Dungeon Master Musings: From old to new: Digital Tabletop

If you're one of the 4 readers that regularly reads this blog, you'll recognize that I tend to jump deeply into hobbies that I'm doing.  So while in the middle of a 5e Dungeons and Dragons game that my friend Nick was running a few months ago, I got the crazy idea to start a campaign of my own.

The idea was to take this campaign I made 4 years ago typing Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, and Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and run people through all of them in a big series of dungeon crawls, while converting the whole mess to Fifth Edition.  So, we started out normally, with the usual dungeon master screen and paper notes.

My DM area looked very similar to this person's 

But that, erm, evolved.  After a while, I realized that trying to get my players to draw maps of the places they've been was really challenging.  So instead of doing that, I grabbed a second laptop, installed MapTool, and started displaying the DM's map to the players.

The lower level of the Sunless Citadel

Of course, 13 pixels per square really doesn't cut it, and while we were having a good time, I decided to, well... learn to make my own maps...

My first attempt at drawing my own map

That first one took like 20 hours, mostly because I was trying to find tutorials and assets to use.  Plus, I have no knowledge of how to do that kind of stuff and was focusing on all the wrong things.  Since then, my maps have been improving in speed and quality.

So... that's all well and good, but since I had these really pretty maps, I really wanted to do something better than displaying it on a small 15" computer monitor at the head of the table.  I did some research online and came up with this setup.

I sit on the far left, with only my computer as a DM screen.

Here's the setup.  Atop an 80" camera tripod sits an LG PA77U projector capable of WXGA projection. It projects down to a normal whiteboard.  Both the DM computer and client computer run MapTool to handle hiding information and stuff.  Two bluetooth mice connect to the client computer to allow players to move their digital pieces about.

I'm on my fifth or sixth map now, and it's a blast.  It really improves the experience to have a setup like this, and the players really enjoy it and get more into the action.

In a future post, I'll post about what I've learned is and is not important for adding to these maps.  And maybe some tips I've picked up from others that actually know what they're doing.

In the meantime, I've got maps to make!