One of my pet annoyances with doing everything on Dungeon Tiles is the complete and utter unrealistic nature of the scale when you are not in a bare dungeon fighting monsters. Recently this was brought home when we used our new Dungeon Tile A2 sheet to play a scene out in a rather large inn. What become immediately apparent was that Dungeon Tiles, and the whole five foot square thing, are completely out of scale.
As I drew out tables and chairs, rooms, staircases and everything else in the building, we realised that if we were going to fit our characters in there with their own square for every model, the tables were going to be about 30 to 40 feet long. That’s probably a bit big. And chairs immediately have a seat that is 5 feet by 5 feet. Very uncomfortable I’d imagine.
And then I noticed that the same 8 players (who’s characters were in the inn…) where sitting around a table that was only 6 foot long in my small living room.
After a quick think (we were in the middle of An Encounter), we came up with the following idea. We’d use tokens in situations like these – a different colour for each person. We’d identify who’s token was who’s by placing a token next to their model on the side of the sheet.
This worked so well, I am considering using it for a lot more of our gaming situations. It restores the sense of scale and reality to the map and keeps the utility of using the system intact. For those of you that might need tokens, Chessex has a great range of colours, and they are pretty damn cheap too…
[You will notice that there is one white token in the private rooms at the back of the inn. That's our resident Halfling mischief maker. He has a Charisma of 20, so I don't need to tell you what he was doing...]
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