D&D Battle Mats | From Wet-Erase to Digital Tables | Wandering DMs S08 E20

So as part of that, I've been asking Dan, what do you want on the table? What do I need to point cameras at? What's going on? What are we going to be looking at? What are we going to have? And that got us into the whole discussion of what are you going to use? Are you going to use the classic wet erase? Here I've got the good old classic wet erase vinyl mat.

That's kind of like typical go-to, I think.

You know, and the funny thing is how much I go back and I kind of flip flop.

And I think you're kind of in the same ballpark with this, Paul.

And I will say that nor historically I normally come to the table expecting to do most of the stuff in theater of the mind, just verbal descriptions.

And, you know, Gary, you know, Gygax is on records.

Once we started playing D&D, we didn't use miniatures anymore.

And then having a battle map, like, in case things get tricky or complicated.

And, you know, like, Gygax having said that, there's a lot of the early classic modules that come with prepared battle maps in the adventure for the complicated stuff.

Like, the A series does that a whole lot.

That's true.

That's a good

point.

I forgot that those come with some kind of preset, you know... yeah that's you know that's the interesting thing i find okay so let's so we have a comment here back we just mentioned in the chat um bust out all the dwarven forge yeah we got we had a whole bunch of dwarven forge that we got for uh the big bad uh still got boxes of it sitting here uh many thanks to our kind sponsors there um it really really uh helped elevate the show i think I've got a ton of this beautiful stuff lying around.

We could absolutely use that.

We talked about the sand and you said you want the Dwarven Forge.

I've got it ready to go.

And I think the thing for me about that, I feel like these are the two opposite ends of the spectrum here.

On the one hand, you've got the, I don't know, lazy, like there's a pad on the table and I'm just going to sketch something real quick when it's necessary.

And like you, yeah, I generally prefer for theater of the mind whenever possible and then if i must because it gets it's getting complicated or i'm spending too many times trying to think up the words to describe the situation and all the physics that are happening and again let me just get a model on the table so i can show you what's happening um Versus Dwarven Forge, the problem I have with Dwarven Forge is gorgeous for these kinds of things where you have a set piece, where you know this is the terrain that the players are going to be playing in.

But for off-the-cuff play in the midst of a campaign on any given week, I have no idea where the players are going.

it's like it's just too slow right that's my it's just too slow to you know off the cuff be like oh we need a room that looks like this with a cave and a pillar and a you know now we're sifting through the box you have a two by two piece with a wall on the left side oh

man okay okay Do you have a balcony? Do you have this? What we're looking at from the Big Bad show, there was a single set piece area.

Is it a gorgeous water feature, a river running through it? Do you have enough water pieces? Is it big enough? Is it wide enough? And just

to put that together, like what I noticed when watching the other big streams, right? Like if you look at like Critical Role or Dimension 20, it usually is they're going to pull this stuff out when it's a big set piece that clearly they anticipated was going to be needed.