Where do y'all get your minis?

[atemu1234]

Seriously, I've never once played in a game using miniatures. Is there a specific brand I should look for? What's cheap, and ambiguous enough I don't have to get a replacement for every character I make. or monster I use?

[Psyren]

For cheap, it's hard to beat the Pathfinder Bestiary Boxes. They're cardstock minis of every single monster in their manuals, along with plastic bases to put them in that are appropriate to the size of most battle mats. They also have boxes for codexes (e.g. NPC Codex) that are easy to leverage for PCs and NPCs alike - mainstream races anyway.

[Crake]

We generally have a collection of generic monster/npc minis and cobble together whatever looks closest to the monsters/npcs that we can with a brief scan of our bag of miniatures. For player miniatures on the other hand, the majority of my table takes great joy in finding a good mini that matches their character, then painting that mini and using it at the table. Sometimes we re-use old minis if they match closely, other times people will go out and find a mini to match their character, usually looking at the reapermini website, or perusing our local gaming store to see if there's anything interesting. We also have a lot of unpainted minis for possible future character ideas, or just ones we haven't gotten around to painting yet, because we usually only paint together as a group, because hunching over a mini by yourself isn't as fun as doing it with other people to chat with.

[Dancingdeath]

Depending on how much customization you want and how much you're willing to spend Hero Forge will make anything you want to your exact specifications.

Now if you just want standard monsters and generic character minis then the above answers would suit that just fine.

[Geddy2112]

Our gaming group has an incredible assortment of minis. We have everything from marbles to represent mooks, to heroforge custom PC's. A couple people in my group used to/do play warhammer so we have minis from that as well.

For a grab bag of "this looks kind of like my PC" I second getting a bestiary box, namely the NPC pathfinder box. Most character concepts can find something close in there.

[zlefin]

sometimes old board games have thigns that make nice minis, especially fantasy themed ones. I had an old copy of uh, Hero Quest I think was the name which had a lot of nice minis that can be repurposed.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I have no idea, honestly. Cardstock-type things aren't hard (find a picture, glue it to a bit of cardboard or something, maybe stick it in some clay if you want it to stand up, presto), but I generally prefer to just use numbered or labeled tiles or something. I'd rather consistently have one step of remove ("remember this quarter is a goblin") than frequently have two ("remember this orc isn't an orc, remember it's a goblin").

[Elkad]

We just had a thread about this a couple weeks ago.

For cheap (but better than the monopoly dog), hit the toy store. Bags of 144 zoo animals can be had for under 10 bucks. Same with soldiers, dinosaurs, aliens, pokemons, and whatever else.

All my metal minis I accumulated one at a time. Go to local game store, pick out something for my new character, paint. Repeat for 15 years, while inheriting the collections of my 3 brothers as well. Have them all (a couple hundred) stolen. Start over again.

Edit: Here it is.
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?528881-What-does-everyone-use-for-game-tokens-miniatures