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Have not tried this for roleplaying, but have downscaled my wargaming to 10mm scale and it works great - now I can play on a coffee table rather than a 6x4 foot table I don't have :)
1 inch = 1cm + OD&D + Chainmail or OD&D + Delta's Book of War works great Then there is Fantasy Trip and print on heavy stock 11mm or 12mm Hexes - I like to base on 8mm or 9mm x 1mm round disc magnets
You don't need a 3d printer if you can't get one. There are lots of independent businesses you can buy 15mm fantasy miniatures from. Splintered Light Miniatures, DemonWorld Miniatures, Alternative Armies, are just a few that focus on fantasy/sci-fi. You can even use 15mm historical miniatures from any time period for a lot of your human characters and NPCs. I've been gaming D&D in 15mm for years now, and I think it really works well for those folks with smaller spaces or budgets. Great video Knarb, keep up the good work man, and thank you.
Excellent point about historicals and the half-scales; who knows that figure wasn't meant to be an elf when his ears are just a pair of painted pinpricks next to his head XD
YES!!!! I have been saying this for YEARS. Make terrain in standard inch-grids, print or buy minis at 15mm, and play at the original D&D scale of 1"=10'. Instant epic vistas, cyclopean ruins, and table-friendly megadungeons. Edit: and your existing library of 28-32mm monsters are suddenly much more impressive!
There's some other things to consider. 10mm is approximately the same as model railroad N gauge, which is an extremely popular model railroad scale in Europe and Japan. Given that a lot of 'fantasy' buildings and whatnot can be extrapolated from historic European & Asian buildings there's a lot of terrain and stuff out there to be kitbashed from, if you know where to look. One manufacturer I see a lot of in this scale is Kibri.
10mm painting is so relaxing compared to 28mm+. Basecoat highlight, a handful of dots, and they pop. Paint 36 guards in an hour compared to base coat 10 at 28mm.
How easy have 10mm been to move in a tight dungeon environment? Logically 10mm seems like the way to go, but my test prints feel, small and fragile in my big fingers, what has your experience been?
@HyperRealitySuperFan You are so right. I am not doing much offline roleplaying these days, but I have recently started playing Warmaster. there I can easily paint a whole unit of 36 infantry models in about 2-3 days (or even faster) at a decent level of quality. Speedpaint work like a charm for small miniatures.
I'll do this, roleplaying in a city or exploring? 10-15mm. Battle scenes and main events? 28-32mm. Edit: it would also depend on the scale of the battle, imagine playing like you did in the older final fantasy, dragon quest and phantasy star games
I would also add that your existing 25mm to 35mm minis also work nicely at 15mm to 20mm scale. Ogres and orcs become giants, skeletons become monstrous tomb guardians, and wild animals become huge dire beasts.
Such a fascinating idea I had NEVER even considered. Definitely interested in shrinking my terrain/minis down to allow for larger battlefields. Thanks for sharing Knarb!
I'm not sure how this got recommended for me, but I'm glad. Excellent video. I've been a 15mm/ 1:72 scale enthusiast ever since my late father introduced me to Napoleonic Wargaming. Smaller is always grander.
To me the details of the miniatures is a big part of what I love about them. The map and terrain is more for vibe and reference, less for 1:1 representation to strategise. It's still theater of mind, just with a bit of a visual aid. But if you are more into strategy I see how this is amazing and I'd love to have minis of whole town districts, if I had the space for that!
100% with you on scaling down D&D. I was thinking of going 10mm myself, giving a more grand and epic feeling to a lot of environments. Plus the amount of space you save as a DM with terrain!
Use the small scale for cities and large scale encounters, dragon lairs, rolling plains, etc. Have a 28mm scale miniature for character representation, but also use it for like building interiors and dungeon crawls. Now that you've given me this idea that's exactly what I'm doing.
I love the idea of being able to zoom in and out depending on the scale of the battle. This also works great for vehicle battles, such as for pirate ships.
"If you can hardly see the details on the miniature..." Aaaand you lost me. Having 28/32 mm beautifully painted minis is a big part of the charm for me 😍
I think there is room for both, since not every battle is going to be on a large field with large enemies. There are a lot of magnetized assets you can get to throw rooms together for standard scaling that you can use for your typical fights with the pretty miniatures. Then you can switch to the smaller scaling for big strategic fights in huge areas. You can even mix the scaling. By having the magnetized assets around for when people jump into a house during these battles. Using the smaller scale minis and map as a sort of overmap for the overall battle and switching to standard scaling for localized battles. You can even have these localized battles placed closer to the appropriate players so they can manipulate them by theirselves.
I suggested this to all major gaming manufacturers around the time of D&D 2e, when whe started seeing movement speeds that supplied over 60 inches of table movement. Power creep was evident in other games as well, especially in movement and range.
Playing 1e D&D, we have the high-movement problem pretty regularly. Because rounds are 1 minute long, movement is 120' in-game, which scales to 24 inches of table. Outdoors, it's triple. One amelioration is to actually use encumbrance rules (maybe with a quick method like stone-weight or per-item counting instead of pounds). This typically means that at low to mid levels, a full unencumbered 12" MV is a luxury, and most people will be moving at 9" (chainmail) or even 6" (platemail). Especially loaded with equipment on the way in or loaded with loot and unconscious friends on the way out! Another is to use the 1-inch squares on the grid map for 10' in-game scale, instead of 5' When I'm designing a dungeon, I know that if I keep it within a 30x30 grid I can put the whole zone (dungeon level or whatever) on the mega mat at the same time. In my notes I know those are 10' squares. When I draw on the mat I tell players those are 10' squares. Which means four man-sized figures can fit into one square. I have a whiteboard or piece of paper with the party's marching order. During exploration of the dungeon I ask one player to put their figure in to represent the front of the party. A forweard scout goes ahead alone. But the rest of the minis don't need to go on the mat. Based on the marching order we know that the party is actually stretching out backward from that first square. For an outdoor encounter that's all spread out, I can call each tabletop inch = 30' in-game per the 1e rules. If it's a close-in encounter we can still use the 1 sq = 10' we're used to. But what I've wanted to do for a long time is buy a bunch (or 3d print them) of 10mm-12mm figures, cut off their bases and rebase them on thin magnet card, so they'll stick 4 to a 1x1" square metal plate. Just get a variety of poses, some dogs and donkeys, and the whole crew can be represented on that. You could use a moderate-sized dragon as a mega-sized dragon, small wolves as dire wolves, goblins as ogres or trolls, etc. So anyway, that's a use-case that doesn't involve changing your whole shebang from 25/28mm to 10/12mm; just buy a handful and use them to represent up to 4 members of the party per stand.
The dragon really sold the idea to me - had an adventure some years ago where the end of the story was a fight with a dragon in a gigantic underground cavern, and we really struggled with getting the fight working on standard 1" grid - had to do the encounter on squared paper with pencil markings (5mm squares) instead, since it didn't make sense on the gaming mat.
this is a great idea for space restricted people that still want something physical rather than just theatre of the mind. Even for those that like having 28mm for smaller locations, it'd be easy enough to have the character models in both scales for the epic encounters (also lets you do "honey I shrunk the kids" at any time in 28mm as well!). As an extra bonus, lots of 28mm monster models become terrifying behemoths at 10mm scale.
I loved this video. Great discussion on scale. I could really see great use out of a city map like that. My sand box campaigns always have a lot of back and forth within the city. With a map of that scale, you could do some really awesome encounters.
As a travelling DM, I want to love this idea - but as a 3D printer and person who's been collecting miniatures for 4-5 years, I cannot fully embrace this perspective - no matter how much I love you Knarb. P.S. Please share your baby dragon STL.
I dunno. I think there's a lot of merrit. Small scale models might be an issue with losing them, but then you just have your players bring their own, or print out some on some paper. could be a viable option. Then as a traveling DM, you wont have to worry about lost figures and just bring the smaller scale terrain you've built. I suppose there would be other workarounds too. Either way, I really enjoyed the discussion!
The size of the table can be considerable smaller or even portable! Great info but even better to see it visually with the dragon example instead of just proposing the idea of going smaller. I've only played DnD remotely due to my location but if I play in person in the future small scale looks like a blast! There's nothing to say you couldn't have "regular" scale character minis for closer encounters too! I always enjoy watching your videos, Knarb 👍
I'd be curious to see a comparison of a few minis printed at differing scales, especially focusing on how it difficult would be to clean up the scarring from larger supports vs defects from having smaller supports.
Seems interesting! I came across a warhammer video were a comment said that downsizing would be perfect for D&D, and then I found this video. The dragon example seems like a very epic bonus you get when downsizing the sizes!
I love how people discover smaller gaming scales and have an epiphany. Smaller scale miniatures have been around for a while. I regularly play wargames in 3mm and 6mm.
I love the idea of using the appropriate scale for the appropriate fight. I have always just used tiny tokens and slap dashed the terrain then used a young dragon mini to be the ancient dragon...everyone got it, and they got to basically use the entire living room as it sat with tape measures in hand. no one cared that it didn't look great, don't be afraid to stretch your players' imaginations in this way. You can abstract some of this down immensely and create cool interactive sessions where the mechanics are clearly visible and the monsters are able to fully use their advantages. The huge painted dragon in its lair at 28mm scale is awesome...and everyone should make one some time in their life just to do it, but that fight is not nearly as hard as you think if you don't engage until you are properly leveled. A dragon with full movement that harasses you across the map then traps you in its lair or systematically destroys the city while archers helplessly fire arrows with no hope of ever scoring a hit. The reason you tried to fight a dragon in its lair, hopefully after hurting it first, was to eliminate the advantage. In the open, you might hurt an Adult dragon, but aren't killing it out in the open unless you have some way to close 120 ft and it doesn't know dimension door or teleport spells...which means you have to follow it to its lair. What happens when you fail to injure the Dragon while out in the open though...I don't think they will just mindlessly swoop down every single round. Nope those pesky sons of bitches will fly straight up full move and dash until out of range, ensure their breath weapon is ready, then start strafing the battle field until all of their dinner is cooked.
Not gonna lie, for the last 5 years I’ve wanted a 3D town map. Having that just even as a set piece of the space so the players feel like they’re in the world let alone move around in it is amazing. I dont have the time to make one these days, with all the other things im making, but i would love to hire someone
First, Cool city! My First time watching your videos and I gotta say this is great man. As for the scale argument I think you’re totally right about the mechanical, tactical, and practical benefits of smaller scales. I never thought of going all the way down to 1/60th, but I feel great about doing so now. Really though I think a synthesis of scales would be great. Small minis for tactical play and large ones for artistry, evocative visuals and joy of painting. I think I’ll rescale all my mini projects for the rest of the month and see how it works out!
If I went smaller, I'd go 14mm models on a 1/2 inch grid. Exactly half is an easy conversion for every aspect. Even rescaling models for 3d printing is an easy adjustment of 50% down in size.
Starting printing and painting in 10mm scale… as happy with the results. I’ve printed and painted half a town, a forest, a dragon, a huge wolf pack and a bunch extra in maybe 9 days.
this is actually a really good idea cause i've wanted to do city encounters but i just couldn't think of how to do it without taking up the whole table
Love the idea for exterior combat, especially when paired with inexpensive scenery like the Tiny Hexes series from Crooked Terrain (1/4”=10’), but I’m struggling with how to best run D&D group combat between characters/monsters with conventional movement abilities (e.g., players and bandits along a road, players and orcs at cave entrance) at such a small scale. Would love to see a video showing your ideas in action, kind of a proof of concept. I think measuring “normal” movement (10’-30’) at that scale would be the most difficult. Thank you.
This is something I’ve thought a lot about since I started DMing seven or eight years ago. If you’re playing at 28mm in an outdoor environment, a large tree (based on real world examples) could easily take up the majority of a coffee table, so we hand-wave it and have stumpy little saplings. Then you’ve got spell sniper warlock/sorcerers with distant spell meta magic casting eldrich blast 480ft (8ft real world at 28mm scale), or a hasted Tabaxi monk who can move almost twice that by level 20 if they play their cards right. 28mm is fine for actual dungeons/caves etc when it’s all tightly packed and everything is happening within 120ft, but as soon as you look at open world combat it prevents characters (and monsters) really making use of cool abilities. I’m tempted to finally get around to getting a 3D printer just so I can make a bunch of 5mm models and then use larger busts or pictures for the players to have as good visual representations of their characters at the table.
I’ve watched both videos and here is my 2¢ . Larger minis are great if you are doing say a dungeon or a small enclosed place , but the second you are outside and you have monsters like a dragon who already had crazy range of movement (2 ft at the base 1 square =5 foot) now by upscaling they are even more crazy by Having an even larger distance it can travel and wreak havoc. So larger for indoors smaller for outdoors basically
Love this idea! I have very limited crafting/storage space so this would be awsome. Shrinking 5ft to 1cm, or 1.5cm would help alot as I would be able to come up with bigger battlemaps.
Why not do both larger and smaller? So, have one half of the map at a small scale to show a few hundred in-game feet across, a "zoomed out" view, then on the other side, you can have a larger scale "zoomed in" view. This lets you see a larger area and track creatures at greater distances which will mostly be ranged combat, while also being able to see larger minis of the PCs and the melee situation much better. For example, you might have the party fighting goblins in melee on the large scale side, while tracking the goblin archers firing from distant positions on the small scale side. With two feet of space, one square foot can be 1"=60', then the other three squares of 1' wide can be 1"=5' and show the zoomed in view of particular spaces on the zoomed area. This can be particularly distinguished by using red, green, and blue square tokens on the zoomed out map to show which squares the zoomed in zoomed in maps are showing, while the zoomed in maps have borders and maybe even the gridlines, in their color. And which each zoomed out square being 60', that is one round of double movement for standard characters in dnd, making it easy to track movement on both scales.
Your channel is one of my favorites but I never got a notification for a new one dropping. Hopefully if I comment more the algorithm will recognize I love the channel.
Nice video man, come on every single slicer out there have your suportes cover with a single click. I just need some village scenery to print, any tips ou recommendations
I myself have a 2 scale system for DnD. Micro for treversing and to see if and when the party will encounter an enemy or key npc. And normal scale for fights with detailed battlefield to allow maximum imagination fighting.
I have scaled up and down. I didn't like how a human with a 5' sword could control 15' without taking a step so I went to 3' squares. 1:36. I have used ~1:100 (AKA15mm) for naval boarding actions and for town sieges I just move pins on a map. I use paper figures so printing at different scales is trivial.
I did the same for grid play, but my wargamer roots demand terrain and no grids! I also find that 3ft increments are close enough to meters that they work interchangeable at most DnD scales.
Another advantage of this being able to do more with a smaller 3d printer (like mine). If you get a small resin printer you are pretty limited when it comes to terrain and buildings, only able to do very small structures or slightly larger buildings if they are broken into small modular sections. At this scale, you could probably print just about any building on the smallest printer, many of them as a single piece.
Hm... This does give me ideas, more room, more terrain, easier painting... And to transfer it to digital tabletops I'd say you could just treat it that every square is 10ft when using the program dungeon draft locked at 50% scale on objects.
I vote for the 1cm scale! What I do is take a regular mini and carve it into a bust, attach the bust to a chess pawn, export a new stl, and auto supports. It's great. I actually get larger faces than the standard mini, which makes them easier to paint. The smaller minis work great on 1cm squares or 1 inch squares too. Also, travelling DM in Japan, so space is exactly why I started doing this. Thank you for the video!
I like that idea - perhaps add a few pinholes holes or magnets (whatever method seems preferable) so that same goblin bust's pawn base can have the bow clipped to it and clearly be an archer, or the spear, shield etc - so when you have the horde each one is more unique, and its more informative of their abilities. Also works great for the player character - they just get some new epic weapon, a visual representation can be subbed in for whatever they previously had - perhaps even a spot to indicate if they are wearing their armor (as what DM doesn't occasionally manage to ambush the party while they sleep).
@@lostinlymbo13 Glad you like it, for my part I'd not considered the small bust approach, and I think that is pretty damn cool (one I think I might implement into a roving DM's kit - so you can easily carry a small horde of everything hostile and a few slightly generic 'hero'/villager type for each race). Though as most of my games are online with Fantasy Grounds VTT or just theater of the mind in video chat, and I don't mind the bigger 28mm mini - lots of fun customizing you can do to a whole mini at that scale when you have the space its not been a big deal for me, so maybe I never will try it, but still it sounds awsome...
Hmm, also just printed two kings of war armies in 10mm. I could play epic high level army battles in dnd now 🤔 crafting nature terrain in that small scale works fine for me. Need to try buildings from scratch.
Been messing around with this concept for a while now. I've mostly been merging 10mm with 28mm scale. I think my best example of this was a recent encounter, where a "battle tortoise" was used for "10 mm" scale despite being 28 mm scale. What I did was using some epic sized infantry to fight the turtoise, I tread the turtoise to be a "battleship" level threat, and the party through some Windwaker Catapult logic, launched themselves *onto* the turtoise which was being operated by kobolds. They quickly swept the kobolds operating the cannons mounted on the turtoise, and yea, it was pretty fun :) Edit: the 2 battles were fought on separate areas on my table. I thankfully have a 4 x 6 ft table so it was a matter of using up about 20% of it for the tortoise fight, and the remaining 80% for the 28mm scale where I used pre-existing terrain and the players regular models for the fight on its back. Edit 2: if you want to reference the battle tortoise, it was the one made by mz4250, the one that has an entire village on it's back (huts).
I ended up doing something similar for a halo themed zombicide I was working on. It did allow for some pretty cool scale pieces and was cheap on the resin requirements too. but in the end I went back to 28mm for 2 main reasons. 1 was because I wanted to paint some Halo miniatures and the tiny ones just weren't doing it for me. 2nd was that that if we wanted to have a couple drinks while playing the game I didn't need someone knocking over half the board trying to move their tiny figures around. So 28mm scale won out in the end but man the resin costs for tiny miniatures was astronomically cheaper and allowed for giant set pieces.
Looking at the two videos and the respective comments I have to say...storm on a teacup! As a historical gamer I, an my colleagues, have no problems whatsoever going between 6mm and 28mm with 20mm (1:72) as our preferred standard. Look at some of our painting techniques and you'll see just how easy and detailed you can be in ANY scale. Remember, where there's a will there's a relative...err...way.
I'll admit, one of the few benefits from being forced to run digitally, has been I can have maps as large as I need. But if ever I get to do in person games again, this is useful, especially shrinking the scale.
This is an interesting idea and I can definitely see the use in specific encounters like dragon fights where having half a town mapped out at once helps make the fight much more cinematic and real. At the same time, I've already got so many minis and terrain for both wargaming and D&D at the standard scale (which I'll refer to as 1" because that's the grid size and default base size). It would be a herculean undertaking to 3d print my entire existing collection over again in 10mm scale, not to mention that with wargaming I would need to also provide my friends (who do not have 3d printers) with copies of their respective armies in the same scale. I appreciate that it has its benefits for specific situations or people, but for me it would be far too large of a project to realistically undertake.
Every collection starts somewhere. For what it's worth, you can print a TON of 10mm minis at once on any resin printer. It uses up a sneeze worth of resin.
I love the concept but it really doesn't work when you introduce X factors like players with low dexterity, poor vision and the overall chaos caused by switching to a much smaller scale.
How easy have 10mm been to move in a tight dungeon environment? Logically 10mm seems like the way to go, but my test prints feel, small and fragile in my big fingers, what has your experience been?
started into the hobby just a while ago, and now with a 3D printer i just went for it. I'm going for 16 mm, for keeping a little bit more detail, and i like it! Glad i stombled upon your video, but a little sad i did only after spending my bucks for 28 and 32 mm minis. Anyway sending you kind regards and a like!
this is a good idea, when warhammer old world comes out im printing at 1/2.54 the standard size, will be easy to convert ranges, 12cm instead of 12inch, and smaller board for standard games means i wont need to set the books on chairs, can actually have table space, and now i can play the full 6x4 table at a smaller scale for a massive game that would be the equivalent of 15x10
You've really lit a fire under me! I love the idea of going smaller, and this is convincing me to try it on my printer (and hey, I get to repurpose all my 28mm monsters and animals as Giant variants!). There's some great recommendations in the comments that I'm writing down, and I want to throw in for BriiteMinis as a possible STL source. They sculpt supportless figures intended to work well on FDM printers, and the art is stylistic enough to where I think it will still shine when scaled down. They have a bunch of free STLs on Thingiverse and even more on their Patreon. My mind is buzzing now! There's so many possibilities here.
As someone who loves my minis and sees them as fuel for the imagination and not generic pieces to mark movement, I'm confused by this argument in D&D, just play theater of the mind and your scale increases to infinity! JK, if you are playing a tactical game that really depends on the scale then this is great, for D&D I think using your imagination works better than shrinking everything down to almost make miniatures an afterthought. If you can't see the detail and art of the mini because it is so small it begs the question of why even use minis, why not just buy tokens and play in a grid with theater of the mind creating the images of the characters and monsters?
This is definitely worth considering for people freshly coming into this part of the hobby, and I generally like the idea of removing the shackles of the hard grid system anyway. But this might be a hard sell for people who are already heavily invested, in time/material/money, into the standard scale. Though, I guess there is merit in keeping those as well anyway. Like for fights in smaller spaces like buildings. You could even use the small scale for larger strategic battls as an overmap, and switch to the standard scale if a character hops into buildings that would be a bit too difficult to manipulate. Also so you don't have to design every building in the overmap with a removable roof and detailed interior. You could just use your standard magnetized assets and standard scale furniture to flesh them out on the fly. But yeah, I love the idea of smaller scaling, since it makes grand battles more manageable. Which in turn opens up the possibility of realistic sniper builds, without having some off-map character you have to remind people is still there. I might actually get to dust off my Edritch Spear/spell sniper/distant spell Warlock/sorcerer meme build.
Been trying to print my minis to this scale but the prints keep failing - they were originally 32mm scale. Is this a printer issue or could it be my choice of mini has too much detail for this scale so keeps failing? Most of them came pre-supported could this also be want is causing the issue - I'd assume they need different supports at that scale? Any suggestions on what I could do to make them work would be greatly appreciated :)
I do agree with almost everything in this video, EXCEPT for your take on miniature painting. I myself love to paint minis and have been for years, and sometimes painting at a smaller scale can be fun! But at a certain point it become very difficult to end up with good results which can really feel punishing. So my solution would be to have the regular scale and the smaller scale for particular encounters, an example, the normal size for a tight dungeon crawl, and the smaller size for a fight against a large creature such as a well, a dragon. This ensures a good result for miniature painters and gamers, I don’t have a fix for the “oh even more minis I have to paint!” debate lol.
Or, use tokens! (and your imagination!) You can change the scale on the fly! From a small tavern fight to large armies clash! You can keep your 28/32mm miniature in front of you as a reminder. More abstraction can let you do crasy stuff.
your points for larger scale battles are very much valid. Though at this scale, I'd rather not hastle with minis at all and just use a token. Because why bother if I don't see beautiful details and can't paint them properly. If I would DM a table with minis/grid I'd think about switching it up depending on the situation.
Our first printed minis were pretty good sized. A Minotaur and Leonin respectively. And while they look great, our next characters are scaled down significantly.
Awesome idea and execution. Unfortunately I'm thousands into 28-32mm scale at this point because I started as a wargamer. That said, I did use some mighty max toys at a smaller scale before wasaay back.
My painting skills are terrible, so I just bought a very large table (Table of Ultimate Gaming 4'x6') and use mostly pre-painted minis. It comfortably sits ten people for dining or me plus six for gaming.
