Terrain and How to Use it.

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dovearrow

Apr 08, 2004 1:14:08		Introduction
I love miniature terrains. I’ve always loved them. One of my favorite things as a kid was visiting the Los Angeles Fairgrounds. There, they have sets of model trains which run around inside a miniature landscape filled with small cars, houses and bonsai trees. I could spend hours watching those trains. Nevertheless, I never wanted to buy my own miniature terrain because I could see no reason why I’d want it (other than it looks really cool). Then my friend introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons. Now was my chance, I thought. Excited, I threw hundreds of dollars into modular dungeons, houses with removable roofs, dollhouse flooring, matchstick carts, trees, and anything I could think of building or getting my hands on. Only problem was, my group didn’t like playing with miniature terrain. “It’s too intrusive,” they said, “I can’t see my miniature.” Dismayed, and feeling a slight bit broke, I boxed it all up and for a long time, it gathered dust in a closet. Months went by. Soon, I was again feeling the urge to break out all of my terrain in order to find some way of introducing it back into our game. Since that time, I have slowly succeeded and today, it is a regular staple of our game. What I hope is that if you are like me, and if you have felt deterred by your group’s reluctance to use miniature terrain, this article will help you find a way of introducing it so that it can enhance your game.

The First Step: Trees
One of the biggest problems I faced in trying to introduce terrain into the game was that a lot of it took an enormous amount of planning to use it. First, you needed to be aware of what you had. Second, you needed to have it somehow readily available, without tipping off your group that they were going to have an encounter with the altar of doom. Third, you needed to have the time to set it up without having it interfere too much with game play. This was problematic enough for a DM, but what if you’re a player like I was? These problems, at first, seemed insurmountable. What I found, though, is that there are certain pieces of terrain which can be easily introduced into any game without ever coming into conflict with these issues. One example of this kind of terrain is trees.

Trees are wonderful for any game, because they require very little planning to use. If you’re going to have a wilderness encounter, six trees plopped down on a table is faster and gives the game a certain amount depth and realism that billowy marker drawings could never hope to express. The other nice thing about trees is that if someone complains about not being able to see, they can move them just as easily as you placed them. Finally, trees are nice because they’re an example of inexpensive terrain. You can buy packages of twelve trees from railroad model stores (complete with plastic trunks and tree fluff) for about twenty dollars. You’ll need bases for them, though, because otherwise they fall over.
Now trees are just an example of easy-to-use terrain. Other examples include small houses for city encounters, hills, rocks, and rivers for wilderness encounters. These are nice examples of inexpensive terrain too because hills are only about twenty dollars, and rocks are only a backyard away. Houses, although they can be expensive, can be found for pretty cheap. Some of my favorite terrain are the small houses which can be found in the paper models section of the Wizards of the Coast website (though I would recommend putting square pieces of styrofoam in the bottoms of them for stability).

The Second Step: Furniture
Now I know what you’re thinking. How can you have furniture before you have buildings? However, I assure you, it’s not as counterintuitive as you might think. One of the greatest games of all time, Hero Quest, used a flat board with two-dimensional rooms furnished with modular pieces of three-dimensional furniture. If you can accept that, then it shouldn’t be too far of a stretch to accept that three-dimensional furniture can be placed in rooms drawn out in green marker. The other nice thing about furniture, as opposed to buildings, is that it’s not only less expensive, but is seen in encounters more often than, say, the inside of a house or even a dungeon. For those reasons, alone, furniture should be the next thing you introduce to your game.

Now one of the problems with furniture is that it takes a little bit more planning than trees. For example, no matter what kind of wilderness encounter you have (unless it’s in a desert), you’re most likely going to run into trees. That’s not the case with furniture. Because each room in a dungeon serves a different purpose, each room is going to be furnished differently. Thus, you could find a table with chairs in one room, and a sacrificial altar in the next.

The key to using furniture is prioritizing. First, figure out what kind of furniture you’re going to be using most. As an example, taking the furniture listed above, it’s much more likely that you’ll be using tables and chairs than you will be using sacrificial altars. As a DM, this is important to know because it means that you can start putting together your furniture collection. As a player, who may be in charge of placing furniture in your game, this is extremely important, because the other players will quickly get fed up with you being able to only furnish every fourth or fifth room. Some examples of furniture which are likely to be used in almost any campaign are the aforementioned tables and chairs, bookcases, desks, columns, beds, weapon racks, torches, barrels and chests. Occasionally you may also see a torture device or sacrificial altar. Now that’s fine and dandy inside, but what about outside? If you wish to use outdoor furnishings, barrels are again very nice, as are crates, carts and wells. The things you should avoid are things like traps of any kind, piles of gold and/or jewels, individual weapons, etc. The reason for this is that though these items may look the coolest, it’s going to be a very long time before you ever encounter a pit of boiling acid, or even a dragon with a horde of jewels. Terrain like this also doesn’t tend to show up in game very often because it’s typically something PCs deal with between encounters with monsters and so doesn’t have to be placed.

The Third Step: Modular Dungeons
Dungeons are perhaps the most common features you find in any campaign and modular dungeons are great for setting up those dungeons. That’s why it may seem odd that modular dungeons come last on our list of terrains. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for this. Dungeons pose a list of problems that the other forms of terrain do not. First of all, dungeons pose visibility problems that the other types of terrain do not simply because modular dungeons need to stay in place. Another problem is that modular dungeons take a lot more time to set up than the other forms of terrain. Perhaps the biggest problem with dungeons, though, is this: they’re friggin’ expensive.

To effectively build a dungeon for use in game, you’ll need modular pieces, and before you’ll have enough pieces to build an entire dungeon, you’ll need to invest a few hundred dollars. Granted, you can save a few bucks by making your own pieces out of cardboard, plaster, or a combination of both. However, you’re still going to be investing a lot of money (and time) before you have enough pieces to use in your game. Therefore, you’d better be pretty sure that your group is open to the idea of using terrain and that you know how to use it effectively before you go and break the bank on these purchases.

Once you decide that modular dungeons are the thing for you, perhaps the biggest problem you will face is the amount of time it takes to put them together. Though modular dungeons are designed to go together in a variety of combinations, it takes a while to get all of those corners, walls and floor pieces arranged into a configuration that even remotely resembles a dungeon. For this reason modular dungeons aren’t something you can use on the fly. They take planning and are probably a tool best used by the DM. With that said, figure out ahead of time when your players are going to have dungeon encounters, then build that portion of your dungeon. You should build your dungeons either before the game starts or during breaks in the game. This will save your players from having to wait for the dungeon to be built and will keep them more interested in what’s actually happening during the game.

The second problem with modular terrain is visibility. Most modular terrains come with walls that are so high, miniatures are obscured when they’re placed too close to them. If you’re making your own modular terrain, this isn’t too big of a problem (simply make the walls shorter). However if you’re buying pre-made pieces, it’s not so easy. So what do you do? One way of overcoming this problem is to simply make the rooms bigger. Why does this work? Imagine it this way. In a narrow, 10 ft. wide passage, you have a wall on each side which obscures 5 ft. of floor space. Because the hallway is so narrow, this effectively obscures 50% of your floor. Now imagine you have a 40 ft. square temple. Though the walls still obscure the same 5 ft. of floor space, you’re left with 35 sq. ft. of floor clear from obstructions. This simple technique lets you use the same pieces while increasing visibility in your game.

The Final Step: Bringing it All Together
So you’ve successfully introduced trees, furniture and modular dungeons into your game. You’re done, right? Wrong. The biggest problem now is going to be trying to use all of your terrains on a regular basis. After all, it’s one thing to have a few trees sitting on the table taking up space. It’s a whole different business having a few trees, a couple of bookshelves and several dozen floor tiles sitting there. What you need to do now is prioritize. Each night, ask yourself what pieces you have and what pieces you really need. For example, if there aren’t going to be any wilderness encounters, leave the trees in the cupboard. Likewise, if the PCs are in the middle of the forest, leave the dungeon pieces in their boxes. This may seem obvious, but in situations where the PCs are traveling through the forest to a cave full of kobolds, you need to decide which pieces are most essential to the telling of your story. If most of the excitement happens on the way to the cave, you probably want to have the trees out. If an epic battle with the sorcerer Zatrov is going to occur in the caverns, it’s probably best to have those pieces out instead. Like special effects, terrain helps tell a story. If used too frequently, the attention eventually turns to the special effect.

Unexpected Benefits
Terrain is an incredible tool. If used effectively, it can give the game a sense of realism it never had before. Meanwhile, it can also add certain benefits to your gaming experience. For example, in my game, the first use of trees took cover from an obscure rule typically used in hallways, to the forefront of many a wilderness encounter. Because terrain allowed us to move our characters in three dimensions, it also taught us how higher ground could be used to our characters’ advantages. These are just a few examples of how terrain has affected our game, but there are other benefits we’ve discovered as well. It’s amazing what seeing the game from your character’s perspective does to your game. If you doubt me, get a couple of trees and find out for yourself. It couldn’t hurt.

Conclusion
My hope in writing this article is that it will help people who, like me, are frustrated with their group’s unwillingness to use terrain in their game. I also hope that it will reach those players who have been hesitant to accept terrain into their gaming experience. Finally, I hope that this article will help those who have never given terrain much thought one way or another to see the benefits of it and to have them try it in their own game. At the very least, it looks really cool.