Advice for DMs: D&D Accessories

Metal coins would work for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay because you'll almost never find a treasure hoard. If you do, and your GM has you properly indoctrinated into WFRP style, you will be too paranoid to take any of it. :)

Really cool video. You two seem to enjoy rpgs in a likeable manner. I agree with so many of these and really liked the hand crafted weapons and equipment, will try those out. I also like a notebook for every player for taking notes :)

More D&D content please! This was so much fun to watch.

Check your local dollar tree. FULL SET of 7 dice for $1

Don't waste your money..... On anything listed...... Paper, Pen/Pencil, 1 Dice set, Free copy of the Basic rules,/character sheets/cheat sheets (DnD Beyond), a simple story/quest/campaign, and some openminded friends...... That is ALL you need to start playing and exploring D&D...... Yes you can go out and buy minis, battle mats, expensive dice sets, scenery and extra bits & bobs, but for starting out and getting the basics down you need none of that.

As a DM/Player myself, I tend to only use miniatures for the PCs. Everyone else is a numbered token or printed/cut out picture. By doing that it makes it very easy to see all the Player Characters (as they are the only miniatures on the table) which tends to lower the amount of brain-drain on my Players.

He’s pretty sad about the coins 😂

Awesome video! Thank you for this content!!! Love the pickles, clear sleeves, and affirmations on the need for MORE DICE... 💜 Thank you guys! I’m feeling something stirring... is that..? My.. imagination...? I wasn’t sure if I still had it! Just did my first session last night, it’s so much fun!

Why are her eyes watering?

Fudging dice rolls is absolutely warranted and good policy. A single unlucky die roll that prevents the success of the party or kills a character is in no way fun nor does it advance the story. Sometimes it is necessary.

i don't use 3D minis... i use Tokens. Print a image from the internet, glue it on a round wood piece, put a epoxi sticker on it and BAM enough :-) and also WAY more easier to store also a DM Screen for me is just a "important stuff is written on the back so i can see it" and it should be landscape so i'tm not "cut of" from the players. I do roll behind the screen when i roll opposed checks or so but combat wise WILL be rolled open

If you have enough dice, you can even use them as minis. the bigger creatures will get a higher die such as a d20 and the smaller ones will get d4 or d6.

If you are beginner DM here are some things i recommend to be a better DM: 1 plan for quest and some NPC prepared and done that will guide the player to the quest (give them reasons to do it). Give the players the illusion they have choice, give them chooses but play so most things they chose will end up doing the quest anyway. Have prepare tavern map +NPC and arena fight. Tavern because every city or village has one (you can use the same map over and over again). Why an arena, if the game gets stuck in the cityt is fun to bring up a safe aria where the PC-scan do fight, character stats of NPCs for arena is grate to improvise stats. Have a Tarot deck needs some randomness to trow up the game or you are frozen what to do draw a card if you hate it yo u will know immediately what to do, its its to evil you can blame it n the deck and its the PC-s problem now :D. A random deck you can associate with personality is awesome also to generate NPC personality on the fly :D. Pro tip don't let the players ever have the "Deck of many things".

You guys are fun! Thanks for the tips!!

thanks for the help

My experience is that coins make good props to throw on the table but that once the players put them on the sheets they disappear.

As a DM with far more years than 99.9% of the people the reason I use the screen if for a few reasons and this is not a set order. When you attack and "describe the attack" the players do not know if the creature hit or misses. A creature coming close in combat can be interesting and is way better than it misses. You can keep upcoming minis and handouts hidden. It helps to keep your notes hidden from players eyes. It makes it more mysterious and you can roll the dice just to scare the players. I understand and could DM without screens. I have DMed a ton without minis. But that was when I was young.

I appreciate your thoughts and comments. They work for you so you cannot be wrong. I do know this video is two years old, however, I respectfully disagree with some of the items. A) I love using DnD Beyond as a DM and as a player. It keeps everything in order. Also gives easy access to info. B) DM screen for me is used for holding easy access notes, as opposed to flipping through binder. It keeps monster health secret as well. I do not use it for dice.

Minis - I use monster tokens (i print out the pictures of the monsters) i do not spend money on minis just on the paper/ink to print out tokens.

I got a bunch of Pokémon minis from a kid's party I was attending with my younger cousin. I don't regret just taking fistfuls of them. The parents hosting were cool with it anyway and so was the birthday kid. 😇
I have excess of standby now and that's not even my own I've kept from childhood. 👾

1. The strictly paper rule is not at all accurate imo. We have gone the other way in our group. It is sooo much simpler to keep track of everything through dndbeyond. It helps a lot and we use it for everything except for note taking.and it is the best thing we’ve done!

2. I don’t hide dice rolls for my players because i need to cheat. I do it because some rolls need to be hidden to not give the players too much information. My recommendation. Make a small DM screen using two small photo frames. Put some nice to have information like passive perception and so on of the characters on one side and print some great art and put it in the frames pointing to the players. That makes them get a feel for the game and it feels really immersive. As a DM you can even change art between sessions and use artwork that correspond to the location the PCs are in.

Here's a rule of thumb: "if you needed to "fudge the dice", then you didn't need to roll the dice". If the dice don't change the outcome, it's obviously a crucial part of the story.

A closed roll's purpose is to cause the "oh no, what's happening?!?!" feeling. Just roll closed dice randomly every once in a while, then pause, and announce something random, like: "the DM suffers of severe malnutrician and demands snacks for his efforts"

Don't pay for minis, gummybears will work (the slain get eaten). Don't buy $2 copper coins, if you can just as easily use pennies (or write it down). Battlemats are not crucial, they just help with distancing and formation.

You need $4 worth of dice and 3 (rather expensive) books. Everything else is just "nice to have".

When I started as a teenager, many many years ago, our friend got the core 3 books and a set of odd dice for his birthday, and we all started like that, buying our things along the way. I took years before we all had our own dice.

What is a really must have item, is a wild imagination! You get +2 on enjoyment if everybody has a sense of humour too

More experienced GMs don't fudge dice rolls. Just don't do it and your rolls will mean so much more to the players.

the whole point of dnd is the math

use dice for health it works great

We always play with DM screens, mainly to hide maps and to have handy charts easy to view... but I also don't play with minis at all in the games I run; I only do theater of the mind. I've tried doing battles with minis over the years, but I don't honestly prefer it. I have a huge collection of painted minis and BattleMats and all that to prove it. lol In the current game I am playing in as a player, our DM adores minis and has literally THOUSANDS that he and his wife painted. lol (He also plays Warhammer) Needless to say, in that game, we always use minis... in fact, we use my huge BattleMat too. ;-) Personally, I prefer not playing with minis, but I am very happy playing with them if the DM is using them. :-) I'm flexible enough. lol Oh... I should also point out that we play old-school D&D, so maybe that matters? Dunno. Our D&D is basically a mix of B/X and AD&D 1e... with some 5e things we like mixed in. heh Been playing with the same group since the 80s, so I guess we are stuck in our ways. lol ;-)

Use lego men?

Dice trays and paper minis are great…. But these days I use a VTT for maps and monsters and my player have their own minis when playing at the table

I would also suggest Pathfinder Pawns and the D&D resurrected tiles Dungeon,city,wilderness helps spice up the grid map and speeds thing up a little so you don't have to draw everything

Nah bro dead wrong with the dm screen

I do it all , I don't do enough props except player maps, and I have never done coins, but I am addicted to buying minis and scatter terrain, I have 10 billy bookcases filled. I enjoy setting up lots of scenes or separate rooms on the table and it gets the players excited that they might do an encounter in some on the rooms or areas

I like a dm screen to help keep my notes secret, it is too easy for a player sitting close to glace and your papers and to me that breaks immersion if they see how many hit points a monster has, also I have the players roll in my dice towers connected to my screen, for rolls their character wouldn't know.

There are so many board games with lots of minis that make collecting some super cheap :D

I used to print handouts, cheat sheets for my players, spell cards, cards for magic items, I even 3d print them props… but they never use any of those.

I like the advice and I agree with most of it but if you are playing D&D 5e then DnDbeyond is a worthy option. The more players using the DnDBeyond Initiative Tracker the less the DM needs to do. It puts all the rolls in order with the Enemies too and only those rolling manually have to be handled manually by the DM. I agree with laptops running out of power unless plugged in, but screen shutting off helps. Same with tablets which are even faster. It's just a non-issue with speed getting into your character and let's be honest here. The player that's supposed to go next needs to be ready with their intended action unless something changed moments ago on the battlefield. Also players forgetting their character sheet is a problem, while with a smartphone and DNBeyond you are never leaving your character home and can even look at it anytime they want to think about their PC in-between sessions.

As for the DMs screen, I agree BUT I do not agree with the statement that if you are hing your rolls you're doing it wrong. This is very wrong. I dont want the thief to know that she failed her detect traps roll. Failed to open doors check on a door too. I dont want them to make a failed roll then have another player attempt. In reallife does somebody slamming a door know they didn't do it well enough? Not likely. Maybe the door can't be opened by someone in the party, yet they spend an hour trying to make it open maing a lot of noise. There are other scenarios that fall under this. How about deception skill roll versus insight. Do you want your players to KNOW that they defeated their roll or failed? It doesn't make sense if they do. The point is there are scenarios in which the DM wants to hide a roll, but it should probably be done sparingly.

I'm not saying do the above but it shouldn't be dismissed either.

I love having my dm screen, I especially like the focus it gives you (not meaning I always wanna be in focus) but it sets you apart, because as a dm, you are a player, but you are in a weird way set apart in a fitting way for the role of dm. I also like to hide the minis behind it, so they dont just see what they will come up against. But also, I have the exact problem with reaching over to the map, but I just walk around the table sometimes, but I see the problem! I just think the advantages outweigh the problems, but then again, that is very up to every player for themselves :)

I've played since 1e came out, I've played with Mind's eye, and I've played with minis and Mats both work BUT... it's 2023, and Digital is easy... I can have thousands of maps on my laptop, I have a TV on my Table and a Portable Touchscreen if playing somewhere else, When starting a campaign Players send me their character sheets to go over as well as an Image of their character. I convert that into a Token and add it and my Maps to my preferred VTT OWLBEARRODEO, I can fog of war the maps, have Players Character tokens at entrances, Monsters in place, with sticky notes only I can see traps till sprung, Monster stats, etc... I even make lists of loot, then just click them to show the players searching instead of having to read it to players 4 times so they can write it down. ... my Current Campaign I run is 1e DND Lankhmar city of thieves with 7 Players ... it's been going 6 months and no one has even left the city, we have had 3 player deaths to date. I also tend to make props like Notes, maps and etc ... I also have a image of a notice board (loaded as a Map), along with tons of wanted posters, Jobs etc loaded in as tokens in a folder I can easy change notice board week to week. ... oh and my DM screen is also Digital on my laptop, all I carry is laptop, Dice, pen & note pad for fast idea in a back pack and the touch screen (has handle to carry easy)

DM hiding Dice rolls, I roll for Rogues checking for traps, because they think they checked good enough but did they, I do let them roll for unlocking because you would know if the door unlocked or not, but the DM job is a Narrator of a great story and if fudging a dice roll to make a Fight more epic is fine as long as you're not doing it to just kill a player, Ive lowered attack damage a few times, to put a player at 0 and not well below it, allowing players to stabilize them and they get a chance to live. It is all up to the DM, long as his players are smiling, then he is doing his job, it's not his job to send lv1 goblins against a 7th-level party, oh you slaughtered them, here is 10000xp each, if it is challenging it isn't fun. ... OH New Addition to my DM Bag, I carry a few Fighter, Mage, Cleric and Thief Premade Characters ... I quite often now get walk in Players, I've had games with a little as 5 Players and as many as 10, if they wish to return or play again they can keep the character or Roll up new ones for next time, but I don't have to stop a game to have a new player join.

I just discovered your channel while looking for DIY initiative trackers. Subscribing now because I love your attitudes. Will be running my first mini-campaign in 3 weeks or so, so the advice on what not to buy is timely and fantastic. Bulk of the party is either folks who have no idea of what the funny dice are for and those who have been out of the game for decades( like me).
I hope you're still looking at comments after 3 years because I just have to know. Was that a Warhammer Goblin Shaman I saw.??😊

I love when people say "we played for awhile... 4 years" and knowing that new people keep coming into this hobby.

The summary at the end was great! What was that music at the end? Videogame?

4 years is several years?

Legally blind, so can't use the typical DM screen except as a physical barrier and … I don't want that. I DO use a small/low screen (HeroQuest's for quite a long time), but only to conceal my copy of the map and some stat blocks, that's all. Why have more?

Pens don't give me great contrast in all lighting, so I like to use bits of scatter to define space on a "stage" (Professor Dan's Ultimate Dungeon Terrain "dungeon pizza", except mine's not a circle), it's still a bit abstract but the scatter gives players a sense of changes in elevation and cover/concealment as well as being something that can be quickly dropped into place when an encounter starts and brushed away when it ends.

I use numbered large print cards with my map, the front side is a few keywords to help me describe the space quickly in very large print, and the back is still large but is meant to be held up away from the players so I can read it—secrets, encounter specifics, etc not for players to see. Likewise cards with monster stat block cards and a few laminated tables I can't or won't just memoorize but do need at the table.

It's not the most portable/minimal setup in the world, but it's pretty portable and very lightweight. Players often have their mini, but everything else is typically a pawn or token, and the scatter is mostly foams and corks and the occasional washer or screw to make sure it doesn't blow away.

I love the dm screen tip I’ve been looking at them for a while and can’t bring myself to spending $40 for one but I didn’t even think abt the fact of it getting in the way. Thanks so much now I realize I don’t need it😂😂

The DM screen is inside the surprise zone. Everything outside the screen is in the surprise zone.