How have minis impacted your game?

[IronWolf]

We use minis in our games. I like them for the combat situations, though there is a bit of a disconnect when they come out as someone mentioned. Of course in my opinion that is as much the DM's fault as anyones (and I am the DM, so I do take partial blame). I could easily continue taunting players, talking, etc while we roll through the combat.

As for the mini selection driving the monsters used, not at all. I plan encounters based on the encounter itself not what minis I have available. Now once I have things worked out I do rifle through my friends large mini collection looking for a close approximation of the creature, but I am more than willing to subsitute as necessary.

 

[Nathal]

Oddly enough, I'm thinking with the success of the miniatures, WotC might feel less pressure to release a new set for the bump of revenues.

Sounds plausible to me.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

I can't really judge how minis have affected my game because I have always used them. I guess now we have a battlemat so movement isn't so haphazard ("why can't I move that far, Bill moved like 2 feet just now?!"). Minis are what brought me to D&D in the first place.

 

[Rudar Dimble]

At first thought they were great. Combats would become more real!
But after playing with them for a year or so, we threw them out again. Some combats lasted for 1,5 to 2 hours because everybody was thinking about ways to don't get hit by AoO's. We had many discussions on what was and what wasn't possible.
And second of all, somehow, combats become less vivid. We were staring at miniatures and we didn't really see the combat in our minds...

 

[Crothian]

they slow the game down when the DM has us face a new thing that he just got and he swears he put it in this box, but it isn't there,. He only has the one and its so cool and he'll be back in a minute must have left it downstairs, or maybe in the car or in the bedroom......

 

[Greylock]

I'm using some of the same minis in my D&D3 game, in 2005, that I used in my BD&D and AD&D1 games back in 1980.

Ditto. Grant you, I took a long break from gaming, but I always thought it was a mini's game on some level. When I hosted my group for the first time last year, I warned everyone I was short on mini's. Whoever hosts our game generally provides them. Lo and behold, one of my fellow campaigners brought a box full of suspiciously familiar mini's. Yeppers, they were from our 1st Ed gamedays.

 

[RSKennan]

I'm glad to see that I'm not alone in thinking minis ruin the immersion factor. I've found that with 3e+ I've had to work harder and harder to keep combats vivid. Ultimately, I think it made me a better GM rules-wise, as I can't rely so much on player's imaginations to fill in blanks, but it's not quite the same.

Still, I enjoy the artistry surrounding minis so I'm torn. I'm coming to terms with them on the table at this late date, but still...

 

[RichGreen]

I've always loved the bulette. I've used them in countless adventures over the years where adventurers quickly close to melee with the critter and the slicing and dicing commences. After getting a bulette mini I ran a little adventure featuring it, and was astonished at the difference. I placed that chunk of plastic on the table and the players stared at it and compared it to the size of their characters. Not everyone was brave enough to run in on the thing, and we had a fun encounter that was just as much about staying away from the big scarey monster as killing it.

The bulette is a great example of a monster I used in an adventure because I had the cool D&D mini for it. I also buy metal minis I like and include them in adventures -- with Rackham's excellent wolfen minis for Confrontation this has meant creating D&D stats for them! On the whole, though, I use whatever monsters and NPCs I want in my games and use my Fiery Dragon counters if I don't have a mini or create homemade ones from the art galleries on the Wizards site. I've been using and collecting minis since my 1e days, but the more recent ones are better painted so we tend to use them much more often.

I like minis as an aid to visualization and to make it clear who is standing where, but I agree that to some players they act as a block to the imagination. Recently, we played a few sessions without minis at all to see what it was like and it was fine, with combat running a bit faster if anything, but that was in a party without characters with AoO dependent feats.

Cheers



Richard

 

[ThirdWizard]

The minis definately have not determined encounters in any way for me. We mostly use old HeroQuest miniatures, so those skeletons and goblins, and whatever the big things are have been many many things. We call the gargoyle [size=-1]"Gygax, the 27th level fighter/mage with a +18 soul sucking sword" because of that Dexter episode, and he's been everything from ogres to balors. We've also bought a bunch of random minis over the years to fill in some gaps.

Minis are definately something we enjoy. We roleplay just fine with them there, and many times battle has been avoided while minis were up on the field. I just finished my dry-erase battlemat, and I'm hoping that will add even more excitement to the battles, as we won't be as limited as to what we can put on the board. You can only pretend a Stratego gamepiece is so many things.

Note to DMs: Make sure the players are looking at *you* when describing battle and not the board! I think this goes a long way to making combats more vivid and less relyant. Minis are good for determining where everyone is, but if you concentrate on them too much, you lose sight of the imagery that is being described. Get the players' attention like you used to with quick movements, props, and evil grins.
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[thalmin]

I've been using minis since the third game session I played in, over 25 years ago. (Actually, we used chess pieces in the third, lead minis in the fourth. Still for over 25 years.) Not all the time or for every situation, but for most combats.
Back to the original question, the new pre-paints have affected my choice of encounters a bit. I lean slightly towards using monsters I own if they are right for the encounters. But I still try to pick the best monster for the story/situation. I also tend to let the figure determine the weapons/armor of the npc encounters when it is convenient. But I also freely substitute whenever I need to.