A Role Playing Games Blog
Sunglar
(275 comments, 210 posts)
Posts by Sunglar
Maps, maps, maps! A trio of reviews… Part 2 – Dungeon Tiles
4April 12, 2010
Continuing my reviews of the map aides I use for my games. On my previous post I talked about Flip Mats. Another great tool is Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeon Tiles. What can be said about them, that others have not said before?
Wizards had the great idea of printing map tiles for different settings, ruins, dungeons, caverns, woods, and even giant sized locations! They come in a nice thick precut cardstock that feels almost like game board material, and you can arrange them in different configurations, giving you myriad possibilities for combining them. Each set brings some suggestions on how to arrange the pieces, but play with these babies and I assure you will be making all sorts of cool interesting dungeons.
There was even a set for the Star Wars RPG that was so useful I got two copies. Ok I’ll admit it; I’ve gotten more than one of many of them…
They are cheap for what they offer, the suggested retail price for the latest sets is $11.95 and for all you can do with them I think they are a steal. I’ve even written on them with dry erase markers and the writing has come off easily. I’ve avoided certain colors that have been difficult to remove form other surfaces, like green and have NOT left the marker on the surface overnight, I always clean them right after using them, so be forewarned, don’t blame me for damaging your precious Dungeon Tiles!
My biggest problem using them is the sheer number of options all these many tiles and pieces offer me. It can be overwhelming! I plan my encounters ahead of time, but the flow of the game sometimes dictates a change of pace or location, and when that happens, putting tiles together in a new configuration can be complicated.
They are great for dungeon crawls and for sessions where you can plan the locations well in advanced and can put the tiles together before hand. When I’ve used them I normally build the set pieces with the different tiles and then put them in zip lock bags labeled according to the encounter name or number. I think using an appropriately colored mat to place the different pieces gives a nice sense of place and combined with the blank side of Flip Mats (see the previous post for details on Flip Mats) you can build even more varied and diverse encounters.
For more spontaneous games where encounter can happen unexpectedly they are a little less useful. I know that as a GM you can create the illusion of spontaneity with careful planning but as a storyteller I like to give myself some leeway and room to improvise and integrate the feedback of the players and how they interact with the story.
Storing the tiles and sorting them out for game prep has been a chore and I think that may be the main reason I don’t use them more often. There are some great suggestions out there on the Internet on how to store them; I currently do it like Mike Shea suggests on Sly Flourish and Newbie DM shows in his video (watch it, its funny!).This post in the EN World Forums also has a GREAT idea for storing the tiles.
Newbie DM also has great posts, including video, on how to use your Dungeon Tiles in 3D (no special glasses needed), as well as putting together the 3D pieces from Harrowing Halls, HIGLY recommended!
Well that’s about it for Dungeon Tiles, they are a great resource that allow you to mix and match pieces to create your own battle scenes. Next post, Map Packs!
Maps, maps, maps! A trio of reviews… Part 1 – Flip Mats
0April 8, 2010
As an avid player of D20 games maps have become an integral part of my games. On a previous post I talked about cheap battlemats and what I use for most of my mapping needs, but these are not my only options, far from it. I own and use other commercially available products for my adventures, Flip Mats, Dungeon Tiles and Map Packs.
On my recent trip to Las Vegas I actually acquired more of these and thought it would be nice to give you my take on these aides and their usefulness. Like a friend of mine likes to say, this is my experience your mileage may vary.
Flip Mats, what are they?
The Steel Sqwire website describes them best, 2 feet by 3 feet laminated cardstock with a map printed on one side and a grid printed on the opposite side. Since they are laminated you can write on them with markers and they erase easily. The maps fold to a small, easy to carry size, making them very portable.
There is a wide variety of Flip Mats available, from forests, markets, keeps and rivers to theaters, dragon lairs and ships. I owe some and I’m always on the look out for new ones. The maps are very nicely done and the details always give me ideas when constructing an encounter around them. Their size makes them big enough for combat in a large area, with many interesting terrain features, but not so large that they become unwieldy. However, be prepared for the players to step beyond the edges of the map and fill the spaces accordingly. They worked well for the D&D 4th edition game I ran and my current Pathfinder RPG game.
Many of these maps have flip side with a grid printed on then in different colors, green for the forest, stone for the dungeon, allowing you to draw your own maps on them making them even more useful. Some have alternate versions of the image or other details on the opposite side. I personally prefer backgrounds of lighter color for drawings, but they make a very nice surface to use in conjunction with Dungeon Tiles (but more on that on another post!).
Nice as they are and owning as many as I do, you’d be surprised by how little I’ve used them. My initial nitpicks about them were the fact that the creases on the folds make them hard to lay flat, but this I solved by placing them on top of the magnetic erasable boards I use as a battlemat and holding them down with magnets. I think the biggest hurdle to their use is just how nice and detailed they are. Let me explain…
I’ve used both the Waterfront Tavern and Cathedral maps for major encounters in my current campaign. These maps have represented specific locations in cities where the adventurers have had important combats and in my mind the maps have become maps of those specific locations, not generic maps of a tavern or cathedral. I am well aware that I can reuse them for other locations, but for me this shatters the internal consistency of the campaign world. Maybe another cathedral to the same god can have a similar layout, but would every waterfront tavern have the same design? I know this is a very personal decision and that the maps are meant to be used for different locations.
The one Flip Map I own that has been used and reused is the Ship. My current campaign is pirate themed and the map represents the character’s vessel so I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Even the flip side which is a large blue background with a grid printed on it has seen frequent use.
After what I’ve just written, don’t get the idea that I don’t like Flip Mats, on the contrary, I think they are a great gaming tool, and the $12.99 price is great for the quality of art and the durability of the material. I hope to use some of the other Flip Mats I own soon. At least the Arena one I know will be used next session. Like I said your mileage may vary!
Cheap battlemats!
4March 30, 2010
For the longest time I gamed without minis or a battlemat. Despite beginning to play AD&D with 1st edition, I never had a war gaming background and for the longest time my combats were purely descriptive. Eventually I started using a small dry erase board to map out the general layout of the area and give players an idea of their position during combat. But the maps where not to scale and not modified round by round.
Then along came D&D 3rd edition with its emphasis on strategic combat, and while I resisted at first I eventually gave in. But I didn’t want to spend my money on battlemats and minis, so I originally used my old Heroquest miniatures for the characters and their opponents. For a battlemats I used paper printed with a one inch grid that one of my players, who worked at an office store, laminated.
I eventually gave in and purchased minis (D&D miniatures, Heroscape, Mage Knight) and right now own more minis that I could ever need! I even got spoiled with a gaming table that had a HUGE dry erase board with a grid affixed to the top. By now you are asking yourself, “He did say CHEAP battlemats?” I did! I eventually stopped playing at my friend’s house where the table was at, and had to find a new option for mapping.
I had uses commercial battlemats before, but none truly met my needs. Some were to easily shaken or moved, in others certain marker colors were hard to remove. So I eventually returned to my old friend, the erasable board, and that’s when COSTCO came in.
I don’t usually make gaming purchases at the big discount club stores but made the exception this time. They sell these large 24”x36” magnetic boards with markers, magnetic colored tabs, cleaning liquid and an eraser for about $26 dollars. Best of all the boards’ surface is marked in a one inch grid, but instead of lines it has gray dots, allowing you to measure distance on the board and draw your maps, but not have your drawings overshadowed or lost against the grid printed on the surface.
The boards are heavy enough to stay put on a table easily. Placing the two together gives me a pretty large combat area for encounters, something I put to good use when playing D&D 4th edition where combat benefits from a large space that offers tactical diversity.
They’ve been a GREAT purchase, so much so that I have two! I will admit that their size makes them a little unwieldy to carry around, but I’ve managed with one for sessions away from home. I’ve had them for 3 years and they are good as new. That’s my contribution for gaming on the cheap!
Let me take this chance to say HELLO to all the guys I used to play with at what we called Sammy’s Playhouse. I miss that huge gaming table! And you guys too…
Traveling for Inspiration
4March 29, 2010
Travels, short and long, have often inspired me, both as topics for writing fiction (something I enjoy and don’t do enough of) and gaming. Over the last fourteen years I’ve traveled all across the island of Puerto Rico for business and found lots of things that made it into my games one way or the other.
While the island is small, the topographical diversity never fails to inspire me, from beaches, to mountains and valleys. In Puerto Rico the Yunque Rain Forest, the Camuy River Cave Complex and the El Morro and San Cristobal Forts inspire me in new ways every time I go there.
I’ve finally been able to use many of these vignettes, ideas and locations now that I’m running two pirate themed campaigns. One a tabletop Pathfinder RPG game and a Play by Post Microlite20 game set on a tropical archipelago in my fantasy homebrewed campaign.
When I’ve traveled abroad new places and new experiences always inspire me; whenever I describe a vast opulent temple complex I remember my visit to the Vatican. New York City has been the setting of more than one adventure and that’s one place I never get tired of visiting.
Now as I begin a weeklong vacation in Las Vegas, I can only think of the new inspiration I’ll draw from it. While on previous visits I expected to come away with a feel for a gambler’s paradise that could color my description of an intergalactic casino or a gambling den in a prosperous port, in the past Vegas has left in me the feeling for a tourist trap, a safe show town and been a little short on the inspirational side.
This time however I plan to do new things, like helicopter rides and finally a trip to the Grand Canyon; things I believe will not only be fun but give me many new ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I like Vegas, otherwise I wouldn’t go! I just think I need to look at it from a different “gaming” perspective.
When I come back I’ll post about the trip and what inspiration I drew from it.
For and excellent take on travel from a gamers’ perspective I have to recommend my friend Daniel’s The Gamer Traveler Blog and Podcast it is excelletn! Tip of the hat to the master… He even has a podcast about Vegas!
See you in a few days. In the mean time, tell me about your trips or visits to different places that have inspired your gaming.
D&D before I even knew what role-playing was!
7March 25, 2010
I may go on an on about how long I’ve been playing but it’s not empty boasting, I actually played D&D before ever picking up any polyhedral dice! I don’t know how many of you remember them but in the 80’s there was a line of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons toys. I remember my mother brought them for me during a trip and I was hooked. I must have been 10 or 11 years old when I got them, even if I had not read any fantasy novel I knew the genre from movies and stories. Sinbad, Conan and Excalibur where among my favorite movies and I had rented Fire and Ice every time I could. So when I got those toys I was thrilled.
I remember reading the character bios printed on the package and pouring over every detail. I was one of those kids that saved toy packaging because they had information, so I read the stories of the characters over and over again. Little by little I got the monsters and even the play set. I remember playing many battles where Strongheart and his allies Elkhorn and Peralay foiled Kelek’s evil plan, defeated his ally Warduke and saved Mercion. (Stereotypical I realize that, but I was 10 or 11, not writing the next fantasy epic!) To this day I can write the character’s names from memory.
When the second set of toys came out I had a new favorite toy in the collection, Northlord the Barbarian. Tall, blond and rather scrawny, his helmet was too big, but I just loved the character. He soon became the new hero in my stories and Strongheart with his Tom Selleck mustache rode his Ferrari warhorse into the sunset.
I dreamt up many adventures and some basic concepts for my homebrewed campaign, even the name of one of the major continents, were created for theses games. Many years later I eventually discovered the D&D supplement The Shady Dragon Inn which included statistics for some of the characters. Some of the characters appeared in the D&D cartoon, and Warduke to this day has a following, he was in the cover of Dungeon Magazine some years ago and hehad a figure in the War Drums D&D miniature expansion.
The toys were actually very well made and I kept them for many years. They had a special place in my heart. Many of the things I learned from the toy’s bios colored my perception of D&D when I finally got around to playing it, to the point that I used them to represent the marching order of the characters during my first session of D&D. The series lacked a proper Thief so when it came around to use toys to represent the Thief in the party I just grabbed my Perseus action figure from Clash of the Titans and put Luke Skywalker’s Jedi robe on him, instant Thief! How appropriate that the remake of Clash of the Titans is about to hit theaters. I guess this trip down memory lane connects to real life in a strange roundabout sort of way.
All the pictures I used for this post were taken from toyarchive.com and their AD&D toys page. An excellent source of information about the AD&D toy line!
The worst session I’ve ever played (or Gaming with Strangers)!
11March 22, 2010
The first time I ever played an RPG with a total stranger was a disaster, and it turned me off from gaming with strangers for years. Let me give you some context.
By this time I had been gaming for some years, but mostly with my friends, neighbors and classmates, people I knew outside of the game. There had been many players, by then MOST of my neighbors and many classmates had at least sat down and tried this “odd” game Roberto was running. But I was yet to play with strangers, and this was well outside my comfort zone.
Then one day after school my friends and I were at a local book store that carried gaming materials and this guy, about our age, approached us and struck up a conversation. He told us he was an experienced Dungeon Master, had created his own world and had been published in Dragon Magazine (something I’ve been unable to confirm to this day) all things that impressed us and we exchanged phone numbers.
On our way back we discussed the possibility of inviting this guy to run a game for us. We eventually agreed and arranged for him to come over to a friend’s house in a few days and run a game. He informed us he had a Forgotten Realms adventure he wanted to run and that we should make new characters. This was back in the days of AD&D 1st edition and the Forgotten Realms gray boxed set which I loved so I was really excited. I can’t recall what my two fellow players rolled up but I had a 1st cleric ready to go.
The day of the game he showed up and revised our characters. His only concern was that he needed one of the characters to be a female. We all looked at each other a little confused but I decided to do it, erased the word male in the character sheet, penciled in female and played my first female character. He proceeded to set up the adventure. It would be set in Waterdeep and the other two players were already in the city. However my character was in the Dales and had been summoned by her deity. Mind you this was YEARS before the whole Avatar debacle (sorry if you liked that story!), so when I was confronted by my deity made flesh I was impressed by this turn of events. What did this DM have in mind?
He then proceeded to play the god, literally, through the adventure. He narrated the trip from the Dales to Waterdeep in excruciating detail. Every stop, every conflict, the converts following us as the deity obliterated every single challenge, all my cleric did was follow him around. Oh and to add insult to injury, she became his sexual slave, he described how he raped her, and she liked it…
By this time I was done with the adventure, this wasn’t just a bad game, it was tasteless and rude and I knew I would not play with this guy again. But we were not gaming in my house so I kept my opinions to myself and pretty much disconnected from the game. We eventually made it to Waterdeep and the other two players, anxious to at least get to play began their part of the adventure. I don’t remember all the details but they had to rescue a Halfling from some criminal so they got around to it only to be faced by the criminal’s enforcers. Burly barbarians that attacked them with “two handed bastard swords”, when we exchanged puzzled looks and asked him about this he explained these were like regular bastard swords only larger, his creation. He proceeded to hit the other player characters and roll 1d20 for damage. The players were almost dead when suddenly my character along with her god arrived and saved them.
When he said, “Well let’s end the session here, we can pick it up later,” we all knew this was one adventure we would never play again. He said his goodbyes and when he called to see when we would play the next session we told him we were not interested and that was that. I wish I could say the traumatic experience did not influence me but for YEARS after that I was reluctant to invite another stranger to play with us. It wasn’t until college when I worked in a comic/hobby shop that I finally decided to invite others to play and the majority of those experiences have been positive.
I wonder what became of that guy? So, what’s the worst session you’ve ever played?
This post is dedicated to my friend Luis Alvarado, who had NOTHING to do with this story, but suggested the topic to me. Thanks Luis!
(And I promise NO MORE ellipsis… Too many post titles with them!)
The Secret of my Success…
7March 19, 2010
Like a mailroom clerk with dreams of greatness, of getting that corner office with a view, I too picked up a gaming book long ago and embarked on this journey we call role playing games! Back in 1986 I began playing and since no one wanted to be the Game Master the responsibility fell on my shoulders and I have not looked back.
All this soul searching came about as a result of Questing GM’s Blog Carnival Topic: How to be a better GM? The Blog Carnival originated in the RPG Bloggers Network and now that Michael has so gracefully allowed me to post in this blog I figured the least I can do is add my contribution to the carnival. So here I go…
In all the time I’ve been playing RPGs there are many lessons I’ve learned. But I think the single best piece of advice I can give any DM, new or old, green or experienced, is be CONSISTENT. And I don’t mean just be consistent with your rulings, know your system of choice well enough to know when to make a ruling or when to say we’ll look it up after the game and keep things flowing. That’s not enough; NO I mean consistency beyond that. I mean be dependable, be reliable, and be constant.
My current gaming group has been playing once a week, with the occasional breaks due to vacations or the holidays once a week since 1993. Of the current six players, three of them have been with the group almost since the beginning. We’ve played various campaigns on the same homebrewed world, with different systems, but somehow we have stuck together and still manage to take out time of our schedules to get together once a week.
And why is that? I would like to say that it’s all because of my wonderful storytelling, the intricate plots, the dazzling challenges but I think deep down inside it is because we have made a habit of it. We get together and play, last week’s game might have been less than stellar, and sometimes at the end of the night you wonder why you do this, but week after week we come back and try our hand at it once more. In hindsight the fun far outweighs the bad things that seemed so terrible at the moment.
You’ve all heard the common advice given to aspiring writers. WRITE! I really think this also applies to Game Mastering. You have to do it and do it as much and as regularly as you can. Like any creative endeavor there will be trepidation and anxiety, sometimes you’ll feel that the adventure you crafted, the one you thought you had all figured out, was simply ignored by your players who just went off on that two sentence tangent you wrote down as window dressing. It’s easy to get discouraged and just say “Forget it!” and give up. But just like a writer working through writer’s block you need to work through those feelings and come back to the table.
I truly believe that the GM is not merely a rules arbiter and a facilitator of group storytelling The GM is the glue of a group, the driving force and many times the reason groups stick together. Being a GM is equal part coach, cheerleader and strict parent with a dash of event coordinator thrown in!
Despite all this attempts at being funny, let me give you one solid piece of advice. Be realistic and consider how often you can play, be it weekly, every other week, once a month, whatever. Doesn’t matter if this is a real life game, or a Play by Post, Play by e-mail or online. Set the date, invite people and stick to it. Not everybody will come at first, some of the initial group you invite will drop out, some game sessions it will be you and one player, but play anyway. Don’t get discouraged. Eventually people will realize that you are serious about this and you will attract like minded individuals who share your dedication and commitment to the game.
A good GM is hard to find, and a big part of being good is being consistent…
Thanks to Questing GM’s for hosting the Blog Carnival and giving me a reason to write this little rant. Hope it’s useful to some of you! Let us know how you think we can all be better GMs. Participate in the Carnival.
PS- If you remember the movie the title and first lines of this post refer to, well you might just be as old as me! For our younger readers it’s all about the movie Secret of my Success with Michael J. Fox, a 1987 cinematic masterpiece. I’ll leave you with the movies entry on the IMDB and the link to the music video by Night Ranger. That was the music playing as I wrote this post. That may explain a lot!
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