What's in your DM toolkit?

[oxybe]

I'm basically doing a cleanup and maintenance of stuff i keep in my DM toolkit and I'm wondering if there's anything I can stealborrow from others in the playground.

Outside of your notebook, dice and houserule list/document/whatever what do you carry in your DM's toolkit?

For me, first is a monthly event tracker. top part of the sheet i jot in the month then there are 31 lines to jot down day of the week, weather, moon phases and big important events like celebrations/terrasque awakenings. as well as stuff like when players left town, what hex they're currently on if moving, ect... helps me keep my events organized and any timetables consistent and honest.

Second is my weather generator. it's a neat seasonal-based hex flower i found i can use to pregenerate a ton of weather in advance.

third are my random tables, for generic empty hex content generation i use the old judge's guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy tables. for generic encounters i use the b/x ones. more specific tables are obviously used for specific special locations but sometimes i just want to roll and find that in that area they're camping they find the remains of a smithy's forge.

a handful of premade dungeons. nothing too big and fancy. one or 2-pages at most, stolen from stuff like 4e's Dungeon Delve or the old map-a-week/original adventures from the 3.5 archive with some quick notes scrawled as general information on encounters/motivations. If the players go off the path, i can quickly whip something up and pretend that it's all according to keikaku.

I do also usually have a name generator on hand on the off chance I don't want my NPCs (or PCs when i play) to be named after the first 2 things I see and wind up with such classics as Tim Nestea. Or cop out and use the the most uninspired of french words for stuff.

So what tools do you use to make your GMing life slightly easier?

[Trafalgar]

I'm basically doing a cleanup and maintenance of stuff i keep in my DM toolkit and I'm wondering if there's anything I can stealborrow from others in the playground.

Outside of your notebook, dice and houserule list/document/whatever what do you carry in your DM's toolkit?

For me, first is a monthly event tracker. top part of the sheet i jot in the month then there are 31 lines to jot down day of the week, weather, moon phases and big important events like celebrations/terrasque awakenings. as well as stuff like when players left town, what hex they're currently on if moving, ect... helps me keep my events organized and any timetables consistent and honest.

Second is my weather generator. it's a neat seasonal-based hex flower i found i can use to pregenerate a ton of weather in advance.

third are my random tables, for generic empty hex content generation i use the old judge's guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy tables. for generic encounters i use the b/x ones. more specific tables are obviously used for specific special locations but sometimes i just want to roll and find that in that area they're camping they find the remains of a smithy's forge.

a handful of premade dungeons. nothing too big and fancy. one or 2-pages at most, stolen from stuff like 4e's Dungeon Delve or the old map-a-week/original adventures from the 3.5 archive with some quick notes scrawled as general information on encounters/motivations. If the players go off the path, i can quickly whip something up and pretend that it's all according to keikaku.

I do also usually have a name generator on hand on the off chance I don't want my NPCs (or PCs when i play) to be named after the first 2 things I see and wind up with such classics as Tim Nestea. Or cop out and use the the most uninspired of french words for stuff.

So what tools do you use to make your GMing life slightly easier?

A 30-second hourglass. I flip it over when I feel the players are taking to long to make a decision.

[dafrca]

So what tools do you use to make your GMing life slightly easier?

I no longer attempt to carry around miniatures. I pack a small box of tokens and a mat grid. It allows me to stage a battle if need be while taking up a very small space compared to a pile of miniatures.

[Kurald Galain]

Let's see,

A list of 10-20 pregenerated names. If they speak to any NPC I hadn't thought of before, that NPC gets one of those names.

Shortlist of important PC abilities, especially ones that haven't come up lately. Like, if one of them has fire resistance, be sure to throw the occasional monster that deals fire damage. This includes PC race and background, because some players tend to forget that.

List of factions. A faction is any group that may or may not have an impact later on the plot. For instance, if the party goes to the Temple of Lathander, that's a faction now. Just write down + or - if a PC leaves a favorable or disfavorable impression. Occasionally prune this list of material that turns out to be unimportant.

Wild surge table, of the flavorful kind and not the ha-ha-killed-your-character kind. Use for all kinds of magical mishaps as appropriate.

[KorvinStarmast]

Outside of your notebook, dice and houserule list/document/whatever what do you carry in your DM's toolkit?
My brain and my imagination.
2d6 reaction rolls (see OD&D and Worlds Without Number) and methodology for NPCs.
Timeline.
I make up people and names on the spot using puns or referential terms. My tool for remembering them is a 3x5 card and a pencil.
A bag with way too many dice.
Water soluble markers
Battle mat
A 30+ year old piece of poster paper with the Green Dragon Inn, floors 1 and 2, drawn on it. Been using it as a generic tavern for a very long time.
My notebook with maps and notes for the session.
A backpack with all of the necessary books in it.
A lot of rocks. :smalltongue:
As many miniatures as I think I'll need that session. I've got a lot of them.

[Eldan]

It's mostly just notes, a notepad, a few pens and dice.

The notes are quite detailed, though. There's campaign background, if it's a homebrew world, that gets its own folder or notebook. There's NPC sheets (description, background, how the PCs interacted with them, connections to various plots), there's always a few "backup NPCs" (as in, I keep "a noble" or "a merchant" or "a thug" with a few identifying details and a picture ready to go), there's probably a few random charts for things like "encounters on the way to another city" or "weird magical phenomenon", but that's pretty game dependent. If it's something like an urban fantasy game and the PCs go to a real city, I usually print myself a few pictures of landscapes and local landmarks and a timeline of the local history from Wikipedia. Oh, and a relationship chart for all the NPCs and factions that have come up so far.

For the current adventure notes, I usually keep them pretty sparse. Usually, I make a timeline up to the point the characters come in, a list of important NPCs and then a flowchart that contains paths for what might happen depending on PC actions.

[Easy e]

I bring the glimmer of an idea for an adventure hook, and that's about it.

However, most of my games are episodic, short notice, one-shots with players who are not system experts as there is no set system we are using.

[Wintermoot]

Mostly I've been DMing Pathfinder and D&D 3.5. So my toolkit/setup would be different than it would be with 5e.

My players are not fans of battlemats and miniatures. I'm not either, so that works out well.

I am also an old man with a full time job and full time responsibilities and not a wealth of free time. So my DM process has evolved.

I DM a game every two weeks. I only devote about 3 hours of hard preparation time to the game. There's a lot of soft preparation. Thinking about it while watching TV or working, doodling ideas on scratch paper. But I spend a maximum of 3 hours dedicated to building the next session before the session. If I had to spend more time than that, I wouldn't be DMing. It would be too much effort for the gain at that point.

Mostly I use notepad++ to write some dialog, do some flowcharting and write down things likely to come up. I also draw a lot of maps on graph paper that may or may not be used, but are essential to my mental process. I have an excel workbook format I use to keep stats of the PCs and NPCs that will be met/fought.

If I anticipate a notable combat, I may or may not put notes for individual enemy types on 3x5 index cards for ease of access. Generally, what I do is create a subfolder in my chrome bookmarks and bookmark the archives of nethys or d20pfsrd pages for the enemies, spells, and sub rules I expect to find coming up. Usually that's about 20 or so pages.

So when the game begins, I have my laptop open, with some or all of those bookmarked pages open in a tab in chrome and the notepad++ notes open and the excel workbook with the tabbed NPCs is up. That's in front of me. To my right is my graph paper tablet and a fresh, unmarred open notebook page to manually keep notes on. And a cup of pencils/pens and a tupperware of dice. To the left is a deepset anti-tip cylinder with my drink of choice in. If I did make index cards, they are upside down by the drink.

I roll dice in the space between me and the laptop. The laptop creates a natural screen. I don't really try to hide my rolls and a lot of the time, i'll just toss it in front of the laptop where everyone else is.

We have a 5' x 3' whiteboard stood up behind me where I will sketch out battlescenes if needed. There is a tray with several colors of markers, erasers, cleaner etc.

Over the course of the game, I sometimes take notes on paper, sometimes in notepad++. depends on what's faster at the moment.

After the game, I take an hour (sometimes the next day) to consolidate the notes, write a recap, erase the no longer needed bookmarks and clean up the detritus of the last game. All the notes go into the campaign "bible" which is just another Notepad++ document with all the campaign information consolidated. By the end of the campaign those are pretty huge. Then the process starts over.

[Telok]

Map*, campaign notes & calendar, beastiary (any campaign will use a set of standard monsters & custom npcs, my stat block style, runs about 10-12 pages), dry erase board with magnets (cheap strip magnet cut to size with blank stickers, easy initative reordering), cheap small colored disks (look like 2cm toy poker chips).

For monsters: Important, special, reoccurring may get a 3d printed mini (painted or permanent marker colored). Less important, big big, & vehicles get printed out & glued to wood blanks from hobby store. The blanks I can flip over when they go down and leave on the mat to remember body piles, multiple corpses are hard to walk on.

*Always the campaign map, usually a printout of 4-6 mini maps per page for dungeons, ships, cities, buildings. Details & special npc stats will be in the campaign notes.

I have a mega dungeon campaign set of files from a d&d 3.5 game I ran 10 years ago. I could literally pull out plastic baggies of the flat monsters, print out the beastiary & maps, and run it again with no more prep than rereading & maybe converting stat blocks to a different system.

[Catullus64]

Maps, and lots of 'em.
Player HP tracking sheet (for when I decide to try this nonsense: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?636046-My-Terrible-Experiment)
Sketchpad for when I need to express a simple visual concept to players.
A mighty host of pregenerated characters, covering a wide range of levels, complexity, and optimization.

[Milodiah]

One neat thing I picked up is a little tent-style whiteboard stand that I prop up by the battle mat during combat. The order of initiative gets written on it, and a chip clip thats clamped to the side of it gets slid down, beside each name, as the round goes on. Then it goes back up to the top at the start of the round.

Now everyone can just look and see whose turn it is, and don't have to ask.

[Kurt Kurageous]

An excel sheet with 400 prerolled d20 results.

You cant imagine how wonderful it is to have a log of die rolls. Without it, if a player sez, "Uh you forgot each of their eight saves are disadvantaged because..." you have no way to go except reroll. Me, I just relook the list and adjust.

And attack rolls? dis/advantaged becomes circling pairs of rolls. Your multiattack claw-claw-bite is resolved at a glance.

[Jay R]

An Excel spreadsheet with each character, their stats, their saving throws, their primary weapons, and whatever are the primary numbers I need to track for whichever game it is.

The players know that I reserve the right to roll for them in situations that their characters do not know they are rolling (Spot checks when they are being ambushed, secret doors an elf walks by, etc.)