Pre-Painted Miniatures are back!

[Kzach]

Now all we need is some sort of price confirmation.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I was hoping for more than four figs.

Since we know one is a cleric, I'm guessing the rest fill out the "stand adventuring party" (fighter, wizard, rogue).

 

[Tanstaafl_au]

Kinda meh. I have a lot of minis already, and they will have tp be cheap or very interesting to me to buy more. Iconics from pathfinder doesnt interest me as dont follow the lore.

I really hope they are priced much cheaper than the way piazo priced singles of DDM.

 

[Herschel]

Point is, I think both WotC and Paizo are doing a good thing by getting rid of the random collectible aspect of minis.

The thing is, you're most likely very wrong on a market scale for a continuing line but fine for sporadic releases.

1. "Collectible", like it or not, adds a marketing group to the line. (As does an associated tournament game)

2. What you want for minis and what I want aren't the same, nor are either of our lists the same as Joe's, Kim's Sally's or Imelda's. The best we can hope for is a Venn Diagram model where most of our wantss fall in to the center.

3. Larger, longer production runs are lower cost per unit, which is very important in a continuing line.

As a one-off, the beginners box could do fine, but as a continuing line randomized seems to be the way pre-painted plastics sell best overall. That's how the vast majority of WizKids minis are already sold.

I'm waiting for the Paizo cult to start with the "OMFG Paizo requires miniatures to play Pathfinder it's no longer D&D it's a board game" rants.

Didn't think so.

A four miniature set of basic adventurers doesn't trip my trigger a whole lot but if they look good I'll buy and use them.

 

[Treebore]

"I'm waiting for the Paizo cult to start with the "OMFG Paizo requires miniatures to play Pathfinder it's no longer D&D it's a board game" rants."

Yeah, I think if that was going to happen they would have done it over the official "Iconic" line of metal Reaper miniatures they have been putting out for years.

I am pretty sure we are going to see a $15 to $20 price tag on this, so I won't be buying. If they shock me with about $10, then I'll buy.

 

[pawsplay]

As a one-off, the beginners box could do fine, but as a continuing line randomized seems to be the way pre-painted plastics sell best overall. That's how the vast majority of WizKids minis are already sold.

First of all, the products are very different. The whole point of Heroclix is to collect an play with the figures. The point of D&D/Pathfinder miniatures is to play D&D and/or Pathfinder.

Secondly, the Wizkids stuff includes a number of high-profile, non-collectable sets, including what I would consider some of their most important, like the Green Lantern sets and the Fantastic Four starter.

Randomized boosters work great for expanding a collectible line indefinitely, but that is not compatible with the goal of a long-lived, popular line of minis for supporting RPG play. That model would be the "stuff people can use" approach, exemplified by Legendary Encounters line by Reaper. While a smallish line, it has continued to sell and to produce new models steadily.

In terms of content, offical Pathfinder miniatures are about halfway in purpose between the Reaper pre-paints and the Green Lantern sets. They are supposed to be useful and usable and easily acquired, and they are expected to sell to a great extent based on name recognition and identification with a popular brand.

 

[Herschel]

Randomized boosters work great for expanding a collectible line indefinitely, but that is not compatible with the goal of a long-lived, popular line of minis for supporting RPG play. That model would be the "stuff people can use" approach, exemplified by Legendary Encounters line by Reaper. While a smallish line, it has continued to sell and to produce new models steadily.

This has simply shown to be false in the marketplace. Reaper's Legendary Encounters are a small line and made up by a lot of singles also, is rather small and doesn't produce many new models at a pace of a major line. They're also generally more expensive.

Will that be enough for some gamers? Sure, but people getting in at the ground floor are left woefully behind. Merric's Law of Miniatures is a pretty good general guideline.

 

[Argyle King]

One of the reasons I started painting my own minis was due to how random the WoTC ones were. (There were other reasons as well -such as the poor quality- but being able to pick and paint what I wanted was one.) For a time I still did buy the occasional DDM set just to have minis, but there for a while it seemed a though the price was going up while the quality was simultaneously going down; the double whammy being that I also had no idea what I was getting from a pack.

(on a side note: I have bought a few packs recently from the local 5 And Below store because they had packs of DDM minis and Star Wars minis for $5 and below.)

For me, my ideal mini situation would be to have a few set sets for some of the more common monsters - a bag of kobolds for example. If the company still wanted to toss one or two randoms in there as well, that wouldn't bug me. Surely there's some way to find a middle ground between randomization and known content which performs better than what the D&D minis were.

Either way, I'll still probably continue the mini painting route for my primary mini source. It would be very nice to have a good quality prepainted route to enhance my collection though.

 

[pawsplay]

This has simply shown to be false in the marketplace. Reaper's Legendary Encounters are a small line and made up by a lot of singles also, is rather small and doesn't produce many new models at a pace of a major line. They're also generally more expensive.

Will that be enough for some gamers? Sure, but people getting in at the ground floor are left woefully behind. Merric's Law of Miniatures is a pretty good general guideline.

Yet DDM has failed in three different incarnations and Mage Knight has had issues, while LA is still producing new models. Perhaps LA is relatively more expensive because MK and DDDM were priced too cheaply to make money. Yes, DDM produced many new models at a fast pace... the majority of those models were wretched, many of the figures were of things no one wanted figures of, and the line was never a success by Hasbro standards. Owning an army of Farmer Browns has never been my collecting ambition, and I ended up with so many substandard orc models that I used to sprinkle them into large Ebay sales as a garnish.

I have never regretted any of my LA purchases. In contrast, I've opened more than one DDM booster that made me feel like I had bitten into a rotten peanut M&M.

Models for plastics are expensive, but the figures less so. A slow pace of top-selling, popular figures seems like the correct long-term strategy. Randomized packs mean, essentially, that everyone is sharing the cost of some figures that perhaps almost no one wants. Yes, the per-figure cost is lower, but the availability of desirable figures is higher; the cost of desirable figures is higher. It's only cheaper when you average in Farmer Brown and Orc #7.

 

[TarionzCousin]

The example figure looks rather nice.