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Friday, February 11, 2011

Tiles vs. Geomorphs

In a comment on the latest S-series geomorph, Zornhau asked about getting player POV versions of the geomorphs, so that he can lay them down as tiles, covering certain portions that the players can't see yet. I've been debating this for the past several days.

I would think that geomorphs would not really work as tiles. Since I don't use tiles, I'm not certain on this. However, it seems to me that even if the geomorph were missing obvious "secret door" symbols, and even if the GM covered every portion of the geomorph that hasn't been explored yet, there'd still be some obvious clues to unexplored elements. For example, I've been trying to make most of my geomorphs have multilevel elements, similar to those created by Dyson Logos or Risus Monkey. In S8, the large room with a secret door in one wall also has a passage and 20' square room below it, outlined with a dotted line. If the GM reveals either room, the other room will be known. If I were to make a player POV version, there'd have to be two versions, one for each level. That doesn't seem feasible to me.

Additionally, I would think that the POV geomorph wouldn't be very useful, because many people would be using minis or counters on a different scale than the geomorphs. What I would think people who use tiles would prefer would be counters for the various elements, like the sentinel statues, scaled to typical tile scale. Perhaps a printable PDF of such counters?

8 comments:

  1. A geomorph is a device used to produce random dungeons (or whatever), a tile is an extravagance used by someone who obviously has too much money and nothing worthwhile to spend it on. Give me a sheet of perspex and a whiteboard marker any day.

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  2. @austrodavicus: Personally, I don't use tiles, but I didn't want to piss on anyone's parade. I could be persuaded to do the counters for the tile people, though.

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  3. I certainly hope no tile-users are offended by my comment. I'm just a thrifty gamer who scratches his head at the use of tiles, a seemingly throw away product. But then I'm the same fella that used an old cardboard box as a DM screen. :-)

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  4. With the desktop publishing tech we've got these days it's actually conceivable to make two sets-- one for DM one to lay down in front of players.

    The multilevel tiles would be difficult, but imagine printing a second sub-tile to put down on top of the first tile when they climb up to the balcony, or whatever.

    Extra work, put certainly possible. I use a battlemap and marker for efficiency, but think it would be cool to have a map you could build in front of players.

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  5. I was imagining them as throw away - a quick alternative to mapping - print them on stiffer paper and card, and just use a marker pen to add hidden rooms/traps etc as they are discovered.

    I suspect, though, that you'd need a slightly different scheme - perhaps so that the tiles can always be divided into 2-4 neat sub tiles should they contain smaller rooms.

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  6. @zornhau: yeah, I'm at a loss as to how I could translate my existing geomorphs effectively into tiles. Yes, as Telecanter suggests, I could do a layered PDF (although that's something I haven't tried yet,) so that GMs could print out multiple tiles from multiple viewpoints. But that's an entirely different area from what I've been aiming at...

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  7. Absolutely. I don't think it's doable without starting from scratch. However, I wonder if it's the kind of thing people might pay for...

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  8. Tiles could be used to connect geomorphs, with geomorphs used mainly as a map for the DM.

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