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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 9, 2022 3:13:58 GMT -6
Can you play D&D (or a retro-clone) using stuff from the Dollar Store? Of course, free rules are available online, but everything else needs to come from the store. Here's one way to do it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdRrvn6G4Bs
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 9, 2022 12:55:21 GMT -6
Also, while it's not the Dollar Store, your local pet shop may have some useful terrain in the aquarium section.
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Post by rsdean on Jun 9, 2022 13:30:50 GMT -6
Also, while it's not the Dollar Store, your local pet shop may have some useful terrain in the aquarium section. Almost certainly. The Dollar Store was pretty amusing…
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Post by Starbeard on Jun 9, 2022 14:12:31 GMT -6
That's a really neat video, I like the setup he made.
I enjoy going to office supply shops as much or even more than game shops. They have all the stuff you really want for setting up games, whereas game shops just have minis.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2022 14:14:21 GMT -6
Haven't tried the Dollar Store but I did buy a lot of gaming dice on sale at Wal-Mart a while back, which surprised me because I've never seen them there in my hometown. (Still no RPG rules for sale there, but it's a start.)
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 9, 2022 15:52:27 GMT -6
Cheap miniatures and terrain continue to bedevil me in my "playing rpgs on the cheap" thought experiment. I've seen videos saying miniatures are cheaper when you buy a D&D board game. That's true that the cost is cheaper than buying the same number miniatures individually, but the games themselves aren't exactly cheap.
My best solution so far is using paper miniatures mounted on fender washers or binder clips. You can print them if you have a printer. You can draw them as well if you like your drawings. Tokens are another way to go, but not my ideal solution. Maybe the dollar store will have some usable miniatures.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2022 16:48:40 GMT -6
Dollar General and other big chain stores often sell big tubs of plastic bugs and dinosaurs with lots of cheap plastic terrain in them. Safari animals, too. You could easily run a "lost land" type D&D campaign with those for the fauna/flora, and maybe something like lego figures for the PCs and NPCs.
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Post by Starbeard on Jun 9, 2022 19:19:48 GMT -6
We played plenty of RPGs and wargames using Legos.
You can find bags or tubs of cheap plastic knights, as long as you don't mind them being a larger size than your typical 28mm figure.
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 9, 2022 20:24:23 GMT -6
As long as they scale together okay, I don't mind if the miniatures are a bit larger than 28 mm. I still have my old 25 mm and 15 mm stuff anyway.
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Post by captainjapan on Jun 10, 2022 0:04:32 GMT -6
I did not know about the grid-backed wrapping paper. I will definitely be using that and markers to draw table maps in the future. The value would be unbeatable.
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Post by Starbeard on Jun 10, 2022 0:24:06 GMT -6
Gridded wrapping paper is the bee's knees! Ikea also sells them for pretty cheap, I believe.
I have a big Chessex mat, but the wrapping paper can't be beat if you want to have lots of maps drawn out ready to go.
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 10, 2022 1:53:35 GMT -6
The gridded wrapping paper also works well if you craft dungeon tiles.
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Post by Finarvyn on Jun 10, 2022 5:54:31 GMT -6
You want gridded paper? I think the inside of Arby's roast beef sandwich paper is still hex grids. At least, it was back in the day. Quick non-greasy meal and a map to boot!
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 10, 2022 10:02:45 GMT -6
Hey, we have standards here!
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Post by captainjapan on Jun 11, 2022 0:07:57 GMT -6
Mmm, roast beef!
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Post by rsdean on Jun 11, 2022 4:20:22 GMT -6
I now want to stop in at the nearest dollar store and see what’s on offer this weekend. I realize this is the OD&D forum but I had a look around at available free RPGs other than 5e Basic after watching the video. My top alternative choices : Swords and Wizardy (for the OSR flavor), Fate Core/Accelerated (for the flexibility), and earlier versions of Barbarians of Lemuria (for the streamlined mechanics using only d6s). Fate would be easier with some speical d6s; the minimal cost version is to mark up white d6s with a permanent marker. I haven’t tried it, but I presume my local library would let me print out rules from the net, if I didn’t have a device? Wonder what that costs these days … ? This bucket of useful plastic USED to be available at Toys R Us: www.littleweirdos.net/2013/12/true-legends-mythical-warriors-bucket.html
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tedopon
Newly-Registered User
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Post by tedopon on Jun 11, 2022 5:26:12 GMT -6
Almost all of my terrain I made from literal trash. When I'm dead it will likely be sent to the landfill decades late...I'm just providing all of it with a stay of execution.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2022 5:43:41 GMT -6
I now want to stop in at the nearest dollar store and see what’s on offer this weekend. I realize this is the OD&D forum but I had a look around at available free RPGs other than 5e Basic after watching the video. My top alternative choices : Swords and Wizardy (for the OSR flavor), Fate Core/Accelerated (for the flexibility), and earlier versions of Barbarians of Lemuria (for the streamlined mechanics using only d6s). Fate would be easier with some speical d6s; the minimal cost version is to mark up white d6s with a permanent marker. I haven’t tried it, but I presume my local library would let me print out rules from the net, if I didn’t have a device? Wonder what that costs these days … ? This bucket of useful plastic USED to be available at Toys R Us: www.littleweirdos.net/2013/12/true-legends-mythical-warriors-bucket.htmlIMO if you can find a free rules pdf for an rpg online that's "close enough". It's not technically Dollar Store but my interpretation of this challenge is that you only pay money at the Dollar Store. If you can get something free online, it doesn't violate the spirit. Most of not all of the good OD&D clones or hacks have a free pdf or SRD online, and a lot of the other systems you mentioned generally have an art-free or lite version for free, so there you go.
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 11, 2022 13:15:56 GMT -6
Those plastic miniatures may be better for kids than 28 mm miniatures, at least in terms of visuals and handling. If you must paint the miniatures, buy craft paints. Some are as cheap as 50 cents per bottle.
Some items may be available different parts of the year. I saw a video where the poster converted some skeletons found in the dollar store. They were larger than 28 mm, but they may scale well with the miniature bucket in the last post. They may even be available all year round. I know several places sell plastic spiders and other bugs on Halloween. I use a couple of them for my 28 mm games.
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Post by rsdean on Jun 12, 2022 11:38:51 GMT -6
I needed to go out to replenish my coffee supply this afternoon, and stopped at two different brands of dollar stores on the way home. It would have been a pretty grim day to be attempting this challenge, as you wouldn’t have been able to source even 6-sided dice. Miniatures would have been extremely challenging as well…
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bobjester0e
Level 4 Theurgist
DDO, DCC, or more Lost City map work? Oh, the hardship of making adult decisions! ;)
Posts: 182
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Post by bobjester0e on Jun 12, 2022 12:59:23 GMT -6
There are a few different "Dollar" stores around here. Dollar Store, Dollar General, Dollar Tree are the big 3. I picked up a knock-off set of Lego pirates - a set of 5 pirates for idr - a buck or two? They also had other Lego figure sets. IDR what the other sets had. Cowboys, or wizards, most likely. Years ago, KREO (or is it KRE-O?), a Lego knock off company sold actual branded D&D Lego sets. A castle with knights and a band of orcs with a sorcerer leader and a working tension spring catapult. Actual Lego 3-in-1 creator series has a Lego castle (31120) for (gulp) $99 at Mal*mart. (I picked up 2 sets in the last 2 months because I like Lego castles...) (I'll probably pick up a 3rd in a few months because I have to build all 3 designs...) WotC is getting in the D&D hobby crafting grift too, as I saw a build your own diorama set for the usual inflated ego price that WotC sets their products at. A box with craft materials, Exacto knives, paints etc., that you can buy at Hobby Lobby or Mal*Mart for the same amount or cheaper - if you know how to budget & time your buys. Like, I'll settle for my old X-acto knife set with old blades, but buy as much foam-core boards as I can, and next trip, I'll get something to color them with, if I can't find the kids' old crayons or paint sets. Then, last trip, I definitely needed a new set of X-acto blades, so got them. I know I have at least twice as much material for the price of WotC's one set of materials. I save the paper mâché & styrofoam formed pieces from appliance boxes, and now have a full city scape for The Lost City. Still working on minis. I have over 10,000 minis now, but I can never find the one I need to represent in time for the game. So, I am in favor of switching to color-coded meeples, or meeples with simple Tom Wham style art to represent any monster or character. That will cut my hunt time down to a minute or less whereas my miniature storage and filing system continues to gather dust in the basement and back rooms. I have devised some flat foam-core tokens using Tom Wham's Mertwig's Maze gamefolio character punch-outs and the character card standies from my original Talisman boardgame, affixed them all on 8-9 sheets of paper & scanned into copier; glued the copied prints (all in black & white now - no color) to a foam-core poster board and started to cut them out. Got about 30 cut out so far, before the X-acto blade went dull, and my fingers ached from eventually pressing so hard. The Talisman figures are too big (over 35 mm tall, I suspect) and cut them in half to use the top halves as hex shaped tokens instead. Not exactly what I wanted, but its all a work in progress. This is what hobby-gaming is, after all!
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bobjester0e
Level 4 Theurgist
DDO, DCC, or more Lost City map work? Oh, the hardship of making adult decisions! ;)
Posts: 182
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Post by bobjester0e on Jun 12, 2022 13:02:56 GMT -6
A Hobby Lobby buy from a couple years back for around $20 or so: a foot tall working trebuchet!
Made all of wood with bits of metal fasteners & even comes with a squeeze tube of wood glue. They leave it up to you to paint it to your heart's desire. I got out my felt-tipped colored markers and wrote orc graffiti all over it.
It's a bit large for D&D scaled minis though, but its still a nice game related diversion when I want to knock minis off the table with bits of clay or ping pong balls from the next room over.
Load the bucket with coins or knuckle-bone sized rocks (or dice!) and the shot strap with your projectile of choice - a small rock, marble, ping-pong ball, plastic round rock from a terrain set, 20 sider, etc.
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 15, 2022 2:50:27 GMT -6
More dollar store stuff, this time involving a bit of crafting.
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Post by coffee on Jun 15, 2022 6:47:37 GMT -6
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Post by Starbeard on Jun 15, 2022 10:58:26 GMT -6
I love those goofy repurposing projects. Boxed up somewhere in England I have a couple of spaceship fleets that cost me something around £2.50.
The galactic patrol fleet is just a bag of drywall screw anchors sprayed silver or gold and highlighted to look like rocket ships, while the green aliens are flying saucers made out of screw caps and drops of puffy paint for the canopies and light fixtures. The third fleet was never finished, that was a pirate warlord fleet cobbled from bits and bobs collected from all over the house.
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skars
Level 6 Magician
Posts: 407
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Post by skars on Jun 15, 2022 15:23:41 GMT -6
There is also 1.5" hexagon wrapping paper available as well. In my opinion if you can get your hands on some of the lego heroica products second hand you will have everything you need. There is even a lego d6 heh
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Post by rredmond on Jun 17, 2022 6:55:04 GMT -6
Bought a single set of those dice, before Dollar Tree went from $1 to $1.25, and regretted not buying more when I saw them. They roll fine, and they did have the packaging suggesting a more sparkly dice. But all were the same brown color
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Post by coffee on Jun 20, 2022 7:11:55 GMT -6
I bought a few sets. You have to watch the quality, though; one set had two 10s dice instead of one 10s and one 1s for the percent dice. And another was the other way around, had both 1s dice. But that was easy enough to fix, just swap.
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Post by tkdco2 on Jun 23, 2022 4:17:16 GMT -6
The YouTuber who goes by Blandco has made several videos on finding stuff in the Goodwill Store. Note that he tends to find parts to kitbash miniatures and terrain.
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