Options for showing scenes to players in RPGs with Bitzy the Bard

This is the 10th of an 18 part series on How to be a DM. To start at the beginning, click here.
There are many ways to add a visual element to your campaign. Back in my first games of AD&D in the 80’s, we would use fancy-dancy maps drawn on graph paper.

grid paper map — Map drawn on grid paper

The DM would say “You go down a 30ft corridor and see a door to your right. The walls are dripping with a strange liquid with a yellow glow…”

The designated cartographer in the group would sketch out the layout and make sure everyone knew what the setting looked like. It worked fine but we got spoiled over time.

homemade vinyl grid mat — Homemade vinyl grid mat with map

Soon the rage was to use 1″ standard vinyl grid maps. You could write on them with dry erase markers and use tokens to represent your characters. This was fabulous! Since we were poor college students, I remember buying vinyl and a sharpie and making our own. We used cardboard tokens and it worked great. Over time, we finally saved up for a real Chessex mat and bought genuine lead miniatures to paint on our Saturday evenings. We were livin’!

Commercial grid mat — Same map drawn on commercial vinyl map. Woo hoo! Made it to the big time!

Residue from markers — Dreaded blue fingers disease

There was just one big problem with the vinyl mat approach. Those markers stained your fingers and left a mess all over. You also had to erase when you ran out of grid.

It could take a while to draw the scene and what if you had some combat on your way out and you had already erased your map? You had to redraw it again. And you had to erase them within a day or the mat could get permanently stained, so you couldn’t save it for next session. Nevertheless, the mat approach remains a good option for many RPG players.

An alternate to the mat approach is to get copies of the maps from adventure modules or online and print them out at a copy shop. This works well if the module or book has a usable map with an appropriately scaled grid. Again, you add tokens, minis, or other props like plastic barrels and chests and you are good to go.

Back in mid-2000s, WoTC started selling dungeon tiles. These were double-sided, quality printed cardboard tiles to 1″ scale sold in different theme packs. Cardboard tile sets were a great innovation because of their portability and convenience, but there was sometimes questions about where walls were compared to doorways. Some people would slap a piece of plexiglass over the top of the tiles as they tend to slide around on the table.

At the other end of the market were high-end 3D dungeon sets with incredible realism. Dwarven Forge is probably the most well-known of these manufacturers. Some companies sold molds that could be used to make your own 3D tiles. I’ve even seen people create their own tiles, building them with individual bricks!

And of course today, there are people developing models and using 3D printers to print out tiles. Add a little paint and they look gorgeous.

But there are some real disadvantages to this approach besides just the cost and time.

Never forget that “Function trumps form” in situations like this. Everyone sitting around the table has to see what is happening. They need an unobstructed line-of-sight to their mini. The walls are just too high. These 3D sets are works of art, but there are usability issues.(Oops, my engineer side is showing.)

So let’s make a list of some of our requirements:

Nice looking interior and exterior terrain
Clear indications of the location of walls and doors
Be able to use miniatures and other props on it
Quick to set up
Reusable
No sliding around on the table
Inexpensive

These types of requirements led to the development of tiles with some 3D aspects, but that preserved the play-ability aspects of flat tiles. Inspired by DM Scotty, DMG, and Wyloch, I developed my own approach based in part on their great how-to YouTube videos.

Using simple supplies like cardboard, foam board, and paint, you can create cardboard tiles that really add to the realism of game play but are inexpensive and reusable. Combined with vinyl mats for exteriors, you can make some pretty neat scenes for your players to experience at a low cost.

Join me in the next story and I’ll describe my approach for showing exterior scenes in What’s behind that tree?