Minis for TTRPGs

[Dannyalcatraz]

Side note: I have an almost useful amount of Dwarven Forge terrain, as well as some stuff from Citadel. I have a bunch of columns, jars & other stuff from goodness knows who.

Check the trains & diorama supplies areas of your hobby shops for trees & other landscapes.

 

[Piperken]

Need clarification with how Reaper Miniatures are organized on their website. What subcategories under "Plastic" should I be looking at... there seems to be older and newer molds of certain miniatures? :3

 

[MGibster]

Need clarification with how Reaper Miniatures are organized on their website. What subcategories under "Plastic" should I be looking at... there seems to be older and newer molds of certain miniatures? :3

It's tough. The newer Bones lines (like Black) are better than the Bones models they produced a few years back. I usually stick to Bones Black or Dungeon Dwellers. I tend to avoid the Bones Plastic unless I'm buying a larger model. The Bones Plastic has less detail and I find they're often warped. I tossed a few of unpainted Bones Plastic minis I had a few years ago on the grounds of not thinking they were worth my time to paint.

This work in progress is from the Dumgeon Dweller line.

 

[Clint_L]

There are so many great options!

I've been collecting since around 1980. If we are going old school lead miniatures, I was a Ral Partha guy, but I had plenty of Citadels and Grenadiers...and whatever I could get my grubby hands on, really.

The 90s took me hard into Games Workshop miniatures. I still use lots of them, a mix of metal and plastic. Their metal treants from the early 90s are still the best treants ever made, IMO, and they basically defined orcs and goblins for me. They are now the gold standard for HIP miniatures.

Reaper revolutionized the medium with Bones making massive collections far more affordable, and while I think basic Bones (the white plastic ones) are kinda substandard for small and medium miniatures, Reaper have since really upgraded their plastics, and their designs are phenomenal. I particularly thathow they celebrate their artists, and are willing to let different artists put their own spin on designs. Also, I appreciate the occasional NSFW miniature and Reaper has that covered; how else would I have had the opportunity to drybrush Demogorgon's junk?

On the other hand, Wizkids goes very standardized, by the book (literally, as in official WotC or Pathfinder books for the most part) with their miniatures, which gives them a lot of consistency. Their small and medium miniatures are okay if a bit bendy, but many of their larger miniatures are fantastic, and their range is extraordinary.

Steamforged do top quality design and, similar to Reaper, aren't afraid to put their own stamp on the creatures they depict. Their "Encounters" miniatures are great, not to mention the many miniatures they do for board games and more niche RPGs.

Dungeons and Lasers (Archon Studios) are starting to compete with Games Workshop in terms of quality HIP miniatures but with a more traditional fantasy aesthetic. If you don't mind some assembly, they are probably the best currently available for D&D-style miniatures, though they don't have anything like the range of a Reaper or Wizkids. Yet. They also do some cool, quirky sets for other games and genres.

And even though they are going through tough times, I'm a huge fan of the Cthulhu mythos, and though basically every miniatures company has models that fall into that category, C'mon games really specializes in it, and they've got you covered if cosmic horror is your thing.

The Golden Age of Miniatures probably peaked around 2020, but we still live in a miniatures bonanza that my twelve year old self could only have dreamed of.

 

[kronovan]

My enthusiasm for collecting and painting minis waxed with my son and daughter reaching an age where they could paint (both became good mini painters), and waned as they approached their late teens and lost interest. We mostly collected Reapers for fantasy figs. My son and I were also fans of WoTC's D&D Miniatures and Star Wars Miniatures games, which featured prepainted minis. We collected about a 100 D&D figs, but well over 500 SW figs. My son is now the keeper of those and continues to play the miniature skirmish game and also uses them in his PF1e, 5e and WEG Star Wars campaigns.

My son and I got into Battletech many moons ago at a local tabeltop club, so we collected and painted about 2 companies worth of Catalyst Games Labs battlemech miniatures. He now lives in a different city, so I gave that set to him and have since collected and are painting 2 new battalions of CGLs battlemechs and 2 companies of tanks & vehicles. Two of my groups enjoys military-SciFi with lots of heavy metal on the ground, so those battletech mini get used for a variety of SciFi TTRPGs. I also have some of Iron Wind's Battletech aerospace minis, which get used in the same campaigns.

With my son and daughter no longer painting with me, my enthusiasm for collecting fantasy miniatues fell off. When my son became keeper of our fantasy mini collection, I couldn't be bothered to paint more. So, instead I bought a number of those Paizo PF pawn boxes, a few of their SF pawn boxes and few of Kobold Presses' and Pinnacle's pawn collections. Those worked very well for the times my players and I want minis on the table. I run a lot of ToTM and zone-based encounters these days though, so those pawns are getting to the table less and less.

Post Covid, I've also been running more TTRPGs (FATE, 13th Age, STA, & recently WH40k IM ) that use zones for action encounters. I've found that tokens seem to be a better fit for those - somehow a more abstract representation of a character seems better suited to the more abstract zones on maps. I now find myself doing something I rarely did before - buying beginner/starter boxes, which usually include tokens. And I have to say, I'm really enjoying the content in those boxes - well worth the cost.

I've also been making my own tokens by printing them on card stock and sticking them to the adhesive foam you can buy at hobby/craft stores. I've been buying and making digital tokens for a while for my 2 VTTs, and with recently added features, I can now export those tokens and print them out.

As strange as it still seems ot me, in the past 2 decades I've gone from an enthusiastic collector and painter of metal and epoxy miniatures, to a collector of tokens. My Battletech-Alpha Strike hobby is still a thing for me, but that's now the full extent of my miniatures activities.