Hot answers tagged tools
30
My girlfriend and I have played 4E D&D and she is completely blind. Here are some of the things I did to help her out:
I obtained a PDF copy of the rules and copy/pasted enough of it so she could print enough of the core rules out in Braille. I also made a plain character sheet for her as well that was also printable in Braille.
I bought her a set of ...
25
The RPG Virtual Tabletop (VTT) site, particularly the links section, summarizes most of the known options. The most popular VTTs are:
Fantasy Grounds (Windows XP or later, DirectX 9.0+)
Gametable (Java VM, system independent)
Maptool (Java VM, system independent)
Roll20 (web-based, system independent, built-in voice/video chat)
Generally, people use ...
22
Any well written dice roller will give you perfect random rolls (well pseudo-random - the difference doesn't matter for gaming).
Some dice rollers are not well written, or depend on the underlying OS/language's source of random numbers, which itself can be well written or not.
The vast majority of the time you will find dice rollers more random then actual ...
20
This answer comes from a MMORPG-oriented roleplaying group, but it's a good one!
There's this technique called a character diamond. Basically, you choose four words that define the personality of your character: for example, my fighter Collin is modest, taciturn, gullible, and underwhelming. You're looking for things that don't overlap; the link provides a ...
17
The smaller sized Kindles aren't great for PDFs; they're a little bit slow and the screen size is a big issue for most roleplaying PDFs. I haven't tried the Kindle DX, but it's designed for PDF reading so I assume it would be better. However, you're going to run into trouble if you read a PDF designed for color.
I have an iPad, and it's a superb PDF reader. ...
16
One way which I've enjoyed from the Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Game is to use cards. Jot down each spell or item on a separate card or slip of paper. Each day, the wizard takes his/her allotment of resources from the card deck into his/her "hand". As s/he uses a spell or expendable, drop from the hand of cards for the day.
16
You're looking for Obsidian Portal.
Obsidian Portal is specifically designed to allow tabletop RPG groups to build their own internal wikis. The privacy options are apparently undergoing an upgrade right now, but if nothing else you can set the whole campaign as private, so that nothing is viewable to anyone except people you invite.
15
There is Dizzy Dragon's generator which has a variety of layouts and is oriented to Moldavy B/x D&D.
There is Donjon's generator which has D&D 3.5 and D&D 4.0 options. But the layout are strictly room and corridor.
Both create the encounters for you. Of the two Dizzy Dragon is the best.
14
I'd suggest getting some self-sticking felt and placing it on the shelves and the bottom. The felt is soft enough to minimize the clattering noise of dice, yet firm enough to allow the dice to continue rolling to the lower levels.
EDIT: as mentioned in the comments below, here is a place to find the self-sticking felt. Thanks to Stephen Furlani!
14
I am a legally blind 4E D&D player and DM. I have been playing for many, many a decade now. I have utilized several different approaches over the years.
• For dice: If the blind person has access to speech synthesizer software on a laptop, mobile device or other electronic medium, there are all kinds of compatible applications available. Mach Dice on ...
14
See my answer to What is a good combat tracker for D&D 4th Edition? for several common techniques.
We use stack-able 1" tokens (I cut them with a laser cutter), hand-cut translucent folders for non-mobile area effects, and pipe-cleaners for smaller, mobile effects like stances.
Another clever thing I've seen is all paper (download them at By ...
13
A clever, if ugly, version of status indicators used at my first DnD Encounters session cap rings I found a photo of the technique at http://slyflourish.com/three-cheap-4e-game-aids/:
I also found this - http://dapperdevil.com/index.php which includes a tray-style approach:
And a mini's approach:
UPDATE: I used a laser cutter to create some of my own ...
13
Battlegrounds hosts a table comparing popular virtual tabletop software. One of the comparison lines is whether it's "Suitable for offline use".
Based on the comparison, the best bet is MapTool since it explicitly notes that it supports dual map windows so that the player map can be moved onto an external monitor. The other entries indicate support for ...
12
There are some great answers here, but whatever you do, I would suggest keeping your system a secret.
Dont tell the players your system for tracking rep, maybe even keep from them the fact that you are tracking rep. Sure, they should be able to find out in game what people think of them (or at least what NPCs want the players to believe they think of them) ...
11
You might want Dizzy Dragon's generator. It does encounters and treasure, although no random encounters. The dungeons are generated from geomorphs, so the maps are more complex and interesting than the fully random versions. Each map will have some three dimensionality, with stairs up to some sections and so forth.
11
I print out my power cards as shown in character builder (9 per page), and then use a marker (candy, pennies, beads) and just place it on the sheet when it's used. For special powers (like dailies that can be used 2x per day or something) I just put multiple markers on them. Keeps things very simple. At the end of the day, I just eat... er... remove all ...
11
Fantasy Grounds is the one I use and the one I feel is the most polished. Most run on windows, and require that the referee be able to open a port as he acts as server. Most people couple these with a VOIP software with Skype being the most popular. But if you have your own server you have a lot more options as you can pick whatever VOIP software you like.
...
11
This is now possible.
I'm not sure when this was changed, but there is now an Orange House icon on the top of both the Powers and Feats tabs.
If you click the Orange house, an extra power or feat slot will be added and can be used for whatever purpose you desire.
If you click on the extra feat slot, there is a remove button at the bottom of the window ...
11
The irony games generator is long gone, as far as I can tell.
When it dissapeared, I started coding my own generators.
I guess they'd be better if I dedicated a bit more time to them, but at least they help me with my games (they might be useful for you too).
And if you don't like them, check my "about" page. I try to link to other people's generators.
...
10
First, only D&D Insider subscribers can download issues. However, assuming you are already a member, each issue is compiled into a single PDF after all of the articles for that issue are released, so you typically can't download a PDF of the current issue until the end of the month. Once all of the articles are released, a "Download Complete Issue" link ...
10
"Yes, but what have you done for us recently?"
We like numbers, as gamers. We like representing the world as modifiers to rolls. But social capital is both horribly represented and really well represented numerically. I'm going to quite happily refer to At-Will's excellent post of "Penniless but not Powerless" and riff from there.
They introduce reputation ...
10
My group handles this with Styrofoam squares and colored pins. You can use either random Styrofoam packaging materials or dinner plates to cut up into squares for creatures of medium size, large size, etc.
Define whatever color coding you like. For us,
Red = Bloodied
Green = Cursed
Blue = Marked
Orange = Quarried
9
All too often overlooked is Google Docs. It's free, instantly accessible without downloading or registration, and it includes multiple platforms for live collaboration between up to 50 people at a time.
Google Documents work essentially like cloud-hosted Word documents, and are perfect for character sheets, campaign logs, handout-type information, and ...
9
Computers and their kin are deterministic machines. They have no way for generating a pure aleatory variable.
However, there are a lot of very good pseudo-random number generation algorithms that generates a sequence of numbers where the correlation between a number and the next is so weird that a human being is unable to discern a pattern.
These algorithms ...
9
I've looked more than once for replacements for their tools over the last few years. I've found a couple of decent replacements for certain items at sites such as Inkwell Ideas, which has decent random generators for inns, cities, magic shops, villages and small dungeon maps. There are other good resources here and there as well to replace the tools that ...
9
Android
Spellbook - D&D 3.5 is a free app that allows you to lookup spell descriptions and create custom lists of your spells. It includes all spells from 3.5 SRD. Very useful.
PC
d20 SRD 3.5 Spell List is a free app (in Beta however) it lists your spells per day and allows you to organise them into ones known.
Spellforge is an excel based system for ...
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