D&D 3-D

Let's talk about combat environments.

I find that they are often too flat. All the things Wizards of the Coast puts out for D&D are flat too, to my knowledge. I mean sure there's a few flat card depicting stairs going up or stairs going down and whatnot. But that doesn't really count.

For my gaming group we have a box of those terrain tiles, sure, but we hardly ever use them. I even got a couple of Hirsch Arts molds for making your own cool-as-hell-looking plaster dungeon tiles and walls and stuff. But I don't have a month of full-time work to set aside to painstakingly mix, mold, dry, extract, assemble, glue, paint, paint, and repaint them all. It's just not my thing, apparently. And it may look cool but it still doesn't give me what I crave.

Here's what I want. I want the capability to make 3-dimensional battlefields on my gaming table. These are easy enough to make in my head but unsatisfying when sketched out on the wet erase mat with the grid on it. My solution is simple. And I haven't actually found these material yet but bear with me here.

My solution is 1 inch cubes of wood.

That's it.

Resulting in monochromatic Minecraft-like 3-D terrain but 3-D terrain nonetheless.

With a good-sized volume of these I can create terrain that rises up off the gaming table. It's a simple solution requiring nothing more than finding a supplier of reasonably-priced 1-inch wooden cubes. Oh and for stairways or slopes upward (where the terrain would rise, say, at a 45 degree angle or so) I'd need some 1" x 1" x 0.5" "cubes" that are flat on top as well for ease of placing a mini atop of it. And if I needed a bridge I could always construct one. Or maybe use one of those handy 2-D cardboard tiles I already have to bridge the gap.

"But if you bump it it will all come tumbling down," you might be saying. Well the same sort of goes with minis on the table anyhow, really. Though I suppose if you made a tall skinny tower of the things you might be at risk. At that point you could, if you wanted to, get out the hot glue gun and weld a few together for the upcoming session and add a few wedges at the bottom to act as feet to keep it up but really I don't even care about that. All I care about is that this solution would require little to no work and is infinitely reconfigurable. And heck even if it tops out at 3 or four high max it will still add that much more to the map at least.

Most DMs who don't have a ton of time to devote to paint, photoshop, or otherwise create and cobble together a photo-realistic terrain map for each of their players' fights ask a lot of their players' imaginations when they have to transform their wet erase scribblings into a complicated and/or evocative terrain. Bringing the third dimension to the fights set on your gaming table will really make each setting seem more unique and memorable. You and your players won't have to sit there and try and visualize how high up your character is or how far they have to climb up the ledge (ooo! a thought: thin but stiff card stock to slide in between the blocks representing a cliff or wall to set your mini on to show how high they are up the wall!) or any of that - you can just *see* it.

Anyway, I'm sort of excited about this idea. Send me a comment if any of you happen to find a decent supplier of 1" wooden cubes and I'll post a link in a future post if I find them as well. Likely along with some action shots* trying this method out.

*shots may or may not contain anything resembling action.