Hey all, Sam and David here.
Hello and welcome back to another Tabletop Tuesday, the series on our blog where we talk about some board game, card game, dice game, or TTRPG game or accessory. We had a couple weeks of talking about tabletop games, so today we want to talk about some cool gaming accessories to help level up your role-playing game.
Obviously what we talk about today will mostly be relevant for folks who are playing in person. We could definitely do other posts for virtual tabletop accessories. But that would be for another day and time.
When it comes to combat while playing TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of all of the spell effects and conditions affecting the player characters, non-player characters, and the enemies. It can also be difficult to remember who is busy concentrating on things, especially since the physical character sheets don’t have sections to keep track of all of these aspects. Again, the digital sheets allow you to select conditions and such, which is useful, but that is a post for another time.
So we’ve found a few different accessories that are quite useful for keeping track of these things, so you can focus on the highs and lows of combat.
Let’s get started.
First up, WizKids has a line of cool spell effects to aid in your D&D playing: Arcane Fury & Divine Might, Halaster’s Tumultuous Templates, and Mighty Conjurations. Yes, we own all three sets. These help you see what areas are affected by things like the Fireball spell or Burning Hands, or they help remind you that someone has cast Dancing Lights and show where each of the globules of light are in the area. The spell effects in these sets include things like Elemental Weapons, Spiritual Weapons, Leomund’s Tiny Hut, Guardian of Faith, Cloud of Daggers, and so many more.
Since Sam plays clerics a lot, she often has Spirit Guardians up, and the spell effect definitely helps everyone see the area that is under the effect. Or if a middle of the night encounter is set up to happen, and the party is under Leomund’s Tiny Hut, you can actually put the miniatures inside and still see them there.
Now, it should be noted that these WizKids products are designed for D&D 5e, so not all spell ranges of effect will translate over if you play other systems.
Next up: ArcKnight has a flat plastic spell effects set, one for 5e D&D and one for Pathfinder. They actually have some sets that are designed specifically for D&D 5e clerics or wizards or whatever too, but we’re focusing on the generalized sets with this post today.
These are nice because you can see through the centers of all of them and it makes it easy to see who would be affected underneath when you hold it up in a direction from the person casting the spell or whatever. And the sets include tokens for things like Bardic Inspiration or Enlarge/Reduce.
But, because they are flat plastic, if you set them down on the flat terrain, it can sometimes be difficult to pick them back up quickly. This won’t be as much of a problem if you play with 3D terrain though.
You can get a whole set of these for like $45 (US), which isn’t too bad. We don’t mind these, but we sort of prefer the WizKids effects because they are 3D and easier to pick up and move around.
Finally, Viridian Gaming has a really cool set of Condition Rings that we definitely use in our gameplay. We’ll note that we have two sets of the rings, which is why we have two storage boxes. Each set has 72 rings in it, but with some of the party makeup we’ve had in the past, we’ve needed more than what a single set could provide (we had two clerics in one party, and we both needed “Blessed” rings and “Bane” rings. Since there are only 4 in each set, we thought two sets made more sense.
You can hang these condition rings on the miniatures being affected by the condition, and that is an easy way to keep track of what is going on. We don’t tend to use the Invisible ring much, because for the player characters, we often print a secondary copy of the miniature in clear resin. But it’s still useful to have for NPCs and enemies.
Probably our favorite rings in here are Concentration and Bane/Bless. Oh, and Hunter’s Mark. But all of them are useful. In the middle of combat, with so many things going on, it can be easy to forget who is Poisoned or Incapacitated or Charmed or whatever, so these rings make it easy to keep track of all of that.
Sure, there are other methods for doing this. You could save the plastic rings from bottles of pop or jugs of milk or juice, and use those. It would certainly be a time saver. But then you have to remember which ring means which condition. That’s why we really love these Condition Rings sets.
There are some of these rings that we wish existed. Like, we wish there was a ring for Death Ward, because that lasts for 8 hours and there’s no place to mark that on the character sheet. So we end up having to use a post it note or something attached to the sheet so we don’t forget.
Oh, and it should be pointed out that these are technically designed for D&D 5e but a lot of the rings will work for other systems as well.
And you can buy the rings with the storage container, or just the rings. We actually used their 3D print file and printed the storage boxes out ourselves, which works very nicely.
Well, that is all from us for today. Do you use any cool accessories to keep track of your spell effects and conditions while playing TTRPGs? Let us know in the comments so we can check them out! Thank you so much for stopping by, and we’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
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