Hi all,
Seems that pawns are very popular. So, I'm curious... Does anyone use actual miniatures? (Especially personally hand-painted ones? :-D )
Take care,
Harry
I have somewhere between 200-300 miniatures I have painted, and just as many unpainted ones. My GM has maybe 500 pre-painted minis from 3.5, PF, etc. I have no need on pawns.
We're along the same lines as Scrapper - players definitely get minis, bigger deal enemies and/or NPCs get minis, mooks get minis if we have them on hand, otherwise pawns. I think minis are definitely best if you have them available - I even sculpted several minis for the game I'm currently in since myself and a couple others had character concepts that weren't well represented by any minis we had available.
if there aren't mini's, it's not an rpg... :-) The pawns make me think I might as well be playing candyland.
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I play Warhammer fantasy battles...So yes,thousands of mini's. Many are so specific though I actually end up using numbered or marked chess pieces for many of the enemies so that it's easy to tell them apart and not be confused by differing descriptions.
The PCs always have minis for their characters though.
I enjoy both in PFS
For playing I use specific minis. I like to use metal minis and then mod them as well as I can to look like my character. Lots of green stuff, alternative weapons, and paint. However, these minutes are for a specific character and I usually don't use them outside of that character.
For GMing I use the pawns from the bestiary boxes. I like these a lot because they take up little space for the variety of models I get. As a GM I am thinking about how much stuff am I dragging around to game days and conventions. Less space, less weight, less cost, more variety.
As a player, it depends. I definitely prefer minis, however it can often be difficult to find a mini that I find fitting for a character. In those cases, I will often find a picture online, or draw one myself to put in a pawn base. I have thought about trying to make a mini myself out of the mountains of polymer clay I have sitting around, but I'm not skillful enough to get some of the finer details I want.
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Until just recently I used a free program called inkscape and made custom Order of the Stick-styled stick minis. Print them out on card stock with a simple sealant and they were quick (usually), cheap, and easy. There were also lots of resources out there, like iheartprintandplay so I didn't have to sit and create every single monster and npc.
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Honestly, I hate pawns. The white cardboard background just doesn't work for me.
I mostly use pre-painted minis, I although I have a bag of flamingos from trailer park wars that I use for mooks.
I always use a mini for my PC. I usually modify and paint that mini. I prefer minis made of vinyl or other plastics to metal minis for this because:
#1 - they're cheaper
#2 - they tend to hold paint better
#3 - they're easier to modify
I also like to use minis when I'm the DM if possible. I have a pretty large number of D&D and Pathfinder prepainted minis, but those can be a little expensive, especially for larger minis. I've also got a bunch of MageKnight, Dreamblade, and HeroClix/HorrorClix minis, many of them purchased for as little as 49 cents. I've also been known to sculpt my own minis from a variety of materials. There's some self-curing white stuff called SculpIt which is good enough for mushrooms and other fungal monsters, and I've found that Sculpey is very easy to work with and can be carved and filed into fairly detailed shapes after it is baked.
The DM for our Kingmaker campaign bought a box of pawns for the Bestiary monsters, but he never organized them very well, so most of the time we fought empty bases. Even when he could find the right pawn he often didn't have enough of them. Overall the experience was not a lot better than in the days of yore when we played with a DM who used a bag of plastic ninjas for Large creatures and a bag of plastic Indians for Huge creatures. The ninjas were white, grey, and black, and the Indians were a bunch of colors like yellow, green, and red. Encounters often started with questions like "Are they Ninja sized or Indian sized?" and proceeded with statements like, "I attack the green guy"
Thanks for all the responses so far!
I play Warhammer fantasy battles...So yes,thousands of mini's. Many are so specific though I actually end up using numbered or marked chess pieces for many of the enemies so that it's easy to tell them apart and not be confused by differing descriptions.
The PCs always have minis for their characters though.
I was having similar issues. 'So you hit the orc with the shield and the axe on the left or was that shield and axe on the right?' :-)
I came up with a solution that worked for me. For some giant rat minis I used a numbering system with objects on the base. A 'large-ish' rock was a '5' and smaller rocks were '1'. I have over a dozen giant rat minis numbered 1 through 12 using my system. And it's easy to increase the count for future minis
Regrettably, like many mini collectors, my unpainted minis vastly outnumbers my painted ones. :-D
Take care,
Derek
I'd think that organizing them in plastic bags or pocketed sheets labeled with the first letter of the monster's name would be easier and possibly more effective. Anyhow, I'm sure that somebody could make better use of pawns, but my own experience with them was pretty lame.
When I don't have a suitable mini for a monster I'll sometimes just print out a picture of the appropriate size such as a 4x4 picture of a shark for a Megalodon. I guess if I got a few pawn bases to mount them on I'd have my very own homemade pawns.
@ Lab_Rat and Saldiven
Very good points in their favor.
If I start going to cons again, I'll just have to hire a pack handler for my minis. ;-)
Take care,
Derek
Hi all,
Seems that pawns are very popular. So, I'm curious... Does anyone use actual miniatures? (Especially personally hand-painted ones? :-D )
Take care,
Harry
My group uses painted and unpainted figures, pawns and tokens. All the PC's and significant NPC's have individual figures. Most of the PC figures are painted and some of the NPC's figures are painted. We are an older group of players so painting figures happens only when schedules allow between the needs of RL and family.
Our GM uses a set of old 'Stratego' game pieces that she has glued colored paper to with numbers for 'mook' npcs so we now that purple 1 is seperate from green one or red 1 etc. Works very well especially as she likes high density battles.
But yes we use minitatures. But we do not do pre painted figures. Not sure why, we just don't. That said, I and another old player both had figures professionally painted for our characters in one game for about $100.00 bucks each. Guy also did figure customizing to our specs too. Was worth it as those characters eventually reached level 26 before retirement so we got out monies worth out of amazing looking figures.
Pre-painted mini's are used in my home group. I sometimes see pawns in the local PFS group, they were real popular a year or so ago but seem to be fading out and the trend I see is back to pre-painted mini's. Some metal painted mini's are also in use but usually only by those who are master mini-painters.
For most pathfinder gamers I encounter the preferences are in this order:
1-Personal Painted metal
2-Pre-painted plastic
3-un-painted metal or plastic (some people this flips with pre-painted plastic)
4-Pawns
5-tokens
6-Dice
7-Mind's eye
In fact I know one gamer who used pawns religiously because he liked that he could more often get accurate pictures then accurate mini's, but has since changed his mind and decided the 3 dimensions of mini's even if they are incorrect mini's is preferable to pawns.
I also know another gamer who has poor vision and cannot tell the pawns a part unless he looks at them within 12 inches or so.
Thanks for all the responses so far!
I play Warhammer fantasy battles...So yes,thousands of mini's. Many are so specific though I actually end up using numbered or marked chess pieces for many of the enemies so that it's easy to tell them apart and not be confused by differing descriptions.
The PCs always have minis for their characters though.I was having similar issues. 'So you hit the orc with the shield and the axe on the left or was that shield and axe on the right?' :-)
I came up with a solution that worked for me. For some giant rat minis I used a numbering system with objects on the base. A 'large-ish' rock was a '5' and smaller rocks were '1'. I have over a dozen giant rat minis numbered 1 through 12 using my system. And it's easy to increase the count for future minis
Regrettably, like many mini collectors, my unpainted minis vastly outnumbers my painted ones. :-D
I have stacks of orcs, skeletons, goblins, etc. I finally put a dab of white paint in the corner of each base and wrote a number.
@Ciaran Barnes - I sometimes use dots of paint for a similar purpose. Each duplicate mini gets an additional dot on the base. I use yellow dots since another local DM was already using red dots (and I like yellow)
I started to go down the Pawn path. But after a dozen games I sold them and went back to minis. The flopped art bugged me and two other players, and the bottom of the pawns started to look ratty after only a few uses.
The up side is they were a lot cheaper than the minis, but as I have collected PPMs for years minis were available. :-)
Our Group has both Pawn and Minis. When ever we start a new game, it is time to pick a character that looks like yours and it can come from the superhero box or it can come from the fantasy box. I think the only time we pull out Pawns is when we want a named villain or we don't have something on hand that looks like the monster.
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I have a fascination with miniatures, so I collect and paint them. I think it adds immersion.
We had one great scenario in PFS where the druid summoned three tyranosauruses and wildshaped into an allosaurus... and had brought four dinosaur toys to the table to represent the huge and colossal creatures. It was a blast - definitely enhanced our enjoyment of the session.
On occasion (as in very rarely) I would use tokens that I had borrowed from a friend. My players hated using them so I never saw the need to continue using them. My players would sometimes use dry erase mats and they seemed to like that.
I guess I am in the deep minority when I say neither.
I've actually never played a game where we use pawns or minis. We always just describe what's happening, and if we want to get really technical/tactical someone will draw a map of where everyone is.
Having said that, I'd love to see some well painted/modded miniatures if people want to post photos? (I'm kind of surprised we haven't already seen a bunch of pics, only that flamingo guy ... good work flamingo guy, those would make for some scary encounters!)
I have a fascination with miniatures, so I collect and paint them. I think it adds immersion.
We had one great scenario in PFS where the druid summoned three tyranosauruses and wildshaped into an allosaurus... and had brought four dinosaur toys to the table to represent the huge and colossal creatures. It was a blast - definitely enhanced our enjoyment of the session.
That's really cool!
Take care,
Harry
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If you enjoy using plastic dinosaurs as minis or the idea of it then I suggest that you visit your local dollar store. The toy section will probably have various dinosaurs, insects, and other "critters", some of which will likely be sized appropriately to be monsters in your games. I've even found unusual stuff like dinosaur skeletons.
Often the toys are in garish colors like bright yellow or green, fluorescent pink, etc, but the underlying sculpts are frequently pretty good. If you have even modest painting skills you can end up with several table quality minis for a dollar. You can also find a lot of sub-dollar minis online from lines like Dreamblade, Mage Knight, and Horror Clix. I'm usually happiest showing off the minis I got dirt cheap.
During Saturday's game one of the players was spending a lot of time sorting pawns into alphabetical order. It looked like a nuisance. Then again, finding the right minis is sometimes a nuisance too. Perhaps I'll get some stackable cabinets with small, removable drawers and put monsters with a certain theme in each drawer (fishmen, mushrooms, orcs, drow, etc)
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Over 35 years my wife has painted about 500+ PC's and monsters, (characters always get metal minis) I must have thousands of WotC/Paizo/WizKids pre-painted plastic, and yet still use pawns for the creatures they haven't made a mini for yet, or larger groups of mooks on occasion. They're something I'm really glad Paizo came up with.
I mostly prefer the plastic minis to the metal ones since they're easier to modify. I also find that the paint seems to rub off the corners less.
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For those that have pawns, can you tell me exactly how think they are please? As accurate as possible would be great!
Thanks!
Whoops! That was supposed to be 'thick' not 'think'!
For those that have pawns, can you tell me exactly how THICK they are please? As accurate as possible would be great!
Thanks
We have house rules that add facing and have well over a thousand minis in our group so no pawns here.
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I mostly have pre-painted plastic - I never had enough time to get good at painting. Also, the plastic ones are more forgiving for storage and takes up much less room than metal.
Of course this was way back in the day when we used to use pieces of matter to represent our game. For the past few years most of my games have used a VTT, and it's tremendously better.
- You don't have play come grinding to a halt while the GM draws out the battlemat.
- You don't have to guess what the squiggle is on the map.
- You can have fights that are bigger than the battlemat. 4e may not have long range, but in Pathfinder I'm going to use that 400'+40'/level when I get a chance.
- You don't have to use a room where everybody can access a table.
- You can easily use fog of war to hide the parts that people haven't seen.
- For characters and monsters, you can use any picture you can find or make. Spending 20 seconds with Google image search will find me multiple versions of any monster out there.
- If the battle goes over one session, you can just save the file. With battlemats, you have to hope it's not disturbed or take cellphone pictures and try to decipher them next week.
- You can show different status conditions on the tokens.
I have and use pre-painted plastic minis. Durable, and no work involved (no pile of unpainted figures sitting around either). :)
One of our DMs uses a projector Roll20. I think it does an OK job for maps, but I still prefer physical minis. What the projector seems really great for is showing the players illustrations such as pictures of monsters and NPCs, letters, etc. Integrating an old flat screen TV into a gaming table is one of those projects I keep meaning to get around to.
I wish Paizo would include versions of their maps without the numbers, notes, etc at least in the map pack PDFs.
Our projection DM got his when a local school district decided to upgrade their projectors and sold off the old ones. His unit is an Epson PowerLite 83+, which seems to be available pretty cheap on eBay. We project the image onto a couple of sheets of sturdy white paper purchased from AC Moore for around 49 cents each, and it looks pretty good. I think I found the bulbs online for around $45 each.
Considering the dropping cost of flat screen TVs I'd think you should be able to find one online for a reasonable price too. At least in my imagination the "TV Table" wouldn't require dimming the lights as much as the projector. That might be nice for players who have trouble reading their paper character sheets in dim light.
Pawns are better for the money and time.
Minis are just plain cooler.
We use both. One of my players bought the pawns for the AP we are running. It was 30 bucks for the pawns the minis would have been over 200.
I am going to make a ton of my own minis soon.
I used to have a few thousand D&D pre-paints. I ended up selling off most of them, and giving the rest away to new(ish) GMs. Nowadays I use pawns for Pathfinder, though I do have minis for the core pregens for PFS (I find things work much better when the PCs are minis; they stand out from the pawns).
For those that have pawns, can you tell me exactly how think they are please? As accurate as possible would be great!
Thanks!
Whoops! That was supposed to be 'thick' not 'think'!
For those that have pawns, can you tell me exactly how THICK they are please? As accurate as possible would be great!
Thanks
3/32" to be as precise as possible.