Tabletop Gaming on a Budget - RPG Blog Carnival

I love this month’s topic from the RPG Blog Carnival, so I had to join in.  I am very proud that my kids have followed their old man and become incredibly cheap in their young ages, so not all of these ideas are my own.  Just saying.

OK, so the way I typically game master nowadays is through the use of a simple white board and dry erase markers.  I know a lot of folks have vastly better resources, but this really works for me.  I don’t just use white boards, but I use some small ones that I found at a school supply store a while back. This means I can easily pick it up, draw and then put it back down, and if there are people at the far end of the table, they can have it handed to them without disrupting figures, etc.  That’s the easy way.

But let’s be clear - figures are cool and cool is fun!  But how much cool can you afford?  The cheap way to do figures is to use these new sets that we found at Toys R Us.  They are effectively toy soldier figures, but in different shapes.  The two sets in the picture here are:  Pirates & Skeletons and Mythic Warriors (normal adventurers and orcs mainly).  These ran my oldest son about $10.  Now, not every style of bad guy can be found in these limited number of sets, so he went a step further.  He got a couple sets of really cheap green army men and then took a lighter to them.  Some were ruined (he uses these as corpses), but the rest became zombies and other generic horrors.  Are they all to scale?  No! but they meet the rule of cool.

 

The next two are not cheap!  They are instead, things that we already had around the house that we can use as figures in a fun way.  The first began when my daughter started playing.  Being a young(er) girl, she had brought some of these tsum tsums to the table with her (I think because she wasn’t sure she was going to like the game and wanted to have a toy to play with).  Well, I was using the white boards and at one point there was a minor debate about where people were.  So I grabbed her tsum tsums and placed them around the white board so everybody knew what was what.  Fortunately, she had male and female “figures” and the younger group of players was having a bit too much fun with using Disney characters as their figures, but oddly enough it worked.  Again, these things are not cheap!  But we already had them, so it worked for us.  I strongly suggest using the smallest of the rubber ones.  Yours don’t have to be tsums, but you probably have something around the house that will work.

 

OK, last one.  Again, this is not cheap!  But you probably already have them laying around your house.  And these can be far more useful than tsums:  Legos!  Yep, the world’s greatest toy (just my opinion), makes the greatest playing field.  Not only can you use the mini-figs for showing where characters are, but you get a larger base and the figures will stay standing up.  Don’t know about you, but when I used lead figures (or whatever they are made of now), keeping them standing up was a problem, especially when people would get up from the table to get closer to the figures and personally move them.

This one can go as big as you want it to.  You could lay out the entire dungeon in Legos and run the party through the whole thing.  We normally don’t do that, but it can be really helpful to place 6-8 Lego blocks on the big plate to show generally where the walls are.  I admit I have built a couple of things from time to time, typically trapped hallways or one time a balistae.  You can even do elevations pretty easily, which I have never had enough stuff to do by other means.

 Looking forward to see other “thrifty” ideas this month!