GM Tricks

Here's a Trick I did for myself to solve a little problem I was having in my 3.5E game. A party member cast the spell Entangle.  Nice low-level spell.  Area of effect... so... You make a little 'push pin', give it a Character Sheet (for later), make the Bio a copy-paste (with links embedded) of the d20SRD site Spell Information, load the AoE as an Aura and... drop.  Now adjust character controls so every can view, but only the people who can cast the spell can edit/use.

I do almost the same thing with my own spell area effects.  I just set them to all players control and that lets anyone that casts drag them onto the map.  As an added bonus, if you have access to the character vault, you can us it to pull them into any games you're playing in. =D

Yeah, I'm not quite at that point, but using a generic push-pin and things like d20SRD you can make them pretty fast.

As I'm a narrative text based GM, I tend to prewrite lots of scene descriptions to speed up the process and add to the fact that any and all my macros that my players are going to use are set to whisper the gm so the text flow is not broken up with the mechanics for the players. I also use two open game rooms so that any ooc chat can be done in one while the story takes place in the other. Closest thing to having multiple text channels.