No miniatures? No problem.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 มี.ค. 2023
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![fellow fellow - Proud [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9uZF7BlUQPE/mqdefault.jpg)
Sad that Ginny Di is going to get demonetized for showing a Fire Snake.
The demonization of Fire Snakes needs to stop :)
Fire snake by the name of fire! Wang Fire!
JESTEEERRR
XD
I thought it was a Cheeto
So sad that Salamanders are so oppressed in our society, constantly being shamed for showing natural parts of themselves such as their flaming tail ridges
Paper minis should absolutely be standard practice for lower budget games. Just print em, stick em in a little stand, or even just fold them in a way so they can stand. They can look fantastic and are super customizable, and you can have millions without spending much at all
I've been doing this for years, and it works great! Plus they're much easier to store in bulk.
@@TheCarpDM You'd just look up the creature or somthing? I'd love to know where to get good images for printables on the cheap
Printable heroes and Paper forge. Excellent choices.
Without spending much at all? Printer and computer.
@@ElijahForLong well, most people have access to that already, or can print stuff... Like... At school, or maybe a friend's or colleagues place
In case it hasn't already been mentioned: for hardware enthusiasts, hex-nuts are another great substitutes for minis. They can be painted in different colors to show factions, and embellished with shortened bolts (or little ball bearings or whatever other stuff's available). And they're heavy enough to stay put.
They're also compatible with magnets.
You didn't even say what the magnets are for. I'm imagining you just like magnets.
@@TheQuark6789 Everyone likes magnets. Lol, for real though, the variety of shapes and sizes means small metal parts can be modular game pieces. You can use the same parts to differentiate creatures/objects at a glance, then rebuild them into other stuff in the next or even same encounter. Like, a hex nut with a bucky ball inside is a goblin? Stack em up and it's the bugbear chieftain... or 3 goblins in a trench coat.
Using candy as minis is a great way to help keep kids engaged in combat!
And adults, it works on adults too.
And when the BBEG drops bring out a donut or full size candy bar!
@@nate6386 weapons use a nerds rope as a whip...eat a little when it gets "damage" if you got that in the game...
Candy as enemies makes me gag. All those fingerprints all over that candy is gross. I don't want to taste what's been on other people's hands, especially if they just got back from the bathroom or have cheeto fingers.
@@Shirodragoon use packaged candy
I'm so happy you mentioned candy! It's my favorite "mini" substitute for in-person place!
Absolutely! One game I was in used Reece's mini cups! 😁
I’ve heard about someone using candy as minis for a while campaign and the bbeg was represented by a giant donut
Lego mini figures work great for minis. Lego bricks can even resolve the problem of depicting a flying thing being directly above something else. Make a little stack of bricks in one space, and staircase over above the space they are in.
if you have a large Lego collection, a whole Lego campaign would be really easy. terrain, party minis, enemies, all of it could be made from Lego pretty easily. need a dragon? brick build one, there's plenty of instructions if you're not quite confident in making one from scratch. a band of kobolds? get your hands on a few Chima crocodile heads and small legs. goblins? plenty of options to choose from but recent Ninjago sets have purple ones that probably go fairly cheap on bricklink, not to mention lord of the rings or Spiderman sets.
I really want to run a whole Lego campaign now, unfortunately I've never dmed before but I'll definitely keep that idea around
100% I used Lego minis in a game a while back and they're great. Full of character and super customisable; pose them, change out their weapons, dismember them etc. etc.
Dang it, I just said this. If I would have scrolled down, I could have seen it was here already. I also like the MegaBloks mini figures. They have a lot more points of articulation and can hold Lego weapons.
When we played in person we used Lego minis. Though we've been on Roll20 and Skype since lock down.
Lego was literally my first thought when see this short
🤣🤣🤣 Thanks Ginny. This was both helpful and proved my table isn't the only one with a built in gutter.
oh you don't. I play with high school catholics, i have nightmares...
@@calebfreeman8284Oh please elaborate this sounds funny and/or painful
As a DM, I have used the dice just as described as well as printing NPCs and folding them to stand on their own.
As a player, I have hand drawn my low-intelligence orc using crayon. I also drew his background story with crayon.
ngl, the crayon orc is brilliant
We've used candy for years. Is SO motivating. Recently, my party fought an adult dragon, so we got a cupcake that was about the right size on the grid. They really enjoyed cutting it up and splitting it after they won. 😁
My DM uses Starburst to represent creatures. They fit almost perfectly on a standard 1 inch grid and they even correspond to our folder colors for our characters. And we always get to eat the boss if we kill them
As a DM, I use Starburst as well. They are the best fit for the maps
Friendly Reminder that those of you without printers can probably print at your local library for cheap (if not free!) My local library charges about ¢25 for one full-color page of printing, which is pretty great since you can fit 6+ minis on a page depending on size/margins!
My library offers 3d printing at 5 cents per gram!
we like to use LEGO minifigs, they even get their own armor and they can be customized forever. AND you can remove parts if your playing with limb damage!
Rubber ducks are really fun
You can use multi colored sharpies to customize them
I'm using these for my characters. I am new to DMing
@@JaidenMaidenPlays a late good luck!
I was kicked from doing it because of a rumor lol
We recently started using lego minifigs, though the scaling gets difficult my players were super excited about them.
I do this too!
We did this as broke college students! Legos and a grid drawn on a whiteboard we borrowed from the dorm's front desk.
yeah, our uncle gave us tons of legos when we were kids (i mean TONS) so we just collected all the minifig pieces and could make our own characters (there were a lot of options and every time it felt unique)
Scaling honestly isn't that bad for me, plus I make a lot of homebrew stuff so it's fun to physically build these concepts I have for monsters to see if they'd work for my campaign
Binder clips work great for printed out tokens. You can get them on the cheap and all you have to do is snap the picture in and take off the clip arms. Works better than most actual stands for paper and cardboard.
A friend introduced me to colored glass beads. These are really valuable at low levels for making swarms of goblins or kobolds.
Long ago, the big bad of the campaign (who the DM used as the big bad in all his campaigns) was represented by a Hershey's Kiss. I took a Post-It note, cut it to the right size & wrote "Hi, I'm Edward" on it. We were the first group to not only foil Edward's plans, but also end his existence. I cut up the kiss & we all had a piece. I still have that Post-It.
Also Rich Burlew (of Order of the Stick) has amazing papercraft minis available on Gumroad. I love them.
I backed that kickstarter!
Hahaha "foiled"
@@debbrady7457 I did too! He's kept doing the "Monster for Every Season" since then.
For oneshots, i like to use nail polish to paint the tops of corks to be the players' favorite colors, or a thematic color for the player. They're pretty cheap at craft stores, and can be easily replaced if people want to keep them, or repainted and reused for future games/other players.
Bonus points to use different sized ones for small/tiny and large creatures, if you get a variety pack
A friend of mine printed FF I sprites. Glued then to tooth picks, and staked some felt pads into cubes to make bases. Painted the sides green and the result was cool af.
Fibal fanysdy is the bestorzzzz
I use 1 inch washers with construction paper glued on top. Each player gets a different color, arrows on them for directional facing if it's important. I use numbered white ones for enemies. They also fit nicely in an Rx amber pill bottle.
My first campaign our dm collected bottle caps, everyone had one they were. After that I used and still use a tiny snorlax
I usually use dice. When a PC falls unconscious, we turn the die to the lowest face.
Abit weird but we didn't have enough figures for my campaign, so we used afew of the snow white figures from a super old video tape of snow white and then used some tiny dinosaurs figures for enemies ♡
Literally as long as you can remember what is what , it doesn't matter what you use ♡
Have some fun with it 😉
Legos work great. You can even build walls and stuff.
I just draw my character, cut it out, and glue it to some cardboard. It also makes it double sided incase your character has two distinct looks.
Dice are great; I've always used them for my baddies when I'm running a physical game. As well as IDing with the numbers, the sides are also a good way to show the relative danger; d12 boss, with a couple of d8 henchmen, and a handful of d6 lackeys
We usually end up using a mix of minis and random objects mainly because I take so long painting the minis 🙈 I'd love to paint one for you one day though ☺️
Our DM uses neutral looking (they usually represent classes/subclasses or just have pictograms or numbers for NPCs) tokens in his offline games. I like this one, and will probably stick to it if will eventually start running the game myself.
If you get yourself in some trouble and find yourself in the clink, it isn't uncommon to see people using chess pieces or molded wet toilet paper to play!
Bonus: you'll be playing pathfinder. Dnd has been banned from most institutions since the satanic panic!
@@matthewblaszak6096 what? The lead for my local YMCA plays dnd
@@solsystem1342 the Y ain't the pokey.
My friend used starburst candies and we ate them when they died. I killed the lemon ones on purpose because I liked those the most, even if it was more beneficial to slay a different foe
Ah, the Ranger's most favorite enemy: Lemon Starburst
My group used the candy thing when we played in person, and it's honestly awesome. Low cost for the DM, and SUPER satisfying for the players.
A lot of craft stores have little wooden pieces that kinda look like that Catan robber (cylinder with a sphere on top). It's easy to paint them like your character for simplicity + flare!
My favorite: Push pins on cork or foam board. They can be numbered, crowded together (if need be) and even climb (if helped)
I've been doing something very similar. Since minis can be fragile, I use other items such as a sealing wax stamp, small game chips, etc.
Love the idea of candy. Not only are there plenty of different gummies, but there are also dozens of molds that can be used to make any monster or character you can think of.
Dice, lego minifigs and glass bead cabuchon shaped counters and warhammer fantasy models was the standard counters for RPGs throughout my teen years.
With extra pencils or lego base plates and bricks outlined walls or other terrain features.
I stick those little round one inch stickers to pennies and sharpie numbers onto them. Yellow stickers for monsters, green for players, blue for allies or other NPCs. All of them get flipped to red when they’re bloodied.
Not as pretty as minis, but it’s cheap and effective. I like to pull up pictures of the monsters we’re fighting on my tablet and have that to one side slideshowing the different art, so people know what it is they’re fighting even if there aren’t little plastic/metal figurines.
I prefer not letting the players see the monsters. Imo it is so much less interesting to fight "a skeleton" that you can see, sitting there,than it is to imagine what it would actually be like. Also, I run a lot of *weird* creatures that no one has ever drawn so it help to have miniatures to manage positioning but leave the design slightly up to player interpretation.
For instance, the endling is an ancient prior (the last of its kind as far as it knows) which is based off the birrin project's birrin but in skeletal form. I'm not good enough to draw that and it just doesn't exist
Cw: body horror
But the imagery of a skeleton with tattered bits of skin still clinging to it (as in, you can see through it in places) still struggling to breathe. Is, well it's a lot. The fact that it has God-like power and a better understanding of the setting than anyone else willing to share memories with the party just makes it extra fun to play imo.
I used crystals for a pirate one-shot, and it was so aesthetically pleasing
Magic cards! Bulk commons are pennies a dozen and have great art for anything you can imagine. I cut or punch them out and glue them to small (1.5") wooden discs. They fit perfectly in poker chip cases, for easy storage and travel.
My minis for 4e was Starburst with the rule you eat what you kill.
I don't have any official stuff, so I printed out maps and used a cardboard box and thumbtacks as pieces. You stick the thumbtack into the square you want the character or enemy to be in, and it goes through the box and stays there! Bonus points for keeping the map in place!
We've used various things. Currently we use some painted wooden baubles. But I LOVE the candy idea! Who doesn't want more excuses to eat candy? 😂
I played in a game once where we had washers with a symbol for our character printed and stuck to each side one side had a green outline and one had red with a line through. NPCs were just numbered versions.
I also have used those little glass beads you fill up vases with. You can write on them with a marker to track what they represent and it wipes right off after!
The candy idea is so good. Imagine a giant being placed on the board and it's just a giant easter bunny or one of those giant gummy worms making it's way around the map.
In one of my first campaigns I played a wizard tortle named Argon. He was an old codger, so I used a butterscotch candy.
Another guy at our table 3d printed a tortle as a gift. It was my first mini. I painted him and made a pointy wizard hat out of modeling clay.
Back in the Before Time when we were playing in person we always kept a bag of Haribo gummy frogs around for the explicit purpose of bullywug attacks.
We use minis, coins, dice, Sorry pawns, and clay home-made things.
Haven't tried the printed idea. Nice.
Guitar picks work great. Lots of different colors and shapes and you can even use them to show what direction someone is facing
I use furniture protector pads. They have a sticky side, I slap a small piece of paper on it then draw the mini. Easy and custom 2d minis for the table :)
You can also draw them on paper, cut it out, and fold over the bottom edges to make it stand
I bought a sheet of 1" white glazed bathroom tiles. Write on them with permanent or dry erase pens. They're heavy so they stay in place when cardboard wouldn't.
I used the old Monster in My Pocket toys. That's not a metaphor. They were these little rubber monsters... they had some famous ones like vampires and werewolves, and really obscure ones like Spring-Heel Jack and Tengu.
One of my groups exclusively use candy for the NPC's. Typically Starbursts, because you can write on the wrapper to differentiate them.
Also, when you learn which flavor people like best, you can manipulate them on a meta level into going after certain enemy first because you know they want to eat the pink one!
That's Evil!!
Or awesome, you choose.
I’ve personally used a bunch of little clay things I’ve made in the past or just little figures I have in my room. They’re great!
The coin hoarder part spoke directly to my soul and now I know EXACTLY what to use for my first campaign
I'm planning on making a campaign based on candy monsters, so I'm definitely using actual candy for minis lol
I can't believe how many jokes and helpful advice you packed into 55 seconds.
I love the candy idea! I saw what I think was a tumbler post re-posted on pintrest about someone doing that, and when they fought a dragon they used a GIANT donut to represent it
My group uses a big sandbox table. Definitely wouldnt want to eat the candy...
Me and my son are really new to TTRPG. We use little wood bricks as walls and interior for our "battle maps" and little wooden figurines in different colors for our characters and enemies. We place all on a self printed hexfield mat
What do you do, Monopoly tophat?
Monopoly tophat: Exploit the working class
For my introductory module, I bought a bag of wooden cubes from the dollar store and taped the tiny printed out icons onto each cube. For the larger boss, I taped a group of cube together to give some idea of scale compared to the players
I’ve also used different random decorations as objects in our game! Like a decorative gem tree
My family has a lot of legos from both my dad playing with them as a kid and me and my siblings playing with them. I use them for enemies, players, or other object, such as barrels or beds. It’s really easy to build new things with them too.
I was honestly waiting for this to become a dungeon craft ad.
Yep! I used coins to start, and numbered them to easily keep track of which enemy was which. We also used the 4-sided die, since they were seldom used. Now my girlfriend makes miniatures from air-drying clay, super easy.
Chess pieces could also work. Actually that could be a cool idea, a dungeon based on a 3D chess board.
Dice is the absolute best fallback. Different colors, sizes, and "denominations" already exist, and being at a table with at least four people, there's bound to be a few spare dice lying around
I run D&D for an afterschool program, I had to come up with something to represent an aboleth and ended up drawing an aboleth face on a sea shell, then gave it to the kid who got the final hit. I enjoyed that one a lot
I knew my origami skills would come in handy some day!
> you've already got a billion [dice]
Excuse me, I did not come here to be violently attacked like this
I've used LEGO minifigs for my D&D minis for over 20 years. You can swap out their weapons and give them different poses. They're perfect!
My DM uses those little flattened glass bead things! They're in a myriad of different colors & we can write numbers on them with dry erase.
My DM used old pop tabs that she had painted with nail polish! She was also able to scratch some small numbers on them so she could keep better track of everything!
It's been over 2 decades since the last time I fought a dragon who strangely looked like a can of Dr. Pepper.
Good to see that we've come full circle here XD
One of my old GM's used to do fun sized candy and the like.. Kisses were an easy go to as they fit perfectly into the square.
The basement we occasionally play in, at your local game store, has all sorts of knick-knacks lying around. When, one day, our bestower of Lego figures couldn't attend the session, we improvised. Hot wheel goblins, action man dragon, My Little Zombies: it made the board look a bit more ..chaotic, and we loved it
I’ve been using white board markers on paper maps covered in plastic. It’s not the best but it works. Will definitely try out some of these though
When I heard wingspan I was like: "Yoooo wingspan is awesome!"
A convention GM I played with used one of the Massive bulk bags of Starburst. I'm not a big candy guy, but eating your enemies was unusually satisfying, and they're individually wrapped.
When you make the monsters candy but now your party turned murder hobo
I knew a guy who used off-brand Lego figures as minis they were like a dollar each and very easy to customize.
My party uses lego and funko key chains, it's funny when we're fighting some cultist and hamilton just pops in
Dice could be an interesting way to show health! If you have unique dice for every character you show, then you can turn it for the amount of health there is left.
Yay, board game shout-out! 😄 Those are all cool ideas
We've got a couple pediatricians in our group and we've definitely used the little plastic tips for the otoscope (pre-use of course, but you never know when an ochre jelly is going to show up :)
For our very first session, my mates and I were set up in my basement. No miniatures, but we already had a map and hadn’t considered we didn’t have the pieces. Instead of actual miniatures, we used the tokens from Disney Monopoly. I was Remy from Ratatouille.
Ooh, for printed minis, you can use binder clips for the base! Get the colorful miniature ones, remove the arms, and boom!
Othello pieces use the white side to keep track of health using a dry erase marker and have them black side up when on the map
While our gaming group doesn't use minis in our RPGs, we do play mini games. In a few games we've used all kinds of things as minis. Played FRAG with alt team rules. One team was Mega Bloks figs, one was rubber animals from a coin machine, and the other were some 40k knock off minis from Russia. We needed a big bad monster to fight in one of our games, so we used a rubber duck with octopus legs (the behemoth quakapus) that constantly spit out smaller rubber ducks each round that began to devour the other warbands. Funny, weird, and yet somehow terrifying.
My party used this tub of colorful beads we had laying around as our minis for a long time, I got a 3d printer recently and I'm looking forward to printing my own! (And maybe even making my own custom ones in TitanCraft or possibly Blender.)
you can often get things printed in libraries if you don't have your own printer!
My group used dice diagrams all the time. We still do if we don't have minis for an encounter. Which is rare now as I run 2 3dprinters and my dm's wife really enjoys painting. DM gives me a list every month of stuff he needs printed. He donates resin, I donate my print time, his wife paints them. We can go from encounter plan to awesome minis in about a week.
Soda/beer bottle caps are a must have at any roleplaying table
these ideas -especially candy- sound fantastic, now I'm a little sad we mostly play online xD
Chocolate kisses was how my 3.5 dm showed monsters. We used metal minis for us though.
Ginny reminding us all that while she makes good sensible DnD content, she is still a friend of the Traveller.
I've recently been on and off making mini paper standees by drawing on cut up index cards. Now if only I had an irl dnd group I could use them with 🤔
Binder clips also make great stands for print/2D minis. I DIY'd some for my warlocks familiars with shrink plastic and binder clips.