Whats the story with the D&D minis?

By minis I mean the WoTC blister pack themed ones. So I never got into the whole miniature scene. My group uses them to indicate the PCs and the occasional monsters but we only have a handful that we use over and over. Lately I've been seeing the WoTC minis for sale pretty cheaply and thought why have I never bought any of these?

My question is: are these things a game unto themselves or are they specifically made for D&D? How useful is it to buy them and use them in your game regularly? From what I have seen it would be very hard to use them with an actual adventure since they rarely come with "6 goblins and 4 ogres". Most of the packs I see are varying size individual monsters and very specific WoTC IP monsters.

I guess in general is it worth picking these things up when I see them or should I not bother at this point?

They used to be a stand alone game as well as RPG accessories.WotC stopped supporting the mini rules around the time 4e came out.

They can be very useful as D&D/PRPG minis, but I'd consider picking them up individually. The hard to find ones can be stupid expensive that way, but you don't end up with a bunch of useless crap. Most FLGS's will have them available and Paizo has quite a bit as well.

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My question is: are these things a game unto themselves or are they specifically made for D&D? How useful is it to buy them and use them in your game regularly? From what I have seen it would be very hard to use them with an actual adventure since they rarely come with "6 goblins and 4 ogres". Most of the packs I see are varying size individual monsters and very specific WoTC IP monsters.

I guess in general is it worth picking these things up when I see them or should I not bother at this point?

easy answer - it depends what you're looking for:

If you're a collector, the early sets are not cheap anymore. WotC is still putting out 1 set a year of these, The most recent set came out this week, actually. I'd say on an average set, 90% of the figures are usable in a OGL game. They may not be exactly what they represent, but for example Gith's (Kalliroth, Githyanki Pirate
is pictured) make decent 1/2 orcs the way they are painted.

I use these minis all the time, and just bought a bunch of the new set. I like them because they're cheaper and more durable than metal minis, as well as being pre-painted. I started buying them back when there was actually a D&D Miniatures game, but I never used them for that.

If you want X number of orcs and Y skeletons, your best bet is to buy singles - Paizo sells singles, and commons start at about $1 - you can build up an army fairly cheaply. I'd recommend going with the most generic figures you can in this case. I bought a bunch of human cultists and they have variously gotten use as cultists, barbarians, thieves, castle guards, and assassins.

The other way of using them, and what I mostly do, is buy the blind boxes, in which case you end up with a lot of variety in the minis you have. That means that for most encounters you'll have a mini that more-or-less fits the scenario. You might also be inspired by an awesome looking mini to throw that particular monster at your PCs.

Regarding whether you can use them in Pathfinder - the answer is definitely yes. To be completely honest, it's rare that you'll ever get a perfect match with the D&D minis - they like creating oddly-sized versions of monsters, unique monsters, monsters with class levels and so forth. It's possible that you'll end up using a Mindflayer mini in place of a Lich, but by that point your players won't mind, since you've been scraping together horses, giants and elementals to fill out the ranks of your dire wolves.

easy answer - it depends what you're looking for:

If you're a collector, the early sets are not cheap anymore. WotC is still putting out 1 set a year of these, The most recent set came out this week, actually. I'd say on an average set, 90% of the figures are usable in a OGL game. They may not be exactly what they represent, but for example Gith's (Kalliroth, Githyanki Pirate
is pictured) make decent 1/2 orcs the way they are painted.

That's what I figured. It looks like these are geared toward collecting, which I have no interest in. I wasn't sure how useful buying packs of them would be for RPing. Doesn't sound like much from what I read here.

The other way of using them, and what I mostly do, is buy the blind boxes, in which case you end up with a lot of variety in the minis you have. That means that for most encounters you'll have a mini that more-or-less fits the scenario. You might also be inspired by an awesome looking mini to throw that particular monster at your PCs.

Regarding whether you can use them in Pathfinder - the answer is definitely yes. To be completely honest, it's rare that you'll ever get a perfect match with the D&D minis - they like creating oddly-sized versions of monsters, unique monsters, monsters with class levels and so forth. It's possible that you'll end up using a Mindflayer mini in place of a Lich, but by that point your players won't mind, since you've been scraping together horses, giants and elementals to fill out the ranks of your dire wolves.

Agreed... if you go through a senario and list out the minis you want, you can usually find a pretty good match for most monsters in one of the DDM sets for one of the PFS scenarios I found I'd need:

If you know what you need beforehand, and buy it as you need it, you'll have a good size collection pretty quickly

Regarding orcs, goblins, and skeletons: Reaper also sells pre-painted plastics of these monsters, in singles and multi-packs of 3 each. And, they sell them with different weapons - i.e. a pack with skeletal archers, a pack with skeletal spearmen, a pack with skeletal swordsman.