Searching online you will find a thousand and one ways to make your gaming sessions better, but most of them seem to focus on the DM, with tips and tricks on how to make better stories, draw maps or interpret characters. It's a whole different story trying to take your game to the next level as a humble player.
In this post I will share with you 3 tools I really felt were game changers on my table.
1) An Adventure Log
Just grab any small notebook you have lying around, and at the end of the session write down a brief recap of what happened, on the next time the group plays, open up the notebook and read what happened last time. That's it.
You will quickly realize that between sessions the group will shift into the game mode much faster, engagement will be high right from the beginning since everybody will have a quick refresher right at the start.
2) Spell Cards
Head over to http://hardcodex.ru and print out your character's spells into some good cardstock. For bonus points I put mine into color-coded MTG sleeves, according to spell level, looks like this:
This is amazing to cut down time at the table just checking the book for those pesky details like: damage, range, duration, saving throws...
3) Ambient Music
I know it sounds silly, but try and put any of the Final Fantasy combat themes in your next battle, and you'll see how it makes everything feel more epic.
Make a quick search on Spotify for "RPG" and you'll find some pretty decent public playlists, listen to a few and pick one that suits your table's mood. Don't feel pressured to try and sync moments of the game with the music playing (like trying to find a music with orc grunts when the party fights orcs), just go with general mood and you should be fine. As an example, I have three playlists:
- Battle, for combat
- Ambience, for city visits, some travels and rest
- Ominous, for dungeon crawling
I also recommend using an external Bluetooth speaker like the JBL Go or Logitech X50, but playing from your phone is fine (as long as you have enough power, playing music drains batteries like crazy).
Bonus: Pens, pencils and erasers
Don't be that guy that shows up to the game session without anything to write. Seriously.
Once I happened to play at a table that had like 6 people and 2 pens, and we leveled up... it felt surreal that we were wasting time waiting for people to be done using a pen!
And there you have it!
Let me know what you do differently at your table :)