Painted Vs. Unpainted Miniatures
Back in March, Stuart Robertson of Robertson Games wrote a post about painted vs. unpainted miniatures, which got a lot of great comments.
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In the post, he asked who out there uses entirely painted figures with no stand-ins.
I wish.
My ultimate goal would be to be able to run a weekly game in which I had full 3d terrain for any situation, as well as hand-painted miniatures for anything the players find themselves encountering.
A pipe-dream, right? I’m not so sure.
I’ve got a ton of World Works Games and Fat Dragon Games pieces printed out, but not assembled. As I get them assembled, I’ll have a ton of dungeons, caverns, tavern and town pieces assembled. Will it cover every situation? No, but it’ll come close.
I’d love to begin collecting Dwarven Forge terrain, but it’s so damn expensive, I’m not even sure I can afford to start collecting, much less build a collection.
Now on to miniatures.
If you’re running a game of 4e D&D, you can expect to run between 1-2 encounters in a four-hour session, with some RP in between.
After getting the minis for everyone’s heroes, you simply have to, in the week before, plan the encounters, then head down to the FLGS to pick up the minis for the monsters, or order from Reaper. If you have the whole game group contributing about 5 bucks a week, you could easily put together two encounter’s worth of monsters each week. Then spend a day giving simple paint jobs to your monsters, and you’re good to go.
You don’t really need to put fantastic paint jobs on these monsters, unless it’s a Boss, since they’re expendable. And eventually, you’ll have minis that can be used in later encounters, so they don’t need to be bought that week.
Here’s an example:
Say you play on Saturday nights. Here’s how the week would go:
Sunday: Plan out a few encounters using DDI.
Monday: Pick up the minis at the FLGS and begin painting. Any they don’t have, order online. You should get these by Friday.
Tuesday-Thursday: Continue to paint, assembling cardstock terrain as needed.
Friday: Recieve the minis you ordered and paint those up.
Saturday: Play!
I know it’s not so easy as all that, but you could get ahead of the curve by getting figures for the first six encounters or so before the campaign begins, then keep one step ahead of the game by continuing to plan ahead.
Just an idea. Let me know if you have ever tried anything like this, or might try!
While the Dwarven Forge stuff is pretty… so very very pretty… I prefer my Hirst Arts terrain.
.-= David´s last blog ..Snowden’s Wand =-.
Tough one. Though I loved to paint miniatures at one point in my life, it was both cost-prohibitive and limited my creativity to stick to creatures I had minis. I’ve used paper stand-ins (these days, full color is rather easy to do on cardstock), but they don’t quite have the same charm.
.-= Siskoid´s last blog ..RPG Campaign(s): Eternal Champions =-.
And don’t forget mention if you have to lug that stuff around. It’s OK if you’re DMing at your own place but sometimes it just gets to be a pain to carry all your books, a laptop (possibly), mini’s and 3-d terrain. I like the look of prepainted’s and 3-d terrain but like so many time and money are just in short supply.
As an avid mini painter myself, I can identify with the idea you layout but I can also promise you that it would lead to burn out on both painting and playing very, very quickly. I tried it with just a single game day’s worth of minis and it was a lot of work for very little return. Nowadays I stick to painting PCs and named or memorable NPCs, and use paper tokens for most of the rest, supplementing with what I do have painted when appropriate (like those 30 goblins I have painted).
.-= MJ Harnish´s last blog ..Review: Curse of the Crimson Throne Player’s Guide =-.
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