OK, so i know 5th edition has moved away from using minis and battlegrids to an extent, but my group certainly find a visual representation of the dungeon/room they are in to be useful when playing a game. With that in mind, you may find this product on Kickstarter interesting/useful. It is a set of pre punched, colour printed card terrain which just slots together straight out of the box and comes with a vinyl mat which i believe is compatible with chessex ones in terms of the scale of the grid.
I backed their sci fi kickstarter and received that a month ago and i can vouch for the quality of the final product and the types of things you can do with it. Multi level dungeons can be made as you can see from the pictures. If you are interested check it out, it ends in about 2 weeks!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1621774283/battle-systemstm-fantasy-dungeon-terrain
WoTC still sells mini's for 5e
Oh i know that there is a 5th ed line of minis coming out, Battle Systems sell terrain rather than minis :-)
Good find.
I just spent 5 years playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition. One of the gripes by the grognards of wfrp2nd edition was that WFRP3 used /abstract movement/ instead of wfrp2's shift to copy D&D3e's grid-based-miniatures-combat-gaming. 13th Age has since copied WFRP3 and now D&D 5th edition has also copied both of those (or gone back to 0D&D depending on how you look at it).
I find abstract movement to be pretty great for social interaction games that had 'some' combat, but weaker for combat-reliant-as-x.p. games such as D&D. Sure you can be representative with zones and whatnot, but I'm not sure its the best in the dungeon. I think we're one-step away from a better evolution of gaming. I still prefer someting on the table. It doesn't have to be part of the 3e/4e grid/5'-step/danceteria fad that was later made obsolete in the failed attemp to compete with modern video games, but I think we're still missing something in terms of using abstract movement.
On a related note:
Dwarven forge is still the Gold Standard for tabletop stuff, but I understand that not everybody can afford that stuff.
The drawback of the kickstarter will be the shipping cost outside uk (+10 pounds = +$16usd).
3d stuff sure looks pretty though. Here's a picture of the mess that was one of our WFRP3 sessions for instance:
..
That dungeon terrain does look nice, and it's much more affordable than dwarven forge.
I just find 3D 'tiles' problematic, myself. It's hard to see, errant dice and large hands knock stuff over, set up can take longer than the fight...
A gridded 24"x36" dry erase whiteboard with several marker colors, and/or WotC's dungeon tiles work better, in my experience.
What I really want (at least for 4e) is a way to obviously, yet unobtrusively, show conditions with minis and monster tokens...
I can't really argue that a simple battle mat, non permanent pen and counters is not more practical Seti 
I would say that the BS stuff is pretty sturdy once assembled and is fully modular so it can be stored in sub assemblies and simply clipped together as needed or, if you wanted, you could layout the whole dungeon in advance and just populate it with items/creatures as the players see it. Obviously the former is quicker than the latter but i guess it depends on what you want. Absolutely no danger of an errant dice knocking any of this over though and once it is all clipped together you would have to give it a pretty hrfty nudge to move it all.
Not my taste. However people with low budgets and no ability to craft might see it as something nice.
This is cool: I found the dwarven forge map maker (uses their tiles): http://www.dwarvenforge.com/mapmaker/
In a 13th Age game I ran (not quite 5e, but it shares the system's TotM approach), I mostly used a dry-erase whiteboard to help keep track of what PCs where were. Since I didn't need to bother with a battle grid, it worked pretty well in helping people visualize where their characters and the baddies were without taking too much time in figuring out fiddly little details.
Looks good for setting up dioramas but think it'd detract from fluid gameplay though, a lot of the terrain doesn't have a clear grid on it which makes it hard to measure distances without a ruler. I'm glad during 4e I bought a couple white tabletop surfaces from ikea with wheeled legs (so they can be joined or split based on surface space needed) and drew a 1" x 1" grid on them then laminated them with a dry-erase friendly material. This gives me a non-moving grid surface that I can just use dry-erase markers on to draw out maps, mark difficult/hazard terrain on, and works with standard mini's. Based on the site's information their grid is 1.1" (28mm) so a bit off the US standard used by WotC and many other mini makers but at least on the large side rather than small side so the mini's will fit within their grid (and even gargantuan mini's should still "cover" all the squares they should).
Looks great and I wish them the best of luck with their Kickstarter and project. I know a lot of gamers who do model/terrain for Pulp and other games and I always love looking at them for conventions or playing games on one. However, this isn't something I would use for a D&D game.
First, the tile system is highly specific to locations. I run games in cities, on ships, while swimming across a river, in forests, hills, mountain passes, etc. Having a wonderful looking castle or specific dungeon isn't that great if the other 90% of the enounters are back to standard battemaps and drawn lines.
Second, this is a lot of setup for a single enounter. It also smacks of meta-gaming for the DM. If the DM plans that you assault some place and spends an hour putting together a dungeon like this... and they players say "Hey... lets wait until they attack the next caravan and ambush them near the river." then what? Players also start to meta-game when the moment you bring out something like this and uncover it. "Gee... combat?"
Third, when exploring dungeons and rooms, I'd rather than areas they haven't explored/can't see... aren't visible on the map. Hence only drawing the rooms/hallways they have explored on a battlemap.
Forth, I don't like walls or things which block the view of the table. We already clear food and drinks during most combats and players reaching for figs, counting squares, etc. already have a hard enough time reaching without having to circle the table. These just seem to get in the way.
Maybe something like this would be great for a convention, public game day, or something where you need to impress new players and are following a highly scripted adventure. Otherwise, we are already imagining 75% of the game (cities, towns, farms, NPCs, mountains, trails, rivers, accents, dress, etc.) plus another 20% of combats. The 5% when need to draw something on a battlemap, is just because the complexity of the setting/location gets overwhelming in combat and it may speed up the game in terms of remembering where things are.
sketching the scene on a pathfinder map with various colors of expo dry erase has been the go to setup for my groups. it works pretty flawlessly.
we tried the chessex battlemap, but the wet erase was not nearly as easy to work with and slowed down gameplay.
for creatures and PCs we use a mix of miniatures, 4ed tokens, and pathfinder pawns.
oh, and i also have a bunch of tiles from the 4ed adventure board games and all the dungeon command series. haven't really used those yet for tabletop.
DM_HEEGZ wrote:
Here is some more use of our dwarven forge stuff from last night's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3e game:
