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!