Dear Hasbro: about those minis

[Darrell]

Exactly. If you play D&D, most of the monsters are useful.

Depends. The games I run, I use tons of orcs and goblins and skeletons and zombies and such. Animals (wolves, bears, hyenas, spiders, etc.), about the same. Tons of humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, etc., too. More exotic critters, not so much. Demons, devils, elemental critters, drow, githyan-zer-kai, and all that rot; almost never. Colorspawn Slashcritterz? No.

My games aren't terribly 'high' fantasy. The locals are far too busy worrying about orc warbands roaming the fringes of the settled lands, looting, raping, and killing folk in every village on the western border...or about some fool necromancer raising an army of skeletons to press his claim on the barony...to think about plane-hopping or dragon-crossbreeding.

The type of pack I suggested earlier (basically, a pack o' commons) would be of immense value to someone like me (and I don't think I'm the only one who runs games like that), and wouldn't affect the collector/rarity issue at all, since the pack would be composed of common minis, and uncommons and rares would still be in the random packs.

See, my LGS doesn't sell single minis, even as a secondary market thing. The flea markets around here carry standard redneck crap (bootleg Larry the Cable Guy DVDs, NASCAR logo fish-scalers, 'Made-in-Outer-Slobovia' hunting knives, and such), not D&D minis. I don't use eBay, because you pretty well have to have a Paypal account, and I won't...ever. I buy things with cash only.

So, I'm reduced to trading; meaning I have to locate the people online who have what I want, and want what I have. Not a bad deal, since there is usually a collector or two willing to trade me a butt-load of the commons I want for a few rares that I have; but I'd much rather be able to simply buy those commons outright.

I realize it's probably never going to happen, but it'd be nice. :\

Regards,
Darrell

 

[Darrell]

See now, you don't need to be rude about 'Three Dragon Ante' to make your point. It's actually a fun card game and worth picking up.

Sorry, man, but I disagree. I was given a set as an 'end-of-the-run' gift on the closing night of a play I was doing. I played it twice, and gave it to my nephew. I can't understand how it got the green light, other than Hasbro/Wizards trying to find a use for all the extra card-printing machines left over from Magic's heyday.

Regards,
Darrell

 

[Allensh]

Right now, Milton Bradley is actually doing something about this, on a smaller scale. The "HeroScape" game sells minis just the right size for D&D, and sells them in sets, and in clear blister packs. You know what you're getting, and what you're NOT getting.

WoTC is trying to use the "Magic: The Gathering" sales model to sell minis, artificially "valuable" mini's mixed in with everything else, so you have to take your chances...

But what's not being considered is some other company getting into the minis game. Not the high dollar pewter minis from Ral Partha, et al, but a cheap but still good looking set/series of minis from someone else. Sets of 10-12 minis, prepainted and maybe even with SRD stats and a copy of the OGL in the box.

A known quantity for a known price. I KOW I'd buy them! What about the rest of you? A 10 pack of prepainted dwarves for $!0 bucks? A 20 pack of kobolds, a 20 pack of skeletons and zombies? A ten pack of (fill in your own blank?).

I'd buy it in a heartbeat, and I don't really mind the D&D minis or the way they are sold!

Allen

 

[MerricB]

There have been companies that have investigated making such miniature packs... but the price is phenomenal. Making plastic minis has a far, far higher start-up cost than making metal minis, and you really need to make them in bulk.

Cheers!

 

[molonel]

That's kinda apples and elephants. You don't go to the LGS and get a grab bag of a board game, a comic, a novel, a mini and die. You get a random assortment of D&D minis from a pre-described set. Big difference.

Excuse me, but since I am the customer here, I know what I want. You don't. I'm frustrated, and so are a lot of other people, because I'd like to be able to buy non-randomized miniatures. If you like never knowing exactly what you're getting, that's just peachy and you must enjoy asking strangers to order your meal for you in a restaurant, or giving $1,000 to the person at the ticket counter at the airport, and saying, "Just send me any old place! I don't care!"

 

[BroccoliRage]

Err, no. They're too big for D&D. Base size is 1.5" rather than 1", and the scale is larger as well.

Cheers!

That depends on hw in-depth you get about your mini size. I tend to use one inch hexes and minis of relatively similiar size, many folks who are playing D&D don't care about .5".

I'm sure if I wanted to dissect the rules that would make some difference, but I don't: I've been using a variety of mini's for years with no problem.

 

[Li Shenron]

The randomness is simply what made me not buy a single pack of minis ever.

Not only I would certainly get something I don't like or need, but also the distribution criteria is very bad for me: at least if you got things like "8 random undead" or "12 random demons including 2 large" it would be way more acceptable.

Instead, the sets are too much random themselves: namely they have a theme, but in practice the theme is only in a minority of the figures... If you buy an "aberration" pack, how many actual aberrations do you get? How many PC minis are scattered into each set?

These things for me mean that maybe half or more of what I would get from a pack will be useless (especially tons of PC minis), and the minis I will actually use would effectively not be that cheap after all. Same with secondary market, it eliminates randomness but increases the average price, adds postal costs, and requires more time.

I would probably buy their minis only if WotC started selling them "on demand", which technically should be a piece of cake from the web (like you buy music for IPod), but it's obviously not so lucrative so it's not going to happen.

 

[molonel]

Instead, the sets are too much random themselves: namely they have a theme, but in practice the theme is only in a minority of the figures... If you buy an "aberration" pack, how many actual aberrations do you get? How many PC minis are scattered into each set? These things for me mean that maybe half or more of what I would get from a pack will be useless (especially tons of PC minis), and the minis I will actually use would effectively not be that cheap after all. Same with secondary market, it eliminates randomness but increases the average price, adds postal costs, and requires more time. I would probably buy their minis only if WotC started selling them "on demand", which technically should be a piece of cake from the web (like you buy music for IPod), but it's obviously not so lucrative so it's not going to happen.

Bingo.

 

[Frostmarrow]

Might I suggest WoTC release random themed sets. You know you get a themed set; orcs, bandits, undead; but you don't know which one. Works for me!

 

[Aus_Snow]

I just don't get the whole discussion mentality. They are what they are. Why spend time discussing it [--on a discussion forum--]*?

(. . .)

The minis WOTC produces come in random packs. That's it. Discuss them or don't discuss them.

FIFY.

* A little additional context, for further clarity.