D&D General Miniature Survey

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm a theater of the mind DM, so I only use minis for my characters when I'm a player. Because it's a bummer to show up and be the only one using a d4 or somesuch to represent my character.

My miniatures purchases generally fall into ones for characters I've made, character ideas, and minis I just think would be fun to paint. Like this lich:

I'm not great at painting minis, but I enjoy it and try to paint a little each night.

 

[Stormonu]

I have a ton of minis for monsters (mostly preprinted plastics now - I’ve put the metals in storage), and I hand-paint minis for the PCs. Been using minis since I started playing at the start of the 80’s.

Almost exclusively fantasy for D&D, as other genres have been lacking until recently. Oddly enough, D&D is the only RPG I normally set minis out - for combat. Almost all other RPGs I do as theatre of the mind when combat rolls around.

I also have a bunch of Dwarven forge I picked up in the 90’s, as well as the D&D cardboard tiles, as well as set of dry/wet wipe tiles for games on the go. Recently expanded my collection with some of the Warlock tiles from WizKids for town/city/tavern encounters.

 

[Lanefan]

Metal minis for characters, plastic (preferably pre-painted!) for monsters and generic NPCs.

I have the painting skills of a rowboat so unless someone else paints 'em, bare they stay. Fortunately, over the years I've had some players who are quite good at painting...

I don't bother with scenery etc. - while I love the idea in theory, in practice it just takes too long to set it up and take it down every time the PCs go somewhere new, which can easily be several times (or more!) a session. If I need to represent the location of trees in a forest I'll just scatter some bits of wood across the board and remove or move any that happen to land on roads or other places that don't make sense.

My one annoyance with minis in general is the constant, if slow, increase in scale/size. A Dwarf mini today is the same height as a 1e-era Human. Bleah!

 

[ART!]

"Buy"? I've accumulated so many at this point, there's no need - between pewter minis from the '70s and '80s, Heroclix, toys, Play-Do, Lego bits and minis, minis cannibalized from boardgames, etc., I can find something suitable enough for most purposes.

 

[Richards]

While I've amassed a fair amount of the D&D Minis (and a small handful of the Pathfinder Minis), I also have a fairly large collection of plastic critters from the Toobs line (dinosaurs, bugs, horses, forest creatures, farm animals, fish, etc.) and a bunch of odds and ends like the plastic dinosaur skeletons I got an a Nobbies store and some massive spiders, scorpions, and a bee I got for a dollar each at a Target store several years back. Michael's is good for some of the standard mythological creatures like dragons, hydras, chimeras, and griffons (although the scale is often off enough that they work better as "dire" versions). I've also constructed some larger "minis" out of poster board and cardstock, and if noting else I've been known to print out standup tokens for miniature use.

PCs are usually either an appropriate D&D Mini, a plastic mini (requiring painting) from a game store, or in a few instances a specific purchase from Hero Forge.

Johnathan

 

[J.Quondam]

I buy any kind of minis that look good and seek out particular ones I need or think look cool and thus make sure I will find an excuse to use. I paint at least an hour every day.

Two of my players made this display case with a "spoiler" curtain for me:


View attachment 146782View attachment 146783

Nice!
I hope the minis do a little song and dance number whenever you raise that curtain.

 

[Greenfield]

I started buying mini's way back in the 70s, when they first became available. I generally prefer metal to plastic. Cardboard was never a contender.

For scenery I use a number of sources: The aquarium section of the pet store has things like roman/greek columns, bridges etc. There's a vendor I see at Cons that sells resin walls, intact and ruined. I've tried the Wizard's cut-and-fold buildings, and they look good, but scenery that stands that tall becomes a problem: Players can't see the figures over/around it.

I have a few bags of colored moss/lichen for brush.

I have enough figures to field several armies worth of unique figs, but I find that I seldom come close to using all that many. I simply have to acknowledge that I can't possibly have the right figure(s) at my fingertips all the time, so for play I generally have a single box of "people" types, for PCs and NPCs, and two for monsters. I often use the same small figures for Goblins, Kobolds and most other small humanoid types, another six or eight figs for Orcs and medium humanoids, a similar number for Ogres, Trolls and such, and a few for Giants. Half a dozen demon-types, a pack of wolves.

The point of all of this is that we're trying to help the players see the same image that the DM has in his or her mind, to enable us to quickly and easily draw/lay-out the places the PCs are in. Wall sections go down faster than I can draw lines on a battlemat, can be quickly shifted as the action moves on.

Doors are good (WizKids makes some that can be opened and closed), furniture less so: I have enough to do a minimal bar scene, and very little more.

My solutions may not work for you, of course.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

I love painting minis. I always try and find appropriate minis for our characters; if I can't find one, I'll buy one from Hero Forge. Over the years I've bought and painted up lots of monsters we can fight, and I'm always getting more.

 

[overgeeked]

What type of miniatures do you buy for your games? Player characters? Encounters? Wargaming?

What genre…D&D? Sci-Fi? Steampunk?

I try not to as much as possible. Whenever I can I use what I already have instead of buying new stuff. It's an expensive side hobby that doesn't add much, if anything, to the hobby of RPGs.

 

[jmartkdr2]

One hypothesis I'm getting from reading all of this: if someone in the group likes minis in and of themselves (they enjoy collecting and/or painting them, for instance), you'll have them available and use them. If no one in the group likes minis as things, you generally don't have them and improvise when maps are needed or just run TotM.

In other words, the presence or absence of minis seems to happen by factors outside of whether you like them for actual gaming.