Ye Olde Inn

by **Bouncing Orbs** » December 17th, 2015, 2:21 am

Thantos wrote:You bet, the TC range of "regular" doors will fit in with these tiles

Was planning to do a base tile set of generic tiles then some special tiles in resin for things like pit traps, mosaics, spear traps, pools of blood, piles of bones. Which would cost more than the plastic due to the production method. Unlockable stretch goals there

Also wall tiles so you can make walls up in a couple of styles.

Excellent stuff - this time I will place my Kickstarter order as soon as it starts instead of waiting until the end to see all the stuff I have to choose from...that way I can be close to the front of the dispatch queue

Personally, I'm not interested in walls for the following reasons;

1) Similar to small tiles, they cramp the room you have to place dynamically posed mini's or mini's with wings, extended tails etc, etc,
2) Where small tiles make it more difficult to easily manipulate mini's when bunched close together (because they can get caught up on each other - the Genestealer Conga Line anyone? ), walls make it a little more difficult to easily get your hands in there to manipulate the mini's and place tokens and/or game effects without bumping things,
3) They take longer to set up and pack away,
4) Increases the amount of terrain you have to paint,
5) Increases the cost of your set-up,
6) You need more room to store all your pieces, and
7) The walls look artificially short anyway.

...it's just not worth it in my opinion...I'd prefer the extra time/effort/resources/finances went into creating higher quality tiles and more and varied tiles.

Just having a more in depth thought on this...I've just calculated I'd want about 600 tiles to be happy with an initial set up. At 0.20GBP per tile, that works out to about $240AUD for 600 tiles, which is a cost I'd be happy with dropping on a plastic dungeon set. 0.25GBP would probably also see me drop cash...but anything higher would probably see me sticking with my resin sets...

My poll vote has been changed to reflect my new thoughts after having done some calculations...

by **whitebeard** » December 17th, 2015, 1:50 pm

If can show how to create a HQ style board with these, with zero height walls I can paint "white". I would likely buy them at the price you're quoting. Call the package, "Classic Dungeon Dweller"

by **QorDaq** » December 22nd, 2015, 1:25 am

Firstly, I think this is a great idea.

I love Dwarven Forge, as an example, but ALWAYS wished it was in plastic. I recall "Back in the Day" when Mage Knight was putting out their dungeon sets (Still love the traps and such from those), that they had some interlocking 3D dungeon floor sets. The floors were okay for what they were, and the doors were cool, but the walls were a pain.

However, without the walls the MK stuff looked VERY bland. Since then the concept of 2.5D terrain has become popular within the DIY community. It provides the suggestion of depth and therefore walls without interfering with models on the board. Especially in these days of heroic scale with limbs and weapons extending in crazy directions and also crazy distance.

This makes me wonder if walls in this project might not be handled similarly, basically strips of plastic (of varying lengths), that could be attached to the "Tiles" that the floor pieces are made of. The tops might have various details to suggest brickwork, cobblestone, sandstone, or whatever, but the point being if the walls only stood perhaps a 1/4 inch (maybe 6-7 mm), above the floor they need not obstruct view or reach but still define the space?

In fact, what would be awesome but possibly complicated to design, would be "Wall Sections" that had a gutter along the bottom and running length-wise along each side allowing Room (or Corridor?) pieces to "Snap or Slot" into them. A design like that would allow for the walls to be single wall thickness (saving on the number needed) for rooms and corridors that were next to each other. This would also limit shifting of tiles on the table as the walls could actually fix the rooms in place--relative to each other and any corridors or the like.

As an example, a wall section of that sort might look a bit like an inverted letter 'T' with a lip or something along the cross piece for the Floors to connect to.

Again, I don't know how complicated that would be but I thought I'd at least bring it up as an idea. Potentially less ugly than the MK Dungeon floors with all of their corner peg holes mucking up the board.

Secondly, price-wise, and if my math comes in anywhere near accurately, @ say 0.25 USD per square, 250 Floor pieces would come to around $62 bucks. And would build ~ 12 typical HQ-sized rooms (at 4x5 anyway and certainly not counting corridors).

Regardless, I feel that ~ $65 for a base set would not be bad.

I'll definitely be following this discussion to see where it goes. I missed out on the last KS (was not paying attention until it was too late), and would like to be in the loop on this one.

maj!

by **whitebeard** » December 22nd, 2015, 11:05 am

The problem with 2.5D is doors. You need to be able to place a room quickly. If you pre-build your rooms and lay them down as you go then you can front load a lot of this work and run the game quickly. But if a door is "dynamic", furniture moves to reveal, etc. OR secret doors... then you have a 2.5D piece that must be removed to accommodate the secret door model (twisting catacombs) or the traditional cardboard tile.

Also, if you lay the 2.5D pieces with odd breaks (e.g. a 2 and a 3 instead of a clean 5), then you would be signalling the players that they should search for doors.

So much to consider! Interested to see what you finally come up with Thanos!

by **QorDaq** » December 22nd, 2015, 4:56 pm

whitebeard wrote:The problem with 2.5D is doors. You need to be able to place a room quickly. If you pre-build your rooms and lay them down as you go then you can front load a lot of this work and run the game quickly. But if a door is "dynamic", furniture moves to reveal, etc. OR secret doors... then you have a 2.5D piece that must be removed to accommodate the secret door model (twisting catacombs) or the traditional cardboard tile.

Also, if you lay the 2.5D pieces with odd breaks (e.g. a 2 and a 3 instead of a clean 5), then you would be signalling the players that they should search for doors.

So much to consider! Interested to see what you finally come up with Thanos!

Yeah doors, secret or otherwise, as well as other portals that breach a wall, are always a challenge in modular dungeon designs. One option, that works way better with 2.5D than full 3D, is to have such things designed to straddle a wall instead of replace it. i.e. the bottom of the door frame might be designed to attach to the wall in some way. But you are correct to observe that the TC doors should be useful with such a set.

I am just not a fan of walls that sit directly on top of room tiles, because invariably you lose a lot of space for minis and furniture. Or, if the tiles are designed with extra space around the edges, you end up with double thick walls separating rooms... It's a tricky business to be sure.

maj!

by **Bouncing Orbs** » January 1st, 2016, 9:06 pm

Thantos wrote:Will be doing some rough 3d prototype pieces over christmas to test the fit

Did you manage to find time for this over X-mas? If so, how did it go? Any pics?

by **Decipher** » January 2nd, 2016, 5:03 am

Little too fancy for my taste. Think I'll stick to the original, I'm too old school. But it is cool to see HQ expanded beyond its original content. I love trolling the forums to see how things are added and how people play and how they incorporate new items.