Monsters… the quest for a better token

Varzof — Sat, 23 May 2009 04:04:39 +0000

My quest of the day is: find a better way to represent monsters in D&D combat. In the past, I’ve used a combination of the following objects as tokens to represent monsters:

Dice
Starbursts
D&D minis

Each of these have their own benefits and drawbacks.

	Dice	Starbursts	D&D minis
Cost	Low (most DMs already have plenty)	Low (can buy them inexpensively in big bags)	Moderate to High (depending on how many you buy, and how you buy them)
Suitability	Appropriate size and weight	Appropriate size and weight	Appropriate size and weight
Distinguishability	Come in many different colors, shapes, and are pre-labelled with numbers	Come in several different colors, can be easily labelled	Many models available; difficult to distinguish between multiple instances of a single model
Immersion	None	None	Variable (increases with cost)
Other factors	Can be confused with other dice on the table	Can be given to players as rewards when killed

It’s the lack of immersion that bothers me the most. Seeing a die on a grid moving towards your mini doesn’t inspire fear in quite the same way as a mini that shows exactly what the monster looks like. If you’re using generic tokens, like dice or Starbursts, it’s left entirely up to memory (both the DM’s and the players’) to remember which dice represent orcs and which represent wolves.

While it would seem that the obvious solution is to use D&D minis (or an equivalent minis line) instead, I’m not convinced that’s a very good solution. While the minis look nice and play well, there’s a number of issues with them. If you only have a few, you generally don’t have a mini that’s appropriate for whatever monster the PCs encounter. If you use minis that don’t have anything to do with the actual monster in question, they’re effectively fancy-looking generic tokens, with the same lake of immersion and need to remember what they represent. As you increase the size of your minis collection (and thus, the cost), you’ll be able to use appropriate minis increasingly often. This can be a particularly large expense if you’re buying boosters as opposed to targeted singles, since it’s likely to take quite a few boosters to get the minis you’re looking for. Even then, you’ll sometimes come across the need for a monster that you don’t have a similar mini for. What do you do then? Go back to using an inappropriate mini? It seems like there has to be a better solution.

What I’m going to be trying next is supplementing my existing minis collection with self-made tokens, based on a blog post by NewbieDM. I’ve already picked up the appropriate supplies. Coming soon: the results of my efforts.

Nefzonia

Monsters… the quest for a better token