Anybody use lots of terrain and miniatures for their RPGs? Share photos!

[Ozreth]

Will be starting up a new campaign soon and inspired by this channel (https://youtu.be/LH4aiWQPBRo?si=2HLLzhwlUIhKUrSy) as well as this guys game (https://youtu.be/nJ-ehbVQYxI?si=RfwKSOTROVF1ZOg9) I’ve decided to try switching the group over to a heavy terrain and miniature setup. I will need a lot more terrain than I have but it will be an ongoing project. We may use 2e AD&D but have been playing 3e for a long time now and everyone is most comfortable with it, I’m just not sure how conducive it will be to terrain and tape measures without using a grid (we typically use an old chessex dry erase mat and always have for 3rd edition D&D).

Anyways! Who is using a lot of terrain for their RPGs, what are you playing and most importantly share photos! Posted here as I am most interested in fantasy settings.

[Elbows]

While not particularly helpful...not me. 

I just find it's the polar opposite of what I want in a role-playing game.  A role-playing game's biggest benefit is that you can be anywhere, fighting/seeing anything.  Now, if you're just doing some kind of basic old school D&D dungeon crawl from a book and you have some generic dungeon tiles and all the miniatures for the included encounters?  Maybe...but in any other situation, you're just removing all the benefit of an RPG.

It also hurts you as a DM if your party goes "off script" and decides to do something other than what you planned...particularly if it involved a place or encounters you don't own.

Thinking back to all of my favourite RPG moments (from when I was 10 years old till now)...none of them could have been represented on a tabletop with terrain/miniatures.

[Dentatus]

Terrain and minis for RPG sessions... All the time.
Established RPGs: Symbaroum and DnD5e.
My own rule sets are more narrative wargaming, and don't really count as RPGs.

[mweaver]

We do use terrain and minis when there is a fight.  Although we are currently using Savage Worlds rules, we played D&D 3.0/3.5 for many years.  You do not really need a grid (unless you have one or more of those players in your group; we don't).

If there is not likely going to be a fight, we usually have the minis for the PCs out, anyway.  There has always been a strong visual element for RPGs for me.

-Michael

 

[mweaver]

Why it came out upside down, I cannot tell you...

-Michael

[mweaver]

OK, flipped the original picture upside down, saved it, and uploaded it.  Still upside down.  Sigh.

-Michael

[armchairgeneral]

 

[dadlamassu]

We use as much terrain and as many figures that fit the scenario

Zona Alfa





Dedburgh (home written Zombie Rules)



We play many other RPG wargames set in Morval Earth (our fantasy world), Greek and Roman myths/fantasy, Spectre Operations etc.

[Hobgoblin]

While not particularly helpful...not me. 

I just find it's the polar opposite of what I want in a role-playing game.  A role-playing game's biggest benefit is that you can be anywhere, fighting/seeing anything.  Now, if you're just doing some kind of basic old school D&D dungeon crawl from a book and you have some generic dungeon tiles and all the miniatures for the included encounters?  Maybe...but in any other situation, you're just removing all the benefit of an RPG.

It also hurts you as a DM if your party goes "off script" and decides to do something other than what you planned...particularly if it involved a place or encounters you don't own.

Thinking back to all of my favourite RPG moments (from when I was 10 years old till now)...none of them could have been represented on a tabletop with terrain/miniatures.

I generally agree with all of this - but we sometimes use miniatures and terrain, though the terrain tends to be semi-improvised. I think there is a half-way house in which you can have miniatures on the table but only use them when it helps - giving you the best of both worlds.

This was an episode in our long-running D&D campaign. The players were in Hell, and we'd finished the previous episod (theatre of the mind) on a Friday with them holed up in a ruined tower and something huge crawling up the outside. We'd decided on a garden session for the next day, so I made and painted the demon lord of manticores on the Friday night (it helps that Fimo can be baked in 20 minutes!) and got my son to knock up a cardboard tower to my specifications on the Saturday morning. Then we had a huge, all-miniatures session in the afternoon before going back to theatre of the mind on the next occasion:







This was another episode from the same campaign (which is still going on, though only episodically now - it was every day during lockdown!): an encounter with a brain collector in the dungeons of Castle Amber. Again, the terrain is very roughly improvised with blocks and scatter items: