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merfolkotpt
2009-02-16, 09:09 PM
Hey gang,
Was thinking back on the hodge podge of figures my old group used to use and was wondering what everyone liked to use for their groups. So what kinds of figures do you use? Do you use any at all? Are they repurposed from another game? Do you make your players bring one for their character?

Assassin89
2009-02-16, 09:11 PM
My D&D group has some plastic and pewter figurines, but most of the time, we use dice as playing pieces (another use for d12s).

monty
2009-02-16, 09:13 PM
One group I'm in uses little plastic animal figures. I'm usually the blue turtle :smallbiggrin:
Actually, this was a little confusing in the Heavy Gear session we had yesterday, when the bear figure was a Mad Dog, the dog was a Tiger, and the cat was a Grizzly. That was a pain to keep track of.

My other group doesn't use minis very often, but when we do, we just use whatever small objects are handy.

RTGoodman
2009-02-16, 09:17 PM
Well, I've got a small duffel-bag full of WotC plastic D&D minis, so I usually use those when I DM. Occasionally DMs will ask me to bring those for other games, too, but not always.

If we don't use those, I've been in groups that just use coins and other knick-knacks for PCs and dice for minis, and even groups that just used initials written in squares in pencil so they could be erased with the character moved.

merfolkotpt
2009-02-16, 09:36 PM
One of the reasons I ask is because in my previous intense gaming life we always used figures, and more recently we haven't been and as a result combat seems much more confusing. This may be the result of a less competent DM, but there is also something cool about seeing your character, if a little bit off, standing in front of you, or flanking the big bad.

Thurbane
2009-02-16, 09:41 PM
We used to use a hodge-podge of painted (and unpainted) lead minis from a variety of manufacturers, as well as a lot of game pieces borrowed from games like Hero Quest and Space Crusade.

These days, we have a decent collection of DDM minis that we use.

BobVosh
2009-02-17, 06:24 AM
All of us are nerdy enough to play D&D minis. In fact 3 of us worked at game stores. I easily have over 2000 minis. I also probably have the smallest collection.

Although I did use some Tyranids from WH40k to mess with them.

AgentPaper
2009-02-17, 06:46 AM
I use WotC minis, and have at least a few hundred of them, all sitting in my closet when not in use. I would actually love to have a lot more, but refuse to buy any more from WotC until they allow me to actually choose what I'm buying. I have more kruthik figures than I have orcs and goblins combined, for example, which gets annoying. Most of the figures I have are uncommon and strange types, and I don't even have an ogre! I have a single dragon, at least, though it has a rider, unfortunately.

Anyone know some place where I can buy painted DnD figures like what WotC sells, but either by the model or in themed packs? (ie, a pack of 30 assorted goblins, mostly warriors and archers) It's eternally frustrating to never have the right type or amount of minis. For example my planned campaign will have a lot of cultists, and trolls, and greek-style and persian-style soldiers, so if I could go and buy a dozen or so of each, I think it would add a lot to my game. (the fighting bits, at least)

Totally Guy
2009-02-17, 07:25 AM
We dress up mannakins and put them in our group's actual dungeon. We don't call them miniatures however.

Just kidding. That room's reserved for the giant wizard chess set.

Does anyone know where you get replacement giant wizard chess pieces?

RTGoodman
2009-02-17, 07:34 AM
Anyone know some place where I can buy painted DnD figures like what WotC sells, but either by the model or in themed packs? (ie, a pack of 30 assorted goblins, mostly warriors and archers) It's eternally frustrating to never have the right type or amount of minis. For example my planned campaign will have a lot of cultists, and trolls, and greek-style and persian-style soldiers, so if I could go and buy a dozen or so of each, I think it would add a lot to my game. (the fighting bits, at least)

Ebay is the place to go for that sort of thing for now. Check there first. After that, well, WotC is going to non-randomized minis sometime this year (you can get one pack with the PHB classes, one pack of certain kinds of monsters, etc.).

AslanCross
2009-02-17, 07:46 AM
I've got a box full of D&D miniatures. It took me 2 years to actually assemble the proper miniatures for our 5-man party. <_< Stupid randomization.
At least they're scrapping the skirmish game and catering more to the DM/Player crowd, hence the departure from the totally random format.

monty
2009-02-17, 10:04 AM
We dress up mannakins and put them in our group's actual dungeon. We don't call them miniatures however.

Just kidding. That room's reserved for the giant wizard chess set.

Does anyone know where you get replacement giant wizard chess pieces?

Wizard chess. That would be any battle involving a mid- to high-level wizard, right?

Totally Guy
2009-02-17, 11:09 AM
Wizard chess. That would be any battle involving a mid- to high-level wizard, right?

Didn't I mention we've all converted to 4th Edition?

monty
2009-02-17, 12:50 PM
Didn't I mention we've all converted to 4th Edition?

Never mind. So wizard chess changed to wizard doing-the-fighter's-job-in-a-slightly-different-way, then.

Zaq
2009-02-17, 01:02 PM
Generally speaking we use dice. It's convenient for monsters of the same type, because they have numbers built in. (The dire rats are the red d6s, the trolls are the blue ones...) Sometimes we use a whiteboard and just write in and erase what we need. In one campaign I was in a couple months ago I brought in a handful of random Mario figurines. I was Mario, my roommate was Luigi, the orc with a permanencied Enlarge Person was the huge-ass Toad figure I have...

Totally Guy
2009-02-17, 01:16 PM
Never mind. So wizard chess changed to wizard doing-the-fighter's-job-in-a-slightly-different-way, then.

I hate to kill jokes be explaining them...

I was referencing Harry Potter. Then on the follow up gag I was trying to ride on the 4th edition fan reaction. This is why I wish the little emoticons worked for me reliably.

Waspinator
2009-02-19, 02:14 AM
Here's how I do 'em:

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/532/minis2td4.jpg
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6836/minidemons0.jpg

Nice, customizable, and cheap. Only takes some paper, hot glue, and a penny for each one.

Avor
2009-02-19, 02:39 AM
Hey gang,
Was thinking back on the hodge podge of figures my old group used to use and was wondering what everyone liked to use for their groups. So what kinds of figures do you use? Do you use any at all? Are they repurposed from another game? Do you make your players bring one for their character?

I usaly use nothing but grid paper and pencil. Works as fine as game mat and figures.

But I do own a decebt ammount of reaper minitures, I just realy enjoy painting them. I have enught to equip a party, but not enough to run a game.

d13
2009-02-19, 09:32 AM
One of my players, for my birthay, made me TWO COMPLETE CARDBOARDS of generic monsters drawings...

Random Zombie-ish thingies, Kobold-ish thingies, Random Humanoids... And even the PCs' portrait fully detailed...

He's teh gawd of pencil and paper xD

Narmoth
2009-02-19, 09:51 AM
For PCs, we use Warhammer miniatures. For monsters, I've used some warhammer stuff, like skeletons, some of the boxes from D&D (not a good buy at all), and chess pieces

monty
2009-02-19, 10:13 AM
Here's how I do 'em:
http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/532/minis2td4.jpg
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6836/minidemons0.jpg

Nice, customizable, and cheap. Only takes some paper, hot glue, and a penny for each one.

Spoilers please. They make the page fat, and it's annoying to read the other posts.

Surfing HalfOrc
2009-02-19, 10:21 AM
I'd like to have all of Rich's Avatars as a set of minis. Front and back, taped to a penny as shown above.

Of course, we'd need all the mosters done up OotS style as well!

Good, cheap minis!

Kiero
2009-02-19, 10:24 AM
I have never, in 15 years of gaming, used minis in a game. Not when I was playing weekly AD&D, not in our WFRP game, not even when we were playing Star Wars with Saga Edition.

PurinaDragonCho
2009-02-19, 12:20 PM
I have a large pile of minis and I used to try to use them. One day, I saw some small poker chips in a game shop, and I bought them. Sure enough, they fit perfectly inside one square on the battle mat. Then, I got a sharpie and numbered them. So now, when my group is attacked by 12 badguys, it's easy to remember which bad guy got hit for four points of damage, which one is entangled, etc. I don't have to remember "the orc with the longsword mini got hit for 6, and the undead kobold monk got hit for 8" - especially when the badguys are moving around, it can be really difficult. The players still use minis, but it's easy to remember which mini is which character.

This solved one of my biggest problems as DM.

kamuishirou
2009-02-19, 12:46 PM
I love using Miniatures. We use to paint them back in the early days of 3ed. Our DM would even give us bonus experience for painting some of his miniatures. It was a lot of fun. Then Mage Knight came out and I bought a case of that. We bought bases and ripped all the Mage Knight guys off there bases and glued them to square bases. It worked great. Then DDM came out and it was even easier.

I have thousands of miniatures and love using them. My DM always uses a different mini for each NPC, so he doesn't have much trouble distinguishing them. Though I've been thinking about painting the bases a different color to help split them up. Especially with all the goblins I have that look similar.

I can't wait for the new packs to be release. It'll be nice to have some Dragonborn miniatures instead of using the Half-Dragon miniatures that I've been using.

Magnor Criol
2009-02-19, 01:02 PM
The group I first started playing with, who'd been playing for several years before I met them, never used miniatures of any sort, it was just a mental thing. If distance is important, we'd ask the DM "Are we close enough to charge," "I step just close enough to cause him to provoke an AoO if he moves," etc. If we need it the the DM sketches a map on his notebook for us. It works out for the most part.

Recently, though, I got us using dice as miniatures; we were playing through an Eberron module at the moment and our specific positions were very important, so I convinced the DM to bust out a dry erase board and I provided the markers (for the grid) and my spare dice for the figures. It caught on, and we've been using them since, even in other games in the same group.

We use miniatures in another group I play with, but their collection isn't too broad, so the figs rarely match up well - or even at all - with the characters they represent.

AslanCross
2009-02-19, 06:20 PM
I once had to improvise miniatures because I didn't have a Bluespawn Godslayer mini. I cobbled one together with Zoids BLOX parts. It still looked pretty awesome. My players were shocked when they saw it was about 4 times the height of their own miniatures.

I also have three dragons now: the Large Green dragon that came with that nonrandom 4E miniatures pack, the Gargantuan Blue dragon, and the Gargantuan White that came with the Drizzt and Wulfgar miniatures in that set. (One of my classes gave it to me as a Christmas gift. It is still the best gift I've received from my students ever.)

Mando Knight
2009-02-19, 06:25 PM
I can't wait for the new packs to be release. It'll be nice to have some Dragonborn miniatures instead of using the Half-Dragon miniatures that I've been using.

Yeah... WotC kinda dropped the ball on that one. Dragonborn Paladin? Sure... not. I've got a Elder Red Dragon, but not the Dragonborn from that pack. The Ghoul King? Yeah, I've got one o' him. Any Dragonborn? Not. A. Chance.

Olo Demonsbane
2009-02-19, 08:03 PM
I have lots of different types of dice, so I use them as minis whenever I decide to use minis (repeating terms, X on OR). I turn the numbers to show the initative order.

Alteran
2009-02-19, 08:42 PM
Yeah... WotC kinda dropped the ball on that one. Dragonborn Paladin? Sure... not. I've got a huge Red Dragon, but not the Dragonborn from that pack. The Ghoul King? Yeah, I've got one o' him. Any Dragonborn? Not. A. Chance.

According to WoTC, the biggest problem with dragonborn is that they were complicated enough so that they couldn't make a good-looking one at uncommon quality. This means they're all rare, and therefore expensive to buy. :smallannoyed:

Our DM was lucky enough to actually get two Dragonborn Defenders, so that's what I use for my paladin. Before he got those, I used a blackspawn from an older pack.

Thurbane
2009-02-19, 08:47 PM
Don't get me started on the decline of quality in DDM in the last 3 or 4 sets...:smallfurious:

Grommen
2009-02-19, 09:08 PM
All of us are nerdy enough to play D&D minis. In fact 3 of us worked at game stores. I easily have over 2000 minis. I also probably have the smallest collection.

Although I did use some Tyranids from WH40k to mess with them.

No paint no Save man!

Lets see some pic!

I keep getting my fantasy orks mixed in with my Space Orks. Nothing like a wave of Gretchen chargeing in formation at the Sword Weilding PC's to really shake up the night.

Right now though our current group is a bunch of War gammers so anything is likely to hit the table. Dice, Paper, coins, right on up to fully painted minies from just about anything. :smallbiggrin:

Maybe next week I'll bust out a Heavy Lance from BAttletech

"Wha he just an archer!"

Thurbane
2009-02-19, 09:20 PM
I'm still looking for an excuse to plonk down my Rancor SW mini and scare the bejeepers out of my D&D group! :smallbiggrin:

monty
2009-02-19, 10:09 PM
See, this is why I don't use official miniatures. It reminds me of when I played Pokemon cards back in the fourth grade or so. Magic, not so much, because I got most of my collection from trading and buying individual cards.

/em opens pack...
Damn it, another Weedle!
(Replace Weedle with whatever you have way too many of. Seriously, I have like 20 of those things, and I didn't even buy very many packs).

Weezer
2009-02-19, 10:16 PM
Usually my group doesn't use miniatures, every once and a while if it gets especially confusing we pull out 40k models to use but its not necessary most of the time. This might be helped by the fact that most of the players arent all that tactical, its not hard to keep things straight when there actions are mostly "fireball the T-rex" or "charge the ogre".

Lycan 01
2009-02-19, 10:39 PM
I usually just sketch up whatever's going on for Call of Cthulhu. Distance and stuff doesn't matter in most situations, other than saying if something is "near" or "far away" from the player.


For Star Wars, I usually either draw sketches of indoor stuff, while I use a cardboard grid I made and hand-drawn and cut out cardboard tokens and minis for bigger things like major battles and space encounters...


Minis and figures are just too expensive considering the random nature of it... :smallannoyed:

Myatar_Panwar
2009-02-20, 12:42 AM
Minis and figures are just too expensive considering the random nature of it... :smallannoyed:

Our group couldn't care less about the mini matching the actual creature. Its much more of a visual you can look at and not be completely ashamed/disgusted of.

We often use these drunken human models gotten from the D&D mini boxes for representing normal people (everything from actual drunkards to noblemen to cart pullers).

But we do use reaper miniatures for PC's. One of our players has quite a bit of them, well painted, which we pick from for our characters.

monty
2009-02-20, 01:17 AM
Our group couldn't care less about the mini matching the actual creature. Its much more of a visual you can look at and not be completely ashamed/disgusted of.

A bit of a stretch in some cases, though. A month or two ago, one of our friends came back from college for a couple of weeks and brought over some of his minis. I was playing an unarmed swordsage at the time, and ended up as a bikini-clad woman mini since that was the only humanoid figure he had that didn't have a weapon (I didn't bother to ask for the story behind that).

SilentP
2009-02-20, 03:05 AM
Our group originially use miniatures as the situations were usually simple enough for us to manage in our heads and there weren't so many of us. However as the group expanded and we switched to games like Dark Heresy, where short range/point blank and normal ranges make a significant difference to the 'to hit' modifiers, it became necessary for us to start using models, since we were having combats where I as a GM couldn't keep a track of combats. For non combat situations though, we don't use the models, and if there's anything that need some visuals, I just sketch it on a white erase board.

We use mainly Warhammer Fantasy and 40,000 minis, though when we started giving minis a try we used the little plastic guys and zombies from the ZOMBIES!!! boardgame.

Remmirath
2009-02-20, 03:24 AM
We always use lead figures, ranging from really old ones to new ones. Some of them are painted, those being mostly the older ones. I keep thinking I should paint the newer ones, but I'm not very good at painting yet (my mom painted the older ones, you see).
For monsters, we've got a lot of soldiers that are about the same size (I don't know where they're from, really. Maybe they came from a game of Axis & Allies), and assorted dinosaurs of roughly the right scale. As well as a pack of zombies.
Figures are pretty much interchangeable for D&D and MERP, and are still at least on the right track for D20 Modern.
We use them in any situation from combat to just sitting around in an inn. We're a bit weird like that, I guess.

Other groups I've played with, though, have ranged from using no figures ever (which was weird to me), to using grab bags of the WotC Miniatures. Whatever works.

kamuishirou
2009-02-20, 05:45 AM
A bit of a stretch in some cases, though. A month or two ago, one of our friends came back from college for a couple of weeks and brought over some of his minis. I was playing an unarmed swordsage at the time, and ended up as a bikini-clad woman mini since that was the only humanoid figure he had that didn't have a weapon (I didn't bother to ask for the story behind that).

I've taken one of the bikini clad dancers from Reaper and filed out her cymbols. I glued a small silver chain in their place for my half-orc spiked chain wielder :).

ghost_warlock
2009-02-20, 05:58 AM
My first 'set' of minis were from HeroQuest.

I then collected oodles of the paper ones TSR produced for OD&D supplements.

Then I got into pewter miniatures; some of which are from Warhammer sets (the plastic skeletons were awesome in that they came as a bunch of parts you could assemble any which way :smallbiggrin:).

Finally, I bought a couple crates of D&D Miniatures and ordered a few individual minis I wanted off of ebay.

I've since locked most of the pewter and paper ones away since they're either more fragile than the plastic DDM or were a larger financial investment. As such, they only see use on special occasions - like reprising old characters associated with certain minis - they're the Fine China of the miniature world! :smalltongue:

Waspinator
2009-02-20, 06:09 AM
Also, to go with my paper-glue-and-penny minis, I print out grids of rooms (usually on multiple sheets of paper) and tape them together. I go color with the minis, but grids tend to get only black and white since they generally don't get reused as much. It's especially nice if you're using a published adventure, since a lot of those have a grid image that you can scan, resize, and print out for your battle mat.

AslanCross
2009-02-20, 07:04 PM
According to WoTC, the biggest problem with dragonborn is that they were complicated enough so that they couldn't make a good-looking one at uncommon quality. This means they're all rare, and therefore expensive to buy. :smallannoyed:

Our DM was lucky enough to actually get two Dragonborn Defenders, so that's what I use for my paladin. Before he got those, I used a blackspawn from an older pack.

I was lucky enough to get the Dragonborn Myrmidon from the Against the Giants Set. It was one of the last boxes remaining (to my knowledge) in the country too. The hobby store chain I frequent has never been able to restock since then. :(

Behold_the_Void
2009-02-20, 08:05 PM
Dice tend to work just fine for me. We've been using my roommate's multitudes of Warhammer figures of late though.

Recaiden
2009-02-20, 08:14 PM
We use miniatures for the party, and some other things, but a lot of the time we just use dice.

Waspinator
2009-02-21, 06:20 AM
The customizability of printed minis allows you to depict some pretty weird parties:
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/9397/swparty.jpg

For the record, that's a crazy protocol droid, a human jedi who stole some stormtrooper armor off of a dead body, and a gungan axe-wielding scout who did the same.

mindblank19
2009-02-21, 09:11 AM
My group uses WotC minis, but because we only have maybe 50 each there have been some pretty weird substitutions.

Like the fact that for three adventures in a row the druid's wolf mini was an Abyssal Maw.

Afterwards I bought some more and the wolf is now a Demonweb Guard Drake :smallbiggrin:

Ernir
2009-02-21, 09:13 AM
Surprised no one has mentioned chess pieces. Almost every household has a set somewhere, they come in two colours (one for the party, one for the Bad Guys). And a standard set contains enough different pieces to represent everything I have thrown at my players at one time so far.