In my in-person games, I typically do combats theatre of the mind style, but I was thinking of starting a Pathfinder 2nd Edition game and use actual maps and pawns for combat. I'm most likely definitely going to buy the Pawns for the first Bestiary, but I'm not sure which Flip-mats would be a good choice to get started.
Any advice?
(P.S. I'm also curious about what to for my player's characters as far as pawns go, but I'm mainly curious about the Flip-mats.)
If you're just starting off, you need a catch-all solution, and that means a plain, blank grid with nothing on it.
Search the Paizo store for "Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Basic Terrain Multi-Pack" and you'll find a great baseline - 2 maps, each double sided, with a different color on each side (4 total) gives you a water, stone, dirt and grassy texture.
There are also many other brands that offer similar products - an easy google search can find you the others.
Flip Mats have one big advantage over some of the key competitors - you can use both wet AND dry erase markers on them. Some of the notable competitor products will be ruined by dry erase markers.
If you get bit by the bug and really want to expand, there is a HUGE library of flip mats that have pre-designed art on them. Ships, towns, forests, dungeons... there really is quite a variety. One friend of mine started his Flip Mat collection by getting a few of the more "generic" maps - forest paths, swamps, stuff like that - and then expanding slowly when a particular mat seemed to perfectly fit what he needed for an upcoming adventure.
You might also check out the Flip Tiles as they have the same high caliber of art that the flip mats have, but they are more modular in nature. Slight downside, if you have any OCD in you, Flip Tiles trigger that sort of thing as players/GM move pawns around it is very common for the flip tiles to get jostled slightly out of alignment. Small price to pay for the customization you can pull off with the flip tiles.
Another approach that I like is to get some transparency sheets. You can pre-draw different areas in your dungeon on the transparency sheets, and you can lay a new one down whenever the party opens a door. With a little work you can make a pretty artistic map, and being able to lay new rooms down as the party goes helps preserve the secret of what's next while also saving time - the other alternative is to pre-draw the whole thing out, but then the party sees it ahead of time, or draw as they go, and if the rooms are complicated to draw that can really slow things down.
Finally, google, scroll through amazon, check kickstarter, whatever - just look for a variety of different RPG map products and see what catches your eye. There are some very neat ideas out there, and you never know what might catch your eye :)
Pawns:
I use pawns extensively. Love 'em. I do think minis are better BUT for the price, I can have whole armies of pawns or just a handful of minis. For player characters, I bought a set of green bases. They stand out from the black bases that the NPCs and monsters get. But I prefer it when my players bring a miniature for their PC, as that REALLY stands out. I have the old NPC Codex pawn set that I allow my players to sift through if they want a pawn for their character.
Storage is another problem with minis - where are you gonna put them all?? Plastic minis like the old D&D minis are built to be dumped into a bin and pawed through, but many nicer minis would be ruined by that. Pawns store very easily.
The Enemy Encounter pawn set is an excellent place to start a pawn collection. Pathfinder Bestiary pawn box is another great start. Together those two products ought to cover most of your needs.
The upcoming Gamemastery Guide NPC Pawn collection looks like it'll be a good set and ought to cover whatever gaps are in the other two products I've listed.
Many of the 1st edition pawn sets are out of print now and hard to find, but it's worth taking a look through Paizo's store, or failing that amazon and ebay, as occasionally a set shows up at a decent price (or a bonkers price, depending... the Monster Codex box, if you can find it, is often quite expensive - I'd highly suggest the Enemy Encounter set instead as the price point will be far more favorable).
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I'm a big fan of pawns, because they're so compact. It makes storage and transport a lot easier, and they're quite cheap compared to 3D minis.
I think the ideal base collection of pawns is:
- One set focused on humanoids, such as the NPC Codex Box, Villain Codex Box, or perhaps the upcoming GMG NPC Pawn Collection.
- Another with monsters. Bestiary box 1 is the obvious starting point, it's got a wide selection of relatively generic monsters in it.
- Bases in several colors. It's really convenient to use a different base color for PCs and NPCs, makes it easy to see who's on what side.
Further, it can be handy to number the bases you use for monsters, so that you can easily track the hit points of zombie 1, 2, 3.
My advice, use two computers. Start up Fantasy Grounds. Set the second computer (the player view) to send the map to a large screen TV for everyone to see.
I love minis. Collecting (and painting, when they used to come only blank) them and getting props used to be a lot of fun. But I just don't have the time or space for the clutter anymore.
The GM in my Starfinder game uses the pawns collections, and he also uses cardstock and prints his own and puts them in a base.
The cool thing about that is he can find images for PCs, and print just the head and shoulders closeup, to keep them apart from the monsters.
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As another perspective, I don't use pawns or minis or anything for tabletop play. I use dice.
Players are d8s, monsters are d6 for medium/small, d12 for large.
This way I don't have to buy new minis or really do anything but bring out the big box of dice I've accumulated over the years. I've always really hated having to substitute one mini for another one, or having a player who's dissatisfied with how well/poorly a mini represents how they view their character.
So instead, everyone's a 3D shape that lets them put their own imagination onto the board and I don't have to buy anything extra or prep minis.
I love flip maps! The way they are best used is either for random encounters, or for encounters that you design specifically for the flip map.
In either case, get ones that are appropriate to your campaign. For example, if you run a pirate game, get some of the ship, wharf, island, and/or sunken city maps.
The ambush sites flip map is pretty good for a more traditional game. You will probably want to add in a tavern map, eventually.
In my experience having either a great flip map (or the equivalent) adds quite a bit of dramatic oomph to an encounter.