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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."
We played on the floor.
Bring on the 3d googles!
Visit Tim's Journal, yes?
a DLP rear-projection system. Doesnt't that make a little more sense, in a way? Then you won't have shadows over everything from people's hands. It'd look a bit better overall anyway.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
magnetic pieces that move themselves to voice commands - like Jumanji!
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
Wouldn't a better way of doing this (though probably much more expensive) be to mount a projector in the bottom center of the table with a screen, so that reaching across it doesn't blank out the map?
Problems are like gifts, it's better to give than to receive
1) Cost. The equipment and software necessary for this setup are beyond many gamers' means.
The software isn't so bad, if it's the mentioned dunjinni package @ ~$40, but that projector is the backbreaker. Even lores projectors are a chunk of change. I know, as I've looked at them for a variety of causes, but just can't muster the green, yet.
2) The task of scanning and editing printed maps is labor and skill intensive.
My hope is that you could help me and any others that wish to use this technique by publishing this letter or similar instructions and by making high-resolution maps, which do not contain DM-only information, available for download.
Ok, the map drawing/editing thingie doesn't strike me as bad, so long as you're a coder like me. I've already done a few simple applications which can paint hexes (so cartesian should be less difficult) any color and anywhere I like, I could even map brushes to create furniture or terrain. (the worst part would be shelling for the package I delveloped it in, which I have no intention of leaving it in, for what should be obvious reason.)
Back in the day, though, for RPG's we didn't even use maps, but had the DM describe where we were and what we were to see. Kept it simple, so long as you remembered.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Your parents sure let you do a number on your basement. It'll be a shame when they kick you out.
My cardboard cut out dragon and magic tin-foil Helmet of Smiting.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
The last time I played D&D we didn't need no stinking miniatures, just some paper, dice and a shit load of caffinated beverages.
Imagination is a wonderful thing.
"Your party has left the linoleum plains and come to an area of deep pile shag ..."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wouldn't it just be easier to run a multiplayer neverwinter nights session and project THAT on a table?
TODO: Something witty here...
Cool... so with the projector you also get realtime shadows!
And the DM can have the Dragon's shadow show up via hand puppet gestures!
Of course the Raging One Finger of Darnisus will probably be the most popular creature shadowed on the board.
Otherwise the Israeli Intelligence Services might be able to track your purchase and then you won't get a high-paying position with them!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Wow, I remember D&D being an almost pure mind-game. This was back in 1985-90. There were some really good DMs, some who went on to be writers and at least one who went into film production. The most we did was darken the room and clear a spot to throw dice. No lead figurines, no physical maps, just dice and a character sheet. Maybe I'm just being an old fogey, but I think I'd prefer the old way than all these props.
This is only necessary for dungeon crawls. This is a very minor subgroup of RPG gaming. In fact, it's very hard to justify the "R" in the acronym in dungeon crawls.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
By contrast the best D&D that I played in, I admit to being a fairly mediocre DM, was in a group that played very fast loose with the rules, w/o miniatures, w/o maps. Just you, the DM and your imagination.
Who plays D&D with a table? What's wrong with the woods behind my parent's house?
LIGHTNING BOLT! LIGHTNING BOLT! LIGHTNING BOLT!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
My DM made us draw a map, but first he made sure someone bought paper and had a feather quill and ink, then we looked for someone with mapping skill. :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Israeli army would not approve of your ingenuity.
The hidden area of the map contained scenes from what it would look like if u actually went outside.
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.
Voila! You've got a rear-projection system you can set things on.
If the grease is light enough, your gameboard will also be projected onto the ceiling.
Variations on a theme:
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Good lord. 30 years ago the military would have spent several (hundred?) million dollars on something like this.
And people are using this for Dungeons and Dragons?
Christ, we used to sprawl out in my friend's rec-room.
God I'm old.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Oooh! You rolled a critical miss on your saving throw against staying a virgin into your eighties.
Why not return to Bigby's Bed of Eternal Solitude and cast grasping fist repeatedly and often!
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Picture this - put a web cam RIGHT next to the projector, aimed down at the table.
Now, on each of your miniatures (the characters, the monsters, etc.) you put a tiny set of LEDs, blinking in a certain pattern.
The webcam can recognize each object by seeing the LEDs blinking in a certain order, and can even figure out which way they are facing.
Now, all of a sudden, you've got your physical objects mapped back into your virtual space. What's the point?
Ragnar (played by Dave) wants to cast a fireball spell. So Dave pulls out the "Spell" miniature, and the DM punches up "Fireball" on a list. Now, as Dave drags the spell miniature around on the board, a little (projected, virtual) dashed line stretches from the Ragnar miniature to the spell miniature. Around the spell miniature is an animation of a fireball exploding, set to the appropriate radius (20' in virtual space.) Dave can easily see if Ragnar's spell can go far enough, and how many people (good guys and bad) would be affected by different placements of the spell.
You also get to immediately measure how many distance increments your character is from the bad guy he's throwing a dagger at.
All sorts of things start turning out to be easy and cool.
Why bother with the physical objects? Because nothing's as cool as reaching out and grabbing something real and moving it interactively (which begs the question of why people play D&D instead of rugby). It's like a mouse to the power of 5. Plus, all the players can fiddle with measurements and stuff simultaneously.
Yes, you could also just pass around a wireless mouse, and move around virtual miniatures, instead. Probably pretty close to the same experience.
Instead of the "look-away" part of what these guys have to do, I think it would be awesome to have a dual-monitor set-up - but not many laptops let you drive two independent monitors. One monitor the players can see, one the DM can see. Drop in a wireless PDA or two for passing messages back and forth between players and DM (Rogue: "I steal the amulet!"), and you're cooking. *grin*
I didn't come up with this webcam + LEDs idea - I just have thought about how it would apply to Dungeons and Dragons. I first saw this kind of set up on a SIGGRAPH DVD, back in 2001. They were using it to play with how buildings would cast shadows and warp wind patterns. They also simulated a virtual holograph-making system. It was amazing to watch this video go. I can't remember the name of the group for the life of me. Can someone post a link? I gotta dig up that DVD!
Education is the silver bullet.
I waited until the traffic died down, to say that while I appreciate the ingenuity with the use of a projector (and there's lots of others cool things this approach could take), this is hardly the "Ultimate RPG Table".
No, my friends, this is the ultimate RPG table.
I am taken with how much effort and thought the creator of that table put together in planning, executing, and documenting his work. Truly, it's a work of art and quality far beyond a simple application of an LCD projector.
Best of all, it's a version 1.0 and additional refinements are to come.
Disclaimer: I don't play any of this stuff, but I know quality when I see it.
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!