Useful Play Aids

[ecz]

Originally Posted by fisherro

Yes, it was clear that you weren’t talking about single tiles. But my printer still can only print 8.5 by 11 inches at once. And it can’t print on anything heavier than light card stock. And it can’t print on a dry-erase surface. So even if I’m not creating individual tiles, I still don’t see how I can avoid mounting & some sort of lamination.

OK, so let’s say I skip the lamination and live without that feature. Am I going to try to play on several letter sized pieces of light card stock just laid out? I’ve tried that, and that doesn’t work. The pages don’t stay aligned and—even if they did—they’re too easily displaced.

So how do you make this work?

I use homemade boards light-card printed in colors for several different uses:

1) small boards with small hexes printed in colour on light card using an ordinary printer. These cards represent the map of the region where to record using a pencil the "tactical/operational" movement of the party (one hex generally = 100 meters or 1 km, it depends) .
They are for GM's eyes only and contains all the infos the players should not see. The GM just describes the terrain the party encounter when they move.



2) Sometime - when the players will surely enter a key area during the adventure, for example the throne hall of the castle for the final encounter, or the market in the village, the common room of a inn - I prepare in advance a big map with large hexes to arrange miniatures and combat with the right elements at their places ( the road, the stream, the rock, the tower, the fence, the big table in the middle and so on...). In this case the print can be of four or even six pages that I link accordingly. Yes, the link is not perfect, hexes do not overlap exactly at the edges and I must use plexiglass to hold the pages but it's good enough for us.
I show the board to players and put it on the table over the battlemap just when they enter the area.

3) Plus I have prepared a lot of "melee-sized" boards (all one-page prints) with all possible generic terrain (forest, swamp, desert, clear, city, rough, brush...) to use for combat. They are useful when players are in "generic terrain".

when no homemade board is available or necessary, I use a common battlemap for miniatures (actually cardboards) where I hand- draw what the PCs sees. Combats happen there.


The only use of the fine tiles I can think is "strategic" to create the board when the players explore a new area; for example if the party decides to go to north the GM says: you continue for 3 km (putting three new tiles on the table) with the river along your left and the hills on your right... but it's not essential since the GM could just describe the terrain and let the players draw their map on paper.

Or they could be used to arrange combat on a finely detailed terrain. Put enough tiles together (at least the equivalent of 4X6 megahexes) to have a decent area for combat, with trees, rocks or other tactical elements. Seven tiles = 1 MGH.
They look beatiful, stay at their places and enhace the estethic part of the game. But, if it's a key area for the adventure, they could be exchanged with a (even much larger) board prepared in advance and printed in four or six pages.
If it is not a key area, then a generic "melee sized one-page board" (#3 above) with the appropriate type of terrain is a fair substitute IMO.

Thus I do not see the utility of the tiles.