The ULTIMATE Minimalist DM Kit! (Ep  

Yes! I finally beat you to the punch!

Hehehe took you both long enough to make this 😅

Most excellent. I've been building a minimalist kit for mork borg it all fits in a tiny backpack

No one likes a copycat Bob! Lol. J/K of course. Looking forward to it

Can't wait to watch that one too

Cool!

Yeah, I used to do that in boy scouts. We'd have long hikes and we had minimal space in our packs for anything as frivolous as dice or books so we just played full on Theatre of the Mind. It was back in the Moldvay and AD&D days. Even then, I could remember enough of the rules and keep stats and numbers (yes even Thaco!) in my head to actually DM and play fairly accurately. It was my first realization of a lot of what Prof. DM often says about what playing a fun game boils down to.

That's the way we used to do it at my first burger-flipping job, and in the car on road trips, back in the 2nd Edition AD&D era: my first DM did almost everything in theatre-of-the-mind mode. Back then, there really wasn't any terrain, miniatures, or maps to work with (the metal minis available in that era cost more than we could generally afford, and were sort of a separate painting/collecting hobby for the most part when we could afford them), and we only had one set of dice which only got used for the most important and dramatic encounters (boss battles and the like.) The DM, having played 1st Edition D&D for years before I joined the group, memorizing the relatively simple rules from that edition, only rarely referred to the game books except for storytelling inspiration, and the character sheets back in those days were pretty minimalist and were only rarely referenced (we were encouraged to write up elaborate character backstories, but that was mostly for the players' benefit, with a verbal summary at "session zero" to give the DM some ideas.) I believe we referred to the player's handbook when we leveled up to make adjustments to the character sheets, but again, it was a relatively simple game system back then, and the DM mainly only bothered with the leveling-up to get some story ideas (such as those henchmen/followers and stronghold benefits that came with certain levels back then.) After "Session Zero" (we didn't call it that back then, but the basic idea was still the same), we would just give the campaign a session or two as a "shakedown cruise" to figure out who was who, where the story was going, and what we were doing, and that DM could improv a pretty effectively immersive and entertaining game, even while driving. I'm not sure every DM could run a game while driving, but I think the real bottleneck to modern DMs running these sorts of minimalist games is a fear of the improv involved: I think there's a great deal of comfort for modern DMs in stacks of detailed rule books, complicated stat blocks and charts and tables, and mountains of tactical maps, scenery, miniatures, and so on: the less you have to make up and imagine, the easier it seems, I guess! I dropped out of gaming for several years and didn't return until the 3rd Edition era, when I started DMing for the first time, and I got pretty wrapped up in the published adventure modules, maps, minis, rulebooks, and so on, and had to stop and teach myself the lost art of improv later on - it was surprisingly hard to learn, given that it should come naturally and had to be un-learned to accommodate modern D&D! But, once I began figuring out improv again, the game got much, much easier, more fluid and quickly-paced, and more fun for everyone involved.

I do this with the kids while walking to school sometimes. We use rock-paper-scissors to determine outcomes though.

Blackwing elevates those credentials.

I highly recommend: General's "Cedar Pointe"

Less is more.

I've got a purpose-built erasable board that Paizo used to make somewhere in my stack of stuff, it was magnetic and pre-printed with areas for tracking hitpoints and initiative and stuff like that. I never actually used it for anything, and something that fancy is probably more than anyone really needs with a plain erasable board being much more versatile, but I think a lot of DMs could absolutely use an erasable board of some sort! For that matte, really, a plain, light-coloured erasable grid and a handful of cheap dry-erase markers could cover a lot of terrain, post-it-note, and pencils and scratch-paper/notebooks territory, for keeping up with temporary notes and the like, and even take care of the need for minis for a really minimalist game! (Back in my day, a couple sheets of graph paper and pens did most of the heavy lifting accomplished today with all the terrain tiles and minis and so on - a dry-erase grid would have been great for that sort of thing!)

For sure. We tend to use a large plastic covered map (I believe it's from Paizo) that our DM will draw terrain and maps on. It helps a great deal when we need to see what we're doing.

I’ve been running at GenCon just since 2018. I still bring too much stuff 😆😆

Got to see Prof DM last night!

Good on you! Unfortunately my first will be 2024

Context pls

I think I’ve done stuff like that on Patreon. The biggest difference is it’s easier to run at cons. Everyone comes on time & is focussed on the game-because they are paying customers!

Thank you!

Thanks for commenting. New Caves of Carnage next week.

Thanks for your longtime support. This was a favorite video to make and it BOMBED in views. But I make them for the hard-core fans like you, Jay. GenCon was great, but not as good as if you had been there.

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Aww, shucks. Next year we're planning on attending

"What're ya sellin?"

😆😆Semper Fi

I know!! I am grateful for their support.

Swing by any evening at Ballroom 4 in the JW Marriott. I’ll be running something 😁

Cool! Pleasure meeting you!

Good idea.

Welcome!

Harbor Freight tools. I'll put that in the doobly-do.

Much appreciated!

Thank you!

That's what's great about the Professor's main philosophy on this channel: You don't need tons of books/rules to play great D&D

@@elishmuel1976 - I used to be a "the more rules, minis, maps, tiles, and pages of character sheet, the better!" kinda guy, but I'm reformed these days, and really, REALLY appreciate this minimalist philosophy: I've still got closets, chests, and boxes full of stuff I really need to start getting rid of, just because I just don't have room for it all anymore, and I'm beginning to really resent all that gaming baggage.

@@elishmuel1976 I like to read books, because I get ideas that way. My games are streamlined before I get to the table. The main rule at my table is Roll for if. I use Plot Points in my games allot. I give my players one at the beginning of each session, but only allow one at a time. If they use one, they have the ability to earn one back by roleplaying well. Basically, I have a yes and no but type of D20. When a player wants to do something off of the rails, I tell them to use an plot point, and let them role for it. Having access to your library is never a bad thing though

I've been there, too, and sympathize! I played back in the 2nd Edition era, but didn't start DMing until 3rd Edition after about a decade away from gaming, and that was definitely the point where things started snowballing: it went from trying to find a nice set of minimalist minis to go with the boxed starter sets from 3.5, to collecting all the cheap minis and terrain I could get my hands on at a time when there wasn't much around, to finding myself buried in all those books, maps, tiles, minis, dice sets, and other unnecessary cruft that just sort of accumulated in my gaming collection as a specialized industry rose to the challenge and began supplying so much stuff, it was suddenly everywhere, and way more than anyone really needs to run an enjoyable game! It's when I realized at some point in the 4E era that I was bringing only a small part of my collection to the table, and the table was so full of stuff that nobody would move without knocking stuff off the table, and nobody was having much fun trying to keep up with all the rules and libraries full of rulebooks, and plowing through mountains of pretty miniatures and stuff that only needed to be on the table for a moment to be "killed", and all the other unnecessary stuff, that I realized I was ready to start going back to the minimalist theatre-of-the-mind games I'd grown up with in the '80s and early '90s.