Evolution of your game - minis, markers and whatnot

[pogre]

1975-1980 A few minis on a posterboard.
1980-1985 Almost no minis
1986-1990 Minis on an Elysium Field (Anybody remember those?)
1990-1996 Minis with lots of hand painted dungeon tiles
1996-present Dwarven Forge, Hirst Arts, Miniature Building Authority, and lots of metal minis.

These days I just keep going further and further with minis and terrain. I do custom terrain boards, huge dungeons, castles, etc. The key for me is having a stable game room available. Fortunately for me, one of my players built a custom 22' x 18' game room. I have drawers and drawers of Dwarven Forge sets, tons of Hirst arts pieces and buildings, and a huge display case with most of my minis. I have ready access to all of these materials whenever we play and they don't clutter up my house! If he ever sells his house I don't know what I'll do!

 

[Gilladian]

Like most here, I went through a phase where we used many many minis, though I was always into collecting minis for PCs, not monsters. I still have a largish collection of painted lead minis that I use for all the PCs. Mine are all lead, and collected in the 80's and 90's, and handpainted by me. I wish my eyesight was good enough to keep doing it.

For maps, I have a big and a small chessex battle mat for wet-erase markers and often use it during the game. I also often predraw a map on a gridded flip-mat. That allows me to use my colored pencils and such. I used the battle mats starting in the late 80's, I think, and discovered the paper flip-boards from teh office supply in the last 10 years.

I tried dungeon tiles, and as many have said, there's no way to use them quickly during a game without spending a lot of prep time selecting them. It is a drag, either way.

I tried paper cut-and-assemble minis, but the storage space, sorting time to use them, etc... and another factor - seated players had trouble seeing over/into the walled dungeon, so everyone was constantly having to stand up to move their mini carefully without tipping walls over, meant that I gave them up after just one or two sessions. I think I tried both of those solutions about 10-12 years ago, briefly.

Now I do sometimes break out flipmats, tiles or 3d bits and pieces when I want a really dramatic scenario, but on the whole I stick to drawn maps on paper or vinyl.

However, I've collected a lot of 3d props; plastic monsters, lego-style dungeon blocks, toy props, and I sculpt a lot of stuff in polymer clay; I have trees and bushes, numbered tokens, flames, campfires, a well, an archery-tree-stand that holds 3-4 minis, a bunch of numbered tokens, and a kraken. I keep them all on a shelf below my dnd books, and pull them out as needed, or get them arranged before the game on my DM-table. I've been doing that for the past 15 years or so, since we moved into this house and began playing almost exclusively here.

 

[Desdichado]

What has been the evolution of your use of mats, maps and minis? How have they affected your games and your interest in the game?

I have a dry erase battle mat and some of the prepainted minis... and a few older minis (mostly from Citadel or Privateer, actually--although I've also got some much older Ral Partha or Rafm or whatever miniatures kicking around as well) that are painted by me.

In general, though, I've never liked the miniatures tactical game within D&D, and it's something that I've never appreciated and want to minimize rather than emphasize. I've made my peace (mostly) with d20 games, but that's still one of my biggest sticking points; it's much harder to run combat without a graphical representation of the combat, and I greatly prefer not to have graphical representation of combat at all.

I also dislike minis because as cool as they can look if sculpted and painted very well, there is still a major discrepancy between what I can produce on the table and what I and my players can imagine in our heads. Miniatures tactical games are fine, and I flirted with both Warmachine, Warhammer, and several others--as well as played Blood Bowl enthusiastically for many years--but it's a completely different beast than my roleplaying hobby, and I frankly dislike the combination of the two. They are not peanut butter and chocolate, and they do not taste great together.

I know the roots of the hobby are in wargaming. I get that. But I did not come into the hobby through wargaming, and I've never seen wargaming and RPGs are really very closely related hobbies at all. Or that because I like one, I must like the other, or that I would like one for the same reasons as the other. To me, roleplaying is about collaborative story-telling. I'm interested in it because of my interest in fantasy stories, novels, action-adventure movies and the like. That's what I want to emphasize in my RPG hobby. Representing combat through miniatures on a battle-mat or scultped dungeon, or anything else, has never had any appeal to me.

And for the same reason, frankly, the entire concept of dungeoneering has no appeal for me either.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

For me, the use of minis IS about collaborative storytelling.

I am often inspired by the appearance of them. I have even made PCs based on the appearance of a mini.

Having minis on a map lets me get a firmer grasp on the tactical situation as the PC would see it, thus letting me react as he would.

 

[Stumblewyk]

When we started playing in the days of AD&D 2e, we used literally nothing. No pawns, no paper, nothing. Mostly because we were poor high school kids who barely had enough money to share books, much less own minis. We just played "theatre-of-the-mind" style, and it was good enough for us.

Then we added 2 guys who had only played 3.x. They talked us into trying 3.5, and made it pretty clear we'd need to use minis to track movement and positioning. Fortunately, one of the guys had enough minis and a battlemat. I took over DMing again, converted my game to 3.5, and started collecting and painting minis since I wasn't a poor high school kid anymore.

Nowadays, I have fair amount of miniatures (more on the way, thanks to Reaper's Kickstarter), my own ginormous battlemat, a few spare rolls of Gaming Paper, and a large 1" square-gridded pad of paper. I predraw a lot of buildings and dungeons, and we use minis for everything.

Occasionally, I wax nostalgic for the days of playing without a mat and minis, but I don't think my game suffers for having adapted to their use either. Even when we play games like Dresden Files RPG that is VERY "theatre of the mind" with only roughly defined areas for combat, we still end up drawing something, and using pawns to denote who is in what zone when a fight breaks out.

I'd like to upgrade to a projector set-up some day, but it's still out of my price range, and I'm way too lazy to learn how to use GIMP or Photoshop to do Fog of War type stuff. =/

 

[Aldeon]

Mang, some of you guys make me feel like an infant in the hobby.

I started out running games with maps drawn on grid paper (standard printer size) and taped together while using random small toys for miniatures, and NONE of them ever fit. (queue shame) We used these Hamtaro figures and some Pokémon toys for any NPC or PC we had. That stayed as the norm from when I started at 13-14 til around the age of 17, although we ended up pulling out chess pieces as well to be less childish-looking.

When I hit 18 or so, I discovered the fabled FLGS thing that I heard so much about on the Google. I started going there, bought myself a single Reaper mini for my PC and played with people who actually had boxes of game-appropriate minis.

Now I'm 21, and it's sad to say that I'm still fairly poor. I have a dozen or so of the Pathfinder minis, which is my entire mini collection. I also have small figures of Yu-Gi-Oh! characters that I took from an old board game for characters in modern day campaigns. I still use chess pieces for enemies, but I have to rep some really awesome print-and-play paper minis. I've also gotten my own chessex battlemat for the board with some wet erase markers; it currently has some blue markings on it due to my mistake of using dry erase marker at one point. Luckily for me, my gaming groups have moved onto theatre of the mind style and we no longer require anything more than dice, our books, and some paper.

 

[Lanefan]

For me, the use of minis IS about collaborative storytelling.

I am often inspired by the appearance of them. I have even made PCs based on the appearance of a mini.

Having minis on a map lets me get a firmer grasp on the tactical situation as the PC would see it, thus letting me react as he would.

Agreed on all counts.

And having the minis out prevents players from suddenly having their character be somewhere else when danger strikes...

Lanefan

 

[Nytmare]

1980-88 - No minis at all. I'd see them in the store, or the ads in Dragon, but what little gaming I managed to do, mixed with the fact that I was hiding my surviving D&D books from my PTA-induced-witch-hunting mother, mixed with the fact that I was a kid with a dollar a week allowance meant that they were not a viable addition.

1989-92 - A new friend in high school introduced me to Battletech, which introduced me to painting minis. Suddenly I have an army of Battlemechs, and a handful of half painted RPG miniatures that still exist as a coat of primer, and maybe a base coat.

1992-97 - College! All evidence points to me attempting to major in gaming. For a number of years I'm a fixture at a local game store where we paint EVERYTHING. DBA, DBM, and a million other different 15 and 35mm historical games, Hordes of the Things, terrain pieces, Warhammer, 40K, 40K Epic, the one with the boats, the one with the boats in space, some Western duel game that used a deck of cards... I paint a lot (A LOT) of minis for D&D characters, but they're rarely used on a battlemat. They're seen as more of a fancy character sketch than anything else. Combats are usually sketched out on a chalk/dry erase board. All of this comes crashing to a halt when 3 tackle boxes of fully painted minis, and a 40K army that I was being payed to paint for someone else get stolen right out from under my nose at the Thunderbolt Mountain booth at Gencon.

2000-02 - 3rd edition rears its head, and I get the bug to start painting again.

2003-present - I finally realize that having a "game room" at my house, and inviting the people I want to game with is an option instead of carting all of my stuff to the university gaming club and trying to find a vacant classroom/office. Looking at the available space, and realizing that I'm on the verge of filling it full of crates and drawers and boxes of miniatures and paint, along with teetering towers of terrain pieces; I come to a decision. Instead of investing in what I'm sure will end up being a disastrous pack-rat decision, I go 2D. I start printing out miniature tokens and terrain pieces. I eventually land on a procedure that allows me to field an army of basically anything, fighting anywhere, at the drop of a hat. 200 orcs riding velociraptors in a jungle pyramid in 24 hours? I can have the images created, printed, cut, and laminated in 12.

Eventually the terrain goes almost entirely digital, I have a miniatures collection of easily over 5000 figures that fits into two Stack-on cabinets, and somehow I inexplicably find myself with a weekly game night but no one to play D&D with.

 

[Desdichado]

For me, the use of minis IS about collaborative storytelling.

I am often inspired by the appearance of them. I have even made PCs based on the appearance of a mini.

I'm rarely so inspired, but it has happened. I can dig it.

Having minis on a map lets me get a firmer grasp on the tactical situation as the PC would see it, thus letting me react as he would.

I guess you must be doing different kind of storytelling than I prefer, then. Detailed tactical combat is not an interesting "story" to me.

And having the minis out prevents players from suddenly having their character be somewhere else when danger strikes...

That's another thing I've never really completely "gotten." The essence of good drama, of any interesting dramatic, fictional entertainment of any kind, is when bad things happen to characters, right, and they have to deal with them? If anything, my players are often doing the exact opposite; trying to find ways to be right there when danger strikes, even if they have to finagle it somehow that stretches credibility just a little bit. Who wants to be left out of the action? How is that any fun whatsoever?

 

[timASW]

I started out using the boards and mini's from heroquest and dragonstrike. Used those for a long time until 3X came out while I was in highschool. Me and another guy both had afterschool jobs so we pooled our resources and upgraded to a couple of very big laminated grid papers for maps. We still used the mini's and dice.

Now I mainly use the mapping stuff if the players are in difficult terrain or there are lots of enemies where formations and such matter. But if its fairly even numbers on relatively safe terrain i dont bother with all that. Just describe the scene and we go round by round.

I would honestly use all the maps and mini's less but a couple of my players really like them so I accommodate that and use them.