Not owning a laptop, I’ve found my little USB thumb drive to be very useful when I’m running games at someone else’s place.
It lets me carry support material, like the SRD for D&D, backup game notes and character sheets, and also download stuff that was generated during the session — for me, that’s always been session photos; for you, it might be something else.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s so small that there’s also no real downside — and it’s a great place to back up your campaign data, even if you don’t access it during the game.
I love my thumb drive! I usually make a folder of all my campaign materials, any reference pictures, etc. Usually I will do my campaign prep at work, download pictures, write up notes to access later, etc. and then use them on another computer. It is invaluable for carrying enough information. Plus there are things like TiddlyWiki and Gray TiddlyWiki that I sometimes use on a thumbdrive to keep massive amounts of data organized.
Probably the single greatest GM tool I own. I carry a 1Gb USB drive everywhere I go and save everything to it rather than the PC.
I no longer have to haul books around as I buy almost everything in pdf format. I use HeroForge and True20’s Character Creator, so all my player’s info and NPCs are on the drive. With Fiery Dragon’s paper-based minis I print out what I need when I need it. I’ve also used TiddlyWiki to input all the info from pdf modules, greatly speeding up my time.
There have been times last year when I went to the bi-weekly game with only the laptop + USB, a d20 dice and a notebook. It certainly beats the two bags full of books and papers!
Being both a gamer and a techie (I know it is usch an odd combo :)) I can’t say enough good things about USB key drives. SD drives are also great as more and more PCs/laptops come with built-in multi-card readers.
But for me what really makes the USB ideal for gamers is that more and more games are published as PDFs. Having a whole library of RPG books in my pocket is what makes the thumb drive truly a great product for me. Having portable apps is just the icing on the cake (I carry my laptop everywhere, so stand-alone apps work fine for me).
definitely, if i didn’t already have a laptop which has a copy of all my gaming PDFs and materials, i’d have a large jump drive and steal the host’s laptop.
I’m a big fan of the thumbdrive. I do a lot of my gaming stuff on the computer. For a long time, I had no laptop of my own and had to rely on other people’s computers. The thumbdrive was definitely a life saver in those situations.
Portable aps are amazing things. The best collection can be found at the appropriately named portableaps.com. Their base suite has quite a few of the basic tools for general computer use, all usable from a thumbdrive. Definitely worth checking out.
This is one of those little tips that I figured would quietly fall off the front page without many comments. I’m glad I’m not the only one who gets a lot of mileage out of my faithful thumb drive. 😉
I get a lot of use out of Martin’s thumb drive too…when he brings it over so I can print something out for him. 😉
Abulia: I didn’t think that was likely to be a common usage for other GMs, so I left it out of the post. 😛
If you pay the $15 annual fee (well worth it, IMHO), d20srd.org supplies a downloadable version that (ta-da) fits on a thumbdrive.
And yes, my 4 GB thumbdrive is 3 GB gaming, 1 GB computer support apps (my alleged job). I also have a 20 GB minidrive with “everything else” on it…
Techie = gamer.
USB drives = the win, generally. I know I’m supposed to be more articulate than that, but it’s really hard to put it in much better words than that.
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I too use a thumbdrive religiously. Mainly as a way of having my campaign world handy no matter where I am and what computer I am on. I know that inspiration can hit at strange times, and if I have a computer readily available, I can type up whatever I need quickly.
I am looking at getting a thumbdrive, partially for this reason, partially just because I’m a geek and always wanted one. *lol*
Unforunately, they have disabled the USB ports on the thin clients we use here at work, so I can’t use it here. 🙁
(Jason) I am looking at getting a thumbdrive, partially for this reason, partially just because I’m a geek and always wanted one.
For quite some time, I wanted a thumb drive just for the geek factor — but I didn’t think I’d actually use it often enough to justify buying one. Then I actually got one, and found that I use it much, much more often than expected. 😉