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Phobos wrote:

The other issue with this isn't just the randomness of the boxes, but its the randomness of the creatures they even produce.

Even being able to buy minis in singles, won't solve the problem of not having a mini to buy.

EDIT: As for the issue of making money and random creatures, start selling the miniature stat cards in card packs, like TCG packs, instead of in boxes with figures. Make those 8 cards random.

Next sell your miniatures without cards, lower cost packs, bags and bundles. Including adventure packs if you want. In this way, the CMG players are still dealing with randomness, if you don't have an official card for mini, the mini is not CMG playable. On the flip side, we (the RPG crowd) can buy our box of orcs, or whatever and not deal with the random issue.

Like it or not, this isn't and won't be WotC model. They tried this with several lines, and discontinued them. They've stuck with the CMG route, and say they intend to continue this style. they've said:

It reduces production cost over time (you make a mold, produce it for a limited run, discontinue it and make new ones). Even if a model is popular, you don't need to worry about making more of them. you can male another version later for another set, though. While your design costs seem like they would be higher, the production costs of having only 60 miniatures at a time being made is a much greater cost savings.

For retailers, only having to stock a handful of SKUs makes ordering & stocking much easier. They only order boosters of the current set (and maybe the one past), plus the starter set. No worrying about how many orcs to order versus how many goblins, or giants, or warriors,etc.

These factors keep the line profitable & producing. There is a healthy secondary market, plus eBay.

For those who don't want this model, for pre-painted minis, hope the Reaper line takes off & doies better than it has so far!

TragicMagic wrote:

Mike Mearls put up a post in the thread Miniature Packs elsewhere in this forum, explaining WoTCs reasons for not releasing minis in encounter packs.

Buying the booster packs for the D&D rpg as opposed to the CMG doesn't make much sense, granted. But honestly, I don't see the reason for the handwringing behind the decision not to release encounter packs. Not when you can easily visit one of the websites that sell individual minis and simply build your own encounter packs.

Maybe I'm missing something, but could someone please explain to me why this option is unpalatable?

Yes, I can explain why from personal experience. Some of these website you can order singles from are very nice, but even so, its very hard to search for the exact mini that you need. Most of them are non-intuitive, and list the minis by set. I don't care what sets they are in, I just want to see all your Hobgoblins. Additionally, often these places will have (1-3) in stock, and thats it. What if I want just 12 generic skeletons? I've had a hard time finding exactly what I'm looking for.

To further complicate this problem, many of the "basic" miniatures (like just a skeleton with a sword) were in the first set, and they are drastically more expensive.

So, in conclusion, I can tell you that wanting to buy "singles" minis from a website is still not user friendly, and it would be really awesome if WotC chose to do some prepackaged sets aimed towards D&D players. I wouldn't even care if the base was a special color or something and they weren't tournament legal (so the D&DM collectors wouldn't get upset). I just don't wanna buy random minis. So I'll stick to Ral Partha, so that I can get the exact minis I want. I would prefer the plastic, prepainted, open and go D&D minis, but alas WotC has no plans to do this at this time (though Mike Mearles did say they have tossed the idea around a bit).