If you use Miniatures, how significant of a financial commitment have you made to Miniatures, Terrain, etc.?

I decided to move to Miniatures last year, and it created a hole in my wallet.......

I was conservative, to an extent.  I bought a bunch of Dinosaurs. (Hey, Dragons need a reliable food source.)  Otherwise, I just tried to cover as many bases as I could on a budget.  I mostly bought unpainted Reaper minis, but even that adds up after a while.  I spent hundreds on minis.  Then bought the Pathfinder Bestiary Pawns.  Then some Wilderness Dungeon Tiles.  Then some Dungeon Maps.

Turns out Miniatures and Terrain get expensive fast.

I just say no to minis.

Quote from: Razor 007;1071120Turns out Miniatures and Terrain get expensive fast.

They do, but you can do a lot on a budget, and with proxying.
We have a couple of small storage containers worth of minis for RPGs. (I'm not going to count specific wargame miniatures I have) I covered most of the base sizes, and general types. Undead, humanoids, player character types, monsters. Sometimes I get a few that just tickle my fancy, and I'll go ahead and convert and paint a mini for a specific purpose.

I got most of my minis for RPG purposes from the various D&D collectible wargame things that have been released over the years, buying singles from miniature market.

Depends on the game. Savage Worlds? D&D 4e? Always. OD&D? 50/50. CoC? Traveller? Rifts? Close to Never.

I love minis and I'm a cheap bastard. My solution has been eBay. I have a significant collection of prepaints from Mage Knight and WotC that I bought at 1/10th to 1/5th retail. How? I buy in lots and sell back duplicates I don't need

I also play Warhammer and 40k and I do the same thing. I can't paint worth shit so I buy other people's painted armies, usually at the price of an unpainted box or less.

Back when I was a penniless gamer, I used cardboard minis and plastic toys. Honestly, I don't find the more expensive stuff that meaningful.

Quote from: Razor 007;1071120If you use Miniatures, how significant of a financial commitment have you made to Miniatures, Terrain, etc.?

Turns out Miniatures and Terrain get expensive fast.

1: surprisingly very little for the amount I have. But I got in on minis when prices were more sane. And Aside from a brief foray into collecting a Warhammer skaven army prices were sane.

2: Not unless you are just buying willy-nilly from overpriced companies. The main thing is to look for minis from like Reaper and such who tend to price their stuff reasonably and with great quality. The other thing is to look for minis from board games that can be press-ganged into use.

I got really lucky and ended up with a bunch of HeroScape sets for dirt cheap and that garnered alot of minis that can be used for various projects as needed and there is the modular terrain which is great.

Better yet. Hasbro put out a D&D line for HeroScape and if you can get ahold of the starter set thats alot of minis right there. Then there are the now 4 or 5 D&D Board games, each with quite a few minis for PCs and monsters.

As for terrain. I use the heroscape tiles and DIY dungeon tiles.

Though I use minis in sessions only rarely.

Been buying minis since age 12 (recently turned 46) and I have quite a few thousand. I pretty much always use minis for tabletop play these days; online gaming I use theatre of the mind.

You can get nicely sculpted hard plastic minis for the fantasy market in bulk very cheap, eg Mantic/Kings of War http://www.manticgames.com/games/kings-of-war.html and Warlord. Mantic's undead are particularly nice, I like their orcs too.

For running D&D, I would recommend investing in some individual painted 'dungeon vermin' minis - these tend to show up a lot especially in older editions. Oozes, spiders, beetles, snakes, that sort of thing. Also wolves. A reseller of WoTC minis like Auggies or Tritex is usually best for these.

I use miniatures and Dwarven Forge, and as to cost, trust me, if you have to ask...

Both - depends on the game and whether I have appropriate minis.

One of our players has a collection in miniatures and likes painting them, so we just use his.

Personally, I prefer paper minis, as they are easier to produce, but he hates them.

We use 6mm miniatures, whatever "extras" I bought because I wanted to paint them, and a dry-erase hex/grid board on which the map is drawn. So we use a lot of both.

I have come back around to almost full TotM and find it far more enjoyable, liberating, and entertaining.

We used minis back in the 2nd ed days (I have the Dark Sun minis collection to prove it).  But after years of playing on the grid between Savage Worlds and DnD3, I decided I didn't care for grid-based tactical play.  And it really came to a head when I started running games over Roll20 and discovered just how much of a time suck building tricked out maps, tokens, and all the other bells and whistles became.  I (personally) feel RPGs are more fun when the action plays out inside your head, and got really tired of players being married to the board.

Don't get me wrong, we still use tokens and cards to represent heroes and opponents.  We just don't use a map, grid or otherwise.  All the utility, none of the fuss.

Doing minis on a budget isn't hard, but you have to make compromises.  First up, forget all the tiles and premade maps.  Just get yourself a Chessex battle mat (or something similar) and a pack of vis-a-vis markers (don't use the red ones though--they'll stain your mat).  Invest in minis for the PCs (or encourage your players to do so) and the occasional important boss monster.  Skip the big boxes of PF pawns (unless you get them at Half Price Books or a good discount) and invest in PDFs of paper minis and cardstock (Or buy PDFs of the pawn boxes!).  Or a pack of 1" counters and a 1" hole punch and go to work.  Yes, the production values aren't as pretty, but you'll save a fortune, keep your significant other happy, and never have to worry about where to store terrain.  Plus, it gives you almost infinite flexibility.

Tom

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1071143I use miniatures and Dwarven Forge, and as to cost, trust me, if you have to ask...

Same here, tell it how it is brother!

On a more serious note, the primary reason I use miniatures is that I am 50% deaf that is nerve damage which has impacted clarity was well as loudness. So using miniatures helps greatly with me understanding what players want to do with their characters at various points in the session.

However I can and do use theater of the mind and switch freely between the two modes. For example I may have a map of City State laid out with the player's minatures on the map to show where they are in the city. If they enter a shop or anything else that results in something social happening then I just roleplay it out.

I only lay out something if combat ensues or some other encounter where is important to see or know what the locale is like in detail.

Here is some example of my use of miniature when I go all in.

A small dungeon after it been completely explored
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The center of the City State of the Invincible Overlord on an ordinary day
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The above laid out from this portion of my CSIO map

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A riot breaks out after the Archbishop called for rebellion against the Invincible Overlord
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The aftermath
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Cool.

I go in and out of miniatures, theater of the mind, and counters.

My initial reaction to D&D was that it wasn't a miniatures game, so I passed on it and bough Tractics instead, despite "miniatures wargame" being on the cover.

Then I saw it played, and then my parents got me some fantasy minis for Christmas. I came to have a large enough collection that between miniatures and books, I was lugging a 40-50 pound back pack 1 mile to the bus stop and then two buses, a subway, and a several block walk to MIT for gaming. It was a relief when my parents started letting me take the car.

In college, I used some minis and some theater of the mind. When we started playing Champions, theater of the mind wasn't going to cut it, but minis were sort of out, so we used counters (players would decorate their own 1/2" counter - I still have these). I then started using counters for my Cold Iron play, at least for monsters, during this time, I took several colors of counters a numbered each set 1-10, 1-20, and one set 1-50. That made it easy to distinguish monster types in mixed battles and keep track of which creature was where.

Post college counters mostly dropped out so either miniatures or theater of the mind.

In the 2000s, with Arcana Unearthed/Evolved (D&D 3.x base), I used some miniatures but also heavily invested in counters (making my own when needed).

Post that period, the primary face to face play was Burning Wheel which is theater of the mind.

And since getting married my play has all been play by post (so far mostly theater of the mind) and Roll20 (combination of theater of the mind and using the grid - last night we had a major RuneQuest battle played theater of the mind).

Frank