Top 9 Dungeon Master Screen Hacks
Dungeon master screens are often talked about, especially customizing them. I’ve been following a thread over at Roleplaying Pro where I commented on a few tips for customizing your screen. The potential of the game master screen has also been covered at RoleplayingTips.com, and numerous readers have responded with their tips over the years.
Published DM screens are great, but unfortunately, one-size does not fit all. Dungeon masters have different tastes. They also have different styles, varying experience levels behind the screen, and unique needs based on their current campaign and character group make-up.
While buying a DM screen can get you started if you’re new to a game system, you’ll want to upgrade over time. For example, I reviewed the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master screen at Dungeonmastering.com and thought it was great for DMs new to 4E, but eventually the EXP and Food Prices tables will be wasted space. Other tables could be too, once you know the rules. Also, the screen never truly serves your unique campaign, your homebrew world, or the different tables you reference more often in the books but weren’t chosen to be placed on any of the panels.
At some point, you’ll want to customise your own screen.
Following is my list of the best dungeon master screen hacks. Use these to customise to your heart’s content to make a dungeon master aid that works for you as your DMing skills – and campaign – continue to evolve.
1. Page protectors glued to cardboard panels
From Roleplaying Tips E-Zine Issue #80 a reader suggests gluing plastic page protectors to cardboard to make a customisable DM screen. Whenever you need a new chart or page of reference notes, just slip the page into a sleeve and you’re set.
2. Folded index cards along the top edge
Photos at the Sly Flourish blog demonstrate well how you can place folded index cards on your dungeon master screen. Sly’s pics show him using the cards for initiative. Don’t forget to use temporary cards for foes.
You can also just use folded slips of paper. Regardless of paper or card, you can put anything you need that’ll fit on those suckers.
3. Recycle old screens
I don’t know about you, but I’m on my fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. That’s not only four official screens for me, but I’ve got some homemade ones too. You can resurrect old screens by gluing new charts or plastic page sleeves over them. You can cut and glue old screens together. If you’re like me, you have enough to build a fort with.
4. Clips along the edges
Roleplaying Tips reader Perry Rogers recently wrote in with his tip about using clips on DM screens. Similar to folded index cards, you can get specific clips with surfaces for pasting things onto them, such as PC portraits, to make another easy initiative tool.
Here’s a photo with the monster leader’s turn. His troops’ initiative clip (color coordinated with the leader’s clip) is at the end of the turn.
View from the player’s side of the screen.
The dwarf has two ongoing effects: Stunned and -2 to Attack
rolls.
The turn indicator and a player’s clip. Note the magnet on the turn indicator. The magnet does a great job holding the
marker in place atop the screen.
Another hack is to clip things to the screen. Papers, printouts, photos, whatever. You can not only clip things to your side of the screen for reference, you can also clip things on the other side for player reference. You can also use different types of clips to best suit your screen’s thickness.
5. Extend your screen with flaps and panels
Have you ever seen the Hackmaster GM screen? It’s a work of art with two dozen panels and flaps tucked away in a three panel display. Why not do the same? Use your existing screen, hack an old screen you don’t use anymore, or build your own from scratch. Create additional panels and tape or glue them to your screen:
- Extend your screen to a third or fourth panel
- Add interior panels you flip back and forth through like a magazine
- Add flaps that go up and over to reveal inner panels, and perhaps new useful panels on the players’ side.
6. Post-It gods
P0wn your DM screen with Post-Its. Don’t just paste them onto your screen. Paste notes onto each other. For example, monster powers and feats often come in groups or categories. So, make a stack of cheat notes with one power per note, paste ’em together on your screen in alphabetic order, and flip through ’em as needed when dungeon mastering.
Do the same with spells, combat actions, and any other groups of rules that you can stack half an inch high on your screen.
It doesn’t need to stop at Post-It Notes, though. Take a trip to your local stationery store and check out the whole family of Post-It products and see if organizational inspiration strikes. There’s Post-It Cards, Tabs, Pages, and more.
If you have any Post-It Notes left over from this hack, get a pencil and make a mini page-flip book of PC decapitations.
7. Paste over useless tables with your own
Who says you have to settle with the charts the publisher gave you? Make your own charts, print them out, and tape or glue them over useless ones. Measure up the space you will be covering and build your new charts to spec. You might even have a colour printer at home to design awesome charts with, but black and white serve just as well.
8. What’s with art on the players’ side?
A dungeon master screen pet peeve of mine is reference printed only on one side. The players get to look at pretty art. That’s great, until the players have stared at that art for so long they no longer see it, and don’t give it another conscious glance for the rest of the campaign. Use the hacks in this post to put some useful information on that side of the screen.
For example, how about putting EXP and level-up tables on the players’ side? Maybe print up random insults and post a new one every session to goad your group on. “Divide and conquer is the GM’s best friend. It works on you every time.”
9. Build card holders
If clips don’t grab you or the deep real estate of your screen, then consider building card holders. Imagine printing or writing anything you wanted on index cards and being able to swap them out anytime depending on what’s happening in the game. Use tape and paper or chopped-up index cards to make a pocket on your screen, and then fill it with cards, the face-up one being what you need at the moment.
Nominated
Velcro: This did not make the official list as every Velcro experiment I’ve tried has failed. It’s heavy and takes a bit of a rip to separate. When I first learned I could buy Velcro in a roll for cheap I immediately thought about using it for my dungeon master screen. I was hoping to attached it to charts and props that I could mount on my screen and swap in and out as I pleased. In practice the idea was a flop.
Magnetic strip: Another eureka moment that died a thousand deaths. What could be better than a magnetic strip running along the top of your screen, right? With bits of magnets attached to cards, charts, and props, I could mount and replace items on my screen fast and easy. I didn’t get very far. Actually, I only got to the stage of getting a magnetic strip and cutting it up. Then it dawned on me that someone invented Post-Its. Hey, no one said I was the sharpest tool in the shed.
So, those are my top dungeon master screen hacks. What are yours?
Discover more from Campaign Mastery
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
May 26th, 2009 at 7:39 am
What a solid idea, i love it. It almost makes me want to go back to using a DM screen.
One Post-It tip though is to use the small color post-its in your books to quickly identify common areas. (3.5 & older, the saving throw charts pg 101 in 2nd ed? that sound right)
In any case Post-Its are always handy.
mike’s last blog post..Encounter: A Quick One
May 26th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Those are some awesome ideas!
Our group uses the ceiling-mounted projector setup, so since I have my laptop out anyway using the projector as a second screen, I just use it as a DM screen as well. All the tables and rules that commonly come into play I have entered into an Excel spreadsheet and rarely ever have to spend time looking anything up because of it. I also have almost all of my campaign notes and material on the laptop, and I can type much faster than I can write, so the laptop is not only my DM screen but also my “campaign binder”. I also use a normal DM screen, but only so I have a place to put my paper notes (mostly important NPC char sheets and maps that the PC’s can purchase and such) and secretly roll dice. I could technically do all of that on the laptop as well, but I enjoy rolling dice and having physical sheets to give to the players after they defeat a major enemy as a battle trophy of sorts.
May 27th, 2009 at 6:09 am
I’m surprised at how ‘controversial’ a topic as using a GM screen could actually be! It seems that there are a lot of people with pretty strong opinions about using, or not using, a GM screen.
That aside, those are some pretty great hacks listed for a GM screen. I especially like the ideas of extending your screen and just pasting over useless tables. We used to actually take two or three GM screens, paperclip them together into one massive multi-panel screen, and then create our own 8.5×11 sheets that we would put on them. It pretty much would give you a perfectly customized GM screen for what you wanted.
Samuel Van Der Wall’s last blog post..RoleplayingPro Gallery Feature
May 31st, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Im surprised nobody mentioned Hammerdog Games “The World’s Greates Screen,” available at paizo.com. Its a 4 panel screen, with something akin to binder covers, that have the slidey thingy that you can slide paper into. ala….homebrew dungeon master screen. i have one, its very very nice.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:36 am
I always make my own by gluing two manilla folders together. Then I photocopy or print off the tables I want and glue those on.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:51 am
@Mike – you gotta love Post-Its. They should release edible ones.
@Robert – what software do you use to display maps for the group?
@Sam – Agreed on the controversy. We should do a panel on this topic someday. groan. Sorry, I’ll try to screen my puns better from now on.
@Don – 4 panels? Nice. That beats my Citizen Games 3 panel customisable screen. :)
@Jacob – cool idea!
June 1st, 2009 at 7:21 am
One additional tip: a lot of people cover their home-made screens with self-adhesive contact plastic. A better choice, available from most hardware stores, is clear or tinted clear benchtop covering – it’s just as self-adhesive and the plastic is much thicker and more resiliant. It also resists folding and bending much more securely.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:39 am
@Johnn – I just use photoshop. I have a black layer over the map, and as they move and get LOS I erase the black layer. Of course I also have the map open in paint on my laptop to make sure I don’t accidentally show them a hidden path…
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Sorry for the double post, but I just thought I should mention that the free program Paint.NET can do the same thing I mentioned, for those of you who don’t feel like dumping close to $1000 on a piece of software just to effectively do Fog of War for D&D games…
Not to mention that Paint.NET is MUCH smaller and MUCH faster
You can get it here:
http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
@Robert. Cool. I tried that trick, but I tended to over-erase, revealing parts I didn’t want to.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Oh man, don’t give up on this awesome method just yet Johnn!
If you do the typical Gygaxian dungeon crawls that are full of secret paths left and right, then you could create a separate black layer covering each secret area. That way you will never accidentally reveal a secret area, and should the players find it you can erase it’s own layer. Of course you then have to blend these “secret” layers in to match the color of the surrounding area, e.g. everything not a room or a hallway on the dungeon map needs to be black, else the players will see something secret is there when you obviously erase to the borders of another black box.
July 1st, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Johnn – try RP Map Tool. I found Photoshop to be too cumbersome for display but RP maptool is great. You can do fog of war very easily and generating maps is no more difficult than in photoshop. http://www.rptools.net/
It’s under active development and the dev team is quite responsive.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:08 pm
@Robert: I downloaded GIMP recently and your tricked worked well.
@Projector DM: Thanks, I’ll check their tool out again.
December 29th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Thanks for this great piece, bookmarked and rss subscribed…
January 16th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
[…] Resources: Mediocre Tales' custom screen, Campaign Mastery's screen hacks […]
August 15th, 2012 at 4:49 am
[…] are some other interesting ideas to add to your screen here, for those feeling more […]
November 15th, 2012 at 3:16 pm
[…] classic paper and dice based RPG. One player is the game master, the others the adventurers. The Dungeon Masters screen delineates the space between the GM and the other players similarly to a second screen. The GM has […]
December 15th, 2013 at 5:38 pm
One trick I’ve used to great success while on deployment (would also work in the dorms with a RGB/HDMI input on your TV) is I’d borrow a projector after hours and use power point to run my games on the wall of my room. I’d have the presentation on the wall so the players could see the map and on my laptop I’d have it and my browser up so I could make edits and see outside the slide (where I put notes, extra objects, etc) or look up something. Players would tell me where they wanted to go and I’d move them, I’d use object effects like glow or shadow on N/PCs for marking or effects. Slides where usually the world/area/town with encounter/artwork slides at the appropriate points in the presentation. It was really easy to insert black boxes or camouflaged boxes to cover up individual rooms, hide secret doors, surprise them with traps, or set up illusions. On my screen (when I re-sized them) ppt allows me to see what’s under that object so I never reveal more than I want to to the player. I also could easily copy/paste the black box if I found one I needed another based on the group’s LoS.
Don’t get me wrong when I got home I switched back to the board, but only because I like letting the players move their pieces. As soon as it becomes cost effective to have an interactive screen on the table that would allow the players to be involved in the process I’ll probably switch over for life.
December 15th, 2013 at 9:17 pm
Some excellent suggestions, Nic – thanks for contributing!
February 23rd, 2014 at 7:00 pm
I Re-purposed the metal base of a vertical slide light table for my DM screen. I then laminated small name tags of the characters and numerous blank name tags. I put magnetic tape on the back of the tags so I could place them on my screen in any order I need them to be. The best part about the tags is I can use dry erase markers to record die rolls and stats I will need for the current battle/adventure. I also laminated a note card for each player so I can give everyone private information. I plan on laminating some blank grids and forms to use. The nice thing is how much it cuts down on shuffling through paper during gameplay.
February 23rd, 2014 at 8:38 pm
Interesting idea, Stacy – thanks for sharing!
November 10th, 2015 at 4:55 am
[…] Campaign Mastery: Top 9 Dungeon Master Screen Hacks […]