Boardgame w/o a board???

[Blondie Jo]

May I ask y’all what do you use for board in your D&D games?
I tried to draw maps but I am not very good at it...for the fight I solved it by using a chess board, similar to when in a JRPG you start a fight and a teleported in a “stage”.

How many of you rely on the theatre of the mind? And how many use models?

Share all your methods with me! (please)

[Hugh Mann]

At one point I used an empty table as the board and colored dice as miniatures. Spare pencils were walls. When we needed to we eyeballed distances.

Most of it was theater of the mind.

[Florian]

For smaller combats, I use a Chessex battlemat.

For bigger dungeons and such, I´ve bought a big roll of disposable paper tablecloth and simply draw on that.

[Celestia]

You can buy dry erase boards with grids on them. Those seem to work well.

[CharonsHelper]

For smaller combats, I use a Chessex battlemat.

For bigger dungeons and such, I´ve bought a big roll of disposable paper tablecloth and simply draw on that.

I have the 4' x 8' Chessex mat.

It's big enough that I use it as scrap paper for initiative etc. too

[JeenLeen]

My group uses pieces from the RISK boardgame instead of miniatures, and these fit really well on standard graph paper you might buy for school. So we use that when we're doing a game when distance matters, like D&D 3.5.

If distance doesn't matter, we might still use paper to draw out a rough map, but we don't care too much about actual distance as general positioning, so no need for grids.

At one time we had a dry erase board with grids on it. That worked pretty well, but it was bulky (& bigger than we needed, since not using real miniatures), so we went back to graph paper.

[Grod_The_Giant]

There are some real nice wet/dry-erase grids you can find pretty cheap-- I've gotten great use out of a folding one I got for $15 from Pazio. Scribble down a crude map and you're good to go. Nickles make great reusable tokens, since you can label them with a wet-erase marker pretty easily. If you want to get fancier and have some money to burn, you can make maps using an online tabletop like Roll20 and hook up a projector, or lie a flatscreen TV on its back or something.

Some people will no doubt be along to preach the superiority of theater-of-the-mind, but I find it gets too confusing for everyone to keep track of positions and enemy numbers outside a real small group.

[Knaight]

Some people will no doubt be along to preach the superiority of theater-of-the-mind, but I find it gets too confusing for everyone to keep track of positions and enemy numbers outside a real small group.

There are games where TotM* works just fine, but I prefer not to pair it with exact ranges, movements, etc. D&D tends to warrant a grid.

*A terrible term, but sadly it seems to be catching on.

[LibraryOgre]

I have used:

1) Crude maps drawn on whiteboard/chalkboard/spare paper
2) Chessex Battlemat
3) Whiteboard with gridlines
4) A Heroquest board with "Ok, ignore these walls"

[tensai_oni]

I never use maps or boards. I play online so players get a convenient writeup that says who is in one group with each other and how far away from anyone else.

I tend not to play systems that warrant something less abstract. The only DnD I played for years is 5e which is far less grid-based than earlier editions.

[Anonymouswizard]

I prefer Theater of the Mind. Players will get a map of the area and will be asked to mark and update their rough position, but we won't be too fussy about it and your description is now important (I also run with vague ranges).

I do plan to get a dry erase hex may and start painting some minis (likely 15mm) again when I have my own place (or at least aren't living with my parents), but that's not near future.

[Thrudd]

Old reliable: any largish flat surface (table, floor) with a tape measure or ruler and random things or pieces of paper to mark terrain. Set scale depending on the size of your minis or whatever is representing characters

[Grod_The_Giant]

There are games where TotM* works just fine, but I prefer not to pair it with exact ranges, movements, etc. D&D tends to warrant a grid.

*A terrible term, but sadly it seems to be catching on.

It works alright with small groups, but in big ones I prefer at least a rough reference map, even if I'm playing something like M&M where engagement ranges can be anywhere from "30ft" to "you see that guy in China?" Otherwise you just wind up with too many creatures on the board and too much downtime for TotM to be practical, in my experience.

[Pleh]

We used a table affectionately called, "wiggles."

Wiggles was a standard card table you can buy anywhere, plus a sheet of drafting paper (like for house plans) with a blank grid laid on top. Then we screwed plexiglass over top so we could draw in wet erase on the grid (I think dry erase would stain the plexiglass?).

A little pricey, but if you plan to game often enough, well worth the investment.

[Knaight]

It works alright with small groups, but in big ones I prefer at least a rough reference map, even if I'm playing something like M&M where engagement ranges can be anywhere from "30ft" to "you see that guy in China?" Otherwise you just wind up with too many creatures on the board and too much downtime for TotM to be practical, in my experience.

My ideal group size is also 3 players and a GM, so there's that (although in practice it usually runs higher).

[LordCdrMilitant]

If I have nothing else, I draw on a chalkboard.

Otherwise, I have enough Imperial Guardsmen, Sisters of Battle, and other miscellaneous imperial units. Sometimes, one of my figures will even match a player character. I also have a collection of base-sized acrylic disks I can write on for more specific hostiles, and sometimes my friends have their own 40k collections if I need a carnifex or a battlesuit or a daemon prince. It's always fun to have the exact unit there. I also have a big pike of KEVA blocks that I can use to build terrain with, which works out really nicely. Typically, we go with 1"=2m for scale, and use tape measures and circular blast templates.

[VoxRationis]

Even in D&D 3.5, the tables I play at tend to be very verbally-oriented in this regard. We only rarely break out the dice or colored blocks for use at showing relative position, and use of a consistent scale is almost nonexistent. It works most of the time, though sometimes I can't help but think that our fights might play out differently if we had a clearer picture of how people obstruct one another. Right, now, our DM is on a hiatus and we're playing Pulp Cthulhu, and most of our combat encounters tend to be either us shooting large monsters or party members facing off against one another, and in either case, at ranges well below maximum effective range of our guns.

[Pugwampy]

I hate theatre of the mind . I like to make encounters as pretty as possible . I dont make encounters and then pretty it up . I sit with my all my props and make a pretty scene and then add in monsters and encounter hook to fit that .

It depends on where the heroes are located . if its a dungeon I make use of my few official dnd tiles . Starter packs for whatever edition are great for getting more tiles . My 4th edition starter had bits and pieces of tiles , kinda like the lego version of carboard tiles . Not as pretty but you have a million dungeons at your fingertips .

If its a forest fight i put plastic toy trees and rocks around the table.
Castle defence I build a small castle from wooden blocks and add in towers .
Dungeons are tiles with added extra plastic furniture .
You want a battle at sea ? blue towel or blue shirt spread out and add toy boats .
you want a mountain terrain ? bunch up a towel or two and put it on the table .


I have used garden stones , felt tip erasable graph boards . I used a harry potter chessboard and pieces for a temple .
I used a wooden elephant with a fat body and taped a cut up plastic bottle to his back and now wha la a Mumakil with orc archers .
We all have old toys and the toyshop is full of cheap plastic goodies . Wooden blocks can give you amazing options .

Props and minis make an awesome add on experience to your game .

[Anonymouswizard]

A side note, Lego minifigures (and other brands) make great miniatures if you have the money for a collection of pieces. Swap bodies and accessories when you swap weapons and armour!

Of course it'll look a little more thrown together, and won't scratch that mini-painting itch if you're like me, but it's actually a really good solution. It's also relatively easy, if you have the bricks, to build a two or more colour grid and then build terrain on it, or you could build sets and count movement and ranges in studs (I recommend two studs per metre*).

If you have the money for it Lego is probably the ultimate gaming aid, although you'll want to try to stick to relatively basic pieces unless you have a specific need. No, I'm not saying that just because I want an excuse to use my new raygun gothic spaceman minifig as a mini, although that would be an amazing opportunity (I'd name the character Brick Rogers).

Yes, my dream is to have a plastic set of draws or boxes filled with lego at the table, and for it to be ransacked during the game to build sets. It'll increase the time per game, but I've yet to find a gamer who doesn't love building lego.

You can even do things like give the PCs a bunch of bricks and let them build a model of their spaceship! Need a monster? Build one! (okay, maybe not, but it'll work for mecha.)

*three studs/metre would be more to scale, minifigures come in a bit under 2m, but not everybody has the space for that.

[SirBellias]

I go theater of the mind most often, though I don't usually care about positioning that much and keep to less enemies with more players. Occasionally I'll have a map for important places with Distinguishing Features, but other than that I don't prepare anything too extreme.

A lot of people I know use chalkboards (since they play in classrooms) and that seems to work well too. Especially if they have a dedicated map drawer to draw out what the DM is describing.

[Kaptin Keen]

I just use paper.

[Jay R]

Rolls of wrapping paper often have a one-inch grid on the back as an aid to cutting. This means that a throw-away four-foot by ten-foot grid that you can write on is very cheap.

[Blondie Jo]

We used a table affectionately called, "wiggles."

Wiggles was a standard card table you can buy anywhere, plus a sheet of drafting paper (like for house plans) with a blank grid laid on top. Then we screwed plexiglass over top so we could draw in wet erase on the grid (I think dry erase would stain the plexiglass?).

wow! Must have good DIY skills.

Even in D&D 3.5, the tables I play at tend to be very verbally-oriented in this regard. We only rarely break out the dice or colored blocks for use at showing relative position, and use of a consistent scale is almost nonexistent.

I go theater of the mind most often, though I don't usually care about positioning that much and keep to less enemies with more players.

I went theathere for my first 2 game and improvided in some part but i am afraid I may not be able to answer the future question of my group about the terrain ("How tall is the grass?", "How dark is the place?", "Haw far is that goblin i want to shooot?")

A side note, Lego minifigures (and other brands) make great miniatures if you have the money for a collection of pieces. Swap bodies and accessories when you swap weapons and armour!

I thought aboout that but on amazon i didn't find anyuthing simple/cheap enough for my needs... any of you use programs? Suggestion for a free and simple one?

[bc56]

You can buy dry erase boards with grids on them. Those seem to work well.

I use one of those. It works great! Don't even need minis, you can just write character names on there. Not especially expensive either, only around $20.