Alea Tools – A Review

In D&D 4E, to be able to fully use and arbitrate the effect of combat in general and powers in particular, you need to be able to visualize the positions of the PCs and NPCs. This might mean pencil, paper and lots of eraser or miniatures and 3D terrain to scale. Our group has a wet dream of some kind of solution based on Microsoft Surface but so far, that seems to be quite a bit into the future. This means we use D&D miniatures and a whiteboard with inch marks, drawing terrain in different colors. We use the whiteboard for bookkeeping as well, tracking initiative and effects. Read more after the break on how some magnetic markers and a battle mat saved me lots of sanity DMing 4E combat.