More Minis, More Dice ...
More minis and dice are desperately needed to keep this newsletter going!
Normally I’ve photographed a hand-painted mini and a cool set of dice to lead off this newsletter. But, as we near the end of 2022, I must confess:
I’m running short of minis and dice!
This will come as news to my wife, who considers us incredibly (irrationally?) well stocked (overstocked?) in both departments. The reality is that TTRPG gaming is not just a storytelling hobby, but also a collector’s hobby.
When I started playing Pathfinder nearly a decade ago, I borrowed my GM’s spare dice for a while before scoring my first set. Buying that inaugural dice set is a major milestone, and when I’ve got a new player at my table who shows up with their first “forever dice” I can tell they’re hooked.
Over time, as I transitioned from being a player in our home game to becoming the GM, I was gifted a generous quantity of loose dice from my forebears to share with new players or for when my NPC caster dropped a 12d6 fireball on the party.
Most of what I’ve learned about D&D tradition has been picked up on the fly, and I fell hard for the geek custom of keeping dice in the crushed velvet drawstring bag that comes with a bottle of Crown Royal rye whisky. This was around the time that the Canadian distiller, which I just learned while researching this post is located in THE TOWN OF GIMLI MANITOBA COME ON WITH THIS …
… was named World Whisky of the Year. My dad sent me a bottle, unwittingly contributing to my ongoing transformation into an inveterate dice roller.
Soon I was buying a new on-theme set of d20 dice to accompany each new character. After all, you can’t have your feather-stepping elf ranger rolling a heavy set of metal-cast dwarven rune dice. That would be stupid.
And with the dice came a new addiction: custom minis. Pathfinder is, after all, a tactical combat simulator, which is why we use grids and minis. To represent my first PC on the battle map, I used the “tengu rogue” cardboard pawn from my GM’s Bestiary accessory kit. But there was another big geek wave swelling in 2014: Hero Forge had just launched a Kickstarter to produce custom 3D-printed miniatures.
Soon everyone in our gaming group was designing and ordering Hero Forge minis, and painting them thanks to the Warhammer 40K fan in our group who was fully stocked with fancy miniature paints.
We learned the hard way that plastic minis were rather fragile, and metal minis were more robust but less detailed. One of our players splurged on the top-shelf bronze mini for their ifrit bard, which seemed like an outrageous spend that we were all instantly jealous of.
On the topic of splurging, please earn yourself a Hero Point by clicking that heart button up top. I have no idea what it accomplishes, besides making me feel good!
The last time I bought a Hero Forge mini was in late 2019, a few months after the launch of Pathfinder Second Edition when my OG GM began to run an in-person group through the “Age of Ashes” Adventure Path. I designed my dwarf monk, Bente Bensik, and was excited to eventually find time to paint her …
Then Covid-19 hit and our gaming was relegated to Zoom and Roll20, where we learned to design PC tokens and roll “interactive” dice across the screen. It was new and exciting for a while. But the digital novelty faded. And even with Discord and Tableplop scratching my itch as we moved deeper into the pandemic era, I eventually realized how dearly I missed sitting around a flip-map and moving minis into flanking and rolling a d20 to hit.
Now I am pleased to report that, as we approach the end of 2022, I am slowly rediscovering my passion for tactile Pathfinder gaming. Sure, scheduling a bunch of busy adults to converge at the same physical location on a regular basis is worse than herding cats. Ask any tech CEO nowadays: getting people to show up for in-person meetings is HARD.
But there are ways to tempt people out of the comfort of their homes:
Camaraderie.
Alcohol.
Snacks.
And, as I’ve learned and relearned: moving minis and rolling dice.
THE MINI AND THE DICE
That image up top showcases my home game players reaching the climax of “Pathfinder Society Quest #10: The Broken Scales.” As mentioned, our mini/pawn game is still a work in progress, but (from back row to front) we’ve got:
Bodhi the gnome bard
Ziggy the human summoner and his psychopomp eidolon, Stardust
Joël the human magus, and Darlan Silverleaf the elf fighter
Delving through the sewers beneath Absalom, the party has just stumbled upon [SPOILER WARNING] a pair of injured weak otyughs terrorizing a kobold tribe. They managed to take down the filthy aberrations, but not before I rolled initiative for each otyugh separately and saw this gorgeous result pop up in my GM dice tray:
Yes, the otyughs were READY to throw down. Speaking of throwing down:
SCREENSHOT PRESENTED WITHOUT CONTEXT
That’s it from me for 2022, folks. And so, as I say at the end of every Pathfinder module I run: this has been Ambush Tactics. I’ve been your Game Master. I hope you had a fun year.
Adventure!