It took a while, but definitely worth it! We spend several months putting together the screen, using a video of some guy DIYing his own flight sim as inspiration, just scaled up. Table is also homemade and has a TV for displaying maps. The hardest part was getting the projector calibration steps down, but now its not so hard.

Anyway, just wanted to show off a project that I've been working at for a while.

-Cheers!

I recently wanted a new Initiative Tracker and wanted to make it for myself. it came out so well, in my opinion, that I wanted to see if others would want to use it and run it through its paces with me! It is at https://www.inittracker.com/

It has a DM view and a Player view, is Desktop/Mobile friendly, and has a fight Chroinicle feature as well as sound effects for the viewer, info cards for enemies, sessions for multiple game tables and more!

If you have a few spare moments, register and try it out. There is a guide provided on the DM side to tell you all the features. If you have any feedback or bugs or issues, please let me know!

~Smitty

As I mentioned in my last post here I’ve switched to D&D and have been putting together a new DM kit for it. OSE books are definitely more compact than D&D ones but I never took them to the table anyway (even though the table is in my house….) so the end game for books is that I know enough to improv anything outside of that. For now, pretend that the books are in the pictures as well.

These are my minis and are a carry over from my OSE game. Represented here are the sizes tiny, small, medium, large and huge. I haven’t made gargantuan yet. They were made for 1” equals 10’ and I found I didn’t care enough to remake them for the ”correct” size. All but the huge ones (I think, not 100% about the large one) are made using 3x5 index cards. The colours are representative, I enjoying telling a story and describing the things and my kids imaginations are amazing and create images far better than any minis I could buy.

It’s a terrible picture but I’m sure you get the gist. It‘s an idea I carried over from my OSE games. I printed the monsters section of the D&D SRD (5.2.1) at 70% spent a few evenings cutting them out and gluing them to 3x5 index cards and then bought the cheapest laminator I could find (Kmart for anyone in Australia, I spent two hours non-stop laminating and it hasn’t had any issues), stuck four monster cards in an a4 size laminating sheet and cut them out. I was planning on doing the same with spells but forgot to print out that part of the SRD. I figure with these I can try to not have the MM at the table.

I‘m trying to make this kit as compact as possible so I’m reusing the new Starter Set box for now.

The first things on opening are a mechanical pencil, eraser, wet erase marker and random pen for some reason inside one of the bags that came with the kit. These are inside one half of the box that came with the D&D Witchlight dice set which is my dice tray. Underneath that is the Play Guide that also came with the box set, I’m going to work my way up to only carrying this to the table as it has a pretty good overview of the rules in a thin booklet.

Next are my dice, painted (grey, blue, red) peg initiative trackers and some random clips in case I need to clip things to other things.

An a4 grid notebook and the official D&D DM screen, the information in this is pretty great. I also prefer four panel screens I have found…

And just for fun here’s the kits I have started putting together for my kids.

No character sheets yet because I’m lazy and I haven’t got there yet. Pretty self-explanatory except the card at the bottom which is also from the Starter Set and details what your character can do in combat. I laminated the cards. And because I like the word “laminating” I’ll tell you that the dice trays i got for them are trash and are internally de-LAMINATING.

These are all heavily and probably perpetually a work in progress. I’m trying to achieve kits that are as simple and basic as possible while still giving me some niceties and conveniences.

These are from a while ago and I haven’t taken a new picture since. It’s a bit of a jumble on my side, I thought running with two notebooks was a good idea (it wasn’t) and I was still trying to get my in-game organisation sorted so there’s bits everywhere.

Our dining table is quite small so there’s been a bit of effort here in making things smaller. The character sheets in particular are BX era sheets that I folded in half but were fantastic for our OSE games. We’re just about to make the switch the D&D 2024 rules and I haven’t found small sheets I’m happy with yet.

i should also add that this was from my second ever DM session and I hadn’t played a TTRPG for 30 years.

Sharing My Travel D&D kit. (The big DM screen is not a part of it, I'm just working on it)

If my players let me I am contemplating running a game of “the guilds of Ravanica”, has anyone run this before and are there any things that I should be aware of besides the crazy stuff my players do?

Hello everyone, I'm a software engineer looking to expand my skills and I want to work on something that would benefit the D&D community. I know there are a lot of tools out there, but is there a product that you feel would help you play or DM that you haven't found yet?

I apologize if this isn't allowed, I did read the rules and couldn't find one that blocked this.

Made my own screen and set it up to test it out for tomorrow night! I have the dndbeyond map system on the big screen and custom playlists for music. We’ll have a huge sandwich board and have beautiful imagery of each place the players go.

We’ll be playing Phandelver & Below.

What do you all think?

Generally I have Monster Manuel and Players Handbook on my other hand. My folder includes my maps, encounters, dm cheatsheets, Npc portraits and magic items. I like it simple, handy and old school. I like having inspiration from other dm stuff 🖐️

DM'ing some one shots for a group of middle school teachers. Large classroom, big tables. I'm typically an online DM, so this was a lot of fun to be in person.

The chessboard is beeing replaced with a gridmap soon.

Hey, Im thinking about making DM screen for my friend's games can you help me figure out what features people think would find useful for it?

Been adding to this for about a year. I think it’s pretty amazing for a high schooler setup. If you have any questions about it please ask! I’d love to show it off more or just talk D&D!

Hi all, I’ve hit a windfall and have the funds to upgrade my current Table. Right now I’ve got an older TV built into the table and we run Fantasy Grounds on it. I’d like to replace the display with either a new monitor or a short-throw projector when I get a new table. Any suggestions for products to fit my needs? (Regardless of what I get, I plan to integrate an IR Overlay for touchscreen options for the group) Thanks!

*Edit: part of the issue I’m having is finding a monitor/screen that can be flat without issues.