In my last article we talked about the tools we need to run our D&D games. We glossed over one giant topic, however, the topic of miniatures.
When we say “miniatures” we’re really talking about the physical objects we use to represent the characters and monsters in our D&D games. The options are vast.
Groups don’t actually need to use anything to represent monsters or characters in Dungeons & Dragons. We can use a gameplay style known as the “theater of the mind”. When running D&D in the theater of the mind, the DM describes the situation, clarifies it from the questions of the players, listens to what the players want their characters to do, and describes the outcome. It is the same for combat as it is for exploration or roleplay.
Ever since D&D game out forty years ago, however, players and DMs have often used some sort of miniature to represent their characters or monsters. Back then it was often lead or pewter war game miniatures, sometimes painted and sometimes not. The use of miniatures has evolved in the four decades since, but even today there is no perfect solution for representing monsters and characters at the table. We have a wide range of options, from no cost at all to thousands of dollars, but none of these options are perfect.
No matter which of the paths we take or products we buy for D&D miniatures, we’ll always make tradeoffs. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s time, sometimes it’s physical space, sometimes it’s the flexibility of our game. Even if we spend thousands of dollars on miniatures, as some veteran DMs have, finding the right miniature can take too long to make it useful when running a game. No matter how many miniatures we own, we still will not have exactly the right one or exactly the right number for every battle. While no perfect solution exists, we can mix and match a few ideas together to design our own personal best-case solution for representing characters and monsters in combat.
The Free Options and the Theater of the Mind
As mentioned, we can describe combat and use the occasional paper sketch to help players visualize what is going on. This method is fast, free, and doesn’t break the flow of the game from scene to scene.
Running combat in the theater of the mind means we can run any sort of battle we want. With a zero cost comes infinite flexibility. We can run a battle atop a massive titan's skull surrounded by a thousand screaming ghouls if we want to. We can run a ship battle in the depths of the astral sea fighting against a pair of githyanki warships. Whatever sort of battle we can imagine, we can run. Even if we do choose to use miniatures, keeping this gameplay style in our toolkit gives us the option when we want it.
Combat in the theater of the mind isn’t for everyone. When battles get complicated, some representation of the characters and monsters helps. We can start by representing them with whatever we have on hand. Game pieces from other games, dice, coins, glass beads, LEGOs, and a any roughly one-inch-square object can serve as tokens for characters and monsters. This is a fine option when starting to play D&D that may serve you well for your entire D&D career. Even if you do end up getting more miniatures and better representations, keeping some generic tokens on hand can help set up an improvised battle and save you a lot of time.
Low Cost Do-It-Yourself Options
Some crafty DMs learned how to print paper versions their own miniatures either as tokens or as stand-ups. This is a low-cost solution but does take time to build them out. Enrique Bertran, the Newbie DM, wrote a popular guide to making tokens with print-outs, a one-inch hole punch, a washer, and some glue. More recently he posted a great trick of making one token per monster type and then using generic tokens to represent the rest of those monsters. These hand-made tokens are a wonderful and scalable solution that won't break the bank.
The folks over at Alea Tools have a wonderful suggestion for making tokens out of old Magic the Gathering cards. They suggest punching out the card art you like with a one-inch punch, and sticking adhesive one-inch epoxy stickers to the top to make it feel like a hard plastic token. I spent a weekend making about one hundred such tokens and the look and feel great. The epoxy stickers, originally designed for bottle cap necklaces, work just as well on printed artwork like in NewbieDM's solution above. The one-inch punch and epoxy stickers can make just about anything into a great usable D&D token for pennies. A few generic tokens made this way can also augment our miniatures collection by representing additional monsters whose miniatures we don't own.
Many other creators have published PDFs of tokens and stand-up paper miniatures. Trash Mob Minis and Printable Heroes are two such creators. These print-out miniatures require your time and the right equipment, which can get expensive if you don’t already have it, but offer a nice pocketbook-friendly solution that gives you the exact type and number of miniatures you want.
Pawns and Flat Plastic Miniatures
For those who would rather save time and are willing to spend more money, we come to cardboard pawns. The most popular of these are the Pathfinder Pawns Bestiary collection which offers a large number of cardboard stand-up monster tokens for a low price. Though designed for Pathfinder, these tokens work just as well for D&D.
Other producers like Arcknight Games have come up with flat plastic miniatures that cost more but, in my opinion, look much better on a table and pack light since they’re considerably flatter than cardboard stand-ups (full disclosure, I have a curated set of Flat Plastic Miniatures available through Arcknight Games).
These flat stand-up miniatures are a great way to build a large collection of monster representations without breaking the bank.
The Wide World of Plastic Miniatures
We now come to the large topic of plastic miniatures which come both painted and unpainted. Pre-painted miniatures often come in random booster boxes while specific unpainted miniatures can usually be purchased in non-random blister packs. Some sets of individual painted miniatures exist for heroes which is a great way to build up a small collection of hero miniatures without resorting to random selections.
Unpainted miniatures can be used as-is or painted. Painting miniatures, of course, adds the cost of paints, brushes, and other painting accessories on top of the time it takes to paint them. Painting miniatures is a fun hobby all on its own but it isn’t for everyone. Backing the occasional Kickstarter by Reaper for unpainted “Bones” miniatures is one way to get a large collection of miniatures for a relatively low cost-per-mini.
Pre-painted plastic miniatures are, by far, the most common solution. Wizards of the Coast and their partner, WizKids, released thousands of miniatures over the past fifteen years. They’ve almost always been in randomly assorted packs but the price per miniature has changed dramatically over the years, and not in the direction we’d hope for. DMs collecting for many years might have large collections but building one today costs more than it did ten to fifteen years ago. If random boosters aren’t your bag, you can buy miniatures on the secondary market but the cost per mini will be about $3 to $4 per mini on the low-end. Miniatures for our heroes and boss monsters might be worth it but it’s probably not worth getting a warband of twelve orcs together for $36.
An Evolving Marketplace
The world of tokens, stand-ups, and miniatures continually changes. New ideas, like printable paper stand-up miniatures, pop up quickly and become very popular while older solutions like cardboard tokens or cheap pre-painted miniatures tend to fall out of production. Sometimes one can buy cardboard stand-ups easily and other times they’re out of print and selling for four times the cost. This all points to the same core truth of miniatures: no miniature solution is perfect.
Terrain
If you thought miniatures were the end of the D&D money sink, you are mistaken. The top of the line D&D accessories include 3D terrain to go with all of those miniatures. These fantasy terrain arrangements look absolutely stunning, showing off full three-dimensional maps and areas including dungeons, cities, towns, and castles. The most popular vendor for these accessories is the venerable Dwarven Forge and their creator Stefan Pokorny. These are the setups that everyone drools over on Pinterest and Twitter. Matt Mercer uses Dwarven Forge on Critical Role.
The costs for these elements of terrain are as high as the sets are beautiful. A table-sized representation of a complicated castle or dungeon can run thousands of dollars.
There is also a hidden cost with this terrain. The time to set up such an arrangement leaves little flexibility for the game to go anywhere else. If you set up a castle, the characters are definitely going to that castle. Likewise, the terrain takes up a lot of space to store and time to set up. I am a huge fan of Dwarven Forge and own many sets myself, but it is not a requirement to run a great D&D game.
For now, admire the pictures people put on the web but stick to your blank battle-mat for a lightweight, cost-effective, and flexible alternative.
Some Final Recommendations
Given the imperfection of the D&D miniature market, I have no clear solution but a few recommendations.
First of all, even if we don't use it all the time, running combat using the "theater of the mind" offers us infinite flexibility and no cost. Even if we do have a collection of miniatures, we don't have to use them all the time. Keeping this style of play in our DM toolbox keeps our game fast and flexible.
Players love to have nice miniatures for their characters. Character miniatures can show their marching order when heading down a hallway, who is on watch, and a variety of other non-combat situations on top of their obvious representation in combat. They’re also just plain fun to play with. Investing in a good set of character miniatures, either as full miniatures or stand-up tokens, can help bring the characters to life.
As far as monsters go, sticking with cheap representations of monsters with whatever objects you have on hand is just fine. Hand-made tokens are fast, flexible, easy to transport, and cheap. Plastic and card-board stand-up miniatures give us a large collection of monsters for a reasonable cost. Painted or unpainted miniatures look great at the table but the costs are high. Choose which ever of these options best fits your budget and the type of game you want to run.
What are your favorite solutions for representing monsters in your game? Leave a comment below or chat it up on Twitter.
About the Author
Mike Shea is a writer, technologist, dungeon master, and author for the website Sly Flourish. Mike has freelanced for Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, Pelgrane Press, and Sasquach Games and is the author of the Lazy Dungeon Master, Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Locations, and Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Adventures. Mike lives in Northern Virginia with his wife Michelle and their dire-warg Jebu.
Really love using PF pawns! (I've also used Hobbit and LOTR Heroclix figures in games. Quite handy. Mage Knight figures work good too.)
Hello.
I would appreciate a set of rules for running a game in a grid.
Great Article.
TY
@Xillian. You are right! I didn't cover 3d printing. It's not the sort of thing I'd expect new DMs to dig into but it is definitely a powerful way to make the exact minis we want these days. I'll have to study it more.
@thricebedamned. I covered the use of a blank battle map in my previous article on DM tools. I should have given it a nod here too, you're right.
I don't think I saw it mentioned, but make an Amazon wishlist of a bunch of board games with minis and buy them as they go on sale. You can get the Magic: the Gathering board game and expansions for like $10-15 each if you are patient. Descent and the DND board games are other options.
The average mini uses under 10g of filament, so that averages out to about 90 minis per roll depending on the size.
I also support the 3d printing method. I have a pair of FDM printers and a DLP printer (getting the hang of the DLP, it's very different). The Hero Forge figures look great done with DLP (assuming I can get it to work right). While you can print figures on FDM, they're going to lack a lot of detail. But, terrain is awesome with FDM.
With some practice, and a free account at Tinkercad, you can make your own tokens and other items to print.
You can usually print a lot of small items on a single roll of filament (usually filament is 1.75mm x 200m, and weighs about 1 kg). Most slicing programs will tell you how many meters of material you're going to use (but not how many ml of resin . . .) and you can usually check on the printer's menu to see how many meters you have left on your spool.
Minis, though they'll be quite rough on FDM, are usually printed for pennies per figure. DLP, since resin is more expensive, is usually more expensive in general.
I'm a little surprised there's no mention of using mapping software. I realise that could warrant a whole post in and of itself, but there's some great software for running battlemaps. Stuff like Roll20 is super common for remote play, but it can be used really well in-person. I use Maptool, which is free and open source, displayed on a TV in the pub where we play. It's great for showing line of sight and visualising things much more effectively than pen and paper. It does have trade-offs - it's a whole lot of work doing the setup, particularly doing the vision-blocking, and not everyone has access to a projector/big TV next to the gaming table. But I find it's ideal for my table.
I've heavily invested in prepainted (and the occasional self-painted) miniatures over years, and don't expect to change anytime soon. Especially for PCs.
I have fun augmenting my collection with "giant" animals, insects, and dinosaurs from cheap kids' toys (sometimes found in collections in dollar stores).
That said, for newbies with color printers and some loose change, stand-up paper miniatures minis might be the way to go. If you are okay with a "cartoony" look, imho you can't beat "A Monster for Every Season". There is amazing coverage of D&D monsters and characters here. There are, as might be expected, four sets to date, but more are planned (eventually). And "Spring" has templates to draw your own. (And if you haven't discovered the web comic Order of the Stick which started this, treat yourself! No, I am not affiliated with it in any way, other than being a fan.)
Also, I am surprised there was no mention of individually wrapped candies. Starbursts, Rolos, Hershey's Kisses/Hugs, and similar have been popular in many games that I have played or DMed. (Peanut butter cups, chocolate coins, cookies, etc. for larger monsters.) Not only can they be numbered/labeled/color-coded with a marker (or simply by wrapper color), but there is extra incentive to defeat the monsters if you get to eat what you defeat!
Can you recommend a printer, and what is the learning curve for using this? I was thinking about this today while looking at stuff for DnD, and this article just seemed to hit on what I was thinking of.
My recommendation for anyone who wants to get into 3d printing is to start with the Da Vinci Jr. from XYZPrinting. It's a smaller printer (150mm^3 build area), but it's easy to work with, easy to learn and reliable.
It's also cheap. Not cheaply built, but cheap to purchase compared to many other printers. They're currently doing a deal, buy 12 spools of filament and they'll give you a Da Vinci Jr. It's a bit more than just buying the printer, but you'll easily use that filament.
The learning curve is fairly forgiving on something like the Da Vinci Jr., which is why I recommend it. It's easy to use, easy to maintain, and the software, while a bit clunky, is easy enough to learn.
I have made many items out of cardboard. My own assortment of tiles that allow for infinite random dungeon generation, Death tokens (One side representing a numerically defined creature and the other a corpse), traps (such as a spike trap made of toothpicks, paint and glue strands as gore). 3D doors and pillars. Limitless options. Simple and cost effective with plenty of flavor. Very fun to make as well!
I just use some Warhammer 40k ones that are unpainted as miniatures for my campaign.
Personally i order Custom made 3d printed minis for the adventurer's and a mix of Wizkids minis and Games Workshop models for the monsters
Which printer, if you don’t mind sharing? How good is the detail?
Ha! I do the same thing. Each of my players have a plastic or metal miniature, but for my monsters I will quite often use the Pathfinder pawns - however, I really prefer to use a full miniature if I have one, or can get my hands on a reasonably priced one.
If you want to craft checkout DM Scotty, Wyloch, and Black Magic Craft on Youtube.
If you want to custom build a mini check out Hero Forge.