Tabletop Role Play

One of my (relatively interesting, maybe?) hobbies is tabletop role-playing games. Anything where I can get together with a group of friends, create characters, and roll some dice to simulate various events in a fantasy universe falls under this category, I believe. You can't forget about the role-play of course, but hacking, slashing and burning packs of monsters and finding awesome treasure is equally satisfying.

That said, every dungeon master (the person who creates the setting, pretty much) needs a few good tools. My husband created this simple visual game board by scoring lines into a magnetic dry erase board in a grid fashion.

We have assorted magnets which represent our characters and non-player characters (merchants, adversaries, and various other creatures). Dry erase markers are used to draw boundary lines and other landmarks in areas. To give you an idea of how much space is shown on this board, each magnet (player or non player character) occupies a five-foot square.

The most obvious disadvantage to this board is that we can't easily display flying creatures, due to the lack of a third dimension. For the most part, though, we've had great success in our games with showing the positioning of the player and non-player characters.