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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Scale Matters. Or, why Vryce doesn't fear my Ogres

This is a throwaway post for all of the "use your Ogre minis against the PCs!" folks.

Yeah, maybe for a Gulliver's Travels session:


Ogre Infantry, 3 squads (6mm or 1/285) vs. Vryce (28mm) vs. Mark V Ogre (6mm or 1/285)
 photo Vryce vs. Ogre s1_zpsplmkdico.jpg

JS-2 tank (1/72 scale) vs. Vryce (28mm) vs. Mark III and Mark V Ogres (6mm or 1/285)
 photo Vryce vs. Ogre s2_zpsyqbfpoqg.jpg

Of course, thanks to scale creep, I have dwarves and halflings that nearly top Vryce in height, even at nominal 28mm (is that 28mm to the top of the head? The eyes? The bottom of the dwarf's beard? Who knows anymore.)

Maybe next game I'll take a picture of Vryce vs. the Shambling Mound toy I have had since I was like 11 years old or so. You'll see why the players fear me actually using it as a "miniature." Which I still might - if someone accidentally lets a shambling mound hug a tesla coil or something . . .

4 comments:

  1. Even at that scale the SATNUCs from the mains should still kill Vryce pretty much dead, and he's probably still incapable of getting through the BPC even rescaled at the new thickness.

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    Replies
    1. I was waiting for that response.

      Fact is, it's just not intimidating, not interesting, and not a good use of minis to do that. It's not "Holy crud! It's an OGRE!" it's "Crud, we die by mini nuclear weapon just so Peter can use his minis all together." The SIZE of an Ogre is a serious part of what makes it interesting. The scale of it vs. the squad markers is what makes them so cool. Putting them next to a 28mm mini and saying "They shoot tacnukes and you're still dead!" is just boring.

      Like the Party vs. the Tiger II, the scale difference means it's just visually jarring, not visually interesting.

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    2. Yeah, it just occurred to me that in GURPS it's not only possible to answer this question, it's fairly trivial to rescale a Mark V to SM 2 or whatever if you convert the 3e stats. Also TL10 versus TL3 is no joke.

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    3. Right. But a GM can make anything lethal. Anything at all. But minis are all about the visual impact, and the visual interest. A 6mm scaled Ogre vs. a 28mm scale human isn't interesting for the human. It might be for the Ogre scaled game . . .

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