Alternate Minis?

[Snake]

Does anyone have any suggestion on mini use for a game? The D&D Miniaturegame minis are so expensive and I have a hard time finding pewter or the older Reaper minis now that a game store chain (Gamers Paradise) went out of business by me. Is there an alternative that anyone uses? I'd like to find a bunch of stuff in a lot or box so that I have random characters, monsters to use if needed for DMs, players, etc.

[Strahdsbuddy]

I'm gonna get laughed at for this i know, but i'm not an artist and the old Ral Partha minis were cool, but most of my old ones are still silver. So, when i use counters for major battles, i use........

....Legos. Particularly the newer castle minifigs with the angry faces and beards and such right on the heads. I'm an avid collector for 25 years, and, like at my first AA meeting, i am admitting to you all that I LOVE LEGO MINIFIGS!

No really, if your players will take them seriously, they work out very well.

[Jester of the FoS]

Legos work nice, especially for a mostly human game. They can get pricey to get the sets but you can pick up some nice collections of random bits from eBay and the lego website sells bricks and individual figures for a reasonable rate.

The plastic minis are still the cheapest option, just shy away from the rares and go for eBay sets of the commons. You can usually snag piles of orcs and goblins and humans.

For metal minis I recommend Reaper. A good online store is:
http://www.miniature-giant.com/home.php ... b8ce3874ff
Cheap on the shipping (where it really hurts) but with painting, metal minis can be really time consuming.
But Reaper is starting to sell sets of pre-painted non-randomized plastic figs (legendary encounters) but these are still less diverse.

[Strahdsbuddy]

Some good ol thread necromancy, caused by more thread necromancy this week: Those chibi icons would make decent counters on the right sort of heavy paper. I was thinking of this very idea and intended to use the sprites from Final Fantasy Tactics as sort of generic humans, but the chibi avatars in that thread make for some great customization. And there are already so many of them done!

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

We've actually been playing a lot on maptool lately, and using the chibi avatars as our token pictures. Never thought of printing them out a la cardboard heroes...

speaking of cardboard heroes, that's a good suggestion for this thread too..

[HuManBing]

For a cheap, downloadable option, do a web search for "Paper Miniatures". These are things you can download, copy and paste as you need, and then print out.

Then cut them out and tape them so they'll stand on their own, and voila - you have a lightweight cheap mini!

[Strahdsbuddy]

Hey Ron, Maptool looks pretty excellent. How do you like it? Does anyone else use it? Does anyone have an opening for a player, maybe even just as a one-time NPC so I could see how it works.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Hey Ron, Maptool looks pretty excellent. How do you like it? Does anyone else use it? Does anyone have an opening for a player, maybe even just as a one-time NPC so I could see how it works.

I'm constantly impressed by it. The line-of-sight/fog of war features are amazing. Some of my friends have really gotten into the macro-writing parts, so much so that they can just hit a button for their most common rolls and get all the results instantly. (personally, I prefer rolling real dice, but that's personal preference.)

the best way to learn it is just to play with it a bit, and go through the tutorials.

We've used it both in in online-server mode, and also while playing live, with the PC's client up on a TV and the DM's server on a laptop screen. (this was primarily to avoid roaming toddlers eating minis). In both cases, it did the job awesomely. Can't recommend the program enough.

[HuManBing]

I've played using MapTool - it's a good program. You can also use TeamSpeak or Skype to talk with people while you play remotely.

I have never sat down and tinkered with it, but I'll get around to that someday.