Some gamers will go all-out and buy the deluxe leather-bound collector’s edition rulebooks of all their favorite games; they’ll build custom gaming tables and top them with “dungeon tiles” and landscaping, and amass large collections of figurines to represent characters’ positions on the map.
I’m going to try to do this… not that way. My goal is bang-for-the-buck, so where I can get 90% of the functionality for 5% of the cost, that’s what I’m going to do.
I can’t Martha-Stewart everything, though, so there are a few bits of gaming gear that are must-buy items:
- Dice. Obviously. Ideally, enough for the GM and each player to have a full set or two so the flow of the game doesn’t get interrupted while everyone passes dice around. I found a few left over from my earlier gaming days, and added a couple of sets from a local gaming shop (Days of Knights).
Don’t splurge on dice, but don’t go too cheap either. After a couple of gaming sessions we decided we wanted a few more, so we went for one of those bulk sets of 100 you can find on Amazon. My wife learned about something called the “salt water test” for dice and spent a few hours obsessively going through all of ours. The bulk ones didn’t fare very well – around half of them ended up set aside in a “failed” bag. - The rules. Playing a game is tough if you don’t know how to play the game! The items I purchased were:
- The Mighty Protectors Rule Book in PDF form. I’ll probably grab a paper copy in the near future as well just because it’s more convenient to skim through if I need to look something up during a game session.
- The Excel Record Sheet Pack. Not strictly a necessity, but so useful I wouldn’t recommend going without it. Though it’s designed for Excel, it works fine in LibreOffice (so probably also in OpenOffice, though I haven’t tried).
- The printable referee screen. I haven’t actually put it together in screen form yet, but it’s been slightly useful as a quick reference for looking up critical hit information. For most of the other info it contains I’ve ended up having to look into the rule book anyway. I imagine this will change as I become more familiar with the game, and this item will become more useful, but I wouldn’t rank it as a necessity.
- Gameplay surface. I wanted a grid I could draw basic landscapes & layouts on to set up the environment as needed for each gaming session.
- I started with an inexpensive 12′ roll of 1″ grid paper which would allow me to use just as much as I needed for each session…
- But on a visit to DoK I spotted a reusable Chessex gaming mat for about the same price as it usually lists for on Amazon, so I couldn’t resist splurging on that and a set of wet erase markers to use on it. It’s worked very well so far and cleans off nicely at the end of a gaming session. There a number of other similar products I’ve seen on the market but the Chessex one is the one for which I’ve seen the most consistent positive reviews. It also has a hex grid on one side, which will be useful if I decide to venture into the vehicle system in MP or some other game that’s better played on a hex surface.
… and so far that’s it in terms of products specifically related to gaming. Everything else has been standard office supplies or items readily and relatively cheaply available from local craft or hardware stores. In subsequent posts I’ll describe what I’ve done so far to create tokens to represent characters, effects, etc.