How "Table-Top" is Your Game?

[S'mon]

I have players claim I am out to destroy their imaginations - and they love it. Minis and scenery for everything of course.

I exaggerate, but I do like having things represented on the table during an encounter. Exchanges at a tavern or poitical stuff is different naturally.

I tend towards this. In fact I tend to use minis for the tavern & political stuff also, although I realise I really shouldn't - I'm trying to cut down on my noncombat use of minis a bit, and emphasise description a bit more. There's a danger as DM of using minis & scenery as a crutch rather than an enhancement.

 

[Desdichado]

Battle map and dry erase here. Before that, graph paper and/or nothing.

 

[Djeta Thernadier]

How much do gridmaps, hexmaps, minis, terrain, and scenery come into play in your games? What do you use, if anything? Just a gridmap and dry-erase markers? Does every player have a mini? Just use extra dice? Counters? Do you use them all the time, or rarely, say only for the big battles? Is it an added plus or an extra burden to lug all that gear around? Or do you just hate anything outside of your imagination? I wanna know.

Grid map and mini's for each PC. NPCs are represented by either mini's lego, small toys or dice. We also use lego to build walls, houses, wagons etc. , those little trees you get at craft stores, beads, fish tank stuff (you can find awesome colums, castles, bridges etc. that are perfectly to scale at your local aquarium store) and whatever else we can find for misc. visuals.

I find it difficult to not use at least a grid map and minis, because both groups I game with are relatively large and combat gets confusing without at least minimal visual aid.

 

[Henry]

We game at a friend's house, in his living room. He has a fold-out table that we use.

We use a Chessex 36" x 48" Wet-erase Battlemat - the most awesome gaming tool invented. We alternate between unpainted mini's and Fiery Dragon Counters, depending on the desire of that session's DM.

Mini's are for sure a double-edged sword; without 'em, the combats are more boring, and more likely to devolve into "where were you last?" arguments. Too distinct, and it kills the representation of our characters for us. The best mini's in the world? Old-style plastic Risk Pieces. (A player of ours used to have those little plastic "I" s and "V" s and "X" s - those were great!)

 

[DragonLancer]

How much do gridmaps, hexmaps, minis, terrain, and scenery come into play in your games? What do you use, if anything? Just a gridmap and dry-erase markers? Does every player have a mini? Just use extra dice? Counters? Do you use them all the time, or rarely, say only for the big battles? Is it an added plus or an extra burden to lug all that gear around? Or do you just hate anything outside of your imagination? I wanna know.

We don't bother with mini's or grid maps. Its all dice and imagination for us. I've never been too keen on using figures as it just serves to slow the game down.

 

[Thresher]

For fights that have a lot of NPC's in them and a lot of people playing (5 or so) then the board gets dragged out for intensive fights. But for the most part our games are 3-4 people and you dont really need them, we've all been playing for about 10-18 years each and did fine without them then and can do without them.

Me personally, Ive never had a character do anything epic, memorable or spectacular in a board/war game.

 

[BlackMoria]

Our group is blessed with being able to use the board room at our local community college.

Plush chairs, lots of tables and whiteboards and a computer projection system.

We use the whiteboards and the computer projection with a laptop. With the laptop, it is easy to project a map and put up icons representing chracters, monsters, furnishings and terrain.

All members of our group have laser pens so we can sit back and use the laser pens to show where our icons are going and the path to get there, or to point out features or details.

About as high tech as you can get.

 

[Psion]

How much do gridmaps, hexmaps, minis, terrain, and scenery come into play in your games? What do you use, if anything? Just a gridmap and dry-erase markers? Does every player have a mini? Just use extra dice? Counters?

We have minis and counters and a map with dry erase markers.

Every once in a while, the combat gets complicated enough that I force my players to clear the chips and pop cans and Arby's wrappers off the map so we can actually use it. But most of the time I just wing it. It's not that hard.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

We use a battlemat & markers, and we usually have miniatures for all the PCs. For monsters & NPCs, we use Fiery Dragon counters. We usually just use minis & counters during combat, but tend to draw the maps out on the battlemat most of the time just to get an idea of where we are. I don't mind lugging all the stuff around, I own it, so we might as well use it.

 

[Umbran]

Chessex mat and markers, a mini for each PC if we've got 'em. Counters (often home-printed), spare dice, or bits of candy for enemies. We've never used scenery.

We don't haul out the mat except for combats. And not for every combat - if the situation is tactically simple, and is likely to be done in only a round or two, we won't bother with the mat. In general, if the time used to set up the mat would be a significant portion of the entire combat sequence, the mat stays put away.