Do you use miniatures?

[Djday45]

What’s the consensus about using miniatures for Runequest combat here?

My group has traditionally used them for other games, but there is no mention of them in the new rule set , so I am assuming many people use theatre of the mind?

What are the pros and cons of each viewpoint with the new rule set? Are there any problems with using miniatures that anyone has any experience with?

 

rgds

Dean

[kirinyaga]

The pros and the cons of using miniatures are one : precision. Everyone knows exactly where are peoples, the distances, etc ..., no misunderstandings. And everyone will be tempted to focus more on pushing the plastic rather than the combat narrative, drawn to the technical side . It's a bit like comparing a novel and its adaptation as a movie. Try both and see by yourself what your game group prefers.

Also, you'll have to paint them 😋

Edited March 1, 2019 by kirinyaga
syntax

[jps]

I used to then we moved to the Storytelling system and I gave them up. Now I'd like to use them again in RQ in Cthulhu and maybe even in Vampire 5th edition.

The painting though ... ^^

[RosenMcStern]

...is definitely part of the fun

Go attend one of Gregory's painting sessions at the Kraken, and you will see. You do not know what "gorgeous" means until you have painted Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep with him (the huge ones which come in the Cthulhu Wars box, I mean).

[jps]

I'm just scared about my artistic skills or lack thereof   

[Alexandre]

Playing mainly through roll20 these days, miniatures (or more precisely tokens) are a must. But whenever possible I always used them, I think they add a lot, and not just from the mechanical point of view. It doesn't matter if you use superbly painted 40mm miniatures or counters or even just dice, a physical representation of the situation helps to fuel the imagination IMO. 

In the last sessions we have been using Cry Havoc boards and counters...

Edited March 1, 2019 by Alexandre

[jajagappa]

When I ran face-to-face games years ago, we used miniatures - they were useful in combat situations. They were generally unpainted.

For current play-by-post games, where needed I create maps and then mark positions.

[Djday45]

Are there any plans for official glorantha miniatures to come out?

also, although the combat rules are crunchy, they do not mention miniatures for rules such as grids, hexes, flanking etc. Fo any of the other basic RPG games do that anywhere?

 

rgds

Dean

[David Scott]

I’ve always used 15mm for RQ and now RQG. But I’ve never painted them. I’ve also started using standees. Mainly as I can cut and paste them from the pdfs and print them out. I’ve got a load of tusk riders printed and ready to go. For demos I’ve been using 50mm standees! Monster coliseum for RQ3 had a handy range stick in 15 & 28mm scales.

pros: good for positioning Adventurers relatively in situations, good scene setters for new players.

cons: can lead to slavish rules lawyering. 

[David Scott]

1 minute ago, Djday45 said:

Are there any plans for official glorantha miniatures to come out?

There are three at least three official licences

infinity-engine.com

rapier miniatures

Mad Knight

[Dissolv]

Definitely.

Runequest is a crunchy mechanics type system and the visual aides are important.

[Kloster]

It depends if the whiteboard is a vertical one or put on the table. If on the table, unpainted 25 mm miniatures.

[Zozotroll]

Always use Minis.  But I was a wargamer before RPGs where published so it makes sense.   Painting is as much or little trouble as you make it.  For example, I have over 4000 painted Napoleonic minis.  Half a dozen for a party is not much of a stretch

[styopa]

2 hours ago, Dissolv said:

Runequest is a crunchy mechanics type system and the visual aides are important.

Beautifully done but how 'necessary' the aesthetics are is up to your own personal showmanship/OCD.

Miniatures are placeholders that show location and facing, minimally.  Beyond that, it's up to you.  We're pretty openminded - we have a huge pile of minis to pull from, but it's mainly a matter of convenience/speed/what we can put our hands on quickly enough in the course of play.. which means we're mostly using a well-worn set of crappy heroquest plastic minis for bad guys supplemented as needed from whatever other figures have been tossed into the bin over the years, each player has a "real" 25mm metal mini that they chose, some have painted them, some haven't bothered.  Our player with a duck character found a duck and he's using that.  The beast shaman has a figure, but uses animal ones when he's in animal form(s).

Here's the annotated map from last session, unfortunately we had to end abruptly due to work circumstances, so we took a pic to save the gamestate.  These are all runelord-equivalent characters in a ...not great situation right now.  (I'm running the D&D Tomb of Annihilation adventure, they're fighting Ras Nsi and his multiarmed bodyguard Sekelok in the Audience Chamber of the Fane of the Night Serpent...details provided so you can look those up if you choose).  Hexes are 1m.

Explanations below are /spoileriffic, if you ever intend to run/play that adventure.  Unfortunately AFAIK this board software doesn't have spoilertext functions. 

01: Black Fang duck party member; in desperation has summoned from his Mud Ring a 6cbm earth elemental (the horse figure @01A) and this round a 4cbm water elemental (garados at 01B)...he can't actually control them.

02 the main tank of the party, orlanthi wl & his cat; he's on the ropes, his cat's out of mp.  The red armless figure is Ras Nsi, in RQ setting an Apostate Zorak Zorani RL troll who'd been converted into a half-serpent undead monstrosity.  Head of Yuan Ti temple, several hundred years old, pretty powerful, BBEG.

03 as mentioned the horse is the 6bm angry earth elemental; the tipped-over sheep is a party member that is a shape-changing druidy Shaman in grizzly form*, prone; grey thing is Sekelok, 4 armed massive bodyguard of Ras Nsi BBEG2, immobilized up to his knees in the floor by the elemental, he would like to attack the elemental to free himself but with only 9 INT he keeps getting stunned by...

04 ...the silvery figure is the party's powerful sorcerer, currently hovering about 5m up,  can't really cast anything because his actions are used attacking with a (gained) psychic ability that allows a ranged int v int chance to stun target for some SRs.  So far, they've been enough to keep Sekelok cc'd.  The pearl is his familiar "glowy ball", an awakened floating stone ball 1m in diameter with a chain dangling from the bottom, it's floating about 2m above him.  Some of you will know where he found that.  Between the two of them, I think they've burned something like 50mp in this fight already so they're getting low.  The prone figure is the party's Zorak Zorani RL* whose 1 POW (from a regrettable previous DI) left him vulnerable to being commanded to attack the party by Ras Nsi (has the innate ability to command fixed-int undead, has a chance to control intelligent undead); fortunately, his only having 1mp also made him easily knocked out by being drained of that 1mp by another party-member's magic item effect touch attack.  (The other figure well back is a noncombatant scholar they have dragged along with them after saving his life.)

*Both the player-bear and player-troll are ACTUALLY zombies; they died in play while the party is investigating a giant soul-sucking curse preventing people from being rezz'd.  A witch they encountered had "fell magicks" that nevertheless could ... sort of... bring them back.

Edited March 1, 2019 by styopa

[Dissolv]

I've done it all the ways.

 

Full on everything painted. 

No figures or even drawings at all.

In between type representations such as you have put (pen and graph paper, some bottle caps fighting an eraser.) 

 

People seem to fill in with their own imagination who and what they are seeing, which is great.  I mean, a game of imagination is kind of the point.  However RQ takes place within Glorantha, which is so far out of the norm these days that people seem to struggle not seeing Tolkien elves and dwarves and ents.  Unless you are working with some veterans, I find that having the miniatures really rams home a couple of points.  Like this is the bronze age, as a major one.  Or that the fantasy races, or indeed the landscape is much out of the ordinary from what is imagined by the average new player.  This sort of "fantasy shock" is a pretty big deal I find, and getting a new player over the hurdle  and actually buying into it helps a lot.  Otherwise you get stuck on "there are Ducks in this game? What?"  The miniatures help that.

Beyond the setting, I do find that a lot of times some of the severe consequences of RQ combat in particular are best demonstrated with representation. That way you can see where the Shaman is in case he needs to use a touch spell -- such as Healing 6 if everyone else is out of Rune and/or magic points.  It matters, and it is just easier to move the representation where he needs to go, or to point out that the Shaman actually isn't near the character who just had a limb hacked off.  It helps with the flow of a pretty drawn out combat system, frankly.

Once you go decide to go painted figures for representation, you may as well paint them decently.  🙂  As an important note, these days I deliberately vary the use of figures depending on the session.  Big military battle? Break out some movement trays because we are doing this!  Standard adventure -- some use of figures, but a huge amount of the evening will be spend talking, interacting, and dealing with social situations that crop up.  The figures are handy then to put players on a map if they split up, or to show who is going in whose group.  Big Heroquest?  Imagination time, and the figures stay into the box.  GM exposition of the utter strangeness now must carry the day.  It's all just part of the tricks of being a GM.

Dissolv

Edited March 1, 2019 by Dissolv

[Smudgster]

A Broo raiding party freshly painted, ready to ambush the party next session.

And a Baboon troupe looking to cause trouble.

Mostly use miniatures in combats, for positions and distance.

Also use them for chases, I’ve got some road section terrain about six inches long which I use as range categories, so for example if you’re miniature is sitting on the close range section and succeeds they will move up to the 2 lengths section. Makes chases very easy to visualise. I really like the chase rules.

[Sumath]

On ‎3‎/‎1‎/‎2019 at 1:11 PM, jps said:

I'm just scared about my artistic skills or lack thereof   

If you don't have the time, patience or skill to paint miniatures, you can always give them the 'chess piece' treatment - paint them a single colour (e.g. white or light grey for PCs, humanoid NPCs, mounts etc and black for monsters, chaos creatures etc).

To differentiate individuals you can then paint a band of colour around the side of the figure's base. Alternatively, you could paint figures in their rune affinity colour (e.g. yellow for Yelmalions, orange for Orlanthi).

In the end, miniatures are just tactical markers - they don't have to be show pieces.

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, Sumath said:

In the end, miniatures are just tactical markers - they don't have to be show pieces.

One of our RQ2 players made his own miniatures, as he found out how to make moulds and could fill them with lead alloys. They started off as blobs but ended up reasonably good. However, he swore by the dipping technique, whereby he dipped them all in one colour paint, then let them dry out, dipped the legs in another colour and the helmets in another colour and so on. He sometimes hand painted shields, in one colour, or painted a rune on at the end, but they were mostly dipped.

1 hour ago, Sumath said:

In the end, miniatures are just tactical markers - they don't have to be show pieces.

We have used numbered tiddlywink counters, monster figures from some old boardgame, unpainted lead miniatures,  painted lead miniatures and paper cutouts, all did the job quite nicely.

[styopa]

Dipping works great for large area coloring, you just have to seriously thin the paint or lose lots of figure details.

[olskool]

On 3/1/2019 at 12:09 PM, styopa said:

Beautifully done but how 'necessary' the aesthetics are is up to your own personal showmanship/OCD.

Miniatures are placeholders that show location and facing, minimally.  Beyond that, it's up to you.  We're pretty openminded - we have a huge pile of minis to pull from, but it's mainly a matter of convenience/speed/what we can put our hands on quickly enough in the course of play.. which means we're mostly using a well-worn set of crappy heroquest plastic minis for bad guys supplemented as needed from whatever other figures have been tossed into the bin over the years, each player has a "real" 25mm metal mini that they chose, some have painted them, some haven't bothered.  Our player with a duck character found a duck and he's using that.  The beast shaman has a figure, but uses animal ones when he's in animal form(s).

Here's the annotated map from last session, unfortunately we had to end abruptly due to work circumstances, so we took a pic to save the gamestate.  These are all runelord-equivalent characters in a ...not great situation right now.  (I'm running the D&D Tomb of Annihilation adventure, they're fighting Ras Nsi and his multiarmed bodyguard Sekelok in the Audience Chamber of the Fane of the Night Serpent...details provided so you can look those up if you choose).  Hexes are 1m.

Explanations below are /spoileriffic, if you ever intend to run/play that adventure.  Unfortunately AFAIK this board software doesn't have spoilertext functions. 

01: Black Fang duck party member; in desperation has summoned from his Mud Ring a 6cbm earth elemental (the horse figure @01A) and this round a 4cbm water elemental (garados at 01B)...he can't actually control them.

02 the main tank of the party, orlanthi wl & his cat; he's on the ropes, his cat's out of mp.  The red armless figure is Ras Nsi, in RQ setting an Apostate Zorak Zorani RL troll who'd been converted into a half-serpent undead monstrosity.  Head of Yuan Ti temple, several hundred years old, pretty powerful, BBEG.

03 as mentioned the horse is the 6bm angry earth elemental; the tipped-over sheep is a party member that is a shape-changing druidy Shaman in grizzly form*, prone; grey thing is Sekelok, 4 armed massive bodyguard of Ras Nsi BBEG2, immobilized up to his knees in the floor by the elemental, he would like to attack the elemental to free himself but with only 9 INT he keeps getting stunned by...

04 ...the silvery figure is the party's powerful sorcerer, currently hovering about 5m up,  can't really cast anything because his actions are used attacking with a (gained) psychic ability that allows a ranged int v int chance to stun target for some SRs.  So far, they've been enough to keep Sekelok cc'd.  The pearl is his familiar "glowy ball", an awakened floating stone ball 1m in diameter with a chain dangling from the bottom, it's floating about 2m above him.  Some of you will know where he found that.  Between the two of them, I think they've burned something like 50mp in this fight already so they're getting low.  The prone figure is the party's Zorak Zorani RL* whose 1 POW (from a regrettable previous DI) left him vulnerable to being commanded to attack the party by Ras Nsi (has the innate ability to command fixed-int undead, has a chance to control intelligent undead); fortunately, his only having 1mp also made him easily knocked out by being drained of that 1mp by another party-member's magic item effect touch attack.  (The other figure well back is a noncombatant scholar they have dragged along with them after saving his life.)

*Both the player-bear and player-troll are ACTUALLY zombies; they died in play while the party is investigating a giant soul-sucking curse preventing people from being rezz'd.  A witch they encountered had "fell magicks" that nevertheless could ... sort of... bring them back.

I have that exact mapboard myself.  I also have the square/grid version too.  Nowadays, I also use standard sized (8.5" X 11.5" ?) 50 and 100 sheet pads/tablets with 1" grids (available at Staples) to draw individual interior rooms on.  If I plan on using them a lot, I will laminate them.  For most adventures, I just leave them as is so I can draw on them during play. 

For markers, I have seen Checkers, Chess pieces, and even Monopoly pieces used to represent combatants.  The coolest "minis" I have seen for a GM who travels to games is the 25mm cardstock prints that fold in half to show the front and back of the Character and which "clip" into a plastic Hex Base to stand upright.  You can carry a ton of those and swapping bases is very easy.   

[Djday45]

I have noticed that although most people here advocate using minis, the rules themselves do not mention hexes or squares, grids or such rules for things such as facing, flanking, attacking from the rear etc.

 

Do you guys include these kind of rules as house rules? Or are they present in other BRP  games or are they just considered overkill and not needed?

Rgds

Dean

[Zozotroll]

I dont like grids or hexes, just use rulers.

[womble]

With figures you don't need a grid for facing (which determines flank/rear); the figure tells you, if the situation doesn't make it apparent. Since RPGs are not competitive games, you don't need 'quarters' painted on the figure base, either; marginal positionings are a judgement call by the ref, rather than a call for a straight edge and a protractor/template.

[jps]

5 hours ago, Zozotroll said:

I dont like grids or hexes, just use rulers.

I think I won't use those either, I'll try to go more freeform (combat is a mess anyway), I'll just use miniatures to picture where everybody is roughly.

[g33k]

On 3/3/2019 at 5:16 AM, jps said:

I think I won't use those either, I'll try to go more freeform (combat is a mess anyway), I'll just use miniatures to picture where everybody is roughly.

If I am using mini's at all (or bottlecaps, or spare dice, or etc) then I am likely to use a ruler/etc to determine any critically-important ranges; if there are no such range situations, then not.