Miniatures, we hardly knew ye…

2011 February 9
by Dante

Shortly after my last post on my Beholder’s Collector Set, Mike Shea provided a very moving eulogy for D&D Miniatures over at Critical-Hits.  As I have said in numerous articles, I am conflicted about this news.  Just as I started to embrace more miniatures in my game, now they are gone to be replaced with the cardboard tokens as featured in the Dungeon Master’s Kit, Monster Vault, and the D&D Essentials Red Box.  I really enjoyed the tokens upon my first experience with the D&D Red Box, at the time I wondered aloud whether this was going to be the next genesis of monster indicators.  Turns out I was right.

I am also interested in what this means for future miniature offerings.  If Wizards is focusing their efforts more on the collector’s sets and player miniatures, that could mean some iconic and very cool special edition miniatures are coming down the pipeline.  Personally, I think they should continue down the line of gods and produce more large scale figures, like say Bahamut or Llolth.  Pretty much any god or goddess that could provoke a pants-crapping response like the Orcus figure.  More of that would be excellent.

Rest in peace, random miniature booster packs.  Long live the tokens!

2 Responses leave one →
  1. February 10, 2011

    Well, there’s always Reaper and other lines of miniatures.. Rediscovering painting in 2000 was kind of a big boost to me.. Back then, just as D&D3 launched (and it kinda needed miniatures) there were no D&D plastics! So we would use pennies or little plastic toys.. and then metal miniatures for PCs because they’d been there all along. The problem with metal is that if you use the pieces, they get chipped and the paint comes off, and the little swords break sometimes, and so on. But after a while each piece does sort of develop a history.

  2. February 10, 2011

    I think this is pushing me to rediscover painting my own miniatures. I never really knew what I was doing in the past (as was happy for awhile for the prepainted minis), but now I think I want to figure out how to paint more effectively. It’s just going to be more rewarding, for me anyway.

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