For the Love of Minis

[David Howery]

I love minis. I got into D&D way back when because of minis. A local game shop in Bozeman (where I went to college) had a big display of them, and I noticed them first, long before I ever knew of the game that went with them. In fact, I started painting minis before I learned how to play the game. Over my years of gaming, I bought dozens of them, even though I never used half of them. When I started going to Gencon regularly, I always haunted the mini market stalls in the great hall; I bought dozens of 'bargain bin' ones. I branched out from D&D minis into some historical ones (all kinds of medieval ones, a nearly complete 'defenders of the Alamo' collection, assorted ancient/medieval/age of rifles, Iroquois, Sioux, etc.). My nephew were into GW's Warhammer and LOTR games, so I picked up some of those too, so they'd have someone else to game against. Nowadays, even though I don't game anymore, I still buy and paint minis just for fun. I focus now on ones that I just like the looks of... and if you've ever seen Reaper and Copplestone's lines, you know they have some really goofy ones (I've got Santa Claus, sexied up versions of Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty, and Zombie Hitler). Someday, I need to put some shelves up so I have a decent display space for them...

 

[Holy Bovine]

I used minis before I knew what the heck D&D was. I saw a few packs in my local bookstore - bought them, painted them and just goofed around playing with them for a while. Then I saw some magazines that had pictures of the minis I bought (it was an ad in Dragon) and discovered there was a whole game that used these things. That was around 1980.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I love minis, both painting and using them in various games. I keep buying more of them because I must be convinced that I'm buying the time to paint them too.

 

[David Howery]

1980? Me too...

 

[JoeGKushner]

52 Weeks, 52 Miniatures

Gaming or just for the enjoyment of painting, I and others, as set up on this blog by one Mike Mearls, showcase some of the miniatures we're painting in an effort to reach 52 minis in 52 weeks.

 

[Steel_Wind]

We used minis:

• OD&D: Rarely
• 1st Edition: infrequently
• Call of Cthulhu: Often
• Rolemaster: All the time
• Gurps: Most of the time
• SpaceMaster: Often
• Dragonstar: All the time
• LUG Trek: All the time
• Star Wars: SE: All the time
• 3.xx: All the time
• Pathfinder: All the time
  

Seeing as you only presented options for D&D, it seemed useful to point out they were (and are) used in other games as well.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I played a few campaigns in 2E D&D and never used minis. Occasionally we may roughly draw out on graph paper a map of the area where combat was taking place and then mark on the paper where everyone was but we never used minis or even tokens.

When 3E came along I started to DM. With more rules like AoO's, flanking and various feats such as Cleave determined by where exactly you were positioned on the map it became more important to have an accurate representation of the battle. I started using different coloured gemstones to represent PC's and monsters, and combats took place on a home-made battle mat I constructed using graph paper and some thin clear plastic. That lasted for all of one (short-lived) campaign.

My very basic initial set-up was upgraded for the next campaign I ran. The coloured gemstones were eplaced by Fiery Dragon monster and PC tokens and the home-made battle mat replaced with a Crystal Caste vinyl battle mat. That set-up worked pretty well but the campaign itself imploded after about 3 or 4 months.

After a few months I got another campaign together with an almost completely new group. By that point I had upgraded from a vinyl battle mat to a Paizo Flip-mat (dry erase mats are so much better than wet erase IMO!). One of the players had painted up quite a few Warhammer minis and brought them along for me to use for the monsters. I still used flat Fiery Dragon counters to represent some of the monsters, but the 3D minis had a certain "coolness" factor to them that the counters didn't.

Soon I was drawn into the pre-painted DDM's line and quickly fell down that slippery slope! I now own a couple of thousand DDM's and have enough of them that I can accurately represent most of the monsters and bad guys my PC's come up against. Sometimes I will have to "substitute" minis, but even then the substitute is generally looks similar to what he is actually representing.

In addition to the pre-painted DDM's I have also bought a couple of dozen metal minis to use for PC's and NPC's. None of them have been painted yet but they will sooner or later. I'm definitely in this for the long haul now!

Olaf the Stout

 

[Mark CMG]

Despite our miniatures wargaming background (some of my early groups even played Chainmail in the early Seventies), in the early D&D games we mostly used minis just to keep track of marching order, and only sometimes bothered to move them about to show where people were during combat. The vast majority of combats didn't last that long and bothering to move the minis might have doubled the amount of time devoted to combat during gameplay.

 

[Stormonu]

Seeing as you only presented options for D&D, it seemed useful to point out they were (and are) used in other games as well.

Sorry about that, but it was deliberate, I was trying to get sense of how much folks were using them in each edition. Course, I forgot to ask which edition they started with, so results are probably skewed for those who started in later editions....

Anyways, since you mentioned it, I sometimes use markers for other games (for V&V we used Jeff Dees wonderful counters that came with each adventure) , but I've never had much luck finding decent modern-day miniatures or futuristic minis that weren't Star Wars.

 

[Stormonu]

Does LEGO count?

Certainly! We used to have some of the castle legos we'd build into labyrinthes at our house, though we always had the issue of what to use for monsters, and how to figure out how far you could move (1 lego pip = 1 foot?).

(We even did some LEGO pirate games after I think it Steve Jackson came by our local Con and did a lego pirate wargame there).