Kelsey Dionne’s advice for GMing is to show up to the table like a tiger.
It’s possible this advice originally comes form ICRPG. I’m not sure.
But it is metal as hell. I strive for this always.
When I fail at it, it’s often because my grasp on the tension at the table has to go slack while I look something up. And while I love physical RPG books, I find it very hard to channel a tiger while flipping through a book. If I do, I’m almost never looking up rules. It’s almost always statblocks.
So for a long time I was writing or printing out all the monsters, spells, and magic items on index cards before sessions. On my twenty-fifth time writing out the statblock for Stingbats, I thought:
We have so many beautifully built digital tools for online play. Why don’t we have beautifully built digital tools for at-table play?
I didn’t know shit about programming outside of some very elementary HTML and CSS, but I learned! It was hard! I had four principles in mind for what I wanted:
A stat-block tool should do 4 things.
Display statblocks in a familiar fashion
Allow me to build custom combinations for encounters (or whole adventures)
Be very readable and usable on a phone
Offer no distractions at all from the table experience
It’s built now, and it’s my loveletter to you, Tiger!
3x5 Arcana
A mobile-first statblock reference tool. It puts statblocks, spells, and magic items from Shadowdark & OSE (maybe others later) at your fingertips.
You can search and sort Monsters and Spells, by level (HD) or alphabetically. Pop the little mark on the left of a card to pull it out of the big stack and into your little stack.
Here’s what a custom stack of Monsters looks like:
And here’s what a custom stack of Spells looks like:
Burn bright, you tiger.