Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5504548" data-attributes="member: 2011">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.</blockquote>

Verification