I've begun a small collection of minis, primarily unpainted Reaper Bones figures, especially given the boosters made by WotC guarantee me nothing worth their cost.

How are you representing creatures on your table? Using paper cutouts, minis? Let me know, and post some tips and tricks for this and finding a significant minis collection! :)

In the past I have used paper, coins, buttons, etc. Usually I run Theatre of the Mind, so it's not really an issue. Recently I have starting using Roll20 on a projector, so there are tokens built in there for creatures.

Some unpainted Bones (working on painting them, but I'm slow because I forget to even paint for weeks on end), a few painted Bones, some pre-painted minis from Wiz Kids, the old Wizards of the Coast gargantuan blue dragon and white dragon (Icingdeath), and the colossal red dragon they put out. Plus some of the token that came with the D&D Essentials DM's toolkit (or whatever it was called), some standees from Paizo... and occasionally some small d6 (the ones that come in bricks of 30-something) in a variety of colors so I can have [color] 1 through 6, and not have dice that are representing a monster/npc confused with dice that a player is using because the players all use normal sized d6.

But really, I'm a proponent of the idea to just use whatever is on hand, whether that's dice no one is using, bottle caps, empty cans/bottles, dice cases/bags, other sorts of toys/figures, paper clips and pennies, or you name it - I've just made it so that when I am at home, there are plenty of things on hand.

When my cousin was DMing for us he used a chess set that he had to repersent the monsters on the grid. He wrote down what each piece repersented in his notebook. If there was aot to keep track of he used both colors from the chess set and or put a number beside them to keep track.

I buy 1 in furniture pads they are lightweight and come with a sticky. I use GIMP (open source photoshop) and token maker to print off creatures in sheets of like 20, then I punch them out with a 1 in hole punch I picked up for like 5-6 bucks. Pull the sticky on the pad and place the cutout picture and you have a 1in token for a 1in grid. I think the math came out to like less than 10cents a piece and if you use cardstock and high resolution images they can look REALLY good.

I'm currently using printed paper minis. Here are my minis from the first parts of Princes of the Apocalypse. (Specifically, the stirges, the bandits and bear, the spectre and animated sword, and the goblin and half-ogre.)

Glass beads are nice because you can write on them with erasable markers and they are cheap if you don't have minis.

So here is what I do... I bought a 1" hole punch... and found pictures to punch out, sometimes in magazine (some hobby shops give away Game Trade Magazine, this is a good source).

So you punch out the 1 inch images, then glue them onto bottle caps, which are approximately 1" in diameter. Plastic ones work best for not scuffing surfaces.

Voila!

Lego NPCs and monsters. Makes it easy to alter/customize them, and you can automatically identify the PCs on the map.

We have used dry erase symbols on our laminated grid-sheet-map-thing for monsters. On nights the dry erase marker wanders away, we use random objects from around the room or extra dice. More recently, we started representing the monsters with the different numbers on the dice. Nothing too fancy, since I'm still a newbie.

Quote from Lorathorn >>

So here is what I do... I bought a 1" hole punch... and found pictures to punch out, sometimes in magazine (some hobby shops give away Game Trade Magazine, this is a good source).

So you punch out the 1 inch images, then glue them onto bottle caps, which are approximately 1" in diameter. Plastic ones work best for not scuffing surfaces.

Voila!

I used to use bottle caps, either numbered or with paper tokens attached. Then I started buying all sorts of cheap plastic "army" figures, including skeletons, pirates, etc, while the players started using Lego mini's for their characters. I do tend to split between TotM and Mini's though.

I originally picked up wooden discs for my players tokens and printed off high res images then glued those images to the wooden tokens, this gave the pc tokens a heft and quality that was a cut above the rest. It was Really worth it since they are the most commonly used. For the rest I printed on card stock and got crafting foam with a peel and stick side and just cut out the tokens to size. This allowed to keep The scale of monsters Correct and keep cost down.

More Recently we started using d20pro vtt and I created my own "digital tokens" using artwork scoured from the internet to move about the board.  We play around a coffee table that I built with an old 50" LCD tv inside.  Everything runs from my laptop dual screening the tv.