New Gaming Product Marketing Inquiry

[Dasher]

As long as I've been GM'ing DnD I've always liked using miniatures in game. They have numerous benefits for the GM and the players that I think everyone here understands. Being as lazy as I am though I find that I rarely have them painted and usually due finansis I don't have as many as I want of the right type of creatures. No big deal, I just use whatever's close and call it whatever critter I want it to be. So now I have representation for all my creatures and the battle begins. During battle things tend to get confused and I lose track of who's who, usually only in larger battles. So after many setions of faking that I had everything under control and knew exactly who was fighting who, I decided I would look into coming up with an inexpensive way to provide clearly represented and trackable game pieces. What I came up with was printing cardboard picture tiles that would insert into a plastic 1" dia. base piece. The base piece excepts a numbered flag for tracking and a color printed cardboard tile that can be interchanged with whatever creature image you want to use. I started off making a 1" dia. tile, 2" dia. tile and 1"x2" tile to accomodate the sizes I use most. As for the inexpensive part of the idea, the final product would be a bargin at ruffly $18 U.S. for 10 - 1" base tiles, 5 - 2" base tiles, 5 - 1"x2" base tiles, 80 - 1" creature tiles, 9 - 2" creature tiles and 9 - 1"x2" creature tiles. Now manufacturing and tooling isn't cheap though so I wanted know if the community thought this is something they might find useful or had any input before I go sink thousands of dollars into it. I'd also like to know of other features that you might want or what monsters would be prefed?

Thanks
Dasher

 

[Dasher]

Game Tile Picture

I guess a picture of the game piece would be helpful.

Dasher

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Re: Game Tile Picture

I guess a picture of the game piece would be helpful.

Dasher

I'd like to see it with the flag attached.

 

[Valmur_Dwur]

It looks good and I could see myself buying something like that. But probably only 1 set/bag/bunch whatever

 

[Vrylakos]

What I'd like to see would be similar products compatible with Fiery Dragon's Counter Collection and the counters in Dragon.

Hm, then I could actually see me buying the Counter Collection...


Vrylakos

 

[2WS-Steve]

I'm with Vrylakos on this; I'd want to be able to protect all those cool counters I get from Dungeon and Fiery Dragon with 'em.

With that though it'd definitely go on my buy list; probably a couple sets even.

 

[Painfully]

With so many different types of counters, I would recommend you use different colors or patterns on the chips to differentiate creature types. Large creatures need this less so than the many types of humanoids.

It would break down differently depending on how many different colors you could make, but you can work it out on paper first.

double-sided counters might be a cool idea as well. Either it could save space by putting a different creature on the back (would use the same color chip though), or you could just put a skull and bones pic to signify it's dead. I usually remove counters after they die, but others may feel differently.

I don't know if I'm too crazy about the flags. It's just another piece to go missing, and I got enough pieces of misc. things lying around the gaming table as it is. Anything to avoid extra pieces is a plus in my book, so I hope you'll be able to manage something else.

If this does work with counters, consider approaching Fiery Dragon about being able to include a "sample pack" with their next pack of counters!

I'm all for more DM/player tools of all kinds, and this sounds like a good idea to me. Painting figs is my "other" hobby, but it's been a while since I've seen any drider or gauth (beholder-kin) figs from any manufacturers out there.

If this is going to cost you thousands of dollars, I don't know if it will ever be profitable. But I suppose that's something for the accountants to work out. Good luck on making this work!