How inportant are figures to your game?

[Dingle100]

I have a friend http://6d6fireball.com/who makes figures and is hoping to make a some money manufacturing them.
My personal experience in D&D is that I use the nearest figure that fits the template (The cow figure has been used a lot).

I just wondered how many people buy figures and paint them for a specific adventure/campaign, and how many just use what they have got and improvise, also how many just use templates.

http://www.dinglesgames.com/

[AslanCross]

Been using figures since I started about 3 years ago. It was annoying how random D&D minis were in the past, but now that they've been semi-randomized I think I can buy more purposefully. Unfortunately, no stock has arrived in this country yet.

[Blackjackg]

I try to minimize the use of minis in my games (no pun intended). They are useful for mapping out combats in the distance-heavy rules of 3.x and 4.0, though, so we usually wind up using something.

You should probably edit the content of your original post before the mods do. I think that linking to for-profit websites is against the rules.

[RTGoodman]

Eh, they're relatively important, but only up to a point. That is, we always use miniatures in games I run and most I play in, but we don't go overboard in trying to buy and paint ones to fit every PC, NPC, and random encounter for the whole campaign.

I've got a couple of gallon-sized ziplok baggies full of WotC minis and we usually find something reasonably close to each character, and then the same for NPCs/enemies, but it's never exact. I've used some Hyena minis to represent wolves, dogs, dire weasels, a pig, hell hounds, and probably several other furry quadrupeds. (Ironically, I don't think I've ever actually used them as Hyenas. )

[Fiendish_Dire_Moose]

Many of the games I run involve a dry erase board. I do however encourage the use of miniatures in the game my friend runs. However being that he uses dice for the enemies, I like to encourage the use of action figures. This is to help distunguish, and give the players some extra fun.
I personally use the Alice figurine made by Todd MacFarlane for American McGee's Alice.
Yes, it fits in the squares.

[Quietus]

I never use minis. However, with the advent of 4e, they've become far more important to have; I play mostly 3.5, where we are very freeform. The moment we switch to 4e, we'll need to start determining just how far a slide of three squares is.

[TheThan]

Since I run games mostly on the forums here. I find that a “digital grid” and markers work just fine.


I use adobe photoshop to create a “master map” for each fight; this is saved it as a photoshop file with layers and whatnot. Then I move everything around according to what happens each round. Then I save that as a .jpg and put it up on an image sight to post it.

The only real problem is it chews up a lot of hard drive space. So I recommend only running one game at a time using this method.


As for tabletop games, we have a eightish foot and a smaller 2x2 map mat we use and just about anything we have available to us as minis. Everything from warhammer fantasy to warmachine/hordes minis to beads and rip up pieces of paper. so all you really need are markers to represent PCs and enemies.

[Thurbane]

I wouldn't say minis are vital to our games, but they can (and do) help things run more smoothly. Besides, I enjoy collecting them...

[Kaiyanwang]

Never used minis. Our previous games where freeform, so no problem.

Now whe see more the grid, but my player draw quickly the creatures using symbols. We manage it quite well.

I hate minis for RPG. I prefer players imagine more, the schemes are just to be clear about positions etc, but not more.

[TheCountAlucard]

I have reason to suspect that if I actually had minis, my D&D games would feature them more often. As it is, I find the paltry handful of miniatures provided by my "starter kit" to be so insufficient that I end up putting X's on a piece of paper instead...

However, back when a friend of mine was GMing SWSE, he had us using minis every session. He had a freakin' army of the things, and he even had some that resembled the PCs.

[J.Gellert]

What I have is mostly the plastic D&D minis and a few Lord of the Rings strategy game minis. I would be using miniatures a lot more often if I had some to represent exactly what I want - exactly my character, or a real-looking crusader, and so on. D&D miniatures just fail for me (for example, all I have is werewolves with boobs. Seriously, Hasbro?). Using a miniature of one thing to represent another thing doesn't do it for me - I might as well use dice or counters or whatever.

On the other hand I consider it wasted money to purchase specific miniatures for specialized use (I am that cheap ). So what I do is this: Find a cool picture of a monster or an awesome portrait for a character, photoshop it on a square 1 inch across and print it. Ta-dah! A bonus is that they are disposable so I don't mind marking things directly on them (damage taken, buffs/debuffs, etc).

[cfalcon]

My friends and I run on specially made mats. For figures we use little plastic thingies that I can't describe exactly, with smaller ones superglued on. Essentially these are plastic colored discs about a quarter inch in diameter, which is a little smaller than the size of our hexes on the laminated mats we use, which are a few feet by a few feet. This allows for a MUCH bigger game box than the standard set of stuff, and allows for hexes, and doesn't even have the small possibility of limiting what the DM puts on the table based on what he has.

The fewer the barriers to imagination, the better.

[Zaq]

I never used to use minis. We used to use dice, or a dry erase board. Within the past month, we started playing at a game store (instead of at our apartments or at the student union), where they sell D&D minis for fifty cents a pop (not a grand selection, but hey, can't beat the price), so now I've got a dozen sitting next to my keyboard, just because they're completely freakin' adorable. Even the zombies and kuo-toa and tentacled tree-men. You make anything an inch tall and it becomes significantly cuter.

As for actually using them in the games, eh, I use whatever's handy. If that happens to be one of my little hunks of painted plastic, then I use it. If not, well, then not.

[Kurald Galain]

Never used minis. Our previous games where freeform, so no problem.

Now whe see more the grid, but my player draw quickly the creatures using symbols. We manage it quite well.

I hate minis for RPG. I prefer players imagine more, the schemes are just to be clear about positions etc, but not more.

I completely agree.

[Tyrmatt]

The thing that puts me off doing a lot more gaming is the need for expensive mini's. I got out of the Warhammer scene to get away from it and now I'm being asked to play in Mordheim, Necromunda and Gorkamorka as well as try and find miniatures so I can play 4E and even my own GURPS game may end up using them as the players are quite big on having a personalised avatar that represents them.
So for my RPGs I deem them non-essential. But a lot of people love to use them and thus you just can't escape them. I wish I had to money to but things like the Dangerous Delves Complete Set so I could never worry about this. However making a set of bases that you can slot tiny printouts of monsters into is a much more viable idea. Either that or use a PC solution with a projector/over the web motif.

[Kiero]

Never used minis in over 15 years of gaming.

[Eldariel]

We use pieces of paper mostly. Except for player characters; everyone has their own figure, at least optimally. Usually it comes down to taking something to that effect.

But yeah, we fight on the grid and we use paper a lot.

[Dogmantra]

I use spare dice, mostly. I have a couple of really ugly ones that get used, and I don't like numbered d6s either, so they act as minis.

If we ever got a proper campaign going, I'd make OotS card minis for all the characters.

[bosssmiley]

If you'd only asked before April. Up until then I'd have said "They are one of the few things staving off the madness inherent in DMing." Since then I tend to use them for marching order, and that's about it.

[Totally Guy]

We pay Larpers to act it all out. But that tends to only in the ball room, the house mausoleum and the outdoor life size chess. Due to the squares on the floor.

Just kidding... but if I ever win the lottery...

[Telonius]

I've used them since I started about 7 years ago. It makes adjudicating area effects and line of effect quite a bit easier. The exact thing that you're using to represent the character doesn't matter much - we could be using jelly beans, pennies, or chess figures, and it would be fine. But having a mini that looks at least a little bit like the way you imagine your character is nice.

[Salty]

I didn't really use minis up that much until recently. Even then, I was disappointed about how expensive it would be to have an accurate representation of all of the monsters in all of my games.
[shameless_plug] This might help me, though. [/shameless_plug]

[Serpentine]

In my game the only "figures" we have a little condomish-shaped coloured tokens from a board game, and the map (sticky laminate-covered grid paper) mostly just comes out for complicated battles and some dungeons.
...
Not very.

[FMArthur]

Get some damned LEGO, you fools!

Anyway, a dry-erase mat is the bare minimum requirement for my group to assemble for D&D.

[Britter]

I've used them for my Shadowrun games for about 8 or so years. Combined with a big ehiteboard and evlevation created by using various household items, they allow me to more accurately determine line of sight for shooting things.

However, there are some scenarios and environments that I can not even begin to map out, like incredibly complciated factory floors and such, that I run freeform, using the minis for maching order and little else.

Interestingly enough, when playing D and D 2e I never used miniatures, just description and th eoccasional piece of graph paper with letters on it.

[DeathQuaker]

For my campaign, I have bought, converted, and painted the party and the major villains. (Hopefully one day I will have pictures of the current party uploaded.)

BUT... this is because I really enjoy the miniature hobby by itself, not just for use in D&D. I doubt if I enjoyed it I would go to the lengths I do to make likenesses of the characters (let alone spend the money on the Reaper figurines).

And even now, non-important characters tend to be represented by any number of 1-inch-square pieces of plastic, plastic minis a friend of mine bought at E-Bay for cheap, dice, glass beads, and anything else we can improvise; for example:

Spoiler

Show

[mikej]

It's not something I really care about. I'd rather use pokemon minatures, bought from those toy ball vending machines at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Plusle for good-alignment characters.

Minun for evil-alignment characters.

[Renegade Paladin]

We use candy for monsters. The players get to eat them after they kill them.

[Fiendish_Dire_Moose]

We use candy for monsters. The players get to eat them after they kill them.

A friend of mine once ran a game where each monster was represented by a shot of the cheapest tequila he could find. Nobody wanted to kill a monster.

[shadzar]

The questions asked are loaded.

Minis are not solely bought by gamers. There is an entire website dedicated to JUST painting and modding minis. http://www.Coolminiornot.com

Well that is a lie. There are dozens out there about JUST painting them.

So while many of today's gamers may want prepainted minis, there are still plenty of actual mini enthusiasts that like raw mini to paint/mod themselves.

Peter Lee (a current WotC employee for the minis team) used to do a lot on CMoN to get himself out there.