Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/23/astonishingly-detailed-foam-c.html
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6 Likes
The canopies are a nice touch.
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Really going for that pedant award here but this isn’t “a coliseum”. It’s an amphitheatre. The Coliseum was just one specific amphitheatre (that this model obviously doesn’t copy), and even that wasn’t called the Coliseum at the time and even “coliseum” is a bastardisation of the more accurate “colosseum”.
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What’s this, a coliseum amphitheatre for ants?
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Antphitheater
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You forgot when they sold the naming rights. Then the venue was named things like “Marcus’ Famous Garum Amphitheater” and “Refreshing Posca Battleorama”.
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Thanks for being pedantic so I didn’t have to be. Or just a little bit: the proportions don’t even match any kind of amphitheatre. These things didn’t just fall from heaven, there are quite concrete design rules for (amphi)theatres which have changed astonishingly little over the last few thousand years. Still you need a very specific range of viewing angles (by far not as steep as here), ratio between stage and seats, backstage area etc, etc. You don’t really have to study architecture to get it halfway right (but it admittedly helps a lot) but a quick look at wikipedia will give you some basic idea. Some analysis of the requirements resulting in an at least seemingly working design might not be too much asked if you want to go public with your model - or you risk pedants from everywhere writing ugly things about it.
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GM: “I’ve spent over 80 hours building this awesome amphitheater for the game. The players are going to be blown away. They’re going to spend so much time in the scenario here!”
Players: [bypass amphitheater entirely]
GM: “FFFFFFFFFUUUU…”
Designing the model as more of a display case was very smart. It’s never going to be that useful as a game set-piece - it’s not really big enough to work that way, players aren’t going to spend that much time there, etc. I often wonder about the utility of the more elaborate sets I’ve seen for RPGs - huge towns, harbors, etc. They’d have repeated use in wargames, but for RPGs, I can’t imagine they’d get used enough to justify making them for purely utilitarian purposes. The real reason to make them would have to be purely for the pleasure of building miniatures.
(Which is kind of where I ended up with painting/modding just the game miniature figures - I quickly gave up trying to paint minis for specific characters/scenarios because the prep lasted longer than the actual games, finding/modding figures to match characters was difficult and ultimately it was more fun to just make something unconstrained by having to fill a particular game need.)
Also, the size doesn’t remotely work for an amphitheater. It’s more of a Renaissance bear baiting pit, in terms of interior size, which causes the rest of the structure to not really make sense. The interior floor space grid is too small to be useful for miniature fighting scenarios. Which is why really I’d say it was designed with the exterior size in mind, not the interior or the relative scales of various areas. There’s just enough of an interior to represent the various parts of an amphitheater and look cool, but mostly it’s about having a certain amount of exterior space for miniatures without being too big to store. Which a reasonably proportioned amphitheater would be.
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The tickets would also be unreasonable small and unwieldy.
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Think of it more for wargames played at a 20:1 figure scale (each figure represents 20 soldiers) than as an RPG setpiece. Then the size might make more sense.
Plus there’s no way multiple players are going to reach down in there to move the figures and not bump the edges. Given that it’s made of foam and not concrete, that bump will tip the figures over. It looks more like a cool display, less like an actual thing for playing.
1 Like
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