D&D Miniatures

[Fellfrosch]

Well, Mr. Postman just brought my starter pack of the new collectible D&D miniatures, and since I'm home eating lunch I thought I'd give you guys my first impression.

a) The figures are very small. Well, not VERY small, probably about Warhammer scale, but for someone accustomed to Mage Knight they strike me as pretty tiny. They are also very dark, with a generally subdued color palette that obscures a lot of the detail unless you're looking very closely. The paint job and the sculpts are middling--better than Mage Knight's first set, certainly, but not quite up to current WizKids standards.

b) As a stand-alone game, it looks very complex. It doesn't have any of the elegance or simplicity of Mage Knight (it's only competition in the realm of collectible miniature games), and the rule book is thick and intense. On the bright side, the game looks essentially identical to a D&D combat round. If you're already into D&D and know the system, playing this game will be cake--if a bit lacking in the roleplaying department.

c) As a companion to the RPG, I have to admit it looks pretty cool. It comes with a big fold-out maps and several full-color map cards, and could facilitate battles quite helpfully. The problem, of course, is that you'll have to buy a ton of packs to get all the guys you need for a given adventure (or just structure your adventure around the random guys you open in a pack--but how many adventures require you to fight a lone kobold?).

d) A starter costs 20 bucks and has 16 guys, so you're getting a better cost-per-figure than Mage Knight. Still kind of expensive, though. I'm not sure what boosters cost or how many are in one, but we'll see.

[Entsuropi]

Personally, if i was that bothered about using minitures i would just use my Warhammer figs. Stand-ins are your friend, and i have enough that i could field unfeasabily large numbers of enemies.

And what real benefit does D&D clix have over wizkids? I only play Heroclix, since i vastly prefer warhammer to normal mage knight games.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

So these AREN'T just minis to go along with? This is the "new game?" stuff? Any reason you can't just buy whatever mini you find on the shelf and use it? I've been experiementing with the "battle grid" from the new DMG and it's pretty darn easy to find a mini for any small, med, or large creature on the map. So I don't know why I'd buy WotC minis. Unless they take the HGMA route and say only their minis can be used in official D&D games. In which case I'll show them my middle finger and never play an "official" D&D game, con or other wise.

[Fellfrosch]

To answer Entropy: D&D's game is collectible, but it's not a clix game--instead of a cool dial to keep track of everything, you need paper and pencils and a handy rulebook. That is why I predict that this game will fail as a stand-alone minis game--it's just too hard to play, given the other options.

To answer Saint Ehlers: The more I look through this, the more I ask myself the same question. There really isn't much incentive for you to buy these particular minis when any old fantasy mini will work just as well. There is in fact a disincentive, since the random nature of the packs makes it almost impossible to get a figure that represents exactly what you want--and if you're just going to use stand-ins, why buy official D&D minis in the first place? I suppose this is offset by the fact that they come pre-painted, but it's still a pretty big problem.

It's time for some baseless Fellfrosch conjecture: D&D 3.0 was designed with a very tabletop-ish combat system in order to work in conjunction with Chainmail, but they quickly realized that a collectible mini games are the wave of the future and much easier to sell than minis you have to assemble and paint, so they aborted Chainmail and developed D&D Miniatures to release with 3.5. Therefore, WotC considers the minis to be an essential part of the basic game--you'll buy them because that's how the game works, they're just inherent to the system. This makes the game scizophrenic, since it has to be a stand-alone and an addition at the same time, and the two purposes work against each other. It also ignores the concept of competition, which is not something WotC has to worry about very often--I honestly think that any old random mini, no matter who makes it, will get the job done for an RPG, and WotC isn't taking that into account.

You know what they should have done? Half or more of a pack should be set--you know when you buy it that it will have a certain number of orcs or zombies or something, so that you can use them in your games. The rest of the figures in the pack are random, so you maintain the collectible aspect. as it is, you'll have to either buy a ton of boxes or trade away half your figures just so your RPG group can fight a pack of goblins, and that's just silly.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Yeah, coulda shoulda woulda. I don't collect minis. If I decide I need a ton of zombies, I've seen at the store where you can get 100 for like, $15. Yeah, they're crap as far as minis go, but they'll show you where the zombies are in relation to the characters.

Now, the big question. Will this absurd emphasis on minis hurt WotC? I think it will. Just because you're a D&D nerd doesn't mean you'll get minis. I mean, if you already like it, you already know you can play it without any minis, so if you haven't used them before, you'll be unlikely to use them in the future (unless, like me, you were already moving that route). But 3.5 barely even hints that it's possible to play D&D without minis. At best you get 2 sentences in the whole of the 3 core books that even hint you could think about not using them, and those two sentences are essentially to tell you to stop thinking about it and go buy your minis, cuz that's the new rule, bub. The rest of the rules don't just use "squares" to give examples, but talk about your miniatures.

So, they've turned it into a game where you not only have to buy a new $20-40 book each month, but hwere you need to buy a huge stock of expensive figures too. I liked that there was a game where I didn't need to "collect" to play. RPGs are it. I think that people will be turning from D&D in even greater numbers now with the new emphasis on minis. They've been alienating a lot of people, which I didn't mind, because I LIKED 3ed better than 1 or 2. But now I'm starting to encourage people not to buy anymore because they ask for too much.

You want to collect? Buy Magic. You want to role play? BESM is cheap and diverse. Decipher has a good system. But don't buy D&D.

Yeah, i'm a exaggerating a little. But the more I look, the less necessary 3.5 becomes. I still like D&D, but I'm hating where it's going in a major way. Maybe they'll recover, but ick. No signs of it yet.

[EUOL]

D&D 3.0 is still the most cohesive, best RPG I've played.  It's also the best supported.  Some of the other systems need to overcome their inhernet 'we're gaming nerds' shortfalls and try and streamline their products a bit.  (I'm talking to you, Palladium.)

[42]

I've started playing D&D 3.5 and I'm not having a problem with not using minitures. It you want to have very involved combat than you would want to use minitures. Still they're not entirely necessary, though the new books would lead you to believe that they are.

[Fellfrosch]

I think that's the problem--the actual mechanics of combat haven't really changed, but the book tries to convince you that minis are necessary. I hate it when companies use cross-promotion to sell their products.

[JP Dogberry]

I've always maintained that D&D (IMO the worst RPG out there) isn't even an RPG, but really a wargame with a story attached. This only confirms my theories. A Roleplay should be about story and character interaction, not mathematics and looking up tables to see exactly how long in milliseconds it takes to shoot an arrow.  Trying to market an RPG with a CCG mindset is probably the most insane thing I've heard since recent memory.

[42]

I'm not seeing the ccg marketing in a an RPG.

[JP Dogberry]

Ummm...the whole "Collectable" thing.  Like a CCG, you never know what pieces you're goign to get. In the case og Mage Knight/Heroclix, this makes sense. However, an RPG isn't a game in the sense that there are no winners or losers. It is (Or should be) based around some kind of character or story. As such, the characters use dhsould be based on what is dramatically interesting, not what you randomly picked.

Now, based on the information in the above posts, the new D&D rules are written so as to sound as if they cannot  be played without the minutures. If that isn't an attempt to make more money in the whole CCG wayof forcing people who want to play to buy more to get the pieces they want, I don't see what is.

[Entsuropi]

Again, i find it interesting that WoTC is taking a company that once made tabletop and now is the RPG market leader back into tabletop, while GW, a company that used to be in RPGs and is now the tabletop market leader, is moving back into RPGs. Both are doing so half heartedly, in conjunction with their current products (Inquisitor and D&D minis) but interesting all the same.

[42]

What was confusing is that the D&D minuratures have a different game that the D&D rpg. So there is pen and paper D&D, minurature D&D, video game D&D, and novel D&D. They actually need to make a D&D ccg. Despite the fact that this screws over D&D consumers, it's marketing brilliance. Most game manufacterors cater to demographics that are far too limited. Particulary in RPGs where most seem to cater to the "I'm fed up with D&D" demographic.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

D&D being a "wargame with a story attached" is interesting as an exaggeration, but is hardly a valid statement of fact about the nature of the game. Yeah, it has a lot of rules, but it has always (and as far as I can tell, will always) sucked rocks when it comes to mass combat.

And yes, I still really like D&D 3.0. I'm not saying the new rules change the necessity of minis. Like I said,  people who already know aren't going to automatically change their style of play just because WotC released a new book demanding it, but I wonder if it's going to hurt the attraction of new players who think they have to spend all this extra, when they can go out and with any other system and spend less on core books than on D&D, and not feel pressured to buy more crap from the same company for the privelege of playing the  game.

[JP Dogberry]

SaintEhlers,

I don't think that it's an exaggertaion toc all D&D a wargame with a story attached.  You argue that it is bad when it comes to mass combat, which is true. Not all wargames are about mass combat though, look at a game like heroclix where a team may only be about four charcaters.  

D&D has a lot of rules. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you're trying to achieve it can be a very good thing. As a story oriented Role-player, I consider it a bad thing, but only if it gets in the way of the game. The trouble is, in D&D is does. Unless you have absolutely no life, you will occasionally have to change/ignore a rule, or look it up in the book. It is too complex a game to completely memorise.

D&D grew out of wargaming. This is a historical fact. When D&D was designed, the creators looked at existing wargames, and decided to make a similar sort of game, but with story and charcater. As such, D&D was an important first step.  But now, RPGs are designed to be RPGs specifically, and so design their rules for that purpose specifically, rather than with wargame roots.

Combat exists in RPGs, and it probably wouldn't be very good without it. But D&D focuses far too much on that aspect, to the exclusion of character and story.