Using Miniatures

Does anyone else on this board use miniatures for their games? What about floor plans?

I have always used minis for combat situations - makes it far easier and more visual (in my opinion!). Sometimes though I use glass beads.

Ideally I also use floor plans (lots of downloadable floor plans on the net), but often laminated square paper has to serve.

The minis I use are the Games Workshop LOTR line. Excellent minis. The only problem is the lack of generic adventurer types. I am still looking for a supplier that produces fantasy minis that have the same scale, look and feel of the GW minis. Any suggestions?

Most of the time I don't use miniatures or floor plans, it's just notebook paper and in my head.

However, once in a while, if it's the right kind of battle, I'll draw out a map to scale using a ruler and pencil, then we'll put move tokens around on it to represent characters (I use the aquarium-droplet thingies, the tokens I use for the TCG). The most fun battle I ever played was using those, it was wild. :D

Also we'll sometimes use Lego guys too; I made some really realistic LotR guys. :)

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Originally posted by Brandir
Does anyone else on this board use miniatures for their games? What about floor plans?

The minis I use are the Games Workshop LOTR line. Excellent minis. The only problem is the lack of generic adventurer types. I am still looking for a supplier that produces fantasy minis that have the same scale, look and feel of the GW minis. Any suggestions?

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For miniatures, try these manufacturers:

Reaper
http://www.reapermini.com/

RAFM
http://www.rafm.com/ (They don't have many images online yet, unfortunately. Make sure you go to the Shop Online page, as most of the pictures of the minis that are available are there. Apparently, the website just went online recently and they're "working on it".)

Confrontation
http://www.fantization.com/ (click on the Confrontation bar on the right, it's the top bar of several manufacturers)

All three of these companies make (IMHO) excellent quality miniatures, and they all make "adventurer" type minis perfect for roleplaying games. The only difference is some will come on square bases and some are on round bases, depending on the manufacturer.

Hope this helps!

Steve

We use a bunch of old D&D minitures that a player had laying around. We also use the some of the peices from LotR Risk game. For a board we use a cheap 2'x3' white board we got from Staples or Officemax. We carefully pulled the frame off it so the board would lay flat on the table. I then marked out one inch squares. To make them permant I put a small hole at the corners. It makes it easy to see the grid without tons of distracting lines. For a battle we simply draw in the terrain and features and put the minis on it.

Later
mcb

I use the GW minis in our sessions. Even though most of them our models of main charectors, by painting them different they really dont look like the movie charectors at all.

I'll second Steve's recommendation of Reaper minis. I have about 50 of them lined up here on my desk. They're very detailed, reasonably tough, and fairly easy to paint. Oh, and cheap, too. Their website and catalog will give you some idea of their selection; so far, no one I game with has come up with a character idea for which couldn't find a decent Reaper mini. Maybe not an exact match, but certainly close enough to avoid any confusion about which character was which.

I have a large square grid map that I can draw on and wipe off easily, and my group uses Lego minifigs for our games since a) most of us cannot paint, and b) it's much easier to customize a Lego guy than to go through the thousands of miniatures hanging up at the store and trying to find one that sort of matches your character.

Last weekend I tried something new with my group.

I used a large green field that I use for war gamming with various pieces of terrain (mostly lichen to simulate bushes etc.) and a ruler to use for movement.

I cut out pieces of construction paper for things I didn't have time to make "real" models of like a large blue piece for a river and a small oval piece for a boat.

To my surprise the players LOVED it. None of them seemed to miss the rolled up grid and water-soluble ink markers I usually use. I plan to use this method more in the future, but I'm going to have to produce a large quantity of terrain. :)

I wasn't originally a fan of miniatures in the DnD / fantasy world until 3rd Edition. Now, for WH40k, OH HELL YAH!! Can't have WH40K battles w/o miniatures (now, epic scale is a bit too small for me).

With the advent of the new combat rules in 3rd Edition and making it easier to do mass combat, having miniatures really helped out in our recent campaigns (massive levels of pain!!). Luckily, one of the house members has ~100 extra fantasy figs that are just out and about that we used - worked great for the 50:6 combat and even the smaller scale w/bigger beasties.

Ineti's SW campaign would be tough to play (we still going to finish that at some point?!) w/o the lego / mini-figs. Ineti soon realized that anytime that Faethor, Berkanna, Krog, & Tavis entered the room chaos and pain was sure to follow - throw more storm troopers at us, go ahead - bring the pain!! It does add a lot to that universe to be able to see things out in the open like that with miniatures.

When we don't have miniatures to use for the 3rd edition campaigns, we normally use my chess board - tends to work pretty well....gives us enough markers and pretty acurate scale for 5x5 / attack of opportunity / range.

Graph paper works really well too - was in a 3rd edition campaign not too long ago that we used graph paper for. Would have been difficult to run the campaign to the scale and level of accuracy that the DM wanted to run it at if we didn't have the layout. Sometimes, it helps out a lot to be able to see it.

Spent the first years w/o miniatures, just got used to envisioning everything. Then, once time became a commodity, the miniatures helped out.

Ineti - all you have to do is ask. I still paint WH40K miniatures when I get the chance.

I'm going to be using Games Workshop minis. I know they're a little specific and not very adventurerish, but try to keep in mind that miniatures are only for representation, and if you had a mini to represent every character a player might want to play, or every beast the narrator wants them to challenge, that would be alot of miniatures. The characters from the Fellowship, and Helms deep box sets supply alot of PC representations

We use a litle fold-out card table that has a clear plastic hexed sheet on it, which can be lifted up so terrains can be put under it. I find it adds a great deal to gameplay to use miniatures. It gives your players a visual perspective of the battle field. We generally only use it during battles or when gameplay gets into rounds.

Hi all,

I have to recommend the book "Backdrops" from Atlas Games for use with miniatures. This is not an un-biased recommendation, of course.

Read about the book here.

Download a free map from the book here. (Look under "Odds and Ends.")

word,
Will