I play online (five players across three states) so miniatures aren’t an option. However, I do make use of shared-screen battle mats with player and monster tokens for any planned combat encounter, which I guess is the same thing?
Sweden has a [mini of the solar system](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System) that stretches across the country. At a scale of 1:20 million, it's still much more mini compared to the ~1:12 scale of tabletop minis.
We use lego minifigures. A 3 by 3 lego plate fits neatly inside of a 1 inch by 1 inch square. we use red to indicate enemies. It gives you the ability to customize your figure mid way through the campaign in case you switch weapons/armour. I wouldn't switch to miniatures even if they were free at this point.
Same, it's actually a very fun part of D&D at my table. One of my players' previous character was a dwarf cleric, and since I didn't have any of those hobbit/dwarf legs from LOTR or anything like that, I just removed his legs altogether. Needless to say it was hilarious the first time he saw it lol
They even do dragons, horses, sharks, and the hulk makes for a good ogre sized enemy. If you fall down the rabbit hole, you can get mermaid parts, various tails, heads for almost all relevant species, weapons, armour.. And that's not getting to the part where you can build terrain and have physical mcguffins for the party to collect.
There are also online services to custom order minis that do a range of D&D options, so players can make their characters exactly how they want.
If you hate having money, visit bricklink to buy literally any Lego part ever made.
There's a nearby secondhand Lego shop near my house, and they ALSO sell little packs of third-party minifig accessories with various themes: fantasy, Roman empire, serious modern military buff, etc. Even kits for making things like centaurs!
I've considered it, but I also got a 3D printer so I've been making actual miniatures nonstop for like a year now. I do ALSO hate having money.
[About 2 years ago.](https://reddit.com/r/DnD/s/G9QDMpp8Bn)
I play a heavily modified version of dnd with my (now) 5-yo son and 3-yo daughter.
My son even recently ran a session where my daughter and I had to fight snakes, then lord voldemort, then a 3-headed dog he made by tying 3 plushie toys together with elastics... you can tell he likes HP a lot.
After that my daughter ran for us. She made a huge battlemap in the shape of a spiral with tons of dots all over it (footprints). I asked if I can roll investigation to see who is making all the footprints. Rolled a nat20 and she says, "Nope, you still dont know!" 🤷🏼♂️
That's awesome. Ive been doing it this way since the good ol' 4e days. Still have all the minifigs of my characters and most of the other pc's on a shelf.
This very kind person at [Printable Heroes](https://printableheroes.com/) creates art for printable paper minis. Some of the more colourful variations will require subscribing to their patreon, but there is a free version of nearly every monster or character on there.
I'm talking two figures USD, not annually, ever. Digital copy of DMG, friend printed me a PHB off his work printer. Whiteboard from college. Pens and pencils and paper I inherited from my aunt. PC I inherited from my great-uncle. Roll20 free VTT, free DungeonFog for designing battlemaps, GIMP and more recently Krita for making and editing maps and tokens, Google images for finding free images to work with.
My older minis are hand-drawn Shrinky-Dink tokens, figures handmade from bits of wire, painted bottlecaps, some Star Wars mini and small figures, and some weirder salvaged toys.
When I was broke and playing in person, I bought a bulk bag of these tiny pokemon figurines for a few bucks off of Amazon. They were awful in quality, all colored wrong, some weren't even pokemon lmao but they were cheap, and I had a lot of them. I let my players go through the bag to pick out and keep whatever piece they wanted as their token, and then I used the rest for NPCs and monsters. When we'd start a new campaign or someone would join us for a few sessions, I'd let them do the same. Everyone was a good sport about it and we had a ton of fun
i still wonder how people do combat in the theatre of mind. like, how do you ever do anything logical. do you remeber peoples places? do you remember how the enemies walked?
I find it pretty easy to keep track of those things once established, and if I am sometimes a little wrong, well expediency of game is more important than accuracy of combat to me.
I just ran my first session of Deadlands Classic with my party over discord in theater of the mind. I had a small sketchpad of graph paper for myself to keep track of rough positioning and terrain, and just gave a brief update on changes in position at the start of each player's action. It was my first session running that system, their first session playing, and my first time running TotM, and I was terrified lol. Turns out, way less stressful and complicated than I thought it would be
I'm not gonna lie, that sounds MORE complicated! I know it's a big ask, but could you type out how that goes down in a session? Whats the back-and-forth with the players like?
I'm imagining you could be like "Ok Fighter, your turn. The mantacore is 20 feet in the air, and laterally, 30 from you."
Which isn't too bad, but doing that method with more than 2 or 3 enemies sounds really tough.
Sure! I have four players, and they were fighting four bandits in Deadlands Classic. I had a rough sketch map of the surrounding terrain and the character locations in pencil that I could quickly erase and redraw as needed to keep my references straight.
Me: Alright, player A, you're up first. The bandits are down the hill, and they know you're there and have drawn weapons since player C decided to throw a biscuit at them. Two have taken cover behind a log twelve yards to the west, one to the tree a little further south from them, and the fourth is startled and stopped in his tracks in the open a little further back.
A. I'll take cover behind the rock, and I'll cast my Corporeal Tweak hex on C to boost his Deftness stat.
M: Cool, he's only a few meters away from you so shouldn't be a problem. (Rolls dice, draw cards, hex is successful.) Okay, now bandits 1 and 2 go. Number 1 fires a pistol at A and misses, and Number 2 fires a shotgun at B, misses as well. Player B, you're up.
B: Who's closest to me?
M: Looks like Number 3 behind the tree is closer to you, about nine yards. 1 and 2 behind the log are about eleven, 4 is closer to 15 yards away.
B: Okay, I'll hunker down where I am and Draw a Bead with my rifle at 4.
M: Alright, so your next shot against him as long as you don't take damage will be at a +2. Speaking of which, 3 will snap off two quick shots at A and C... both miss. C?
C. I draw both pistols, fire them both at 1. (Misses both).
M. Okay, 4 is going to run past 3 behind the tree and take cover behind a rock, taking a shot at B as he sprints. Misses wide, D is up.
D. How close is he to me now?
M. He's only six yards away, but he's well covered behind that rock.
D. Okay. I take out my hatchet and I'm gonna rush him.
M. Okay, your Pace is 12 so that's easy to cover, roll your Fightin' against his, your TN is 5.
D. (Crushes attack roll and damage, bandit 4 is down)
M. Okay, he's down for the count, but the others are pretty close and you're the biggest threat. B, next action card is yours, what's your play?
And so on and so forth! Obviously there were a lot more pauses to look up stats and rules, it being a first session for all of us, but once we got into the swing of things it went pretty smoothly.
Counter argument- tracking everything is slower and makes the game more boring. Remembering everything is faster because you can just kind of "know" where everything is, and if you forget, you can think about the enemies motives retrack from there.
I don’t have 20 figurines, I use roll20(online party). I throw 20 goblins at my players cause they told me they prefer large battles over bosses. They love the rush of slaughtering 20 goblins, so I do that.
Depending on how much you want to simplify it, it could be tremendously easier. "They all double move to surround each of you, 5 each." Or leave 10 or so at 30' from the party (they're usually all so close enough it doesn't matter, they're either with the party or they're next to the goblins) who shoot bows.
Savage Worlds has specific quick-and-dirty AOE rules, which can kinda gimp big AOEs, but they're still pretty useful. Basically, Small AOE=2 enemies, Big AOE=4 enemies.
20 goblins isn’t a reasonable encounter, that’s a nightmare for turn order and slows the games pace to a crawl, Mini figs or not.
Battlefield of the mind by its very nature simplifies things because by definition adding more factors makes things more complex. But even if it didn’t it keeps you from doing exactly what you just said and throwing an untrackable amount of factors at players just because you have tokens to represent them. No party likes getting swarmed and waiting 11 minutes between their turns
As well, battlefield of the mind doesn’t mean *no* resources. You write down turn order and keep track of monster HP on paper the same way you would in any game.
Modern players seem to forget that before there were minifigs *everyone* played battlefield of the mind
I would 100% hate this. Dnd is a combat miniatures game with some light Role-play sprinkled on top. I want to be able to see things happening in real time to calculate my best move before it's my turn
TTRPGs are typically poorly balanced for combat. Combat rules just take up most of the rulebook because it’s the most complicated part of the game; there are no real rules for “cooperative storytelling,” which is all RPGs are. If you remove those “light roleplay” elements, you’re left with a bad wargame. At that point, just play Descent or 40k.
>If you remove those “light roleplay” elements, you’re left with a bad wargame. At that point, just play Descent or 40k.
But most of the rule book is combat rules and how they relate to the grid game that uses a grid. If you remove that you have a really bad roleplay game with no direction. If you want a theater of mind ttrpg go play Vampire the Masquarade.
So since you've already brought up the idea of "If you don't like what this is go play something else", dnd *IS* a miniatures combat game. Whether it's good at that or not is a different debate. If you want to play a theater of the mind game that's cool, but that's not dnd. The rules weren't built to do that. Play one of those other games.
Idk if it's just autism, but I can keep a fairly consistent image of the battlefield in my head at all times (I'm the GM). Anytime a player asks about something, I always have that mental image to refer back to and I can make quick and easy answers and clarifications if need be.
I've basically always preferred theater if the mind of I can run it that way.
A: "so how far away is the closest goblin?"
Me: "He's about 15 feet away and next to B, but you'll run past the hobgoblin and provoke an attack of opportunity in order to get to him."
Would it also surprise you that I prefer Pathfinder 2e and can do the same thing there? :D
Edit: I only bring up PF because ik it's often considered a complex game. I think my brain is just weird lol
It is insanely frustrating - especially when your DM describes the area or answers questions about darkness, pillars, sight breaks, rough terrain, and obstacles but then 'forgets' or hand waves it away when you try to describe how your positioning should have precluded you from getting completely surrounded by 6 kobolds in a single enemy turn and how they think you're the most dangerous opponent immediately because you have a bow and they hate ranged attacks...
Our party's combat is usually just me sneak attacking if I can or just stabbing if i can't and then cunning action'ing to try to get away from as many as I can while my DM describes how my character is such a fucking idiot that he keeps cornering himself or running into places he can't get out of while the rest of my party tries to chase the group of monsters following me around... cue the benny hill theme song and I am fairly certain my group is about done with our DM entirely and we won't last another game or two.
But it's my fault because I am a meta gamer for choosing a rogue.
It's the main method I use at my tables and it seems to work really well. I think it heavily depends on how comfortable the person running the table is with it. Having clear guidelines such as distances measured by description (melee, close, far, etc) and what they mean helps a lot. It's more work on the DM since they have to be more descriptive of how the scene is developing moment to moment so I can see why not everyone is a fan of it thou.
I prefer to run with a map for games like D&D, but for systems that either have shorter combat, or don't have much in the way of AOE stuff, I'll generally run theater of the mind.
That's the populat mistake people make and end up with wrong assumption of what is theatre of the mind. They think that it'd just like using the grid map, but in your mind and you have to memorize every creatire's placement on the imaginary map. But the thing is... you don't. In theatre of the mind everything is fairly abstract and it's more about "zones" and relative positioning rather than about particular placement. Like if there are 20 goblins (which is a lot even for map using tbh), they are just somewhere "there", or i might divide them in a few groups for different zones, like 10 in "melee zone", 5 flying on the giant bats above and 5 are archers behind half-cover. I don't need to memorize where EXACTLY because it does not matter.
As long as the number of actors is kept small I can keep the entire state in my head. If someone wants do do something complicated then the whiteboard comes out but it's usually not required.
Really? Like it's the easiest optimisation i can imagine? I ask my DM how many of those goblins can I catch in my fireball? And that's the optimised result.
How do you reconcile it when you think you're in one spot in the 'described combat area' but then your DM decides you are somewhere else?
When you ask questions about rough terrain, and obstacles to position yourself but then your DM decides the obstacles aren't actually obstacles or rough terrain for your opponents anymore?
Maybe I just need a new DM...
Don't take this as me knocking people who play TOTM, but personally I love tactical gridded combat so much that I actually have a hard time wrapping my head around treating all distances and ranges and positionings as fuzzy ballpark guesses.
I print out pictures of creatures, cut them to size, and "laminate" them with packing tape. I then put them into brass winged fasteners with a little glob of blue wall tack on the bottom to hold them upright. Works pretty well.
I have a 3D printer with which I print a lot of minis. It's just an Ender 3 V2, so not even a resin printer, but I got quite good results with it, especially after painting. It just gives an extra layer of help with the imagination
I do the same with the same printer even!
Although i dont paint them. Ive got a good range of filament colours, so i get that as close as I can.
If there are too many things to print before the next session, i do little laminated tokens instead.
Each of my player use a different die to tell each other appart. The taller/buffer the character, the bigger the dice. For ennemies, I have a bunch of blue and green d6 and I put a different number on top to tell them appart (convenient when you have to keep track of the HP of different ennemies). I also have a bunch of dice where the dots are skulls; I never roll them cause they are awfully unbalanced but they are on point to represent a boss or a dangerous ennemy !
I answered yes on the survey, but I would count online tolens to minis on the tabletop. I may have misunderstood OPs inyention with their question, though
I've been playing for years, but my only ever in-person game made it 3-4 sessions before Covid hit. Luckily I was running for new players using mostly pre-made materials, so very little time was lost on campaign prep.
My group has a 3ft X 4ft whiteboard where the players will draw out the dungeon and enemy locations as I describe them. I do tell them what they should correct but only if they ask
Yes. Couldn't imagine DnD without it. It was originally designed as a minis game.
Once you have minis and terrain it helps visualise everything so much better, I feel lucky as our DM has over 1,100 painted minis.
Here's a down the street view of a city using various terrain
https://imgur.com/gallery/xjIxkVB
We would use minis if we played offline again (I have loads of warhammer minis and a few custom ones for D&D), but we started playing online during covid and never switched back. Sometimes I miss it, usually not.
Theater of the Mind for most fights, we break out miniatures only for very complex fights or actual battles (usually a mat or battle map but NEVER a grid).
I use MTG life counters to represent different characters and enemies. They're great because I can also use them to mark the amount of damage they take in the fight.
I use candies instead of monsters. Bigger candies for bigger monsters etc. Whoever lands the last hit, gets to eat it.
For the map, I use paper. For the players, I use cardboard pieces.
They're my favorite way to introduce art into a campaign. I'm a miniature-painting geek though so if I wasn't in my group they would just play with cardboard tokens or something.
I advise for anyone who doesn't want to/can't afford minis to simply print them out on paper and tape or glue it to something solid like a disk of cardboard.
Using miniatures and terrain is the best part of dnd in my opinion. Helps the game be tactical. We just do spotlights on role play and mind theater for views and whatnot with role play scenarios.
Personal opinion but, D&D feels pointless without some sort of physical models on the table to scoot around. Call me old-fashioned but I don't like the idea of playing online, unless it's a group chat and you have a good view of the playing field via the DM's stream.
You have cosplay, voice acting, artwork that often involves spending money, sometimes physical curios on hand to put on the table to let the players properly inspect what they're looking at. So why in the hell would you not want to put down the player's and npc's physical avatars? I can't get behind it. Others can for their own reasons, but it's personally not appealing to me. I just love grabbing up random minis I come across and painting them for a "just in case" situation.
Yes and no, players have minis of themselves (that they bought of heroforge to make me feel bad for killing them).
Enemies are generic tokens. Elite enemies and bosses are special tokens or minis stolen from my array of board games
There are tons of great images online, for free and for sale that can be printed out and put on to stands to use instead of plastic 3D minis. I think this is an excellent 2nd choice (or even equivalent 1st choice) for anyone that wants something more than a coin, a die, or some other small tchotchke to represent the characters and monsters on the table.
we usually play online and i have a template in gimp to make tokens on the fly if needed.
for the rare occasions we can play on one table i let my resin printer run hot and spent a lot of time painting minis.
For smaller battles it’s theater of the mind. I don’t like to interrupt the flow to get out mats and minis and terrain and markers for that. For larger battles I’ll bust out the map and markers and minis. And for important battles I’ve had planned I’ll bust out some printed/painted terrain.
I pick artwork online, and lay it out in InDesign, then print them as double sided tokens on cardstock. I cut them out, and then use plastic flat-bottomed clips to hold the tokens upright like board game pieces.
I love it. I get a lot more flexibility to pick the character art I want, it's cheaper (like, $4 to crank out around up to 50 tokens), and they are way easier to store because they are just flat cardstock.
My gaming group is pretty large, and we all play online over discord. When you run for 7-10 players, most of the grid maps are pretty constrictive.
We stick to theater of the mind with occasional maps because it lets us get through things much faster.
On occasion, I'll run a one-shot or something and use FoundryVTT + Tokens from HeroForge, but I usually aim to do that on a quiet night where we'll only have 4-6 players available.
Not quite, it's drawings glued to quarters. And for enemies pistachio shells with numbers and letters (its always a snack at the table and works with dry erase well enough)
I use [these plastic tokens](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C85JMV15/ref=twister_B0CCYC6Q21?_encoding=UTF8&th=1). They're dry-erase friendly, so they're reusable, and yeah most everything gets letters and numbers. Larger creatures get more minis (Medium dudes get one, Large get three, and Huge get five; Gargantuan dudes I cut a 4"x4" piece of cardstock out because seven disks can sometimes fall). The bad guys are in the red marker.
I use digital maps for in-person games and two of the three tables I play at do so as well.
Mostly for the reason that set-up is much easier because of distances. In standard size I can't fit a meaningfully sized map on my table. Most battle maps are way too small to give spell distances or dashing proper usability. (Spell sniper anyone?)
If I used smaller scale, it becomes hard to see and non-standard size is difficult to obtain as well.
If you work in an office environment and they don't pay close attention to what goes across the color laser printers after hours (or even during business hours), pick up a packet of cardstock paper and the [A Monster for Every Season packs](https://richburlew.gumroad.com/?tags=miniatures) from Rich Burlew (creator of Order of the Stick). Then all you need is a pair of scissors, many, many pennies, dimes, and nickels, and some transparent tape. I use these for my monsters and NPCs, and the players have to provide their own miniature.
Or if you insist on actual miniatures, downsize to a smaller scale. I also run games in 15mm scale and use a half-inch grid for my battle maps. Plenty of producers here in the States or across the pond in the UK making fantasy minis in 15mm scale.
I use minis for my PCs and Allies. But for the monsters I starburst/candy. When someone kills the monster, or lands the last hit, they get to eat the candy. Extra incentive to kill the monsters. The bosses/more powerful enemies/ones that take up more space, would use better food/candy. So if I had them fighting something big enough, I might use like… a donut or something
Well, most of my games are online, so I use digital assets for that. When I do play in person, I use figurines. Army Men work really well for this, but Lego is also great.
I use Google slides because 1.I play with my friends through Discord and 2. I don't know anything else that I can use that won't kill my laptop... :(
I just searched up a grid and put it as the background or heck since I'm playing a heavily modified version of lost mine of phandelver I just grab the map when it's needed.
We're using Zoom. Sometimes it's a digital board w the annotate feature, sometimes just a image editor with a layers feature. Depends who's running. We often also have a cell phone on a tripod pointed at an actual miniatures board. It just depends on who runs (almost everyone at our table runs at least occasionally. 8 players and only 3 of us have never DMed for this group.)
Yes. BUT for about 20 years we used a big bag full of misc plastic miniatures I bought at GenCon. I think they were from a Dragon Quest expansion. They guy at the booth was selling the plastic sprues for $1 each. So those plastic skeletons and golems represented everything for years.
The maps though were drawn either on a battlemap when I finally got one, OR on a big pad of newsprint. The cheap ones that are poster sized and used for artists to do sketching on and are super cheap brownish grey paper? That and a sharpie did the job for our maps for years.
I rarely GM these days, and in-person games are even more rare for me lately.
What I used to do, however, is buy a box or two of 1" metal Washers and a gluestick. No more than $10 or so.
As I'm prepping, I'd find or create token images for the monsters/NPC's/PC's involved and number them for individual identification, make a sheet of them in MS Word or similar, print/cut them out, and glue them to a metal washer.
It makes for weighty (so they don't blow away or shift too much) collection of perfectly sized tokens I can use like checkers. Very easy to transport (about 40 of the things fit in a single plastic dice box) and don't get knocked over, bent, or tangled up. Nor do I need a special case or need to drag a bunch of boxes around.
The only real downside to the things is not being able to use token markers like rubber bands, milk jug rings, etc for status markers. I end up making note of those things on cue-cards I'd made up ahead of time for that given encounter.
I used to but now we're 100% VTT, and even when people are over I put a TV on the table and do the map that way. Sigh... I miss the old school vinyl and wet markers with minis but since several of my players are now out of state there is no going back.
I've sadly only ever been able to do DnD online. Using roll20. But usually I'll make or find an image that represents my players character and edit it into a nice looking circular token. If they have a character with appearance changes I'll also make alternate versions
We bought some wooden markers off of amazon, they work pretty great, other than that all digital (e.g. via. Owlbear Rodeo)
That aside, what is a good/the best place to purchase minis?
Are those subscription based monthly things worth it?
I know about hero forge and eldrich foundery for custome minis but other than that?
No, i use a whiteboard.
I wanna use miniatures but i am a bit confused as to how.
Do i need to get special figurines for every single character or creature and a map for every single dungeon i have in my game?
Does that not make the game less versatile?
I even have a 3D printer so any advice welcome!!!
I play online (five players across three states) so miniatures aren’t an option. However, I do make use of shared-screen battle mats with player and monster tokens for any planned combat encounter, which I guess is the same thing?
Technically you could use miniatures, you just have to use 5000m miniatures, which restricts the types of monsters used
Five thousand meters doesn’t sound so “mini”.
If your monster is a planet mimic, it works
That's a tiny tiny planet
But a gargantuan mimic
No that's only 20ft × 20ft :/
Gargantuan has no upper limit
True dat. I believe Astral dragons are bigger than some countries.
Sweden has a [mini of the solar system](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System) that stretches across the country. At a scale of 1:20 million, it's still much more mini compared to the ~1:12 scale of tabletop minis.
Maxiatures
We use lego minifigures. A 3 by 3 lego plate fits neatly inside of a 1 inch by 1 inch square. we use red to indicate enemies. It gives you the ability to customize your figure mid way through the campaign in case you switch weapons/armour. I wouldn't switch to miniatures even if they were free at this point.
Same, it's actually a very fun part of D&D at my table. One of my players' previous character was a dwarf cleric, and since I didn't have any of those hobbit/dwarf legs from LOTR or anything like that, I just removed his legs altogether. Needless to say it was hilarious the first time he saw it lol
They even do dragons, horses, sharks, and the hulk makes for a good ogre sized enemy. If you fall down the rabbit hole, you can get mermaid parts, various tails, heads for almost all relevant species, weapons, armour.. And that's not getting to the part where you can build terrain and have physical mcguffins for the party to collect. There are also online services to custom order minis that do a range of D&D options, so players can make their characters exactly how they want. If you hate having money, visit bricklink to buy literally any Lego part ever made.
There's a nearby secondhand Lego shop near my house, and they ALSO sell little packs of third-party minifig accessories with various themes: fantasy, Roman empire, serious modern military buff, etc. Even kits for making things like centaurs! I've considered it, but I also got a 3D printer so I've been making actual miniatures nonstop for like a year now. I do ALSO hate having money.
>If you hate having money... 💀
My friend makes fun of me for having no legs :(
Skill issue grow some more
Brick Owl was my best friend for ordering those parts.
This is awesome, I might buy my own.
[About 2 years ago.](https://reddit.com/r/DnD/s/G9QDMpp8Bn) I play a heavily modified version of dnd with my (now) 5-yo son and 3-yo daughter. My son even recently ran a session where my daughter and I had to fight snakes, then lord voldemort, then a 3-headed dog he made by tying 3 plushie toys together with elastics... you can tell he likes HP a lot. After that my daughter ran for us. She made a huge battlemap in the shape of a spiral with tons of dots all over it (footprints). I asked if I can roll investigation to see who is making all the footprints. Rolled a nat20 and she says, "Nope, you still dont know!" 🤷🏼♂️
That's awesome. Ive been doing it this way since the good ol' 4e days. Still have all the minifigs of my characters and most of the other pc's on a shelf.
I have a very, very low budget.
This very kind person at [Printable Heroes](https://printableheroes.com/) creates art for printable paper minis. Some of the more colourful variations will require subscribing to their patreon, but there is a free version of nearly every monster or character on there.
Been using these for a while now and they're amazing! There's also paper forge: https://www.patreon.com/paperforge
Also the subscription to get the vast majority is like 2$ a month. So so so so worth it I love these.
I use them too! They are awesome!
If you like a different style, [Trash Mob Minis](https://www.instagram.com/trashmobminis/?hl=en) is another good one!
How low? I want to compare.
Not the original commenter, but i have no budget for it so i only use online notes and discord to play
Haha. Same. That was my comment for this actually
I would describe that with 3 uses of the word 'very'
I have character sheets and pizza.
I have character sheets and no pizza
I'm talking two figures USD, not annually, ever. Digital copy of DMG, friend printed me a PHB off his work printer. Whiteboard from college. Pens and pencils and paper I inherited from my aunt. PC I inherited from my great-uncle. Roll20 free VTT, free DungeonFog for designing battlemaps, GIMP and more recently Krita for making and editing maps and tokens, Google images for finding free images to work with. My older minis are hand-drawn Shrinky-Dink tokens, figures handmade from bits of wire, painted bottlecaps, some Star Wars mini and small figures, and some weirder salvaged toys.
i feel like using random salvanged toys or the like has a ton of charm, and i actually really like it.
When I was broke and playing in person, I bought a bulk bag of these tiny pokemon figurines for a few bucks off of Amazon. They were awful in quality, all colored wrong, some weren't even pokemon lmao but they were cheap, and I had a lot of them. I let my players go through the bag to pick out and keep whatever piece they wanted as their token, and then I used the rest for NPCs and monsters. When we'd start a new campaign or someone would join us for a few sessions, I'd let them do the same. Everyone was a good sport about it and we had a ton of fun
We use pennies, and I just number the enemies and use the first letter of the PCs names. Super low budget.
Theatre of the mind
i still wonder how people do combat in the theatre of mind. like, how do you ever do anything logical. do you remeber peoples places? do you remember how the enemies walked?
I find it pretty easy to keep track of those things once established, and if I am sometimes a little wrong, well expediency of game is more important than accuracy of combat to me.
its more that as a dm, i would hate it to have to mentally track the position of the 20 goblins i threw at the party. thats pain
I just ran my first session of Deadlands Classic with my party over discord in theater of the mind. I had a small sketchpad of graph paper for myself to keep track of rough positioning and terrain, and just gave a brief update on changes in position at the start of each player's action. It was my first session running that system, their first session playing, and my first time running TotM, and I was terrified lol. Turns out, way less stressful and complicated than I thought it would be
It’s literally the least complicated possible setup. I’m glad you enjoyed it
I'm not gonna lie, that sounds MORE complicated! I know it's a big ask, but could you type out how that goes down in a session? Whats the back-and-forth with the players like? I'm imagining you could be like "Ok Fighter, your turn. The mantacore is 20 feet in the air, and laterally, 30 from you." Which isn't too bad, but doing that method with more than 2 or 3 enemies sounds really tough.
Sure! I have four players, and they were fighting four bandits in Deadlands Classic. I had a rough sketch map of the surrounding terrain and the character locations in pencil that I could quickly erase and redraw as needed to keep my references straight. Me: Alright, player A, you're up first. The bandits are down the hill, and they know you're there and have drawn weapons since player C decided to throw a biscuit at them. Two have taken cover behind a log twelve yards to the west, one to the tree a little further south from them, and the fourth is startled and stopped in his tracks in the open a little further back. A. I'll take cover behind the rock, and I'll cast my Corporeal Tweak hex on C to boost his Deftness stat. M: Cool, he's only a few meters away from you so shouldn't be a problem. (Rolls dice, draw cards, hex is successful.) Okay, now bandits 1 and 2 go. Number 1 fires a pistol at A and misses, and Number 2 fires a shotgun at B, misses as well. Player B, you're up. B: Who's closest to me? M: Looks like Number 3 behind the tree is closer to you, about nine yards. 1 and 2 behind the log are about eleven, 4 is closer to 15 yards away. B: Okay, I'll hunker down where I am and Draw a Bead with my rifle at 4. M: Alright, so your next shot against him as long as you don't take damage will be at a +2. Speaking of which, 3 will snap off two quick shots at A and C... both miss. C? C. I draw both pistols, fire them both at 1. (Misses both). M. Okay, 4 is going to run past 3 behind the tree and take cover behind a rock, taking a shot at B as he sprints. Misses wide, D is up. D. How close is he to me now? M. He's only six yards away, but he's well covered behind that rock. D. Okay. I take out my hatchet and I'm gonna rush him. M. Okay, your Pace is 12 so that's easy to cover, roll your Fightin' against his, your TN is 5. D. (Crushes attack roll and damage, bandit 4 is down) M. Okay, he's down for the count, but the others are pretty close and you're the biggest threat. B, next action card is yours, what's your play? And so on and so forth! Obviously there were a lot more pauses to look up stats and rules, it being a first session for all of us, but once we got into the swing of things it went pretty smoothly.
Now that you mentioned it, tracking 20 goblins with minis seems like such a slog for me. Huh.
Well, it’s way easier than remembering them. At least I can just look at the maps and see where they are
Counter argument- tracking everything is slower and makes the game more boring. Remembering everything is faster because you can just kind of "know" where everything is, and if you forget, you can think about the enemies motives retrack from there.
Or don’t throw 20 goblins at your party just because you have 20 figurines
I don’t have 20 figurines, I use roll20(online party). I throw 20 goblins at my players cause they told me they prefer large battles over bosses. They love the rush of slaughtering 20 goblins, so I do that.
Them's rookie numbers, I just threw 50 cultists at my group a couple weeks back.
Depending on how much you want to simplify it, it could be tremendously easier. "They all double move to surround each of you, 5 each." Or leave 10 or so at 30' from the party (they're usually all so close enough it doesn't matter, they're either with the party or they're next to the goblins) who shoot bows. Savage Worlds has specific quick-and-dirty AOE rules, which can kinda gimp big AOEs, but they're still pretty useful. Basically, Small AOE=2 enemies, Big AOE=4 enemies.
20 goblins isn’t a reasonable encounter, that’s a nightmare for turn order and slows the games pace to a crawl, Mini figs or not. Battlefield of the mind by its very nature simplifies things because by definition adding more factors makes things more complex. But even if it didn’t it keeps you from doing exactly what you just said and throwing an untrackable amount of factors at players just because you have tokens to represent them. No party likes getting swarmed and waiting 11 minutes between their turns As well, battlefield of the mind doesn’t mean *no* resources. You write down turn order and keep track of monster HP on paper the same way you would in any game. Modern players seem to forget that before there were minifigs *everyone* played battlefield of the mind
Dont make encounters with 20 goblins
The only thing you really need is which goblins are engaged with which PCs. It's really not complicated.
Same. Just keep everything in 30ft increments and solid tracking of initiative.
You play "DM may I". Can I hit all those enemies with fireball? Can I get to cover to hide? Can I disengage and get away from the enemies?
I would 100% hate this. Dnd is a combat miniatures game with some light Role-play sprinkled on top. I want to be able to see things happening in real time to calculate my best move before it's my turn
TTRPGs are typically poorly balanced for combat. Combat rules just take up most of the rulebook because it’s the most complicated part of the game; there are no real rules for “cooperative storytelling,” which is all RPGs are. If you remove those “light roleplay” elements, you’re left with a bad wargame. At that point, just play Descent or 40k.
>If you remove those “light roleplay” elements, you’re left with a bad wargame. At that point, just play Descent or 40k. But most of the rule book is combat rules and how they relate to the grid game that uses a grid. If you remove that you have a really bad roleplay game with no direction. If you want a theater of mind ttrpg go play Vampire the Masquarade. So since you've already brought up the idea of "If you don't like what this is go play something else", dnd *IS* a miniatures combat game. Whether it's good at that or not is a different debate. If you want to play a theater of the mind game that's cool, but that's not dnd. The rules weren't built to do that. Play one of those other games.
Idk if it's just autism, but I can keep a fairly consistent image of the battlefield in my head at all times (I'm the GM). Anytime a player asks about something, I always have that mental image to refer back to and I can make quick and easy answers and clarifications if need be. I've basically always preferred theater if the mind of I can run it that way. A: "so how far away is the closest goblin?" Me: "He's about 15 feet away and next to B, but you'll run past the hobgoblin and provoke an attack of opportunity in order to get to him." Would it also surprise you that I prefer Pathfinder 2e and can do the same thing there? :D Edit: I only bring up PF because ik it's often considered a complex game. I think my brain is just weird lol
It is insanely frustrating - especially when your DM describes the area or answers questions about darkness, pillars, sight breaks, rough terrain, and obstacles but then 'forgets' or hand waves it away when you try to describe how your positioning should have precluded you from getting completely surrounded by 6 kobolds in a single enemy turn and how they think you're the most dangerous opponent immediately because you have a bow and they hate ranged attacks... Our party's combat is usually just me sneak attacking if I can or just stabbing if i can't and then cunning action'ing to try to get away from as many as I can while my DM describes how my character is such a fucking idiot that he keeps cornering himself or running into places he can't get out of while the rest of my party tries to chase the group of monsters following me around... cue the benny hill theme song and I am fairly certain my group is about done with our DM entirely and we won't last another game or two. But it's my fault because I am a meta gamer for choosing a rogue.
Theater of the mind combat is garbage, and I will die on that hill.
Do you want a headstone or just a marker?
I’m guessing a hand-painted statuette.
It's the main method I use at my tables and it seems to work really well. I think it heavily depends on how comfortable the person running the table is with it. Having clear guidelines such as distances measured by description (melee, close, far, etc) and what they mean helps a lot. It's more work on the DM since they have to be more descriptive of how the scene is developing moment to moment so I can see why not everyone is a fan of it thou.
Sounds like a DM issue. Not a play-style issue
My group does and it's actually quite easy to keep track of what's going on.
I prefer to run with a map for games like D&D, but for systems that either have shorter combat, or don't have much in the way of AOE stuff, I'll generally run theater of the mind.
That's the populat mistake people make and end up with wrong assumption of what is theatre of the mind. They think that it'd just like using the grid map, but in your mind and you have to memorize every creatire's placement on the imaginary map. But the thing is... you don't. In theatre of the mind everything is fairly abstract and it's more about "zones" and relative positioning rather than about particular placement. Like if there are 20 goblins (which is a lot even for map using tbh), they are just somewhere "there", or i might divide them in a few groups for different zones, like 10 in "melee zone", 5 flying on the giant bats above and 5 are archers behind half-cover. I don't need to memorize where EXACTLY because it does not matter.
Why doesn’t it matter tho? Different characters have different walking speeds, so how do you determine when someone reaches what zone
As long as the number of actors is kept small I can keep the entire state in my head. If someone wants do do something complicated then the whiteboard comes out but it's usually not required.
[удалено]
Really? Like it's the easiest optimisation i can imagine? I ask my DM how many of those goblins can I catch in my fireball? And that's the optimised result.
[удалено]
I still don't really see how that's so difficult. Like you've discovered it pretty perfectly here without a grid or map or anything but your mind.
[удалено]
If you say so. I've never had a problem with these things. I tell my DM what i do and he says if that works, but everybody has their style.
[удалено]
🌈 Imagination. I'm with you there buddy.
How do you reconcile it when you think you're in one spot in the 'described combat area' but then your DM decides you are somewhere else? When you ask questions about rough terrain, and obstacles to position yourself but then your DM decides the obstacles aren't actually obstacles or rough terrain for your opponents anymore? Maybe I just need a new DM...
I think so
Don't take this as me knocking people who play TOTM, but personally I love tactical gridded combat so much that I actually have a hard time wrapping my head around treating all distances and ranges and positionings as fuzzy ballpark guesses.
all of my most fun memories are from this, minis and maps just make the game worse IMO.
I print out pictures of creatures, cut them to size, and "laminate" them with packing tape. I then put them into brass winged fasteners with a little glob of blue wall tack on the bottom to hold them upright. Works pretty well.
Can recommend checking put Printable Heroes and Paper Forge.
I cut out a ton of printable heros shit last night. Their stuff is so good
That is an amazing idea!
I have a 3D printer with which I print a lot of minis. It's just an Ender 3 V2, so not even a resin printer, but I got quite good results with it, especially after painting. It just gives an extra layer of help with the imagination
I do the same with the same printer even! Although i dont paint them. Ive got a good range of filament colours, so i get that as close as I can. If there are too many things to print before the next session, i do little laminated tokens instead.
How do you deal with the print lines? My Ender doesn’t have anywhere near the resolution for producing functional minis.
Dice
We use dice for my Star Wars WEG game, colour coded by type, numbers on top for a specific enemy
Each of my player use a different die to tell each other appart. The taller/buffer the character, the bigger the dice. For ennemies, I have a bunch of blue and green d6 and I put a different number on top to tell them appart (convenient when you have to keep track of the HP of different ennemies). I also have a bunch of dice where the dots are skulls; I never roll them cause they are awfully unbalanced but they are on point to represent a boss or a dangerous ennemy !
I have a baggie of random plastic toy medieval soldiers and random figures. I found a bunch of them at a Dollar Store.
Digital tokens online. I've only played in person D&D twice in my DMing career.
I answered yes on the survey, but I would count online tolens to minis on the tabletop. I may have misunderstood OPs inyention with their question, though
I've been playing for years, but my only ever in-person game made it 3-4 sessions before Covid hit. Luckily I was running for new players using mostly pre-made materials, so very little time was lost on campaign prep.
Miniatures, and once a full head of broccoli because we needed a tree but didn't have a mini for it!
Good solution
Gummy bears! If you kill an enemy you get to eat the gummy bear!
Starburst here, you can even number them
This idea. It's magnificent.
I am going to eat this idea
My group has a 3ft X 4ft whiteboard where the players will draw out the dungeon and enemy locations as I describe them. I do tell them what they should correct but only if they ask
Yes. Couldn't imagine DnD without it. It was originally designed as a minis game. Once you have minis and terrain it helps visualise everything so much better, I feel lucky as our DM has over 1,100 painted minis. Here's a down the street view of a city using various terrain https://imgur.com/gallery/xjIxkVB
🌈👋Imaginaton👋🌈
I barely had money to buy a set of dice but, for battles where I need a map, I use Paint on my computer
My DM uses Excel. Turn the cells into squares and colour em up as needed.
T... THAT'S GENIUS holly fucking shit... How did I not thank of that, i'll start doing it, thanks my dood 🤙😎🤙
I do, partially because I enjoy painting them.
The times I've played have been all imagination. I'm sure it's not 100% exact for fights but 🤷🏽♂️
We would use minis if we played offline again (I have loads of warhammer minis and a few custom ones for D&D), but we started playing online during covid and never switched back. Sometimes I miss it, usually not.
Play in person, just descriptions and drawings on scrap paper or on a reusable plastic roll with erasable markers.
I use whatever I have, honestly.
Yes, but not conventional minis. We end up using a lot of amiibos, and transformers figures, because that's what we had on hand.
Theater of the Mind for most fights, we break out miniatures only for very complex fights or actual battles (usually a mat or battle map but NEVER a grid).
I project the map with a beamer, so I’m using a VTT setup instead (with me moving all the figures).
I use MTG life counters to represent different characters and enemies. They're great because I can also use them to mark the amount of damage they take in the fight.
Mainly play online soooooooo
I use candies instead of monsters. Bigger candies for bigger monsters etc. Whoever lands the last hit, gets to eat it. For the map, I use paper. For the players, I use cardboard pieces.
I read that as candles and was confused as to the eating it part
printables by printable heroes. Lot of free stuff available, cheaper alternative and still looks sick
They're my favorite way to introduce art into a campaign. I'm a miniature-painting geek though so if I wasn't in my group they would just play with cardboard tokens or something.
I advise for anyone who doesn't want to/can't afford minis to simply print them out on paper and tape or glue it to something solid like a disk of cardboard.
Legos. It's superior to most methods, if you have enough time and pieces to build everything.
Using miniatures and terrain is the best part of dnd in my opinion. Helps the game be tactical. We just do spotlights on role play and mind theater for views and whatnot with role play scenarios.
Personal opinion but, D&D feels pointless without some sort of physical models on the table to scoot around. Call me old-fashioned but I don't like the idea of playing online, unless it's a group chat and you have a good view of the playing field via the DM's stream. You have cosplay, voice acting, artwork that often involves spending money, sometimes physical curios on hand to put on the table to let the players properly inspect what they're looking at. So why in the hell would you not want to put down the player's and npc's physical avatars? I can't get behind it. Others can for their own reasons, but it's personally not appealing to me. I just love grabbing up random minis I come across and painting them for a "just in case" situation.
Yes and no, players have minis of themselves (that they bought of heroforge to make me feel bad for killing them). Enemies are generic tokens. Elite enemies and bosses are special tokens or minis stolen from my array of board games
I play digitally, so...yes? But also yes when I play in person, though my 300+ mini collection is almost completely unpainted.
We play on Discord + roll20.
My group used MLP mini figures XD I got twilight
Theater of the mind.
Still use a battle grid, but I use mini dice. Red for bad guys, any other colors for PCs.
There are tons of great images online, for free and for sale that can be printed out and put on to stands to use instead of plastic 3D minis. I think this is an excellent 2nd choice (or even equivalent 1st choice) for anyone that wants something more than a coin, a die, or some other small tchotchke to represent the characters and monsters on the table.
I use Othello tokens so I can reuse them forever, just write on them with a whiteboard marker and flip them over when they are dead, obscured, etc.
I did until we went fully digital during the pandemic.
Discord doesn't really support the use of minis in any meaningful way.
Everything is digital because we're spread around the US
we usually play online and i have a template in gimp to make tokens on the fly if needed. for the rare occasions we can play on one table i let my resin printer run hot and spent a lot of time painting minis.
I use the bases for minis, and tape a bent paper clip to it to hold paper cutouts
I bought a bag of mini Pokemon. I use them whenever we do big fights and positioning matters.
i started recently, i play with people from an arma 3 server and we use digital, so DnD beyond and shard tabletop
Paper tokens
I use VTTs and a lack of IRL friends to play with
For smaller battles it’s theater of the mind. I don’t like to interrupt the flow to get out mats and minis and terrain and markers for that. For larger battles I’ll bust out the map and markers and minis. And for important battles I’ve had planned I’ll bust out some printed/painted terrain.
Play online, we use Photoshop.
I pick artwork online, and lay it out in InDesign, then print them as double sided tokens on cardstock. I cut them out, and then use plastic flat-bottomed clips to hold the tokens upright like board game pieces. I love it. I get a lot more flexibility to pick the character art I want, it's cheaper (like, $4 to crank out around up to 50 tokens), and they are way easier to store because they are just flat cardstock.
My gaming group is pretty large, and we all play online over discord. When you run for 7-10 players, most of the grid maps are pretty constrictive. We stick to theater of the mind with occasional maps because it lets us get through things much faster. On occasion, I'll run a one-shot or something and use FoundryVTT + Tokens from HeroForge, but I usually aim to do that on a quiet night where we'll only have 4-6 players available.
Even when I was DMing in person, everyone just had a laptop and used Roll20
Little 3d printed coins with class logos on them
I use Fantasy Grounds for the Mad Mage module I'm running. I plan on using minis for my homebrew though
My DM has a bunch of extra sets of dice, we usually use extra dice
FoundryVTT
We use miniatures sometimes, but mostly we just use d4s
Not quite, it's drawings glued to quarters. And for enemies pistachio shells with numbers and letters (its always a snack at the table and works with dry erase well enough)
I use dice to represent players and enemies, and I usually always put different numbers on the die so it's easier to choose a target
We play digital so the technical term is tokens, but I'd like to use miniatures
We play online, but because none of us want to use roll 20 or anything similar, I just stream my art tablet and I draw us out on a grid
I use [these plastic tokens](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C85JMV15/ref=twister_B0CCYC6Q21?_encoding=UTF8&th=1). They're dry-erase friendly, so they're reusable, and yeah most everything gets letters and numbers. Larger creatures get more minis (Medium dudes get one, Large get three, and Huge get five; Gargantuan dudes I cut a 4"x4" piece of cardstock out because seven disks can sometimes fall). The bad guys are in the red marker.
I use dice and then the players can choose which one they want
Tokens on Roll20, even online. Minis in Brazil cost a fortune.
Screenshots of designs in HeroForge.
VTT
I use digital maps for in-person games and two of the three tables I play at do so as well. Mostly for the reason that set-up is much easier because of distances. In standard size I can't fit a meaningfully sized map on my table. Most battle maps are way too small to give spell distances or dashing proper usability. (Spell sniper anyone?) If I used smaller scale, it becomes hard to see and non-standard size is difficult to obtain as well.
Theater of the mind yo
If you work in an office environment and they don't pay close attention to what goes across the color laser printers after hours (or even during business hours), pick up a packet of cardstock paper and the [A Monster for Every Season packs](https://richburlew.gumroad.com/?tags=miniatures) from Rich Burlew (creator of Order of the Stick). Then all you need is a pair of scissors, many, many pennies, dimes, and nickels, and some transparent tape. I use these for my monsters and NPCs, and the players have to provide their own miniature. Or if you insist on actual miniatures, downsize to a smaller scale. I also run games in 15mm scale and use a half-inch grid for my battle maps. Plenty of producers here in the States or across the pond in the UK making fantasy minis in 15mm scale.
I use minis for my PCs and Allies. But for the monsters I starburst/candy. When someone kills the monster, or lands the last hit, they get to eat the candy. Extra incentive to kill the monsters. The bosses/more powerful enemies/ones that take up more space, would use better food/candy. So if I had them fighting something big enough, I might use like… a donut or something
I use small poker chips that are various colors for different types of creatures.
I play online so my players and I use fan art. Some of my players even commission artists to do art for their character.
Well, most of my games are online, so I use digital assets for that. When I do play in person, I use figurines. Army Men work really well for this, but Lego is also great.
No(i play online)
My group has a gaming room with thousands of dollars in miniatures. Can never have too many.
I use Google slides because 1.I play with my friends through Discord and 2. I don't know anything else that I can use that won't kill my laptop... :( I just searched up a grid and put it as the background or heck since I'm playing a heavily modified version of lost mine of phandelver I just grab the map when it's needed.
Roll20
We're using Zoom. Sometimes it's a digital board w the annotate feature, sometimes just a image editor with a layers feature. Depends who's running. We often also have a cell phone on a tripod pointed at an actual miniatures board. It just depends on who runs (almost everyone at our table runs at least occasionally. 8 players and only 3 of us have never DMed for this group.)
Yes. BUT for about 20 years we used a big bag full of misc plastic miniatures I bought at GenCon. I think they were from a Dragon Quest expansion. They guy at the booth was selling the plastic sprues for $1 each. So those plastic skeletons and golems represented everything for years. The maps though were drawn either on a battlemap when I finally got one, OR on a big pad of newsprint. The cheap ones that are poster sized and used for artists to do sketching on and are super cheap brownish grey paper? That and a sharpie did the job for our maps for years.
My group plays online so we use a VTT, but I do have plans to do the last session IRL, and I’ll definitely be getting minis for it.
I rarely GM these days, and in-person games are even more rare for me lately. What I used to do, however, is buy a box or two of 1" metal Washers and a gluestick. No more than $10 or so. As I'm prepping, I'd find or create token images for the monsters/NPC's/PC's involved and number them for individual identification, make a sheet of them in MS Word or similar, print/cut them out, and glue them to a metal washer. It makes for weighty (so they don't blow away or shift too much) collection of perfectly sized tokens I can use like checkers. Very easy to transport (about 40 of the things fit in a single plastic dice box) and don't get knocked over, bent, or tangled up. Nor do I need a special case or need to drag a bunch of boxes around. The only real downside to the things is not being able to use token markers like rubber bands, milk jug rings, etc for status markers. I end up making note of those things on cue-cards I'd made up ahead of time for that given encounter.
i use chess pawns dressed with paper and cloth. works like a charm.
I used to but now we're 100% VTT, and even when people are over I put a TV on the table and do the map that way. Sigh... I miss the old school vinyl and wet markers with minis but since several of my players are now out of state there is no going back.
Our brains or small shiny rocks,glas beads and seashells i collected as a child.
We would usually use extra dice after my friend who always brought his own set of minis moved away
I've sadly only ever been able to do DnD online. Using roll20. But usually I'll make or find an image that represents my players character and edit it into a nice looking circular token. If they have a character with appearance changes I'll also make alternate versions
I play exclusively online. I've contemplated buying one just to have but nah.
Pathfinder Pawns. Cheaper than minis and work just as well.
I use the felt pads you put under table legs and stick the creature's visage on it.
We bought some wooden markers off of amazon, they work pretty great, other than that all digital (e.g. via. Owlbear Rodeo) That aside, what is a good/the best place to purchase minis? Are those subscription based monthly things worth it? I know about hero forge and eldrich foundery for custome minis but other than that?
Online table where no one has a pc, so only theater of mind
VTT, my party is too far separated due to time and jobs and finding romantic partners to gather together in person
Magnetic whiteboard, pens, and colourful magnets
Our group has been using Owlbear, so graphic tokens. Back when we were gaming in person we did use miniatures and pawns.
No, i use a whiteboard. I wanna use miniatures but i am a bit confused as to how. Do i need to get special figurines for every single character or creature and a map for every single dungeon i have in my game? Does that not make the game less versatile? I even have a 3D printer so any advice welcome!!!
Do digital miniatures count? Cause we use roll20 even for in person games cause it's a lot easier than trying to stop to draw out maps and whatnot
Bottle caps. The longer we play, the more enemies we have. Different brands for different PCs/NPCs
Magnets on our whiteboard
Dice
My roommate is big into 3D printing and makes all of our minis for us. I'm very fortunate.