When Is Good Terrain Bad?
For many people tabletop war games can be a very visual hobby. I’m not a proponent of having to paint to play but there’s no denying that painted models and nice terrain can really dress up a table. Sometimes, though, well crafted terrain can add difficulties to play, or worse yet be damaging to models!
My most recent run-in with good terrain gone bad was after DieCon when I discovered a few of my models with decent sized chips in them. Most of them only came out for the four rounds of Hardcore, so they hadn’t seen much play. The likely culprit is the play surfaces themselves – 4×4 foam table tops with sand glued down for texture. While the sand drybrushed well to make the table look nicer, it also had the tendency to turn the tabletop into sand paper and damage models that happened to topple in play.
I like a nicely terrained table but sometimes I’d just rather have something that’s more playable. Hills that are both steep and tall make placing models along their edges difficult. Forest templates that are warped – no matter how nicely flocked – are unstable surfaces for figures. There are actually a number of potential pitfalls for forests in particular… for example trees that are permanently affixed to the template base can interfere with placing miniatures.
Is a finely built yet potentially damaging piece of terrain simply analogous to the fantastically converted model that for whatever reason suffers when it comes to playability on the table? There are a number of Warmachine and Hordes models that suffer similarly. A prime example is the Seraph, which hangs over its base so far that it can be difficult to maneuver models around it on the tabletop. Should gameplay suffer for art? Should art suffer for gameplay?
I enjoy fielding painted miniatures whenever I can but I find myself unfazed whether I’m playing on particleboard, cloth, or a flocked tabletop… whether I’m using a fantastically painted and sculpted piece of terrain or felt cut to size. Does this mean I have a double standard when it comes to tabletop aesthetics?