MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Dungeon tiles! I love these things. Creating maps is a lot of work, and it helps so much if you can quickly assemble a few rooms and corridors, AND have it look good. I'm so glad that 5th edition released Dungeon Tiles Reincarnated, because those are useful regardless of what edition you play.
Can you tell me how you get the most out of these for actually use in most of your sessions. I don't want to yuk on your yum. I'm seriously curious because when I got back into gaming with 5e, I bought a number of the Dungeon Tile sets (I think from 4e) and found them frustrating to use. I even read DM David's Complete Guide to Using Dungeon Tiles and use his system to keep them organized.
Mostly, they have stayed on my shelf unused.
When Dungeon Tiles Reincarnated came out, I bought them as a knee-jerk reaction, but had buyers remorse because they were pretty similar to what I had and, again, just gathered dust on a shelf.
I find them difficult to organize in a convenient way, difficult to prepare in advance, and WAY too much bother to try to use them on the fly. They are anathema to a sandbox campaign.
My current digital battlemap display make them entirely unnecessary, but even before I had that, I found that for on-the-fly encounters, a chessex battlemap and multiple colors of wet erase markers were for more convenient. For a more realistic look, I could throw down a felt, gridless battlemap and some terrain pieces far faster than digging through my dungeon tiles and trying to puzzle something together.
For encounter location that are prepared in advance, I would found it more convenient to just print out the map on a large-format printer. I've even pieced together large maps from multiple letter-sized pages. Because I can tape them together and roll them up. Even when not working with published material or from my large collection of map images, I found that I would rather create a map in a program like Dungeonographer and print it out than use Dungeon Tiles.
With Dungeon Tiles I could never get it to look how I wanted and it tool loads of time to piece together something passable. You can't easily prepare multiple locations in advance without more craft work to stick them to foam boards, assuming one location doesn't need pieces used in another location.
I tried very hard and spent many hours to make them work before I concluded that they were the worst of all worlds. Not convenient enough for quick and rough locations (use a Chessex map, Flipboard, etc.) and not enough fidelity to ever capture the exact dimensions of the locations they are mean to represent (unless you build your adventures specifically with Dungeon Tiles in mind).
What I've done, so that I can get some use out of my Dungeon Tile investment is that I removed all the terrain "overlay" pieces. Things like bushes, lakes, tents, campsites, etc. I organize these in envelopes with all of my 2D miniatures and terrain pieces, alphabetically.
All the large tiles, however, stay in their boxes gathering dust.