Miniatures and Your Character

[Angel Tarragon]

My group doesn't use minis, at least not yet anyway.

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I try and find a suitable mini for a new character with the right look. I don't worry too much about equipment and stuff. Once that mini is used for that character, it doesn't get used to represent anyone else.

Cheers


Richard

 

[MerricB]

I have a box with one of each character-type mini that Wizards have yet produced for the D&D Miniatures line.

I empty it on the table at the start of sessions, and my players choose the minis that are closest to their characters.

As the DDM line keeps expanding, they get closer to their concepts.

Cheers!

 

[wingsandsword]

When I ran a year long Star Wars campaign I had a huge selection of Lego figures I used as minis. I had plenty of Star Wars characters, plus a large number of custom minis I made by mix-n-match to represent every PC, as well as recurring NPC's.

For the current game I DM, I provide all the minis (since none of my players are into minis), and I have a big collection of several hundred Mage Knighta and Heroclix I transplanted to 1-inch bases and use those (bought them in bulk lots on eBay and from quarter-a-piece bins Gen Con). I usually find a mini that's pretty dang close to any character or small-to-large size creature I want to use from that pool. I haven't really dabbled in the D&D Minis (just a few minis I could pick up cheap from dealers), since I don't particularly care for the art/sculpting style and they are a lot more expensive than the MK stuff.

In my game, after months, I decided to dabble in miniatures painting (getting some metal minis of things like miind flayers that MK had no real version of), and to practice I decided I could paint some existing minis, so collaborating with my players on the appearance of their characters I repainted some minis.

One characters mini went from having black hair to blonde, another went from blonde to red. The Purple Dragon Knight got to have his heraldry painted on his shield, the half-dragon got some draconic scales painted on her mini, and the monk had his gi painted a different color. Now the minis look a lot like what the players want them to look like, and we're all happy.

 

[sniffles]

I have to admit I am a little anal about finding the right mini for the right character. it probably comes from owning thousands of the damned things so I figure I should a miniature for all occasions. And I usually do!

I'm with you!! Otherwise I couldn't show off my mad painting skills to my friends (who are all mini painters too).

I used to try to find and/or modify a mini to more accurately represent my character. But I've started picking the mini first and making the character to match the mini. Much less painful.

 

[D+1]

You get a character idea in your head. You go out and look for a miniature. How close does that mini need to fit your character idea? Or do you do it the other way around?

The mini does not need to fit exactly. Sometimes I'm just grateful if it actually has an appropriate weapon or armor. Often as not it's really the POSE, the overall feel of the sculpt that makes it the appropriate mini. Rarely do you manage to find the PERFECT mini when you come up with the character concept first.

Often the concept is inspired by the mini which makes it all so much easier. I've got one mini; a pirate-ish looking fighter type. leather armor with a sword and axe. Bald with a topknot. You've probably seen it at your FLGS as it's a reasonably popular fig from Ral Partha or whoever. But the concept it helped to inspire is a BARD. Almost a bard in the classical 1E multiclassing tradition. Starts as a fighter (and this first as a sailor, then as a military conscript), then goes into a career as a killer (assassin really, but definitely a thief/rogue type) for the army that conscripted him, then having had enough of killing goes awol and using a new identity becomes a very successful playwright and performing in his own comedies and musicals. Now if I'd actually come up with that concept FIRST and then looked for the mini I'd have never found anything even remotely appropriate. But first finding that mini and then writing a little background story is what really created the concept for the character. He doesn't LOOK like a bard - and that was the point of the character concept - but it wouldn't have worked for me with any other figure.

I used to modify minis. Actually I still do, but much less often and then almost never more than changing or removing a weapon or something in the hand.

 

[tetsujin28]

You get a character idea in your head. You go out and look for a miniature. How close does that mini need to fit your character idea? Or do you do it the other way around?

I buy minis all the time. Then I come up with ideas for characters. I modify minis all the time, but once I've painted them, I leave them alone. Gaming without them just isn't gaming, to me.

 

[Odhanan]

You get a character idea in your head. You go out and look for a miniature. How close does that mini need to fit your character idea? Or do you do it the other way around?

I do both. Inspiration either comes from something I've read, some cool idea I had for some time or just popped up, some movies/books, some art I just looked at, or some miniature I really like.

Do you pull a Ken (from Dork Tower) and constantly mod your mini to perfectly reflect your character? Or do you just use a bottle cap? Probablly somewhere in between I would imagine, so what it is? And how do you find it?

I use a mini that basically represents my character in its traits and function. Base color of clothes, the face's traits, the pose, the attitude the mini implies is what matters to me. Then the equipment. But I'll never modify a mini just because I have a new piece, or new pieces, of equipment. The mini is just there to represent my character, not to be an absolute *equal*.

 

[Stik]

We had a very strange occurrence at our gaming table one night. We had a new player join the group and the DM had gotten together with her one night about a week before her first session and they rolled up her character, a cleric by the name of F'Lora.
During the week after they created her character, Jenn proceeded to draw a fairly detailed sketch of F'Lora, using colored pencils. Cleric, red hair, chain mail, sky-blue surcoat over the armor, mace in hand and a round shield. So, on her first-ever night of AD&D, Jenn pulls out her character sheet and her sketch and our DM asks me if I have a mini that she could use for a female cleric. I pull out the only female cleric mini that I have (one that I had painted a few months earlier but had never shown to anyone since no one in our group was playing a female cleric) and put it on the table. "Oh, my God," Jenn says, "That's her." Incredibly, the mini was an exact match: Cleric, red hair, chain mail, sky-blue surcoat over the armor, mace in hand and a round shield.

Kind of makes you wonder if there might not be a real F'Lora out there someplace, one that we had both tapped into....

 

[Lars Porsenna]

Usually, I'll come up with a very general character concept, usually limited to gross physical features (i.e. "my character has a beard" or "my character has long hair"). I'll then find a figure that matches the description in a general way. If needed, I'll either modify my character concept to match the figure, or modify the figure to match the character concept. I'm pretty handy with minis (extending even to using greenstuff...I'm thinking about my most challenging conversion I want to undertake in the near future...converting a GW skeleton into an Elf mage using greenstuff and a head sourced from an Eldar guardian set from GW) so that sort of thing isn't an obstacle. Usually, though, I can get pretty much whatever I really need from commercial minis...

Damon.