Always wrong with math and minis

[huank]

Hello, Now I have a question about minis, wich I hope is not to complicated to answer.

I've been using homemade minis since I started playing 4e as a Dungeon Master, because where I live, official minis are hard to find and very expensive. What I do is, getting images from the internet; then I crop them to the required size on Photoshop; after that I build a letter or tabloid file on Illustrator with a lot of images which I later print, cut and paste on cardboard to get tokens of every monster I plan to use on the table (I really like to have tokens of the exact monster I'll be using). But, I've figured that now I have a lot of monsters that I really didn't use and that because of bad calculation, which translates in doing useless extra work. For example, I ended with more than 30 zombies and rotten corpses that I thought I would use, but I really used the half or even less than the half of them. So my question is, and I hope I'm clear, in your experience, how many minis could do the trick to cover all the minions, standards, solos or else to have complete encounters? For example: Should I print 10 orc minions, 1 chieftain, 1 bloodreaver, 5 warriors, etc? I've tried to calculate this myself, but last time I made less of the minis I needed and I'm kind of fed up.

BTW I usually have a party of 7 players, if this could help in something.

Well, thanks and I hope that I have explained myself, I'm not very good writing in English.

 

[im_robertb]

I just use placeholder tokens, myself. Each one has a letter and a number on it. Make 45 tokens: 9 tokens for each letter A to E, each numbered 1 to 9. Each letter represents a creature type (read: statblock), and each number is another individual of that type. Example: 1 goblin hexer = A1 4 goblin warriors = B1, B2, B3, B4 8 goblin minions = C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8 They don't have the advantage of looking nice, or of helping the PCs remember which letter is which, but it works for the battlemat.

 

[Mr. Teapot]

Why not plan the encounter(s) first and then print and cut the tokens that you need?

 

[huank]

Why not plan the encounter(s) first and then print and cut the tokens that you need?

What happens is that I work in a place where we print a lot of stuff and most of the times I use the blank or wasted parts of the sheets we print to add my minis . So I need to think ahead. Maybe I should stop trying to make them look nice and do as im_robertb says.

 

[shamsael]

Why not plan the encounter(s) first and then print and cut the tokens that you need?

Mr. Teapot is right.

Plan out all of your encounters, then print tokens to accomodate the largest individual encounter.

If encounter A has 3 zombies and encounter B has 4 zombies, print 4 zombies.

 

[Alisair Longreach]

I use the official D&D minis, not selfmade counters but I have an upper limit of 8 minis for most minion types but 4 is sufficient for most encounters. For non-minion monsters a single mini is usually enough but I might get up to 3 of a cheap uncommon. I never get more than a single mini for PC types and Solo monsters.