It turns out that not all miniatures you buy for your tabletop RPG or wargame are created equal. If you've been painting miniatures all your life, this is probably obvious. But for those of us new to painting miniatures, this is an important lesson. Here are my thoughts on miniature quality.
Detai
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Recently, I've purchased some wargames, like Reign in Hell, Space Station Zero, and Mechaforce, and they all require miniatures. I knew they needed miniatures when I made the purchase, but they're all intentionally indifferent to what miniatures you use. My plan was to use RPG miniatures, and...
At the time of writing, Wizards of the Coast has just held a "summit" for D&D "influencers" and publishers. The event was well covered by Enworld and some Youtubers. I understand that it's in the spirit of reconciliation to take WotC at its word, to believe that they're sorry for what they attempt...
I like to treat painting miniatures as a craft project, not as an artistic one. Thinking about my process of painting in an objective and purely functional activity makes me less precious about it. I don't feel the weight of my own expectation. I don't sit staring at the unprimed miniature in dread,...
Painting miniatures is hard, and I'm no artist. Before miniatures, I'd painted walls, and that was my experience with paint. That was pretty intimidating, honestly, and it was a significant block for me to start painting as a hobby.
Once I started painting miniatures, I discovered something I hadn...
Miniatures are small.
Impossibly small.
So it's no surprise that you might think that painting miniatures would be a nearly impossible task. I have poor eyesight, and terrible eye-hand coordination. My hands tend to shake, I usually have an abundance of nervous energy, and my depth perception is...
For the longest time, I had no interest in painting miniatures. In an RPG, miniatures aren't essential components of the game. I've probably played as much tabletop RPG with miniantures as I have without. I've never played with miniatures in Shadowrun, for example. So when I did buy miniatures, I bo...
It's annoying that the Open Gaming License 1.0a is under attack, but it's not actually detrimental. As many people (and in fact possibly most people) recognize, you don't need anybody's permission to play a game at home, nor to write an adventure that happens to work with D&D™ 5th Edition. Don't c...
Many RPG rulebooks start out speaking in the bizarrely theoretical future tense, addressing the reader as if they were going to build a character: "First, you will choose a race, and then you will choose your skills." Then, over the course of the next few chapters, these player guides describe t...
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast was attempting to unjustly, and probably unlawfully, revoke the Open Gaming License. They've recently agreed to stop that attempt, and as a sign of good faith they've released the System Reference Document (SRD) into Creative Commons. That's a minor...
Before I knew it was supposed to be hard to do it, I converted adventures from one RPG system to another on a regular basis. It started innocently enough. I'd play in someone's Tunnels & Trolls campaign, and then go home and run the same story as a D&D adventure for my friends. It never occurred t...
Building a character for an RPG can be mildly intimidating if you're not used to it. You might think it takes special knowledge, or that it's a chore, or that it's just overwhelming. But I find building characters to be fun and invariably easier than sometimes the rulebooks make it seem. And buildin...
A unique thing about tabletop roleplaying games is that when you buy them, you're mostly just buying rules. Some rulebooks also describe in-game items, and some even come with a sample adventure tacked on at the end, but the thing you carry from game to game is a book on how to play, not what to p...
Like all tabletop games, an RPG is a group effort. As long as everyone playing the game is determined to have fun, the game goes as well as it needs to go. You might not get all the rules "right", but the game master makes rulings that work well enough for that game session, and everyone has fun. Pr...
Are you thinking about playing D&D or Pathfinder or some other roleplaying game (RPG) like Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or similar? Of course you need players, and one player designated as the person (usually called the "Dungeon Master" or the "game master") to "play" the game world itself. The best...
Are you thinking about playing D&D or some other roleplaying game (RPG) like Pathfinder, Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or similar? You might be confused by all the trappings of such a game. For instance, there's a special important-sounding title for one of the players, like "Game Master" or "Dungeon...