D&D General Miniatures shouldn't be edition-dependent (a Fire Giant size rant)

[billd91]

Ever consider flat paper counters? I picked up the Fiery Dragon digital counter collection years ago and they work pretty well. I usually paste them into Word, adjust sizes as needed if I want something in an unusual size, then print them either with a color inkjet or color laser printer.
It’s not a bad way to get lots of figures for playing on a battle mat in an economic way. Plus, you can write on them as they take hp damage, stat damage, suffer conditions, etc.

DriveThruRPG

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[The Green Hermit]

Could you just switch all giants to the larger size? That way, you could just get larger bases for the others.

 

[pukunui]

. . .and I'm also wondering, does WotC just arbitrarily change the size of creatures to encourage players to buy new minis to accommodate? That's what it feels like. How many other creatures went from large to huge, or vice versa, or maybe from medium to large?

They changed the size of giants for 5e because they wanted them to be truly gigantic and of epic proportions, not because they wanted to encourage people to buy more minis or to make previous minis incompatible with the new game.

With 5e, WotC has de-emphasised the use of miniatures. In fact, they don't even make the minis themselves anymore. They've licenced miniature production out to WizKids, who have ironically been somewhat inconsistent with the 5e mini sizes as well.

WizKids' first two 5e giants -- a stone giant and a frost giant from the initial Tyranny of Dragons set -- were Huge minis posed in such a way as to fit onto Large bases. The ogre from the same set also looked like it should be Huge but was still on a Large base. Subsequent ogre minis have gone back to being around the same size as the one that was in one of the Dungeon Command sets.

WizKids also messed up the sizes of their initial elementals from the Princes of the Apocalypse set. According to the 5e MM, the four basic elementals are all supposed to be Large, but WizKids's water and earth elemental minis from that set were Medium. (I note that they included all Large elementals in the most recent Fangs & Talons set.)

I would also argue that most of WizKids's 5e-era dragons are too small, even the supposedly adult ones like the silver dragon that was a premium figure for the Princes of Apocalypse set. They now seem to be attempting to rectify this by producing truly gargantuan premium dragon figures, like the big red, white and black adult dragons, and Arveiaturace the ancient white and so on.

Incidentally, I have some old Large-size 3e era giant minis (including a fire giant) I've set aside to get rid of, but I'm in New Zealand, so it may not be a feasible option for you ...

 

[NaturalZero]

Ever consider flat paper counters? I picked up the Fiery Dragon digital counter collection years ago and they work pretty well. I usually paste them into Word, adjust sizes as needed if I want something in an unusual size, then print them either with a color inkjet or color laser printer.
It’s not a bad way to get lots of figures for playing on a battle mat in an economic way. Plus, you can write on them as they take hp damage, stat damage, suffer conditions, etc.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

I haven't run a game in person in awhile, but I always made "pogs" for every creature on the board. I strongly preferred this method to minis because I could use google and photoshop to make an exact image of whatever homebrew NPC or monster I was running. I really like having accurately represented images on the board and I don't want to limited myself to a selection of minis that is infinitesimally smaller than the collective sum of monster images on the internet.

My method was to by 8.5 x 11 label stock, make a document with a grid of the images I wanted to use in photoshop (or other free online editing software), print and stick the label to posterboard, and then use circular craft punches to make 1, 2, or 3 inch circles.

 

[Tyler Pickering]

I use pawns instead of minis for most monsters now with only PC's and special characters sometimes having minis. I sold my collectible miniature collection from WOTC years ago and noone here would believe how much I got for them all ebaying them. I still like to paint so I always try to paint PC minis and I do have some of the larger minis still like the dragons but pawns are so much easier to work with and store.

 

[DemoMonkey]

Paint the outer edge of the mini base (and the edge) the same colour as your battle mat so the black part of the base is 2 inch instead of 3 inch.

 

[Mistwell]

Oh well I am guessing you could trade a huge giant for a large giant with people, since I would assume the huge mini would cost more than the large mini and a bunch of people will have older 3e minis they'd be happy to upgrade to the 5e ones?

 

[Orius]

I’d have more sympathy, but if you think that’s a problem, imagine those of us with 80s minis trying to use them at the same table as modern ones lol. Where the ral partha hill giant is as big as a modern human reaper barbarian

I was going to comment on this myself. Some of those minis from 40 years ago and more are smaller than modern minis. Maybe as much as 25% smaller? And this isn't even all WotC's fault either, go blame Games Workshop for making their minis so damn big. Sizes for giants aren't at all consistent across editions either, 2e pumped up their sizes too compared to 1e and D&D.

 

[Luz]

Reaper has an excellent selection of fire giants, I own most of these and they are scaled for Large size. Just be careful which ones you select as they do offer Huge size for some of them now.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

. .and I'm also wondering, does WotC just arbitrarily change the size of creatures to encourage players to buy new minis to accommodate? That's what it feels like. How many other creatures went from large to huge, or vice versa, or maybe from medium to large?

Some people like their giants gigantic. In this case I think wanting the true giants to be a size catagory larger than various giant kin like ogres and ettin, wanting to make them immune to grapples from player characters under normal conditions due to being two sizes larger, wanting to emphasize that these human shaped fellows are very different from humanoids so no Hold Person or whatever will not work on them, and generally wanting to make them more fantastical were probably higher priorities than to marginally increase the profits of their miniature licensee. To the extent they thought about minis the thought process likely began and ended with "huge scale ones will look pretty cool".

If another division of Hasbro made the miniatures I might be a little more conspiracy minded.