What are you doing with your Dwarven Forge tiles?

[Rel]

I just got mine this week and used them immediately. The funny thing about the arrival of my tiles was they were due to get here just as the party was finishing a lengthy dungeon crawl. However, even if I'd had the tiles already, they wouldn't have been ideal since it was more irregular caverns than carved dungeons. I was determined to get to use them though so I had the caverns emerge into the basement of a cathedral above the ruins of a small town. All of these were infested with undead.

I was able to construct four town buildings, the cathedral, and basement from the DF sets I got and they looked great. I did make note of one thing: In recent years I've used my Descent dungeon tiles for this kind of thing and I still love them. They are less visually impressive than the DF stuff but they go together so quickly I'm able to throw together terrain in moments. The DF stuff takes a bit more assembly so I'll likely use it for set pieces that I can pre-assemble on a piece of plywood and then set down in front of the group for consumption.

I wish I'd taken pictures, especially of the fact that I layered the DF stuff on the table with the first encounter on top of a piece of plywood and the later sections of the map below. I'm sure I'll be doing more of that along the way. What cool designs is everybody else making?

 

[ced1106]

Someone posted a pic of their DF tiles on top of a gridded gaming mat. Looked pretty good.

Question: What do you think about playing with the tiles without paint?

 

[Rel]

I used them unpainted on the first night I had them and was fine with it. However they are so easy to paint that I'm going to go ahead and start painting some. I'm sure they will look loads better.

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) it was more irregular caverns than carved dungeons.

I think the next DF Kickstarter is going to be caverns and such.

 

[frankthedm]

Day they arrived I used them for a small dungeon { 1 set IMHO is small ] in WFRP. Went well enough.

Tested some housepaint on one tile to make sure it would not wind up tacky. Seems fine even days later.

 

[mcmillan]

Mine showed up between the two sessions that involved exploring an ancient ruin (from the Digging for Lies adventure in the Zeitgeist path). That actually served as a nice test where they first entered the rooms with just my descriptions and hand drawn maps, then I used the tiles to show the parts they'd already been in, and added on as they continued to explore. That did reveal some things where people had a mistaken picture in their head that was cleared up with the tiles. As for paint, they actually look fairly nice without any paint, and I have enough of a backlog from the Reaper kickstarter that also could use painting, that I'm ok with keeping the tiles unpainted.

Main downside I saw was the extra prep/cleanup at the beginning or end of a session for dealing with tiles compared to just rolling up my mapsheet. And it doesn't necessarily save much out of session prep compared to drawing a map before the session since I still had to think about how I needed to layout tiles anyway. An idea one of my players who also DMs and bought a tile set came up with was to rig up the bottoms with velcro, with the opposite side on a small board. This could be set up ahead of time, and he could just set down the boards for each room as the group enters them. Will be interested to see how that works for him

 

[Dice4Hire]

I got mine about ten days or more ago and have used them in two sessions so far.

They would well, but I found I do not have enough tiles for a fight with a gargantuan, blue, white and black on the same table. Man it was crowded and the dwarf's player could hardly even find him mini in the middle.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Hit send too soon.

So now I have available for mapping use.....

2 sets of DF with some add-ons
1-2 of every set of the Dungeon Tiles.
4 of the boxed games (ravenloft, etc) tiles
100+ battle maps
My (and my player's) imagination.

I think I am set.