a visual tool for the plays along with about 6 boxes of minis for the players to use and have minis for the encounters....
Hope this helps!
If you don't want to spend too much on 3D minis these look great:
https://skinny-minis.com/
This website has different levels of contribution available with quite a few for free:
https://printableheroes.com/
So, yea, I wanted to share the Donjon website, but Portential got off the first shot. It has a number of things you might use.
But I also wanted to promote The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, which may be purchased here:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/251431/Return-of-the-Lazy-Dungeon-Master
along with a number of other things.
Good luck and happy gaming.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt