Death of D&D Miniatures

[Firebeetle]

For the first time since the release of 4e, I find myself questioning a WotC decision.

The D&D miniature line was a game changer. Before, I never ran miniatures, ever. I tried tokens and quickly abandoned them during 3.0. Then came the minis, and I was hooked. I have a huge collection.

4e was definitely inspired by the D&D miniatures game (among other things). The combat mechanic is focused on miniatures. The D&D tiles are focused on miniatures. All the rules are written in the format of miniatures.

I find changing to tokens from minis to be a step backward. I think they really add to the game and create a culture in which miniatures are just the expectation.

Of course, I stopped buying the minis when I switched the lead (well, pewter and sometimes tin). I started painting, and stopped buying D&D minis by the case and contented myself with singles. So I guess I contributed to the problem of lagging sales. However, by buying into the miniatures market in general I help the RPG industry in general and therefore the market leader, WotC and D&D, but I digress.

I would really rather see a retool of the market strategy here, instead of just making some special kits. I think the random distribution is the biggest problem, as the secondary market shows. They should make limited edition box sets of different general minis, so players can buy what they like (in general) and get good value for their money. Boxes of monsters types, boxes of PC types, etc.

 

[Dausuul]

WotC has retooled their market strategy repeatedly over the last few years. They tried visible minis. They tried themed packs (admittedly, "lots of beholders!" was not the best choice of theme). They tried adding a very rare category. Nothing worked. If you ask me, DDM 2.0 was what did it; the skirmish game market was always much smaller than the D&D market, and it couldn't sustain a split like the 3E/4E one. After that, the line was doomed.

 

[samursus]

Miniatures, as WotC has been doing them, just doesn't work. Have you ever wondered why other companies have not tried to produce relatively cheap, varied, decent plastic pre-painted miniatures? Because its not a viable business model... WotC tried many different ways to make it work... for many, many years. They ended up producing about, what, 15 or more 40-60 miniature sets? The closest competitor is Reaper's PPM offering, and they are more expensive, of lower quality (from what I have seen) and magnitudes smaller in variety.

Whether its the price of oil going up or the downturn in the economy or a shrinking customer base; right now, it just doesn't work. I feel your pain. I LOVE the WotC Minis. I can't even look at my old pewter jobs. Besides my inexpert painting, they have mostly become bent and broken and are in many cases depressingly monotone. I only have a couple hundred (after selling my complete Harbinger and Dragoneye sets for ridiculously low price in a misguided attempt to downsize) but am sad I will have to wait (for how long?) for this particular aspect of the hobby to revitalize. But I am optimistic that it will come again.

 

[thewok]

The problem with D&D miniatures is not the product itself (though many believe it is poor quality, and I can't say that I can disregard that sentiment), but the price. They were just too expensive for people like me (with little or no disposable income after books) to buy. There was also the problem with the packaging. I didn't want to pay $22 for a grab bag of five or six minis, especially when I may never use them.

I bought the Beholder collector's set because, hey, they're frigging Beholders. I also knew exactly what I was getting. I think the secondary market that developed for D&D minis proved that this was a selling point. People would just buy singles or bundles off ebay instead of dealing with the randomness of buying a booster pack.

I'm glad that WotC is going to release CEs of minis and minis in their board games (I'm using some of the Ravenloft minis for my current campaign), but I'd also like to see multi-packs of enemies like kobolds, goblins, orcs and so on--enemies that a party is bound to see a lot of. I think these would sell fairly well.

As it is, I'm anxious for the next board game not just because I found Ravenloft to be extremely fun, but because it's bound to have a number of minis that I can use for my RP game as well.

 

[Dausuul]

The problem with D&D miniatures is not the product itself (though many believe it is poor quality, and I can't say that I can disregard that sentiment), but the price. They were just too expensive for people like me (with little or no disposable income after books) to buy. There was also the problem with the packaging. I didn't want to pay $22 for a grab bag of five or six minis, especially when I may never use them.

I bought the Beholder collector's set because, hey, they're frigging Beholders. I also knew exactly what I was getting. I think the secondary market that developed for D&D minis proved that this was a selling point. People would just buy singles or bundles off ebay instead of dealing with the randomness of buying a booster pack.

The key point you're missing here is that those cheap secondary market offerings were made possible by the randomized booster packs. People were willing to pay top dollar for minis like Raistlin and Drizzt and the big dragons, so the resellers bought up DDM by the case and opened the packs to get the high-end minis. But that meant they had a whole pile of commons and uncommons to offload somehow. Those commons and uncommons could be, and were, sold at a much lower price than would have been possible without the "chase rares" subsidizing them.

I refer you to Merric's Law of Miniatures. Low prices, a good selection, or non-randomized packaging: Pick two. You can't have them all.

 

[beepeearr]

I used to buy several cases of them, until they raised prices for third time, decreased the number of minis per box and the case sizes too. It was the last time I bought them, three cases I wound up buying and wound up tripling up most of my rares, and they weren't even the good ones. The previous sets had been awesome usually I would only miss out on 4-5 rares and get 4-5 of each uncommon, so all good. That set I was short like 10 or 12 rares, the set before that i was short 7 (the first were they only had 12 instead of 16 in a case). It stopped being cost effective and the quality seemed to be getting worse, the quantity was decreased, while the price kept increasing, so not surprised they are canceled now.

 

[beepeearr]

I refer you to Merric's Law of Miniatures. Low prices, a good selection, or non-randomized packaging: Pick two. You can't have them all.

Yeah, but towards the end all they were offering were 1 (good selection, and not all that useful when randomized). At 8.99 they were cheap, then they went up to 9.99 ok, then up and up, then fewer and fewer minis, just looked at where they ended up 21.99 for 6 minis in the huge pack, more then 3 dollars a mini. And the non huge were not much better, 14.99 for just 5 minis, wow, that's just bad. Oh and 9.99 for the heroes set and those were pretty poor quality paint jobs.

 

[thewok]

The key point you're missing here is that those cheap secondary market offerings were made possible by the randomized booster packs. People were willing to pay top dollar for minis like Raistlin and Drizzt and the big dragons, so the resellers bought up DDM by the case and opened the packs to get the high-end minis. But that meant they had a whole pile of commons and uncommons to offload somehow. Those commons and uncommons could be, and were, sold at a much lower price than would have been possible without the "chase rares" subsidizing them.

I'm not missing that point at all. I'm just saying that unless you were playing the skirmish game, it was a waste of money to bother with boosters. It was definitely more cost-effective to go to ebay or whatever secondary site you favored and grab some singles.

The price wasn't even really the main issue. It was the chance of getting usable minis for the RP game. Had WotC packed up the common minis into theme packs or something, they could have set the price, rather than losing sales to the secondary market.

I refer you to Merric's Law of Miniatures. Low prices, a good selection, or non-randomized packaging: Pick two. You can't have them all.

This is not a theory to which I subscribe, as I believe you can have all three. I would even go so far as to say that Wizards' D&D line had none of them simultaneously.

I understand you mean a "wide selection," and I can say that WotC certainly had that. The problem was that the selction was too wide. Out of any one set, there were maybe four to 5 minis I'd want. And I'd want them in bulk.

Wizards has proven that it can do inexpensive, non-randomized minis with the board games. When I bought Castle Ravenloft, I not only got a great board game, but I also got 40 miniatures I can use (and currently am using) in my RP game. The game is $65, but that also includes the tiles, the cards, the scenarios, and so on. Let me reiterate: Forty miniatures for $65. It would cost $154 to get the same number of minis from the last D&D Miniatures set, and even then, I'd not be guaranteed to have three rat swarms, or three kobolds or three wraiths.

Are the Ravenloft minis painted? No. And I consider that something of a bonus, actually. The plastic also seems to be a higher quality than the standard minis, too, as it is less prone to warping in the packaging. I only got one mini reminiscent of Michael Jackson doing his lean in the Smooth Criminal video, rather than the 50% or so I'd get from my DDM boosters. But that may also be a result of the packaging.

 

[Alisair Longreach]

The reason WotC can make cheap minis with the board games is because they can reuse the molds from their DDM line.

 

[AlioTheFool]

Rather than write out a whole new post, I'll just re-post what I wrote in the official DDM WotC forum:

Non-random doesn't work as a business model. It drives me insane that years later people are still stuck on the "I'd pay xx dollars for a pack of monsters that I want." That's exactly why Wizards couldn't do it. You'd buy one, maybe two, packs of kobolds, or skeletons, or whatever and then you'd never buy another pack of that monster type. Random, or at least semi-random was the only way to go.

What I think WotC should have done, however, is move toward a "best of both worlds" scenario. Rather than the visible model they went with, they should have created packs with multiple common-level visibles, with uncommon and rares hidden inside. For example, a package with one goblin, one hobgoblin, and one bugbear visible, all common or uncommon quality. Put a rare/very rare or two and uncommons hidden in the box.

Then people know that if they buy 4 packs of those, they'll have a fair sized encounter group of low level monsters. In addition, they'd be getting the pieces in the box that you only need a small number of, such as a blue dragon or balor demon.

The problem with the visibles they went with was that people only needed a small handful of them. How many huge green dragons or beholders do I really need? If those had been, say, different models of skeletons, I'd have an incentive to buy more packs of them. If they were common/uncommon level monsters that people can use bunches of, there's no reason to not buy more. I couldn't justify buying more packs of the green dragon after I had already bought three.