Proxy
Once upon a time, way back in the early days of my gaming career, I struck gold. It was a garage sale, and among the usual assortment of dinged-up furniture and warped Tupperware lids, I found the beginnings of my miniature collection. It was a full cardboard box of Mage Knight minis, over 300 of the things! There were elementals and constructs and orcs galore, and I took the lot. At long last, I could stop using spare pennies and LEGO minifigs and begin setting up combats like a real gamer!
Since then my collection has grown. Years have passed, and I now own 40k armies. I’ve got the Bones kraken. There are random townsfolk, re-purposed craft store dragons, and custom 3D-printed critters from Hero Forge. It was all beginning to get a bit out of hand, actually. That’s why, late last year, I decided to make a project of organizing my collection. I decided to put up Swedish shelving all around of my office. I filled the Swedish shelves with Swedish shoe boxes, labeled them with the full gamut of creature types, and put my horde of plastic dudes in their new homes. Many hours and much swearing at wall studs later, I was all sorted and set to game!
Now let me tell you another story. It was just last session, and my players were fighting ratlings. If you’ve ever read Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House,” you know that these esoteric little horrors stem from a particularly nasty specimen named Brown Jenkin. That’s a weirdly specific creature. And while my collection may be vast, there were no ratling minis to be found. Instead, I wound up proxying a couple of unpainted skaven clan rats from the Warhammer universe. They made fine replacements in a close-enough sort of way, but some sick corner of my brain was still shrieking at me: “You should find out if there are any official ratling minis. Check ebay! Spend more money! Own more plastic!”
You see, I understand exactly where Wizard is coming from in today’s comic. When you’ve got a clear image of a fantasy world all picked out in vivid colors in your mind, you want to see that image reflected on the table. That’s why I possess more plastic toys than a grown man ought. But something sort of clicked in my brain during that ratling fight. An epiphany. What I realized is that no matter how hard you try, when you’re attempting to represent Imagination Land in psychical reality, you’re always going to come up short. Even if I owned every mini in every bestiary ever printed, I still don’t have a 3D dungeon. (OK, I do have a 3D dungeon. But it’s made of gothic stone rather than natural caverns. A travesty for Underdark games!)
It’s taken me many years to accept the possibility, but the “gold” I struck at that long-ago garage sale may have been fool’s gold. Whether it’s LEGO, paper minis, or plastic dollar store toys, you’re always going to proxy some part of your imaginary landscape. Learning to live with that, to accept “close enough,” can save you a lot of time and money. I just wish I’d figured that out several Swedish shoe boxes ago.
Question of the day then! What do you use for miniatures? Do you strive like me to maintain an expansive collection, or do you make do with whatever bits you can scrounge from your board game collection? Let’s hear about all your favorite Monopoly thimble thieves and meeple mages down in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
With my more recent groups, we primarily i just use paper slips, occasionally though for a big boss someone might scramble up a figure somewhere. With my old group we also used paper slips, but we also had a bunch of kobold, orc, dragon, ogre and bandit minis, and stuff like that, and our guys had minis of their own as well. I usually ended up with androgynous elf since i tended to play half elf bards and warlocks, high elf wizards, wood elf clerics, and skill nut rogue/cleric/ranger half elf mixes.
What does an androgynous elf paperclip look like?
Nah paper slips, with letters on them, often just pulled out of a notebook. And i had figurines in the old group for our own characters.
Teach me to read comments when I first get up in the morning. :/
I know that feeling, though usually my reading is good, and its my writing that comes out as a somewhat garbled mess of words.
I am fortunate enough to be a member of a local gaming club which has access to a very extensive collection of miniatures (through they are technically on loan from another member, but since he only games in said club they are always there anyway).
While we regularly use imperfect proxies* I do feel that it adds a lot to the feel to have something that feel vaguely similar to what’s happening. The knight we are fighting might not be wearing the exact correct kind of armor, but at least hes mounted which gives a nice feel in a way that a 2by2 square eraser wouldn’t.
It’s not worth going too obsessive about through. A centaur can easily substitute for a knight in a pinch and vise versa.
*including from time to time proxies for things we actually have a non-proxy for, but which it would take longer to find than we judge it worth.
Can you describe what you mean by “the feel?” What’s the basic pleasure of seeing minis on the board?
It’s difficult to describe as it’s an immaterial quality, but it is similar to the pleasure of rolling some nice dice, or of having neat character sheets with small flourishes in the detailing instead of merely functional boxes.
Or having hand-outs instead of just describing what’s in them (of for that matter making the hand outs look like an in-universe thing instead of just a word document)
It helps get one in the mood.
I started playing Pathfinder while at a convention. I was given a gift certificate for $10 at the Paizo online store. I bought a couple of minis since I wasn’t interested in buying the books for a game I might not keep playing but figured I could use the minis for something. (I did keep playing of course, but I wasn’t sure of that at the time.) I bought a female warrior and a female archer. The next year, I got another certificate. I used it to buy a gnome and a halfling that would pass as the only characters I had at the time. I also bought a boar. Earlier this year, my friend went to a little Gundam thing that was going on at a gaming store. I bought 2 Dragonborn minis there. That’s all I own, though I might buy one or two more at conventions.
I gather that the boar was a fateful choice.
How’s Mick doing these days?
He’s doing just fine. When everyone retired, Irlana used her massive amount of cash to buy the forest where she grew up and turn it into an animal preserve. Mick is now happily living in safety and comfort.
Ah, this is where the magic of the computer comes in. Me and my friends play D&D on Tabletop Simulator, and I’d say that the stuff we use in there is about as close to the imagination as it gets.
How long does it take to set up a scene?
I play online, so while I don’t have the issue of spending piles of money on figures, I went through a phase at first where I was convinced tokens with a top-down view were better then portraits. (Looked more like they were actually “standing” on the map) But eventually players stopped playing “standard” humanoid races, and I couldn’t find what they were playing in the format I preferred, so I had to switch to portraits. Now, I don’t see why I thought it was such a big deal. Top-down tokens have their benefits, but so do Portrait style tokens. And when you have so many varied races and combat styles, Portraits really do the job better.
On the rare occasions I play in person, I use Paper Minis. I have a big bag of around 30~ Orcs that I spent a night pasting together for a big battle. Fun tip: Cardstock and glue make surprisingly strong minis that can hypothetically last quite a while. So there’s no need to worry about not having the right mini, as it’s simple enough to make.
If I had it to do over, I’d have got a couple of these and called it a day:
https://paizo.com/products/btpy8tj5?Pathfinder-Pawns-Bestiary-Box
Would have saved a load of shelf space.
When I first started (like 20 years ago), I used coins for enemies, and the four? minis that came with the HeroQuest AD&D board game, and I made massive paper maps that I would fold or roll out. I also generally used official TSR forgotten realms adventures (the paperback ones that covered stuff like the plumes of hillsfar, volo the bard, the times of troubles, maztica, etc.
When D&D 3.5 came out with D&D Mini’s (the ones that were random assortment, but came also with simplified stat-cards), I purchased a bunch of them, and switch my primary map-tool from large paper maps to overhead projectors. To simplify the exploration process even more, I made a bunch of projector sheets of scanned graph paper. By this time, I was confident in my GMing ability, and mostly ran my own custom adventures (usually sticking to only monsters I had minis for). During this time, I also encouraged my players to learn how to GM, and used WotC’s downloadable/printable adventures.
Nowadays, I have access to two (soon to be three) 3d printers. With them I print custom PCs from Hero Forge, Monsters from ‘DM workshop’ on Shapeways, and Dungeon Tiles from DragonLock. I rarely GM anymore, except when playtesting content that I am writing.
https://www.shapeways.com/shops/dmworkshop
https://www.fatdragongames.com/fdgfiles/?page_id=2658
Any tips on a storage solution?
For miniatures, we 3d print drawers for the empty filament spools, see here: https://www.matterhackers.com/articles/how-to-make-use-of-empty-filament-spools-for-organization
For dungeon tiles, we hang them by floor on the wall, as one would a poster. Other miscellaneous tiles we just put into plastic bin sorted by type (cave, dungeon, castle, village, etc).
Can you recommend some good-but-affordable 3D printers suitable for miniatures?
Our GM for our steampunk campaign uses the fold-your-own mini’s from Order of the Stick. They do the job ok, but sometimes I find it hard to get into the feel of the thing when the art style is just so… cute. It’s just hard to be scared of the bad guys when they look like that, you know?
For the 5e campaign I’m running now I’ve stolen the idea of the foldable minis and am printing my own, that way I can just choose images that represent the characters as I imagine them (or, mostly, pinch official art from D&D Beyond). It’ll be my first session using those tomorrow, so we’ll see how it goes. Up until now I’ve been using a mixture of Lord of the Rings wargame minis and 40k stuff.
In our Rise of the Runelords campaign we eventually all shelled out for proper minis for our characters; mostly custom ones from Hero Forge. We had a nice sessions sitting down and painting them all together, given that none of us wargame any more and most haven’t painted a mini in years. Our GM uses the official pathfinder tokens for everyone else, which at least look exactly like the characters they represent.
I share that Hero Forge impulse when it comes to PC minis. Funny how “my character” deserves better treatment than all the NPC mooks of the world, even though those mooks will have a longer shelf life in other campaigns.
Whilst those mooks last longer, I don’t know if they get more table time. Even the most generic fighter or bandit won’t appear in that high a proportion of combats over the years, whereas the PC’s will be in every combat for the life of one campaign.
It has upped the stakes about them dying though; we’ve houseruled that raise dead doesn’t exist, and that the only way to come back is reincarnation, so even if we bring the character back they’ll need a new mini.
I got mildly hooked on the pathfinder subscription starting with Rusty Dragon Inn, the next set will likely be the end of that. My leftover bucket has about 200 figures, which will go up for sale some time next year.
Before that I got singles of anything PC like, as those tend to get most table time.
Generally: The shorter the time I expect a figure to get on the table, the further down the quality of a stand in I‘m willing to use for my home brew campaign.
The First Edition sale of Hells Rebels AP came with pawns and will eventually be played using them.
Any pics of the collection? I’d be curious to see what a full Paizo haul looks like.
only half a haul, and doesn‘t look like much through the clear plastic boxes in drawers and Swedish shoe boxes in shelves. I don’t have the space for a pretty „dust collector“ style display.
I might do a full inventory next… easter, realistically.
I already have a huge collection of Legos, and since our table setup is not well suited for a battle mat, we tend to use a whiteboard attached to the wall behind my DM chair. Everybody can see it clearly, if they need to they can come up and poke it, I can change things on it just as easily, we just cant use minis. While I can see the appeal of having a mini collection, I’ve never felt driven to do it. Plus, I cant paint the darn things to save my life.
Wait…. How do you attach the LEGO dudes to the whiteboard?
Slightly off topic, when I first saw the comic, I thought it was about GMs integrating ‘social justice warrior’ stuff by having the white dragon “identifying” as a red dragon. It didn’t help that the last “word” in the comic title banner was “WYSIWYG” and that the center three letters looked like “SJW”.
Don’t worry. I promise not to include any SJW stuff in comics about my trans wizard character. >_>
So, in one game I had the characters fighting in the frozen north. They were following the trail of a dragon that had been attacking nearby encampments, freezing people and devouring everything.
They spent a lot of time tracking this dragon, and they had interviewed enough survivors to know it was white, so then went in loaded for bear – resistance to cold, fire damage weapons, bombs, etc.
They find the dragon and start fighting it, they win initiative and throw a ton of fire damage at it…
And it does nothing.
And then the illusion spell drops, and a red dragon begins to laugh at them.
It had pretended to be a cold based dragon, and used its spells to create cones of cold to add onto the illusion. There were a few clues here and there, but they never put it together in time. It killed two of them because they were unprepared, but the others got the bodies and Teleported out just in time.
By the time they had come back properly prepared, it was gone.
It was one of my favorite encounters, and a good example of my Gm mantra which is “NPCs are also allowed to be intelligent.”
Heh. I think there’s actually a more appropriate comic for that story:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/altered-bestiary
Back when I played games with physical people at an actual location instead of with internet ghosts, I used pathfinder’s bestiary box, which had a bunch of art on cardboard strips you stuck in little holders. It only had stuff from bestiary 1 in it, and it didn’t have EVERYTHING, so even then there was a lot of proxying.
These days, art from google search just gets thrown into token press
Is token press a program or a physical object like my fondly remembered pog machine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq9r50EYJh0
A cool thing one of my DMs did was print out tiny square images of the monsters, and have those papers represent the corresponding monsters. Cheap, and it’s the appropriate mini. Plus it doesn’t fill up several shoeboxes.
How does he keep ’em organized?
Candy makes for great enemy tokens. Whoever kills the foe gets to eat it!
Never have I wanted to play an awakened animal so badly.
In one of my very first D&D games, our party came across a dragon that the GM described as “having some unusual aura about it”. After we fought the dragon and won, we wasted a session-and-a-half trying to figure out who had enchanted it, how, and why, before the GM admitted that it was just an illusion to make the dragon look bigger… because he didn’t have any dragon-minis of suitable size to represent a dragon that was an appropriate challenge for a 3rd-level party.
If he hadn’t said anything, I’m pretty sure the rest of us would have been far to noobish to realize that it was an “adult dragon” mini and therefor not something we would normally be expected to fight.
Bonus points- it was a White Dragon mini.
I am always delighted — though never quite surprised — to learn that the Handbook’s art imitates my readers’ lives. Where’s Vladimir Propp when you need him?
I just don’t run prewritten scenarios. I write all my scenarios, characters, etc. Based on minis I own. As a painter, I love buying games that have a ton of minis and like buying unpainted and giving them color. I don’t know how many painted minis I own, much less unpainted. So now, I just don’t use monsters that I don’t have painted minis of.
I used to tell my friends “you know I have a mini for everything because I can offer you a CHOICE for your female dwarf wizard”.
I mean… doesn’t that get a little limited? I know that I’d have had a lot of fights vs. goblins and only goblins if I’d adopted this policy when I was just starting out.
Yeah when starting out. But I have hundreds of miniatures – orcs goblins and kobolds sure. But I also have hook horrors, ropers, owlbears, demons, daemons, devils, solar angels and a dozen other kinds, at least two inevitables, gibbering mouthers, unicorns, I few of every kind of PF giant from running Rise of the Runelords, and many, many more. Considering I own more than a fee bestiaries worth of painted mosters, and a cadre of humans of various stripes, I feel like I’m not missing out.
Our DM: So you discover that are surrounded by a horde of- Wait! Where are the…?
Me: Sorry¡ I eat them.
In my country, which i don’t need to mention since everyone must know which one it’s, we have better things to do with our money than buy minis, so instead in our table we use a Tarrasque brand Nike, a evil wizard brand Coca-Cola and a king of the Pepsi dynasty. We use anything, food, shoes, coins, domestic appliance, books, bills, photographs and once one of my friends was playing a fighter fighting a group of orcs represented by beers. He got drunk of victory… and beer. Many times we have discovered that we lack the necessary minis because we have eat them, our DM agrees that using chocolates to represent drow priestess was a bad idea. A tabletop role-playing game is a intensive mental activity so my brain craves food and sugar for fuel, that is why i can’t help myself and eat the “minis”. MY DM is still don’t convinced of that excuse, but since one he ate the whole party he can’t say a thing about 🙂
Found your next boss fight: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/6d/49/52/6d4952cff01855b1949debc64a24e523.jpg
Seriously now, my companions and i are gonna kill that dragon and feast on his entrails. Shen-long always look tasty to me 🙂
Also why there is a Dark Eldar in that collection of your?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7e/8f/f5/7e8ff5b86e2ba72b7b8cdd106cccbcc4.jpg
Dunno. I just yoinked a rando from Google Image.
Everything i used to believe about reality has been destroyed. How i can trust in anything if i can’t trust internet 😛
In the inverse for the comic scenario, I’ve been holding on to ye-olde 8×8 colossal+ red dragon ‘mini’ just waiting for the perfect time to bust it out.
You and me both, buddy. You and me both.
My local dollar store sells glass pebbles in bulk, and each is about the size of a tile on my mat, so I’ve bought mixed color sets and use different color glass pebbles for different kinds of enemies.
“The red ones are gray oozes, the green ones are ochre jellies, and the clear ones are black puddings. Why is this so hard for you guys!?”
Is that last word WYSIWYG? (what you see is what you get)
If so the ‘I’ looks like a ‘J’ in that font.
Yup. It is indeed WYSIWYG. The font was the real boss monster all along. 🙁
I’ve got no minis at all. I strive to never succumb to the temptation to buy them, because I know I would want more. It would never stop.
So I don’t use a board most days. Everything is in the imagination. When a board does get used, I stick to using some colourful rocks.
Do you ever feel like movement-based powers go to waste? I like theater of the mind as much as the next guy, but sometimes it feels like everybody is always adjacent to everybody in a weird n-dimensional space.
Blasphemy that it is, I just use colored glass pebbles. Special monsters (and the PCs) get hand crafted clay figurines by our resident artist.
Any pics of these bespoke wonders?
Hmmmm. Back in the day when I actually played games irl, most games we played were theater of the mind. The few times they weren’t, we just used different colored dice because at least three of us owned enough dice each for everyone at the table and some to spare. And because dice conveniently come in seventy billion different colors, patterns, sizes, and shapes there was never any trouble getting enough unique colors or enough that were close enough to tell “oh, all these red ones are the orcs, those green ones are the goblins, and that yellow one is the werewolf half-lightning half-glass elemental” or whatever.
A few times someone had some actual minis and that was a nice treat, but nobody was every overly concerned about trying to accurately represent for our lesser real world eyes what we could see with our most ascendant mental ones.
Have you ever played at a more elaborate setup? Maybe at a con or something? There are a lot of advantages to the theater of the mind, but painted minis exploring custom-carved foam terrain makes a pretty nice sometime food.
Never “got” to go through the miniatures phase in gaming. I still buy the things ‘cuz I think they’re NEAT, and I occasionally really want to do some model crafting, but I’ve not really used them for gaming.
These days, we game on Roll20. I have supported my fellow artists a REASONABLE amount for many of my needs, but there are things I need that my fellow artists have simply NOT resolved on my behalf. So for now, I am created tokens here and there as I need them, with an eye on releasing a token pack in the next year or so in case anyone feels they could use some more interesting pieces. My icon I’m using here is one of my R20 tokens, and is based off a character who succeeded beyond ALL of my expectations, but in a way I NEVER expected. As a result, they are now an NPC who schemes and plots and recruits able bodied heroes to do things, and thus a token was required.
We’re thinking about doing the custom Roll20 token thing as well. Where are you planning on releasing ’em? Is there some official forum I should know about?
Roll20’s marketplace is where I would like to do it. I haven’t done all the research, but judging from some of the packs that are up on there, I think it’s a completely open marketplace.
I prefer theater of the mind exclusively. Dont gotta spend the bucks or the time. The pieces do little to ‘unleash my imagination’ improving a scenario or encounter.
Devil’s advocate I suppose, but here’s a counterpoint. There was a corridor fight in my last Pathfinder session, and a bunch of cultists popped out of doorways at either end of the PCs’ marching order. That meant some of their party were trapped in the middle, unable to contribute directly to the fight. Suddenly interesting tactical considerations like pulling your own ally out of the way and swapping spots with ’em were in play. It made the fight feel different in a way that “the cultists attack you in an n-dimensional non-euclidean mind theater” couldn’t.
I keep a pack of graph paper on hand for maps and notes and stuff. When we need a mini, I just snip out an appropriately-sized square and scribble something on it.
Heh. Last home game I joined as a player did that. There were a few hastily cut-out blast templates as well.
I use dice or this series of undead figurines I got, through I will use a different die size or figure type for different styles of enemy. I have horrified a party once by drawing the room on the map, then setting a Blue Dragonspawn Godslayer (Gargauntian blue dragon humanoid). Someone asked what is that, and I said, “oh, it’s exactly what the figure is.”
It turned out to be an illusion, but it was fun to see the looks on their faces.
“What is that thing?” they cried.
“WYSIWYG,” I whispered.
“Is that some kind of demon lord?” they asked.
“Facepalm,” I said.
There is also great fun to be had using Disguise Self or the Disguise skill to make your Wizard bbeg’s Monk servant look like the wizard and having the Wizard look like the Monk. I roll with an experienced group, so I like subverting their expectations in a fight.
Fighter: “I charge the wizard. 28 to hit.”
GM: “Miss. His turn.” tosses 4d20
Fighter: “Don’t I get an ao?”
GM: “The wizard steps back into an unusual swaying posture, mimicks snake style kung fu and lashes out with four lightning fast jabs. Take x damage.”
Fighter: “Kung fu wizard?!”
Another point in online game’s favour it seems!
Whenever I need to bring in a new monster, I open up tokentool and hit the mean streets of google image search.
However, I do love minis. If I was less poor my house would be 60% minis by weight.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, but this comic and its many hyperlinks would not survive without those mean streets.
And this is why I now use paper mins. That and the expense. The two reasons I use paper mins are the expense, not having the correct representative, and the weight. Er, among my primary reasons are weight, representation, cost, and individualisation! Um, I’ll come in again…
Actually I switched over slowly starting back in the mid-90’s in a Supers game and I’ve slowly just switched over completely since. I attach pennies to the bases to give them some stability, but that and printing cover my costs.
And there’s the thread’s mandatory Monty Python reference. I was getting worried there….
Honest to God, I dream of a time when I can pop out some 3D dudes before a session and then throw ’em back into the hopper after a session. My fantasy 3D printer will also be full color. And print fabulous desserts that help you lose weight. :/
I just use Legos on graph paper, and not the 1″ kind, either — the sort of graph paper I still have lying around from my high school days. Turns out a 1×1 brick just about fits into a standard-issue graph paper square, and then you can use 2x2s for Large creatures and so forth. It’s a little awkward and it can sometimes be difficult to move Zombie #3 without accidentally nudging Zombies #2, #5, and #7, but we make it work.
Sometimes I think it would be cool to do it all in the Theater of the Mind, but it really helps to have physical representations when you’re working out where everybody is, what things are in range, and who all got hit by that fireball.
Of course, now that one of our players has moved out of state, maybe I should finally get around to looking into some sort of online resource…
Pros and cons. It’s nice having relative positioning, but the more true-to-life you get the more you begin to lock down creativity. I actually dig the very-abstract graph paper + 1×1 legos as a middle ground.
Oh, and another advantage — you can accessorize your “minis”! If you’ve got some sort of ongoing effect like Hunter’s Mark or Hex, you can just use one of those little clear studs and stick it on top of the bandit in question. Got a bunch of orcs and then a boss orc? Put one of those little gripper pieces on top to simulate a horned helmet. Don’t have quite the right size piece? Awkwardly kludge something together out of a bunch of smaller pieces! (I ended up representing a young green dragon with a 2×2 piece I’d built out of two green things I had slapped onto a blue 2×1.)
Affordances! Affordances for days!
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/affordances
Started out using Lego Minifigs for the PCs, and Battlebeasts (http://www.toyarchive.com/BattleBeasts/Figures/Figures.html) for any opposition from spiders to kobolds to ogres. Plush dinosaurs and dragons also made an appearance. Now I STILL use lego minifigs for the PCs, but generally use Rich Berlew’s A Monster for Every Season (https://gumroad.com/richburlew) printouts for monsters. Unless we’re playing Deathwatch (40k Space Marines RPG), in which case we use actual 40k minis for PCs and enemies.
That said, we use miniatures purely to show general locations of the monsters and PCs, and never break out a ruler to measure distance. Somewhere between Theatre-of-the-Mind and full-out Grid-and-Minis play.
I went back over my minis. I found a female swashbuckler and a female caster. I also realized that I can’t use the boar mini as Mick. It’s a DIRE boar figure and is a Large. I need to get a smaller figure that works for the Small and Medium sizes.