I have to say that I am in a bit of a bind these days in terms of gaming. As I have mentioned in another post, after three years of RVing full time, I am once again in a house and can game. When my wife and I decided to do the RV, we had to get rid of a lot of stuff. One of the things I had to do is get rid on 95% of my physical gaming materials. The other stuff we stored at a relatives place in boxes. Then about a year or so ago, we got news that the bad weather had destroyed the storage area that we had our stuff in. While a lot of stuff did survive, one of the things that did not was the rest of my gaming stuff.
The only saving grace is that almost everything I had in Physical Form I also had in PDF form. Hell I even had a lot of stuff that was only in PDF format. I know I got a lot of stuff in PDF because it seemed pointless to have physical copies of things that I would only use once or twice. Or for that matter stuff that would only be used for reference.
All that means that to game again, I will be forced to use only my PDFs. I just don't see the point in trying to acquire the physical books again for most of it. The only book I might get again is the Savage Worlds main book, since Savage Worlds is the game I will most likely be playing. For other games, I will just have to use the PDFs. Which begs the question on how?
Right now for me, there are only three options
- Use the Laptop to View
- Use the Phone to View
- Print them out
Considering where I am at, I do think that I will mostly be doing gaming via some sort of virtual table top software, the choice of which will be another post. So that said, the viewing on the Laptop seems to be the most practical. After all I am going to use it to for the VTT so why not just use it to display the rules. If I was doing face to face gaming again, I think I would use the phone initially. Although I think the phone screen is small and some sort of tablet would be better. I could use the laptop but I think that is a lot to just haul around and large screen tablet would be the best choice. As far as printing stuff out, the only things I would print out is my notes, quick reference material, and character sheets. Otherwise it would be the laptop or phone. I know with VTT games, I have printed out the adventures I was going to run so I could make easy notes on them.
How about all of you? Do any of you game just with the PDFs? If so, how do you do it and do you have any tips or tricks?