What Do You Use For Minis?

[Dausuul]

It appears that the majority of people on these forums use minis/grids in D&D. So, a follow-up poll... what do you use for minis?

1. Whatever's handy. Bottle caps, dice, bits of paper, very small rocks. Somebody had an actual mini once, but we lost it.
2. We use whatever scrounged minis we can come up with. Paladins are likely to have their sacrifices represented by fiendish boars.
3. We have a fair assortment of minis and can usually find a decent approximation to whatever's needed, though we might still use (for example) orcs to represent gnolls, or a Huge dragon for a hydra.
4. We're pretty careful about using the right mini for the right creature.

(My group used to be #2, but I dumped a pile of money on minis recently in hopes of moving us to #3...)

[Baalzebub]

Number 2. Yeah, it's weird.

[Khantalas]

Tikal pieces.

No, I'm quite serious. Four colors are handier than you think.

[ishi]

Depends on what's available. If we've got access to minis, we'll use them, but if we don't, we use coins/lego people/pieces of paper.

So, in your list, we use the highest number available, but it's not a big deal otherwise.

[Thiel]

1. Although I do use a little warhammer,

[Ranis]

4. A guy in my group has over 700 of the crazy things, all organized and classified, so whatever I need for the occasion, I have, in addition to him having all three sets of Dungeon Tiles; it makes describing things much easier in-game and sets the scene much better.

[clarkvalentine]

Mini painting is a sub-hobby of mine, so my collection is pretty good. We usually use a mini per monster (although bad guy NPCs are much more common in my campaigns, my monster collection is actually somewhat sparse) - if there's a slew of mooks, we'll sometimes substitute glass beads.

[Krellen]

Old Hero Quest minis.

I figured that was probably option #2.

[Dareon]

Combination of 1 and 2, closer to 3 in spirit. Often one of my players will bring this huge trophy cup he has full of minis, and we use what mostly fits out of that. Otherwise, I pull out my tray of Lego minifigs and we build characters with them to look at least vaguely like our characters.

Notable substitutions include a Jawa representing a Wookiee and a Taco Bell Chihuahua doll for... some Huge monster or other, I forget. I just remember it was carnivorous.

[YPU]

For monsters we use pieces from games, especially settlers of catan, and random pieces from a big box of games. We have about 15 official dnd minie’s but that number is growing. For the PC we have mini’s I am a rather dedicated converter of dnd minis so if someone makes up a character I probably have the mini done the next day.

[Khantalas]

Oh, I forgot about Catan. I use "stadt"s for large creatures if I run out of Tikal figures.

[Bryn]

Random plastic game counters, for the most part. The sort you get in 'travel games' - round and coloured. They're smaller than actual minis, about 1cm in diameter, which means we use less paper printing out maps. They also avoid 'I attack the gnoll.' 'But its an orc!' situations.

[pestilenceawaits]

The OoTS comic matches my game just about perfectly we have reasonable approximations for PCs and NPCs but the monsters a re generally mismatched unless I have a good mini for them.

[Saph]

2. In my last game my enchantress was represented by a Dire Badger mini, and in yesterday's game my sorcerer's position was marked by an eraser.

We just never seem to have the right mini around.

- Saph

[Silvershadow]

My DM has an obscene amount of both Star Wars and D&D miniatures and I have a fair amount myself (it's especially obscene when you consider the fact that we've never actually played the miniatures game, not even once), so we tend to use the right miniature for the right PC or NPC. The only exceptions are when they just plain don't make that miniature, or when neither of us owns it, in which case we'll use the closest approximation (for instance, for my Squib Jedi I use Yoda).

We've been known to just stop the game for 10 minutes prior to combat while we go fishing for the right mini. Come to think of it, we're kind of OCD about it. Maybe we should join a support group.

[Maglor_Grubb]

Dice, coins, a little plastic pinguin...

[TheThan]

I find poker chips to be quite useful as minies, particularly for hoards of the same type of creature.

[Behold_the_Void]

1, by which I mean dice.

[Accolon]

Mini painting is one of my hobbies, so all the PCs, important NPCs and "Boss" or "important" bad guys have their own hand painted mini. My collection #'s in the 100s, and I think late at night, they run amok through my house.

For mosters, one of my players and I have collected a pretty good assortment of the crappy WoTC minis, Mage Knight, and Hero Clix. I also have Dwarven Forge Skeletons and Lizardmen, as well as a good handful of orcs, giants, etc. Between the two of us, (mostly him) we have about 300 or plasitc "throw down" minis to represent the other nasties, or commonplace NPCs of the world.

We also use scenery and ruined buildings, etc. It makes the game pretty cool, especially for combat.

[Galathir]

Personally, I dislike minis. I much prefer small glass pebbles, like those used in fish tanks. You can get dozens of colors and textures and they are very cheap.

While it doesn't look like anything in particular, (unless it is some ooze-like thing) you can still keep track of your character. Healers are generally blue, tanks red, rangers green, etc. I even have some large ones for covering two or four squares.

[Gadhar&Sealgair]

Most of the time, we use whatever random minis we have; there's a decent but random collection of D&D minis between myself and the DM. Large and huge creatures are much more restricted; the same Dire Boar, Dire Ape, and Carrion Crawler have been involved in a many encounters.

If all else fails, we use dice or pieces of paper.

[Gorbad the Limb Rippa]

One of the guys in my roleplaying group bought a "heros of the lance" minitures box set,so raistlin is the generic wizad,tasslehoff the generic halfling,tanis as the archer and so on and so forth.

[Krimm_Blackleaf]

I use chess pieces.

[Sesquedoodle]

I voted Random Scrounged Minis, but in fact most if not all the PCs are represented by a specific lego person.
For monsters, we use little plastic thingies called Crazy Bones, and whatever else is handy. One time when we were fighting a huge amount of hobgoblins, we went out and bought sweets to represent them with. It provided an excellent incentive to kill them.

[Bender]

We use mostly miniatures from the board game heroquest, so we have some skelletons, goblins and orcs, but half the time we just use some dice that are near...

I sometimes show the image of a creature in the MM, but just using a description and imagination is great

[elliott20]

I use stuff in this order

1. lego minis: this is for the PCs and for major humanoid size NPCs
2. if the NPC is larger than normal, I throw some blocks together to make something that roughly equates to the proper size
3. if I run out of legos or time, I'll grab an eraser or some other object for it
4. for red shirt NPCs and monsters, I usually just use coins.

[ShadowYRM]

It appears that the majority of people on these forums use minis/grids in D&D. So, a follow-up poll... what do you use for minis?

1. Whatever's handy. Bottle caps, dice, bits of paper, very small rocks. Somebody had an actual mini once, but we lost it.
2. We use whatever scrounged minis we can come up with. Paladins are likely to have their sacrifices represented by fiendish boars.
3. We have a fair assortment of minis and can usually find a decent approximation to whatever's needed, though we might still use (for example) orcs to represent gnolls, or a Huge dragon for a hydra.
4. We're pretty careful about using the right mini for the right creature.

(My group used to be #2, but I dumped a pile of money on minis recently in hopes of moving us to #3...)

We're #4...

Between us, we have well over a thousand miniatures now, and we've built up a large collection of 3D terrain.
- 3x3 Grass board w modular trees & hills (pretty realistic shadings)
- Modular cavern tiles.
- Modulare Hirst Art ruins (8x8 squares you can re-arrange, roman style ruins)
- A 2x2 volcano or blasted landscape
- A tabletop town... 6x2.5 with lots of modular buildings Hirst Art (some buildings entered into HADD5 and 6 at www.voidgamers.com if you want to see some of the buildings) Picture of the whole town can be found here... www.jpoppa.com/daggerfalls.htm
- A giant keep that the PCs own now (large category HADD6 winner at Voidgamers)
- The other DM just built the Undying Temple for CotSQ out of foam... looks great.
- We have about 12 boxes of Master Maze w several Cavern and Cavern/River/Passage sets.
- We're working on ships from Stormwrack and desert setting.
- In a pinch, the one guy has a few things of D&D dungeon tiles.

So we've overdone it... but it is fun to have a spider climbing duel on a 2' tall keep where falling actually means something and you can actually stick the minis to the walls with a bit of poster tack.

I don't recommend going this far unless you also enjoy modeling as a secondary hobby that you'd do anyway (which several of us do). You also need lots of room. I've got another 4x2 underkeep model that I can't show yet, and this stuff is eating up a lot of room in my house.

It's taken years to build up this collection of minis and terrain... there would have been lots of easier and cheaper ways, but, we all have careers and didn't mind the expense or long periods of time to slowly build this collection.

Not everyone's cup of tea, but we are happy with going a little overboard.

[Matthew]

Card Board Counters, for the most part.

[Golthur]

Pennies, cardboard cutouts, random scrounged minis. We've even got about 20 painted pennies in two different colours with numbers written on one side and "*" on the other for when you kill them.

[daggaz]

friend of mine came up with a great idea. First he scanned (or found on the net) the pictures of various DnD monsters from the books. Then he enlarged them usually, and made pages with a whole grid of them, usually head and shoulder shots, but some of them with full body poses. Then he prints them out on a color printer. Cut em out, and with a spot of sillyputty, just afix whatever you need to ...a poker chip! (the heavier ones from a good set work best). Instant army of perfect mini's on the ready.