Miniatures are a wonderful hobby. With just a little time and love, a boring gray lump of metal can be transformed into a semblance of a real creature/hero/vehicle. They are required for war games, but do they have any real value for standard pen and paper RPGs?
In my experience, combat with large groups can be very confusing as to the locations of everyone involved. There's a big difference between being "at the bar" or being at the "3rd barstool from the left end of the bar" when a drunken brawl starts up. Miniatures solve this problem quite well, because there is no way for you to be confused about the location for something. Combat strategy is more advanced when you can more easily visualize the placement of furniture, innocent bystanders, and bottomless pits in a cave. Scouting out dungeons becomes easier when you can actually see what the GM is thinking, rather than trying to imagine it.
There is a problem with miniatures, however. You aren't imagining the layout of things anymore. For some people this makes it harder, if not impossible, to get into the gaming experience. Rather than being a part of a living breathing alternate reality, players are painfully aware of the fact that this is a game sitting in front of them. There are simply some times when miniatures hurt the game rather than helping it.
In general, here are a few suggestions that will help ease the transition into miniatures play for your group:
-Only use miniatures for combat, or in situations where visualizing the area is of extreme importance. Buying something from a shop doesn't need miniatures, while a highly trapped hallway does.
-Only switch over to using miniatures when it's already obvious that they will be needed. A trapped hallway has no effect if you've already set up a hallway in the center of the gaming table before they get there. Whip out a pre-drawn hallway AFTER the first trap is triggered or detected.
-Although gaming terrain such as Master Maze by Dwarven Forge may look impressive, a dry erase marker and some sort of protected grid paper will work just as well.
-Use markers and 1" grided paper to map out dungeons as the players progress. This way, they can't see what their characters haven't seen.
-Just because you've decided to use miniatures doesn't mean you need to spend hundreds of dollars on monsters that you may never use. Save your hard earned cash for important NPCs or villains and use tokens, coins, or extra dice instead. Party supply shops often have large sets of D6s for only a couple of bucks that are intended to be used in party games. Although they aren't that great of a quality, they'd be wonderful for marking the location of things in your game. Add a piece of masking tape, and then you can easily label them for quick recognition. Six sides also means that you can have six labels for different uses.
-Pre-draw all locations that are highly detailed before the game. Just bring them out when the players arrive at that location. Examples include bars, heavily trapped hallways, inns, etc.
-Try to plan a little bit of extra flexibility into your adventures, because after you've mapped an area out before a game, it's hard to explain to characters why you can't use one major portion of your dungeon that night. To help, leave specific details out of the map. You can always add more when you lay down the map, but it's too late to take some of it away.
I hope these tips help some of you to expand your roleplaying experiences into something a little more interesting. This may not work with all games or even all groups, but if used correctly, miniatures have the potential of helping make the gaming experience better.