How do you make effective game use of WotC's Dungeon Tiles?

[S'mon]

Well, I bought the "Ruins of the Wild" set for woodland/wilderness encounters, mostly to have some random trees on either side of the path. I've ordered the village set for some building interiors, but it hasn't arrived yet. I'm very sceptical that any set can let you detail a dungeon in play, so I'm sticking to dry-erase maps for that.

Edit: The WotC sets would be much more useful if they were laminated so I could use a dry erase marker on them.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

The WotC sets would be much more useful if they were laminated so I could use a dry erase marker on them.

You can. See my post above.

 

[S'mon]

You can. See my post above.

Yeah, I saw that after I posted. Time for some experimentation...

Edit: Cool, dry erase seems to work. I'm planning to run B5 Horror on the Hill soon, and it has a lot of wilderness encounters, so that's great.

 

[blargney the second]

Blargney's guide to using Dungeon Tiles.

I love these things, and it took me time and effort to learn how to use them effectively. The biggest part is learning to let go of specific configurations and allowing the tiles to help shape your environments. Here's how I do it.

1) Familiarization - learn what's on the tiles and how they work together. I learn best when I'm having fun, so when I get a new set I sit down at the table and play a game of Make A Cool Random Dungeon with my girlfriend. (We take turns putting down a tile, no takebacks.)

2) Access - categorization & storage. I pull out all the tiles that have stairs and put them in a ziplock bag. Ditto for tiles with entryways such as doors, arches, and portcullises. Ditto for outdoor tiles. What's left is random dungeon stuff and I stick them all in a big, strong bag.

3) Table use - putting it all together. When the characters come to an encounter area, I grab a bunch of tiles: 2-4 doors, stairs if applicable, and a handful of dungeon pieces. I quickly lay out a room one tile at a time, add doors and stairs, no takebacks, and away we go. I treat poster maps as really big tiles and our 1" grid paper as a wild card.

I hope this helps!
-blarg

 

[RabidBob]

I could make fantastic use of Dungeon Tiles ... if the out of print sets were not out of print.

 

[Jhaelen]

So far I've only used the Wilderness tiles. These are really easy to use and work great. I'm using them pretty much every session (I'm not really fond of big dungeons, so most encounters happen in the wilderness).

I've also bought the Underdark tiles and did a couple of test sessions trying to rebuild maps.
It took ages and I wouldn't really want to do it in a real session. A battlemat is a lot more practicable for this.

What I'm going to do for my next adventure, though, is to 'redraw' the maps of the underground area so they can be easily recreated using the tiles. As long as the main features of an encounter area are approximately where they should be, this hopefully works okay.

I'm also looking forward to the city street tiles. Unless WotC botches them, they should make a great addition to my tile collection. So far I've been using the poster maps from the 'Fantastic Locations' line for city encounters.

 

[S'mon]

So far I've only used the Wilderness tiles. These are really easy to use and work great. I'm using them pretty much every session (I'm not really fond of big dungeons, so most encounters happen in the wilderness).

I've also bought the Underdark tiles and did a couple of test sessions trying to rebuild maps.
It took ages and I wouldn't really want to do it in a real session. A battlemat is a lot more practicable for this.

Yes, that's my feeling - great for wilderness, should be great for urban encounters, but not for published dungeons, for which a battlemat is more practical. With the battlemat I can draw different levels of multi-level dungeons on in different coloured ink, so everyone can easily see where the stair wells link up etc - that works great.

 

[Nebulous]

I've also organized similar pieces into baggies for easier retrieval. My best suggestion is to build your maps ahead of time and sketch what pieces go where, and lay them out as needed. Searching through a whole pile for a specific piece in the middle of a game is just wasting too much time.

 

[rokeca]

My biggest issue with the sets is, with a few small exceptions, the tile dimensions are the same set to set. Lots of 8x8s, 4x4s, 8x4s, 2x8s, etc. It makes it difficult to recreated dungeons from modules with rooms of odd dimensions (and I'm not talking weird shaped rooms - I'd love to see some 3x7s, 5x5s, 5x7s, 3x3s etc for a greater variety of room shapes).

 

[Obryn]

My biggest issue with the sets is, with a few small exceptions, the tile dimensions are the same set to set. Lots of 8x8s, 4x4s, 8x4s, 2x8s, etc. It makes it difficult to recreated dungeons from modules with rooms of odd dimensions (and I'm not talking weird shaped rooms - I'd love to see some 3x7s, 5x5s, 5x7s, 3x3s etc for a greater variety of room shapes).

YES.

PLEASE.

I am tired of building 5x5 rooms out of 4 miscellaneous pieces.

-O