Ideal Terrain

Starting out, I made a lot of terrain that looked bad.  As my skills improved, I found I could make some really good looking terrain but it had very specialized uses.  And they were bulky -- filled out my shelf of gaming terrain.  After many mistakes, the terrain I build going forward will be:

- Interesting to play on.  It has to be something that people see and get excited to play long. 
- Modular - so you can play several times and ways.  Also, you can put together some huge terrain pieces if you make them fit together. 
- Tough - Terrain gets picked up and dropped much more carelessly than models.  People lean on it when they reach across the table.  If it's multi-story, it needs to hold up multiple heavy large based models without bowing.
- Storable  - It needs to fit in a storage container and be stackable if possible.  At this point, all my area terrain is all flat and I place the interesting points on top of it.  Forests for instance are flocked and stoned,  kidney shaped cutouts of 1/8" MDF.  The trees and bushes that are placed on top of the flocked cutouts are mounted on poker chips which get flocked like the cutouts.  Now the bush/tree can be moved out of the way when action occurs on the forest and also the 5-6 forests can store flat in a shoe/boot box with the trees on top.  I like playing on huge monolithic terrain pieces at the LGS but when it has to be stored in my basement, it has to fit cleanly and easily in a storage container.
- Obvious in terms of rules to use.  Nothing worse than a great piece of terrain you build causing all sorts of rules questions each time you pull it out.  I found the worst trouble with hills that had interesting rock faces where one player sees the terrain as having an impassable portion and the other player feels it's an ordinary hill.  Another annoyance is the building that has heavy battle damage.  Is it a structure (series of cover yielding obstacles)?  Or a ruin (area terrain)?  Each piece needs to be clear what the effect of the terrain is.

There is usually a continuum for a new terrain piece where something that's Interesting to play on sacrifices on the other dimensions (Obvious, Storable, Tough, Modular).  The trick is designing terrain pieces that are high on all the dimensions and still interesting to play on.

I know those letters spell out the acronym "moist" but your terrain should not be moist at all. :)