Battle Mats

[wolff96]

We use a piece of waterproof bathroom panelling.

Scribe it with an exacto knife, using a T-Square to make straight lines.

Takes about 1 hour to do a 6' x 4' area. Total investment is about $9.

Very handy to have, since players can scribe spell durations, current hitpoints, and other information on the board and wipe it off with a quick paper towel.

I don't know how we'd live without it.

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Before I got that idea, we used a Chessex mat.

 

[thalmin]

Both Crystal Caste and Chessex double-sided mats have hexes on one side, squares on the other. Chessex has just released Battlemats and Megamats with 1.5" squares or hexes. I am not sure if this new size is available in double-sided.

edit: The double-sided mats are not yet available for the 1.5" size.

 

[Olive]

i'd go with the make your own, but if you wnat to buy some kit, Military Simulations
have the chessex megamats - just go to their online catalog/minis/minis accessories.

i'm lazy and over paid

i looked there and couldn't find it... so thanks for the heads up.

just don't try to look at the milsims site without adding .au if you're at work...

 

[La Bete]

don't try to look at the milsims site without adding .au if you're at work...

mmmm thanx for the hint.

 

[D-rock]

I use a battlemat. Its much better than the hand made paper grid system with overhead projection films that were taped together and pined over top of it that I used before. That always used to be a hassle.

 

[Fast Learner]

A cheap mat I like is a Dry erase board. It has a wooden frame to bounce dice off of and a good sized one is only 7 to 8 dollars. If you need a grid, you can draw one on with permanent marker.

I found that the permanent marker doesn't work, as the chemical in the dry erase markers will lift up the permanent marker and remove it the very first time you write over it.

However, scribing a grid with a straight-edge (ideally a metal t-square, but any metal bar will work) and an X-Acto knife works extremely well -- the grid is very fine but very visible, and it can't be erased.

 

[Aquila]

Let me just be the sole voice of dissent here. Battle mats squelch imagination in some players. In my campaign a certain player has gotten very angry at me at least three separate times, due to my decisions to do something different than what the battle mat would indicate (attack of opportunity while getting out of being flanked, placing four dire rats on a three square wide doorway, and drawing a radius from the point of detonation of a fireball spell).

While the enforced scale of the battle mat is convenient at times, I prefer a large whiteboard (shower panel is the same stuff). I feel it leads to much more organic, if somewhat chaotic combat.

 

[smetzger]

Let me just be the sole voice of dissent here. Battle mats squelch imagination in some players. In my campaign a certain player has gotten very angry at me at least three separate times, due to my decisions to do something different than what the battle mat would indicate (attack of opportunity while getting out of being flanked, placing four dire rats on a three square wide doorway, and drawing a radius from the point of detonation of a fireball spell).

If you use a battlemat, then yes you should abide by 'the rules of using it'. If you want a more free form aproach then do not use a grided mat.

 

[JeffK1966]

We almost always used a battlemat in 2E days. However, we use it less in 3E now. The reason is that we find that somebody can count squares to judge range on things, when it should be something that is a guess. So, we now we have fireball templates that we can lay on top of the table, and have other templates for area effect spells. And, we have some of those slim plastic Warhammer rulers to measure out distances. This allows us to set up some scenery and the like and makes for better combats.

We still use a battlemat for quickie combats where we don’t want to set up the scenery, though.

 

[Iron Sheep]

B) Unlike most people I use a 50 page easel pad marked out in 1 inch squares available from most office supply places.
This has a number of advantages.
You can write on it with anything, Personally I use colored wax pencils. You can use the edge for notes.
You can prepare maps ahead of time or even in sections if you want to just scissor them into the appropriate pieces.

My wife and I also use this system in our game (we use Sharpies for drawing on them), but I don't think that 1 inch grid easel pads would be easily available in Australia. There might be an acceptable substitute, but I'd think that 1 cm grid would be standard.

I found that the permanent marker doesn't work, as the chemical in the dry erase markers will lift up the permanent marker and remove it the very first time you write over it.

However, scribing a grid with a straight-edge (ideally a metal t-square, but any metal bar will work) and an X-Acto knife works extremely well -- the grid is very fine but very visible, and it can't be erased.

Before we used paper pads, we used a whiteboard with a grid made of thin drafter's tape. It wasn't perfect - the dry erase tended to get trapped in the corners of the grid, and the cleaning solution dissolves the adhesive on the tape temporarily - but it did work OK. We used it vertically on a stand, rather than with miniatures, and used letters to indicate where characters were.

The big problem with that system was that we had 3 different games using the same board, so complex maps needed to be re-drawn over and over by the DM.