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Post by DnDPaladin on Aug 14, 2015 22:45:21 GMT
Basically what you are saying is... Do a scale for rooms and a different scale for characters. Because a corridor 6 feet large is really really small if you ask me. Thats the thing with scale... there is no one size fits all.
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Post by rane on Aug 15, 2015 0:51:47 GMT
I will scale my world to be playable so it's not killing the flow of the game fiddling with things that are too small/big just cause it's "realistic"
The only thing that scale rules come into play for is consistency - or basically things that will look irregular, like a end table that's as wide as a door...
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Post by onethatwas on Aug 15, 2015 3:25:56 GMT
Basically what you are saying is... Do a scale for rooms and a different scale for characters. Because a corridor 6 feet large is really really small if you ask me. Thats the thing with scale... there is no one size fits all. No...I am saying "do what works," and it just happens that 1 inch=3 feet is a rather convenient measurement, and is even used as the baseline in various official systems (Deadlands/Savage Worlds) even WITHOUT changing the miniature scale (they still use the 28mm scale mini). Now, as for realism: lay down, lengthwise, in your hallway. If you could do this at all...you have some spectacularly spacious halls. However, if you are like most people, youcould not, and at most you could sit upright against one wall while having your feet pressed against the opposing hall. Realistically, most times a hall is about 3 feet. That is because most people, shoulder to shoulder, are about 2 feet, and that gives them 1 foot extra space. The 5 foot scale used in minis games and D&D is because A) it is stupid easy math to count by 5, and B) it helps to give a combat visual of a person swinging his sword, ducking, dodging, etc., and have that combat motion take up 5 ft of space. Supposedly this is after analysis of combat performances. It ignores that melee combat results in people standing toe to toe, but sure. If you look at tunnels for real life dungeons, their corridors are rarely larger than normal (3-4 feet). If you want an exceptionally opulent dungeon, 6 feet wide corridors is enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder (which is a good combat formation...watch 300 if you want to see how awesome it was). If you want your dungeon to have ogres, then the ogres are a teeny bit smaller than originally envisioned. By like 1 foot. Tops. Then again, you can suspend your disbelief and just say, "yep, its a huge, hulking ogre." The resizing of horizontal scale is actually a really minor shift, and, IMO, Solves more problems than it presents. And, considering 2.5D kinda encourages a "pretend the vertical walls are there" mentality...is the discrepancy of vertical height on the miniatures really an issue?
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Post by gnomezrule on Aug 15, 2015 5:34:13 GMT
Rooms don't bother me as much as furniture. For instance. In our house we have a huge "farmhouse" dinning room table. Its about 3 feet wide and 8 feet long. If I were to make it to scale it would be less than an inch wide and less than 2 inches long. But when I try to craft that I am faced with trying to build really small. Tables are not that hard though . . . what about the chairs. If I try to use something small enough I don't have anything that a character can sit on or stand on when the fight breaks out.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Aug 17, 2015 11:53:38 GMT
onethatwas, you have some pretty small house or appartement then... i can lay down in my corridor and have my head touch the wall. and my feets barely not touching the other end... basically my corridors are 6 feet large. just because i like to have room to move around. and i hate when i have to go out of the corridor for someone else to get in. for me a corridor must be big enough to hold 2 person side by side. otherwise its too small.
the only times i have seen such small corridors are from small appartements.
when you build stuff, there is no real guidelines. while i agree that 1 for 3 is a good measurements per say... i would never build corridors 3 feet wide. heck at my size im already 2 and a half feet wide by myself. same with the "supposed" standard height of a ceilling.... people now seeks ceiling that are 9-10 feet high instead of 8. why ? because it feels that much better to them instead of the cramped 8 feet height. housing varies a lot. some are smaller, some are taller. in the end i even have seen oversized chairs yet still confortable. this is why i said scale isn't as important as it can be.
its good to have a scale, you still want things to look one way... but dont be too strict onto it. otherwise you may miss opportunities of making stuff that will be much better at a different size. all i am saying.
in very short... scale is what you make it to be, not the other way around.
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Post by onethatwas on Aug 17, 2015 15:11:26 GMT
On the flip side, I have only seen halls and corridors larger than 4ft wide in public places of importance (school halls, legal or business administration buildings, public transportation access) and houses for upper middle class.
Again, in a medieval setting, this is much less likely to occur, especially in dungeons, where considered access is only for those who built it, or people maintaining it. opulence (such as that implied by spatial comfort) is reserved for the very wealthy in areas where their wealth can be observed...it does no good for a lich to make his dungeon pretty and spatious for the benefit of adventurers walkinh into his lair. And he is far beyond the need of opulence himself...he can't experience the comfort of having a roomy hall. To him it is just a hall.
But, to each their own.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Aug 17, 2015 20:15:06 GMT
as i said... size do matter, but you shouldn't stick to one size fits all !
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Post by icewind1462 on Nov 30, 2015 18:17:21 GMT
For me; I had come to realize that miniature scale (the 28mm) is not actually consistent with the base scale. What I mean by that is the height of a mini is not consistent with the scale of the base of 1inch = 5ft. I one day looked at a mini, knowing that per the game rules 1 inch = 5 feet I decided to take that and measure the height of a miniature that I assumed was about 6 feet tall. What I found was that the mini (when using the scale) would have actually been a little over 7 feet tall. And I found this to be true with most minis. The average height turned out to be well over 6 feet tall with many larger minis equating to about 20 to 30 feet tall. After some additional measuring and calculating I found that if you set 1 inch to = 4 feet, then all minis come into a normal average of about 4ft 10inch -5ft 6inch for average humans with some up to 6ft and about 9ft - 11ft for large minis and so on. So I had thought about setting that for my scale in general. And it could work.
The problem I faced was that I haven't been able to complete my tiles so I use tiles from descent and the D&D adventure games, as well as a few others. They have squares (heavens forbid), but I play in a gridless style using the squares as just a guide. As well as the measuring sticks for open areas (without squares- I use felt cloth or other things like cork boards) So I hit the issue of having to make adjustments. In order for distance to be factored correctly for ranged weapons and the like I would have to remake the sticks and it would be hard to use the grid guide for helping to determine distance. all in all it seemed that it may get confusing for some.
It's probably not a bad thing if you have no grids in anything you are using, and remaking the sticks would probably be easy to do. But it seemed that for me at least it might not work, at least not for now. Hopefully someday I'll get the time to complete all the projects I want to complete and thus can implement this simple adjustment. (I've got my own version of the beginners box build constructed-I just need to paint it) For now I have to roll with it (finding this out about minis really bugged me) but I'll just suck it up and go with it as is for now.
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Post by DnDPaladin on Dec 1, 2015 9:24:38 GMT
as mentionned before in this thread... the base size is not for the mini height, its for the mini actual movement size. as in extend your arms and calculate from one hand to the other how much space you take. thats much closer to 5 feet then you think it is. thats why the bases are 1=5 not because its better and more convenient, but because they only look at the place a character needs to move around.
play a on a kinect in a tight space to see for yourself what i mean.
PS: calculated my corridors and my parents corridors... mine, very very small one... is 4 and a half feet wide. and my parents are 6 feet wides. my parent live in a small 4 1/2 that used to be a 5 1/2 and mine is a 4 1/2 as well. i calculate my size man, and i'm really 2 3/4 feet wide from shoulder to shoulder. so 3 fet, i'd barely pass in it.
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Post by michka on Dec 1, 2015 13:59:44 GMT
There's also the issue of figure scale from head to toe vs shoulder width. Most miniatures are actually wider proportionally then they are tall. If you ever see miniatures with correct proportions they look emaciated, purely because we're used to seeing mini people with certain proportions.
Then there's the issue of scale creep. Back in the day miniatures were 25mm from eye level to toe. (This measurement was used because most older wargaming minis wore hats.) When Games Workshop miniatures became the face of gaming those eye to toe measurements started to creep toward 28mm and even upwards of 32mm. Meanwhile the shoulder widths started to broaden more and more. Oh, and GW heads are usually much bigger then proportionally accurate.
What does this have to do with terrain scale. Not much, other then I don't worry about furniture scale any more then miniatures manufacturers worry about figure scale. Seems fair to me.
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Post by onethatwas on Dec 2, 2015 16:22:51 GMT
as mentionned before in this thread... the base size is not for the mini height, its for the mini actual movement size. as in extend your arms and calculate from one hand to the other how much space you take. thats much closer to 5 feet then you think it is. thats why the bases are 1=5 not because its better and more convenient, but because they only look at the place a character needs to move around. play a on a kinect in a tight space to see for yourself what i mean. PS: calculated my corridors and my parents corridors... mine, very very small one... is 4 and a half feet wide. and my parents are 6 feet wides. my parent live in a small 4 1/2 that used to be a 5 1/2 and mine is a 4 1/2 as well. i calculate my size man, and i'm really 2 3/4 feet wide from shoulder to shoulder. so 3 fet, i'd barely pass in it. So what you're saying is that the scale I proposed is actually not as far off as you had previously suggested. Traversing a single-file corridor (using a 4 ft hall as the standard) could be represented fairly by a 5 ft OR a 3 ft measurement...either way you are fudging the numbers by a foot, and who really cares. Traversing a hall shoulder to shoulder such as in a hall 6 ft wide is accurately depicted by a 3 ft measurement, while incredibly inaccurate (4 ft worth of inaccuracy) in 5 ft measurement scale. Room measurements get more disproportionate with realistic scale the larger/the smaller the scaling measurement is off from accuracy. In doing camparative measurements while designing dungeons and buildings for D&D I have found that while it is stupid easy to measure a space using the 5 ft scale, it grows disproportionate at a stupid fast rate. I can fit 4 people shoulder to shoulder in a 10 ft wide corridor. D&D only allows me to fit two. The disproportion increases exponentially...I can fit 6 people in a 15 ft wide corridor, while D&D only gives me 3. The problem resolves when you lower the scale...3 ft is used in various other systems officially, and scales really well. It too isn't accurate, but the inaccuracy and disproportionality is vastly reduced...it takes at least 6 squares (18 ft) for it to even become noticable to my spatial awareness...and even than, only just. Now, as for personal shoulder length...Sorry, that doesn't have an affect on measurement. Adventuring isn't made to be comfortable...dungeons, as I said, aren't made for the convenience of the trespasser, and only the opulent in a medieval setting have access to wide corridors for convenience, unless the building is a publicly used one, such as a church or town hall. So, while adventuring, it is unfortunate that you feel squeezed by the single file, 3 ft passage the Kobolds built to murder you in. Take it up with their leader, the bone thin lich who A) has no concept for comfort and B) didn't want you coming into his domain anyway. He has a complaint box right next to the collection of adventurer bones who keep coming into argue about the spatial comfort of his dungeon.
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Post by SpielMeisterKev! on Dec 2, 2015 17:17:12 GMT
Howdy,
I feel that one all encompassing scale is unnecessarily complicated. Especially trying to integrate the scale of the miniatures and the scale of the terrain. Yes the minis should look reasonable next to the terrain and each other, but they don't need to match exactly. The terrain scale needs to be useful for game mechanics. You could use flat tokens for everything and still need some scale for game mechanics. 1 in = 5 feet is reasonably good for this. With 2.5d and even 3d for the terrain, vertical scale is right out the window. As long as it looks ok and plays ok, that is what is important to me.
My 2 coppers, Kev!
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Post by onethatwas on Dec 2, 2015 17:33:40 GMT
That is true...functionality is the only realfactor in playing on or off the grid.
To that end you really don't need actual scaled distance. 1 inch= 1 unit of movement. Whether it is 5 ft, 3 ft, or 100 ft is irrelevant except in terms of what satisfies you.
However, if you are bothered by the scale and how it affects room size, percieved irrationalities in movement distance, or furniture scaling, then it makes more of a difference whether you are talking 5 ft or 3 ft.
Personal preference reigns, obviously, but given the points I've made above, I find 5 ft to be too large. Others may agree or not. At the end of the day, when I sit at a table, I convert everything to 3 ft distance measurement privately, even if the rule is that everything is in 5 ft according to the rules or the group. Each person can make his own private scaling assessment without hindering play.
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Post by ogrestamp on Dec 2, 2015 21:55:10 GMT
When I started playing D&D back in '81, I had the D&D Basic box set and well as the newer AD&D PHB and DMG. 5 feet per person was mainly for combat. You could certainly crowd more people in that space but not if you wanted some type of quality fighting. Somewhere down the line that one person per 5 foot space became a law especially when grid play became the popular way to play.
But even 5' per person seems a bit crowded when you want to duke it out with an orc. My arms are about 2 feet long (give or take) and when bent, say about a foot long. I would swing my 3 foot long sword giving me just under a 4 foot arc. If I were to swing that in my 5 foot square, I would have to stand to one side of my square to swing the sword and not hit my buddy next to me. And we are not even talking about 2 handed swords and glaives and spears. So I think there has to be a happy medium between what's real (or believable) and what works.
The same applies when I think about furniture and such. If made to scale, some of this stuff looks silly. My friend made a chair that he tried to make to scale for the minis and it looks so thin and it has trouble standing. It looks nice, but emaciated. It all comes down to what our brains will accept as believable.
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Post by onethatwas on Dec 2, 2015 22:12:49 GMT
5 ft is the clearance you want to give to your friends...more if you can manage.
You want your enemy to be much closer...at least 4 feet, and at max proximity you want to be toe to toe so you can see the whites of their eyes.
The way combat manuevering works is less than realistic, but using a tabletop mini representation it is hard to convey all the actions occuring to scale.
One could argue that two combatants trading blows will manuever along a 10 ft range as they parry, thrust, dodge, strike, defend...
But that is arguable and dependent upon circumstances. The Man with the Black Mask and Inigo Montoya took up an entire ruin as they traded blows...try depicting THAT in D&D combat rules.
Madmartigan and Gen. Kail required no more than 4 ft between them and any given opponent they fought until they reached one another. Even then, most of the combat between them took about 5 ft of actual space. If not for Kail's ridiculous resilience (roughly10 mortal wounds and he is still giving Mamartigan a hard time), the combat would not have really moved beyond Madmartigan's position.
So yeah...the abstract makes the game work, but it hampers some of the realistic details in some respects. Also, it sometimes ruins the awesome...
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Post by daveyjones on Dec 3, 2015 1:44:14 GMT
seems like this entire issue can be summed up with the question: 'how do you get one mini to give another mini a lapdance?' i don't think there is a solution to this as long as you are using actual minis.
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Post by onethatwas on Dec 3, 2015 1:52:54 GMT
seems like this entire issue can be summed up with the question: 'how do you get one mini to give another mini a lapdance?' i don't think there is a solution to this as long as you are using actual minis. Extensive modifications and hot glue!
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Post by ogrestamp on Dec 3, 2015 3:11:51 GMT
But that is arguable and dependent upon circumstances. The Man with the Black Mask and Inigo Montoya took up an entire ruin as they traded blows...try depicting THAT in D&D combat rules. I have thought about that very problem many times. How cool would that fight be?
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sotf
Advice Guru
Posts: 1,084
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Post by sotf on Dec 3, 2015 3:29:10 GMT
There's also the issue of figure scale from head to toe vs shoulder width. Most miniatures are actually wider proportionally then they are tall. If you ever see miniatures with correct proportions they look emaciated, purely because we're used to seeing mini people with certain proportions. Then there's the issue of scale creep. Back in the day miniatures were 25mm from eye level to toe. (This measurement was used because most older wargaming minis wore hats.) When Games Workshop miniatures became the face of gaming those eye to toe measurements started to creep toward 28mm and even upwards of 32mm. Meanwhile the shoulder widths started to broaden more and more. Oh, and GW heads are usually much bigger then proportionally accurate. What does this have to do with terrain scale. Not much, other then I don't worry about furniture scale any more then miniatures manufacturers worry about figure scale. Seems fair to me. Not entirely, it's more of a blurring between scales where there was originally both 25mm and 28mm (28's tended to be more merged with certain model railroad products such as Lionel) and there were others added with 32 and a few others at different sizes larger. Scale creep and shrink kind of hits everywhere. However, GW kind of hit the stylized "heroic" scale. It emphasizes the head, hands, shoulders, belt, and feet...the massive weapons and such that come from it are part of that subscale. A lot of video games utilize the same thing, Blizzard is well known for it with the way WoW is done and there are others...comics also tend to use portions of it. While unrealistic, the appearance is more dynamic and is something that focuses more on the aspects of the look. Terrain and Vehicle scale tends to have a LOT more to do with appearances. You want to move up in scale slightly if you are using based minis. A base can add a head or more of height to a mini, which makes properly scaled terrain and vehicles look to small for the minis. Basing the vehicles tends to fix them somewhat, but unless the terrain is one that the minis aren't interacting with, you kind of want the slightly larger scale to blend them in, and that's with the things needed to make minis "fit" and balance properly.
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Post by michka on Dec 3, 2015 7:00:10 GMT
I totally agree sotf. Any issue of scale becomes a balancing act between accuracy and appearance. The most important gauge of what works needs to be the eye of the guy who's making the scene. If you're running the game, you get to say what looks right.
I've never liked over sized vehicles. Many of my friends use them all the time. If my friend is running a game then I'm happy to play with whatever he puts on the table. When I made my dungeon doors I ended up making at least four different sizes before getting the size right. Just imagine if I'd spent that time working on tiles or monsters (or maybe even reading the module one more time) how much more I could have had ready. Scale is a wonderful thing but it should never get in the way of having fun.
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