fed up with mini randomness...back to counters? (teeny-tiny rant)

[Keeper of Secrets]

I sort of like the minis. As far as not having enough frost giants, can't you just substitute the frost giant with one of the other giants?

 

[Foundry of Decay]

I have to admit, my initial enthusiasm is wearing off as well.

I wasn't too twitchy about the randomized thing to start with. While I wasn't pleased I wasn't wildly against it.

See, I heard that after a while, the 'mid level' critters would start to become more common (or at least, uncommon) and for this I was willing to hold out.

But now I'm finding more and more things that my player's characters would enounter are in the 'rare' end of every pack. Mind flayers is my biggest jaw clencher, and has started to turn me very sour on the future of these cursed and habit forming recycled record blobs.

Why must a very common mid level enemy be 'rare'? My hopes, like the original poster, are dashed when it comes to encountering more than one of these things in any reasonable capacity. And with the 'remake' model in the next set being rare as well, I've basically given up on bothering to get a decent amount of these.

Some would mention the aftermarket. Yes, it is brilliant for commons, or even uncommons. Hell, I picked up 10 Kuo-toa, and 8 Dretch demons for a steal, and I've nabbed a few others for a good price as well.

However, when it comes to rares, especially desirable ones like mind flayers, Warforged titans, Dragons and Gauths, people go right the heck out of their thinkmeats bidding on these. I wholeheartedly refuse to pay nearly 30 CND for a single (1) mind flayer. These things are plastic.. If you could break them open and have a powder within that cured cancer, I'd be all for it, but paying so much for the 'privilage' of owning a small, deformed, and badly painted bit of vinyl is.. Well.. A bit loony.

Some suggest Reaper, and yes, Reaper does a respectable job, but I don't like their 'flayer' sculpts (ones that wield a log as a weapon), and they are far better for PC sculpts than they are for a variety of monsters, simply because they have to be very careful not to step on any legal toes when it comes to D&D canon.

So indeed, my enthusiasm is really starting to wear down on these things. I'm getting tired of being disappointed by having to buy a few dozen packs just for a rare (or even uncommon), and ending up with a few hundred PC sculpts that I will *never* use (I tend to buy metal miniatures for PC's, since I paint, but that is just me).

My toss of the copper.

 

[D+1]

Okay, so I guess I can forget about having an encounter with more than one frost giant. Sure, maybe I can trade for one or buy one online. But why does preparing my game have to be so much work? Why must I now pay 20 bucks for a piece of plastic?

You don't "must" got to do anything of the kind. You can still buy metals and paint it. You can trade one rare for another (yeah, not always a good option nor even always an option period). But it is what it is.

I was excited that WotC could supply me with dozens of cheap minis - just not the ones I need.

Well unfortunately they're not manufacturing minis for roleplaying purposes (that's strictly a secondary use for them), they're manufacturing units for a... collectible miniatures game.

Someone needs to start a competing product line. Someone needs to mass produce monsters and cannon-fodder creatures the same way they make army men. They don't even need to be painted.

If manufacturers of metal minis still stay in business I can't see that a competitor COULDN'T hire the sculptors and the injection molding machinery and send them off to foreign lands to be cheaply hand painted and MAKE MONEY. Heck, they probably could even just take orders online. I've purchased virtually all my WotC minis online by the case (only a few boosters from the FLGS) or individually to complete sets.

I'd certainly be willing to fork out repeatedly for shipping costs if I could order "3 Frost giants, 6 ogres, and 8 winter wolves", pay prices even roughly approximating the average cost for WotC minis, and be able to recieve them in time for a planned game a week or so later. [Not just fantasy minis either. I've had a game in mind for a few years now. A SF campaign based on the 1994 X-Com computer game. I just don't want to run it without being able to use minis since my original concept entailed it being an INTENSELY accessorized endeavor. I want aliens in a wide variety (but especially "greys" - which nobody makes) and then I'd build my own set pieces to run the combats.]

There IS room for a competitor. If I had the investment capital (or had a hope in hell of obtaining it) and even passing knowledge of where to hire away the necessary sculptors, manufacturing and other personnel, I'd BE that competitor inside of 6 months.

 

[Droogie]

Since your solo Frost Giant won't be doing you any good, I'll be happy to give you 10 or 12 Common minis of your choice for it.

Thats ok. I still want to keep him. He's pretty neat. And he's mine mine mine.

While stopping in at my FLGS this week, I saw a bag of 100 3d zombies for $10.00. I guess they were initially designed for the game "Zombies" but would work just fine for d20 tabletop. The advantage of the flat counters, however, is that you can NUMBER them individually.

Indeed. I have "Zombies". I bought it at GenCon last year. The board game is kinda meh but the zombie figures rock. And we have used them in our RPG. You can even buy glow in the dark ones, I think. How's THAT for Gamma World?

Then again I really would like a cloud giant.

I've got three of 'em now. I think its my least favorite huge. For some reason, the morningstar looks ...uh...obscene.

Our solution? We got a 1/2" dowel and a 1" dowel, and we sliced them into about a hundred little pieces. This gave us minis that are 5'=1/2", and everything seems to fit. I'd love to be using minis and counters, but I just find the scale issues are far easier to handle when we shrink it down. I just need to learn how to paint with a really fine brush, so I can at least make little faces or something on the little pieces of wood (currently they're just numbered).

Has anybody out there tried this, or had any luck with buying counter collections and modifying the PDF printing size to get smaller minis?

I used to make my own counters with CC2 Character Artist. One of my projects was to make a small collection of half-inch scale counters (1" = 10 ft.) Pros: They doubled the playing surface, and they were so dang adorable.
Cons: My eyesight is getting worse, and the tiny pictures and numbers were getting a bit hard to see. Also, because of the size, they were a bit tough to move around the board, esp. if there were a large group of them battling it out in close quarters. When my players would try to move in such a melee, they would invariably fat-finger the attempt and scatter the little counters everywhere.

To solve that problem, I bought some of that sticky poster-tack stuff at an office supply store and stuck some at the end of a pen. Then when a creature was killed, I'd tap him with the pen and gingerly lift him off the board without disturbing the other counters.

I liked them, and my players seemed to as well, until the D&D minis came out.

if you want a "Bag o' Undead", or "Box o' Goblins"... just buy single D&D minis online! There's *plenty* of commons that go for anywhere from 50 cents to a quarter or even less per mini. In fact, thanks to the D&D minis (and thus thanks in a large part to their randomised nature), there has *never* before been so such a wide selection of single, extremely cheap, prepainted minis.

Don't like the randomness? Don't buy the random packs then! Buy the cheap singles. And don't complain the rares and some of the uncommons are too expensive to buy as singles... nobody's *forcing* you to buy them. Whether you use them for roleplaying or for the minis game, you're still better *with* the D&D minis available than without.

Yep. Done that. I have a nice goblin collection now.

I know I'm not being forced to buy. And I'm not going to. I will not pay $20 for a plastic troll. We've just been doing the substitution game: "Ok, this troll is a troll. This ogre is a troll, and these two ogre ravagers are trolls as well. The Owlbear here is the troll king on his throne."

It would be nice if I could have some "real" trolls for cheaper. Hasn't ruined my game by any means; we still have lots of laughs playing D&D. But from an aesthetic standpoint, I'd like more trolls.

Some suggest Reaper, and yes, Reaper does a respectable job, but I don't like their 'flayer' sculpts (ones that wield a log as a weapon), and they are far better for PC sculpts than they are for a variety of monsters, simply because they have to be very careful not to step on any legal toes when it comes to D&D canon.

I do have some reaper minis- best sculpts I've ever seen, despite some scale issues.

You don't "must" got to do anything of the kind. You can still buy metals and paint it. You can trade one rare for another (yeah, not always a good option nor even always an option period). But it is what it is.

Used to piant, but I don't really want to deal with it anymore.

Shrug. Like you said, it is what it is.

 

[Orius]

But now I'm finding more and more things that my player's characters would enounter are in the 'rare' end of every pack. Mind flayers is my biggest jaw clencher, and has started to turn me very sour on the future of these cursed and habit forming recycled record blobs.

Why must a very common mid level enemy be 'rare'? My hopes, like the original poster, are dashed when it comes to encountering more than one of these things in any reasonable capacity. And with the 'remake' model in the next set being rare as well, I've basically given up on bothering to get a decent amount of these.

Some would mention the aftermarket. Yes, it is brilliant for commons, or even uncommons. Hell, I picked up 10 Kuo-toa, and 8 Dretch demons for a steal, and I've nabbed a few others for a good price as well.

However, when it comes to rares, especially desirable ones like mind flayers, Warforged titans, Dragons and Gauths, people go right the heck out of their thinkmeats bidding on these. I wholeheartedly refuse to pay nearly 30 CND for a single (1) mind flayer. These things are plastic.. If you could break them open and have a powder within that cured cancer, I'd be all for it, but paying so much for the 'privilage' of owning a small, deformed, and badly painted bit of vinyl is.. Well.. A bit loony.

Some suggest Reaper, and yes, Reaper does a respectable job, but I don't like their 'flayer' sculpts (ones that wield a log as a weapon), and they are far better for PC sculpts than they are for a variety of monsters, simply because they have to be very careful not to step on any legal toes when it comes to D&D canon.

So indeed, my enthusiasm is really starting to wear down on these things. I'm getting tired of being disappointed by having to buy a few dozen packs just for a rare (or even uncommon), and ending up with a few hundred PC sculpts that I will *never* use (I tend to buy metal miniatures for PC's, since I paint, but that is just me).

I would say that's a downside.

For me, if I needed a giant, I'd buy a metal mini, if I didn't have a plastic D&D mini, and use the appropriate color scheme to paint it. Same thing goes for dragons, it doesn't matter to me if the scupt matches the MM pic, since it's just artwork anyway.

But for unique D&D monsters, particularly non-SRD monsters, making them rare is kind of sucky, if they're the only type of that mini you can find. I can see not making them common, after all, who uses hundreds of mind flayers and beholders? But rare mean that a DM who wants to use the monsters in encounter either can't do it, or has to use some sort of counter as a placeholder, unless they've been playing for many years and have a sizable collection of the old Ral Partha D&D minis.

I think making mini of the iconics or PC types with "special powers" for the mini game as the bulk of the rares would be better, since I don't really need those minis. But unfortunately marketing isn't on my side, because it's probably more profitable for WotC to make the classic monsters rare and drum up sales, rather than a Krusk mini because people don't care about getting iconic or unmistakely 3.5e minis, and may consequently buy less than try to complete a collection.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I was gonna get some Fiery Dragon counters but the artwork is atrocious. Anyone know of any with decent art?

 

[Atom Again]

Minis are nice but I have come to the conclusion that they are not worth it to me. I'm sure the cost:fun ratio is way better for others but I just can't keep up with any mini game for very long. After this last time I swore off minis for a while and all collectable games forever.

Amen, brother.

Miniatures = horrible, horrible, horrible expense. I sold off ALL my minis recently (I had over 200) and now I'm back to my counters, of which I have a few thousand. THAT is the way to go, baby.

 

[Atom Again]

I was gonna get some Fiery Dragon counters but the artwork is atrocious. Anyone know of any with decent art?

????? Are we talking about the same counters? http://www.fierydragon.com/

I've always thought the artwork is superb. [shrug] Different strokes, and all that.

One thing is for sure, though: you won't find counters with better artwork than these.

 

[Spatula]

I like D&D miniatures, but I have a similar issue: I don't understand why nobody has produced full-color monster cards yet. 5" by 7" glossy cardstock, illustration on the front, stats on the back.

I had a set of these back in the 1e days. TSR published them, and the full-color painted art on the front was really nice (certainly of a better quality than the B&W line art in the 1e MM).

 

[TheAuldGrump]

If you don't mind painting them there are still cheap packs of metal miniatures around. Discounthobby.com has sets that contain 24 figures for $15 in their Dark Ages line. They also have sets of 4 for $7.50

For me part of the fun is painting them and have other folks go 'oooh, aaah', plus I hate random packaging.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* Fortress Figures also has a line of cheap, resin miniatures, running 10 for $10.