rpggeek.com/thread/700407/uber-geek-game-table

I saw this and figured "Why should I be the only one weeping tears of envy?"

It's pretty neat...but more if you tend to use miniatures while gaming, which we don't. It's a bit too gimmicky for me, I guess.

Hi! I'm the person that posted those pics and created the blog. As for the use of Mini's, we do use them. In fact, that's one of the main reasons for the design of it. It projects a map on the table and we put our mini's on it. You can see us using mini's during a battle in one of the pics on the latest blog post.

ubergeekgametable.blogspot.com/2011/09/s...ctures-and-info.html

or here is the pic I'm talking about;
3.bp.blogspot.com/-d3rKV4gIRfo/Tngn0omoO...w/s1600/DSCN0208.jpg

We don't always use mini's for the monsters simply because we don't own that many.

If anyone has any other questions about it, please ask, I'd be glad to answer them.

It is definitely cool technology. I saw a more luxurious version of the same at GenCon this year, where the minis were encoded on their bases, and the table could read them and display stats and game effects on the projected map. In addition, as the minis moved, you could set one to be the "center", and the map would move instead of the figure, so that that miniatures representing the PC's were always near the center of the table and so you always saw as much of the map as possible.

Yea, MapTool allows you to have character stats/sheets. Right now we don't use a MapTool Framework for our HackMaster 4 games simply because no one has created one yet. For my HMb and A&8's games at Conventions there's already Frameworks for those made by a guy I game with online. Also, the map can be moved, shifted/altered easily.

MapTool has a built-in Fog-of-War and Vision Blocking tool that we use. The way we play, the players move their mini where they want to go and the GM moves the onscreen token for that character, that way, as the character moves more parts of the map is revealed. Also, you can click on the character token and it will show exactly what is in line of sight of that token, so it's pretty easy to tell what is in sight of a character or not.

All that does take some prep work by the GM but it is worth it. I need to take some video of how it all works...

We have been using MapTools and skype for a while (as one of our group is no longer local), but rely on a number of laptops rather than the rather cool projector. It seems to work well and I am slowly putting a EABA framework together.

Yea, that's what we were using until a couple of weeks ago. We have one remote player(4 hours away) so we use Skype to talk to him. We were using a bunch of laptops at the table but the guy who built this table wanted to try this as an experiment after he saw a thread about something similar over at RPTools.net

We've used it for 2 game sessions now and are loving it. We've got one more game session and then we are taking it to a local convention, GameCon Memphis, to run HackMaster, Aces&8's and Mongoose Traveller on it.