Digital miniatures to be converted to plastic miniatures?

[Thornir Alekeg]

I guess you guys can tell that I started playing D&D with a crayon filled d20, a blue covered basic D&D book, a pad of graph paper, a pencil and my imagination.

I know that the game started with minis, I guess I was just making the point that you really don't need all this stuff to play. It's neat and everything but not essential. I admit I would likely buy one for my favorite player character.

Well, I started with a little more, but probably around the same time. The big reason we needed imagination was because those Ral Partha miniatures we had were so bad.

"What the heck are those lump of metal?"
"Those are goblins. See, that little bump is its nose and that big dent is its mouth..."

 

[D.Shaffer]

I thought this was a myth that was debunked. That we would NOT have to pay for digital miniatures for the online gaming table.

I think the debunking was for random digital miniatures, ala booster packs, actually. Someone with better searching skills will have to confirm that one, though.

 

[Agamon]

POD minis would be ex-pen-sive. They'd have to be hand-crafted originals, not mass produced. I can't see WotC offering this, but they might allow a 3rd party do it. And the price of creating, painting and shipping the mini would not really affect the DDM line hardly at all. Except that we might see a few less heroic types and more monsters, which would be a good thing.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Bet they go for $10 a figure, not including shipping. Neat but not entirely needed from my point of view. More and more, the game seems to be getting away from the imagination and more into the physical realm. Terrain, dungeon tiles, custom miniatures, gold coins... next thing you know we will all be wearing costumes around the table.

Not entirely needed, but miniature customization has been around about as long as D&D. Using the material printing technology to make it should make it a lot easier for the average person, and that'll make it a lot more popular.

I mean, heck, my friend is seriously thinking about one of those Figureprints for his WoW character, even with it at $100. $20 for a D&D miniature of my anthropomorphic tyrannosaur half-dragon monk would be awesome, and make me toss the Mage Knight figure I was using for him.

Brad

 

[Nebulous]

$20 is absolutely the highest that i would go for a customized miniature. But since i would rather DM than play, i would probably only get one for a BBEG.

 

[WyzardWhately]

Huh. I'd do it if their system for character design was absolutely awesome, I was going to be playing the character for a long time, and the price wasn't too awful high. But the absolutely awesome design system is the toughest hurdle of the three, I think. They do probably need to look at CoH and try to go even better than that. Also, how do they color this stuff? Can the figure printing hardware paint them? Or does some painter somewhere get a picture, the unpainted figure-print and go to town? Because if I'm going to have to paint it myself anyway, I might as well just order a mini from one of the ten thousand mini companies out there. It's not like they don't have some good ones.

Also, this would be *much* easier if the minis were at a larger scale. Going 54mm was one of the coolest things HackMaster did. I'd be way more likely to go for a custom mini if the game was standardized for the minis to be bigger and thus stand out more on the table.

 

[JDJblatherings]

3d printers are useable now for limited production. They are also available for under $25,000 . To put this in perspective my first postscript compatible B/W 300 DPI laser printer cost me a little over $10,000 about 18 years ago.

 

[WhatGravitas]

POD minis would be ex-pen-sive. They'd have to be hand-crafted originals, not mass produced.

Hence the idea of 3D printers. Regular scupts, perhaps even cast? No way to do that. But 3D printers... are getting better and better, and if we're talking about 3D minis, they'll have all the wireframes needed to produce a nice dxf from it... and put it into a 3D printer.

And they HAVE come a long way, look here - "Print a Part" and their pricing. And here is a short thread on the Reaper forums.

A company dedicated to minis, with WotC's (and hence indirect Hasbro's) backup, could at least deliver great unpainted minis. The painting though, would really eat money.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Eldragon]

If they do not need to have character animations, I don't expect WotC to have too much trouble coming up with a character designer that have a lot of flexibility with millions of combinations for cloths, armor, hats, swords etc.

Comparing the character designer to games like City of Heroes and Neverwinter is a good start, but starts to break down when you consider the fact that the character needed to be animated. When designing a armor for games, its hard not to have severe clipping issues. e.g. Its much easier to make a cloak and robe on a wizard that looks really good if it does not need to flow in the breeze.

 

[Mirtek]

Bet they go for $10 a figure, not including shipping. Neat but not entirely needed from my point of view. More and more, the game seems to be getting away from the imagination and more into the physical realm. Terrain, dungeon tiles, custom miniatures, gold coins... next thing you know we will all be wearing costumes around the table.

As far as I have read it will cost $115 to get your WoW character, I can't imagine that the D&D characters would be any cheaper.

Sure, they're smaller, but I guess that this actually makes them more expensive to 3d print.