Your WotC spending: More on Minis or Books?

[The_Gneech]

Seems almost a sure thing that they will include a hook for minis in any future RPG products, and it might even lead to an instance of reversal - an RPG BASED on a miniatures game.

If memory serves, isn't that what D&D is?

Ref: http://www.cgonline.com/features/011218-f1-f1.html

The Castle & Crusade Society was quick to embrace the rules, and Gygax and Perren added new ideas and supplements as quickly as they could cook them up. Inspired by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E. Howard, they created a supplemental set of fantasy rules that took wargaming out of the realm of history altogether. Archers and pikemen gave way to orcs and elves, heroes and wizards, fairies and dragons. In 1971 Gygax and Perren republished their revised medieval warfare rules—along with the fantasy supplement—as Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures. The publisher was a tiny company called Guidon Games that operated out of Gygax's basement. "That fantasy supplement was the tail that wagged the dog," explains Gygax.

...

Chainmail did not pretend to be anything other than a wargame, albeit a somewhat unusual one. Still, it planted a lot of the seeds that would later find a place in the Dungeons & Dragons rules. "Heroes had four dice instead of being fourth level," Gygax explains, "and superheroes had eight dice instead of being eighth level, and wizards were basically two dice guys who could throw fireballs and lightning bolts and so forth. In fact for a long time, the burst radius of the wizard's fireball was the burst circle for a catapult, and the lightning bolt was very much like the old cannons used in medieval warfare. We would use the regular military miniatures rules for the spells."

There had always been an element of role-playing in most wargames, however, even if it wasn't an explicit part of the rules. One player might be playing the role of a Viking chief, another the role of a Thane or the leader of a hill fort. The game was about commanding the troops, but part of the allure was the fact that you were the commander. "Have you ever played Diplomacy?" Gygax asks. "To put yourself in the role of the Kaiser, or the arch-duke, or the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and so forth… there was always a little role-playing in most miniatures games, and in Diplomacy."

...

Dave Arneson was the founder of yet another wargaming group—the Midwest Military Simulation Association, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul. He was also a member of the IFW, although he didn't meet Gygax until later. "I met Gary at an early Gen Con—1970 as I recall," Arneson says. "We collaborated on a sailing ship game called Don't Give Up the Ship that I tested at that year's Gen Con."

Gen Con started as a small weekend gaming event organized by Gygax and other wargamers from the Lake Geneva area. The name is an abbreviation for "Geneva Convention," something of an inside joke among the wargaming crowd. In 1968, the event became a full-blown official convention, and drew nearly 100 attendees. Last year's convention—which hosted everything from role-playing games to computer games to the old standby, wargames—took place at the 800,000 square foot Midwest Express Center in Milwaukee, where it hosted roughly 21,000 people from all over the world.

Guidon Games published Don't Give Up the Ship, which provided rules for Napoleonic-era naval battles, in 1971. By that time, Arneson and Gygax were well on their way to better things.

In 1970, Arneson created a scenario using the 1:1 variant of the Chainmail rules in which a small group of characters had to sneak inside a stronghold and open the gates from the inside. The scenario represented a remarkable shift in focus from past wargaming by placing the emphasis on heroic adventuring rather than on military conquest. Arneson brought the scenario to Gen Con in 1971, where Gygax (among others) had a chance to play it.

That scenario launched Gygax and Arneson in an entirely new creative direction. Their games rapidly became less about commanding armies and more about enacting the role of a single character on heroic quests. "We were playing this game where you are this guy, right there, and if he got killed, it was over," says Gygax. "The game went a long way into exploring the subterranean world. Then it started to become a matter of whether you had a sword or an axe, and a backpack, and rope and spikes and all these spelunking tools… That was Dave's main thing, to start as a zero level hero and go from there..."

I'm always amused by sneers over using miniatures in D&D.

-The Gneech

 

[DaveMage]

In the last six months I have spent more on the minis. I have about 800ish.
I like the skirmish game and their use in gaming, so I get double use out of them.
But my spending will probably even out between them since collecting D&D books (mostly WOTC) is also my hobby.

If you own 800 minis, then you've probably spent between $600 and $1,000 on them - and that's in a about an 8-month period (since the minis came out).

That amount equals approximately 20-35 hardback books (figure $30/book). In the last 8 months, WotC has released 10-12 hardbacks, with a list price of around $350, so figure an average discount of 10%, that would be $315 spent.

If this trend continues, it certainly will not even out amongst WotC products for you. (Though it certainly may if you buy non-WotC books.)

 

[ledded]

There are other people like you.

However, there are also people (like me) that appreciate how the random element keeps the price down, and who didn't have such a product to buy. So, Wizards serves one group of people with the mini line - just not everyone.

I do believe there are prepainted miniatures sold non-randomly, but they're not that cheap.

Cheers!

I have to put in a slightly dissenting opinion here, with all due respect.

The random element does not do as much to keep the price down as it does to make sure that WotC and your FLGS makes more money and stocks them easier (i.e. keeps the *cost* down more than it does the *price*). There are lines of metal minis of a similar bad quality, unpainted, that sell for similar or less prices if you look for them.

Now for prepainted minis sold non-randomly, there not always more expensive. Sure, em4miniatures and ebayers sell metal minis with a decent paintjob, but you can get singles in mage knight plastics that are far superior to the WotC stuff at prices approaching the pennies. Check out after-market sites like www.pjcc.com and a few others. Look for loose Mage Knight lots on ebay that fit your needs. I've bought some plastic miniatures (mostly mage knight monsters for me and heroclix for my son) and, on average, I paid about 24-50 cents each for them. And I picked exactly what I wanted. I have a decent sized warband (10-12) of well sculpted and decently painted orcs that I paid about $4-5 dollars for, and in the exact combination I wanted them. I've bought entire lots of clix miniatures off of ebay, maybe 20 clix for about $8 including shipping, then stripped the big base off and did a little easy converting for some halfway decent 'normal' townsfolk for our modern game.

Sure, the D&D miniatures have their place and lots of folks like them. That's fine with me, though I'm not a big fan, as I really enjoy collecting and painting miniatures. But you *can* find better bargains without having to paint a ton of stuff and get to pick what you want if you just look for them.

Just my 2 cents.

I'm always amused by sneers over using miniatures in D&D.

Oh man, thanks for posting that The_Gneech. Most people dont realize that while RPG's may be a relatively recent development historically, people have been staging battles with their toy soldiers using well-defined rule sets for at least 100 years, if not a whole lot longer.

I'm not a big wargamer myself, but a lot of our D&D and d20 Modern sessions have turned into huge sprawling battles with lots of opponents that take hours to finish, and are a lot of fun. (See the miniatures link in my sig for some examples, there are pics from a WWII scenario we did once that was a ton of fun)

 

[jerichothebard]

It'd be interesting if it lead to a 3rd party company including a hook for their own line of minis. Or this may have already happened - pardon my ignorance, if so......

Go check out Iron Kingdoms Warmachine, Privateer Press' mini game...


(which, in my opinion, seems to have taken all their time up when they could have been writing a really great campaign setting...)

 

[Mouseferatu]

I'm always amused by sneers over using miniatures in D&D.

A lot of us aren't sneering, though. We're just saying the game shouldn't require them.

It doesn't matter that D&D developed from miniatures combat. Lots of modern medicines developed from mold. Doesn't mean I want mold in my bathroom cabinet.

Okay, that came out a little more insulting than I meant it, but the point is, the fact that minis came first does not in any way, shape, or form mean D&D still must have them. I don't sneer at people who want to use minis, but why shouldn't the game present equal options for those who don't? It used to, after all.

 

[Mouseferatu]

I want to go on record stating that the above metaphor is not me comparing minis, or those who enjoy them, to mold. It's just meant to make the point that the origination point of something doesn't have to remain the be-all and end-all of it.

Just wanted to make that clear, before any feathres get ruffled.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

Books. For one thing, our FLGS doesn't stock WotC miniatures, and in the one booster I bought in Sweden, the paint jobs sucked, the weapons were bent out of shape, and my rare was a bleepin' ochre jelly. I'll stick to Games Workshop and Reaper, thanks. At least I can paint within the lines, myself.

Um, there is no Ochre Jelly in the D&D Minis line. not yet anyway.

 

[mearls]

(An interesting essay could be written about the swinging pendulum of general game design epitomized in the different versions of D&D.)

What I think makes this even more compelling is that over the history of the game, I don't think that gamers as whole have changed much in how they play the game.

 

[MerricB]

Um, there is no Ochre Jelly in the D&D Minis line. not yet anyway.

Yes there is!

It's a rare Archfiends figure. You can see the jelly (above) eating a poor adventurer.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

If 4th edition doesn't have rules for Diplomacy and Gather Information because they have no use for a minis game (to use an extreme, hopefully absurd example), it would be bad for the game in that sense, because it would be closing off an avenue of play of importance.

I can think of a few 1E players and designers who would rejoice at the thought of no rules for Diplomacy and Gather Information. Indeed, I've seen some of them ranting against the mere existence of those skills. From their point of view, the inclusion of those skills was extremely bad for the game.

Oh, I mostly agree with you; my previous comments about "good" and "bad" are absolute nonsense when I actually think about them.

Cheers!