Do you Use Miniatures?

[JoeGKushner]

Minis, counters, chits, stand ups, etc... When the fireball goes off, I know when you're hit.

 

[weem]

Didn't really have any before 4e - others had enough, or we used other things - but when 4e came out, I raided my "Descent" board game for its mini's.

I actually have yet to buy a single mini for myself, but have bought different sets for all my (D&D playing) friends for their birthdays over the last year...

...I will be buying some in the near-ish future though

 

[darjr]

It really depends.

4e and 3.5 I always use them. In GURPS and Savage Worlds I'll often go without. Same with older D&D editions. There are many other games I've never used them for.

For Traveller I've used 15mm a ton, although those are mostly just a representation of where everybody is and what they can sense. Not so much playing pieces like in GURPS or Savage Worlds or 3.5/4e.

 

[Vegepygmy]

I always looked at D&D as a highly organized and systematized "storytime around the campfire", where everything happens in your imagination.

Miniatures don't change that, IMO. They just reduce the number of conflicts between one player's (or DM's) imagination and another's.

I've been using them since sometime around 1980, and while I'd be willing to play without them, I'd find certain activities to be more difficult/frustrating/confusing.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

My group uses minis for every single combat in our 3.5E game. When I first started playing 3.5E regularly back in 2005 I didn't own a single D&D mini. I used the Fiery Dragon Counter Collection Digital to make counters for all the PC's and monsters.

However, when I started a new group and campaign back in mid-2006 one of the new players brought along some of the minis he owned. I found that the 3D minis added an extra "coolness" factor to the game that flat counters just didn't have. Within 6 months I bought my first booster pack of D&D prepainted minis and I was hooked.

Now I own a couple of thousand D&D prepainted minis as well as about 50 odd Reaper unpainted minis (I just need to get around to painting the Reaper minis so I can use them!). I've just about gotten to saturation point now with the D&D prepainted minis as I have the vast majority of minis that I need and I can cover off almost all of the monsters in the 3.5E Monster Manual. There are some monsters that I still need to get, but my spending on D&D minis has definitely reduced in the last 12 months.

Personally I (obviously) think minis are great. As much as you can describe an encounter with a Beholder, it still can't replicate the looks of horror you get on your players' faces when you just plonk the Beholder mini down on the battle mat in front of them!

On top of that though, I really like that I am at the stage now where, no matter what the party is fighting, I can (almost always) put a mini on the table that looks exactly like (or very close eg. a Mummy instead of a Mummy Lord) what the party is fighting.

Olaf the Stout

 

[JoeGKushner]

Miniatures don't change that, IMO. They just reduce the number of conflicts between one player's (or DM's) imagination and another's.

I've been using them since sometime around 1980, and while I'd be willing to play without them, I'd find certain activities to be more difficult/frustrating/confusing.

I can see people's point about taking them out of the immersion but I always keep in mind that I'm playing a game and that there, for me at least, have always been tactical elements and having what I think is going on as opposed to what actualy happens because the GM gives me a description that doesn't match what I think is going on, is far more disruptive in terms of my immersion.

The miniatures are another step in that immersion for me in terms of insuring that character placement is where it should be and is one less thing to 'think' about in meta terms as to "I hope the GM understands what I mean and I don't have to argue with him about it." as with a miniature, I'm friggin' here.

 

[Lanefan]

I must say I'm surprised. Given the debates that pop up about which edition is more "miniature-centric" I would think there would be more people who don't use them.

There's a difference between using minis because you want to, and using them because you think you have to; that the game demands it.

A good corollary question would be "Do you use a grid?" We use character pieces - have done since the dawn of history - and a grid in 10' squares (rather than 5') that we're not really married to. It's quite unusual for anyone to count squares for anything; we usually just kind of eyeball it. The grid is there mostly as a guide for on-board mapping, to keep things in scale. But the character pieces sometimes end up more famous than the characters they represent!

Oh, and metal only, for the PCs. I almost always use plastic for the opposition; that way I can dramatically knock them over when they die without fear of breaking them.

Lanefan

 

[The Shaman]

Frequently.

 

[Shemeska]

Don't use them, and either my experience is amazingly skewed, or Enworld's demographics might possibly be, because no group I've been a part of has used minis except for rare occasions with large combats or complex environments.

 

[Iron Sky]

I've never even seen a role-playing mini in the 15 or so years I've been gaming(except pictures on the internet). I guess I don't get them at all since I've never played with them.

That's not entirely true, I suppose, since my group got together playing Battletech when we were in middle school. It was kinda neat physically having your mech in hand.

As far as roleplaying, we used to do battles completely abstractly, up until somewhere in 3.x when we started sketching on graph paper. That lasted until a few years ago when we moved on to a ghetto erasable marker grid(a sheet of cardboard with 4 pages of graph paper taped down by a layer of masking tape) and we used the old roman-numeral Risk pieces from a long-lost Risk game as counters.

For x-mas this last year, one of the guys and his wife bought the group an erasable marker board with dots on it(1' separation) and we bough a few cheap magnets for it. That's our current "state of the art". We'll probably stay with that since it's so quick an easy to set up most battles (or to whip them up on the fly as a DM).

No one in our group makes much money, so I can't imagine us ever moving to minis(especially since most of us have never played with them).