PAINT JOB
I'm amused by the folks that point out that mass-produced plastic minis painted in 15 minutes on a production line in China don't look as good as metal minis painted in 8 hours by a dedicated miniature painting enthusiast in his basement.
Well...
duh.
Similar news flash: a Toyota Camry isn't as fast or luxurious as a Ferrari. But surprise! Camry is the best selling car in America. The Camry is not a car enthusiast's car. But it's good enough for the vast majority of car buyers--it gets the job done, and for most people that's good enough.
Plastic minis are for mass market gamers, not for miniatures enthusiasts. If you don't like the plastic minis because they don't look as good as your metal minis, that's fine, but that doesn't mean that WotC is stupid--you aren't the target customer.
Bonus: unlike with hand painted gorgeous metal minis, you don't have to have a heart attack every time someone drops your D&D Miniatures mini, or picks it up with cheetos-stained fingers, or sweeps them all off the battlemat in one swoop, or manually depicts how "the dragon swoops you up--like this--then drops you to the ground far below--like
this--where as you can see, the impact knocks your companions off their feet. And, apparently, sends Lidda into a nearby pool of guacamole. Er--I mean green slime."
RANDOM PACKAGING
I can sympathize with the folks that complain about the random packaging. As a D&D RPG player, I'd like to be able to buy a cheap pack of gnolls or wights or whatever. But with this new collectable D&D Miniatures game WotC is primarily targeting collectable minitaures gamers, not D&D players. Sure, they'll try to get D&D players to buy and try out the new game as well (as someone earlier pointed out), but that's gravy--this is a new game, packaged in the way that's best suited for that particular type of game (as someone earlier pointed out).
Fortunately for D&D RPG players a secondary market will exist. If you want to buy a certain miniature, and for whatever reason you don't want to buy any of the untold thousands of metal miniatures available from the dozens of metal miniatures makers, then you'll be able to buy it from Joe Gamer via eBay.
Speaking of those untold thousands of individually packaged metal minis made by dozens of metal mini makers... It's often really hard to find the exact mini you want. Physical stores have limited shelf space, and it's just too expensive for them to take inventory risk on unusual minis... they usually only carry a small selection of minis from a couple of the most popular manufacturers (GW, Reaper). Hmmm... maybe WotC's "only two SKUs" strategy makes sense.... it's a way for them to get a selection of 80 minis into a store, and the store only has to order 2 SKUs. Hmm...
SEALED DECK DUNGEONS
The guy that mocked the sealed deck dungeon/encounter idea didn't really think things through. Of course you wouldn't just dump out the contents of a box and say "Okay, you fight all this."
No. Remember that each mini has a point cost.
The DM or organizer of the tournament would impose some form of rules that would level the playing field and make encounters appropriate. Such as... "100 point limit for armies" (for a tournament) or "No single encounter can exceed 20 points, and the whole dungeon must be 100 points or less" (for an encounter/dungeon).
Clearly you wouldn't want random dungeons to be the norm, but they might be a fun change of pace.
***
This post is not intended as an insult, just friendly jibing.
All I want is for my fellow gamers to keep an open mind, to evaluate this new product as a new product, and to think about the fun possibilities that this new game brings to the table.
-z
D&D Miniatures is a new game. The miniatures are figures for this new game. The figures can also be used in D&D the RPG.
