Do you care about or enforce aesthetic consistency in your games?

[Retros_x]

When using things like tokens, battlemaps, music .etc in your games do you put any effort into ensuring they are aesthetically consistent? Do you enforce your players to adhere to this? As a player, do your care about your GM doing this at all?

If me and my players would have no other hobbies, no children, no friends and no jobs, I might consider working on consistent looks. But its pretty low on my priorites, because this hobby is IMO not about consistent visuals. Its not a visual hobby. Visuals are just an aid, the main work happens in our imagination and brains. The work and effort to build everything visual consistent is just way too much, just a big hassle for a result that is not that relevant IMO.

 

[Li Shenron]

In our tabletop games (I don't play with VTTs) I would care if I could, but I don't stress over it much... because I choose to use Lego minifigs for characters and some occasional bricks for terrain elements, but it would be a really huge time sink to try and have the right depiction for every humanoid creature or to build larger monsters and environment structures (I know someone does full dungeons with Lego, but I doubt they do it anew for every gaming session...). So I mock things up or use other stuff available, and generally I just put some canvas, map or picture below, to represent terrain.

 

[Umbran]

Most TTRPG sessions will have the GM and players using some form of artwork to represent their characters and the world

As someone who, in over 4 decades of gaming, has never had a miniature of the character I am playing, I question how true that is.

especially if they play online via a VTT.

Okay, that I won't argue.

The TLDR Question

When using things like tokens, battlemaps, music .etc in your games do you put any effort into ensuring they are aesthetically consistent? Do you enforce your players to adhere to this? As a player, do your care about your GM doing this at all?

Not. At. All.

Folks can and will use minis, dice, coins, M&Ms, bottle caps, or whatever makes sense at the time.

 

[FailedFocus]

Thanks for the responses thus far. Whilst I’m sure I’m not the first, this really just felt like a weird idea I had that I wanted to try out and hear how other people have gone about it.

Whilst I haven’t started running this game yet, in terms of it being too high effort like people are saying... i'm certainly hoping not haha

I have a fair bit of time before this game starts and to me it's seeming like one of those things that is a lot of effort to start doing half-way through a game and applying it retroactively - like having an in-game calendar or making session notes - but not too difficult if you know you plan on doing it from the beginning and set it up properly, just spending a few minutes each session to maintain it.

Also while I am trying to limit myself to a few sources... if I can't find the right artwork or music piece I want, i'm not going to lose any sleep over branching out once or twice.

I also have no idea how much of an impact this will make on the game or how much players will care, so it really might be something I do just this once.

 

[LordEntrails]

Thanks for the responses thus far. Whilst I’m sure I’m not the first, this really just felt like a weird idea I had that I wanted to try out and hear how other people have gone about it.

Whilst I haven’t started running this game yet, in terms of it being too high effort like people are saying... i'm certainly hoping not haha

I have a fair bit of time before this game starts and to me it's seeming like one of those things that is a lot of effort to start doing half-way through a game and applying it retroactively - like having an in-game calendar or making session notes - but not too difficult if you know you plan on doing it from the beginning and set it up properly, just spending a few minutes each session to maintain it.

Also while I am trying to limit myself to a few sources... if I can't find the right artwork or music piece I want, i'm not going to lose any sleep over branching out once or twice.

I also have no idea how much of an impact this will make on the game or how much players will care, so it really might be something I do just this once.

I think this will be cool for your players. Kudos to you for putting in the effort

 

[Umbran]

I do care about how a a character is described in-universe, because (1) they should seem like they belong in the setting, rather than the player's favorite cartoon or comic book or w/e; and

For one (non-D&D) campaign I was in, we collectively came to the realization that the effective art style of the game would be somewhere between Record of Lodoss War and Ranma 1/2.

We even found a theme song, and designed an opening credits sequence for the anime series of that campaign.

So, there's that.

 

[plecostomus]

I draw tokens for my players. So they are consistent to each other, but not really to the monster tokens or anything else around them. The other campaign I'm in has a mixture of PC tokens with different art styles, and I've never really thought about the fact that they don't match. Neither of the games I play in are moody/themed in any particular way. I think sometimes consistency is important- it's part of the thankless Art Director role when making the books -but at the point where the game is between me and my friends, we aren't publishing anything from that so it only matters that it makes sense to the group of us. It's not for anyone else and I'm not making money off it.

Also this was sent to me the same day this thread was made:

Avengers of graphical cohesion

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4fsJyg7MMlwUrTKXATBTrEPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/joshstrifehayesTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/joshstrifehayesDis...

www.youtube.com

As I said above, there are times when I do think aesthetic consistency is important. I'm not pooh-poohing the whole concept. I just thought this video was funny so please enjoy it.

 

[plecostomus]

I will say I tried to use a Pathfinder artwork for a gnome knight token amidst what was otherwise a bunch of D&D artwork and my players told me yesterday that they were unnerved by it.

 

[FailedFocus]

I draw tokens for my players. So they are consistent to each other, but not really to the monster tokens or anything else around them. The other campaign I'm in has a mixture of PC tokens with different art styles, and I've never really thought about the fact that they don't match. Neither of the games I play in are moody/themed in any particular way. I think sometimes consistency is important- it's part of the thankless Art Director role when making the books -but at the point where the game is between me and my friends, we aren't publishing anything from that so it only matters that it makes sense to the group of us. It's not for anyone else and I'm not making money off it.

Also this was sent to me the same day this thread was made:

Avengers of graphical cohesion

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4fsJyg7MMlwUrTKXATBTrEPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/joshstrifehayesTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/joshstrifehayesDis...

www.youtube.com

As I said above, there are times when I do think aesthetic consistency is important. I'm not pooh-poohing the whole concept. I just thought this video was funny so please enjoy it.

I don't watch him much but when I do I always enjoy Josh Strife Hayes.

But it does raise a good point as I know at least two people who cannot get into FFXIV because of this, they just think it looks ridiculous and hate that you can just pay to "naughty word all over the atmosphere of the game" in one of their words.

Still, that is a professional product and not a hobbyist game played with friends, so what it comes to TTRPGs I think people are willing to let a lot more slide from their DM and fellow players.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A little bit; I produce the tokens for the game, so I have in a given campaign a standard framing convention (usually one for PCs, one for villains, and one for non-hostile NPCs), and I avoid using (or having my players) use actual photographs for token art.

When it comes to maps, other than my general aesthetic preference (I don't like overly cartoony looking maps), its just too hard to find an appropriate map for what I want, even with tiles for me to be too fussy. A lot of stuff I use comes from one map producer so there probably looks like a preferred aesthetic that isn't really there.