Why I Hate Tokens

[KarinsDad]

Cheaper, brighter, easier, faster, even more customizable. Better than minis on all counts.

They have their own problems. IDing the token can be solved by someone doing some decent token design.

All counts?

There are several problems with tokens, not just the main ID one (which is the one that bugs me the most).

They are hard to see at an angle. They sometimes have a glare off of lights from some angles. They can more easily slide under a map edge. To see this "decent token design" that you are discussing sometimes requires that players lean further over the map.

Being two dimensional, they also have less visual surface area than a miniature. Miniatures can more easily be visually differentiated via not just multiple colors, but height, width, accessories like weapons or wings or shields.

Tokens are just plain too small to be visually appealing.

Miniatures can also represent prone easier (whereas tokens represent bloodied easier). And there is the ID issue of many tokens (at least the WotC ones) looking pretty similar at any distance over a few feet for us older people with eyesight that is getting worse over the years.

As for numbering, we used to place numbers on all of our miniatures. We haven't done that for some time, but there are tiny colored stickers that can be placed on the bases and a DM could easily have the non-unique monsters (such as a group of undead) numbered for each one. Unique monsters don't really need that.


Tokens make good minions and are slightly easier to place conditions on. Beyond that, miniatures are vastly superior visually and give a better sense of the effect of the game. Just like quasi-realistic looking maps with grids on them are vastly superior visually to the "rough drawings on a surface" that we used for decades.

Visually, playing with tokens is like playing with chess or checker pieces or coins. It's going backwards in time. Using them is like going back to the days when people rolled a D6 and a D10 to represent a D20 because most D20s were the "soap dice". I don't want to go back to those days either.


There is definitely a market for tokens because they are cheaper and more portable, but you get what you pay for.

 

[Incenjucar]

Thanks!

In game design, the first stage of creating a character/race/avatar is to come up with a strong silhouette. In fact, for each concept you make a dozen and pick out the strongest to develop further.

Yeah, it's a basic step in a wide variety of art forms. Cartoons and comics especially. Honestly it wouldn't be a bad idea as a stepping stone when designing D&D concepts as well.

 

[Erudite Frog]

I don't mind the tokens at all. I think they are a great addition to my current minis lot.

 

[TornadoCreator]

There is an alternative to both minitures and tokens that I really like. What you need are blank tokens, a box of either matches (they work better as they're thicker) or cocktail sticks, a block of blue-tac or moddling putty, and standard tokens.

You place the blank token on the board, put a small mound of blue-tac on the blank token, push the match/cocktail stick into the blue-tac add more blu-tack to the top of the match/cocktail stick and stick two tokens (one on either side) to the top of the match. You now have a fully three-dimentional "token on a stick" mini that costs practically nothing to make if you print the tokens yourself on card.

 

[eriktheguy]

Generally use tokens for less important stuff and minions, minis for important enemies.

 

[Blue]

Seeing who's who

I prefer minis for heroes, tokens for monsters. It just makes it easier to distinguish what's what.

For multiples of the same monster, I usually change the hue on the image.

Back from before there were plastic minis, we used to use dice for the majority of foes. An average battlefield would have minis for PCs, and if there was a major villain on the field. The d8s (showing 1-6) would be six guards, the d12 the villain's barbarian sidekick, the pennies his skeletal fodder.

Quick identification of who is who worked well. When we had mroe money for minis, it was often PCs were the painted minis and the foes the bare metal or primer colored (for the old lead minis). Still visually different.

Now, I often find that I confused a PC for a monster because they are all minis. "I thought the armored dude with the sword was Brandar" "Nah, it's the armored dude with the two handed sword." Or worse when the DM has a bunch of duplicate orc/barbarian/gnoll/etc figures. "Isn't this the one that Alph and Bets hit?" "No, Alph hit this one and Bets hit that one."

I like minis, and I like monster minis. But I do make mistakes about who's who and I don't have a good answer for it.

 

[KarinsDad]

Back from before there were plastic minis, we used to use dice for the majority of foes. An average battlefield would have minis for PCs, and if there was a major villain on the field. The d8s (showing 1-6) would be six guards, the d12 the villain's barbarian sidekick, the pennies his skeletal fodder.

Quick identification of who is who worked well. When we had mroe money for minis, it was often PCs were the painted minis and the foes the bare metal or primer colored (for the old lead minis). Still visually different.

Now, I often find that I confused a PC for a monster because they are all minis. "I thought the armored dude with the sword was Brandar" "Nah, it's the armored dude with the two handed sword." Or worse when the DM has a bunch of duplicate orc/barbarian/gnoll/etc figures. "Isn't this the one that Alph and Bets hit?" "No, Alph hit this one and Bets hit that one."

I like minis, and I like monster minis. But I do make mistakes about who's who and I don't have a good answer for it.

Misidentification is the major problem I have with Tokens.


We didn't use dice or coin for miniatures except in the real early days.

Before the recent plastic pre-painted miniatures, we had a few different groups (Orcs, Undead, Humans, etc.) of about a dozen different painted lead miniatures with numbers painted on the bases. So, you could tell that Orc 2 was different than Orc 4 because of the number, but you could also tell that Orc 2 was different than Orc 4 because Orc 2 was short and squat with a scimitar and shield and Orc 4 was taller and had a spear.

And since we painted our own miniatures, the Orcs had similar colored sets of paint, but not identical. There was a number clue, a shape clue, a color clue, a size clue, and multiple equipment clues.

That's quite a bit of differentiation. A player could often glance at a miniature and easily recognize it as different from the others.

When we got to the plastic miniatures, we stopped using numbers (probably because we wanted to not paint on them), but we started using different miniatures for each NPC.

This does force the DM to write down a description of the NPC on a piece of paper. For a group of Orcs, that could be something like: bow, crossbow, short blue, green, and two weapon. This is no big deal if the DM sets up the miniatures for the encounter ahead of time, but it did take about a minute or two to write this down at the beginning of the encounter for unexpected encounters (I often did it as a miniature came on the board, so it was sometimes during a round, so it didn't seem to take long).

We use the same miniatures for the PCs session in and session out. The Druid is always this Elf miniature with the Hawk on his shoulder. We never seem to have confusion on the PC miniatures. Orientation of the miniatures also helps with this. The ones next to the PC Fighter and facing him are NPCs.

For identical miniatures (like 5 identical skeletons), a player in our group put little colored stickers on the bases. Green skeleton, red skeleton, etc. That was pretty good as well, but I always prefered 5 different looking skeleton miniatures.

 

[webrunner]

I couldn't ever go to Tokens. Hell, I hate it when the complexity of the room means I can't use my little bendy walls.

We tend to play on the floor so being able to visualize the area at a glance is important.

As for conditions, I bought some dollar store letter/number/color stickers I use for:
a) determining between different of the same monster or similar minis.
2) conditions and
iii) any other sort of marker necessary.

It works well except when the stickers fall off.

 

[frankthedm]

Love minis, like copy & pasting tokens.

 

[Argyle King]

I recently started painting minis. It's not nearly as hard (or as expensive) as I thought it would be. You have more of an upfront cost because of needing brushes and such, but I now end up with nice looking minis that I actually wanted instead of random kobold #47. I also like the freedom of being able to customize a mini. I haven't gotten brave enough to do anything too crazy like modifying weapons or faces yet, but I'm picking up on being able to paint pretty quickly.


As for tokens... if I had to use them I would, but I'd highly prefer other options. I generally choose/use chess pieces, checkers, lego people, or whatever else I have before using tokens.