Getting Started with Miniatures for D&D

look at this cool little guy here ah drums Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop RPGs can be a really simple and inexpensive hobby but if you're like me sometimes you just can't resist the call of the little plastic monsters and heroes to spend your money on and throw out on the table at game night to really take things up a notch this video is a guide for those wanting to get into 3D Miniatures for d d and other RPGs we'll start by covering some of the basic brands that you can expect to find we'll talk about the pros and cons where you can buy them and then we'll also talk about some of the cheaper options and where you can really get some good deals because I'm a bit of a bargain shopper so make sure you stick around to the end of the video for those tips additionally while I love 3D Miniatures I'm working on a second video that actually covers some cheaper and easier alternatives to 3D Miniatures so keep an eye out for that one coming soon foreign one of the big choices you'll have to make when you are buying 3D Miniatures is do you want to buy Miniatures that are already painted or do you want to paint the Miniatures yourself personally I really like to paint them myself but I want to start by talking about some of the pre-painted options first if you're going to a local shop usually one of the only options you'll find are Whiz Kids Miniatures now you're going to pay quite a bit more for pre-painted Miniatures as you might imagine these figures if you're buying them in a box with a bunch of others that you can actually see generally are going to cost about six dollars each Wiz Kids has officially licensed Miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons Pathfinder and even critical role if you want to save a little bit of money and get a little more variety you can check out some of their booster packs these are boxes of Miniatures that generally cost about 20 each and come with four Miniatures you don't know what you're getting so it's a bit of a risk but some people really like collecting them that way so I've got a few of these and generally I can say I don't really like them once I started painting miniatures myself I really realized that the paint jobs on these are pretty poor now some areas do have a lot of detail and sometimes I think they might use decals or other methods but for the most part I'm not very impressed however if you're not much of a connoisseur and your players aren't either you throw these out on the table at game night No One's Gonna care they're gonna look totally fine and you're gonna have a lot of fun with them you'll also find these paint jobs to be pretty durable in general some of them are really bad though look at this drow I would barely call this a painted miniature so personally I usually go for unpainted Miniatures nowadays because I've learned to paint and I really like to do it however it is really time consuming so if you're not into that you know just stick to the painted Miniatures they're fine still the big brands that you'll definitely find when you walk into most hobby shops are Whiz Kids unpainted Miniatures and Reaper bones let's start by talking about Reaper Reaper does make metal Miniatures as well and those are the more traditional kind back in the 80s and 90s you could really only find metal Miniatures for the most part they're higher quality they're nice and heavy and they're definitely a little more expensive so plastic Miniatures have definitely taken over the market for the most part and Reaper bones are their premium plastic line these figures are available for generally 250 to three dollars a piece for the little ones and of course you're going to pay a lot more for bigger ones that use more plastic now the quality for Reaper bones really varies when they first came out some of the details were really lacking and some of the sculpts just honestly looked bad but they've gotten a lot better over the years and they now even have this Reaper bones black line which is not actually black they're darker gray and they're made of a harder plastic and hold detail better and I really like them all of my Reaper bones Miniatures are incredibly durable and I've been really impressed by that I have no hesitation about throwing them in a bin about letting my kids play with with them I know they're gonna hold up and now that I'm mostly 3D printing Miniatures in resin I kind of missed that feature and yes I have tried some supposedly tougher resins and I even did a video a while back and yeah they don't even come close to the durability of Reaper bones Miniatures now Reaper says you don't need to Prime their bones Miniatures but I've really only found that to be true with Reaper paints which I don't have much of so I always just Prime them with my Vallejo I also really love Reaper's website it's really very easy to search by class or race and by the way every time I've ordered directly from Reaper they've thrown in a free miniature or two and sometimes a free bottle of paint or two so just a little bonus for ordering directly through them hey before we get to the next Miniatures I want to give a quick shout out to thank my friends at 1985 games who are partnering with me to bring you this video they sell NPC and story cards dice counterspell Miniatures but for this video I really want to highlight their dungeon Craft series which are big packs of 2D terrain we're talking Maps buildings Vehicles monster tokens and more these are a great supplement to your Miniatures and I absolutely love them having a bunch of these around will make you such a versatile game master Reddit improvise with all sorts of great locations there's a lot more great stuff so head on over to 1985 games now just click on the link in the video description also as a bonus for my viewers use coupon code wasd20 for 10 off at checkout foreign next let's talk about Whiz Kids unpainted Miniatures so these are pretty comparable in price and you'll definitely find them in a lot of game shops alongside Reaper's Miniatures uh I however don't like them quite as much when they first came out I was pretty high on them I thought they were great they're definitely a little more detailed than the earlier Reaper bones were but now that I've had a little more experience with them I don't really like them as much I find them to be kind of ugly sometimes they are pre-primed which is kind of nice so you don't have to Prime them at all however the primer gets a little bit gunky and I actually know some people who are really into Miniatures who will Strip This primer off and Prime them themselves because of that there are a few sculpts that I really like and if you're looking for certain d d monsters that are official monsters like the beholder or displacer beasts or things like that some of them look really cool like this one is just straight out of the monster manual I absolutely love this sculpt but yeah a lot of them just don't look great and you know things like these kobolds here it's almost like they tried to get too much detail in there end up looking kind of crappy there are some bad mold lines like you can see on this cape here which I tested some paint on there's a really bad one there on this Shield right here right across it so yeah Whiz Kids unpainted they're fine sometimes I prefer them into bones but usually I'm going to prefer Reapers Miniatures over these now in terms of where you can buy these I did mention your local game shops but if you don't have any local game shops around you of course Amazon's a good option I really like however miniature markets website they have a really nice website and I recommend you check it out if you're looking for some pricier options that might give you a step up in quality you can definitely check out Games Workshop Miniatures most of those are for Warhammer or there's a Lord of the Rings war game but they are really nice they're just really expensive and some assembly required there's also some great more independent smaller companies like crippled God Foundry or broken Anvil Miniatures crippled God Foundry has sent me a bunch of stuff over the years and they're really nice resin Miniatures a little more fragile than Reaper bones and stuff like that but you're definitely going to pay a little more something like six dollars per figure or maybe up to 12 sometimes or for bigger ones definitely in the 20 to 30 dollar range broken Anvil has some really nice looking stuff and they're a great company as well also Hero Forge Miniatures if you want custom Miniatures that you can design yourself and then either 3D print yourself or have shipped to your house either in unpainted or colored plastic these are really nice this one right here I ordered unpainted and painted it myself and this little frog guy right here actually came off their color 3D printer so yeah really cool and even if you don't order their Miniatures the character builder on their website is just so much fun so definitely check it out foreign options if you're wanting to get a lot of Miniatures on the cheap here are some good ways first off Reaper bones kickstarters they only happen once every year or two but they are such a great value I backed one of their kickstarters I still have tons and tons of unpainted Miniatures because of it and yeah in terms of bang for your buck I think I probably paid about a dollar per miniature when you break it all down maybe even less and there are some pretty big ones in the bundle just keep in mind that when you're backing a Kickstarter you're playing the long game for the most recent one I think the Fulfillment time is like two years so yeah so you can go to Kickstarter and just follow Reaper Miniatures and then you'll get notifications when they're doing a new Kickstarter but there are also a lot of other companies these days doing miniature kickstarters so keep your eyes open for those just make sure you're not getting 3D printable Miniatures if you do not have a 3D printer now there are some board games that also provide a really great way to get a bunch of Miniatures on the cheap this D board game here which is a huge box I think I paid 40 or 50 dollars for this and it comes with about 40 42 plastic Heroes and monsters including this big old black dragon here and this Eton there's some really cool ones and I've painted some of these up over the years and they're they're pretty good they've got some nasty seam lines and things like that but overall they're pretty good and a good value other board games I've heard good things about in terms of getting a lot of Miniatures massive Darkness it's kind of a Dungeon Crawl board game comes with a lot of cool Miniatures uh hate is another one I've heard good things about blood rage is a good one if you want a lot of Viking warriors and some really cool monsters zombicide if you want to get a bunch of zombies most of those games are from cool mini or not Seamon they make a lot of cool board games with great Miniatures and you're gonna get some good bang for your buck there eBay is another great option you can often find painted Miniatures on eBay so if you don't want to paint your own you can find someone who's painted a bunch and now they're selling their collection and of course unpainted Miniatures too because we all have a big pile of Shame and well personally I've been thinking about putting a lot of mine on eBay recently because there's just certain ones I know I'm never going to paint you can get some good cheap packs on Amazon as well but be a little bit careful because I have found some really nice looking packs for a great price that are actually quite a bit bigger than traditional tabletop RPG Miniatures so you want to make sure you're getting 28 millimeter or 32 millimeter scale Miniatures so I think your average miniature there would be a little bit more than an inch high in general and I don't know a lot of those are like two inch high miniatures lastly 3D printing yeah there's the initial investment of paying a couple hundred dollars for a 3D printer however once you have that man you can print 3D Miniatures so inexpensively I'm talking about like 10 or 15 cents worth of resin for your average miniature they're a great value and I've printed big old things that would have cost me forty or fifty dollars in the store for about ten twelve dollars there's definitely a learning curve it's a little bit of work but I absolutely love it it's a part of the hobby I'm really enjoying these days I'll put a link to a video I made about 3D printing for DND right up there it's a couple years old now but I stand by everything I said I still absolutely love 3D printing for DND I think it's great so if you have any thoughts I would love to hear from you as well is there anything I left out here any brands or methods you recommend for getting Miniatures on the cheap leave them down in the comments if you want to support the channel I do have some affiliate links down in the description and there's also a link to my patreon down there I want to thank the wasd 20 patrons for their support patrons like this are such a key part of what I do here they help keep the channel afloat and they get some pretty cool rewards too things like map drawing streams behind the scenes videos and things like that so check it all out over at patreon.com wasd20 alright like subscribe all that good stuff thanks so much for watching take care everybody you'll see me again very soon [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: WASD20

Views: 56,721

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, 3d miniatures, dnd miniatures, wizkids, reaper bones, crippled god foundry, 3d printing, guide to rpg miniatures, miniature figurines, game master, dungeon master, beginners guide to dnd miniatures

Id: thUkil8qo-U

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2023