Battle Grids: Chessex vs. roll4initiative?

[Argyle King]

Another low-cost alternative is Paizo's foldable flip-mats. They fold up into a handy 8x11-ish square but open up into a roughly 3x4 page battlemat.

Does Paizo make them with hex graphs?




What I've been doing is just using a cheap dry erase board from WalMart and not using the grid at all. Instead, I just have movement measured out using a similarly cheap clear plastic ruler (also from WalMart.) 1" is still the standard regardless of whether you use the grid or not. If you're worried about minis getting bumped, get one of the magnetic dry erase boards and then glue magnets to the bases of your minis.

I think I paid around $25 for what I consider to be a fairly large dry erase board. The plastic rulers were 75 cents a piece, so I bought a few to pass around the table.

This method does require a little more work when figuring out the radius of spells and things of that nature, but, after doing it for a while, you start to be able to eyeball things like that. Still, for ease of reference (and because I had nothing else to do at the time thanks to insomnia) I measured and cut out of construction paper a few templates for common spell and power shapes.

 

[IronWolf]

Does Paizo make them with hex graphs?

I don't think they have any currently in print. There used to be the original Steel Sqwire Flip-Mat that had squares on one side and hexes on the other, but it is currently out of print. It would be nice if they would make one again, especially with the popularity of Kingmaker.

 

[OnlineDM]

For cheap minis, I HIGHLY recommend the following:

• Get a box of 1" metal fender washers (about $8 for 100 of them from a hardware store)
• Find monster images online and format them using TokenTool into 1" round images
• Print these out on photo paper
• Get a 1" hole punch from a craft store (cost me about $10), plus a glue stick
• Punch out the circular images and glue them to the fender washers
• You can optionally get fancy with putting bloodied versions of the images on the reverse of the tokens, but that's totally optional.

I did this myself and loved it. I was inspired by a post from NewbieDM.

I later moved to using a projector and MapTool, but I don't advise jumping right into that approach!

 

[IronWolf]

For cheap minis, I HIGHLY recommend the following:

• Get a box of 1" metal fender washers (about $8 for 100 of them from a hardware store)
• Find monster images online and format them using TokenTool into 1" round images
• Print these out on photo paper
• Get a 1" hole punch from a craft store (cost me about $10), plus a glue stick
• Punch out the circular images and glue them to the fender washers
• You can optionally get fancy with putting bloodied versions of the images on the reverse of the tokens, but that's totally optional.

I did this myself and loved it. I was inspired by a post from NewbieDM.

I later moved to using a projector and MapTool, but I don't advise jumping right into that approach!

Nice! I must have missed this idea before. I have many plastic minis but I never seem to have the ones I need for various encounters. This would be good way to at least have pics that look like what the party is fighting. Might have to try this one out.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

You can also pay a visit to One Monk Games - lots of PDF standees - from demons to goblins to lots and lots of undead.

And they are free.

I have been using them for over a year when running games for tweens, they are fairly portable, colorful, and if something happens to them (a wandering ferret named Simon, for a not so random example) then replacing them is easy. (To be fair - the only damage to the purloined figures was two neat little holes on the heads or shoulders - for some reason Simon likes stealing them and hiding them under a bed. )

The Auld Grump