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Cardea
2016-10-02, 11:41 AM
Howdy folks. I'm Cardea, and I have an issue I'm trying to solve.

My real life gaming group is currently using a Chessex battle mat. We've been using it for several years now, and its absolutely fantastic. And in the years of me being the nearly permanent DM, I've gotten really good at drawing the maps we need quickly and with easily readable information. No one is going "What is that? A chair?". Between using our own miniatures and our multiple colors of dry erase markers, its been good for us.

But I've been throwing myself into the challenge of becoming the best DM I can, since I sincerely love this hobby.

What I'm trying to do now is to get physical building set pieces to put on the map. If they're fighting in a multi-storied house, with players split between the various floors, fighting their enemies, I simply draw the floors on different points on the battle mat, and label which stairs lead to where. But I would like to have a physical piece for the building. A model that I could take apart by the floors, and put them next to one another, and have the players put their miniatures on that. But here's a snag.


Cost
Aesthetic
Re-usability


From what I can tell from what I've seen online on ebay, various shops in my area, or on Kickstarter, I can only really benefit from one of these at a time. I don't want to just have an Inn, and have that be the only style of Inn I can ever use. But at the same time I'd prefer if things didn't look like the same homogenized walls for the Inn, the Town Hall, the Shopkeeper's house. Insofar as I can tell, my best bet would be to figure out how to make modular pieces myself, and just make a bunch for the different places my players can find themselves in.

But before I commit to that, my question is this: is there any sort of 3D building pieces I can use that I can easily re-use for different purposes, that look decent, and won't cost me a small fortune? Ideally they'd also be easy to tote around, but beggars can't be choosers.

Darth Ultron
2016-10-02, 12:04 PM
There is one I can think of: Legos (or other types of blocks)

Legos are cheep, even more so if you just buy the plain sets of blocks. They also have tons of specialty legos that look nice too.

Along the same line are Lincoln Logs and other wood block toys.

Your local toy store should have tons of cheep things you can use too.

And if your into crafts.....your local craft store has plenty of doll houses and miniatures. You can even by parts like walls and floors and build your own.

Grod_The_Giant
2016-10-03, 10:39 AM
I think some sort of building set (Legos, K'nex, whatever) is your best bet, although such things aren't likely to be cheap unless someone happens to already have a big stash lying around.

Telesto
2016-10-03, 10:50 AM
Foam board. Do it yourself. Look online for templates and stuff.

It's cheap, it has held up to years of warhammer usage at many shops, and the aesthetic is what you make it. While it can be a chore making and painting everything, it has everything you want.

5ColouredWalker
2016-10-03, 01:50 PM
Foam board. Do it yourself. Look online for templates and stuff.

It's cheap, it has held up to years of warhammer usage at many shops, and the aesthetic is what you make it. While it can be a chore making and painting everything, it has everything you want.

This.
A old group I had a configerable dungeon. They made a bunch of walls sized to models that had pins in them, and pressed them so they looked vaugely like stone walls. They would then push the walls into a mat to set up the dungeon. It's quick and easy as long as you've got enough walls of the lengths you'd like, and it's relatively cheap.