[Minis] Do you use them?

[Kiero]

Simple as that. Do you use minis or some other form of representation in your games?

[Goober4473]

When combat gets complicated, I bring them out. Otherwise I just use description and imagination.

[tainsouvra]

I use them to mark positions during combat if I'm playing with a group that needs the visual aid...that's all though, and differently-colored dice or other markers are sufficient.

[DaMullet]

For a long time, we used legos superglued to pennies...

Then we "upgraded" to star wars minis when a new member of the group happened to have some lying around.

We usually only bring them out if we're fighting two or more monsters, so we know where AoO zones are.

[Amphimir Míriel]

My group uses a low budget solution.

We use the player pieces from "Master Labyrinth" for the PCs (painted chess pawns would also do) and colored glass beads for enemies. I bought them for aprox. $1.00USD per pound.

Only when I am using a Large or bigger creature do I make up something out of playdough

No need for detailed minis in our opinion, no store bought mini is going to reflect your character satisfactorily anyway, so you are better off using a generic marker and your imagination.

[talsine]

one of our players plays a lot fo SW Minis and D&D Minis so we use them for all of our combats, which is about once every other session of late. Wish it was more, but its nice to have more RP focused games for once.

[leperkhaun]

Unless the combat will be short and sweet we use mini's.

It helps in figuring out what you can and cant do. No more WHooooooa, i thought you said he was in FRONT of the pillar not behind him.

Plus i like to see the pile of dead we just killed.

[The J Pizzel]

For a long time we didn't. But I was tired of people claiming the thought they were close enough to hit that guy or that they shouldn't be in that AoE spell. So I took the battle grid from the DMG and laminated it. Now I have assorted colors that represents all kinds of stuff and everyone bought a bunch of minis. In a matter of weeks we had like 50 minis. Now we use them for any and all battles. I also went and bought the dungeon tiles and they're pretty cool. My group loves them.

[de-trick]

we use minis for combat, I my self bought 1 booster pack and I got addicted to minis 8 is not enough, so I bought like $80 worth and there coming in soon, I can't wait

there night below

but we use them for combat, nice for spells and combat in general

fun for trying to find the best miniature for your character

[Falrin]

Small Encounters: Yes.
I'm short on Minis so we tend to use substitues as well (Dice make good mooks, Gums make perfect horses, you can even put a mini on them)

Open Field: In combo with paper.
I Draw the whole battlefield on the paper. Then we take the 'center of the battle' and here we use minis. Everything that happens further away I'll draw.


Large Battles: Only Paper.
Get lots of nice colours and start drawing dots, marks, numbers, letters, ... Easy to keep track: Red Nr 1 (Goblin) has 1 hp left, Green dot has cast Bull's Str, ...

[Tormsskull]

For D&D we use minis. I am both for and against them. For tactical wargaming they are great (and required for the most part), but for more story-driven games they don't seem to do so well. Unless it is just our group, battles with minis take a very long time compared to battles without.

[Hallavast]

Yep. I have over 200 miniatures including dnd and star wars minis. I like em. We use them for all combats that have more than 2 combatants. It's a huge money sink though, and they are by no means necessary. I don't use them every session (because not every session will include combat), but they're nice eye candy and they help resolve arguments over position and movement.

[Polarbeast]

My current gaming group is more mechanics-minded than roleplaying-centered, and happens to have a few guys with some money, so they have an enviously large collection of miniatures.

I'm starting a new group, though, so am slowly building my own collection, at least with some characters for the players to choose from and some mook-style creatures. There are so many useless minis for me, though (gee, when am I gonna use this guy with the torch pointing off in the distance? When am I going to have the Kobold Trapmaker actually out on the game mat? And what the holy heck is THIS thing?!). Hopefully I can increase the roleplaying aspect so that the mat-and-minis are hauled out when combat begins.

I think the d20/3.# edition has a greater need for minis than the older styles of play, what with the combat maneuvering. But it's still fun: it's nice to get a groan from the players when the DM brings out the ziplock bag that says DEMONS on it, or plunks down some large figure that takes up a few squares, or topples out a handful of enemies.

[Saph]

Yep, use them whenever possible. They speed up combat massively, and are much more visually attractive than scribbles on paper or an empty table. Whenever you forget where everyone is, you can just glance at the map.

I used to game without minis in my last group, and it worked fine, but having minis is a definite improvement. Plus players get to pick out something they think suits the look of their character.

- Saph

[Proven_Paradox]

Well, I use programs that simulate tokens on grid maps, so I guess that would be a yes. I do that even with in-person games. On-line games, that's usually the entirety of how we interact.

[geez3r]

My college group uses minis but not with a "realistic value". Basically, we use some sort of object to represent where are character is, so we don't run into those "my character wasn't that close" arguments. My "mini" was my class ring for example.

[Flawless]

I love minis :)
However, it seems to be a third edition thing as we never used them for 2nd edition games. With all those AoOs, it's pretty hard to play without them, or at least without some other means of visualization.

[horseboy]

Only when dealing with Games Workshop games.

[hecksheri]

My husband used to be an avid warhammer player and he and I both really get into painting minis just for the sake of painting them. We have quite a few nice ones that we are proud of, though not at a competitive level by any stretch. Given the fact that we have about a thousand minis, it would be silly not to use them. The skaven army makes great baddies. We use these little styrofoam bricks (about 3x3x5cm) that came by the hundreds in a light bulb shipment to mark edges of rooms, tunnels in dungeons, etc. We even put together a bunch of those little cardstock buildings. We use a separate table in the middle of the room for our minis, and the rest of us sit at various desks and at tables elsewhere in the room. (Where is it written that everyone must sit around a single table?) With everything focused on a more or less open area in the room with the minis table behind it, we have found that everyone has a tendency to stand up and act out their parts. I feel that minis really enhance combat and really help out with planning strategies in complex situations...i.e. trying to sneak into a building with guards posted in certain areas, etc. One really useful aspect is that when archery is in use, or when spells have a line of sight or cone effect, etc., it becomes very easy for the dm to visualize specific situations and come to a conclusion about whether or not something is feasible.

[Lemur]

In the past I've mainly used tokens, coins, or even dice to mark characters (we'd also place a die underneath tokens for flying creatures, to indicate the number of squares they had in elevation) since hardly anyone had minatures. I've started to consider using legos, though.

[Zim]

I'm a big fan of using miniatures and battle mats. The combination really helps to lay out the tactical situation and eleminate confusion about placement of enemies, blast effects, areas of influence etc...

Ususally, we use D&D minis for everything (I have about 500 of the little pieces of plasti-crack, many repainted) and dry erase Tack-tiles or dry erase flip mats to sketch out the encounter (or sometimes the whole dungeon if I'm feeling abitious). BBEG's that I hope will be memorable warrant their own custom paint job or conversion.

I think it just makes the whole gaming experience more enjoyable and memorable for everyone.

[Vhaidara]

Yes, and I currently need a good place to buy a dwarf rouge. Kettering, OH, that's near Dayton. And don't suggest Wexford Hills Hobbyshop, because they went out of business recently. When I got there, the only DnD anything they had was a Gargantuan Blue Dragon "mini".

[Fhaolan]

It depends on the particular gaming group.

In one of my gaming groups, we do a lot of tactical combat as the DM is new and we're trying to play it perfectly RAW so as to learn all the ins and outs of it. For that game, I bought some Raven minis to represent my wife's and mine characters.

The same group switches off on occasion with a different DM that runs a high-level campaign. I made minis for myself and my wife using epoxy putty, as we had very specific character concepts (with animal companions and familiars and the like). I glitched on these though and made them 25mm scale like all my old minis, not the 30mm scale that is now standard. They look a bit odd next to the minis bought by everyone else.

My other gaming group... well, if they enter combat something has gone badly, badly wrong. So if it does happen, and we need to get tactical, we just throw something together with dice and pennies and the like.

[skywalker]

Yes, and I currently need a good place to buy a dwarf rouge. Kettering, OH, that's near Dayton. And don't suggest Wexford Hills Hobbyshop, because they went out of business recently. When I got there, the only DnD anything they had was a Gargantuan Blue Dragon "mini".


Hey, the manager of my gaming store said that thing took up the appropriate number of tiles. Was he lying to try to get me to buy it?


My first DM(CofC) had a laminated battle mat that he used dry-erase on, and we picked random markers from the basic D&D box set, I liked to play as Kerwynn(the old school iconic rogue), etc. Another DM sprung for a massive pad of graph paper, and another member of that group had his dad's old 1980s minis. So yes, we had fun picking out minis to suit our characters. I remember the rogue was forever represented by a spearman because the first session we had the minis, she was wielding a longspear she'd found.

My favorite set-up has to be for the dungeon I just finished playing. The DM rendered the entire dungeon in flash, then had all of the wizards OGL images downloaded, so he could drop in a picture of whatever he wanted, whatever size he wanted. Then he made dots with player initials on them. We didn't get to move ourselves, but damn, we were SURE about where we and those monsters were located.

[Vhaidara]

Incase that wasn't a joke, I meant it's not exactly small. I remember reading about someone that had a life-size young adult Gold Dragon model or something

[Matthew]

Sometimes, sometimes not. I have a shed load of old Warhammer/Heroquest Miniatures, but for the most part I prefer not to have to get them out (I hate Warhammer Dwarves for one thing, even though I have about a hundred of the little blighters). For the most part I just prefer to use Counters if things are getting complicated, but if I had loads of nice looking and appropriate Miniatures and Dungeon Tiles, I would probably use them.

[DrummingDM]

I DM'd 2nd Edition games for years, and never bothered with them. When we added two staunch 3.5 gamers to our group, and upgraded our game from 2nd to 3.5, we took advantage of the battle grid that one of our new players inherited from a previous group. Since then, we've started using minis.

As a player, I love them - I like knowing exactly where the fighter is so I can buff him, or where the rogue is so I can help them gain flanking, etc.

As a DM, I'm of a mixed opinion - I like the ease of knowing exactly who is within range of my spells and the like, but I find they slow down combat as I have some very tactically-inclined players.

[Kurald Galain]

No. In my opinion it slows down action scenes too much.

[Qooroo]

We often use them, particularly when combat exceeds 3-4 people, or takes place in a complicated setting, but we use them very vaguely - no measuring, no grids, nothing elaborate. Just a visual aid to remembering where everyone is, roughly.

[crimson77]

I have played both with and without minis, both as a player and as a DM.

I got into gaming years and years ago. I got the original Hero's Quest box set with the expansions (then later the Advanced Hero's Quest box set with expansion). I have quite a collection of Ralpartha (sp?) minis from the 90s. Needless to say I have a lot of minis.

What I like about playing with a dry erase battle mat is that when combat scenes are needed then the figures come out. In this way the minis do not detract from the story driven quest, but in some case enhance it.

I have used minis with groups as small as two and as large as 12. When it comes to big groups, I think that the mat can give a focal point and with a good story teller (DM), he/she can keep the players engaged.

The battlemat also keeps players and the DM on the same page as far as relative size of buildings, etc.

[valadil]

I don't think I could play D&D without minis. And I don't even like tactical war games, but I've just seen too many disputes about positioning when minis aren't on the table. Even things like marching order are easier with minis.

We don't use a fully painted mini for everything though. PCs get those as do named NPCs. Random mooks usually get dice or tokens.

[Kelorin]

I liked the Battle Mat but we quit using it since the table cloth had a nice size checkerboard pattern that worked very well with the miniatures. The plus side was it allowed us to make very large rooms and not worry about scale vs. our Battle Mat's size and scale.

For making walls, etc, there was usually a box of pencils or pens that we'd throw down to make them. I guess if you really needed a lot of them, you could buy a bag of popsicle sticks from a crafts store (very cheap).

Mook markers were usually those decorative little glass markers (Magic the Gathering's tapper stones?). Different colors indicated special NPC's or monsters. Flip them over when they're dead. Easy to store and take up very little room in a gaming bag.

[Dhavaer]

No. I hate Paint too much to draw battlemaps for every combat.

[Ruerl]

No I prefer to use that little additional time of descriping the situation to my players and am in heavy favor of using imagination, using minis tend to put the focus on the figures and away from the characters wich ruins immersion.

And to me immersion is the one most important aspect of roleplaying.

So I only use minis when I play warhammer ;)