props and other aides

[seaweedbrain]

Other than miniatures what have you used to help your gaming?

so decades ago I got The Titanic Experience: The Legend of the Unsinkable Ship and it game with a number of artifacts like tickets,a menu,a lay out of the ship and other bits. At the time I was doing a time travel game and so I got to use the stuff that came with the book.

What have you used in your gaming as an added bonus?

[cptbutton]

Battle mats and maps are probably the second most common prop.

I am a great fan of the Starship Geomorphs for making up maps. While nominally for Traveller, you could use them for any kind of space setting and many modern buildings.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by seaweedbrain

Other than miniatures what have you used to help your gaming?

Meeples and 1cm cubes on 1/2" grid battlemats
Ship minis for visualization of the ship only, not on-table play.
Half-inch, 3/4 inch, 20mm, or 1" counters on maps.
Occasionally, minis, usually provided by others.

I've experimented with a variety of handouts over the years.

I've used 10.5g poker chips, a variety of gaming stones, and other various tokens for expendables.

The Doomstones papercrafts were a total flop with my players.

Toy phasers and communicators were more distraction than benefit.

[Luke Bunyip]

I've made up ersatz death certificates for NPCs, as well as setting specific ID cards (1920's British Mandate of Palestine).

IMHO the point of props is generating leads for the players to potentially follow. Or not, as the case may be. Sigh...

[Shostak]

Maps, letters, photographs, death certificates, coroner's reports,... I also like things like game coins that can serve as luck tokens, which aren't so much props as game aids.

[sgtcallistan]

After figures and floorplans, we have made card models of saling ships, a set of card model pieces s of earthworks and palisades for fantasy or Celtic myth games as well as some samurai street buildings.

I have ready a set of Egyptian tomb parts for a likely cliff-hanger game; as well as some floorplans of Martian flying skiffs for a future 'trip to Mars' adventure.

[johndallman]

Food items: there was an occasion where there were a lot of D&D monsters too big to be represented with ordinary tokens, so I used Garibaldi biscuits for "you kill it, you eat it."

I also used Smarties as a tool in a Toon demonstration game. I handed out small packs to all the players at the start. Part-way through, I checked who'd eaten theirs and gave them more. The idea was that holding back and resource planning is not rewarded in Toon, doing things immediately is a more entertaining style.

Very occasionally I'll make up documents. I did a shipping label mostly so that the players could see that the person who sent the god-in-a-box had signed their name as "Illegible Squiggle" and the "Checked" field was just blank.

[Black Leviathan]

We've done coffee-stained letters or treasure maps for fantasy games. We've created mission folders with pages of intel printed in typewriter fonts and redacted and color prints of photographs for FBI games. We've done NPCs portraits for visual reference. I created an intel packet for Twilight 2000 that had maps my players could write on, pens and the intel briefing from the game in a little plastic pouch. I'm working on a painted nautical map for a Pirate Fantasy game.

[khorboth]

Food. Absolutely food. We have a couple of good cooks in my circle, and adding some appropriate food really helps immersion.

In our 7th sea game, we had culturally appropriate food when we visited the various countries. For fantasy games, we periodically have country-inspired dishes. I started a supers game in a movie theater once and popped corn. Filling the gaming room with the smells and flavors of the scene can really sell a scene.

Other things that have come up are a physical puzzle box, paper military orders, and statistical readouts. In our Star Wars game, the GM found a way to recreate the iconic text crawl and played them for us as intro/recap a few times.

I once had a friend who was not in the game play an NPC via video in an ultra tech game, recording video messages when I saw him for sending to the PCs. When they were finally in the same system as him, we skyped for the video call.

For a Rifts game, we once bought a cheap US map, wrote on it, aged it using tea, ripped it, duct taped it, and then used it as a prop.

When including a child in her first game, we made her a sugar fairy and let her give out small candies to the players which gave them in-game bonuses. Something like... +1 DR for having it, eat it for a use of defensive luck. I think there were like 5 kinds.

I'm sure there are more.

[Luke Bunyip]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

I am a great fan of the Starship Geomorphs for making up maps.

Those are amazing! Might have to reacquaint myself with the Snapshot rules.