Over the past four decades, the pen and paper role playing game industry has continued to grow. Along with it are the tools that support that industry. While not required to play these games, gaming tools can still certainly add enjoyment.
Alea Tools makes different colored markers for use with gaming miniatures. Each color signifies a specific condition making it easy to remember a figure’s status. Since there are several condition with a variety of games, these can be useful. Alea also show you how to get your miniatures to stick to the markers, making them even more useful. Usually though, I just use regular old tacky. It works just as well, but is not a permanent solution.
Although Dark-Platypus Studios has a decent selection of tools, I like the Magna Map. With it’s magnetic base, certain figures or other tools stay where they should. Some of their other tools worth mentioning are gaming tokens, dice bags with art, condition tags, jewelry, and counters. I especially like the art that they have o many of their products, as it’s pretty original.
Dragon Avenue is great, and is geared for the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. They offer nice, new character sheets. some useful tracker sheets, power cards, encounter builders, etc. The best they have to offer, in my opinion, are the condition cards. These are perfect for laying out the conditions of affected player characters and monsters, because there’s no need to dig through the rule book – it’s right out there on the table.
Homemade 3D battle maps are an excellent way to visualize and encounter. Fat Dragon Games leads the pack in this area. You simply print their PDFs on cardstock paper, fold and glue them together, and you have an amazing set to play on. Most of their product is fantasy based, but they also have a selection of sci-fi, modern, and even western terrain maps.
RPG Tools is a simple website that provides names of fantasy towns, conjures up traits of NPCs and worlds, offers up some nice character nuances, and even rolls your dice. Not only is it easy to use, but it’s free, too. This is one of those websites that you go to when you’re having a brain fart, creatively speaking. There are many others out there like it, but this one has several tools all lumped together.
The Roleplaying Assistant offers several electronic tools for the gamemaster, to enhance gaming sessions. It supports several games (excluding 4th Edition D&D), ans is similar to 4th Edition D&D’s electronic tools (minus all the nifty visual graphics). A nice touch is that the Roleplaying Assistant has a one-time cost of $20, and you don’t have to pay that until after you’ve tried it out first.
So, if you’re just not having as much fun with role playing games as you think you should be, try some of the gaming tools that are out there. There are a lot of them, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
