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Item tokens?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Objects that convey cover or height would be what I would like. Assuming they are made to a 1" grid scale, I think that would be most useful to support immersion during combat. Boxes and barrels always seem to come up. Also, a chest, wagon, sarcophagus/coffin, stone table, and a generic macgiffin (however you choose to represent it) would be the most useful at my table.
Rght, this is really useful, thank you... a little falcon statue as the universal McGuffin token is funny to me, but I feel like that be immersion-breaking i.e. better to have various little object icon tokens and let people pick out their McGuffins individually.
Also, that actually just made me realize -- probably the object tokens should be sized consistent with the other tokens, e.g. healing potions and amulets and such should be considered tiny and get ½" tokens, chests and swords on the ground should be considered small and get ¾" tokens, etc.
(Also I'm still wrestling with the eternal question of whether a horse is a player token, a creature token, or an object token (since those categories have different color schemes / art styles to keep the battlefield visually organized). Currently horses are themed as objects, with mastiffs themed as creatures, but that's always bothered me slightly and I can't come up with a system for it that makes me happy.)
If it moves, breathes, or bites, it's a creature.
Oh, I agree clearly it's a creature -- I'm just talking about how to categorize it in order to give it an art style. It's useful for a visual hierarchy if the player tokens on the battlefield are heavily distinct from the creature tokens so you can look quickly and say "blue = me, red and orange = other players, tokens with complex graphics = monsters" or something like that.
I think what I'm going to settle on is that the default style is that anything that's player related (players, horses, healing potions, etc) gets a white background, and anything that's monster related gets fully colored (either a solid color background or graphics all the way to the edge of the token). And mastiffs are "monster related" even though if you're hip you're going to be a halfling riding one. 🙂
Could you make the bases modular with different color choices? For example, snapping a yellow base on player characters and blue for monsters etc? I was thinking about how nice that would be a couple weeks ago. My players like to know when a monster is bloodied (half hit points) and we mark that by putting a red baby poker chip underneath the token. It's kind of annoying to move them around but would be easy if it was a modular base you could set on there or whatever. Just a thought.
Hm, that's a good thought... like just multicolored bases of some sort, and you can decide what different colors mean however makes it make more sense. I know you can get different colored plastic rings on Etsy and etc that are designed to snap around a mini / token and indicate different things about the creature, also.
I just recently started doing brass bases for some of the player tokens; in my mind they were going to be super popular and it would solve the problem automatically, because the creature tokens would have a totally different construction so it would be immediately apparent, but it seems like people are still into the wooden tokens for whatever reason 🙂.
One other idea which I think I might incorporate at some point is Sly Flourish's using letters for creatures and incorporating damage with the letter -- maybe I'm not explaining it well, but I really liked the idea:
I actually have some vague plans to switch over to using letters for groups of creatures for exactly this reason -- this might be an idea that makes it easier to keep track of which creatures are badly damaged also (because the players have a lot more vivid conceptual reference of which one is which in their minds).