Minis, maps and “moments”
While running 20+ sessions of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight for the past year and nearing an end, I’ve invested more time in painting minis: ~4 hours/day for a week spent painting and watching tutorials, purchased a bunch more brushes (mostly just so I could drybrush with size 6 and paint larger minis faster) and purchased transparent paints for Hellwasp wings, along with inks that I have yet to use… and I’ve probably purchased around 60 more miniatures, a number of which were $1-3 each from booster boxes. For the minis, I had to be sure I didn’t have something that already resembled it in my collection, given my hope is those will be unique characters I’ll use in the future. The investment paid off in the sessions in a number of ways:
First off — fun. I had one moment where the players audibly gasped in excitement when I brought a mini out (details about this below)
By joining a content creator mini-painter Patreon that included a Discord community I found nice and smart DMs I can bounce ideas off of with whom I’m discussing combat optimization
Minis can be raised up on the map to make air combat more cinematically 3D (Top Gun: Maverick did up the game after all) which players said added to the immersion (I purchased risers that minis could stand on)
Having minis allowed me to better remember the special types of powers that enemies might have by the literal visual aspects of the mini when trying to think of their next moves — seeing a mini can also help better communicate the type of threat (e.g., size, sniping, etc.) for the players
Though I barely got to use them yet, I have rulers and area of effect shape templates for spells should help us visualize where everyone is and who’s within range of an attack — this relieves some of the cognitive load that can happen in theater of the mind
To dig into the first point — the moment where the players all went “ooooh” upon a mini reveal — it was a happy coincidence between the way I source maps and the minis that I have on hand. I’ve had to homebrew and ending for the Witchlight campaign given that the final encounter map has been dismissed as broken, I heeded Matt Colville’s advice that prep can be fun and easy if you start with a map. Sure, I’d have to weave the encounter into the well-established narrative arc that was quickly coming to conclusion, and I’d already opened up a plot hook to a Witchlight expansion I found on DMs Guild, so I needed to find a carnival-related map.
Being a supporter of theirs on Patreon, I found a Czepeku Monster Festival map that looked like it could be at a carnival, and happened to include a spider being roasted on a spit over a fire. Realizing I have a pre-painted spider mini that fit almost perfectly when sat atop the image of the spider on the map, I printed the map out black-and-white, colored the spider the same colors as the mini, and at the right moment, the spider escaped off the spit and I put the figure on the table. The player reaction was so satisfying, and I didn’t even expect it, so wanted to note this for future games if there’s a way to make map elements highly-interactable.
