PDA

View Full Version : Nobody here talks about the tabletop: miniatures, terrain, etc. Why is that?



Imbalance
2020-11-10, 03:26 PM
It perplexes me. Even as one of the most active gaming forums around, it seems the vast majority of forum topics on GitP are all rules, rules, rules, OotS comics discussions, build ideas, gripes, recruiting, and some lore (not in order). That's fine, but also weird to me that the only hits I get when I search for topics about minis are some mentions in a WH40K thread and very rarely an arts & crafts custom. Apart from Kevin Cook, nobody really says much about dice, either. I checked the forum rules a bunch just to make sure the subject isn't outright banned, but it doesn't look like it is. Guess I'll find out.

Is this entire message board populated exclusively by theatre-of-the-mind folks? Does everyone talk toys elsewhere?

I mean, we could.

Talk about it. Y'know...

Hey fellow nerd people, how do you like those little figurines? :smallredface:
Whaddya like? 2d, 3d? Painted/unpainted? Metal/plastic/meeples carved out of soap?
Do you rock the resin tiles, plaster casts, DIY? Fly in a pre-built scene or assemble on the fly? Dry-erase on a gridded mat?
Do your click-clacks sparkle? Do you annually recolor the numbers with a 40-year-old crayon? Use a tower or a tray or just toss them willy-nilly?
Does your DM hand you a map? Are you allowed to write on it?
I know a lot of games moved online, but the plague won't be around forever. What did you do before quarantine? What do you want to do once face-to-face gaming is a thing again?

Tvtyrant
2020-11-10, 03:29 PM
Terrain: We vary by DM. I use 4E flat terrain tiles (I have a double complete set) and some stuff I make to go on top. Plus aquarium stuff.

My current DM now that I finally get to play uses a dry erase board and a pen.

Models: I use a mix of pogs and fantasy risk/chess figures because they are cheap and get the job done. Current DM has a lot of models and one of the other players specializes in modeling so we have mts of them, lots of hero quest style stuff.

Xervous
2020-11-10, 04:00 PM
Being forced by geography into running virtual I can’t make use of my mini collection and it has admittedly stifled my desire to add to the arsenal. Was doing 3D print and paint for a while but with that not contributing to shared enjoyment of the hobby I’ve focused more on other prep I can share.

Speaking of which I should load up that Azgaar’s map and do some updates.

Waterdeep Merch
2020-11-10, 04:10 PM
When I first started really playing TTRPG's, I quickly assembled dozens of miniatures and reusable maps to play them with. These became the standard for a long time, with the occasional high quality printed map and a never ending influx of new minis to add to everything. Then I went through a stint where I got tired of it and only did theater of the mind. Now I go back and forth, all depending on whether I believe the players are going to stick to a single area long enough to warrant maps and minis and if I have the spare time/desire to prepare them. On the extreme end I sometimes add in 3D terrain now, but this is even more exceptional.

The reason for all this is how difficult it has gotten to judge my players' desires accurately enough to warrant all the extra time and energy to use maps, especially with all the newbies we've been getting in the last few years. I can't always guess if they're going to spend five hours or five minutes in any given location, so preparing things ahead of time becomes futile and meaningless. I'll only do it if I'm 100% certain the players are going to spend at least an entire session in a place.

Wizard_Lizard
2020-11-10, 05:47 PM
Simple answer for me. Things like tabletop terrain and minis are expensive. Also in NZ, there is sparse stuff available and shipping costs.. a lot. I would love to be able to have minis and things but honestly I make do with a piece of pad paper and a pencil.

denthor
2020-11-10, 06:09 PM
I like a flat surface to move the mini figure around accurately counting distance. I do not have to worry about up hill down hill. No inside spaces of buildings. Although 2nd story is fun with destroyed buildings. Becomes a problem sometimes.

Kapow
2020-11-10, 06:09 PM
I didn't start with Dnd.
The game I started with was completely theatre of mind, with some very basic maps. (black and white, no grid)
Later I started playing GW games and didn't even occur to me, that I could use those minis for my rpg.
Even later I played SR and VtM and still no minis.
I came to DnD late, I think I was about 27 yrs old and it was late 3.5 and it was honestly the first time I experienced a grid and minis in a rpg.

So, yes, I use them now, but still very basic stuff.
Quickly scribbled battle Maps and the minis, that are on hand (atm mostly Zombicide and Mouse & Mystic).
It's just not important to me.

Mastikator
2020-11-10, 06:49 PM
I've been playing for almost 17 years and this year- this month is the first time I've bought a pair of miniatures. Actually like how the painting turned out.

I've made a lot of portraits of characters before though. But that's as far as it goes, I've never been in a group where people used minis and props, well except this year the DM is really stepping up his game.

Lord Torath
2020-11-10, 06:59 PM
I've always used minis, but never a grid or ruler. More for a general sense of what and where rather than anything precise. Minis are expensive, and I didn't have money to spend on them. I used lego minifigs and battle beasts (https://theretronetwork.com/a-brief-history-of-battle-beasts/) for decades. The lego minfigs have become much more interesting over the years.

KillianHawkeye
2020-11-10, 08:42 PM
I think the reason minis aren't much of a topic here is that they aren't necessary to play the game, and there is no basis to assume everyone has them or uses them in the same manner. Whereas the rules of the game are well established and can be followed by everyone if they have access to the relevant books.

In other words, miniatures and terrain models, while certainly fun and interesting, are props. The game rules are information, and information is much easier to spread and discuss online.



As for my group, at least back when we were meeting in person, we did amass a fair collection of official minis which we liked to use and had some homemade terrain props as well, but most of our combat mapping was done on a large vinyl mat with a printed grid and drawn on with wet-erase markers.

Mechalich
2020-11-10, 08:52 PM
In other words, miniatures and terrain models, while certainly fun and interesting, are props. The game rules are information, and information is much easier to spread and discuss online.

And any differences between the use of such props is mostly a purely aesthetic consideration. For the purposes of actual efficacy in tactical representation the difference between a GM who puts down an extremely well made, elaborately painted, and overall gorgeous troll miniature on a play mat and a GM who puts down a red d12 twelve and says 'that's the troll' is roughly zero. Beyond the basic ability of the participants to recognize which miniature is which and to physically map out the in-game motions, everything else is pretty much pure gloss. And since this is a primarily text-based forum, discussion of visual elements tends to be rather lackluster.

Eldan
2020-11-11, 03:41 AM
I started with D&D (playing other games now, current groups are Degenesis, Fate (Dresden Files) and Unknown Armies), but we never used minis.

Which is interesting, because we were all also Warhammer Players and definitely had enough minis. But we all came to the conclusion that we never really liked the miniature pushing aspect of RPGs. Too much of a break in the action to take out the minis and maps and set up, we always theatre-of-the-mind-ed it.

Glorthindel
2020-11-11, 04:28 AM
I was an avid Warhammer (and 40k) fan before I got into RPG's (its why WFRP is my favourite return-to game) so I have a quite sizeable collection. I haven't played any of the battle games for 20 years now (except Blood Bowl, but even the PC version has moved me off the tabletop there too), and long ago broke my armies down and kept only the bare minimum needed for rpg games (I am probably underestimating that, but it feels like a bare minimum when you only have 40 goblins instead of several hundred!). I still paint, but nowhere near as much as I did, and every new campaign usually provokes a sudden spending and painting spree to get a just-perfect painted party together (even if we are explicitly not using models for the campaign, its still cool to have the party models in the centre of the table).

Aliess
2020-11-11, 04:43 AM
Unsurprisingly, we've been playing a lot on roll 20 lately and I really dislike the way having all these maps and tokens has pushed the game much in a boardgaming direction rather than encourage players and DMs to describe their actions.

We've got a few physical models, but tend to only use them for marking it rough positions in a map.

King of Nowhere
2020-11-11, 05:39 AM
I think the main problem here is preparation time vs uncertainty. Especially given how strongly this community feels avout railroading.
If you don't railroad your players, you have no certainty of any given encounter, so spending hours to prepare a climatic scene that may not happen is not exactly rewarding

Yora
2020-11-11, 05:44 AM
Miniatures and toy castles are distractions that get in the way of visualizing interesting environments and creatures as living things instead of levitating statues. They are a crutch that limits the imaginative potential of roleplaying games. They make sense for tactical wargames like Warhammer, but don't have any place in narratively focused games.

And what's there to say about dice? They have equal sides and numbers on them.

noob
2020-11-11, 06:05 AM
Miniatures and toy castles are distractions that get in the way of visualizing interesting environments and creatures as living things instead of levitating statues. They are a crutch that limits the imaginative potential of roleplaying games. They make sense for tactical wargames like Warhammer, but don't have any place in narratively focused games.

And what's there to say about dice? They have equal sides and numbers on them.

The interest is if the battles gets too crowded and that different people are imagining different scenes and that it results in a lot of communication complexity then using miniatures helps agree on the positions of the things.
If the battles are not too complicated miniatures can just be a loss of time due to needing to set up all the things.
ex: In a boss fight a theatre of the mind setup works perfectly since it does not matters that people imagine things a bit differently from each other due to the low complexity of the armies involved.

RedWarlock
2020-11-11, 06:20 AM
I got into D&D through the minis game back in the mid-00s. I have literally hundreds if not thousands of plastic minis in a dozen or so drawer units, including a TON of the old vinyl minis and the newer WizKids produced hard plastic (especially the Eberron stuff). I've also gotten into buying some to-scale dinosaur toys for expanded selection, though at some point I want to get them on proper bases.

And then COVID hit, and I can't do anything with it all. My gaming table is overgrown with old Amazon boxes we need to break down, because we haven't had gamers over since February. We do all our gaming currently over Discord, though next time I run (Werewolf the Forsaken) I'm going to do screen-share on a Photoshop document and draw a map and maybe some scene-setting illustrations myself.

Glorthindel
2020-11-11, 06:39 AM
I think the main problem here is preparation time vs uncertainty. Especially given how strongly this community feels avout railroading.


I must admit, I have had a bit of 'fun' with my players on the preparation side.

As all my models are now boxed away, I have to dig out the ones I need prior to the session, which means (in order to avoid it being abundantly obvious what they will be facing during the session) I usually dig out 2-3 times the models I actually need, in order to obfuscate the ones on my shelf that I do need, with the the ones I have taken out which I don't. I usually make a point of getting out one or two ludicrously big and unpleasant models to put with the rest in order to freak them out (I have a Dragon, Wyvern, Griffon, couple of big Daemon Princes, a Bloodthirster (basically a Balor for the uninitiated), and occasionally I throw in the Tyranid Carnifex for good measure (if you don't know it, Google it, its a terrifying beast!))

My players used to find that little game hilarious, until the session of Dark Heresy where they actually faced the Carnifex :smallamused:

MoiMagnus
2020-11-11, 07:07 AM
My guess is that peoples more interested into talking about those tend to gravitate toward media that are more adapted to share images than forums. For comparison, I've just opened the DnD subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/) and 3/4 of the posts have the tag [Art] and are peoples sharing what their character look like, and in the middle of that some posts like this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/js1ma8/mtg_commons_a_hole_punch_and_some_large_cabochons/
=> The guy is creating tokens for D&D from MtG cards, since this game has a lot of cards with very good illustrations but crappy effects so you can buy them in big numbers for nothing.

AdmiralCheez
2020-11-11, 08:03 AM
Back in college, when my group all lived in walking distance from each other, we used a dry erase mat, pieces of paper for terrain features, and random objects/dice for characters/NPCs. We didn't have money or storage space for making minis. Nowadays, we're all in separate states, so we use Roll20 to play.

My wife actually started a D&D club at the library she works at, and I made a bunch of mini terrain and props for it. She was using the Monster For Every Season minis for the players and monsters, she used Lego pieces for walls and buildings, and the little props I made out of foam board, glue and paint. It was working really well, but then that too had to transition to online. She just got a 3D printer at the library, and had the teens design characters in heroforge, so I think she plans to print them out herself and use those when the game goes back to being in person.

Imbalance
2020-11-11, 11:17 AM
Terrain: We vary by DM. I use 4E flat terrain tiles (I have a double complete set) and some stuff I make to go on top. Plus aquarium stuff.

My current DM now that I finally get to play uses a dry erase board and a pen.

Models: I use a mix of pogs and fantasy risk/chess figures because they are cheap and get the job done. Current DM has a lot of models and one of the other players specializes in modeling so we have mts of them, lots of hero quest style stuff.

Mixed is where it's at for me. Super detailed props are great, but for the purposes of getting the scene rolling a loose approximation is fine. It's just that what I had on hand from numerous games prior to rpg's was more accessible than the chess pieces and already 3d.


I think the reason minis aren't much of a topic here is that they aren't necessary to play the game, and there is no basis to assume everyone has them or uses them in the same manner. Whereas the rules of the game are well established and can be followed by everyone if they have access to the relevant books.

In other words, miniatures and terrain models, while certainly fun and interesting, are props. The game rules are information, and information is much easier to spread and discuss online.



As for my group, at least back when we were meeting in person, we did amass a fair collection of official minis which we liked to use and had some homemade terrain props as well, but most of our combat mapping was done on a large vinyl mat with a printed grid and drawn on with wet-erase markers.

Ease of use is king, and I've also certainly had interesting experiences with text-only pbp games. For that matter, nothing beyond the SRD is necessary to start D&D (I am ignorant of whether other games have such documents). But did you prefer having those tangible scene-setting elements in front of you, or would you say it was more enjoyable without them?


I think the main problem here is preparation time vs uncertainty. Especially given how strongly this community feels avout railroading.
If you don't railroad your players, you have no certainty of any given encounter, so spending hours to prepare a climatic scene that may not happen is not exactly rewarding

I have definitely found this true. I'm still learning, but I think the general preference is to have some props for spacial representation, as I'm not the best at describing things in relation to one-another in a way that gets everyone on the same page. As this effort evolves, my plan is to prepare certain scenes that are useful in a larger variety of settings and keep them set but for a few details that can be rearranged as needed. If they're likely to be in the desert for the next few sessions, that's a pretty easy battle map to set up ahead of time, with the expected variety of encounters likely to take place there. In town affairs are less likely to require battle maps, but a simple street and some boxes for buildings can get the point across. Where I misused my prep time the most was in the dungeon crawl, when I made the entire Phandelver mine only for my players to avoid nearly half of it. Going forward, I may preset a few of the key rooms with 3d components, and just use a few sections of 2d cardstock tunnels in between if that would even be necessary.


I got into D&D through the minis game back in the mid-00s. I have literally hundreds if not thousands of plastic minis in a dozen or so drawer units, including a TON of the old vinyl minis and the newer WizKids produced hard plastic (especially the Eberron stuff). I've also gotten into buying some to-scale dinosaur toys for expanded selection, though at some point I want to get them on proper bases.

And then COVID hit, and I can't do anything with it all. My gaming table is overgrown with old Amazon boxes we need to break down, because we haven't had gamers over since February. We do all our gaming currently over Discord, though next time I run (Werewolf the Forsaken) I'm going to do screen-share on a Photoshop document and draw a map and maybe some scene-setting illustrations myself.

Similarly, I arrived at D&D after a decade and a half of HeroClix and Mage Knight. When the first group I joined was already using those as stand-ins, we started pooling some more specific resources for the table, eventually sharing a collection of "boss" monsters. We were using HeroClix maps, too. After that game went on hiatus, I started my home game, and with that started building my own collection. To me, that's also one of the more enjoyable aspects of tabletop gaming - not just buying the exact licensed representation of some classic monster or villian, but finding ways to set the scene in a visually appealing way while making creative use of what is already on hand.

I tried to go the illustration route, but I found that I wasted a lot more time trying to find the perfect image than just creating the scene myself. Though, I keep kicking myself for not drawing more. I applaud you for that.


I must admit, I have had a bit of 'fun' with my players on the preparation side.

As all my models are now boxed away, I have to dig out the ones I need prior to the session, which means (in order to avoid it being abundantly obvious what they will be facing during the session) I usually dig out 2-3 times the models I actually need, in order to obfuscate the ones on my shelf that I do need, with the the ones I have taken out which I don't. I usually make a point of getting out one or two ludicrously big and unpleasant models to put with the rest in order to freak them out (I have a Dragon, Wyvern, Griffon, couple of big Daemon Princes, a Bloodthirster (basically a Balor for the uninitiated), and occasionally I throw in the Tyranid Carnifex for good measure (if you don't know it, Google it, its a terrifying beast!))

My players used to find that little game hilarious, until the session of Dark Heresy where they actually faced the Carnifex :smallamused:

Once I got my hands on some scarier models, I started doing this myself. During quarantine, I got back into painting miniatures for the first time in over a decade. I had picked up the Wrath of Ashardalon board game a while back for dirt cheap, so I started relearning my skills on those figures. The otyugh was one of my first finished jobs, and he sat menacingly next to my screen for the first few sessions back before they finally encountered him.


My guess is that peoples more interested into talking about those tend to gravitate toward media that are more adapted to share images than forums. For comparison, I've just opened the DnD subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/) and 3/4 of the posts have the tag [Art] and are peoples sharing what their character look like, and in the middle of that some posts like this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/js1ma8/mtg_commons_a_hole_punch_and_some_large_cabochons/
=> The guy is creating tokens for D&D from MtG cards, since this game has a lot of cards with very good illustrations but crappy effects so you can buy them in big numbers for nothing.

I actively avoid reddit most of the time due to it being a data hog. It is possible to share images here, though not as easy. I had considered whether that was part of the reason and would have to agree. To get the following uploaded was as much a chore as typing this series of responses, but maybe worth getting some examples up. Maybe not.



So, these are some of the materials I've employed at home. Prior to ever introducing the game to my household, I recreated every map in LMoP via AutoCAD, plus one or two others. Don't be impressed by that as it's very close to what I do for a living, took maybe an hour or two to complete over the course of some weeks, and was actually more productive than the coordination calls I was on at the time. I printed the maps on the backs of used drawing sheets and either taped them together (like Thundertree, seen here) or glued them to cereal boxes and cut them up (like the mine). Additionally, I printed one or two scaled down to letter size for handout maps with limited info shown (I think I'll hand draw these from now on). Cragmaw castle and the hideout fit neatly onto a single sheet of scrap paper each, so I simply covered the rooms that hadn't been revealed yet. Those served as the underlay to everything else.


https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50589439353_697ba82859_c.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50589440678_95f47c3581_c.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50590302472_dbda66e646_c.jpg


On top, I first used a mix of the stuff I already had from other games: figures from some board games, Attack Wing, Mage Knight and HeroClix, various scatter elements, old MK walls and a tower, rubber spiders from the toy box, etc. I've got my McFarlane Dragons waiting in the wings. As we went along, I looked for singles to represent some of the specific monsters, but found those prices outrageous and ended up making a few of my own. When things spread out, I looked for more affordable options, and discovered some other products that I really liked. I bought most things second hand, though, and have yet to regret it. In a short time I cobbled a lot of useful options together without blowing a wad of cash, and I'm pretty content with it.

I do understand why folks feel these elements are superfluous to their enjoyment of these games. I get the simplicity of the pencil and notepad alone accompanying the mind's eye. But I also knew there had to be more toy nerds among us, and I'm glad to read all of the different opinions on the subject. Feel free to drop some pics of your props if you are so inclined.

Tvtyrant
2020-11-11, 12:09 PM
Also D&D, like most fantasy, looks very silly. Beholders mechanically extremely dangerous in all editions, they look like someone glued some widgets together as a model. Even Diablo and Doom struggle not to look silly half the time.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-11, 01:10 PM
I'm kinda looking forward to getting my HeroQuest kickstarter material, since it has a bunch of minis and a customizable indoor map.

VoxRationis
2020-11-11, 03:29 PM
Unless you have Critical Role's production team and budget, one's ability to represent terrain in miniature is vastly outstripped by one's ability to envision it.

Also, my current D&D character (in a campaign on hiatus until we finish Masks of Nyarlathotep) is an illusionist with mirage arcane and the Malleable Illusions subclass feature, and so if my DM tried to break out the terrain pieces, he'd quickly end up tearing his hair out when my character snapped her fingers and changed the whole battlefield. That's sort of an extreme example, but other large-scale terrain-shaping effects are common in the game and belong to the players; the DM has to not only possess all the terrain bits and models to model his own invented worlds, but also preempt the ways the players will change the environment according to their own will.

ARTHAN
2020-11-11, 03:47 PM
I love 3d miniatures on 2d terrain.
Or even 2d tokens on 2d terrain.
But the best is 3d miniatures on 3d terrain.
I wish I had more of them... :smallannoyed:

Imbalance
2020-11-11, 03:53 PM
Back in college, when my group all lived in walking distance from each other, we used a dry erase mat, pieces of paper for terrain features, and random objects/dice for characters/NPCs. We didn't have money or storage space for making minis. Nowadays, we're all in separate states, so we use Roll20 to play.

My wife actually started a D&D club at the library she works at, and I made a bunch of mini terrain and props for it. She was using the Monster For Every Season minis for the players and monsters, she used Lego pieces for walls and buildings, and the little props I made out of foam board, glue and paint. It was working really well, but then that too had to transition to online. She just got a 3D printer at the library, and had the teens design characters in heroforge, so I think she plans to print them out herself and use those when the game goes back to being in person.

That's pretty cool of your wife and the library.


Unless you have Critical Role's production team and budget, one's ability to represent terrain in miniature is vastly outstripped by one's ability to envision it.

Also, my current D&D character (in a campaign on hiatus until we finish Masks of Nyarlathotep) is an illusionist with mirage arcane and the Malleable Illusions subclass feature, and so if my DM tried to break out the terrain pieces, he'd quickly end up tearing his hair out when my character snapped her fingers and changed the whole battlefield. That's sort of an extreme example, but other large-scale terrain-shaping effects are common in the game and belong to the players; the DM has to not only possess all the terrain bits and models to model his own invented worlds, but also preempt the ways the players will change the environment according to their own will.

Honestly, this is the point where we'd switch to the dry-erase board completely, hand you the markers, and say, "you draw the map." I'd hate to think that anybody is that married to using terrain bits 100% of the time outside of Dwarven Forge's headquarters or so adversarial that they'd shoot down the pc concept because their precious landscape is set in polystone. In my case, if the barbarian wants to charge through the wall like Kool-Aid Man, I see no reason not to consult the object hp chart and let him try. Those pieces can just as easily come off of the map.

Azuresun
2020-11-11, 04:32 PM
One GM I played with bought a tub of Lego along, and used that to construct dungeon walls. Personally, I used pre-printed 2d terrain pieces that I can use to mock up a battlefield quickly.

For miniatures, Reaper Miniatures (https://www.reapermini.com/miniatures) has always been an excellent source for me--they're cheap, and there's a miniature for nearly everything.

Grod_The_Giant
2020-11-11, 05:12 PM
In my (experience-based) opinion, going fancy with visual aids is never worth it. Not just are there diminishing returns, it's easy to start actively harming the game.

Theater of the mind is great when it works, and frustrating when it doesn't. Getting it right requires the right group and system. You have to have players who are into narrating their actions, a GM who enjoys letting players add bits and pieces to the scene for the purposes of interactions, and a system that doesn't care too much about range and positioning. I hate theater of the mind D&D because fights quickly bog down into trying to work out the details of how you can avoid opportunity attacks, how many orcs you can catch in a fireball, and all the other tactical minutia. On the other hand, I absolutely could not run Mutants and Masterminds with a battle map, because ranges and movement speeds can easily outpace anything you try to draw.
Crude mapping--a quick sketch on a piece of paper, some quarters on a dry erase board, whatever-- is great. It lets you have clear and precise tactical positioning while not really usurping the mind's eye.

But the farther you go beyond that, the worse things start to get. Lego is distracting. Saying "This mini is me, except I'm a gnome, not a dwarf, and I've got a staff instead of a sword and shield" is frustrating, and too easy for everyone else to forget. "Okay, this minotaur mini represents the ogre, and these skeletons are the goblins" adds an entire extra mental leap--not only do you have to visualize an ogre and goblins, you've got to actively ignore your eyes showing you a minotaur and skeletons. It's easy to look at a quick oval with some circles in it and remember that it's supposed to represent a cave; it's harder when the GM has a map of a forest clearing where "the trees are stalagmites."

Eventually, I guess, you can wind your way back around to using customized minis and handmade terrain and all, but that represents a huge amount of work. And it's not like making a fancy battle map for Warhammer, where you can fight multiple battles on the same field. Not only will it not be the same castle next time, it might not even be a castle this time--if you spend ten hours setting up a custom model and the game winds up going in a different direction, then what?

Recently I'm starting to feel like I'm having this problem with virtual gaming--I've been hunting down battle maps and monster images and adapting them to what I need, but the nicer the art is, the more obvious it becomes when I need to change something. I really should go back to just drawing outlines directly on roll20, but that would be jarring in its own right. (Actually, I'm running Exalted and distances are a crap shoot anyway; I should stop using maps altogether and keep track of various combat values on a spreadsheet or something...)

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-11-11, 08:30 PM
I don't do theater of the mind, but I don't do full-on miniatures and terrain either. I generally use a battlemat (for character-scale maps) or a whiteboard (for city layouts, wilderness areas, and other bird's-eye sketches) to depict the environment and dice to represent creatures, with dice of different sizes and colors representing different creature groups (mooks get d4s and d6s while BBEGs get d20s or d30s, special creatures within a group like a badly-wounded one or a buffed one get a different die color, and so on). I do this for four reasons:

1) It makes things a lot clearer and easier in big battles, and I run fairly large battles a lot, given that there's always at least one person playing a minion-master in my current party and my games tend to involve lots of not-quite-mass-combat scenarios. It's easier to put a lot of different dice in close proximity than it would be to have dozens of miniatures in one big clump (not to mention much cheaper than buying all of said minis). Plus, "I attack #4" is much clearer than the "I attack the kobold over there behind the wall. No, the one next to him. No, on the other side," you get with lots of identical minis, and die numbers are easier to use (and see from across the table) than paper labels or the like.

2) Dice and sketches are much easier with improv, as King of Nowhere noted. Prepping set-piece battles that may not take place, scrounging miniatures to represent last-minute allies brought to a battle, and so forth just isn't worth the effort, at least for me--and if you normally prep a lot more it becomes very obvious when you're improvising, which isn't always a good thing.

3) Terrain just isn't available for a lot of scenarios beyond the basic dungeon or wilderness setup. Flyer-heavy battles, battles around large multi-leveled towers, and such require a lot of custom work even with plenty of terrain models, and stuff like battles on other planes with weird landscapes are much more easily drawn and narrated than built into physical terrain you might never use again.

4) I use enough custom monsters that miniatures simply aren't available for to make pulling out miniatures 1/4 of the time or less not worth it. And on the flip side, it can be easier to conceal the identity of a by-the-book monster without a specific miniature--"That X is where the tentacles are coming from" is vaguer and possibly more scary than plopping an aboleth miniature onto the table.


One GM I played with bought a tub of Lego along, and used that to construct dungeon walls


Lego is distracting. Saying "This mini is me, except I'm a gnome, not a dwarf, and I've got a staff instead of a sword and shield" is frustrating, and too easy for everyone else to forget. "Okay, this minotaur mini represents the ogre, and these skeletons are the goblins" adds an entire extra mental leap--not only do you have to visualize an ogre and goblins, you've got to actively ignore your eyes showing you a minotaur and skeletons.

Speaking as someone who used Lego extensively in his younger days, both to represent PCs and to construct modular dungeon architecture...


https://i.imgur.com/ptsQh5H.png
https://i.imgur.com/AO4Mwbt.png
https://i.imgur.com/M2n46kx.png
https://i.imgur.com/NWYc3KX.png
https://i.imgur.com/wn77fL1.png

...one of the major benefits with using Lego minifigs is that you don't have to say "Pretend this staff is a sword," you can just give your character a staff. Especially if you pick up various custom Lego stuff from Bricklink and other fan sites, there's tons of fantasy pieces out there for all your minifig customization needs. Representing monsters can definitely be more difficult, but these days (unlike when I was doing this a decade ago) there are actual goblins and other monsters from Harry Potter sets, Halloween sets, and similar, and it's not too difficult to build a blocky ogre figure instead of trying to use a minifig for that.

Not to say that Lego is the best solution for all cases, of course, but if I were to go back to using terrain and minis I'd definitely go the Lego route again instead of trying for something fancier.


Recently I'm starting to feel like I'm having this problem with virtual gaming--I've been hunting down battle maps and monster images and adapting them to what I need, but the nicer the art is, the more obvious it becomes when I need to change something. I really should go back to just drawing outlines directly on roll20, but that would be jarring in its own right. (Actually, I'm running Exalted and distances are a crap shoot anyway; I should stop using maps altogether and keep track of various combat values on a spreadsheet or something...)

I'm in the same position, Roll20's fancy features really aren't friendly to low-prep and improv-heavy DMs and it's gotten to the point that I'm doing the outlines-and-text thing myself. It's working...okay-ish, but my group definitely isn't going to keep using a virtual tabletop once gaming in person is an option again.

Yora
2020-11-12, 04:59 AM
But the farther you go beyond that, the worse things start to get. Lego is distracting. Saying "This mini is me, except I'm a gnome, not a dwarf, and I've got a staff instead of a sword and shield" is frustrating, and too easy for everyone else to forget. "Okay, this minotaur mini represents the ogre, and these skeletons are the goblins" adds an entire extra mental leap--not only do you have to visualize an ogre and goblins, you've got to actively ignore your eyes showing you a minotaur and skeletons. It's easy to look at a quick oval with some circles in it and remember that it's supposed to represent a cave; it's harder when the GM has a map of a forest clearing where "the trees are stalagmites."

Eventually, I guess, you can wind your way back around to using customized minis and handmade terrain and all, but that represents a huge amount of work. And it's not like making a fancy battle map for Warhammer, where you can fight multiple battles on the same field. Not only will it not be the same castle next time, it might not even be a castle this time--if you spend ten hours setting up a custom model and the game winds up going in a different direction, then what?

Recently I'm starting to feel like I'm having this problem with virtual gaming--I've been hunting down battle maps and monster images and adapting them to what I need, but the nicer the art is, the more obvious it becomes when I need to change something. I really should go back to just drawing outlines directly on roll20, but that would be jarring in its own right.

A more elaborate explanation on my views on the topic. These are exactly the problems I am seeing. Wargames are wargames and roleplaying games are roleplaying games. You can mix them, but they don't mix well.

I guess when all D&D campaigns were only dungeon crawls and PCs replaceable, this was not really that much of an issue, but D&D has stopped presenting itself as such a game over 30 years ago.
(I would even argue that until the mid 80s, D&D wasn't even a roleplaying game as the term is understood today.)

AdmiralCheez
2020-11-12, 10:40 AM
I just found out about a modular set of pop-up terrain that's being kickstarted. I posted a link in the crowdfunding thread for those interested in discussing that product specifically, but for the purpose of the conversation here, it inspired me to see if anyone had any creative solutions for quick set up, breakdown, and storage of terrain pieces for those that use them. In that set, it's basically a series of folding boards with pop-up laminated cardstock buildings built right into it, which I thought was pretty neat because it fits in one board-game sized box.

I, on the other hand, just kind of shove all of the buildings and little mini props/scatter terrain I make into an old cardboard box and put it on my shelf. I'm trying to find better ways of storing/displaying them in a smaller footprint because I live in a tiny apartment with very little room for gaming storage. I would especially love to know how people transport that kind of stuff safely and efficiently when taking it elsewhere, like to a friend's house.

Velaryon
2020-11-12, 02:53 PM
I'm kinda looking forward to getting my HeroQuest kickstarter material, since it has a bunch of minis and a customizable indoor map.

HeroQuest... Kickstarter? As in this HeroQuest (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/699/heroquest)? Is it still possible to back? If so, could you PM me a link to it?

-------

Anyway, on topic: I've been playing since late 2001, and I usually but not always use minis for D&D and other D20-based systems. Over the years, I've used all of the following to represent characters and monsters:

dice
Lego figures
HeroQuest board game pieces
pieces of popcorn
cheese cubes
actual D&D minis
actual Star Wars minis
customized minis made with HeroClix, utlity knives, glue, and paint
3D printed minis
minis made from pipe cleaners (this one group I played with had someone who as an absolute artist with pipe cleaners


And then other times I've played without, going pure "theatre of the mind" with things. I've found advantages and disadvantages to both. In general, I find that using just whatever fits on a battle grid is fine for either small combats or when you're fighting an army of weak enemies (the popcorn I mentioned was from a time when the DM had us face an army of 1,000 kobolds, with each one represented by a piece of popcorn that we ate when we defeated them). On the other hand, I've found that I generally dislike using minis for non-combat situations because it tends to slow down the pace of the game (I check for traps, move 5 feet and check for traps, move another 5 feet and check for traps again, etc.).

That said, I do not have much of a minis collection myself, and so will usually default to either using or not using them depending on whether any of the other players have a decent collection of minis they're willing to share.

LordCdrMilitant
2020-11-12, 03:01 PM
It perplexes me. Even as one of the most active gaming forums around, it seems the vast majority of forum topics on GitP are all rules, rules, rules, OotS comics discussions, build ideas, gripes, recruiting, and some lore (not in order). That's fine, but also weird to me that the only hits I get when I search for topics about minis are some mentions in a WH40K thread and very rarely an arts & crafts custom. Apart from Kevin Cook, nobody really says much about dice, either. I checked the forum rules a bunch just to make sure the subject isn't outright banned, but it doesn't look like it is. Guess I'll find out.

Is this entire message board populated exclusively by theatre-of-the-mind folks? Does everyone talk toys elsewhere?

I mean, we could.

Talk about it. Y'know...

Hey fellow nerd people, how do you like those little figurines? :smallredface:
Whaddya like? 2d, 3d? Painted/unpainted? Metal/plastic/meeples carved out of soap?
Do you rock the resin tiles, plaster casts, DIY? Fly in a pre-built scene or assemble on the fly? Dry-erase on a gridded mat?
Do your click-clacks sparkle? Do you annually recolor the numbers with a 40-year-old crayon? Use a tower or a tray or just toss them willy-nilly?
Does your DM hand you a map? Are you allowed to write on it?
I know a lot of games moved online, but the plague won't be around forever. What did you do before quarantine? What do you want to do once face-to-face gaming is a thing again?

Well, I have a lot of miniatures for 40k [I play 5 armies right now] for Flames of War [4 armies], and for DZC. Sometimes, I even use them in my RPG's.

However, most of my RPG "minis" are of the form of a drawing [done be me, of course!] standing up on a base. I would build terrain with a set of like 2000 wooden planks. That said, nowadays all my gaming is remote, so those drawings have moved into roll20.

Psyren
2020-11-12, 03:51 PM
Even before all... *gestures vaguely* ...this, virtual tabletops and theater of the mind were more convenient for us. Between roll20 sheets that could automatically perform calculations or apply buffs and debuffs, to being able to calculate distance/LoS/lighting on the fly, to having dozens if not hundreds of minis at our fingertips - yes, having a pile of physical minis is a unique experience, but one we don't particularly miss either.

Telwar
2020-11-12, 07:49 PM
We have two DMs. Both have dry-erase boards they can draw the blobby rooms on. We got a TON of the D&D Minis game minis, so we can generally find good hero analogues, and we also have a sufficiency of appropriate mob monsters. I occasionally pick up individual minis, and got a Heroforge for my IKRPG gobber pistoleer.

We also play, occasionally, Shadowrun and FFG Star Wars, neither of which *truly* requires a map, but it's helpful.

I do rather wish we were doing one of those two now that we're using Teams and screen-sharing. One of the GMs, for things that really do require positioning, has a camera pointed at his board and has minis for that.

uraniumdragon
2020-11-12, 08:34 PM
There’s also the problem that RPGs written around the existing wargaming minis to extend their lifespan are, by and large, terrible because the skill set of writing a system with pleasing odds and simple mathematics versus the skill set of writing a system which rewards and facilitates theater of the mind not only do not overlap but don’t seem to be able to bolt one system atop the other but must always be rebuilt from scratch on both sides by both parties.

The least worst problem about this is making a simple and not very visually memorable character concept and then, even when faced with a selection of literal thousands of minis—and that’s privately owned, not an FLGS’ worth where most of them are only available in larger boxed sets—still having to chop up two different minis to replicate the, again, fairly generic look of the fairly generic character.

And then when one does finally get into the ‘hobby’ side of things, well, it’s a lot easier to multitask message board chatter and tweaking rules and builds and odds, than to write posts while trying to glue foliage onto a hand-twisted tree armature yet not onto your fingertips yet also hold all pieces in their relative orientations until they dry. I haven’t quite mastered task flow such that I am only joining two pieces at once and could therefore use the hobby clamp/magnifier set.

ngilop
2020-11-12, 08:38 PM
@Velaryon YES, that heroquest.. updated though. And no more fimirs but you get abyssals or something like that (fish peoples) Sdly I found out about it the day AFTER the kickstarter ended with expanded heroes like a bard and druid. Also, I think they are doing male and female on each of the 4 original heroes



I still have all my original heroquest stuff and my tomb of the witch lord is still in the plastic.


I use a combination of 3d miniatures that i have collected over various games and companies the last 25 ish years plus 2d/2.5d (2d i mean like pathfinder pawns and 2.5D i mean those tri-fold paper miniatures)

I personally enjoy the paper miniatures better as they end up costing you like 12.7 cents a mini. (at least thats how much my collection cost me and thats getting them printed out in color at a print shop and using foam board form the craft section to glue the paper on instead of just using cardstock and then using packaging tape to 'laminate")

There is literally a TON of sites that have free paper miniatures from just tokens, 2d, 2.5D and even 3d paper miniatures. THIS IS AN AWEOSME SITE. (http://pawn.bozark.com/index.html) You can drag and drop images to make your own customized paper miniatures. It what I have been using to make miniatures and I spent a couple days helping the GM assemble them for his campaign as well.

Kardwill
2020-11-13, 10:22 AM
I LOVE minis. Really. I paint them, I created social media accounts just to show those painted minis' picture to the entire world, I'm a complete sucker for any boardgames that has too much plastic in it...

Just... Not in my RPGs. For those, I'm a strong advocate of the theater of the mind. As I said when mini were still chunks of metal "too much lead weights down the dreams".
When I see mini on the map, I stop seing the scene in my head. I just see pretty, inanimate chunks of plastic on a pretty, inanimate image. I don't imagine a cool action scene where my character is rushing down the corridor, I just see its token sitting there on the map. I don't imagine a decor I can integrate in my action scene, with darkness, crumbling walls, blazing flames, stuff I climb onto or under, stuff I can use as improvised weapons, since my eyes show me a static image of the place.

So yeah, I'll break out the minis to play Mansions of Madness or Imperial Assault any day of the week, but for RPGs, I'm all for Theater of the mind :)

(But the "a monster for every season" tokens reaaaally make me wish I wasn't. Those just BEG to be used ^^)

But if you want to show off your painted minis, I'm all for it ^^

Imbalance
2020-11-14, 11:19 AM
When we talk about theatre-of-the-mind and a lot of folks complain that minis and a map thwart that somehow, do character sheets do the same?

I ask because they do for me. Few things are as immersion-breaking as someone having to pause and look through three sheets of paper or tap through however many screens to find a feature or a spell, or a stat modifier, or some piece of equipment they didn't remember trading away. In my experience, the tabletop representations serve to bring all focus back to the present situation after that distraction is resolved.

I'm sure that the demographics vary, but I would wager that many users here on GitP are accustomed to gaming with other players who really have their characters down, which is great. In my groups, there is more of a learning curve that stretches in sporadic ways due to all of the factors that compete with game time as well as time outside of the game for folks to delve into the crunchy numbers and theory of how to play a role within a specific rules framework. Fact is, they just don't. And while there is intelligence and aptitude among them, there is also an overall lack of real-world experience with how they would behave in many social situations, or how big a space is when described in dimensions relative to their point of view, or the faintest clue of what it is like to get in an actual fight before converting any of those perspectives into a make-believe setting. Or worse: everything they think they understand about such scenarios is based on media instead of any first-hand exposure.

What I find is that miniatures communicate most of these concepts better than I can to those who have little to no experience to draw from by presenting a more relatable foundation. No, a 1" tall figurine is not in any way going be a person for the sake of interpersonal relationships, which is why all the maps and doo-dads are far less useful for role-playing, but the right miniature along with more detailed artwork (illustrations) can certainly convey a personality better than I can with my pitiful voice skills, as well. Like I said, the props are to simulate the scene, which, once all can build a visualization in their own mind on that shared framework, focuses the mind's eye more efficiently than mere words.

This is not to dismiss pure imagination. I treasure that as well, and think it wonderful to be able to share an imagined world without any anchors to the real. It's just that, in a practical sense, we just don't have time for it, whereas I have the material on hand to toss a small diorama in front of everybody as the rough sketch for the picture I'm trying to paint. As a plus, the toys are really cool.

Yora
2020-11-14, 03:20 PM
It's different, but similar.

I think the issue is not the sheet itself, but how mechanical character abilities are. In modern D&D, I seen a pervasive tendency for players to listen to the description of an obstacle or opponent and begin the process of choosing their reaction by going through all the special abilities that are available to their character. "Which of my skills could I use?" "Do any of my spells help here?"
This behavior is what I usually refer to as "looking for the solution on the character sheet".

The more rules for specific cases you have, the more you start to consider every situation as a mechanical problem. It makes player think less about a character in a story and more like remote controlling a robot that has a limited set of pre-programmed moves. Like miniatures and terrain, presenting the game as a math challenge creates distance between players and characters. They all turn the game into a more elaborate version of chess, where you think of any situations as rules and mechanics first, with a story being relegated to a framing device.

Jay R
2020-11-14, 03:38 PM
I prefer to play with minis. I've never started a thread about minis because I have no questions that people can answer without seeing my minis.

By contrast, you don't need to see my rulebook to answer my rules questions.

There is no direct connection between the number of threads on the topic and its value. The connection is between the number of threads on the topic with the number of questions that can be usefully discussed online.

ExLibrisMortis
2020-11-15, 10:22 AM
When we talk about theatre-of-the-mind and a lot of folks complain that minis and a map thwart that somehow, do character sheets do the same?

I ask because they do for me. Few things are as immersion-breaking as someone having to pause and look through three sheets of paper or tap through however many screens to find a feature or a spell, or a stat modifier, or some piece of equipment they didn't remember trading away. In my experience, the tabletop representations serve to bring all focus back to the present situation after that distraction is resolved.
I'm not really bothered by that sort of thing. Sometimes, it takes a while to make a move, and that's fine. The delay isn't part of the scene. I suppose that the ability to separate out this "noise" varies a lot between people, though. (Things that are annoying, like a player not paying attention and having to be caught up, do break my concentration.)

The problem with high-detail miniatures and terrain (and a lot of visual media) is overspecification, that is, providing details that don't matter to the story, but that do contradict possible mental images people might have of the story. When you're telling a story, you don't need to describe everything in the scene; a character can simply be "regal". However, when you're drawing the character, you (usually) apply the same level of detail consistently across the image. You're not just drawing the character's "cold, dark eyes" and the scar here and the magic earring there, but you're also showing the (regular) boots, the (common) backpack, the (uninteresting) scabbard, and so on. If we both heard the story, and my idea of what that character looks like doesn't match yours, we might never find out, as long as we use the same words to describe the character. If we both draw a picture, however, we'll see all sorts of details laid out that just look wrong. You might even be forced to add details that don't mesh with your own idea of the character.

Battlemats and character sheets specify what is necessary for the gaming to work*, and the rest is left open. Likewise, narration specifies what you need to make the story work, and leaves the rest open. Everyone may fit their own mental image to the story/game.


*"To work" is deliberately vague. "Produces few enough inconsistencies that everyone's happy to suspend their disbelief (or, on the game side, their sense of fair play) and carry on" might cover it.

Tvtyrant
2020-11-15, 01:41 PM
I prefer to play with minis. I've never started a thread about minis because I have no questions that people can answer without seeing my minis.

By contrast, you don't need to see my rulebook to answer my rules questions.

There is no direct connection between the number of threads on the topic and its value. The connection is between the number of threads on the topic with the number of questions that can be usefully discussed online.

One that could be discussed is what size a square should be. In most games I feel like the instinct is to make them far too large, which means the table has to be enormous. I wish there were more tiny chess set size pieces, it would make it feel more realistic while not being enormous.

Telok
2020-11-15, 06:16 PM
One that could be discussed is what size a square should be. In most games I feel like the instinct is to make them far too large, which means the table has to be enormous. I wish there were more tiny chess set size pieces, it would make it feel more realistic while not being enormous.

No too terribly long ago I was running a game where some of the base weapon ranges managed 300m and some vehicles were moving ~500m a round in a fight involving both spear phalanxes, a grav tank, 40m long undead beetles, and an invisible teleporting mage with Meteor Storm. Yeah, 2m to the inch squares and 32mm scale minis wouldn't work.

Kardwill
2020-11-16, 08:19 AM
When we talk about theatre-of-the-mind and a lot of folks complain that minis and a map thwart that somehow, do character sheets do the same?

I ask because they do for me. Few things are as immersion-breaking as someone having to pause and look through three sheets of paper or tap through however many screens to find a feature or a spell, or a stat modifier, or some piece of equipment they didn't remember trading away.

Yes, looking though a character-album kinda bothers me for this reason. That's the reason all my go-to games nowadays have character sheets that occupy a single page, including stuff like personality traits, significant gear, magic or superpowers. If your game forces me to search 4 sheets of paper to get some information about my charactere, I may accept to play if you're a friend (althuough I'll grumble about the cluttered CS), but I certainly won't ask for it nor GM it.
My sweet spot is around 15-20 stats for a character (again, "stats" includes attributes/skills, but also technical stuff like magic) : Enough to define the character, but still manageable when I need to remember something or find it at a single glance :)

The problem with both moving minis on a battlemap and searching for info on a character sheet is that they detract from the conversation which is the heart of the game. Doesn't mean I don't see their use, though. For example, to ensure that everyone has a rough understanding of what is going on, I sometime draw a sketch of the place. If the sketch is rough enough, it will guide the mental image of the players (so that we share the same understanding of the situation), but not replace it.
And when I want to get tactical, I will divide a battlefield into a few "zones" with specific aspects (Example for a seaport gunfight : The east dock is cluttered and offers good protection but restrains your movement / West dock is more sparse, and many cover are flamable materials/ at the end of the west dock is the control booth of the dock-crane right next to flamable materials / the pier is dangerously exposed with no cover / but it's the only way to get to the deck of the ship). If the zones are big enough, the character will "feel" in movement even between their turns (I'm running across the bridge, and not sitting on a static square of it), and players will feel free to add things from their own mental image and play them in the common fiction ("I grab a rope sitting on top of one of the crates")

And I have no problem with using fictionnal "movie" logic, as long as we discussed it with the other players so everyone know which "level" of movie-logic the world works with ("hollywood logic", where you can run barefoot on broken glasse, crawl into an airduct, and still take on a dozen terrorists? "Manga logic", where a troll sends you flying 5m into the air with a swing of his club but you still land on your feet without any broken bones? "Hardboiled logic", where you're expected to take a beating once in a while, but still continue on sheer willpower once you regain consciousness?). Personally, I tend to go for "hollywood logic" for my games. There's no freaking chance in hell I would know the reality of a real-life combat situation anyway, so action movies are a nice common ground everyone at the gametable shares ^^

LibraryOgre
2020-11-16, 08:53 AM
One that could be discussed is what size a square should be. In most games I feel like the instinct is to make them far too large, which means the table has to be enormous. I wish there were more tiny chess set size pieces, it would make it feel more realistic while not being enormous.

I've seen mixed scales work well... "Everything inside these die is at 5' per square; everything outside these are 30' per square". The interior area might be 12x12 or 6x6, so you can have a good little melee, but your archer can stand out and shoot.

FabulousFizban
2020-11-18, 04:57 PM
I started out making 2.5 modular tiles with cardboard, which I painted. I had all sorts of stuff. I made trees out of paper towel rolls and bits of craft stuff for a forest, I had miniature furniture made from popsicle sticks, toothpicks, and what have you. Chests, bookshelves, barrels, all sorts of stuff. Eventually I donated it all to my local library, which runs a monthly dnd game for local teens.

These days I'm much more theatre of the mind, though I will still do set pieces for important dramatic or combat moments, or if I feel like it. For instance, I made 3d hex tiles for my worldmap. I have forest tiles, river and water tiles, farm tiles, city tiles, etc. I have a large hex base I made to put the tiles in, so when the party moves to a new area, I reveal an add a new tile to the base, depending on what direction they've gone. I took a clear polyacrylic sheet, put a grid on it, and set it above the hex base, so the players can have their minis on a grid for combat, and still see the world map beneath it. It looks pretty cool.

Lastly, I use starburst candy for enemies (I write #s on the wrappers with a marker so I can keep track). The players get candy when they defeat an enemy, and it helps stop them from murderhoboing - because if I put a mini down for an NPC, they know they won't get candy for killing it. I have them well trained with positive reinforcement - like dogs.

Carto
2020-11-20, 05:11 PM
I use old Heroscape figurines and 3D print some other custom stuff. I print my maps that I made in CC3 with this company called Geekify. I like to hang my maps up after I'm done with a campaign and it makes weirdly cool wall art. Back when I started, the DM used dry erase but stuff would keep erasing.

Lord Torath
2020-11-20, 05:49 PM
I use old Heroscape figurines and 3D print some other custom stuff. I print my maps that I made in CC3 with this company called Geekify. I like to hang my maps up after I'm done with a campaign and it makes weirdly cool wall art. Back when I started, the DM used dry erase but stuff would keep erasing.The trick is to make the map with wet-erase, and then put the PCs and monsters on with dry erase. That way you can erase the monsters without erasing the terrain.

GreatWyrmGold
2020-11-21, 08:54 AM
Builds, rules, lore, and so on are all things where new ideas are easy to come by and interesting to test. Arguing over vague rules (or what rules should be), trying to suss out the best builds, and discussing interesting lore tidbits that most people miss are all interesting discussions people can have.

But minis? They're solid, static, and don't inspire much discussion. Sure, there are the two or three topics coming up in this thread, but that's about it. There are individual rules that can start more varied discussions than that! So we don't discuss minis that often, because there's less to discuss.
I'm sure there are people with strong opinions about metal versus plastic miniatures and stuff like that. I suspect most of them drift towards fan forums for games which feature minis more prominently, like Warhammer or 40k. This community doesn't have much to attract them except incidentally, so I suspect there haven't been enough to maintain a steady stream of such discussions.



The interest is if the battles gets too crowded and that different people are imagining different scenes and that it results in a lot of communication complexity then using miniatures helps agree on the positions of the things.
This, so much. Minis are extremely useful for making it crystal clear exactly where everything and everyone is. It's handy when fighting lots of enemies (especially with AoE effects), splitting the party and figuring out how long it'll take to bail out that idiot who wandered off on his own, and—


ex: In a boss fight a theatre of the mind setup works perfectly since it does not matters that people imagine things a bit differently from each other due to the low complexity of the armies involved.
Well, this is something we fundamentally disagree on.

Part of this is because D&D is just not well-suited to "boss fights" between one monolithic boss monster and the entire party. Tools that VRPGs use to make that work—from multi-stage boss fights (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SequentialBoss) to health/damage asymmetry (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HealthDamageAsymmetry)—simply aren't supported in D&D. (Which isn't to say that you can't homebrew in extra stages to a boss fight or jack up the monster's hit points, but it's not supported by the rules.) So when I think "boss fight," I think to one specific boss fight that my group went through—perhaps the most memorable moment in the campaign. (Except the time one half of an ettin pushed the other half into the river.)

We were playing Storm King's Thunder. On our way back from...I don't remember what, we bounced from a random encounter with a brass(?) dragon to a sad hill giantess to the hill giant chief, Guh, two levels before we were intended to start fighting the giant leaders. After some espionage shenanigans that mostly amounted to the ettin pretending to be a loyal giantkin and the rest of the group sneaking across the lake at night with water walk, we met up and started fighting the giants. We quickly made it to the throne room, where Guh was resting for the night. We started fighting with Guh's guards, and more kept pouring in as the alarm was raised. Goblin archers, ogres, hill giants warriors...

Part of what made the fight memorable was specific issues that affected our party, like the paladin's cursed sword forcing him to chase and attack whichever enemy damaged him first (it was a goblin archer in the rafters, and he didn't use ranged weapons), or the barbarian being attached to a warlock that cast blink, or our other two party members being a cleric and a rogue. (My cleric was not a very good tank). Part of it was how tense it felt—I think every party member fell unconscious at some point.
But part was the sheer scale of the fight—we fought just about every combatant in the fortress at some point or another. And yet we won. This sort of battle would have been chaos without a battlemap, and not just because our tanks were indisposed.

Not every boss battle needs an army of minions to be memorable, but boss battles that just amount to trading attacks until someone dies are gonna be pretty unmemorable. You need something unique to set the boss battles apart, most unique things are going to add complexity, and most complexity is easier to understand with a battlemap.

False God
2020-11-21, 09:17 AM
Long and short: When it's flat I'd rather just draw it out, and 3D terrain is expensive. As much as I'd like to use it, ya know, money.

sktarq
2020-11-21, 04:06 PM
I generally find Theatre-of-the-Mind...well, faster, more versatile, takes up less room, needs less planning, is far cheaper, and generally more immersive.
that said I have a dry erase board (one side plain and one side with a grid) that can be useful for laying out scales and relative positions.
I got lucky a while back and found this set of poker chips that have basically dry erase material in the centre and colored rings..so black ones may represent orcs (with the warlord and shaman each having a letter in the circle) and red wargs or whatever the situation calls for while the PC's get solid colour/pattern chips.

As for long character sheets breaking stuff up it kinda depends what's on the blasted thing. I think FATAL took the cake for unneeded numbers and physical descriptors but when page three is all about a characters social bonds in-world it can be a boon as those are the things the player is less likely to overlook unless reminded....the reminder brings these kinds of things back until they embed in the character over time...familiars also fit in this type of category *pop* *caw caw* *poof*

Talwar
2020-11-22, 09:40 PM
I tend to use minis and some form of 2-D terrain for combat just so everybody can tell at a glance who's where.

The terrain is usually a dry-erase board, but if I anticipate some sort of lengthy, linear environment, I unroll some paper towel sheets, sketch in the static terrain with markers, and fold it back up again. I can still pick up messes with them after their gaming utility is done. Also used 3x5 index cards to sketch a city-scape on for a couple of chase scenes.

The minis vary. I've got a fair bit of Warhammer stuff from twenty years back - at the time, they had some good quality and relatively affordable build-a-regiment boxes - so I can bodge together a little humanoid warband easily enough. For the gaming I'm currently running, I picked up new minis from...Whiz Kids or something like that. Seems to be the "official" D&D line these days. Can't say I find them to be of great quality, but they work.

Monsters, on the other hand, are used infrequently enough that I improvise with craft materials or pick up cheap toys at dollar stores when I can plan ahead. There's a hydra with beads for heads, pipe-cleaner necks, and a green potting foam body; looks terrible but the players enjoyed popping the heads off. Yetis got hacked out of styrofoam with a utility knife and every arrow hit was a toothpick stuck into the body. I picked up a 65mm Roman Reigns mini to keep handy as a future giant/ogre. The 65mm Brock Lesnar got painted black and dipped in sand a couple of times so I had a big coal elemental. The players (four of whom are pre-teens) enjoy the hokey nature of these things and I enjoy the process of creating the hokey things in the first place.

We also staged a fight where the party was riding giant snails (constructed from mini jelly-rolls, icing, and candies) and fighting various candy-shaped critters such as gummy dinosaurs. It wasn't a very serious fight, nor a very healthy one, but the gang did enjoy it.

Segev
2020-11-23, 09:04 AM
Up until my friends decided that the risks of the coronavirus were too great, we played a weekly game at one of their houses. They had custom minis for their characters. I used Hero Quest figures and printed out maps from purchased high-res files of Tomb of Annihilation’s map pack, carefully scaled and placed so five foot squares were an inch on a side.

When we started doing it online, we used Roll20.

Tanarii
2020-11-26, 07:29 AM
I've run and occasionally played D&D for thirty five years.

In that time, I've only played in one game where the DM used minis, and I've run zero. I've never seen a game of D&D that used terrain models. Closest was the printed maps for running 4e Adventurers league.

Plenty of battle mat play. But every DM I've ever played with, including myself, uses tokens of some kind for enemies. Players regularly buy a mini if they think the character will live long enough. Although the Curse of the Mini (buying) leading to PC death is an ongoing joke I've heard many times.

Even board games seem to understand that's normal. PCs get minis, enemies counters.

OTOH Star Wars Amanda was a lot of (expensive) fun, so I can kinda see the Warhammer 40k appeal. Not painting minis though /shudder. Tried it once, it was torture. Never again.

Vahnavoi
2020-11-26, 09:05 AM
I use Legos.

Go on. Bring on the hate. :smalltongue:

Also, sometimes board game pieces appropriated from a vast array of board games. Currently I own less of them than I did as a kid, so that's a bummer. But they're handy. Heck, I've even use board game boards for maps. Labyrinth and Tikal are perpetual favorites. You basically get procedurally generating dynamic dungeons from Labyrinth pieces alone.

It's been long enough that I'm somewhat out of practice, so I haven't found the best use for my Legos yet. I mostly use them as a visual indicator of marching order, formation etc.. My paper notes tend to take up too much space to effectively play battles with them.

J-H
2020-11-26, 10:58 AM
I have no interest in spending hundreds of dollars on minis that may be used 2-3 times per year.

We use a dry-erase battle mat. If I'm DMing, I print off little 1x1 paper tokens and use those.

In the one game I'm playing now, I modified my forum avatar and printed it as a little fold-up/stand-up "mini." It's good enough, takes only a couple of minutes, and no expense or storage space.

As for dice? I have a bag full, and could maybe use a few more D4s. I've become more and more annoyed at how hard many of them are to read, and actually have a bag of high-contrast dice sitting in my truck for our next in-person session to give to the guy in his 50s who has trouble reading half his dice. All the low-contrast pretty colors actually interfere with the game.

Telok
2020-11-26, 03:51 PM
One thing I did, for a supers game, was buy a bunch of about 3/4 inch by 1 1/2 inch wood flats at a craft store. Those, a glue stick, some web searches for black & white images, and a bunch of the really small bulldog clips made lots of "minis". They only had fronts but that let you write a name on the back. And one of the books for the game was a pdf so I grabbed a bunch of images of bad guys from that.

Just scaled the images down, pasted them all onto two pages or so, printed them. Then cut them out, glue them on a flat, put a clip on the bottom. You had to pinch the handles out of the bulldog clip for them to stand nicely.

Imbalance
2021-01-05, 10:40 AM
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50803890752_8a14f32131_c.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50803034578_4ab940f51a_c.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50803779776_19a6675f3d_c.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50803893152_abc6a290d8_c.jpg

LordCdrMilitant
2021-01-11, 06:14 PM
I use Legos.

Go on. Bring on the hate. :smalltongue:

Also, sometimes board game pieces appropriated from a vast array of board games. Currently I own less of them than I did as a kid, so that's a bummer. But they're handy. Heck, I've even use board game boards for maps. Labyrinth and Tikal are perpetual favorites. You basically get procedurally generating dynamic dungeons from Labyrinth pieces alone.

It's been long enough that I'm somewhat out of practice, so I haven't found the best use for my Legos yet. I mostly use them as a visual indicator of marching order, formation etc.. My paper notes tend to take up too much space to effectively play battles with them.

Legos are great. You can make characters with minifigures, and change weapons basically to your heart's content.

anthon
2021-01-16, 01:14 AM
when i was a kid i had some pewter minis and i was painting them with colored ink. I wanted the ink to bake on the surface like a glaze enamel, so i made a flame thrower. My little mini's sword melted and made me very sad. I abandoned minis for the next 25 years.

i then 3D printed a mini for a 3.5e game, but his weapon snapped off at the layer seem and the DM demanded my atheist character pick a god to worship and for me, the player, to give verbal oblations to this god, or I would not be permitted to level up. I again abandoned minis, and that game table.

Years later, I was heckled into buying a mini for my fire mage in 5e. About 2 sessions in the DM decided it would be fun to have the entire group take double disintegrates back to back. 7 player characters died with no chance of recovery.

I think Legos would make good minis.

Tanarii
2021-01-16, 11:10 AM
That's some serious Curse of the Mini Buyer right there anthon :smallamused:

Imbalance
2021-01-18, 09:57 AM
Oof, that's harsh, Anthon. I would say that, at my table, if you've put significant effort into a personalized mini for your character (not necessarily $$$), it should be worth an extra death save in game.

EggKookoo
2021-01-18, 10:36 AM
We use minis in our D&D 5e game. For PCs, we tend to use HeroForge and I print them on my Ender. My brother has a resin printer and printed his guy with that. Since we're all getting older and eyesight gets worse, we decided to print them at 150% scale, which puts a 6' human at somewhere around 42mm height, give or take. Makes painting easier too.

For most NPCs, I bought a few cases of cheap plastic figures (like these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0746TKNSL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)). I don't try to paint them, just use them as-is. They're about the right scale and they make good quick bad guys. I have printed some special NPCs, typically recurring characters so it's worth the investment. I also printed up some generic kobold, goblin, and human(ish) figures that I reuse from time to time.

We use these guys almost solely for positioning during combat. It's much easier to just put your guy where he is, and I (as the DM) don't have to continually "repaint" the scene with everyone's position. We don't use a grid, though. I have a length of twine scaled to 30 feet and knotted at 5-foot intervals, and we use that to determine distances (I also have a scaled 60 foot string for extra length if needed). Just a note: If you're going to make a knotted string, do the knots first, then cut it to the final length. Knotting consumes thread and shortened the overall length. Learned that the hard way...

Imbalance
2021-03-01, 09:10 AM
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50993187707_7b4a918e76_c.jpg

Imbalance
2021-04-29, 10:48 AM
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51147303619_31e461ff60_c.jpg

Kardwill
2021-05-18, 10:26 AM
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50993187707_7b4a918e76_c.jpg


Nice looking trollskin :)

Pugwampy
2021-05-19, 03:08 AM
I tried sharing pictures of my miniatures and battle scene decorations long ago . I think you can divide a DND session into half a story , half combat . I think props are half the fun and make the game more alive . Who can deny the cool factor having a castle or a dragon in the middle of a table .Thats a memorable event . My favorite DM said what is the point of DND except to make good memories . Judge for yourself .

After looking at my pics now try to imagine that castle as a top down line drawing made with a felt tip pen or the dragon as an empty cookie box . Is a felt tip pen castle a better memory than what i slapped together using old toys and some brand products ?


https://i.postimg.cc/6p31K2wN/IMG-20160514-205153.jpg


https://i.postimg.cc/sgXG07Zg/cylcindar-3.jpg

rs2excelsior
2021-05-19, 06:44 AM
I think Legos would make good minis.

The only time I've used minis in an RPG, they were Legos, actually!

My group in college didn't own any minis, we always used pencil-drawn maps on graph paper (using letters for characters/monsters, erasing and writing them elsewhere to move them), or just used theater of the mind. I kept that up in my post-college games. The only times I've really used minis were for a couple of one-shots I ran using the old WEG Star Wars d6 system. Since it was a one-shot, I pre-made characters and let the players pick at the table... and I also used my collection of Star Wars (and other) Legos to make a mini for each PC, as well as various NPCs/enemies. I never really used a grid or even any real measurements with them, just used them to rough out positions, but it was fun - and I think the players enjoyed it a good bit. Right now most of my games are run or played over discord, so minis are a bit of a moot point.

Imbalance
2021-05-19, 08:01 AM
I tried sharing pictures of my miniatures and battle scene decorations long ago . I think you can divide a DND session into half a story , half combat . I think props are half the fun and make the game more alive . Who can deny the cool factor having a castle or a dragon in the middle of a table .Thats a memorable event . My favorite DM said what is the point of DND except to make good memories . Judge for yourself .

After looking at my pics now try to imagine that castle as a top down line drawing made with a felt tip pen or the dragon as an empty cookie box . Is a felt tip pen castle a better memory than what i slapped together using old toys and some brand products ?


https://i.postimg.cc/6p31K2wN/IMG-20160514-205153.jpg


https://i.postimg.cc/sgXG07Zg/cylcindar-3.jpg

That's the way. Love it!

Lord Torath
2021-05-19, 08:49 AM
The only time I've used minis in an RPG, they were Legos, actually!

My group in college didn't own any minis, we always used pencil-drawn maps on graph paper (using letters for characters/monsters, erasing and writing them elsewhere to move them), or just used theater of the mind. I kept that up in my post-college games. The only times I've really used minis were for a couple of one-shots I ran using the old WEG Star Wars d6 system. Since it was a one-shot, I pre-made characters and let the players pick at the table... and I also used my collection of Star Wars (and other) Legos to make a mini for each PC, as well as various NPCs/enemies. I never really used a grid or even any real measurements with them, just used them to rough out positions, but it was fun - and I think the players enjoyed it a good bit. Right now most of my games are run or played over discord, so minis are a bit of a moot point.I use legos for minis, but I also don't use battle maps. Minis are there to give the players something to focus on, and to enhance the "theater of the mind" I use. So there are monsters (and sometimes terrain) on the table, but we never measure the actual physical distances.

I love Legos. They are so versatile!

Pugwampy
2021-05-19, 10:58 AM
Hey fellow nerd people, how do you like those little figurines?
Whaddya like? 2d, 3d? Painted/unpainted? Metal/plastic/meeples carved out of soap?
Do you rock the resin tiles, plaster casts, DIY? Fly in a pre-built scene or assemble on the fly? Dry-erase on a gridded mat?
Do your click-clacks sparkle? Do you annually recolor the numbers with a 40-year-old crayon? Use a tower or a tray or just toss them willy-nilly?
Does your DM hand you a map? Are you allowed to write on it?
I know a lot of games moved online, but the plague won't be around forever. What did you do before quarantine? What do you want to do once face-to-face gaming is a thing again?


1. I am fixated on miniatures . I have over 300 . I never grew up I love toys I see minis as the ultimate toy . Even the meanest of games i played at least had miniatures for heroes if nothing else .

2. Durable painted plastic minis . I never had any interest or intention of painting anything so small . The concept of Pewter minis turned me off when a friend ordered about a half dozen most of which broke after a few months . The plastic stuff from wizards of coast or whiz kids assuming you dont take a hammer to them on purpose can last forever

3. I love decorating the battlefield with toys old or new . When it comes to dungeon crawling I make use of the cardboard map tiles and paper posters . Sometimes i combine it . We can all imagine the distance of one inch none of us need square grids . You want a nice cave , collect a bag of rocks from the garden as borders .

4. My original click claks sparkled gold and lost their sparkle real quick . I prefer basic click claks with white numbers on a solid colour . I have lots of click clacks but to me they are just tools like paper and pencil . No i do not recolour . This DM is open screen and likes tossing them into the middle of the battlefield .

5 . This DM loves trying to sell photocopied dungeon maps for gold which the player can do as he wants to it . This DM sometimes gives houses as prizes which then he hands a photocopied house plan .

khantroll
2021-05-20, 04:48 PM
My group is very slowly acquiring miniatures. We use what I call the "pog" method. I have wooden discs in a variety of correct scale sizes with labels printed and taped to them to show what they are. The heroes have miniatures that bought. starting next week though, I'm cranking up the old 3D printer and we are going to make some miniatures for stuff.

We tried the whole digital table top thing, and it just didn't work for us. I hated putting in the time for it, and they hated the clunkiness of the setup. Yeah, they liked the pretty colors, but we all agreed minis were better for us.

Imbalance
2021-06-03, 07:15 AM
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51222198681_ff8ecc99fd_c.jpg

DeadMech
2021-06-12, 06:16 AM
Right now for a campaign I'm working on I am experimenting on making myself a snes style tileset that I can use to create maps and print out on paper. It's an art style I'm used to working in. papercrafting them Is my hopeful solution to making nice looking 3d dungeon maps. I'd probably save time just hand drawing this stuff instead but I don't feel like it would look terribly good. Physical tiles and props are probably not viable because of storage concerns.

In my teenage years I've made 100% original assets like this. Once grid based in an rpg maker program that I've long since lost and haven't seen able to find a replacement for. Used to have nice in program animation tools for things like making walk cycles. 2 tile high character sprite creation. The thing I was most proud of at the time was a boat map I made with animated water tiles. Took forever to make sure all the edges lined up every frame. Unfortunately computers back then were potatoes and when I loaded that map screen up the program turned into a slide show.

Another time I made a similar hex grid tile set 100% original for a rpg I was running. It wasn't too bad but I don't want to know how much time I spent on it making edge case tiles. Things like floors meeting walls at unusual angles, circular floor pieces, transitory pieces for different enviroments.

Of course those are long gone. These days I don't know if I have the time and drive to make a 100% original tileset. So I've gone to sprite websites and such to grab ripped tilesets. Mostly from Chrono Trigger. Been cutting and pasting the pieces of that about. Taking 16x16 pixel tiles and arranging them into larger 32x32 pieces to use as my 1"-> 5' base. Recoloring stuff is relatively simple and I feel pretty confident in my ability to alter sprites and tiles as needed and have them retain their aesthetic charm.

My hope is that I can make floors and use excess paper tabs and sticky tack to temporarily construct the walls. And that all of the materials to make these maps will be able to fit into a three ring binder. If necessary perhaps glue or print them on some sort of cardstock for structural rigidity.

Also I've been doing stuff like removing background transparency colors from objects so that I can decorate rooms with things like furniture or objects. Some of which may also be 3d papercraft and other just bits of paper I can throw down as needed to decorate a scene or show revealed traps and treasures.

I wish I could say it's been smooth sailing. I just don't have the energy or time I used to as a kid. I'll work hard on it for about a week or so before my interest drifts elsewhere for a couple weeks. It also took me awhile to realize that due to limitations in how I'm going to construct this it's not terribly likely I'll be able to easily make rooms that don't fit on a square grid. It's possible but the amount of custom art assets I'd have to make for it is probably more than I'm willing to put in right now. It's also surprising how much of the existing assets don't cover what I need. Maybe of the tiles sets don't have good bottom floor edges. Since those would have been hidden behind a layer of wall in game the artists working on the game never bother to make a large number of them so I've had to make my own.

Right now most of the work I've done is on the tilesets related to Zeal. I thought it would be a nice starting point for the magic college my game is starting in. The ripped assets for it were mostly laid out in a comprehensible manner which made it relatively easy to get started with. I'm a bit more concerned with the cave tilesets. The walls and floor textures for those areas are a bit less easily readable to my eyes in the rip images.

I've certainly put more hours into this that I think I could easily justify but it's been fun to work in this art style again. This time I'm backing up my work to the google cloud so that hopefully it doesn't all go to waste even if I take a break from it or my interest shift to some other hobby for a time. If there is interest perhaps I'll link a copy of what I've got so far.

Imbalance
2021-06-12, 11:06 AM
You had me at Chrono Trigger.

DeadMech
2021-06-12, 05:48 PM
You had me at Chrono Trigger.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ImaCBnWfyNGrSL47B7VAIinRMK8UuRQR/view?usp=sharing

It's not terribly well organized right now. Taking a walk around the file right now.
Top left corner is some sample layout of dormitory bedroom pods along with the first version of some tiles I drew for myself.Right from there are some beds I found online somewhere.

Continuing right there are some rips from ff4. I haven't done much with them yet. Mage college so I figured I'd need some bookshelves Further right are some in game maps of areas of Zeal that I reference for looking at how things fit together.

Top right corner is some relatively complete tilesets for carpeted floors including carpeted stairs. There is also a place I'm planning to move some of place-able objects and such from the 16x16 grid just a bit lower down.

Notably that 16x16 grid contains the walls of Zeal. With them in theory I could start building and printing rooms to do some testing of how the papercraft dungeon will look and hold up. I need to buy myself a color printer for that at some point.

Skipping down to the bottom left are more mostly complete tilesets for floors. Mostly from Zeal again with the checkerboard stone floors and the diagonal brick floors. But we also have some of the millennial fair's cobble roads and a variety of carpets.

To the right we have an in progress section for the church carpets and some finished sets of toppers. These will sit on top of and between wall blocks of the map for structure.

Bottom right is some in game maps of magus's castle to help me see how that tileset was meant to fit together.

Back up to Center left is some grabs from ogre battle march of the black queen. Character portraits and tarot cards. I might use some of these for wall portraits or other bits of decoration. I don't fully know. There are also map icons for the classes in the game. I figure these will make nice little statues and decoration treasure. Some of them came with only one color so I've been working on making a color scale for converting duplicates to the other color scheme. Also noting that the witch icon was missing entirely from the rip site so I had to grab an alternative image jpeg elsewhere which didn't color match the rest. So I spent way too many hours one day recoloring it.

Moving toward the center we have some of the rips I've done very little work on yet. Unsurprisingly these include most of the outdoor areas of the game and areas that while looking very nice contains allot of diagonal walls that I don't think I can use.

Continuing towards center right are some of the areas I have done a bit of more recent work. The millennial fair, the church Guardia castle and such. Past some of the bit of castles and dino fortress is some cut up bits of magus' castle. it's a very dark set of tiles that originally wasn't very well organized which has been difficult to work with.

Imbalance
2021-06-12, 07:17 PM
Dude, that is outstanding. Makes me wish I had all those scratch-built CAD renderings I did in the early 00's of various buildings in N64 games. If only I had an inkling of foresight into today's world of 3d printing...