What type of miniatures do you buy for your games? Player characters? Encounters? Wargaming?

What genre…D&D? Sci-Fi? Steampunk?

I have a player with a 3D Printer… and there a lot of printable figures on the interwebs so we just put in some requests when needed.

I also don’t live in America so getting miniatures is not as easy or a lot more expensive in shipping.

I buy fantasy miniature games mostly, rather than individual models, more often than not via Kickstarter. Buying bulk lots of used models on eBay works too. If I really want the perfect model for a character that's not the best way of going about it, but it's a relatively cheap way of getting a lot of good quality minis. I do have to put up with long waiting times for delivery though.

We use bits of card that have a wipable surface and a stand. Each session, we write the names of the characters each one represents. We have a battle mat with a grid on it that we draw features on for the arena in which the characters are fighting. It's a cheap method that still gives the advantages of using miniatures. We could afford to use miniatures, but we are loathe to spend that much on the game at the moment. It would cost hundreds of pounds...as opposed to the £15 we paid for these pieces.

We use them for D&D5e, and will use them for Star Trek Adventures, which we've recently bought and will be playing soon.

I've got a reasonable collection of the Icons of the Realms Wizkids pre-painted stuff for D&D/Pathfinder, as well as some older pre-painted D&D minis. Half the group also plays Warhammer 40k and there's some minis have been used from that too.

I've also got a 3D printer coming next year which should open up even more possibilities.

Do any of you get scatter terrain, or is it mostly monsters gor encounters?

When I was in person I had a dry erase mat with a grid. A mini for each PC, some 3d printed cubes I could scatter to identify things like trees or low walls for cover, and a combination of monster minis and dice to represent monsters.

When I was buying minis, I mostly bought from WizKids and Reaper because they sold minis that look like official D&D monsters, and I was essentially buying campaign souvenirs that could also be easily used in other campaigns. The goal was to give them away to my players, and I did. Some came pre-painted, some I painted myself, and some never got painted (yet?).

I never bought terrain. I used big dry erase grid mats to make all my battle maps. At one point I bought a wagon mini, but we hardly used it. Stuff like that, it doesn't line up nicely on the grid -- which squares are all the passengers in?

My next campaign won't use miniatures at all. I grow weary of the mental cage that playing on a grid traps you within. In the words of Freddy Mercury, I want to break free.

We don’t really use terrain. We’ve got wipe clean mats for drawing stuff out when required, but the 40k players do have some terrain between them.

I buy miniatures for the player characters- sometimes customs from Hero Forge, sometimes generic that fit the character from Amazon. I also reuse them. A custom made mini that was originally my Half-elf Rogue Ariendela Sneakerson became Starfire, Human Fighter, and later my friend's character- Sai, Elf Fighter. 

For the monsters I use metallic superhero figures. More often then not, my players are fighting the Guardians of Galaxy instead of the orcs, bandits, or skeletons they are supposed to be fighting! 

miniature market PCs and monsters

I collect and paint minis from wizkids, reaper, and the various warhammer games, but we never use them when we play. It feels too constrictive and it slows down play too much. I just keep a good idea of where players are in relationship to their surroundings and opponents. It’s cheaper.. it’s faster, and we have no issues as long as  I as the DM pay attention to what’s going on.

I used to buy minis, but for the last three years all of my games have been online so there hasn't been any point.

A quick note/clarification. In my games the players supply their hero mini (usually wiz kids) and I have enough of a collection to loan out a generic model for players that don't have one

3D Print my own from various Patreons

I have 2600+ minis from WZ and the old D&D line with a few hand painted. Really ups the game play when the players see how large the monster is compared to their puny human. Use an erasable grid map, but getting prepared to use more terrain such as Warlock Tiles when we return to in-person.

Meeples, lego mini-figs, google image search + card stock paper & printer +  1, 2, 3, & 4 inch (dependent on size category) metal washers, and pretty much any other cheap alternatives we can think of.

I still use the metal minis that I bought and painted over 20 years ago, haven’t needed minis since.

No minis, if spatial orientation becomes intricate where a simple X's and O's football whiteball style drawing isn't working, we'll use random tokens ("demon's the salt shaker, you're taco bell fire, you're panda soy sauce, etc) or action figures on hand for stand ins.   

I used to like painting minis, Ral Partha and the like way back, still do just don't have the time for it, but they always seemed to be more a distraction than benefit to the game, minutes loss to ooo and ahhing or laughing about a paint job, players picking up a mini and inspecting fugueing out over it instead of paying attention to the combat round, etc.

I liked the sorta diorama work that could be done with terrain, but never saw the point in investing it for gaming.  Like, rather than shoe horn a set piece finale because I put all sorts of work into the TEMPLE OF ULTRAVIOLENT RESOLUTION TO OVERARCHING PLOT, my game's always took place in a world open enough where the final take down could happen in a lot of places. 

I guess miniatures have never been integral to D&D and most TTRPGs for me, unlike say Battletech or Car Wars or other token position dependent games where mini's enhance the aesthetic, one of the reasons I probably will never get into X Wing you need A LOT OF STUFF, not Warhammer budget, but still, to have a good battle.  I didn't have my first miniatures until probably 3-4 years into playing the games ... it felt sorta weird paying the overhead to stock my games with miniatures on my paper root or pizza place budget and even weirder to impose mini purchases on other players ... and when I played games at conventions, I never saw miniatures used in the RPG (we didn't put TT in front since there wasn't as much digital confusion), they were for the war game room (I'm sure some convention tables had minis I just never sat at any, though didn't make the point to do so).   So for me, minis will always be a sort of epiphenomenon to my gaming.  I may build something on Heroforge and paint it based on a character in one of my games ... but it'll never be instrumental to play at my table.  Other folks use the props to great effect though.