My friend Teos Abadia recently made fun of me for not opening a bunch of D&D Miniatures boxes that have been sitting on my shelf for the past six months or so. They’re still not open, and I’ve just put more boxes of the latest miniature release on top of them… likewise unopened.
The idea was that I’d open them and review them, but life has been extremely crazy of late – some good, some bad – and I just haven’t found the time.
It did make me wonder about my use of miniatures in D&D. The fact is that I own a lot of miniatures – somewhere upwards of 3,000 – and if I want to field an orc army for the player characters to face, I can do that. There’s just a basic problem with that: it requires me to find that orc army first. Once you have so many miniatures (and I’ve been buying the plastic D&D ones since 2003), you need to find the ones you need. It takes time. For me to get the minis out for a 4-hour session can easily take an hour or more.
That’s a significant amount of time. At least transporting the plastic miniatures is easy.
However, if you’re using miniatures, it can look fantastic (even without the 3D terrain).
Many players also much prefer the D&D experience when miniatures are involved. Different people visualise combat and action in different ways. So, by bringing miniatures to the game, I help those people who have trouble working out what I’m describing without player aids.
The flip side to this is that there are many encounters that I run that I’ve got no idea of what the monsters will be in advance. This is especially true during the big wilderness travel bits of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Curse of Strahd and Out of the Abyss. Will the players encounter trolls, ogres or perytons? No idea. Yes, I could take a big bag of minis with me, but there comes a time when it’s just too much effort.
Not playing at my house also doesn’t help.
I was writing an adventure recently and I apologised in the text to anyone who liked using miniatures. There are some combats (particularly those in three dimensions) that miniatures struggle to represent.
Ultimately, I think I should be using minis more than I have been. I go through phases of miniature use. Sometimes I use them for every combat. Other times, it’s Theatre of the Mind all the time. And, with 5E, it’s been very much TotM in the ascendance. Time to change things up!
I think that 4th edition was specifically geared towards minis on a battlemat. 5th edition leaves that much more up to the DM.
I find that TotM allows smoother story telling, and is much less board-gamey (yeah, I make up my own words sometimes). If possible I prefer TotM as a DM & player.
For me, when I’m DMing live, I am much less likely to use a battlemat with minis (well, I use dice), but the online tools (Roll20 & Fantasy Grounds are what I’m referring to) definitely skew in the direction of a battlemat with minis, but it is much easier to do that with the online tools.
I prefer TotM too. But in D&D, you will sometimes need a tool to visualise relative positioning and distances. For that, I have some abstracted tokens with me when I GM — one encounter this orange chip can be an orc, next time it could be a giant spider.
We use minis in our game.
Last night we had a pretty epic encounter – we’d heard two voices arguing behind a door so made a plan to burst in and attack, hoping for surprise. After some words of bardic inspiration we were ready and slammed the door open. A bugbear chief and a drow are in heated discussion and turn in surprise.
The DM then places the minis, and the guy hosting (who owns all the minis) is also able to place a table, bed and brazier to complete the scene. To our surprise, a wolf is also present, plus a dwarf prisoner who we were tasked with rescuing.
The scene was much more evocative with the minis present
Later in the session we had another encounter where a hobgoblin patrol had found our mules tied up in a glade. By having minis out, the DM could see that the wolves accompanying the hobs were not close enough for ‘pack attack’ (or whatever it is called) to come into effect.
I can see the appeal of TotM at times, but for some combats minis carry the day.