Non-Square Minis?

[Fifth Element]

The paint on the Rakham prepainted miniatures, on the other hand, is better, and the miniatures themselves more detailed, but they are much more expensive.

I agree, but there is another important point. Due to the material used, Rackham minis are also much more prone to breakage than DDM. You have to handle them with almost as much care as metal minis. To me, that's the biggest advantage of DDM when it comes to using them to play a game - you can just throw them in a bag and bring them along. You don't have to be careful with them, and you don't need special containers to transport them. Reaper's are similar in this regard.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Just to be clear for anyone who's unsure, WotC-D&D does not assume all creatures are square (or round, I suppose, if you look at the mini bases). It's that WotC-D&D does not consider facing in its combat rules, so there is no meaning to 'front' or 'side' to a creature in combat. A creature that's longer than it is wide therefore cannot be represented that way on the battle grid, since that would require knowledge of which direction the creature is facing. It's the same type of thing that Small creatures take up as much space as Medium ones - how can a halfling possibly fill 25 square feet just by standing there? He can't; it's an abstraction.

You might not like this, but your choice to characterize the decision as "they think all creatures are square" is presumably what got Dire Bare involved. There are less misleading ways of making your point.

It is a bad abstraction - if you have a horse occupying a square are then you are treating it as square.

I would rather have facing than inflate the poor horse into a sphere like it was a balloon. de facto, they are making that poor horse a square. 3.0 did not have facing, but did have horses that were longer than they were wide.

Personally, I use rectangular bases for horses, wargs, crocodiles, etc.. And, you know? I have never had a player that had any difficulties with it - all that was necessary was to remove the penalties from facing for the math to work. The square bases solved a problem that really did not exist.

Mind you, I would prefer that Small critters could fit four to the inch on the map.

The Auld Grump

 

[Wicht]

With D&D tending to be the dominant rpg, this has also lead to most minis adopting the uniform square base sizes.

FranktheDM already mentioned this, but I thought I would elaborate. The prevalence of square bases has more to do with wargames where you want to be able to easily put large numbers of miniatures into an organized unit that is easily moved as a whole. Irregular bases make it hard to arrange your mini's in formation. Square bases make it easy as all you have to do is line up the squares and your miniatures are suddenly in a formation.

There is a secondary benefit to square bases, as opposed to irregular bases, in some games and that is they allow you to more easily determine when one character is actually within reach of another. If the bases touch they are, if they don't they are not (assuming a 5 foot reach).

The square bases have an additional use in some wargames. The angled corners allow one to easily determine line of sight within an arc of vision. In Warhammer for instance, the front of a mini's square is considered their arc of vision (the angles of the square providing a perfect 90 degree cone for vision) and they cannot see anything on the other three sides.