There is only so much you can learn about a subject by reading up on it or watching YouTube videos. So once I actually started 3D printing sample sets of Dragonlock and True Tiles, I learned a lot that these sources hadn't taught me.

First, the cost estimate I had for 20 to 40 cents per tile is a bit too optimistic. A simple Dragonlock tile with one wall weighs already 20 grams, at medium quality with just 10% infill. While you theoretically can get 3D printer filament for 1 cent per gram ($10 per kg), that would be very shitty material that I wouldn't recommend using. So the higher end of the estimate, 40 cents per tile, is actually the lower end of what I think printing tiles costs: 40 to 80 cents per tile for the Dragonlock system.

However I won't use Dragonlock. I don't like the thick, high walls. I can see how those look great on a photo of a large dungeon you assembled. But for actually playing the high walls block the view on the figurines. And they take up half a space, so you end up with a room lined with half spaces on which you can't really put figurines. I much prefer the True Tiles system, which has low walls, and squares of 1.25", of which the walls take only 0.25", so there is still room for a miniature next to the wall or even in the corners. That also makes the tiles lighter, which lowers both printing cost and time.

The locking system of the Dragonlock system also turned out to be not optimal: You need to print tiles with rectangular holes in the side. Which means that the top of the hole isn't supported, so it sagged and I needed to clear the holes manually to be able to fit a clip in. The True Tiles sample set prints tiles that are very flat, and can then be glued on a OpenLOCK compatible base. The holes on the base are open towards the top, so you don't get the sagging problem.

But then I bought several sets of True Tiles, and found out that the sample set isn't representative of the system: Not all the tiles in the sets are so thin that they can be glued on an OpenLOCK base. For example the tiles that have both floor and water use a height difference of a few millimeters to indicate which surface is the water. And so the tiles of that set already have a base which is as thick as a Dragonlock or OpenLOCK base. You could still glue another base under it, but then your tiles become very heavy.

So I wasn't really happy with any of the locking systems. But then I thought that maybe I don't need one: Those 2 x 2 squares (2.5" x 2.5" in the case of True Tiles) are solid enough to not move around a lot when assembled without locks. I'm too lazy to drill holes in all tiles to add a little magnet, which is a fancy method recommended on YouTube. So I think I'll just use them without any locking system at all. Which means having to transport a dungeon as a pile of tiles and assembling it on the spot, but that has advantages as well as disadvantages, so I am okay with that. And I will use the True Tiles with the thicker base, both for stability, and to enable me using the water tiles.

The one downside of that decision is that even a True Tile with the low wall gains some weight when printed with a thicker base. The thin tiles are just 8 grams, but the thick base tiles end up at twice that, 16 grams. Only 20% less than the Dragonlock tiles. And I am using a high end material which costs 4 cents per gram. It is the Z-ABS from Zortrax, the company that made my printer. Not cheap, but really nice quality, and there are standardized settings for the Zortrax material in the slicer software, so I don't need to fiddle around with the parameters. Also the thicker base and my not-so-ugly print settings mean that the print job of 4 single-wall tiles I started this morning takes 9 hours to print. In other words I can do two print jobs like that per day, one while I am at work, the other at night. It'll take me some weeks and some spools of material before I have a nice large collection.

My only remaining problem is color. I'm printing in "warm grey", which looks nice enough for stone floors and tiles. Doors don't look so well in grey, but they are clip-on, so I can print them in another color. Where it gets tricky is the water tiles, which have both stone and water on them. My 3D printer in mono-color, so they are going to be all grey. The obvious solution is to paint the water part blue with some acrylic paint. But that is something I will have to learn and acquire the materials for, I never painted miniatures before.

I am not alone with my hobby of 3D printing things for tabletop games. It is the beauty of the internet that even with a “1 in a million” hobby or interest there are enough millions of people out there to find a like-minded community. There are YouTube channels and subreddits on printing miniatures for games. And looking at these one finds that besides miniatures, a lot of people are 3D printing scenery, and that there are multiple systems of printable dungeon tiles out there.

Even before 3D printing there was already a market for boxes of 3D plastic tiles, which unlike their 2D cardboard tile relatives have upright walls, doors, and similar features. I never bought any, because those 3D tiles are expensive, and then you always are short of the special tiles you wanted for your dungeon, like diagonal walls. 3D printing tiles thus makes a lot of sense, because if you only count the cost of the filament, you can print tiles for one tenth of the cost of the commercial ones. And you can print exactly the tiles you need for your dungeon. While I don’t paint my miniatures, I could easily get a spool of grey filament for $20 and print dozens of “stone” tiles that would look good even unpainted. So why don’t I?

I do actually own some boxes of cardboard tiles from back when Wizards of the Coast promoted those for 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Some 4E adventures came with floor plans designed for those tiles. In the end I rarely used them: They made for boring grey scenery, and didn’t show most of the stuff that players were actually interested in, like chests and other furniture. The walls and floors are usually the least interesting parts of a dungeon. I got more colorful, better battle maps with more features by designing them in software like Cartographer / Dungeon Designer and then printing them on a color laser printer. Some I even had printed on posters, which made for great if expensive maps.

Currently I tend to use a tablet for dungeon maps. Using a standard paint program I load the map in the background layer, and create a black foreground layer hiding the map. As the players explore, I erase that part of the foreground, revealing the dungeon map behind. That way I can play through large dungeons with very little work. However when there is a battle, I still need to draw the room with wet erase marker on a Chessex battle map to place the figurines. So that part I could possibly replace with 3D printed dungeon tiles.

However the tiles are mostly good for the old school dungeons we used to draw on graph paper. There is even a system called True Tiles that specifically is made for dungeons in which a wall is just a line between two squares on a graph paper, which in reality would be unpractically thin. The system needs to fudge and make the squares 1.25 inch wide to have space for quarter-of-an-inch walls and still leave space for 1 inch base miniatures. Most tile systems use half-inch walls which only leave half spaces next to the wall, which then doesn’t correspond to the drawn map. Many of the dungeons in the adventures I am currently running are far more complex, like irregular cavern walls. While cavern tiles certainly exist, one would need a lot more different tiles to create caverns that feel organic and not just rectangular.

Even the first dungeon in the 5th edition starter kit is a cavern with clever use of elevation and irregular walls. I don’t even think the gently sloped tiles one would need for the main corridor even exist. As I am not skilled enough to sculpt the special features, I would be unable to even reproduce this introductory dungeon faithfully. The second dungeon has more rectangular features, but also has a crevasse that would be impossible to print. So dungeon tiles are not an universal solution to dungeon mapping and creating battle maps. They might have some use for more rectangular dungeons, of which there still are many in the published adventures.

One thing to consider is the time requirement. Home 3D printing is not a fast technology. At the highest quality a simple 2x2 squares tile with a straight wall takes 6 hours to print. If I want to print faster, I would need to compromise on the quality. My old printer wasn’t very good at printing several pieces at once, but on my new printer I could easily print four 2x2 tiles at once and just leave it running for a full day. Still it would take me a week or more to make a set big enough for a trial run. But maybe for floors and wall I don't need the highest quality, and the prints should be easy enough to succeed with not too many fine features.

So in the end I got myself a spool of "warm grey" Zortrax Z-ABS and will try out printing various tile systems like Dragonlock and True Tiles out. I'll just start printing the free sample sets first. Then when I decided on my favorite system I can still buy sets of files, a typical dungeon set costing just under $10. I promise that once I got a dungeon together, I'll post photos.

I can't draw. That is to say that if I try to draw a face or a person or an animal, I can't get the proportions to look right. It is something I simply never learned. And as I can't draw in 2D, I can't sculpt in 3D either. I can use simple character editors like Hero Forge or Desktop Hero 3D, but I'm no good with software like Blender. Which means that predominantly I am using 3D models that have been sculpted by other people. Mostly Miguel Zavala, who pretty much sculpted every D&D monster from 5th edition (see here, here, and here), and made them freely available to the world. Thank you, Miguel! So because he allows us to use his files, there is no copyright problem in my production of D&D miniatures.

Now I met another DM from my role-playing club, and he asked me whether I could print him some figurines for his Star Wars campaign. As I was just testing my new printer, it was a good opportunity to try some stuff, so I produced an X-Wing, a TIE fighter, and a bunch of stormtroopers. I found the models for free on places like Thingiverse. However when I was finished I had some doubts about the legality of what I just did. We are all aware that there is a huge difference between the ability of getting a file for free on the internet, and that content actually being free of copyright.

I don't know where these Star Wars files on Thingiverse are coming from. Some had somewhat smudged surface features, which looked as if somebody had 3D-scanned a model released by some toy company and turned it into an .stl file. Others were probably using software like Blender, but clearly following images from the Star Wars universe, which are presumably copyrighted. Disney is unlikely to come after me if I print a few toy stormtroopers. But there are companies that make their money by producing figurines for games, e.g. Games Workshop or Reaper Miniatures. What if somebody scanned their miniatures and made those files public, or started to selling slightly lower quality miniatures for a fraction of the cost? A $2.99 Reaper miniature could be reproduced for less than 10% of that cost on a typical home 3D printer. After painting you'd barely see the difference. After knock-off Prada handbags, we could have knock-off tabletop miniatures. On the other hand the companies making miniatures could actually make money from producing the .stl files themselves and selling you the file for personal use instead of the miniature, if they weren't too afraid of the files getting copied.

I am not a lawyer. The kind of information I found on the internet suggests that copyright hasn't caught up with 3D printing technology yet. And just like with music and film piracy, the law will first deal with people trying to make money from copyright infringement, before they turn against the average use who pirated something for personal use. However as 3D printers become cheaper and more common, it is only a matter of time until the shit hits the fan and we will have lawyers all over the 3D model sites.

In the previous session the group visited Neverlight Grove and discovered another demon lord, Zuggtmoy, on the loose in the Underdark. The general idea of the first half of the Rage of Demons campaign (aka Out of the Abyss) is that the group is escaping from the drow, travel through the Underdark pursued by the drow and looking for a way back up to the surface, and discover this demon threat which is far worse than the drow on the way. So I started this session with the idea to remind the group of the drow pursuit, and attacked them with a drow scout force.

Now playing D&D is not like telling a story in another medium. The DM starts telling a story, but there are two major other participants who can change the story as well: The players, and the dice. In this session the dice demanded their right to sometimes change the story in unexpected ways. Which is okay with me, I'm not the kind of DM who fudges dice in order to eliminate this third influence on the story. I roll in the open. And the dice decided to put a powerful curse on the drow. They couldn't hit a thing. Not just the 4 standard drows, but also the 2 elite drows just swung their weapons around inefficiently and looked like total wimps. Thus when the group captured one of them and questioned him, and he told them that a much larger drow party under the leadership of Mistress Ilvara was after them, the group wasn't much afraid. Instead of fleeing, pursued by the drow, they decided to ambush the drow and be done with them.

Now a drow priestess has a bunch of high-level spells, including divination, so I wouldn't let the drow be surprised by basic ambush tactics. Instead the priestess sent summoned giant spiders ahead that took the brunt of the ambush, then cast a darkness on half of the cave to give the drow the opportunity to set themselves up without all being hit by a single fireball or similar spell. This was supposed to be a very tough fight, and in the book this fight only occurs one chapter and one level later. However the dice still didn't like the drow, and continued to roll very badly for them. While Surina the dragonborn sorceress did drop to 0 hitpoints at one point, it didn't get worse than that. Surina was healed back up, and the group totally defeated the drow. Basically the group just played chapter 7 of the book before having started chapter 6. Which was unexpected, but doesn't really mess up the overall story too much. Arkoy got a nice tentacle rod from the drow priestess out of it.

Now back to chapter 6, the group continue their way towards Blingdenstone, the city of the deep gnomes (svirfneblin). Now the players don't have much information about the place, and they have run out of travel companions to give them information. However it isn't as if all of their former travel companions are dead, many just got left behind at some point. So I pulled a rabbit out of my hat and had them encounter Jimjar, a deep gnome with a gambling habbit, currently in the process of organizing a snail race and looking for people to bet with. And then of course Jimjar was able to tell them the history of Blingdenstone, which was abandoned for some time after a drow attack, and now the svirfneblin are reconquering it. He also told them of Entemoch's Boon and Ogremoch's Bane, magical forces affecting the stone elementals which are a major part of the Blingdenstone defense forces. However once arrived in Blingdenstone, Jimjar left the group again. (I might use him again later).

The general situation in Blingdenstone is that the deep gnomes are distrustful of outsiders. So why they do know a way to the surface, they aren't forthcoming with help unless the group helps them first. So the group is finding out what problems the deep gnomes have, and help them. In World of Warcraft terms you'd call it a quest hub. One of the problems is that in one quarter of the city there is now a tribe of deep gnomes who have been infected by lycantrophy and are all wererats. Blingdenstone is headed by a couple of deep gnomes, Dorbo and Senni Diggermattock. Dorbo wants the wererats chased away, while Senni thinks there might be a way to come to an arrangement with them.

So the group heads towards the wererats. They avoid a trap, but then are ambushed by wererats. Although technically much weaker than the drow, the wererats don't have the same curse on their dice, and the fight is sufficiently tough. But the group kills most of them, captures one, and has him lead them to the rest of his tribe. However that results in them meeting 40 wererats at the same time, which would be overwhelming to fight. But their leader, Chipgrin, wants to parley, so the group agrees. Chipgrin explains them that there is another threat in the neighboring quarter of Blingdenstone: A crazy deep gnome calling himself the Pudding King, who has some sort of power over slimes and oozes, and is summoning a lot of them. At this point we decide to stop the session, and continue the story the next time.

Unless you live under a rock, the past days your inbox filled with mails from every company you ever were remotely in contact with. This is due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union that comes into force today. It requires companies to inform internet visitors about the data they collect about them, and in some cases ask for consent. However, like every European regulation, it is a very long text, and nobody really understands everything about it. This is why the mails you have been getting are all different: Some tell you that they will never send you mails again unless you click on this button, others just tell you they updated their privacy rules.

I must admit that in most cases I didn't click on that button. As inaction is often easier than action, I assume that this is true for a lot of people. Do you really want to receive more mails from this company or that? When was the last time you were thankful for an unsolicited advertising mail sent to you? I assume tomorrow is going to be a very quiet day in the inboxes of the world.

In the previous session the group left Gracklstugh and traveled to Neverlight Grove. As they had spent two sessions in Gracklstugh, I thought I could at the very least fill one full session with the events in Neverlight Grove. Unfortunately I was wrong, and and we had a short session due to me running out of prepared material. My bad!

The myconids of Neverlight Grove are a peaceful people, organized into circles. Even their "hunter circle" doesn't actually kill things, but just collects corpses of anything that dies close to the village and uses them as fertilizer. So the group's first encounter with the myconids (other than their travel companions Stool and Rumpadump) was after they killed a Shambling Mound near the village, and the "hunters" turned up and asked politely if they could collect it. That got the group a friendly welcome to the village, and a quest to kill another monster which was attacking myconids outside the village.

I had some commercial poster battlemaps of Underdark caves, and used one of them for this fight against a Grick alpha. What I hadn't noticed was that on the map there was a pond with treasure chests visible at the bottom. So after the fight the group wanted to lift those chests, and I didn't want to spoil their fun and say there weren't any. So I let them roll on the appropriate treasure table in the DM's Guide, and they ended up with a Figurine of Wondrous Power (Ebony Fly). Nice, but not overpowered.

Back in the village the group interacted with the myconids and learned that they were split in two factions. The "normal" ones were a bit naive, friendly, and not very emotional. The others were overly enthusiastic, dancing around, and awaiting a great event for tomorrow in the Garden of Welcome. They were asked not to go to the garden so as to not spoil the surprise, so of course they went.

That resulted in several fights against infected myconids and other creatures. Ultimately the group discovered yet another demon lord, Zuggtmoy, who apparently is preparing her wedding to the "Great Body". Various infected plant creatures serve as chamberlains and bridesmaids in some sort of perverted wedding ceremony. But it is rather obvious that the group can't stop the wedding without fighting the "bride", and they aren't strong enough to tackle demon lords yet. While the un-infected myconids flee, the group decides that they should do the same, and travel on towards Blingdenstone.

I am getting the hang of my new 3D printer. So I'm posting the photos I promised. First is a comparison: The darker green wererat on the left is with the new printer, compared to the neon green on the right with the old printer. So, yes, for my miniatures the new printer is working fine, and better than the old one.
Next is an example of something my old printer frequently refused to do: Print half a dozen miniatures at the same time. The new one did these 6 bandits in one go without problems. I assume it has to do with the ABS printing hotter, so it still sticks to the previous layer even that layer has been printed a while ago.
The other advantage of ABS is that you can treat it with acetone vapors, which makes the surface glossy and hides imperfections. As an example the 3DBenchy model printed twice identically, with the right one being treated with acetone vapors for 1 hour. Note that for miniatures you better just use 15 minutes, after 1 hour fine parts like arms or swords tend to melt.
Finally I used a model of a bard with a lot of detail to see how it comes out. This is with 15 minutes acetone treatment. Looking closely you can still see the layers and imperfections. But remember that this is just 3 cm tall, so for this size this is as good as it gets. You can see the lute, the rapier, and even the jester's hat is printing out fine.

If you watch a film or TV series like Downton Abbey, you can learn about how the class structure of society worked a century ago. Many of those concepts of hereditary masters and servants are now completely outdated. But while class borders have become a lot more flexible today, classes still do exist. In today's economy there are still masters, who are the customers paying for a service, and servants, who then get money for providing those services. Of course the guy who is a servant all day, for example an Uber driver, can come home and become the master by ordering a pizza delivered. But the rich are more likely to receive services, and the poor are more likely to provide those services; we aren't really much more equal than back in the days of Downton Abbey.

This class divide has also reached games. If you can afford to buy $60 games or spend money in Free2Play games, you get services provided to you. If you play those Free2Play games for free, you end up being the content for other players. It is as if you were paid for providing a service as opponent for another player, only that you don't get paid in cash but in access to the game.

I don't like being a servant to a game company. Game companies, like most other companies, treat their customers like royalty, and their employees like garbage. So I don't want to work for the game company, be the content, provide a service as a cheap replacement of an artificial intelligence. In particular I hate games where even if you pay money, you never can escape from that role as servant, because you always are content for other players.

I just can't play the new Magic Arena, because it only has a PvP mode. Not only don't I like serving as content for other players. I also don't like the content that other players provide to me: Playing against random humans means total unpredictability, you can end up against a complete pushover or the guy who spent hundreds of dollars and hours on the game and is a complete pro. On the one side I feel bad if I play against a human and have to quit early because real life intervenes (which makes the game rather unsuitable for mobile platforms), but on the other side I hate it when my opponent quits early. I much prefer playing against an AI, where there is no social contract, and my opponent plays in a more predictable manner. Previous electronic versions of Magic the Gathering have proven that an AI can be created that plays the game reasonably well. So making a version of Magic without AI to me feels like simple exploitation of players as content, and I'm not willing to be exploited like that.

I am going to post a full review with comparison of things I printed later, but I already wanted to write about my first impressions with my new 3D printer. Unboxing the printer, installing, calibration, and starting to print took me about 1 hour, which is about a "plug & play" as it gets in 3D printing. Most of the printer is pre-assembled, but you need to assemble the cable to the print head and the cable to the heated bed yourself, as well as the spool holder and the guide tube from the spool to the print head. Then you need to install the latest firmware via an USB key, and calibrate the bed to be even. That is done with the help of 3 screws, with the printer telling you which one to turn by how much. Apart from a ridiculous degree of precision in the instructions ("turn the screw by 86.02°"), that went smoothly.

The printer comes with one model for a test print on the provided USB key. In a disappointing display of lack of professionalism Zortrax managed to forget to include supports in that test print model, which results in it being actually impossible to print. Of course I didn't know that and went back to the shop to ask why after installation the test print wasn't working, and it was just by chance that there was a technician present who was aware of that issue and told me not to worry and print something else instead.

Both the firmware and the Z-Suite 3D printing software can only be downloaded after entering the serial number of the printer, but then the software worked on the first try. So I printed a 3D Benchy as test print, and it came out very nice. Much better detail on the fine parts, and smoother walls. However after printing some other models I have to say that not everything is perfect, and some prints that I succeeded with on the old printer failed to print on the new one; right now it is hard to say how much of that is due to the change in material from PLA to ABS, how much is related to finding the best settings, and how much is due to the printer.

What I really disliked about my old XYZ printer was that he would only take spools of PLA from the company that made the printer, with an RFID chip in the spool making sure you didn't use other material. That system also resulted in the spool physically still having several meters of material on it at the end, while the RFID chip claimed the spool was empty and refused to use it any more. The new Zortrax printer is better in that respect, you can print with spools from any supplier. However the software has the optimum parameters for the Zortrax spools, while for external materials you need to find the best settings yourself. That curiously means that if you want to print the Zortrax ABS at a different temperature for some reason, you need to unload it, and reload it as external material, claiming it was ABS from a different supplier.

I notice a real change printing in ABS rather than in PLA. I will need to explore that further, and for example try to print PLA on the new printer. The previous model Zortrax M200 was famous for not doing PLA well, but the M200 Plus has an additional cooling fan on the print head and is supposed to have solved that problem. From a scientific point of view, PLA is more crystalline, which makes it more shiny, but also more brittle. ABS is more matte, more flexible, and sturdier. Lego bricks are made from ABS, and those usually don't break easily. However when printed with a 3D printer, the layers create a preferred axis of breakage, so if I would print a Lego brick it would be less sturdy than the original. And it would be less glossy and smooth on the surface. However ABS, unlike PLA, is soluble in acetone, so there are methods of making ABS printed parts smooth and glossy by exposing them to acetone vapors. I haven't tried that yet. The disadvantage I noticed with ABS is that you need to print it at higher temperature to make it stick to the previous layer, and then there is a bit of possible "sagging", making the printed part a bit broader than the model. I had some prints of figurines with supports where the side of the support stuck to the side of the model, and then left a mark when I removed it. That can probably be fixed by the settings of the software making the supports.

Talking of supports, I still have the same problem with the supports generated by the Z-Suite software than I had with the supports generated by the XYZWare software: The supports are far too massive for small 28mm scale figurines. You can't use them to print a support for something which is only a millimeter or two thick, like a weapon or arm of a miniature. They seem to be designed for large objects. Having said that, the Z-Suite software has at least some degree of manual editing of support structures, so that is good. Just for my main application I'll keep using Meshmixer for building support structures for small figurines.

Finally there is one point where the new Zortrax printer is far worse than the old XYZ printer: The XYZ printer automatically shut down the light after a few minutes, and shut down the fans when the print head was cold. Thus I could start a print in the morning and go to work, or in the evening and go to bed, and when I came back the XYZ printer was on standby. The Zortrax printer doesn't have that, when you come back hours later the light is still on (presumably to allow the internal camera to work) and the fans are still blowing, although the machine is cold. That adds unnecessary wear and tear to the fans, and also consumes more electricity when not in use. I think I will have to buy an electronic time switch or something.

Overall I am happy with the new printer, and I'll show some photos of the improved results in a future post. But there remains a lot of fiddling and optimizing to be done, and the new printer didn't miraculously and immediately solve all my printing problems. But then that would have been boring anyway! :) 

Some time ago I subscribed to the Humble Bundle Monthly to get Civ VI for $12. After one three-month subscription I unsubscribed, because I didn't like the other games I got in the bundles. But if you subscribe now, you get Destiny 2 for $12 plus whatever other games will be in the bundle in June, so I subscribed again. For just one month this time. In short, I still don't like the bundles, but I'm willing to buy one of them here and there if the headline game it has is well worth $12.