In Place of Chainmail?

[Ds Da Man]

I have bought craploads of GWS stuff, and the piece together figures are awesome, and generally I end up with lots of leftovers. I had a couple figurs that were broke in half, so I bought some of the cheap plastic big cats bags that you find at toy stores. Cutting the heads off of the big cats, dremeling out a little extra, then I glued the upper torsos of the broke figures, creating some cool wemic/centaurian type figures. I then used the leftover swords/sheilds/etc. to dress them up. They turned out great.

 

[Limper]

Curious... why didn't they do it inexpensive and put the rest out of business. Being part of Hasboro SHOULD have allowed for this to happen... minis are cool, but they cost to much.

 

[Ds Da Man]

Yea, thats what I meant with the cheap platic figures (They could still be very detailed). Think about how many people would have bought WotC mini's if you could buy a pack (20 or so) of various mini's for 5-10 bucks a piece. They would have seriously dipped into GW following. Add good low price mini's with D&D and a tabletop battle system that will allow you to easily use your current PC, and WotC would have had it made.

 

[Limper]

Yes well that sort of thinking has never been their forte'.

 

[kengar]

Wow. Most of my points have already been made, but I'll post anyway since I just can't keep quiet.

I never played Chainmail (partly because I just didn't get the rules), but I bought several of the minis to use for D&D monsters. The fact is, they are/were just too @#%$* expensive to buy more than a couple of each type. I suppose the logic on WotC's part was that since it was "skirmish" game and not for large-scale battles, the need for bunches of figures wasn't so great.

The problem is some gamers -like myself- want the minis for RPG, not wargaming. The lack of PC-type minis and the cost of something as simple as an orc was a turn-off.

One of the things GW does well are those boxes of plastic orcs/dwarves/elves/etc. You can get 6 or 8 critters for less than what you would pay for two Chanimail orcs. Granted, some of the GW stuff is a bit goofy for "normal" D&D, but for fighting a horde of goblins, a group of players is so impressed and into it when you place down a dozen or so painted figures that they aren't going to sweat the fact that one of the buggers is picking his nose (or whatever).

Even the metal minis from other companies (Ral Partha, etc.) weren't as much as the average cost from Chainmail. Chainmail had some awesome sculpting, but that talent might have been better spent on minis that could have been used as individual character minis for D&D than the monsters.

It takes a little looking sometimes to find a particular creature's mini; especially if you're trying to avoid the "cross-genre" one's like orcs with nail-guns and powered armor. Which is why I was initially so interested in the CM line, I figured this would be my source of 3e monster mini for the campaigns I ran. Sadly, between the cost and the lack of D&D gaming support in the product line, it didn't work out.

 

[Henrix]

Just some things out of the top of my head:
(Well, it turned out to be a longish rant.)


First, all of you who ask why WotC didn't start with putting out inexpensive plastic miniatures - plastic figures are cheap only if you make them in very large quantities.
GW can do that for some of their grunt figures (standard orkz, etc), but as soon as they do any kind of special mini, or part of mini, it is metal!
Why? Well the mould for plastic minis costs perhaps (guesstimating from several years old figures) U$ 10 000.
The mould for pewter/lead/whatever minis costs (I'd have to buy it all from scratch), $30-50.

So, if you're not doing thousends of minis that all are identical, what would you choose? Right.


Back to Chainmail, what was good and what was bad?

The combat system was very close to standard D&D - which was good as many know the sytem, and it was easy to port stats from one game to another.
The bad part is that it was overly complicated, not suited for more than ten or so minis per side.

When I look at a war game, I'm mostly interested in CCC, i.e. Command, Control and Communications*.
Chainmail did very well on those.
The command points and the orders were very good. And the fact that you had limited control over most of your figures was very nice.
It lead to a lot of interesting tactical choices.

The morale rules were sketchy, but there's not much one can do in a skirmish game with so few minis. There's not much fun in making break tests for your warband when a third is down, if all you've got is 5 figures.

The miniatures; some liked them, others did not. Tastes vary. But they were too expensive. Yes, GW can charge as much for a mini, but that's GW, and it's for a leader or hero figure, their basic troops are much cheaper.
And why were they not all the same scale? Most of them were nice 28mms, but the gnolls and the female paladin in the basic box were a lot bigger, 32mm or thereabout! (The gnoll trooper is 40mm.)

So, in the end, what about Chainmail? Was it good? Well, I liked it, despite some minor failings. But was it, really, saleable? Could it sell lots and lots of minis?
No.

What I like in a game, the three C's, tactical intricacies, etc, that Chainmail had, doesn't sell.
If you want to sell miniatures on the scale WotC wants, and GW does, you'll have to make a game, and minis, that'll attract the young teenagers, the 13-14 year olds. It's they who buy lots and lots of minis.
And 13-14 year old kids don't care about tactical intricacies or CCC. They just get frustrated when their figures don't do as they want - a lot of the kids I see playing WHFB/40K think that the morale rules are too much! They just want their cool minis to kill all the other minis. (And there's nothing wrong with that.)


I'll stop ranting now, it's getting too long already



* Communication in pre-modern rules is easy. Some games fail even in that, but not Chainmail.

 

[Pramas]

The problem is some gamers -like myself- want the minis for RPG, not wargaming. The lack of PC-type minis and the cost of something as simple as an orc was a turn-off.

I've seen several people comment on the supposed lack of PC minis. My question to you: did you even look at the line? When we were designing the minis, one of our goals was to have a lot of minis that could be used by roleplayers. Hell, three of the factions are humans, elves, and dwarves, PC races all. There were figs like the dwarf fighter, dwarf cleric, human paladin, human sorcerer, gray elf wizard, gray elf duelist (with a double sword no less; what other company made minis with such exotic weapons?), gray elf snakestrike duelist (with spiked chain), human sorcerer, half-orc fighter, halfling sneak, gnome infiltrator, gray elf warsinger (hello bard), wood elf scout, human death cleric, etc. etc. There was even an aasimar cleric and a tiefling fighter for who like planetouched characters.

So while you can say a lot of things about Chainmail, I don't think a lack of PC minis is a fair assessment of the line.

 

[mmadsen]

I've seen several people comment on the supposed lack of PC minis. My question to you: did you even look at the line?

I know I didn't, but I did get the distinct impression (from the marketing?) that the line was full of Gnolls. And I remember a Skeletal Troll. And some other weirdness.

So while you can say a lot of things about Chainmail, I don't think a lack of PC minis is a fair assessment of the line.

Fair enough. Is your chief complaint that they ditched the mass-battle concept? Or were there other, bigger flaws in their strategy?

 

[mmadsen]

So what would people like to see in place of Chainmail? It seems like people want:

• Compatability with D&D -- Characters shouldn't need special stats for the skirmish game; they should be easy to convert.
• Cheap Plastic Figures -- Everyone can use hordes of Goblins and Orcs, even if they're not playing a wargame.
• Mass Combat -- If it's just five guys on a side, why not use the D&D rules we already know?

I'd like rules that make it easy enough for the heroic PCs to lead armies of men-at-arms against the Goblin king's armies.

 

[VoodooGroves]

I see 2 things

I see two things...

First, mass combat that is easily translated from D&D and makes "sense" in D&D terms. In other words, relative strengths and weaknesses should be the same, but generalized.

Second, a real skirmish game that is not as arbitrary. What's the point in playing Chainmail? Just to move guys around? Do they get better? Do you win stuff? It doesn't have an RPG or other plot behind it like a mass combat game....anyway, check out the thread I put over in "d20 System Games"
here