So, after almost 2 decades I decided to 0lay DND again. Since I have been and always will be forever DM, I’ve been reading up.
I am very charmed about the idea of foundry (that I have a liscence to (what can I say, I’m impulsive)), but have no experience with.
So: DM’s and players that play locally: how do you play?
Do you do oldstyle pen and paper? Printed maps? 3d printed? Foundry for battle and the rest theatre of the mind? Weird combos?
Tell me and inspire me to navigate my fresh crew and myself through this new and perilous world.
Edit: did NOT expect so many reactions so fast here, loving it.
If we play in person, we mostly go with simple dry-erase marker on a battlemap. It is easy and flexible, although not very visually impressive
I do dry-erase markers on a battlemap, I use a laptop with vimwiki on it, I also hit tabletopaudio.com and play through a little bluetooth speaker. I don’t think I really have any other tools.
Roll20 as my VTT, but we do all audio and video over discord. My players all use dndbeyond for the character sheets, so we use the Beyond20 extension to bridge the two.
Maps mainly just for battles and bases, but I will sometimes use a roll20 map screen just to show an image to set the stage for theater of the mind. Lately I’ve been using Easy Diffusion to make some of those images.
I get my maps all over and make some (occasionally) with DungeonDraft. I’ve got a bunch of map and tile packs from DMs Guild, but I forget about them and search around for what what I need instead. I also always keep an eye on !battlemaps@lemmy.world, subscribe to Cze and Peku, and will search the the battlemap subreddits when all else fails.
For notes I started using Obsidian with my most recent campaign. Being able to link and query is handy.
I use foundry and love it. I’ve switched to PF2E but ran 5e on there for about 2 years. It works great for doing a lot of automation for you and you can still throw up a background image for TotM scenes. Definitely my favorite method I’ve tried for our virtual group. Though when we have In-person sessions we still use foundry with eneryone on laptops because it’s so much easier.
That last bit is one of my problems.
The gang is ALWAYS together for things like this, never remote.
And foundry is not really local friendly I think.
Foundry works fine at the table! Check out this article: https://www.foundryvtt-hub.com/guide/using-foundry-for-in-person-gaming/
Wow, that is an excellent article. I’ve been wanting to try and host an In-person game for a bit but the whole “8 laptops” thing is a bit cumbersome. I think there is definitely a viable solution there to let people play from the couch and just hot seat with a laptop while the game is up on the TV.
Foundry makes a great information hub, even locally. All your DM handouts, their character sheets and notes, bags of holding, etc can live inside it. No more “who has X thing?”
I usually have a couple of maps set up for global use. One is the world/region map and I move a toke on it to show where the party is. Journal entries are pinned to locations and I reveal them as the party learns info.
Then I’ll usually have a map set up as essentially their “planning table” with all the info relevant to the current events, images, etc.
It’s set up so that even if we are running a combat in another map, they can swap back and reference something themselves if they want. I can always draw their attention back to the combat encounter map on demand if needed.
Also, if you also run 5e-tools it makes life even easier. You can import all sorts of things from 5e-tools into foundry with no need to spend time re-creating spells and items and such
In person, paper sheets, wet-erase map. Sometimes we use figures. Most of it we just use our imaginations. If I wanted to play a video game, I’d just play a video game.
