Hi I am a brand new GM, I have all my nice 1 inch squared paper,GM screen,Bestiary,Core rule book and Crypt of everflame. Ready to go. I realize I dont have the cash to invest in a ton of great miniatures. Are ther any recommendations or alternatives. Are there printable tokens etc anywhere or maybe something you guys do in your games?
Let me know thanks
Candies! If you kill it, you get to eat it. :P
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Minis aren't really NEEDED. In fact, for the first 25 years or so of Dungeons and Dragons, there were probably more players who didn't use them than those that did. But 3rd edition made combat MUCH more tactical, and now minis are very useful.
Lots of things can substitute: Lego men, little green Army men, coins, dice, a scrap of paper with "Ragnar the Mighty" written on it, etc. I myself have a big bag full of chess pawns (most wooden, some colored plastic) that I sometimes use.
I'm sure if you google game tokens you can probably find some stuff as well.
There are paper minis in the shop. They cost money, but they're quite cute. You can also do some work and print out the pictures from the books onto paper.
Or use figures. You don't have to get Pathfinder Minis or those plastic minis or anything like that.
I remember our first 3e game (this was before wizards released their plasticrack minis), I had painted metal miniature for my character, the other players used Hero Quest figurines, and the monsters were represented by chess pieces.
You can also cannibalise your Pachisi/Ludo box or something like that.
If you have an old HeroQuest lying around, use that.
And I second the candy idea - though expect your party to have no healers or buffers as everybody wants to kill as many treats as he can. You keep what you kill.
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Go to a hobby shop (not necessarily a tabletop gamer's hobby shop) and look for pawn-like items and other trinkety things. You can probably buy them in bulk and have all you need!
Or, visit a tabletop gamer's hobby shop and ask around to see if anyone has a bunch of extra unused minis they're willing to sell in bulk. Before our daughter was born, I bought lots and lots of WotC prepainted minis. Lots. And I have more of some of the figures than I'll ever want or need or even have room for in the pencil boxes in which I organize my minis. Maybe someone like that would be willing to give you a good deal on a "reserve set" like that. Do a little bit of salesmanship, even. "Hey, is there a new book you'd like to get? I can give you the $30 cash now for some of those minis, and, there you go!"
Lots of things can substitute: Lego men, little green Army men, coins, dice, a scrap of paper with "Ragnar the Mighty" written on it, etc. I myself have a big bag full of chess pawns (most wooden, some colored plastic) that I sometimes use.
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Raid any other games you have for bits. Check out the bargain bins at stores. A lot of places you can get a bag-o-plastic junk for a few bucks. Your favorite local game store might have some minis collecting dust that they are trying to blow out to free up space on the shelf.
Dice work very well. You probably have a lot of them, and if you can refrain from rolling them while they are representing monsters, help you keep track of which orc is which (set each die with a different number on top) PCs can be represented by each player using one of their dice (this works better if they are using unique sets)
Have each player provide their own miniature. This spreads the cost around a little. If one of them gets bitten by the mini bug, he can provide for the group. <evil grin>
Way back when (1st ed) we just used random bits. Then one of my friends bought some minis, which were a big step up in coolness. Then he painted one. Much better. This lead us down the path of miniature wargaming, which makes for a nice companion hobby to roleplaying. Not the cheapest hobby in the world, but there is something nice about seeing well painted miniatures being pushed around the table.
As pretty much everyone else has said . . . you don't need minis.
One person I know used the internet to grab pictures of painted minis, and then printed them out in such a way that they could be mounted on 1" bases - creating "monster tokens."
It all depends on how much free time you have.
But definitely don't buy miniatures if you can't afford it. Groceries and rent are far more important!
What I did was get a bunch of square stands for warhammer miniatures, print out a bunch of pictures of monsters and then glue them on. They're really cheap, easier to move around than just paper snips and they fit perfectly on the paizo battlemap.
Awesome thanks guys,rinting out tokens seems like the best way to go. Are there a lot sites out there. I probably will just grab pictures and use those. Cool beans
Lots of things can substitute: Lego men, little green Army men, coins, dice, a scrap of paper with "Ragnar the Mighty" written on it, etc. I myself have a big bag full of chess pawns (most wooden, some colored plastic) that I sometimes use.I'm sure if you google game tokens you can probably find some stuff as well.
I cut this down to the relevant parts for other impatient people such as myself.
You can find tokens all over the place (WotC is apparently deciding to encourage schmucks to either pay $20 for 3 miniatures, or buy a sheet of tokens and inline with such, stopped giving out free minis).
There should be some sites online where you can buy individual miniatures (mooks come cheap) or a big grab bag of fairly randomized stuff for a decent price that varies between cheap mook and fairly decent stuff. I bought a set of those and the results ranged between a couple swarms, some goblins, up to an (young) adult white dragon and the cool dire bear.
For the last D&D day (instead of schmuck tokens), the DM printed out the pictures of the characters small enough and far enough apart on a strip of paper that folding it would show the character on both sides of the triangle and the base would roughly the size of a square on the board.
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Welcome, Bonhulk, to the world of GM'ing!!!
For tokens, I've used glass gem/beads. Walmart, etc has them for really cheap in the craft section and they come in a multitude colors. There are even some larger ones that work great for, you guessed it, large creatures.
Also, most images online can be snatched. I drop them into a word doc and then adjust the image to the proper size (2"x2", 3"x3", etc) and print them on card stock. Adding a border to the image makes cutting them out a breeze. A piece of contact paper to protect the image and you have a long-term mini sized for the battle map. They are easy to store and catalog, and you have as many as you want. If you need an army, print another page of images. Over time, you'll find various action poses for the creatures (melee, ranged, casting, sneaking, etc) so you can represent just about anything. And at pennies a page, what could be better?
The above suggestions for cheep or free minis are really good.
I personally don't like to use dice, because it's too easy to pick them up, roll them, and realize too late that you now have no idea where that orc was. But I have used glass beads, salt and pepper shakers, and the like.
I also had a sizeable collection of the first couple D&D minis sets (I was a freshman in college with disposable income and no oversight), so I would use whatever vaguely-correct mini I had in the right scale. (Since I quit collecting before Huge minis came out, Umber Hulks with their bases on a square instead of an intersection because my stand in for any Huge monster.)
Later I moved to using a projector pointed at the table.
If you're willing to spend at least some cash, then N'Wah's Pathfinder Paper Minis are a great deal. They aren't free, but once you've downloaded them, you can print as many as you need. (N'Wah has also done a few minis sets for Rite Publishing.)
Paizo also has a few sets of punch-out paper tokens from old Dungeon magazines in our Bits and Pieces Clearance sale, which cover a lot of common monsters from the 3.0 Monster manual. At $1 a sheet, they're a pretty decent buy.
I mentioned these recently in another post, but I really love these 1 inch colored plastic squares:
http://www.learningthings.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=LER-0203-100&eq=&Tp=
They come in this $6.00 box for 100, or $18.00 for 400. They are nice, heavy plastic squares. You can write on the squares with markers.
The site, though it's for educational tools, also has useful stuff like various things you can use as counters and creatures for very reasonable prices.
Use 1 to represent a medium or smaller size monster, use 4 to represent a large monster, and so on. Use them to mark out a spell radius or terrain ("the grease spell ends here" or "these blue tiles are water". Stack them up to make "flying stands" for characters. And so on. Best purchase I've ever made for gaming. Because they're one inch, you can be accurate with the game scale, which is so very helpful.
Steve Jackson games and/or e23 warehouse has an assortment of paper cutout figures ranging from undead, werebeasts, elementals, giants, bugs, animals, etc. the only downside is they don't offer a good base so you may have to compromise. But with a little imagination they were my bread and butter for a while, as lead figures were expensive and time consuming to paint, and they did not have the pre-painted plastic figures available.
Paizo also has a few sets of punch-out paper tokens from old Dungeon magazines in our Bits and Pieces Clearance sale, which cover a lot of common monsters from the 3.0 Monster manual. At $1 a sheet, they're a pretty decent buy.
Definitely start here! Also, if you like tokens like this, you really need to start collecting the 3.x tokens from Fiery Dragon Productions. I'm insanely happy w/ them, and the art is almost always fantastic.
Definitely start here! Also, if you like tokens like this, you really need to start collecting the 3.x tokens from Fiery Dragon Productions. I'm insanely happy w/ them, and the art is almost always fantastic.
Paizo also has a few sets of punch-out paper tokens from old Dungeon magazines in our Bits and Pieces Clearance sale, which cover a lot of common monsters from the 3.0 Monster manual. At $1 a sheet, they're a pretty decent buy.
I'm a big fan of the SJG Cardboard Heroes (CBH). There are also some nice ones from Precision Intermedia Games (PIG) and some great ones for Savage Worlds. All are very affordable.
I use wooden blocks that are 3/4 by 3/4 and painted different colors and have letters on top to keep em straight for damage taken.
Blocks with letters: Scrabble board! Comes with it's own battlemat. Do you get bonus XP for killing the Z(ombie) on a triple word score?
here's some options for getting minis fairly cheap.
go to the Minis Database first. It's got almost every mini d&d ever made in a searchable database. Find the minis you want.
then go to an ebay store that combines shipping and get the minis you want. You can usually find a mini that looks like your character for a dollar. I like Jez Hideout. It's a good ebay store that combines shipping.
Troll & Toad sells them by the bag but they're more expensive than going the eBay route and you don't get to cherry pick what you get. I ordered a random bag from them once and got a bunch of duplicates of bugs.
Troll & Toad sells them by the bag but they're more expensive than going the eBay route and you don't get to cherry pick what you get. I ordered a random bag from them once and got a bunch of duplicates of bugs.
I used Alter Reality Games and don't recall getting any duplicates in a box of 50 (other than duplicates to some I already had).
Well I've got 10 Fire Beetles. Wanna trade?
here's some options for getting minis fairly cheap.
go to the Minis Database first. It's got almost every mini d&d ever made in a searchable database. Find the minis you want.
then go to an ebay store that combines shipping and get the minis you want. You can usually find a mini that looks like your character for a dollar. I like Jez Hideout. It's a good ebay store that combines shipping.
Troll & Toad sells them by the bag but they're more expensive than going the eBay route and you don't get to cherry pick what you get. I ordered a random bag from them once and got a bunch of duplicates of bugs.
I also saw a link once where someone had made stadups of most of the D&D minis. Using the artwork from the minis lists and just making them into 2 -sided A frame standups. He has 20 or so pages of them (I DL them somewhere).
Very nice for the mob scenes and the monster you will only use once.