Impromtu gaming props...

[Storyteller01]

Since most off our party is poor/cheap, we use dice as minis. We've also used random pieces of foam padding to represent walls.

 

[Baron Opal]

Pente pieces for monsters. They come in a variety of sizes and colors, and are fairly cheap.

 

[Lanefan]

We use the pizza centers for flyers as well.

At dollar stores, you can sometimes find cheap sets of plastic chessmen; paint numbers on the pawns, rooks, knights and bishops and suddenly you've got 32 generic opponent pieces.

Having some small blocks of wood or similar is handy for representing trees. (and if someone climbs the tree, their mini goes on the block)

The woven-plastic bags that cheap Easter eggs come in make great visuals for where someone has put a Web spell.

With metal minis with small bases, we use pennies underneath to show who is invisible. With the newer minis and their much larger bases, this doesn't work anymore.

Not a prop as such, but we also find small telescoping antennas from old portable radios to be excellent pointers.

Lanefan

 

[EricNoah]

I saw someone at a Chicago game day use Jenga blocks to quickly build rooms/hallways on a battle mat. I wanna do that.

Just mentioned in another thread -- almost got to see gummi bears used as monster minis!

 

[RigaMortus2]

I saw someone at a Chicago game day use Jenga blocks to quickly build rooms/hallways on a battle mat. I wanna do that.

This is a good idea. I wonder how well they scale? Are the Jenga blocks sized in inches? I might suggest this to my DM... The only problem I could think of is the blocks being too "think" for the battlemap/grid lines.

 

[waterdhavian]

I have a similar story about the jenga idea. In the first D&D game I played in, we used wood blocks of varying lengths to build walls. The guy that hosted the game cut down pieces of wood. We had 1 foot lengths, 6 inch, 2 inch and a few odd sizes to round out an almost perfect package for dungeon design. Each block was probably an inch tall or so with its base being a half inch? We were lucky that our host, who happend to be the Dm's uncle was big into minis and had alot of painted prop minis along with the 100's of minis for characters and monsters. I have also seen chess pieces used, string for entagles, erasers, and nearly ever game i run a player will pull out a piece of hematite that lives in his dice bag to represent either himself or something else.

 

[Zander]

I sometimes use knit counters, also called a row tally counters, to keep track of hit points, spells durations etc. You can get them cheaply in haberdashery and craft stores.

 

[demiurge1138]

I once used a plastic sock hanger to show the players an NPC's personal sigil.

And yeah, dice = minis most of the time. Or soda cans. They scale nicely for Huge creatures.

Demiurge out.