I may be telling you something you already know, but I had no clue they sold this until today. I went to Office Depot to get some back to school stuff for my kid and they sell an Easel Presentation Paper pad, with 50 sheets of paper for 20 bucks. But the sheets are huge!! And best of all, they come with a 1” Grid on them....
(They are for presentations with charts and stuff)
I picked it up and quickly copied some KOTS maps over to it with a crayon, the paper is big enough to fit the encounters on one sheet. I plan to use this from now on, no more printing and joining tiled sheets of paper for me.
Sorry if I’m telling you something you all knew… it’s new to me…
Ha ha cool, I did not know that. I need to check it out so I can try to put some encounters on paper. I am yet to play with a group yet, and I have been messing around between paper grids and VT’s (MapTool is the only one I have tried really) and I cannot decide which is better.
I like the feel of actually having the tokens and the grid, but having it on a computer is very convenient, especially when you can just make the computer tokens and then hook up my laptop to my tv. And I use my laptop anyway for keeping track of health and other status’s on the characters. Excel spreadsheets are just too easy, I made a little basic sheet and then fill in names and all, and I can even keep track of what I do in rounds so I can read over it later.
So in summary, computer easy, but hands on is more fun
I’ve seen those sheets. They are big. But they are expensive. At least, they are at Staples. Maybe they need to get an Office Depot in my area.
What I did for my last dungeon crawl was put together Mageknight tiles for the various areas, and as the PCs got to that section of the dungeon, I put that section of the tiles on the table and tiled it with the previous section.
I’ve seen those sheets. They are big. But they are expensive. At least, they are at Staples. Maybe they need to get an Office Depot in my area.
What I did for my last dungeon crawl was put together Mageknight tiles for the various areas, and as the PCs got to that section of the dungeon, I put that section of the tiles on the table and tiled it with the previous section.
I’ve seen those sheets. They are big. But they are expensive. At least, they are at Staples. Maybe they need to get an Office Depot in my area.
What I did for my last dungeon crawl was put together Mageknight tiles for the various areas, and as the PCs got to that section of the dungeon, I put that section of the tiles on the table and tiled it with the previous section.
Isn’t the Mageknight scale off though?
I think it’s close enough that I can consider each MageKnight tile to be 10 feet by 10 feet. After all, most of the dungeons are not precision-engineered to exact specs.
I used a gridded easel pad last night for my game. Predrawing maps is rather handy. Plus, you can keep copies of previously used maps in case the players ever want to return to Location X. The one I got at Office Max was about $15 and has 50 pages. The only issue I’ve had so far is storage--they’re huge, they dont’ fold or roll up, and I don’t really have anywhere to hang it.
That’s the one I got, but at Office Depot they are 20 bucks…
I put mine next to my water heater tank in the closet… it’s the only spot where my wife won’t throw it out!
You could try placing it behind a dresser, couch, under a bed, etc etc
It shouldn’t take up to much space in an area like that, and you can just have it tucked out of the way until you need it.
Might even be good place to hide it from any unwelcoming spouses too
I’ve considered getting a projector (like they use at schools) and getting the attachment for them that you can hook them up to a laptop. It basically looks like a screen you put over the projector and then what you have on your PC displays on the projector. Its very poor frame rate but that doesn’t matter one bit for this use. It also doesn’t have stellar resolution but for simple maps that should be fine.
I think the advantages such a setup would offer would be quite nice. You could setup maps on your PC with various mapping tools and not even have to set it to a grid. You could just use a white grid on top of a table for the grid. To set this up properly you would need to have a mirror mounted above the gaming table to reflect the projector image to the table but I think this setup would be really solid. Anyone ever tried anything like this?
I haven’t seen it personally but I know penpaperpixel.org talks about it and DnDnerd.com has some archived articles about it if you look with some pictures of the process
I personally have been thinking really hard about this concept and have been talking it over for the last few weeks with my group. I don’t think it would even cost that much compared to even a few years ago.
*Edit: I looked on craigslist in my area and found a few projectors in the $200 range. I don’t know how much mounting is, but it can’t be much more. That is not bad for what it is.
You know...with as many tech ideas that have been flowing around here perhaps it would be advantageous to create a seperate section for this stuff. Maybe we could even put together a shopping list of different items that could be used. Hrm. *rubs bear*
Depending on how you mount it (what kind of ceiling you have plays a pretty big part) it could be REALLY simple if you were in like a basement with the ceiling supports still showing to still not that hard in just a regular ceiling. But if you do do this in your house you kind of have to ok it with the family cause it doesn’t really seem like an option to just have it easy to take down. At least the brackets have to stay unless you got really into it and rigged some way to attach them and detach them (like some sort of slide or screw-in function (and yes I just giggled typing screw in, I am officially 7 )
All depends on how much work you wanna put into it, but I do not believe rigging would be expensive if you just kept it up there. I’ll look around in a bit and post some ideas later tonight that I find. This would be a great idea with a regular F2F group that always plays on the same table and don’t move around a lot.
I found this image at one of the links Chad posted. (
