More on Minis: Washer Miniatures

As a followup to my post about the use of miniatures with RPGs, Jamie over at A Fistful of Coppers made me aware of "washer miniatures." He showed me a link to a post about this cheaper alternative to traditional minis.

I find this to be a really interesting alternative to traditional metal/plastic/paper minis! The only thing is, the article only mentions the use of images cut out of Magic: The Gathering cards as a means of putting images on the washers. I believe that one could manage to generate some correctly-sized images using images taken from the Web manipulated using Photoshop. Granted, that might be a bit more time consuming. But it's still possible.

What does everyone think of this?

Regarding the Use of Miniatures

I must admit that I have never used miniatures when roleplaying. Not once have I used them over the entire course of my sporadic gaming career. I know that others have deeply explored the history of minis in connection with D&D, so I won't go there.

Question: What are your thoughts about the use of minis? Do you use them at all? Can you give or take them? Or are they indispensable for your games?

As I have been ramping up my personal gaming renaissance, I have started to consider using minis. Part of it is the growing desire to simply collect them. I feel like I have to fight this urge, because I do not need to buy any more stuff to clutter up my "man-lair" in my basement.

Another part of me is thinking perhaps they would be useful in games that I intend to run. Now, all of this is contingent on the form of my future campaigns. I am starting to think that I might want to explore play-by-chat gaming (I'll explore this in an upcoming post when I have more time), at least for the meantime. In this instance, minis would be pretty much superfluous.

If I were to run a table-top game and decided to go with using minis, my plan might be to use the few plastic and metal minis I own and supplement them with PAPER minis, also known as figure flats.

There are Internet resources for getting these figure flats for free as well as places you can buy them (there's a site for something called Precis Intermedia that offered paper minis called Disposable Heroes, but the site does not seem to be working at the moment).

It's interesting to talk about the paper minis because I was recently digging through the small amount of actual TSR material I have in my possession, and I found the remains of the D&D "black box" I bought around the time it came out. I still have the rulebook, the DM's screen with the pocket that holds the famous "flash cards," and the paper stand-up "counters" (i.e. miniatures) that came with the game.