Laying out your dungeon - advice?

[AZRogue]

For dungeons, I lay it out at home using the tiles, including placing the minis on the tiles for where the monsters will be. I take a digital picture of the whole thing. I print it out and mark it up with any other notes (like traps, secret doors, etc.)

An example here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davethegame/2378566717/in/set-72157603715642320/

Then I throw all the tiles and minis I need into a box (currently a Kinko's box.) I find it's pretty easy to go throw and lay out the tiles as I go when I have the whole map in front of me using the exact tiles.

For non-dungeons, I still throw the minis and maps/whatever into the box, and just mark down in my notes what I use where.

Wow, that's exactly what I had planned on doing. I'm glad it worked for you. It gives me hope. I'm really going to thumb-tack the bottom of those suckers, though, so they don't move. My table tends to get rowdy.

And, Ingolf, that's a great idea about the extra pieces for extra random encounter areas for those times the PCs are convinced the dead end tunnel is really the way they need to go if they could just dig through the wall far enough. I think I'm going to try the accordion file. I have a few of those.

 

[Novem5er]

I've used Dungeon Tiles and minis for 3.5 this year and my players really like them. I have a gridded dry-erase board that I've used in the past to draw rooms, but I like the Dungeon Tiles better. I also asked my players which they prefer and they all said the Tiles.

The problem with tiles, as has been stated, is the organization. My first few games with tiles were kind of a bummer b/c they really were slow to find and set up. I've gotten better at it, but I'm still working out my system. Here are some tips.

- Use zip-loc bags to organize different sets of tiles. Use big bags for the large tiles and the smaller bags for corridors and 4x4 rooms. Even the snack sized half-bags are great for the 1 or 2 square detail tiles, like doorways and chests. Since the zip-locs are see-through, you can quickly tell which bag has what set, and the size of the bag narrows it down further.

- When designing the adventure, set up a "dry run" with the tiles. Place every room, corridor, and detail you'll need during the real adventure. Either record your set up with a digital photo or by drawing it out on graph paper (I've only used pre-written modules, so I already had a copy of the basic map). When you're done, take ALL the tiles you used and put them in a separate bag. You can even "stack" them within the bag/box so that you can grab the tiles in relative order to their appearance in the dungeon.

- When playing, keep all your detail tiles (doorways, chests, etc) ready to use behind your DM screen. I have a small office supply box (for paperclips?) that I dump all my detail tiles in for that adventure. The chances are that you'll have to use your doorways again and again, so having them handy behind your screen makes them accessable.

- (Aside) I really recommend using a black mat to put your tiles on. I see you've already bought something, so I commend you. Having a black backdrop really makes the tiles stand out. Without the black background, I was having a hard time visualizing the "walls" around each tile piece. Now the black background really solidifies the wall border and the empty space between rooms!

MINIATURES

I've been having a hard time organizing my miniatures, as I play both the RPG and the Miniatures game. I started out organizing the minis for RP purposes, bundling "like" monsters in the same ziplock bags (can you tell I like zip-loc bags?). If you don't play the miniatures game, this should work fine for you. However, when the MM comes out, you might want to organize them (in bags/boxes) based on alphabetic order. That way, your minis will correspond to their order in the MM.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

For dungeons, I lay it out at home using the tiles, including placing the minis on the tiles for where the monsters will be. I take a digital picture of the whole thing. I print it out and mark it up with any other notes (like traps, secret doors, etc.)

An example here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davethegame/2378566717/in/set-72157603715642320/

Then I throw all the tiles and minis I need into a box (currently a Kinko's box.) I find it's pretty easy to go throw and lay out the tiles as I go when I have the whole map in front of me using the exact tiles.

For non-dungeons, I still throw the minis and maps/whatever into the box, and just mark down in my notes what I use where.

Wow. There is some creepy overlap between what I and my group do or plan to do and your stuff. Good to know it should work out. Is that "art box" from Kinkos?

 

[drjones]

I have the tiles but I find myself using a flip mat from Paizo a lot, you can draw on it with dry or wet markers and it folds up like a normal piece of laminated paper (since thats what it is) and I think it was 12$ with one side generic and the other some location. It is also handy to use as a dry erase board to record initiatives and such on where everyone can see it.

for the minis I have a thick cardboard shirt box I keep the adventures worth of pre-picked monsters in so I can pull out what I need for an encounter without giving later encounters away.

If I know a big set piece fight is coming I will pre draw it on the map (like the last game where I knew the PCs were going to run into an ambush right away) but in the dungeon I draw each area as they see it, having a good reference map helps to get the size right.

I still have my minis organized by 1.0 ddm faction.. I have no idea how I can organize them now that 2.0 has made overlapping factions common and thrown in good/evil and made a good portion of the pieces 'RP only' now or at least until the restatting is done.

 

[davethegame]

Wow. There is some creepy overlap between what I and my group do or plan to do and your stuff. Good to know it should work out. Is that "art box" from Kinkos?

Great minds and all that?

The Kinko's box is just a plain brown box used to store stacks of paper. The art box I picked up from an art store (Pearl Art Supply in Rockville MD, though I've seen them elsewhere.)

Here's the article I wrote about all my gaming supplies:
http://www.critical-hits.com/2008/01/15/where-does-he-get-those-wonderful-toys/
Though I've changed a few things since then to lessen the amount I carry to each game (and as the adventures in my game became more linear as it approaches the ending.)

 

[malraux]

I definitely found the dungeon tiles to a problem for mapping. Once you have more than a handful, they are insanely tough to organize. What I recommend is to draw out uninteresting corridors and the like, and only organize the DTs for more complicated areas; and for those, I prep those tiles in advance and have them in a stack ready to go. And actually I've found that my (slowly growing) selection of hirsts arts stuff is just easier to organize. DT stuff is often just so small or specific. The only thing I've found that almost works is the clear sheets that you'd store baseball cards and the like in. It does let you see both sides easily, but pretty often they end up sliding out or other problems.

For minis, regardless of how you organize them for long term storage, I recommend a small box (cigar boxes are about perfect) to have as a staging area for the likely needed minis for that night. Its larger enough that almost all minis will fit, while being small enough to be useful.

 

[Jer]

Only using them for climactic encounters and dungeon crawls is probably a good thing, but I'd even consider dialing that back a bit. I now only use my tiles for dungeon crawls, and I keep an erasable map handy for any climactic battles that occur outside of the dungeon. This makes it relatively easy for me to organize the stack of tiles that I think the players will get to during the game session the night before the session.

I keep my tiles organized by size in separate gladlock bags and then keep those in larger shoe-box sized boxes. I've found that you actually don't need all that many tiles to do a nice-sized dungeon layout for a night's worth of play. I also don't use the fiddly-small tiles at all in my layouts - the artwork is nice but I find that it doesn't add as much to the play as the time it takes to keep track of all of them eats up. Anything smaller than 2"x2" doesn't make it into my setups anymore. I've been using poster tack on the bottom of the tiles to keep them from sliding around, and that works fairly well.

One thing that I've been thinking about doing - getting some black poster board and pre-assembling "rooms" by cutting the poster board to size and sticking tiles together on it with poster tack before the game, then keeping those rooms stacked and hidden from the players and linking them together as they move through the dungeon and open doors/turn corners/etc. That gives the flexibility of the tiles without the slow setup, and might be a good way of using the smaller tiles in the rooms. The problem is that you probably need more tiles to do a setup like that - you couldn't easily re-use tiles from rooms that the characters had already explored very easily in the same night.

 

[Scalding]

I place the tiles on a shelf liner to give them traction. This works very well, even when our cats run across the table the tiles stay in place.

I create my dungeons using Jai's Dungeon Tiles Mapper, which allows me to create maps using only the tile sets that I have, annotate them, save an image of them, and so on. I have found it to be a simple and very helpful tool, although it does have some bugs from time to time.

I put the tiles for each room in its own ziplock bag, so there's no searching for tiles at the table. Sometimes it's still a bit like putting together a puzzle, though.

I have the monsters/NPC's for an adventure bagged by type or encounter.

 

[greyscale1]

I actually find myself mapping out my battlegrids in a totally different way. Sorry if this is an excursion from what the thread was talking about (I'm really suprised no one has mentioned this yet)

I use large drafting supply paper, 11x18 1inch gradiated graph paper. Most encounters and dungeon rooms will fit on one of those pieces of paper, and you can go nuts with the details if you are so inclined (pre-game, of course, no assembly or waiting around required).

I like this because it allows me to use color and include all the features I want, clearly mark elevations, difficult terrain, cover, trap/trap related things (path of a boulder). So the PCs end up on a complex and dynamic battlemat without having to wait for me.

For outdoor battles or battles in LARGE areas with no real distinctive terrain (that cant be easily described) I use a green cutting mat. You cant write on it, but its pleasantly sturdy and has a nice grid.

 

[WampusCat43]

Send all the tiles back and get a projector. Works for us.