I tried this long ago, back in the '80s. sorry no pics, its all long gone. Back in the day we had an excellent Games Workshop product called Dungeon Floor plans. With that you could make 2d tiles, or 2.5 or 3d as desired by adding walls or skirting. I never went beyond 2d, though I had dreams of doing so. So my experience of 2.5d and 3d is limited, all I can say on that is , if you want 3d walls allow a wide skirting so that outstretched arms, weapons flowing robes and wings do not get in the way.
3d is worth it if you can pull it off though, but 2.5 is so much more convenient.
Anyway, onto the help.
My hints and tips.
1.
Make larger rather than smaller rooms, stretch internal scale for ease.
In most
RPGs combat is square based, you could have a fairly decent tactical melee in my London flat, we have tried enough times with
GW whippy sticks and general horseplay, yet my entire flat and its four rooms and a corridor would shadow a 4x4 square fairly well.
To turn my little flat into a D&D dungeon I would need 6x6 squares to do it justice.
Now a peasant hut, barracks in fact just about anything except a large hall or church nave would need to be upscaled quite substantially.
4x4 is quite palatial for room sizes in medieval terms and is considered very roomy now, but is an operating minimum for a tactical dungeonbash. You can have some 3x3 and 4x3 every now and then but most roms need to be larger not smaller.
Do not rescale any spells or distances but it is ok to allow scale to be expanded for rooms.
A decent bar worthy of a bar fight will need to be 12x12 squares or bigger. Thats actually a fairly large company warehouse space, and the room can be used for that at fullscale. But a 12x12 once you have added a party of adventurers, some locals, a bouncer a barmaid and a proprietor, a few locals in drinking on the wrong night and four or five guys looking for a fight, plus furniture, will be very crowded. When White Dwarf published two bar fights complete with maps they made the bars far
larger
than this, and used 3' hexes, rather than 5' squares. Even so with 20 people and assorted things inside both felt quite full. In one case the barmap completely did away with the scale of the building it was to represent. Bars used for fantasy barfights auto-Tardis when you make them up as terrain.
Fantasy taverns are popular as 3d miniatures terrain, some look very nice and most are at a reasonable modest scale, and thus generally completely inappropriate to actually use for running a bar brawl scenario. Ironic really.
Tip: Use internal room scale as 'tactical scale' rather than true 5' squares, however just flow with it, make the rooms the size needed, even if they technically look too big and expect the players to go along with it. If players want to try metagaming tactical scale "e.g. the massive warehouse-small tavern is larger on the inside right, so if I get out the window and run around the building I have less far to run".... Tactical scale is for visual and play convenience not for fourth wall breaking metagaming. So bitchslap it if you find it until it behaves.
Now taking all this apply it to your custom 2.5d room builds.
Dont bother with anything less than 4x4, beyond a single closet space, you are wasting your time. Most rooms need to be 6x5 or larger.
Games Workshops Dungeon Floor Plans Rooms, of which I had a copy in the late '80s contained 20 or so A4 quality cardstock pieces thinly marked with squares by the plus signs at square corner intersections. They were a quality piece. Some A4 sheets were for cutting in half, somewhere single piece and one was a two piece cavern to be joined together.
Poiont here was that while some represented cavernous rooms, or even caverns, most were fairly modest in proportion yet all were scaled at 8x6 squares which in room terms is massive. 40'x30' for a bedroom, even a barracks is big. Yet it worked as tactical scale. Look at the 8x6 and 8x12 hall above. While huge they are largely compressed for scale purposes. Now compare them with the 3x3 and 4x4 rooms people are building and you will see how inadequate they are once populated. Hall a Space Hulk room is "tactically full" when you have one termie and a genestealer in it and no furniture intruding. For fantasy ignore external scale for convenience and build big or dont bother.
2. Is that corridor turn necessary.
So the corridor goes left, continues 30' then has a branch on the right while continuing.....
Yep you can map that, yep you can make your individual tiles and small corridor and intersection tilesets work. It works well for Space Hulk so it will work well for D&D yes? Only up to a point. Yes with small individual pieces you can recreate the Ghost Tower of Inverness in the absolute scale Gary Gygax intended. But why bother what corridors are needed to do is go from one place to another, and yes an unrevealed dead end is a space too.
A corridor needs to fulfil the
GM's function, and that oddly enough is to to directly visualize an exact shape but to channel movement and variate distance. While every good tileset should include some small pieces even the single square tile, but I found to my cost you should not subdivide your plans into small units, even if you think you gain versatility. Instead build large and more complex corridor sections for the most part and use a handful of small pieces for flavour and to make things dovetail neatly. This deserves some explanation
3. Small tilesets add versatility inn direct scale. Large tilesets add versatility in composition.
Take the tilesets shown on the thread so far, you can make up any combination of 10ft wide corridors because you have a lot of 10ft wide sections some only a single 10'x10' tile. However with a larger tileset you only need to provide 10ft connectors and the corridors between can be more of any size. 15ft and 5ft corridors add changes, quite subtly for the 15ft, unsubtle for corridors to be traversed single file. Yes you can have differing width corridors between smaller tilesets but it becomes inconvenient below a certain size.
4. Unless you lay down a lot of tabletop distance is not important.
What matters is
LOS and choice of direction. This is a neutral comment and you can make varied corridor arrangements with small tile sets, indeed you can do that more exacting. But more exactingly isn't always better instead a relative handful of larger complex corridor pieces plus a dozen or so small pieces for bridging, and dead ends is enough. You might think you get less variety when in fact you get more, fewer larger pieces builds scale quickly and is more efficient in terms of materials used, and play time.
5. What matters is number and position of exists and number of routes, and LOS.
Do you go straight for the goal room (if you know where that is) bypassing rooms along the way? Or do you clear out systematically and not leave enemies in your rear? Which or two different corridors do you take to the same destination? This can be best accomplished by having a small number of larger pieces determined by number of routes and exits. So a standard T has three exits, you can elongate that and also provide a large X junction. Have smaller bridging pieces anc rooms to link to those. Next onn the list is a # piece, basically an enclosed square with exits on the outside, it need not and in fact best ought not to be an exact square. Next duplicate thrm wirth three more of different dimensions, some should have multiple exists on one side regularly spaced to they can double connect to other corridors making a larger looping network of passages. This is only a start you can take it from there where you will, the larger ther set and the larger the tiles the more variety you get. You will need about two small corridor pieces per large one, all to standard limited sizes plus enough rooms end pieces and doors to fit the total number of exists on the corridors. It will be less than it wounds.
The # sections are important, being a larger piece with an enclosed loop of tunnel linked to 2 square exit ways you could make two sides of the 'square'3 squares wide and the other two one. for a mix of 15ft and 5
ft passageways. Which the adventurers take makes a huge tactical difference for themselves and any larger monsters.
5ft corridor Tip: For single square corridors a 5ft scale is assumed, yet the GM need not stick to it. A single square is still a tactical space, so long as he provides adequate warning a priori a single square corridor could be less than 5ft and the Gm has the choice between wither you can only fight in single file and whether you can only move in single file.. Note that you can fight effectively in a corridor no wider than your shoulders, indeed massed ranked combat training will take this into account automatically, you can even swing a great weapon, though your use will be predictable and should be penalised. However passing another character in such a small, space, with exception of clambering over a prone casualty, will not be possible.
e. Making a hash of things.
Hash shaped corridors, and to a lesser extent larger corridor pieces in general do have a genuine setback compared to small corridor tile sets. With a small tile set you can build to
LOS, with a larger corridor set there will be some reveals. Yes its true this gives the players more info that they have, but don't worrit. First the more they think map the more they are there. Tile sets help just by being there, but corridors revealed in large sections revealing multiple paths or possible multiple paths if there are multiple exits which might link. These automatically add up to tactical possibilities for your players and draws them into the immersion. Second you as the Gm have a secret weapon, the rubble marker. A rubble marker should definitely be 2.5d, it should be flat enough for a miniature to stand on when you want it to but should be as tall as the 2.5d walls so you can make it some blocking terrain used as a defensive barricade, some loose rubble to slow down movement or a floor to ceiling rockpile from a collapse. In its latter from its especially useful for dashing hopes of adventurers who think they have a choice before finding out. If you are that type of
DM you can place the rockfall rubble after you find which direction the adventurers go in, this will force a backtrack and thus make your hash shaped terrain piece longer in distance than it appears on the tabletop. You need not be crude about it either, if you include end pieces, especially ones that fit on tiles rather than caps them off map then the loop might be broken deliberately ending at a dungeon feature like a shrine or some such.
Now it has long been said that a good
DM should not split the party, however that refers to discouraging the party from splitting, say half to the temple, half to the tavern where any adventure will be split and participation diluted. Tactically splitting the party is an excellent tool. You can do this unfairly at any time, a goblin spying through a peephole lowers a hidden portcullis when half the party is trapped, springing an ambush of monsters. However done on a hash the tougher half can race around to rescue to squishier half of the party, or be blocked from trying by a heavy defence. This adds a natural tension.
Tip: End caps. Even while making 2d dungeon tiles it helped to make decorative endcaps that fit on the tiles rather than capped around them. Having a corridor end in an idol turns the corridor into a faux room, and makes sense. In a 2.5d dungeon such a feature should be represented in glorious 3d like furniture and doors for extra effect. Back the end cap feature up with a section of 3d wall to the width of the corridor you block to accentuate the effect
Hope this helps.
