A while back i ran a campaign where my players got custom minis, it was really fun and they loved them. We did this maybe 2 months into a 12 month campaign. The session or the session after they arrived a character died and because they had just got the mini, i chickened out and let him survive. It turned out fine this time, he was a warforged so repairing him from a bad stab wound didn't seem than strange in world. But, it was a bad feeling and I could have had a way harder time of keeping it believable if the circumstances were different.
I like custom minis and want to use them again but when is best time to buy them so we minimize these uncomfortable scenarios?
Short answer, I'd say early. There is always a chance that the dice just hate one player for a night, that can happen at lvl 1 to 20. Admittedly it's a much smaller issue once raise dead is an option.
Edit: I suppose you could do paper minis(print on cardstock and cut out) at low level then custom minis once the characters reach a defining moment.
I usually order mine right at the start of the campaign, and hope the character doesn’t die before it arrives. But really, there’s always a risk, unless you’re playing a campaign with no character death.
Another option can be to just buy and off-the-shelf mini that generally matches gender, race and class, and paint it yourself. They’re significantly cheaper — reaper minis go for $4-5, plus the paint, but if you take care of the paints, they’ll last you practically forever. Not as custom, but much less of a sting if the character dies.
The worst thing you can do is wait too late. Spend the money, the campaign ends, the player now has an expensive decoration.
My question is, what do you mean by "custom"? $8 STL prints, $25 custom print, $50 Full-color custom print, or $100+ metal casting? With an $8 DIY print, there is no reason to wait. Just print it and have fun. If the character dies, recycle it as an NPC.
However, if you want a practical answer.... wait until the party has access to resurrection magic. That means either 5th level for Revivify, or lower, if you ensure that they have adequate access to scrolls/potions/NPCs.
Another mitigating factor is to reuse old NPCs in one-shots. Give them a side story that is not part of the main campaign.
Depends on the campaign. For most games I run, I'd say never: they tend to go up to only 5th level and no character is ever safe. Basically, this is a question for your DM. (My rule of thumb would be 5th level, though.)
But this is one reason why I buy generic miniatures. The Reaper Bones series is pretty good and has a ton of different models, you should be able to find something you like in that line.
I also think early on ... custom minis can help your players get into the game and their characters a bit more -- ownership. Its about theatre of the mind! The process of selecting, painting, or customizing a mini will help a bit with that.
Now that said, as a DM way back I don't like character deaths -- lock them up in prison, stone, slave pits, etc. I recognize as a player that the threat of character death adds to the quality of the game, but I feel the story is a shared story between the DM and characters. I guess I'm a softie!
(Different strokes for different folks: so for my style, I also don't want to play or DM campaigns where players hunt / harm each other. That is fine for many people, just not what I'm looking for ... however, a player who buys a custom mini, develops an elaborate backstory, makes sketches, and creates cool artwork and personal touches on their character sheets is something I'd like to help sustain for a LONG time.)
In my last session as a player my heroforge gnome mini attacked some goblins and the DM made one of them remark, "Man, that is the tallest gnome I've ever seen." It brought the entire party to laughter ... my gnome mini is admittedly huge. Silly, and complete with his red gnome hat! But still the mini itself is giant!
One thing to consider is how character development might change the appearance of a character and how accurate you want it to be.
1st level characters dont have cool stuff. But around 3rd, at least you're going to have the armor/weapon type that you're probably going to stick with for a while.
So, if you're going to get a mini at 1st level, I'd look ahead a bit and deal with the fact that it might not be accurate till a little later.
Also, if you cant afford to lose the money from a custom mini that's had its character killed, then you may want to hold off on getting custom minis in the first place.
Get an "off the shelf" mini like we've had to do for decades and either use you imagination or outfit your character to look like the mini. there are so many options these days, that it shouldn't be much of a stretch.
I never really use minis, but I get the appeal and have thought about getting a couple of the characters I loved playing custom made through Hero Forge. I just do not have the money I would need to invest in them to the level I'd like. If money is not a problem I think starting at session one is the best idea. I'll echo some of the above advice and suggest unpainted minis like Reaper, but also will add that perhaps you might not want to paint them until level 3. The party is pretty squishy in the beginning.
I've had great success following Michael Shea's idea for do-it-yourself tokens. I expanded with both 2 in. and 1/2 in. circular hole punchers for large and tiny monsters. I have all the players send me a portrait of their PCs and I'll make custom ones for them before we start the campaign. They became attached pretty quickly. The Avrae Discord bot's digital tokens work great with this too.
I also think it is a wonderful gesture for the table to provide one mini of themselves to the DM to remember the campaign. Other than chips and drinks, DMs don't get much, and what is more appropriate than a piece of art showing the whole party.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I had this conversation with one of my DMs before I quit his campaign shortly after... "Is my character allowed to die?"
He kept giving us terribly underpowered challenges and beside all the other shortcomings of his homebrew campaign, I got the feeling that he was going to baby us along the railroad he was constructing just to continue his story.
Failure is a very important part of a players experience, as cool as it is to get custom minis for your characters, it is more costly to take death off the table than that mini. It's momentarily relieving to save a character they like, but in the long run it damages the integrity of the entire game. There are resurrection spells, there are even low level spells to preserve a dead player and the option to quest to get a much stronger cleric to resurrect your player, there is a DM screen and DM discretion so you can avoid a killing blow or nerf an encounter before the player dies. But if you let the player eat it, and than just say... nah, there's a unforeseen loophole that you just made up to undo failure, you just killed the integrity of the game. At that point, in your players mind, they are only dying when you want them to, and only living because you want them to. A clever DM can create this outcome without showing the players, but if a player dies, by perhaps jumping off a 200 foot cliff... to try to grapple a flying BBEG, when they fail that grapple check, you need to roll 20 d6 and let the player know that consequence and danger are real in your game (and yes this exact thing happen to a player I'm DMing now).
TDLR: the Mini isn't worth your campaigns integrity.
If you do not mind the blocky aesthetic, LEGO minifigures are reusable and re-customizable.
There are so many different kinds of heads and head accessories that you can build practically any race, besides Grung, since I do not recall seeing frog heads. Lizardmen (and by extension dragonborn), Yuan-Ti, Loxodon, Leonin, Tortles, Tieflings, Aasimar, Kuo Toa, Aarakocra, and Kenku are all possible. Anything in LOTR and the Hobbit are possible.
For body sizes, there are also dwarf/halfling/child bodies, giant bodies, centaur bodies, fish bodies, octopus bodies, and turtle bodies.
I had this conversation with one of my DMs before I quit his campaign shortly after... "Is my character allowed to die?"
He kept giving us terribly underpowered challenges and beside all the other shortcomings of his homebrew campaign, I got the feeling that he was going to baby us along the railroad he was constructing just to continue his story.
Failure is a very important part of a players experience, as cool as it is to get custom minis for your characters, it is more costly to take death off the table than that mini. It's momentarily relieving to save a character they like, but in the long run it damages the integrity of the entire game. There are resurrection spells, there are even low level spells to preserve a dead player and the option to quest to get a much stronger cleric to resurrect your player, there is a DM screen and DM discretion so you can avoid a killing blow or nerf an encounter before the player dies. But if you let the player eat it, and than just say... nah, there's a unforeseen loophole that you just made up to undo failure, you just killed the integrity of the game. At that point, in your players mind, they are only dying when you want them to, and only living because you want them to. A clever DM can create this outcome without showing the players, but if a player dies, by perhaps jumping off a 200 foot cliff... to try to grapple a flying BBEG, when they fail that grapple check, you need to roll 20 d6 and let the player know that consequence and danger are real in your game (and yes this exact thing happen to a player I'm DMing now).
TDLR: the Mini isn't worth your campaigns integrity.
OK i take a little issue with this. You are slightly overstating the danger. Yes you can kill your game by doing it, but you won't kill every game you do it in. For the record in my instance, the consequence was they didn't finish the dungeon. They had to leave and a crucial enemy got away. There was tonne of stuff they had to leave behind too. What happened was no different than them having to go to town to ask for a resurrection except i didn't have to add an NPC who wasn't there before. Not to mention this bruised his ego quite a bit, he'd already narrowly avoided death against that boss before and went in trying to settle a score and didn't. I can guarantee you he did not leave my table that night feeling invincible.
It's not a trick i can pull off every time which is why i asked the question, but i've never killed a PC, i pull my punches most of the time and yet my players never feel safe cause I through mecha tarrasques at them and don't give them cookies for failure.
I had this conversation with one of my DMs before I quit his campaign shortly after... "Is my character allowed to die?"
He kept giving us terribly underpowered challenges and beside all the other shortcomings of his homebrew campaign, I got the feeling that he was going to baby us along the railroad he was constructing just to continue his story.
Failure is a very important part of a players experience, as cool as it is to get custom minis for your characters, it is more costly to take death off the table than that mini. It's momentarily relieving to save a character they like, but in the long run it damages the integrity of the entire game. There are resurrection spells, there are even low level spells to preserve a dead player and the option to quest to get a much stronger cleric to resurrect your player, there is a DM screen and DM discretion so you can avoid a killing blow or nerf an encounter before the player dies. But if you let the player eat it, and than just say... nah, there's a unforeseen loophole that you just made up to undo failure, you just killed the integrity of the game. At that point, in your players mind, they are only dying when you want them to, and only living because you want them to. A clever DM can create this outcome without showing the players, but if a player dies, by perhaps jumping off a 200 foot cliff... to try to grapple a flying BBEG, when they fail that grapple check, you need to roll 20 d6 and let the player know that consequence and danger are real in your game (and yes this exact thing happen to a player I'm DMing now).
TDLR: the Mini isn't worth your campaigns integrity.
OK i take a little issue with this. You are slightly overstating the danger. Yes you can kill your game by doing it, but you won't kill every game you do it in. For the record in my instance, the consequence was they didn't finish the dungeon. They had to leave and a crucial enemy got away. There was tonne of stuff they had to leave behind too. What happened was no different than them having to go to town to ask for a resurrection except i didn't have to add an NPC who wasn't there before. Not to mention this bruised his ego quite a bit, he'd already narrowly avoided death against that boss before and went in trying to settle a score and didn't. I can guarantee you he did not leave my table that night feeling invincible.
It's not a trick i can pull off every time which is why i asked the question, but i've never killed a PC, i pull my punches most of the time and yet my players never feel safe cause I through mecha tarrasques at them and don't give them cookies for failure.
I agree with you.
Really there is no real right or wrong way ... but I do consider it bad form to overstate how one style of campaign is better or worse than another, when a session zero can establish shared expectations and boundaries for DM and Players alike. The basic idea here is that the campaign is actually a shared story and not just the DMs preplanned linear trip. If you allow your players the freedom to go off the rails and for their to be consequences for failure, it can feel real. (Also you don't have to advertise when you've cheated a bad series of rolls ... or when conversely you've cheated a series of good rolls.) The real key is to be dynamic.
Back to the original point though ... when players invest in a mini and art, there is a stronger bonding with the character (why, you've now also spent money of them). I'd be very worried about simply allowing a bad string of dice rolls to take out an enthusiastic player. Just how I roll I guess. ;)
That said, if I had a single player who was doing things at the expense of the enjoyment of the others, I'd have to figure out how to fix the issue ... it could be a character death, it could be dropping the player (and the trouble making character can easily be handled in a less permanent way). Or if I had players doing really, really bad things, sure ...
I ordered 6 custom miniatures last week (just the plastic version) and our campaign doesn't "Officially" start for 2 more weeks. We have been playing the characters as level 0 which is mostly just RP for character development. If you have the money there really isn't a reason to wait. Even if the character dies or doesn't get played, the miniature is still good for NPC's or as another character in the future.
A work friend told me that he once had an issue with his DM over his PC's representation in mini form. So after a while he just had a custom mini of himself irl made and used that instead.
I had this conversation with one of my DMs before I quit his campaign shortly after... "Is my character allowed to die?"
He kept giving us terribly underpowered challenges and beside all the other shortcomings of his homebrew campaign, I got the feeling that he was going to baby us along the railroad he was constructing just to continue his story.
Failure is a very important part of a players experience, as cool as it is to get custom minis for your characters, it is more costly to take death off the table than that mini. It's momentarily relieving to save a character they like, but in the long run it damages the integrity of the entire game. There are resurrection spells, there are even low level spells to preserve a dead player and the option to quest to get a much stronger cleric to resurrect your player, there is a DM screen and DM discretion so you can avoid a killing blow or nerf an encounter before the player dies. But if you let the player eat it, and than just say... nah, there's a unforeseen loophole that you just made up to undo failure, you just killed the integrity of the game. At that point, in your players mind, they are only dying when you want them to, and only living because you want them to. A clever DM can create this outcome without showing the players, but if a player dies, by perhaps jumping off a 200 foot cliff... to try to grapple a flying BBEG, when they fail that grapple check, you need to roll 20 d6 and let the player know that consequence and danger are real in your game (and yes this exact thing happen to a player I'm DMing now).
TDLR: the Mini isn't worth your campaigns integrity.
OK i take a little issue with this. You are slightly overstating the danger. Yes you can kill your game by doing it, but you won't kill every game you do it in. For the record in my instance, the consequence was they didn't finish the dungeon. They had to leave and a crucial enemy got away. There was tonne of stuff they had to leave behind too. What happened was no different than them having to go to town to ask for a resurrection except i didn't have to add an NPC who wasn't there before. Not to mention this bruised his ego quite a bit, he'd already narrowly avoided death against that boss before and went in trying to settle a score and didn't. I can guarantee you he did not leave my table that night feeling invincible.
It's not a trick i can pull off every time which is why i asked the question, but i've never killed a PC, i pull my punches most of the time and yet my players never feel safe cause I through mecha tarrasques at them and don't give them cookies for failure.
Your not making your case by pointing out that they already survived defeat and you protected them from recklessly executing themselves by trying again. Saying you've never killed a PC when you present artificially overpowered opponents, that didn't kill them isn't strengthening your case either.
The answer to your actual question is that they should buy a mini right away if your DMing, nobodies ever died in your campaign, so it's pretty safe.
A lack of negative outcome doesn't mean you made the right decision. But than you weren't asking that question.
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A while back i ran a campaign where my players got custom minis, it was really fun and they loved them. We did this maybe 2 months into a 12 month campaign. The session or the session after they arrived a character died and because they had just got the mini, i chickened out and let him survive. It turned out fine this time, he was a warforged so repairing him from a bad stab wound didn't seem than strange in world. But, it was a bad feeling and I could have had a way harder time of keeping it believable if the circumstances were different.
I like custom minis and want to use them again but when is best time to buy them so we minimize these uncomfortable scenarios?
Short answer, I'd say early. There is always a chance that the dice just hate one player for a night, that can happen at lvl 1 to 20. Admittedly it's a much smaller issue once raise dead is an option.
Edit: I suppose you could do paper minis(print on cardstock and cut out) at low level then custom minis once the characters reach a defining moment.
I usually order mine right at the start of the campaign, and hope the character doesn’t die before it arrives. But really, there’s always a risk, unless you’re playing a campaign with no character death.
Another option can be to just buy and off-the-shelf mini that generally matches gender, race and class, and paint it yourself. They’re significantly cheaper — reaper minis go for $4-5, plus the paint, but if you take care of the paints, they’ll last you practically forever. Not as custom, but much less of a sting if the character dies.
The worst thing you can do is wait too late. Spend the money, the campaign ends, the player now has an expensive decoration.
My question is, what do you mean by "custom"? $8 STL prints, $25 custom print, $50 Full-color custom print, or $100+ metal casting? With an $8 DIY print, there is no reason to wait. Just print it and have fun. If the character dies, recycle it as an NPC.
However, if you want a practical answer.... wait until the party has access to resurrection magic. That means either 5th level for Revivify, or lower, if you ensure that they have adequate access to scrolls/potions/NPCs.
Another mitigating factor is to reuse old NPCs in one-shots. Give them a side story that is not part of the main campaign.
Payday.
Depends on the campaign. For most games I run, I'd say never: they tend to go up to only 5th level and no character is ever safe. Basically, this is a question for your DM. (My rule of thumb would be 5th level, though.)
But this is one reason why I buy generic miniatures. The Reaper Bones series is pretty good and has a ton of different models, you should be able to find something you like in that line.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
I also think early on ... custom minis can help your players get into the game and their characters a bit more -- ownership. Its about theatre of the mind! The process of selecting, painting, or customizing a mini will help a bit with that.
Now that said, as a DM way back I don't like character deaths -- lock them up in prison, stone, slave pits, etc. I recognize as a player that the threat of character death adds to the quality of the game, but I feel the story is a shared story between the DM and characters. I guess I'm a softie!
(Different strokes for different folks: so for my style, I also don't want to play or DM campaigns where players hunt / harm each other. That is fine for many people, just not what I'm looking for ... however, a player who buys a custom mini, develops an elaborate backstory, makes sketches, and creates cool artwork and personal touches on their character sheets is something I'd like to help sustain for a LONG time.)
In my last session as a player my heroforge gnome mini attacked some goblins and the DM made one of them remark, "Man, that is the tallest gnome I've ever seen." It brought the entire party to laughter ... my gnome mini is admittedly huge. Silly, and complete with his red gnome hat! But still the mini itself is giant!
One thing to consider is how character development might change the appearance of a character and how accurate you want it to be.
1st level characters dont have cool stuff. But around 3rd, at least you're going to have the armor/weapon type that you're probably going to stick with for a while.
So, if you're going to get a mini at 1st level, I'd look ahead a bit and deal with the fact that it might not be accurate till a little later.
Also, if you cant afford to lose the money from a custom mini that's had its character killed, then you may want to hold off on getting custom minis in the first place.
Get an "off the shelf" mini like we've had to do for decades and either use you imagination or outfit your character to look like the mini. there are so many options these days, that it shouldn't be much of a stretch.
I never really use minis, but I get the appeal and have thought about getting a couple of the characters I loved playing custom made through Hero Forge. I just do not have the money I would need to invest in them to the level I'd like. If money is not a problem I think starting at session one is the best idea. I'll echo some of the above advice and suggest unpainted minis like Reaper, but also will add that perhaps you might not want to paint them until level 3. The party is pretty squishy in the beginning.
I've had great success following Michael Shea's idea for do-it-yourself tokens. I expanded with both 2 in. and 1/2 in. circular hole punchers for large and tiny monsters. I have all the players send me a portrait of their PCs and I'll make custom ones for them before we start the campaign. They became attached pretty quickly. The Avrae Discord bot's digital tokens work great with this too.
https://slyflourish.com/crafting_lazy_monster_tokens.html
I also think it is a wonderful gesture for the table to provide one mini of themselves to the DM to remember the campaign. Other than chips and drinks, DMs don't get much, and what is more appropriate than a piece of art showing the whole party.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I had this conversation with one of my DMs before I quit his campaign shortly after... "Is my character allowed to die?"
He kept giving us terribly underpowered challenges and beside all the other shortcomings of his homebrew campaign, I got the feeling that he was going to baby us along the railroad he was constructing just to continue his story.
Failure is a very important part of a players experience, as cool as it is to get custom minis for your characters, it is more costly to take death off the table than that mini. It's momentarily relieving to save a character they like, but in the long run it damages the integrity of the entire game. There are resurrection spells, there are even low level spells to preserve a dead player and the option to quest to get a much stronger cleric to resurrect your player, there is a DM screen and DM discretion so you can avoid a killing blow or nerf an encounter before the player dies. But if you let the player eat it, and than just say... nah, there's a unforeseen loophole that you just made up to undo failure, you just killed the integrity of the game. At that point, in your players mind, they are only dying when you want them to, and only living because you want them to. A clever DM can create this outcome without showing the players, but if a player dies, by perhaps jumping off a 200 foot cliff... to try to grapple a flying BBEG, when they fail that grapple check, you need to roll 20 d6 and let the player know that consequence and danger are real in your game (and yes this exact thing happen to a player I'm DMing now).
TDLR: the Mini isn't worth your campaigns integrity.
If you do not mind the blocky aesthetic, LEGO minifigures are reusable and re-customizable.
There are so many different kinds of heads and head accessories that you can build practically any race, besides Grung, since I do not recall seeing frog heads. Lizardmen (and by extension dragonborn), Yuan-Ti, Loxodon, Leonin, Tortles, Tieflings, Aasimar, Kuo Toa, Aarakocra, and Kenku are all possible. Anything in LOTR and the Hobbit are possible.
For body sizes, there are also dwarf/halfling/child bodies, giant bodies, centaur bodies, fish bodies, octopus bodies, and turtle bodies.
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This is very well said. Killing characters is something I've struggled with lately as a DM, but it really does need to be done.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
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OK i take a little issue with this. You are slightly overstating the danger. Yes you can kill your game by doing it, but you won't kill every game you do it in. For the record in my instance, the consequence was they didn't finish the dungeon. They had to leave and a crucial enemy got away. There was tonne of stuff they had to leave behind too. What happened was no different than them having to go to town to ask for a resurrection except i didn't have to add an NPC who wasn't there before. Not to mention this bruised his ego quite a bit, he'd already narrowly avoided death against that boss before and went in trying to settle a score and didn't. I can guarantee you he did not leave my table that night feeling invincible.
It's not a trick i can pull off every time which is why i asked the question, but i've never killed a PC, i pull my punches most of the time and yet my players never feel safe cause I through mecha tarrasques at them and don't give them cookies for failure.
I agree with you.
Really there is no real right or wrong way ... but I do consider it bad form to overstate how one style of campaign is better or worse than another, when a session zero can establish shared expectations and boundaries for DM and Players alike. The basic idea here is that the campaign is actually a shared story and not just the DMs preplanned linear trip. If you allow your players the freedom to go off the rails and for their to be consequences for failure, it can feel real. (Also you don't have to advertise when you've cheated a bad series of rolls ... or when conversely you've cheated a series of good rolls.) The real key is to be dynamic.
Back to the original point though ... when players invest in a mini and art, there is a stronger bonding with the character (why, you've now also spent money of them). I'd be very worried about simply allowing a bad string of dice rolls to take out an enthusiastic player. Just how I roll I guess. ;)
That said, if I had a single player who was doing things at the expense of the enjoyment of the others, I'd have to figure out how to fix the issue ... it could be a character death, it could be dropping the player (and the trouble making character can easily be handled in a less permanent way). Or if I had players doing really, really bad things, sure ...
I ordered 6 custom miniatures last week (just the plastic version) and our campaign doesn't "Officially" start for 2 more weeks. We have been playing the characters as level 0 which is mostly just RP for character development. If you have the money there really isn't a reason to wait. Even if the character dies or doesn't get played, the miniature is still good for NPC's or as another character in the future.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
A work friend told me that he once had an issue with his DM over his PC's representation in mini form. So after a while he just had a custom mini of himself irl made and used that instead.
Your not making your case by pointing out that they already survived defeat and you protected them from recklessly executing themselves by trying again. Saying you've never killed a PC when you present artificially overpowered opponents, that didn't kill them isn't strengthening your case either.
The answer to your actual question is that they should buy a mini right away if your DMing, nobodies ever died in your campaign, so it's pretty safe.
A lack of negative outcome doesn't mean you made the right decision. But than you weren't asking that question.