Building My Custom D&D and Gaming Table

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@CaedenV Ай бұрын

Fun build! A few things about TVs that may help people trying to design something around it. 1) Bigger is typically going to be better... To a point Smaller TVs are aimed at households with 1-2 viewers, so they can get away with cheaper filters that don't give the best viewing angles, where large TVs have viewing angle issues just for a single viewer if they don't use good materials. Seems counter-intuitive, but you will generally have fewer viewing angle dimming or color shifting problems with a bigger TV. I am admittedly a little bit of a TV snob, but the last time I did serious TV shopping for my current computer screen TV I wanted something in the 45-48" range to fit my space and the closer computer use... but I couldn't find a decent quality display with the features I wanted under 55". And as 55" is now firmly in the smaller end of the 'medium' size of modern TVs, I somehow doubt that the issue has gotten any better. I was looking a little bit a year ago, and there were still a few 55" TVs that had features I consider necessary, but for a lot of brands you had to look at a 65" screen to get those features, and the issue is only going to get worse as larger displays get more normalized. That said, there is a point where things get 'too big', especially for close-quarters use like when used in a game table or computer monitor. You don't want something so massive that you cna't view the whole thing. Or so large and leaking so much light that you can't control the ambiance of the room. Or so big that having a gaping hole in your table causes structural issues, or tempt people to put their palm on the TV to support their weight as they try to reach across the table to move a mini. 2) 4k is actually important, and 8k will not be overkill when the price comes down. Again, I'll freely admit that I am a TV snob, but I am also a realist. For most people the move from 1080p to 4k, and now to 8k, yields little to no actual benefit in pixel-level detail of the content. Our eyes, especially with motion, don't register pixels at distance, and having the same movie in 1080p or 4k isn't going to make a whole hill of beans difference on a 55" display 6+ feet away. 4k discs have a wider color gamut more contrast, and smaller compression artifacts than a 1080p disc, and that is far more noticeable than the texture of 1080p pixels vs 4k pixels. 4k HDR content is also a huge improvement at distance because of the HDR more than the 4k. But when you are right next to a TV, sitting 2-3' away at often static images... you are going to see pixels even at 4k on a relatively small display. The higher resolution for close-quarters TV use, the better! The other reason higher resolutions are important is gate size. The bigger the pixels the slower they open and close, the less they can fully close to block light, and the more effort/power/light it takes to illuminate the pixels. Most of the benefit to higher resolution in traditional TV viewing is related to these light control and ghosing mitigation issues being dealt with better than actual pixels. And when sitting literally next to the screen this stands out even more. 3) Consider carefully about OLED. The problem with normal LED/QLED TVs is that to have accurate colors, they are going to be very bright. Turning the brightness down is going to kill your color and quality, but having the TV on at a normal brightness will introduce glare, eye strain, weird under-lighting on any minis and players, etc. OLED has a lot more flexability on retaining quality, while not having to be as bright as 1000 burning suns, which can help make your maps feel much more 'paper-like' and feel more like playing on a glossy play mat instead of a TV. HOWEVER, OLED does still suffer from burn-in. Not as bad as it use to, but long 4-hour sessions on the same static bright white snowey mountain pass or ice cave is still going to have potential to damage the TV. If you spring for the OLED route, make sure to regularly move the map around, and consider springing for animated map options where even a little movement can help save the TV. 4) VESA mount the screen! The back of (almost) every TV known to mankind has 4 screw holes on the back for mounting the TV to a wall mount. Those 4 holes are mounted directly to the frame, and it is specifically made to handle all of the stress and weight of the TV at any angle, while other bits of the plastic housing might actually have sensitive equipment right underneath that could easily be damaged if even a little pressure is applied. Get a wall mount to mount the TV to, and then attach the wall mount to the frame of your table. The TV will then be free-floating without any worry about covering or blocking ports, speakers, vents, etc. The other plus to this is that when it is time to upgrade or swap out the TV, you don't need to totally redo the whole table. Just un-bolt the old TV, attach the new TV, and maybe add a few washers if the new TV is thinner than the previous one. 5) Heat control Leaving the air vents un-blocked isn't really enough. Heat kills displays, and when pointed face-up and trapped under a layer of plexiglass, the worst part of the TV to get hot is sitting in the top of a pool of heat which can reduce the brightness and life of the TV over time. Also, a lot of components rely on their own heat to create a convection current to passively cool themselves... but if they are oriented screen-up they are not going to disapate heat correctly. Now, if you are literally only using the screen 6-10 hours a month during game sessions... it may not matter. But as the DM if you are using the screen for long session prep, or to watch TV while doing other stuff, Just a simple $5-10 computer fan with a basic dust filter circulating fresh air in and towards the screen could save you a lot of money and down time. 6) Full Array Backlight is a must... unless you go OLED. I don't use my TV in a gaming table... but I am going on ~15 years of using large screens and TVs for computer monitor use, and the backlight is a big deal. I rarely noticed it when moving to a new TV for my setup, but every time I have had to go back to my old TV for one reason or another I would notice how the display would not light up evenly, or if something bright was on the screen, it would brighten a whole section of the screen instead of just the intended part. For video... I don't really notice it that much. But for static images on an otherwise dark display, I find it extremely distracting. Getting something with as many backlight zones as is practical inside of your budget will be a help. Over the years I went from edge-lighting, to 10 zones, to 25, and each one has significantly helped in contrast and even lighting. Another annoyance is dynamic or active backlighting... for computer use, or mostly static image use, turn that off. when something barely moves, or the algorhythm can't decide if a section of the display is light or dark, it can get weird and blinky. It does offer better contrast and less light bleed if your room is dark... but at the cost of distraction it just isn't worth it. 7) Last but not least, make your you are getting a full 4:4:4 panel, with the inputs and wiring to support it, and a device that can output it. For computer use this is actually a relatively recent fix. We didn't get modern HDMI connections that could do full 4k 60Hz 4:4:4 signal until just a few years ago, which meant dumbing the output down to 30Hz 4k which gets choppy, or 1080p at 60Hz. But many cheap displays don't even have the hardware to show 4:4:4 even if you feed it the right signal, which is generally ok for TV and movies where things are large and moving... but for computer use, especially around things like text, it can give a weird red or green hue on different sides of letters, or make a checkered pattern or fine texture look like a blurry grey color instead of what it is supposed to look like... it gets weird. And up close, it really looks odd seeing something rendered in 4:2:0 instead of 4:4:4. That being said, if you have a cheap TV with a 4:2:0 panel, or and older computer that can't output 4:4:4, the solution is to make things bigger. 4:2:0 is effectively a type of compression (both logical and physical) treating each square of 4 pixels as a cluster instead of as individual entities... so if you do something like 150% display scaling where what would take 1 pixel now takes all 4 pixels, you effectively work around it... but you are also effectively treating a 4k TV as a 1080p display which isn't without its own drawbacks. But this is just another one of those things where for video it often doesn't matter, or at a distance it doesn't matter... but for up-close use with static images, it gets annoying quickly.

@KevbotFalconhammer Ай бұрын

Thanks for the advice! I didn't even consider the heat generated by the screen of the TV trapped under the plexiglass, or how the cooling system in general changes with the TV flat. Definitely things to consider when refining the build process.

@JohnGunter_Johnprime 3 ай бұрын

I built a table with a TV in it to help with gaming. We use Roll20 to handle the maps because it allows you to make line of sight blocks, so only the parts of the map that the players see are available. We still use miniatures, but the maps are entirely on Roll20. So far it has worked out really great.

@l979corvette 28 күн бұрын

how to you manage line of sight blocks on roll20 with minis? as the DM do you have to manually place where the mini is on roll20?

@JohnGunter_Johnprime 27 күн бұрын

I run two laptops at the table, one is running my DM version of Roll20 and the other is a player version of Roll20. In Roll20 you can use lighting effects on the maps and have tokens on the map that have vision. The player version is what displays on the big screen TV and I have a couple of tokens that represent a few of the minis that the players use. Yes, I have to move the tokens around as the players move their minis, but I do that from the DM laptop. Let me know if I need to clarify more.

@l979corvette 27 күн бұрын

@@JohnGunter_Johnprime thanks so much for the clarification I was racking my head on how to do this as I like using real minis. Might give this a shot.