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Ultimate RPG Gaming Table
Nyrath the nearly wise writes "RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons are traditionally played on a tabletop using miniatures. The problem is that the players are only supposed to see those parts of the map that they have explored. Gamemasters are reduced to drawing explored sections of the map on the playing surface with dry-erase markers or using cardboard tiles representing stretches of corridor. Some fellows have an expensive but elegant solution. They map out the playing area in a laptop using software such as Tabletop Mapper, which allows to game master to dynamically hide and reveal sections of the map. The laptop is attached to a 1600 lumen DLP projector mounted on the ceiling and projecting an image of the visible map onto the tabletop. The miniatures can then be moved on a dynamic map. The eye candy factor is vastly increased, gamemaster labor is reduced, and the players have more fun. The elegance is that this is an intuitive enhancement of the traditional gaming experience, instead of an unfamiliar new user interface to be mastered."
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Look, the table is cool and so are miniatures, but "traditionally?"
Yes, traditionally. D&D started out as a modified set of minatures rules (Chainmail). Why do you thin that AD&D (1E) had all ranges and movements in inches whcih were later converted to feet (which differed if you were indoors or out)? Miniatures were for sell at just about every place that sold D&D stuff. TSR put out lots of minis although I prefered Ral Partha. Warhammer started out as a game to use the minis that GW made for D&D. Not everybody used them, and they weren't required, but the game was still based on the concept of usign minis.
Back in 1980 when I got started in D&D we used miniatures. The tradition started when the original game designers expanded upon the game Chainmail which they were playing with miniatures.
;-)
So, just because you are an inexperienced first level whelp doesn't mean that the use of "tradition" here has any less meaning.
P.S. I moved on to the Hero System long, long ago leaving D&D in the dust.
The expensive part isn't the laptop (which you can now get for around $500.00) but the projector. The least expensive projector I've found is around $1,000.00 now but doesn't do a good job in bright light (such as is found in a house). Also, you have to have a halfway descent amount of room to play/project the pictures.
:-/
:-( )
I experimented (once) with putting the projector (a REALLY cheap/bad projector I found at college) under a plexiglass table top but the dice rolling on the table top was so loud it made playing unenjoyable.
However, someone gave me an idea on how to actually do this cheaply only not being an electrical engineer I never did it like they told me to. Maybe someone else would like to try it? The idea is to take a thick piece of cardboard (like that found in really sturdy corrigated boxes). Draw a grid onto the cardboard box or get one of those cheap plastic layers which already have a grid printed on them (but aren't so hard as to be like plexiglass). Depending on whether you draw or overlay the cardboard you go buy a bunch of those tiny leds for toy trains and such and put one in each of the squares (centered). Here is where the engineering comes in: You have to have all of those wires go back to some kind of a black box which has a cable going back to the computer. Using the computer you turn on or off the various leds. I was told it wouldn't be that hard but I tried a small board (1ft by 1ft) and couldn't get the electronics to work. It was cheap though. The lights cost only about $30.00. The piece of cardboard was about $5.00 and I just drew the squares. The closest I came to making the whole thing work was when I just got a bunch of on/off toggle switches at Radio Shack, mounted them on a metal surface, and just flicked them on and off in whatever pattern I needed. It worked ok. Probably a bigger area would look a lot better.
I have also been working on an idea where laptops are used. The central server is the ref's machine and everyone else uses their browser to move around in the game. (Unfortunately, I just wiped my entire hard drive accidentally. Bought a new hard drive but referenced the wrong one when I went to partition it. I'm looking at recovery software to get everything back. I have never been so despressed as when I realized what I had done. And yes - I have backups but the last backup was about two months ago.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
No RPG's aren't 'usually' played with figures. Those are called tabletop games. D&D isn' or wasn't for a long period either. Allthough D&D did originally start out as a pure non-RPG tabletop. That's why it sucks so much as a pen and paper RPG compared to pure RPG systems like Torg or hybrid RPG systems such as Midgard or Silouette.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In fact, the shadowing can sometimes be an advantage since you can often see things projected on top of your hands, which would be blocked in the rear-projection case.
The trouble is that most projectors require a minmum distance of five feet between the lens and the screen. If the projector was on the floor, the tabletop would have to be five feet off the ground. And of course the closer the projector is to the tabletop, the smaller the image, which is the exact opposite of what you want.
I suppose one could have the projector in the tabletop, bouncing the beam off a mirror on the floor, but now things are getting complicated.
There are more details here and here
You should be able to also get a ground/etched glass plate (could probably get tempered glass for safety) at a local glass shop for not too much. That would also provide a good diffusion surface to project onto.
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My players did not use miniatures in the early years. We couldn't afford them (the game stores were pricey for high school students) and there was no WWW to locate the lowest price retailer. However, as time has gone on and the immersive computer games have become more prevalent, players expect to be able to visualize the relationship of their characters to the world around them, and miniatures are a great way to do this. For those of you who play, how often in an encounter do you have players asking, "And how far away is Bad Guy #3? So he's 15 feet to the left and behind Bad Guy #2? From where I am, that means my view of him is partially blocked by Bad Guy #2, right?" And so on. Much easier to plop a figure down on a grid and say, "Here's what it looks like." Draw a line around the edge of the area and describe the line as "rough-hewn rock, looking like it has been clawed away by something big, because the claw marks start at the 9-foot height and drop down to about your kneecaps." Anyway, you get the idea.
Second, I'm one of the people who posted on Jans Carton's web site (TFA) as to how we run the game. Basically, I use a DLP projector onto the wall. Tabletop Mapper is too slow for the large maps I use for RttToEE, so I've started writing my own in C++ with Qt3. (I also tried http://www.openrpg.org/ OpenRPG 1.6.1 but had weird quirks getting it to work the way I wanted.) I'll post the GPL'ed source when I get it working fairly well. With my projector, the remote control can act as a mouse for a computer, so I'll just hand the remote to a player and tell them to "move their character where you want him". As much of the number crunching as possible will be done by the program, leaving the DM to concentrate on story and descriptive text.
I also have other props I use, such as HTML versions of papers found in a room, or pictures of monsters, or street maps of large towns and cities. As the characters explore them, sections are revealed and posted on the phpBB2 forum which hosts our game discussions.
And no posting here would be complete without mentioning http://www.dmgenie.com/ DMGenie and PlayerGenie. The one-man-show which produces this package does an amazing job! This program manages everything that a DM could want, although it is still a work-in-progress. The author spends plenty of time adding features. And it has a VBscript interface to allow end-users to customize things with scripts as a way to work-around as-yet-unimplemented features. This has been very successful so far. In summary, you thought playing D&D was geeky, but using a projector goes one better! And it has made our game run smoother during encounters, for the most part. YMMV.
Well, this is old news now but for what it's worth:
:]
RPGs as we know them certainly did evolve out of table top war games, but not necessarily chainmail. Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax, co-creators of D&D, had both been playing table top war games for quite a while when Arneson started to develop a very small scale version of the table top battles normally using hundreds of miniatures centered around skirmishing instead. Rules got more complex as the number of protaganists decreased and eventually the scenes changed from outdoors battlegrounds to indoor dungeons and castles. Inevitably players ended up with a lot of rules and only one character each - the miniatures and gaming board became optional as Arneson and Gygax started to hammer out the original rules that would become D&D. Chainmail was a separate product and idea that was a natural corollary of their roots in the table top game world.
I remember being young and seeing those beautiful racks of orange spine 1st ed. AD&D rule books along with the big old Chainmail box in a local book shop - it was like a magic cave
Well, I hope that someone reads this old news and finds it useful!
You could also sandwich RP screen material in some glass, or tape it to the bottom of the glass. I think a place like The Screen Works (www.thescreenworks.com) could just sell you RP material of various types -- I've used some screens that they custom-built.
Give two things a try: try Klooge.Werks for dice handling, miniature display and map obscurement, and try Dundjinni for creating stunning--gorgeous--maps with little effort. These two products deserve tons more users, and they make the game easier to run for the DM and more fun for the players. And those of you talking about "roll playing" -- I hear you, babe. I try to run the most ROLE campaign I possibly can, and KW only helps me do that. Once everyone knows how to use the program, which can be done in a single half-hour training session, play is smooth and you can resolve combat quickly and accurately so you get to the interesting stuff.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Actually. This is really really wierd, becaue I MADE SLASHDOT and the writer didn';t link to my story - he linked to Jans Carton's setup!!
I've been ripped off my Uber_geek moment!
The original poster is describing in my Coolest. Gaming Set-up. Evar. post on EnWorld - but the setup linked to in the post isn't mine - it's Jans Carton's projection page The projector shown in the pic is an 800 lumens LCD projector, not our 1600 ANSI DLP which is way smaller.
Anyways, we went through the projection surface debate with Alan Stalpes at DIY Projector last fall, and the best surface to use for rear projection is a piece of buffed Lexan.
But all of that is besides the point. You need a projector with a very wide angle lens to compensate for the decreased throw distance in a rear mount system. Problem is, the contrast of such an image without serious optics backing it up looks like crap.
And all of this is why? Due to shadows? Sorry. Overengineering for a problem that does not exist.
We use the over the table rig described in the initial story - and shadows are not a problem at all. I mean ZIP. NADA. NYET. No problem during game play at all.
A little less engineering - a little more experience with the tech guys.
.Robert
The initial poster is describing our gaming set-up actually.
:)
Our gaming circle e-bayed our DLP projector off of ebay for just less than $600 USD. It worked out to $120 CDN per member of our group.
The D&D Core Rules cost $130. Keep it in perspective.
We use our projector *every single session*. That's more than can be said for 99% of the gaming books I own. Maybe your group is different...but I doubt it.
Too expensive? Nope. This is accessible and affordable technology. High power LEDs vy Luxeon promise to make this even cheaper in the next 3-5 years.
Show me a gamer without $130 worth of gaming stuff purchased over the course of several months and I'll show you a gamer with a mean wife.
.Robert
Of course it is. That's what we do. Jans Carton is a Mac user and a photographer. That's why he uses Photoshop.
p ic =2386
I use a Thnkpad and NWN. Running NWN's largest mod group doesn't hurt us on getting cool unreleaed tilesets for use with the projector either.
IF you link to the original article on ENWorld, you'll see the DLP shots using NWN.
There are more of them here:
http://www.dladventures.net/iB/index.php?showto
It's excellent as I can use the Toolset to whip up an encounter zone and detail it in 2 minutes. It would take me longer to use overhead pens and a battlemat.
.Robert
Sorry. Chainmail was the set of miniatures rules extracted from 2nd edition AD&D. D&D evolved from an older british game called "Tunnels and Trolls," arguably hybridized with a little known Conan-themed RPG called "Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age," and was the first thing gygax/TSR made.
Why do you thin that AD&D (1E) had all ranges and movements in inches whcih were later converted to feet (which differed if you were indoors or out)?
Because 1st edition AD&D was the first D&D to directly integrate the miniatures rules partially developed by the Dungeons and Dragons Master System and Immortal System crusade rules. Please remember that AD&D was almost 15 years into TSR's gaming line; it should not be used as evidence of how things started. If you look, original D&D was in fact in meters, not inches, not feet.
Miniatures were for sell at just about every place that sold D&D stuff.
When 1st edition AD&D was new, there wasn't a single store in New York City which carried TSR products. Back then they were still a wholly mail-order supplied operation. Where are you getting this stuff? Miniatures broke into the market through miniature train and toy stores; there was no such thing as a fantasy gaming store. You're claiming that a product which created that kind of store showed up in those stores before they existed.
TSR put out lots of minis although I prefered Ral Partha.
Uh, no, you didn't. The miniatures made under the TSR name from 1988 on were made by Ral Partha. You might as well say a 1997 Toyota Celica is better than a 1997 Geo Prizm - they're the same damned car, and they're the same damned miniatures.
Besides, Ral Partha didn't start until 1984; 1st edition AD&D is from 1973. Your timeline is a decade in disjoint.
Warhammer started out as a game to use the minis that GW made for D&D.
Games Workshop started making miniatures for TSR in 1989. Hogshead has been publishing warhammer since 1977. Where are you getting your information?
StoneCypher is Full of BS