Hi there - not sure where this should go, so please put it wherever the powers that be think it belongs...
I was wondering if those who may have used mixtures of minis and pawns might comment on how it looked? I know part of the decision to go with pawns over counters was that they would look better with miniatures. Do they look ok together?
I have a big box full of different colored plastic "pawns" that are similar to what you might find in a Parcheesi game. Before I expanded my miniature collection to the absurd point that it is now, I used to use them regularly.
They work fine. Any marker works fine. You can make them work slightly better with a sharpie marker and some marks to distinguish them from one another.
I've used a mix of minis, pawns and even glass beads before and they all work fine.
Sure, miniatures look better, especially if your miniatures have some variety so the players can say "I'm shooting the big-eared goblin," but that's all bonus. It works fine with pennies, nickels and dimes.
Yeah, we used dice and snacks for many years to represent the combatants. I'm not really thinking about the utility but the aesthetic appeal.
Once we reached a certain threshold of minis though it works better for us to use inappropriate minis over other featureless tokens. The mixture of chess pawns and minis just doesnt look right to us (we'd rather point to a gibbering mouther and say 'that's really a green slime' than use a green piece of paper).
I'm wondering whether the pawns will mix in ok - basically whether they'll be conceptually closer to minis or to counters.
If you have enough minis then substituting minis works OK too. Although you do have to be careful because sometimes players will assume that the mini is representing the NPC and react accordingly. "Oh, I thought that was a flying creature because, uh... it has wings..."
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I try to let players use one type of mini (maybe painted plastic or metal) and then use paper minis for villains. I've been using pawns for animal companions or summoned monsters. That's been working pretty well recently.
I try to let players use one type of mini (maybe painted plastic or metal) and then use paper minis for villains. I've been using pawns for animal companions or summoned monsters. That's been working pretty well recently.
Ah cheers. I hadnt thought of that. (We use metal minis for PCs and plastic for NPCs). My only concern is that pawns will make it look like we didnt have enough minis (I think that's why using dice or other featureless counters bugs us - it throws us out of the game somewhat).
Honestly,
I used to use dice. But I've gotten OC about collecting mini's now, and after some e-bay purchases of big bundles on the cheap, and buying a lot of 0.25 minis back before WoTC changed how they did them, I have a couple of thousand mini's of various types (D&D, PFB, Battletech, Warhammer, Void, Starwars, etc). It really helps, and you should see the PCs faces when I pull out a winged liontaur woman with a sword that's 10 times the size of their mini's and plunk it on the table. :)
The plastic tops of 20oz soda bottles work great too.
You can even be semi industrious and glue pictures on them to represent goblins or w/e they are meant to represent.
Another good tip is to use the little rings at the bottoms of those caps to represent status changes.
A red ring around a figurine means its enraged/berserk. A green ones mean poison, a blue one means blessed etc, etc....
But if you are asking how it LOOKS....
Well it looks like you don't have enough figures, lol.
Not to be flippant but "fill ins" will never look as nice as plastic or handpainted miniatures.
It would be nice if I had a figure for every encounter possibility but I don't so we make do.
But if you are asking how it LOOKS....Well it looks like you don't have enough figures, lol.
Yeah, I was mainly concerned about the look (although using pawns as summoned creatures. Is a potentially useful approach).