Jack Daniel
Legend
This is a fairly straightforward topic: what do you like to use for tactical markers on your tabletop? This generally covers two separate subjects: the dungeon/terrain and the characters/monsters. So, two questions really. (1) How do you like to model the encounter environment on your tabletop? And (2) what do you like to use to represent creatures on that scale?
Modeling the Tabletop
There are a number of ways to put a miniature dungeon on your table.
Pre-printed dungeon maps are one option. As long as you're not drawing the map yourself before you sit down to play, the chief perk with these is the complete lack of prep-time. The map's already there, in glorious detail; you just need to slap it onto the table when the PCs arrive in that area. The down-sides are lack of flexibility (unless it's a very generic map, it's not likely to be reused in the same campaign) and the fact that with a pre-drawn map of any sort, the parts that the PCs haven't explored yet have to be covered up somehow.
Dungeon tiles neatly solve both of those flaws. Dungeon tiles are always generic, so they can be reconfigured for infinite reuse, and they need only be laid down onto the table as the PCs move through the dungeon. The down-sides here are difficulty of storing & transporting the bulk of a collection; the fact that searching for the right dungeon tiles can get fiddly unless they're somehow sorted or organized; and the fact that tiles tend to come in very regular shapes (and they're rarely narrower than 2" wide), so finding unusual shapes, or sufficient numbers of very narrow corridors, can be difficult.
Modeled dungeon scenery is pretty much just dungeon tiles in 3D... with a commensurate increase in expense and storage/transportation difficulty.
The classic vinyl battle-mat, gridded in squares or hexes, remains popular. Variations on this include gridded paper and "tac-tiles." All of these require that the dungeon somehow be marked directly onto the playing surface, either beforehand and covered up, to be revealed as the PCs move; or somehow drawn or modeled as play progresses, which can be a bit time-consuming, and, as when messing with dungeon tiles, can interrupt the flow of gameplay. Wet-erase markers are perhaps the fastest and least annoying tool to use for marking the dungeon as the game goes on, but this requires frequent erasure with water, followed by drying. One possible alternative is to use some kind of game-piece to delineate dungeon walls, e.g. dominoes (ideal for straight walls) or glass "gaming stones" (better for a variety of dungeon room and cave wall shapes).
Representing Characters
This is a simpler matter, because there are really only two varieties here: miniature figures (or tokens with images on them) versus generic playing pieces which can be designated to represent whatever the DM and players choose. Miniatures enjoy visual impact, but (as with dungeon tiles) suffer from difficulties of storing and moving a large collection, as well as the fact that a good collection must be built up in order to represent a reasonable variety of character and monster types. "Blank" game pieces, meanwhile (be they chessmen, board-game pawns, bingo chips, dice, scrabble tiles, or whatever happens to be handy), although mobile and versatile, suffer from precisely what makes them useful: their lack of visual character makes observing an encounter layout at a glance potentially ambiguous and even error-prone.
My Preferences
I like to keep my "gaming kit" light and mobile, so I've gotten away from dungeon tiles and miniatures. These days, I use a battle-mat with wet erase markers, with the caveat that I only draw rooms on the mat when it's time for a combat encounter. If the players are merely exploring, I stick to plain old-fashioned pencil and 0.2" graph paper. I find that this keeps things reasonably speedy and makes the game flow better than trying to draw the whole dungeon as the players move through it.
One of the peculiarities of my own games, though, is that I like to use a 10' scale rather than a 5' scale for pretty much everything, including combat. This is something of an edition-specific quirk, however. Whereas the d20 system pretty much demands a 5' to the inch scale, older versions of the game rarely give movement rates or spell effects on a finer grain than tens of feet. This is especially true of Basic/Expert D&D, which explicitly recommends using a 1" = 10' scale. (1st edition AD&D, I've been told, was sometimes played using a bizarre 3" = 10' scale. That just makes my head ache!) But where the Basic/Expert game still suggests that only one character or monster at a time can occupy a 10' square in combat, I don't find that very realistic. And so, once I switched from 3rd edition back to playing Old D&D again, I was compelled to quest for the perfect way to let several creatures (as many as four or five) occupy a single 1" square on the tabletop, should the situation demand it.
At first, I used the little soldiers from recent editions of Risk (the LotR edition was great for monsters!), but those tended to fall over and get lost. Next I tried using d6s, with the appropriate number of pips turned face up to suggest the number of characters or monsters occupying a square; but that proved inconvenient whenever a group would "split up" and take separate directions across the battlefield. From there, I was led to a variety of stackable tokens (checkers, coins, scrabble tiles, bingo chips), but that made only the top token visible, rendering the tactical display very ambiguous. So, coming full circle, I realized that I would have to use small markers that could all fit into a 1" square together, without stacking; but they would have to be easier to manipulate and distinguish than Risk men. Lately, I've hit upon the idea of using various colors of 6 x 9 mm "crafting beads." They work pretty well for my purposes.
Of course, since most folks around here play 3rd or 4th edition, my unusual scaling concerns are a big non-issue. But I can tell you that back when I was still playing 3e, I was pretty happy with Clue! pawns for the player characters, chessmen for all the medium-sized monsters, and poker chips or a soda bottle(!) for the occasional large- or giant-sized monster.
Modeling the Tabletop
There are a number of ways to put a miniature dungeon on your table.
Pre-printed dungeon maps are one option. As long as you're not drawing the map yourself before you sit down to play, the chief perk with these is the complete lack of prep-time. The map's already there, in glorious detail; you just need to slap it onto the table when the PCs arrive in that area. The down-sides are lack of flexibility (unless it's a very generic map, it's not likely to be reused in the same campaign) and the fact that with a pre-drawn map of any sort, the parts that the PCs haven't explored yet have to be covered up somehow.
Dungeon tiles neatly solve both of those flaws. Dungeon tiles are always generic, so they can be reconfigured for infinite reuse, and they need only be laid down onto the table as the PCs move through the dungeon. The down-sides here are difficulty of storing & transporting the bulk of a collection; the fact that searching for the right dungeon tiles can get fiddly unless they're somehow sorted or organized; and the fact that tiles tend to come in very regular shapes (and they're rarely narrower than 2" wide), so finding unusual shapes, or sufficient numbers of very narrow corridors, can be difficult.
Modeled dungeon scenery is pretty much just dungeon tiles in 3D... with a commensurate increase in expense and storage/transportation difficulty.
The classic vinyl battle-mat, gridded in squares or hexes, remains popular. Variations on this include gridded paper and "tac-tiles." All of these require that the dungeon somehow be marked directly onto the playing surface, either beforehand and covered up, to be revealed as the PCs move; or somehow drawn or modeled as play progresses, which can be a bit time-consuming, and, as when messing with dungeon tiles, can interrupt the flow of gameplay. Wet-erase markers are perhaps the fastest and least annoying tool to use for marking the dungeon as the game goes on, but this requires frequent erasure with water, followed by drying. One possible alternative is to use some kind of game-piece to delineate dungeon walls, e.g. dominoes (ideal for straight walls) or glass "gaming stones" (better for a variety of dungeon room and cave wall shapes).
Representing Characters
This is a simpler matter, because there are really only two varieties here: miniature figures (or tokens with images on them) versus generic playing pieces which can be designated to represent whatever the DM and players choose. Miniatures enjoy visual impact, but (as with dungeon tiles) suffer from difficulties of storing and moving a large collection, as well as the fact that a good collection must be built up in order to represent a reasonable variety of character and monster types. "Blank" game pieces, meanwhile (be they chessmen, board-game pawns, bingo chips, dice, scrabble tiles, or whatever happens to be handy), although mobile and versatile, suffer from precisely what makes them useful: their lack of visual character makes observing an encounter layout at a glance potentially ambiguous and even error-prone.
My Preferences
I like to keep my "gaming kit" light and mobile, so I've gotten away from dungeon tiles and miniatures. These days, I use a battle-mat with wet erase markers, with the caveat that I only draw rooms on the mat when it's time for a combat encounter. If the players are merely exploring, I stick to plain old-fashioned pencil and 0.2" graph paper. I find that this keeps things reasonably speedy and makes the game flow better than trying to draw the whole dungeon as the players move through it.
One of the peculiarities of my own games, though, is that I like to use a 10' scale rather than a 5' scale for pretty much everything, including combat. This is something of an edition-specific quirk, however. Whereas the d20 system pretty much demands a 5' to the inch scale, older versions of the game rarely give movement rates or spell effects on a finer grain than tens of feet. This is especially true of Basic/Expert D&D, which explicitly recommends using a 1" = 10' scale. (1st edition AD&D, I've been told, was sometimes played using a bizarre 3" = 10' scale. That just makes my head ache!) But where the Basic/Expert game still suggests that only one character or monster at a time can occupy a 10' square in combat, I don't find that very realistic. And so, once I switched from 3rd edition back to playing Old D&D again, I was compelled to quest for the perfect way to let several creatures (as many as four or five) occupy a single 1" square on the tabletop, should the situation demand it.
At first, I used the little soldiers from recent editions of Risk (the LotR edition was great for monsters!), but those tended to fall over and get lost. Next I tried using d6s, with the appropriate number of pips turned face up to suggest the number of characters or monsters occupying a square; but that proved inconvenient whenever a group would "split up" and take separate directions across the battlefield. From there, I was led to a variety of stackable tokens (checkers, coins, scrabble tiles, bingo chips), but that made only the top token visible, rendering the tactical display very ambiguous. So, coming full circle, I realized that I would have to use small markers that could all fit into a 1" square together, without stacking; but they would have to be easier to manipulate and distinguish than Risk men. Lately, I've hit upon the idea of using various colors of 6 x 9 mm "crafting beads." They work pretty well for my purposes.
Of course, since most folks around here play 3rd or 4th edition, my unusual scaling concerns are a big non-issue. But I can tell you that back when I was still playing 3e, I was pretty happy with Clue! pawns for the player characters, chessmen for all the medium-sized monsters, and poker chips or a soda bottle(!) for the occasional large- or giant-sized monster.
. Others are happy with a good DDM match.
