I have been toying around with the old resin sets lately, for the first time in a very long time. Because I've worked so much with Dwarvenite in the intervening years, and specifically I've spent a lot of the last few years working with KS6 and KS7, a few things really struck me.
As an aside, for the photographers out there, I noticed that photographing resin (and, for the same reason, photographing KS5) is also an extremely different experience. KS3, KS4, and KS7 (plus Dreadhollow in KS6) are all designed to produce a full environment, and one in which a ground-level POV shot is not only possible but sometimes ideal. You can place the viewer directly in the scene, and see trees and cliffs towers and ramparts looming over them. Even with KS6, seeing as features large pieces like the Stairway to Violence or the Grand Entrance Riser, can kinda work this way, if you shoot in a dark room (or with a dark backdrop) and assume that everything above the sculpted walls is just the unseen depths of cavernous darkness -- either actual wall space the PC's light sources doesn't reach, or unseen depths of a larger chamber. In any case, with these sets, you can get INTO the scene and look straight at the horizon, or even slightly up. Not so with resin -- there, 50% of the detail is on the floors (or tucked into the corner) and needs to be seen slightly from above. Plus, the sets are designed to make clear that you are seeing a 3-D approximation of a map -- a cross-section of a space, with the higher walls and ceilings are left out. As a result, not only will a POV shot simply fail, because much of the room simply isn't there to see, but you'll also get a view the PC's DON'T get, one which breaks the illusion and takes the viewer OUT of the scene, because you see the OTHER rooms and corridors beyond. Resin (and KS5) can be photographed to show off a layout and a game, with the occasional extreme close-up, almost always with a slightly downward angle. It just lends itself to very different kinds of shoots. You may get very cool shots of a resin dungeon that break the illusion and show off a great map, but they won't be as immersive as what you can get with the other sets.
Anyway - as for actually using the stuff, here's what I noticed.
Resin really doesn't lend itself to planning. Some people with particularly acute visualization skills could maybe get a lot of benefit from it, but for me, it's just not going to work. And unlike with some other sets, it's really not necessary.
KS3 was the first time I noticed that I was starting to plan things out. Figuring out how I wanted to combine the various elements of a building to create different structures was fun, and thinking about how to distribute streets and open spaces was an important part of building a layout with proper flow and visual appeal. There is still room for spontaneous experiment in the building stage, I don't deny that. But still, a build will go faster, and the result will look better, if you've spent some time in advance working out what you want to accomplish. This is true at a bare mechanics level, because you need to be sure as you start building that you have enough pieces to finish -- enough doors, enough roofs, enough streets, to actually see through what you've begun. And it's true for aesthetics and gameplay to the extent that you need to think about where your streets will be and how close together your buildings will be so you can see them and access them. KS4 presented very similar challenges -- what do you have, what do you need, how will it look/play.
KS6 introduced such fussy pieces that, again, there's a value to planning. How are you going to handle elevation, how are you going to use your swells and trifectas, etc. And swamps require a similar strategy for banks and the placement of trees. Even forests, which seem fairly straightforward to the extent they rely on a simple rectangle of adjacent ground squares, benefit from/require some planning about how to distribute trees, both to achieve the distribution of density that you want and, again, for the practical value of having something that looks right and that can be played.
Resin, in my experience, works differently. I'll say right away there is of course an exception for anyone trying to reproduce a specific map -- obviously, you need to plan out how to execute a map that wasn't designed for DF. And anytime you're working with a limited number of pieces, you need a plan for how to handle that -- what are you going to do? Are you going to take shortcuts, are you going to abridge certain elements, are you going to focus on only a portion of the original map, etc.
But for just "building a layout," designing the map of the encounter IN THE BUILD as opposed to designing it/receiving it and then trying to copy it with DF... here are some key differences.
First, resin tends to feature fewer types of pieces, both aesthetically and functionally. Resin dungeons are mostly made up of the exact same basic dungeon wall. There are the occasional 6" walls, there's the demon arch and the mermaid fountain, there are deluxe walls with torches. There are diagonal walls and curved walls. But it's still a comparatively small number of pieces and they almost all work basically the same way. You don't need to plan to figure out how to build the way you do with KS3's streets and posts and walls, or the way you need to figure out how to use swells and trifecta pieces in KS6. And you don't have to think about where to place as many different aesthetic pieces -- like two different kinds of temple walls (or magnetic walls, or LED walls) or where to place the StV or the Titan's Tooth or the waterfall, etc. Basically, the Dwarvenite sets tend to feature more splashy pieces (which you may want to think about how you'll use) and more complex engineering like off-grid pieces or 1" pieces or trifecta pieces (which you may need to figure out how to make them look right) or the KS3 buildings (which you may need to figure out the arrangements that produce the most satisfying buildings and street layouts). Dwarvenite simply rewards planning because of the diversity and complexity of its pieces. Resin dungeons are mostly just -- walls. Once you know where you want the spiral stairs or the mermaid fountain, you have made your major decisions. The rest is just how you want your walls and corners distributed.
And here's the thing. I've noticed that, for me at least, finding cool and interesting ways to do THAT -- specifically to place walls and corners to create dramatic and interesting results -- is nearly impossible to plan in advance without actually doing it. I need to see what happens when I change the shape of a room, introduce a strange little corridor, mess with the angles. Almost all my old resin builds were done on the fly in this way, just putting five corners next to each other or lining up a series of walls to make a little parallel secret corridor, stacking pieces in unexpected ways to generate little nooks and perches. It's not the kind of thing I could have planned out, it's hard to see what works without SEEING it (which is why those with better visual thinking may differ from me on this point).
Building with resin is just radically unlike building with Dwarvenite. There are fewer types of pieces, and there's really only one mechanic in place. In some ways it's more fun, because it can be fun to work spontaneously, particularly when one experiment fails. A failed swamp may take 45 minutes to set up, only to find that it's somewhat bland or familiar. And even if a first take resin dungeon takes around the same time, it can be more readily turned into something different and cool on the fly than a Dwarvenite layout, which may take another hour to turn into something different.
I'm really enjoying using the resin again. When Game Tiles first launched, I thought they were a cute gimmick that made it easy for me to give my then-young kids some DF to play with. It was no serious competitor for resin, as the sculpts and paint were significantly poorer in Dwarvenite. Dwarvenite caverns didn't change my mind. But once we started getting cities and castles, I found resin more and more limiting. Even for basic dungeons, I could do so much MORE with the DoD -- actual lit torches, placing different magnetic accessories on walls, using things like the arch wall and big double doors and the temple pieces and the huge round pieces and swapping out the trap doors and placing the epic stairs.... resin was still great, but there was no denying that it didn't present the same number of options.
Now I'm finding that I do still really enjoy working with resin occasionally. It's never going to be as varied as Dwarvenite -- I could build ten different versions of a Dungeon of Doom with almost no meaningful repetition, in ways that just aren't possible in resin. But what resin does well, it does EXCEPTIONALLY well.
