Miniatures - When and How To Use Them

Maybe you agree. Using miniatures in your roleplaying game makes it more fun. It makes it easier to see what's going on. Maybe best of all, they help you better picture the battle itself, making them a more immersive experience.

Do You Need to Use Miniatures?

I grew up poor, jealous of those whose games included cool little "metal men." Maybe this is why I'm a complete miniatures addict now. Take a gander at my miniatures painting site at www.how-to-paint-miniatures.com to see how far this addiction has taken over my life.

But the point is that I played for years without miniatures. You don't really need them to play, as long as you have another way to represent the physical layout of encounters and the positions of players and their foes. Minis are just one great way to do this.

What DO You Need?

To represent a combat encounter, you need a few things. Others in the list below are optional.

• Battle Mat (required)
• Tokens - Miniatures or Counters (required)
• Props (optional)
• Adventure Tiles (optional)

Miniatures and tiles make your battles feel more real and provide a rich backdrop for your roleplaying and combat encounters.

Battle Mat

You need some kind of grid to represent encounters, especially combat encounters. Your battle mat serves these purposes:

1. Draw out encounter area
2. Place counters or miniatures to represent placement of players, non-player characters, and enemies, such as monsters

To learn what types of battle mats you can make or purchase, click on the link below.

Learn To Create (or buy) the Best Battle Mat for Your Game

Tokens - Miniatures or Counters

You'll need some kind of token to represent player characters and other creatures. You can do this with simple, inexpensive counters or with miniatures.

Counters

You can use most anything for counter-style tokens. You can use loose change from your pocket, glass counters, wood circles, or other things. Click the link below to learn some of the better types of counters you can use.

Learn How To use Inexpensive Counters, instead of expensive miniatures

Miniatures!

If you can afford them, miniatures are the way to go! They make it easy to see who is your mighty barbarian and which tokens represent an invading horde of orcs. Since the miniatures typically look more or less like what you're fighting, at a glance you can get the big picture and better plan your attack.

There are an incredible selection of miniatures out there, from metal "pewter" miniatures to pre-painted plastic minis. Here are some of your options.

• Official D&D Miniatures (pre-painted)
• Metal or Resin Miniatures Produced by Third-Party Manufacturers (sold unpainted)
• Pre-painted miniatures produced for other games (Mage Knight, Heroclix, etc.)

Official D&D Miniatures

Wizards of the Coast makes its own line of miniatures. They sell these plastic miniatures pre-painted, so they're ready to use right out of the box. They sell them in these packaging options:

1. Non-random sets - You can see what you're getting through the clear packaging, so there's no surprises
2. Semi-random sets - You can see one or more miniature through the clear packaging. The rest of the miniatures in the package are hidden behind cardboard, and are selected randomly.
3. Random boxes - All miniatures are contained within a cardboard box, so you can't see which randomly-selected miniatures you get prior to opening the box.

If you are a bit of a gambler, you might like to have some or all of the miniatures hidden when you buy them. If so, choose the semi-random sets or random boxes. The upside is that you tend to get more rare creatures. The downside is that you might end up with a lot of miniatures you wouldn't use yourself. If that happens, you'll need to sell the ones you don't want or trade with others for ones you would use.

If you're not much of a gambler, the non-random and semi-random sets are likely to appeal more to you. This way, you know there's at least one miniature that you really want when you buy.

The 4th Option - Buy Single Miniatures

I'm not a gambler at all when it comes to purchasing miniatures. I want to know exactly what I'm buying, and in what quantities.

Typically, I will want several of a single type of miniature. If I'm building a low-level adventure, I probably want several kobolds. I might even want several of two or three different types of kobolds for an encounter. These kinds of requirements don't lend themselves well to buying random packs of miniatures.

Instead, you want to buy miniature "singles." If you friends buy D&D miniatures, you may be able to buy the random miniatures they purchase that they have too many of or they just don't think they'll use in their own campaigns.

Many sites sell individual miniatures. They may purchase cases of random miniatures and then sell them individually or they may purchase miniatures from individual collectors who have extra minis. If you're looking for something specific, this is typically your best bet.

eBay is another source of D&D miniatures. You can buy single miniatures from those with an eBay store or from auctions. Auctions can sometimes be a good way to buy what's called a "lot" of miniatures, several miniatures sold as a single eBay auction.

If you buy minis this way, pay special attention to the shipping terms. Many times, eBay sellers will inflate the shipping price to ensure that even if they only get low bids, they will make money on the shipping and handling.

Some sellers will have many miniatures up for bid on several auctions. They may indicate that they will combine shipping. In these cases, typically you'll pay a few dollars for the first miniature you buy from them and then somewhere between 25 - 75 cents for each additional mini. For this reason, it's always good to check for other auctions an eBay seller is running when you find a miniature you like that they're selling.

Even if an eBay seller doesn't mention combined shipping in their listing, if you ask them, they normally will. Asking about combined shipping is a normal request any experienced eBay seller will get frequently, so don't be afraid to ask. This can save you a bundle.

D&D Dungeon Tiles
are a colorful way to
add realistic details to
your battlefields

I have one of these battle mats. It has been great, especially when used with Crayola's washable markers

D&D Official miniatures
are pre-painted and
a great addition to
any gaming tabletop

This is an example of
one of the semi-random
sets, where you can see
one non-random mini,
but the rest are random

This is a great way to get started adding miniatures to your roleplaying game.

Metal or Resin Miniatures Produced by Third-Party Manufacturers

Sometimes you want just the right miniature for a player character, NPC, or recurring bad guy. If you're not afraid to learn to paint miniatures, your best bet is often to purchase miniatures from a third-party miniatures manufacturer.

My favorite is Reaper, which carries a very diverse miniatures product line. They carry hundreds of different miniatures that are perfect for character minis. Their line of creatures is fantastic. The sculpts are consistently great. They employ some of the very best miniature sculptors in the business. Also, Reaper's prices are very competitive.

If you don't mind paying more, you can often find metal miniatures which have been painted for sale on eBay. The painting quality isn't as consistent as what you get with pre-painted minis. This can be a good thing, though. While there are certainly some minis you'll find on eBay which have been painted poorly, it doesn't take much to outdo the paint jobs you get on assembly-line painted miniatures like those produced by D&D.

You can also pay someone to paint a miniature for you. I do some commission work myself, so contact me at creativeroleplaying@gmail.com if this is of interest.

The best miniatures are almost always those that come unpainted, from companies like Reaper. Learning to paint miniatures gives you a lot more minis from which to choose.

Pre-painted miniatures produced for other games

If you don't have the time to paint miniatures but still can't find what you're looking for, you might want to expand your scope a little. D&D is by no means the only source of pre-painted miniatures. Here are a few other games which use miniatures, many of which work well for D&D or other roleplaying games

• Dreamblade
• Mage Knight
• Heroclix
• Horrorclix
• World of Warcraft

The bases for these miniatures are larger than the standard 1 inch bases used for medium creatures in D&D, so you'll likely need to remove the miniatures from their bases and glue them to one inch bases.

However, as a gamemaster there's nothing like pulling out a miniature and seeing your players suprised looks, which all but say, "Wow! What's that creature?" This is especially satisfying if you have a player who knows every creature in the Monster Manual volumes, since they won't know what to expect. This is also why I make up a lot of my own monsters. Click on the link below to see a list of creatures I created.

Find Just the Right Creature for the Fight

Props (Optional)

I use various miniature props in my game to provide a more immersive experience. I have a number of cardstock fold-up chests, crates, and pillars. I have freestanding tables and chairs that I have found over the years. These add a lot to the game.

Without investing a lot in props, you can do a lot. Head to your local lumber store. Find some long boards that are about one inch by one inch and some that measure about two by two inches. Get a cheap saw of some kind and cut some pieces of various lengths to use as logs, crates, boxes, and so on.

You can also look at your local toy store for childrens blocks. These workd great, if you can find them small enough.

Look for a local cabinet shop. They will have endless scraps of various sizes of scrap wood. If they charge you anything at all, it won't be much.

With any of the options listed above, for a handful of dollars, you have some great pieces to represent furniture, rocks, and so on. This makes it much easier to determine line of sight and to more immediately get a feel for the degree of movement in your combat encounter.

Miniature: "War Toller" by Dreamblade (out of production) on custom base

Dreamblade has some of the most creative and unusual miniatures anywhere. This line of minis has been discontinued, so get them now while you still can.

Adventure Tiles (optional)

One D&D product you'll see in their catalogs is what they call "Adventure Tiles." These are printed cardboard pieces that look like floor, furniture, sewer tunnels, urban streets, and so on.

These are pretty cool, and can add a lot to the immersiveness of your campaign. Each set costs around $10, and consists of cardboard punch-out tiles. You can put these together to make various styles and shapes of rooms.

The biggest problem I found with this kind of tiles was that it was a bit frustrating when I needed two of a certain tile and only one was included. I found that sometimes I ended up fighting the tiles, rather than them helping. Also, the tiles are pretty small, so if you don't somehow configure the room in advance and have it ready to go, it can take a while to put these together. Your players may not want to wait around while you play Legos with your tiles, so if you use them, you'll want to find a way to attach them together ahead of time.

A company called Skeleton Key puts out some great tiles that you buy as PDF documents, then print out what you need. This is a great way to go, since it gives you the flexibility to print as many or as few of each tile as you want. What works well is to print these out on cardstock. Then cover them with clear Contact paper to laminate them.

This way, if you tape them together in advance, when you remove the tape, it doesn't rip the printed paper. Also, with the tiles laminated, you can write on them in washable marker and clean them when you're done. You can re-use these over and over if you laminate them, reconfiguring them in endless combinations.For a handful of dollars, you have some great pieces to represent furniture, rocks, and so on. This makes it much easier to determine line of sight and to more immediately get a feel for the degree of movement in your combat encounter.

Caves of Carnage is a great tile set, especially since caves are much harder to draw freehand than rooms made up of all straight lines.