Tabletop Tips!

Here I throw out some quick and little tips that I've used over the years regarding tabletop!

I start with my books. I mostly would run 5th and Pathfinder, so I keep larger print-outs of condensed rulebooks with me. I have a stack of character sheets for a bunch of different things; Pathfinder, 5th, Starfinder, Lylat D20, Zombie Apocalypse and Those Dark places.

I have a nice book of adventures for 5th from level 1 to 15, which can be easily run in Pathfinder with a quick conversion tip guide on my phone. Then I have some blank A4's, gridded smaller pieces of paper and small paper for notes.

On my phone I keep a beastiary and simple rulebooks. Sometimes I carry notes on my hpone, but I tend to just keep that in a little notebook.

I wanted simple pawns that could be used for generic-enough fantasy games. I wanted them to not be frail or fall over if some one sneezed. So I came out with this, Iron washers with paper pictures glued to them. I was looking into laminating them at some point, but couldn't find anything proper.

I chose a lot of Final Fantasy Tactics sprites because I loved them and all the different jobs gives your basic party enough identity. I have pallette swaps of most main jobs and monsters. Green, blue and red mostly.

On 1 side is the normal character, on the other is that character but either in it's dead or weakened sprite. Meaning you can flip the dead ones around when you got them!

I keep a variety of laminated A4 sized battlemaps in a folder, too!
These range from simple stone tiles to beaches, inns, altars and some more! You can use dry erase markers on them, too! For the more plain ones like forest or stones tiles, I have about 4 of each.

Paizo and some other companies sell those large foldout ones and we've used those as a group. I'm fine with them, but sometimes you play on a coffee table and the size is a little problem. Or you simple don't need the large map and folding the larger battlemaps makes it unstable and buldgey.

In a game like Pathfinder where you need to keep track of which bonuses stack and which don't ; these little folded cars you can put infront of you can help a great deal!

Bless my handwriting, but it shows the bonus, the type and whatever else might be handy for the party to know. The balance lies in finding big enough font for a small enough piece of paper that can be read but won't be a hassle to juggle once the pre-buffing starts.

I keep a list of common food items on hand for when my party gets hungry. Another list with common potions and scrolls might also be good to have on you. At the very least, generic rewards can be traded for barrels of Mead and fortune cookies!