WotC Discontinues Minis: How Much Does It Affect You?

[Shemeska]

Doesn't affect me at all. I've never used minis.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I mourn for the official minis that should have been and never will be.

A moment of silence for the froghemoth.

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So anyway, add modding heavily and sculpting to my goals for 2011.

Current mods in progress: colossal kraken, huge aboleth, gargantuan aboleth, large wereboar.

 

[Pour]

I was sort of a compulsive mini buyer the last two years, so I'm going to miss it, but my wallet won't. I really enjoyed the new monsters each set comparative at least in part to 4e releases, plus I largely prefer 3D representations. For me they were more desirable than unpainted metal. My hope is the existing DDM becomes cheaper, but I figure prices will only go up on singles. I'm now much more inclined to buy the limited sets, though.

 

[Stormonu]

Not at all. I've got plenty, metal, plastic and proxies. If for some perverse reason I need more, there's still Reaper.

 

[coyote6]

I'm sad that they won't be releasing new minis, but not terribly so. I haven't bought too many in several years, since 4e was released. They had some stuff I wasn't fond of, combined with my gaming groups ignoring 4e, and me not having as much money to buy 'em, so I ended up cutting back.

I've still got tons of 'em though. So it's not like I'm lacking minis or anything.

 

[Kelvor Ravenstar]

This won't affect me too much, as I already have a large collection of the D&D prepainted minis, so this does not affect me too badly. I won't be able to get great representations of some monsters, and to acquire more I'll either be paying more money on the secondary markets or buying more metal minis from Reaper and painting them myself.
The people that this will effect are those getting into D&D minis now, like some of my friends at our local Encounters group. After seeing the difference in experience between the table using tokens and mine using minis, most are firmly on the side of wanting minis.
I hope that Wizards finds the best kind of special sets to produce from now on, and in my opinion that would be using older molds to produce sets of common monsters like orcs, goblins, skeletons, etc. PC minis are better served by finding a close metal one and painting them yourself. I know I'm not adding much new to the discussion of D&D minis, those looking for commons for their collections have been asking for boxes of orcs etc for years. Hopefully now that Wizards is re-evaluating their business plans they'll consider this market.

 

[Beginning of the End]

After years and years of minis, does anybody who seriously was using and collecting minis for gaming really not have enough to run?

This is a good point. Thank God there will never be any new players.

 

[karlindel]

Barely, I have plenty of minis for most purposes. However, I did sometimes purchase new ones, particularly for monsters that I didn't have good stand ins for, and I will miss being able to pick up new minis when I want to.

 

[Almacov]

I liked them. I picked them up occasionally, sometimes on impulse.
Even got excited enough about them near the end of the skirmish game's WotC support to play in a couple of pre-releases. (Mostly for the promo minis and the excitement.)

I was sad to lose those when they canned skirmish.
I'm somewhat disappointed now, too. (Mostly because I wish I'd been a more dilligent collector and picked up a few key pieces.)

However, it's not really going to effect my game. I could sometimes impress my players with a new, well-sculpted mini, and once in a while my collection would inform my encounter design, but beyond that they didn't change too much in-game.
Besides, I do have a fairly decent collection as is, so I can still occaisionally use pieces that are more visually engaging than tokens.

I'll mostly miss the anticipation of a new set, and soaking in the aesthetics of the latest pieces I've extracted from their box.

I've thought about supplementing my collection with the unpainted minis from Castle Ravenloft or Wrath of Ashardalon, but they're just too expensive to justify, since I'm not sure how much mileage I'd get out of the boardgames themselves.

Ah well. One less thing to tempt me while perusing the game store.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Like many others, I've got enough minis to cover most of the monsters my group will come up against. However, I will miss the excitement of seeing which minis are in the latest set. I'll also miss not being able to get some of the monsters that they never made, like some of the demons and devils.

Olaf the Stout