This kind of thing can be fun. It can also be just as or more fun to sit around with nothing more than some scrap paper and an idea. Especially no shade on people that don’t have unlimited budgets to spend on setups like this.
One time I built an arena out of kinetic sand, with shaped obstacles and dunes and stuff, then scraped a grid into it for battle. I built some working pit-traps into the sand itself that only collapsed with enough weight was placed on them, and I glued small weights to the bottom of the player minis to trigger the traps, while using light plastic kobold minis for the monsters, which did not trigger them.
The next week my girlfriend responded by running her game with a functioning sewer system with variable water levels.
…my wife came home from a chemistry demonstration with a cooler full of dry ice: we thought it would be fun to fill the master bathtub with hot water, dump it all in at once, and watch what happened…
…besides the obvious violent commotion, our entire house filled with a waist-high impetrable fog, enough that we panicked and quickly evacuated the cats lest they be overwhelmed by carbon dioxide…
Sounds like an exciting experience! I love dry ice. 10/10 would fog again.
The fog in the air is simple water vapor, the Co2 is rather small, you would need about 50Lbs of Co2 before you are in any danger.
One slab of dry ice is a couple pounds, I could easily see a bathtub full of it being a problem. Also, co2 is heavier than air, cats are smaller than humans, and they live closer to the ground, so I think …m… made the right call.
You don’t make full-size, movie-like sets, then dress up as your characters and use your own bodies as figures, throwing wads of paper while yelling “fireball?”
There’s a YouTube channel that focuses on how to make cool atmospheric D&D environments like this. I think it’s called AtmosSeeker? They’re smaller than I think they should be.
Moooom, can you turn on the fog of war machine? I can see parts of the mortal realm again.
I took a breaking DM’ing after running a group for nearly a decade. During that time I started playing 40K. Which, some may not know this, is quite expensive if you don’t know how to 3d print. So I picked up the hobby.
Now that I want to DM again many of my players came to prefer virtual over in person. It makes me sad because I could do stuff like this now without too much effort. What gives?
Convenience gives. It’s hard to get 5 or six people consistently together at the same time and place. Removing the place makes it more accessible even if objectively worse. I am working on a tabletop thing in python with particle effects and other little tidbits so you can have some visuals that are browser and company independent.
To build off this, moneys tight for a lot of GMs and stuff like foundry removes the need for buying, assembling and painting terrain and miniatures. Which saves on time and money.
