D&D 4E [4E only] What kind of miniatures do you use, if any?

[Vartan]

I'm mini-free thanks to Masterplan.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I'm mini-free thanks to Masterplan.

How horrible for you! Hopefully you can get rid of masterplan and play D&D as Gygax intended

Seriously though I use WotC painted minis exclusively right now. I would like to get back into painting metals again and have a big collection of Reaper minis to get started on. If I painted a mini a week I doubt I would be done before my 50th birthday!

 

[NMcCoy]

Up until recently we were using horribly mismatched minis - every fight featured "the snake dude", "the guy in the robe", "the dwarf", and "the orc with the hammer" filling the roles of the various monsters. PCs had somewhat more representational minis, but they still weren't great. I helped the DM make some token templates, and we now have much more evocative monster images.

 

[Shin Okada]

Well, basically, I use metal minis for PCs, especially PCs of non-one-shot games. And the majority of monsters are DDMs, with occasional metal minis.

Thus, it is hard for me to answer which ones are the "primary". Yeah, in a day's game, I will likely to use some dozens of DDMs. But as they are monsters, each of them live short on the gaming table. On the other hand, the metal minis are PCs and thus almost always on the gaming table.

 

[Tony Vargas]

At our tabe we use painted leads (OK, I guess they're pewter, now - thanks RoHS) for PCs, and plastic (like bag-o-zombies or 2nd-hand D&D or even Star Wars minis or whatever we can pick up cheap), chits (from D&D Encounters), or whatever else (yes, I've used M&Ms for minions) for monsters. There's not a lot of point to trying to get exactly the right monster mini, since you often fight a given sort of monster only a few times.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I use the DDM guys as I do not pain minis and unpainted metal minis look truly awful. I have a few metal minis from way back, but they are unpainted and were lost in my daughter's room for ten years for no big loss.

I have about 200 DDM minis, mostly bought on the singles market. Not many of them are expensive and it is a true rarity when one of them actually i representing what is on the bottom o f the base.

I think painted metal minis are probably the top of the line, really, but only if I could paint them, and I cannot, so DDM are the best for me and my group.

 

[giant.robot]

For the Encounters games I've been playing lately I've been using the DDM figures for PCs and colored pawns for monsters. When using minis I like to have one that is similar to what I think my character looks like. I've got a small box of a few dozen minis that I share with the table.

In the past I've used chess pieces, card stock stand-ups, and decorative glass beads. I've switched to minis for PCs because I found some cool ones on the cheap. I've been thinking about getting some Fenryll minis (I like plastic rather than metal minis) but that's a more expensive option than I think I'm comfortable with. I'm not a great painter so not only would I be out money from paints and minis but they would look bad to boot.

 

[Camelot]

I just use paper with letters written on them for the monsters, and the players have different colored clay that they shape into a resemblance of their character (or not, depending).

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

In the games I run, I let players bring whatever mini or counter they want to represent their characters, while I use colored glass beads for small and medium monsters

If I'm having a large monster in the table, I sometimes make an impromptu play-doh sculpture, but that's not very often

 

[Goken100]

No Lego Love?

The poll is problematic, because I'm sure many like me use a combination of mini types.

Our primary minis for PCs and major NPCs is Lego figures. I've got a slew of castle and pirate legos from my childhood, and they're still making them, so I pick up a few now and then (got some orcs last year, for example). They're ideal because you can pick the perfect outfit, armor, weapons, helmet, hair, accessories, etc. I recommend placing them on a 2x2 or 2x3 flat platform, ideally black to match the D&D minis. Fits in a standard grid with no problem.

I've got a bunch of D&D minis as well, and they are the primary source of monsters and enemies. It makes it easier to tell who are friends and who are foe when the mini types are distinct.

Of course, we've also got glass beads and the like that are always available when we need some hordes or movable terrain features.