Transcript
Let’s see, I can pick up some XPS foam, get some ModPodge, cut it up with a craft knife, roll in some rock texture with balled up aluminum foil, maybe cut out a base of MDF or foam core, I can glue up some walls, maybe carve in some detail. Better get some balsa wood, I can make wood strips outta that, and even scribe in some extra wood grain detail. Okay, gotta make a roof, so maybe I’ll cut up some cereal boxes and use some scissors to trim out a row of shingle looking things. I can glue those to more foam core and that’ll make a good roof, and – oh, I forgot the windows. Right, okay, cut some windows into those foam core walls, and yeah I need a door. Okay I’ll cut that out of some foam core, strip off the outer layer of paper, scribe in some wood panelling and then I guess cut it into an arch? Yeah, then I gotta make an arch out of little bricks I can cut from the scrap XPS and glue those around the doorway … Or! I could just buy this.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we ponder useless things and argue about first world problems.
Like making or buying tabletop terrain.
There’s no TLDR for this one – and even if there was, you know it’d be at the end of the video anyway, so why are you even asking?
I think most of us have the same reaction to the question of “should I buy this particular thing or just make it myself?” That reaction being “Making it will be cheaper!” And sometimes, that’s true. Sometimes, it’s not, and sometimes it feels like it’s true when it actually isn’t. Confused? Good. Now I don’t feel so alone.
All us humans, I think we typically want two things: money and happiness. Whether those are misguided is a topic for another video. But I think the most valuable commodity in our human existence is time. We basically buy and sell time, trade it – all the time – without even realizing it. Or maybe just without acknowledging it. But we also sort of inherently equate Time with Free. And that’s a huge mistake. Like it’s super easy for us to just not consider what our time is worth because we labor under the delusion that we have an infinite amount of it. And I assure you, dear viewer, it’s the only thing we absolutely do not have an infinite amount of. And when I say the phrase, “what our time is worth”, the word worth, the word worth — the Rural Juror – when I say the word “Worth” I’m not limiting the meaning of the word worth to simply money. There are other things of value, some might say way more value, than ducats in the bank.
So, how often do you consciously include time in your decision-making process when considering how much something is worth? And the “something” doesn’t have be a consumable product, it could be an activity or time with another person, it could be a lot of things.
Now, I know there are a lotta people who do have a personality or cognitive process that allows them to really consider time when they are making decisions. I am not one of them. My friend Dan Adam of Paint All The Minis IS one of them. I literally marvel at his thought process sometimes when he explains to me how he thinks about or considers his hobby activities and purchases. And while I will never be able to think about things in the same way as he does, there’s definitely a few things I can learn from his perspective on things.
So let’s try to set up a few specific examples for today’s topic and see where they take us. First off, we need to set some parameters. I’m gonna say that there are three categories of purchasable terrain: Pre-painted and assembled; unpainted and unassembled; and 3d printable. Now there are folks who have 3d printers at home and folks who do not, like me – and yes, it is in fact all about me – so those of us who do not have printers might buy printed terrain from places like Etsy or whatever. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m gonna disregard pre-painted terrain and assume that painting will have to be done for all of our comparison subjects today.
So for test case number one, let’s use a medieval townhouse sorta thing. Here are three similar examples, one from the Ferrari of tabletop terrain, Dwarven Forge, another from TTCombat, a laser-cut MDF kit, and this last is a random item from a random Etsy seller. Note that this particular item is printed on an SLA printer, filament printer, so it’s not resin and therefore it’s much cheaper than a good resin print but also has those lithography print lines that I personally kinda hate.
Now the Dwarven Forge item is a set of three smaller houses, but they are also custom-buildable out of all these magnetic pieces, so you can make one larger structure out of it. I think it’s close enough to the other two insofar as the amount of detail or usable space on the table to be a good comparison. I have the TTCombat model and I already built it, it took a couple hours and some wood glue, pretty straightforward but still, it does require assembly. The printed model has the most detailed interiors by far, so that’s a plus for that one. But we can already see a range of trade-offs versus cost. The TTCombat MDF model is probably the least detailed of all three but that laser etched surface does have fine detail that does show up under primer and paint.
I got a video on that right here. And yes, I almost did it, I almost said pa-chow.
The printed model has better detail than the Dwarven Forge set and even though it’s got that annoying print texture, to be honest, painted up and on the table, it’s probably fine. I’m just weird and ornery about micro details that don’t really matter. So $136 bucks for the Dwarven Forge set, main advantage being you can rebuild the set in a number of ways. $50 for a printed building with max detail. Or around $20 for the MDF kit. We’re ignoring the shipping parameter ‘cause … well, I’m pseudo-scientific at best. Personally, I like the MDF kit and the printed one over the Dwarven Forge set – kinda for aesthetics but really for the price versus what you get. I think the printed one is my favorite, but the price tag of both it and the Dwarven Forge set definitely make me consider building my own. Whereas the TTCombat set, to me, is just a no-brainer.
So let’s think about that for a minute. To build something similar to these ourselves, we’re gonna need some XPS foam – very doable, but still an associated cost. Now you can get a 4×8 sheet of 1/2” XPS, which is probably what I’d use for a building like this, for around $30. We’d only be using maybe a quarter of it for this build – yes, maybe less, but I’m the builder in this example and I’m 100% guaranteed to make many mistakes by measuring once and cutting 50 times, so whatever, just go make your mistake-free builds over there and leave me to my misery. So we’ll use say $8 worth of XPS foam.
Now someone’s gonna shout out, “Just use foam core from the dollar store, you numbskull!” And your observation is valid. I am indeed known at times to be numb of skull, but I also, personally, hate building with foam core. It’s just, I don’t know, to me it just reeks of disposability. Stuff built out of foam core feels weightless and impermanent. Maybe because in a lot of industries foam core is what you use for mockups, not finished models. That’s why I like Sintra and plastic and even the XPS foam, which due to it’s density over foam core, feels a lot more permanent. I just want a like a certain feel from my models but yes, dollar store foam core would be much cheaper and is a completely viable alternative.
So we’ve got $8 of XPS. We’ll need something to make like the rock or brick base for the building, I think I’d scribe that into panels of Sintra but thin sheets of XPS could work. Balsa strips or strips of scribed Sintra could work for the exposed lumber beam details and more scribed XPS would work for the lower floor of the building. We gotta design the upper floor and engineer how both the upper floor and the roof are going to sit on the lower floor and be easily removable. That all probably involves some more strips of whatever main material we’re using and a whole bunch of time measuring and fitting and generally doing design and build work. The roof I would base out of large pieces of Sintra, but of course YOU can cut it outta card or foam core or whatever nonsense you wanna use.
You guys know I’m just kidding with the sarcastic bits here – I do truly dislike using foam core myself but I know that’s literally my own issue in my own head, there’s nothing wrong and probably lots of things right with using foam core and it’s definitely versatile and cheap.
Now the shingles for the roof could either be painted on – lame – or cut out of stacked strips of card, which in this case, I think that’s a good use for card, or, if you wanted to be a little bit insane, you could hand-cut 500 shingles out of styrene and … no, no one’s gonna do that. But still, even just using card to trim out the shingle details, that’s a good chunk of time and some fiddly model-making work. Then of course you got some glue cost, that’s no big deal unless you’re using CA glue, but it’s still negligible. And then there’s probably going to be a ModPodge undercoat to seal the XPS foam et cetera. So I’m just throwing a number out there, maybe all told, we’re gonna spend around $15 on this model counting every bit of material used. Maybe it’s less, maybe it’s like $10 worth of materials.
So right off the bat, even if we’re really conservative on the materials cost estimate, we’re already at least in the ballpark of that MDF kit price. And now we need to factor in TIME. Now, plenty of you out there might be able to knock this build out in a day. I would say if you’re an experienced model builder, and I mean in this hobby type of model building, and especially if you’ve built something like this before, my guess is you could build a structure similar to our three examples in, I don’t know, couple of hours? Just a guess, and I’m assuming a certain quality level here too. If you’re a solid scratch builder and you’ve never built a house like this before, my guess is this is probably a full 8 hour day of work. This might be the category I fall into, but I haven’t scratch built stuff in a long time. Now of course, as hobbyists, we would probably work on it an hour or two a day until it was done. But let’s say it takes a day to build a model similar to our purchasable examples both in detail quality, an interior, removable floors and roof. So how much is a day of work worth to you?
For some of us, the cost savings versus the day of work is a totally viable option. Some of us might think burning a day of work in lieu of spending $50 is nuts. Some of us might just wanna build our own model just because we wanna build our own model. For me, in my current financial situation, I would not by the Dwarven Forge set, but I would definitely consider the $50 printed model. And of course I already bought the MDF kit. The MDF kits, especially from TTCombat due to their pricing, really are almost no-brainer must-haves, in my opinion. They’re just too cost effective, even when comparing their seemingly lack of detail against more detailed but more expensive models. And you can always add some detail to the MDF structures! And to be even more honest, I think TTCombat has like some super competitive pricing compared to other MDF kit makers. I’m not putting down other MDF kit makers, there’s a bunch of awesome stuff out there that is super cool and a lotta designs that are not manufactured by TTCombat.
But a day of work vs a day of free time to do other things you might want to or have to do, that is the question. And $20 or $50, for me, is kinda hard to trade off for 8 hours of my time.
All right, let’s consider another test case: ruins. A lotta times the same ruins can be used for both sci-fi and fantasy games, so right there, we have some added value. Here’s where I kinda default to “I’ll just build ruins myself” because I never think about them needing too much detail. But that said, there are some pretty cool purchasable ruins out there. Sets like these printed ruins – and these are PLA resin, not filament, so even better – the detail in these, and these from Dwarven Forge – I keep bringing up Dwarven Forge I’m just trying to have a set comparison, a set of, a comparison set that we return to. Anyway, these ruins are not something I could recreate easily at the home hobby desk. In fact, I would almost argue that these types of ruins, with all this sculpted detail, are maybe worth more of our hard-earned ducats than those buildings we just talked about. I mean, a building is something I can get my head around and actually believe I can make on my own, but the architectural details in these sets, there’s no way I’d be able to craft those on my own versus buying them.
Now these kinds of ruins, this sorta rough hewn columns and rocky terrain type stuff, these are the kinds of things I think make home crafting a vastly better choice. Using just trimmings from other projects, you can knock out scatter terrain ruin pieces like this in like twenty minutes. Not counting painting. You can make walls outta XPS, columns outta cardboard tubes with filler slapped over ‘em, or odd pieces you find laying around, they don’t have to be pretty, they’re so fast and pretty easy to make they’re just pretty much disposable.
All right, last test case – let’s use something big, something highly detailed and maybe a bit too stacked for this conversation but, you know, let’s roll with it. How about a medieval pirate ship? Now there are MDF ship models, and to be honest, they are probably the most game-friendly insofar as being able to put miniatures on them and move ‘em around, but admit it, they’re just not the coolest looking things. But then you have some cool printed ships to choose from. And they have price tags. But for me this is another example of there being no way I would ever try to build a ship on my own instead of buying one of these, I mean unless I just really wanted to build my own ship. I mean, this one’s between $90 and a $120 depending on the scale you get – there’s no way I could scratch build something like this in any reasonable time frame that would make home crafting a viable alternative to just buying this model. And I would buy it in 32mm scale.
Now there are all kinds of other examples – like resin trees for instance. I don’t think I’d ever buy trees like this, I would just make some out of flock or the cheap model railroad trees you can get on Amazon. I’ve even got a few Woodland Scenics tree kits, and while those aren’t necessarily cheap, they’re cheaper by far than stuff like this. Again, this is all just personal preference!
We didn’t even talk about like dungeon tiles for DnD, which is kinda what Dwarven Forge started out their company with. I think Matt Mercer exclusively uses Dwarven Forge terrain for Critical Role, but you know, they have a production budget. I think dungeon tiles are probably best made at the home hobby desk, cause there are a bunch of cheap materials and simple crafting techniques shown off by a lot of excellent hobby channels.
Or, you know, you can just draw on a twenty dollar dry erase battle map with a two dollar marker, which is, honestly, what I do most of the time. But I know that only works for tabletop rpgs, it’s not an option for wargames.
So, I guess in summary, what I’ve been getting at is that a lot of the time, buying some terrain is kinda preferable to crafting it, at least in my opinion.
If you guys have any suggestions for particular sellers online or brands of purchasable terrain you like or other ideas on how to craft or build terrain faster or cheaper at home, you know where to drop ‘em.
So go build something! Or maybe … go buy something! Yeah, that does seem a little weird to say out loud.
Anyway, see ya!