The environmental rules are an essential part of punishing the PCs! I mean challenging the PCs!
Generating maps of the computer and either projecting them or printing them out with Poster Razor can work well depending on how much money, effort, etc you'd like to exert. If you use printed maps consider gluing them to cardboard and spraying it with matte clear coat. In addition to making your homemade "flip mat" more durable it provides a great excuse for why you never got around to throwing out that old pizza box!
I'm currently running an AP very casually and have decided not to bother with custom maps and minis for the most part. I suppose that if I wanted a quick way to define terrain with markers I might go with color coding. With a few colors and a few symbols it could be like the Lucky Charms of combat mapping. Most of our encounters will be urban though, so I doubt it will come up a lot.
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Environmental Rules always make murky situations much clearer. Also gives a purpose to abilities that let you ignore difficult terrain, and other stuff, like Camouflage ranger ability...
Woodland Stride is also greatly ignored as an ability until you set some encounters in a forest... then everyone wants a two level dip in druid! LOL
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I try to use terrain/objects in every single event whether it be a battle or role play situation.
Dressings help set the mood of the scene and you never know when a PC may try to take advantage of something such as a broken pillar offering cover, foliage offering concealment, rubble acting as difficult terrain, or multi-level areas...all good stuff.
The other thing is that it is important to provide opportunities for PCs (and bad guys) to take advantage of their abilities such as stealth, acrobatics, climb, fly, etc.
Was going through some of my old threads and found this. Anybody ever worked on a program to do this?
I did once generate a forest map by randomly rolling for each square but it took forever. I did another one later by just taking the number of squares that were on the map, determining the number of trees needed to make the percentage right, and plopping the trees down willy nilly.
i use the rules that say you have concealment compared to anyone a certain distance away and then don't put any trees and say every square is climbable...
You rang?
A swamp generator and a forest generator (in perl) from 2012, right here
Yes, I have used these. I last used the swamp generator for an encounter in We Be Goblins. They tend to make the terrain look very blotchy and weird. I never got around to making a hill generator. I guess I could try it.
Awesome! I will have to make use of this, thank you!
I'm with a poster on page 1. If I want a quick forest or similar Difficult Terrain I grab some stuff I have laying around. Dice, leggos, miniature terrain blocks, even just wadded up pieces of paper. For water and flat green space I have a few pieces of scrap felt.
D6's are great when using minis, especially for climbable terrain. Drop a green or brown one to represent, say, a tree. Player: My grippli ranger climbs 5' and attacks with his battle axe 1 handed, to get Higher Ground! GM: Cool, put your mini on top of the D6 and flip it to the number "1" under your mini. This means you're 1 square, or 5' up in the tree.
Its not Difficult Terrain or Concealment/Cover that I forget to use in the environmental rules, it's the hazards. Did you know that moving through the woods PCs might hit poison oak, shriekers or poisoned nettles? In the swamps there's quicksand; I don't usually use deserts but mountains have rockslides, hills could have mudslides, etc.
And then there's hot and cold, rain, fog and wind. Want to cheese off those super-archer-ballista-bow types? Throw in some strong wind and rain: low visibility and -2 on all their shots. But there's TONS of rules to keep straight. If you've got your PCs in a forest at night with a misting, drizzling rain and they'll be misearable. Cover, concealment, Dim Light, Difficult Terrain, and everything those entail.
Finally one last push for using terrain on your table. Our hobby involves books, notebooks, dice, pencils and pens. If you're really strapped for cash but you're using these and minis for fight scenes, improvise. Stack books for hills; tear out paper and crumple it for rocks; use pencils/pens laid next to one another to make fallen logs; dice for trees; and then get yourself some string or a laser pointer. Suddenly you've got a fully interactional, 3d environment that your minis can climb, cross and scale to simulate almost any terrain!
Hmm, terrain generator program. That's not such a strange or bad idea. Lemme think about that...
If you decide to Kickstarter this, lemme know. This would be great for several weak GMs I know to enliven tactical maps. I fave seen the Clearing become the default in several games, not just forest, but waterfalls, creeks, cave entrances and such, where the combatants move the fight to a convenient open arena devoid of anything more than grass. We had a rock throwing Hobbit, er...make that Halfling, told there were no rocks to pick up and throw in a rocky hill area!
I look at the irregular footing common to the old 'fencing movies' (Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, any Musketeer movie, Princess Bride, etc.) as a great example to shoot for. The most fondly remembered melee in my early campaign was fought in a boarding action against a crashing airship fouled with wreckage and moving ruins of rigging. No one at the table had anything left to give when we crawled away that night. 35 years later, I ran into a player who enthusiastically extolled the scene to her husband when we met by incident at a store. Her elf was weaving across the shifting deck, fighting crewmen and cutting things loose that needed to be tied down. Until that gleeful outburst, I had not realized how much she had enjoyed wrecking the ship.
Bwang hits on a good point: the environment is only as fun for the players as it is interactive. If its just an excuse for you as the GM to shut down charging lanes, or worse it ONLY hinders the PCs, then it's just a mechanic; a number to tack on when figuring your attacks.
If however you have lots of Small sized boulders, rolled and stacked by kobolds to form cover, suddenly the players have choices. The low overhang overhead makes the space inside the wall for the kobolds a Small space; if you want to go over the wall or stand on it, you're squeezing. But note: the rocks are just loosely rolled or stacked in place.
Grab some and throw 'em at the bad guys; smash them aside to ruin the cover; when the kobolds dart through an open cave entry nearby wedge 'em in place to close it up.
I tell my players all the time: trees can get climbed, flowing water can be your best friend; you can even make a Charge attack by swinging on ropes, vines or chandeliers! Just TRY some of it! The more interactive the players get in the fights, the more fun it is for everyone.