EASILY display ANYTHING to your D&D players in person or online

I'm going to show you how to use this free software to easily display everything it wants to your DND players while still being able to keep all of your notes and tabs private on your screen this will work for running a display in person or online I'm also going to show you how this can be used with a chomecast for a wireless setup thank you so much to improved Initiative for sponsoring this video more on that later welcome to the table I'm Kelly and I'm going to show you some stuff like my vulnerable side since I made the video about my DM screen with a built-in display I've received a number of comments asking me to go more into depth on how I was using OBS to run the display the more I thought about it the more I realized that this could be used in a number of different situations to make it easier to show pretty much anything to your players there are three main setups I'll be going over plugging a monitor or TV directly into your computer using a chomecast for a wireless setup and playing online for those last two we'll be using this cheap little adapter but regardless of what you're outputting to the first thing we need to do is set up the software we'll be using a free and open source streaming and broadcasting program called OBS Studio the main window is your program monitor in other words what will be output to your players along the bottom from left to right you have your scenes which are the presets that will be building the sources which will be things like initiative monster art or videos the audio mixer which is only relevant if you're playing sound through OBS scene transition this is the transition effect that will be used when you switch between different scenes the standard is a fade which is probably good unless you want to go nuts on some star wipes then the last box contains all the settings for starting a recording or a live stream which we won't really be using first thing we want to do is set the output resolution to match our TV or monitor click on settings click on video then change both the canvas resolution and output resolution to the resolution of the monitor or TV that we'll be outputting to we want to do this first otherwise if we do our layout and then change the canvas size we'll have to resize all of our Windows manually which is a pain now we'll create a new Scene by clicking the Plus in the lower left corner and we'll call it combat if you're playing online the types of things that you'll want to display to your players will likely be different than when you're playing in person but you can use this this scene as a starting point and customize it to suit your needs I'll be adding three things to this scene a VT the player view from improved initiative and a slideshow of monster art for the vtt I'm using alar Rodeo I'll grab the share link hit the Plus in the lower left corner of the source box select browser then paste my link into the URL field for the height I'll set it to 1080 which matches my output display and the width I'll set to 12200 one important note the value you put in here will tell OBS the size you want to load the web page at which can be different than the size that it is displayed at on your monitor so if I put in 100 and 100 here and then I drag the red box to resize it it's loading the web page at 100 pixels by 100 pixels and then scaling it up a ton so that's why it looks like garbage you should try to roughly set the correct size here rather than dragging the red boxes to resize if you do need to resize it later you can double click on the source and then edit the width and height Fields this only applies to the browser type Source in OBS because you're telling it what resolution to load the website at other sources like screen sharing or images will have an innate size so they won't have these width and height Fields while creating the source you can just resize those ones by dragging the red squares now you can see that it is shown up in my program window but I can't click on it to join the session anytime you want to click on stuff inside of a browser Source you need to right click on it and then select interact then it'll bring up a separate window and you can click on stuff on the page now I'm going to join the session hide the UI on alar and also zoom in a bit now I can move all my tokens around from my own browser window and it'll show up in obs and also output to my players next thing is initiative this only works for initiative trackers that have a player view like improved initiative I'll copy the player view URL add a browser Source paste it in the URL field change the size again and click add this is the perfect time to tell you about the awesome features of improved initiative the sponsor of today's video and legitimately one of my favorite ttrpg tools improved initiative is a full combat tracker that helps you track initiative keep track of monster stats and abilities roll attacks and damage and track HP I favorite feature is the stat blocks that are embedded right into the initiative order with rollable attacks and abilities this has doubled the speed of my combat encounters which means there's less downtime between my players turns my second favorite feature is the one that we're using in today's video the player view you can easily copy the player view link and send it to your players or use it in your OBS setup so your players can see exactly what's going on and when their turn is coming up this has helped me speed up my combats as well because it has reduced the number of times one of my players is caught off guard by the fact that it's their turn my players can easily see what that their turn is coming up and prepare for what they want to do improved initiative is free to use but if you sign up to the patreon in the Epic tier you get some pretty nice extra features including the D and D Beyond importer so you can import all of your purchase monsters from DND Beyond into improved initiative account sync so all of your content sinks across all of your devices and customization options for the player view it's really cool being able to customize your player view to match the theme of your campaign including changing a bunch of the element colors adding player portraits next to your players and even adding a full screen Splash when it's their turn to really grab their attention head to the link down in the description to try out improved initiative and speed up your combat encounters okay this is a lot of technical details and it feels like it's getting boring so I'm just going to see how many dice I can stack on top of each other while we do this anyways back to this if you were trying to display a website and the text is super small instead of a browser Source you can add a screen capture source and then just capture a specific browser window then you can zoom the text on that page by holding command or control and pressing the plus key the larger text will then show up in OBS the last thing we'll add is a slideshow of monster art I recently came across this website called myth journeys.com where this artist has all kinds of character and monster art for DND and other fantasy and they allow you to use it for free so I've downloaded a bunch of images to a folder on my desktop called Monster art I'll add a source image slideshow change the duration to 4 seconds scroll down to the sources and click add directory now I'll scale and position it so that it fits under the initiative and that's the combat scene done if we click scene which is the empty default scene everything everything Fades to Black which is great then when you're ready to start combat you just click combat you can also set up the default scene with some art and make that your default DM screen this art is from Reddit by u/ sedat I've linked the post down in the description you can repeat the steps above to create different scenes for different things that you anticipate happening in your session like ambient videos off of YouTube image slideshows of fantasy art depicting different terrain or a slideshow of art of your characters if you have character portraits by the way that's something that my group did for our current campaign we commissioned portraits for each of our characters there are so many wonderfully talented artists out there it wasn't very expensive and it was so cool to see our characters brought to life we knew we'd be playing these characters for at least a couple of years so it was really worth it okay now that you have everything set up let's actually get this output into your display so if you're connecting your display directly to your computer like if you built my DM screen or if you're plugging a cable from your TV or monitor directly into your computer then all you have to do is make sure nothing's selected on the window right click on the program window go to full screen projection Brack brackets preview select your monitor and that's it if it says brackets source that means you have one of your sources selected and it will only output that source so just make sure no sources are selected and that it says full screen projection brackets preview if you have a chomecast and you want to have a wireless setup or if you're playing online then that's where this thing comes in with a chomecast you can cast your entire screen by clicking on the sources button in the cast menu the downside is you have to share your whole screen if you're on a laptop top this means your only screen will be up on the TV or display and you can't have any private notes or look up stuff without everyone seeing these little adapters are called virtual display adapters or sometimes dummy plugs they make them for HDMI or display port depending on what you have on your computer this plug tells your computer that there's a display plugged in even though there isn't so you can plug this in select to extend your display so you have a second desktop then output your OBS to that virtual display and then cast that screen from chrome now your obs s output shows up on your TV wirelessly and you can keep all your little secrets to yourself on your laptop now the last use case is for playing online although the types of things you'll want to show your players will probably be different like you probably won't be sharing a vtt because your players will be logged into the vtt directly it's still really nice to have a place where you can show stuff to your players without having to drag Windows around when playing online I like to display the player view of initiative and monster art that way my players don't have to have an extra tab open for the initiative and I can show the art that I want to without having to keep dropping it in the chat you can use one of these little dongles to create a virtual monitor to Output OBS to and then screen share that virtual monitor in Discord or whatever you're using that way you can still have all of your monitors private and only the stuff in OBS gets shared you could also use OBS the way it was intended and create a YouTube live stream and then share the link with your players but I found that the huge lag makes it unusable I prefer to use screen share because it's pretty much real time speaking of playing online if you want some tips on leveling up your online D and setup like improving your Sound and Lighting and some handy programs that I use you should check out this video here I appreciate you

Channel: Power Word Spill

Views: 23,827

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, dnd, dnd 5e, fifth edition, dm tips, dungeon master, d&d campaign, d&d 5e, 5th edition, ttrpg, tabletop gaming, DM, game master, GM, dungeons & dragons, how to play dungeons and dragons, wizards of the coast, how to, rpg, pathfinder, dungeon crawl classics, ose, tabletop roleyplaying, power word spill, level up your d&d night, dnd maps, online dnd, improved initiative, dnd art, obs studio, display anything to your dnd players, dnd in person

Id: hEBQVsW8-VM

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024