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Hey Paizo, I got a question. Is there any way you guys could look into maybe subcontracting a company to make pre-painted plastic minis? If not what about a harder plastic mini (like model car type of plastic) that we could buy in a sheet and paint ourselves?
I don't wanna buy WotC minis anymore and I would like to avoid metal ones that I need to paint.
FH
Hey Paizo, I got a question. Is there any way you guys could look into maybe subcontracting a company to make pre-painted plastic minis? If not what about a harder plastic mini (like model car type of plastic) that we could buy in a sheet and paint ourselves?
I don't wanna buy WotC minis anymore and I would like to avoid metal ones that I need to paint.FH
Contract it out to McFarlane Toys... those would be really cool!
Senior Software Developer
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I've asked about this and it turns out that the tooling costs for plastic minis are outrageous. You have to be in the position to sell a bazillion of each one or else you lose money.
Now, unpainted figures on a sprue.... I haven't asked about that specifically, but I imagine that the tooling costs are similar. Wizards has set the bar pretty high with the quality of their miniatures line, so I imagine that people might be disappointed to buy a "pack" of sprue-mounted minis and discover that you have to cut them apart and paint them manually. My uneducated guess is that anyone who wants to paint their own minis would rather have the heft of metal.
Or you could make 'em yourself, if you got Sculpey skillz.
Actually, I find from my Warhammer days that I like using plastic better, but thats because I run Tyranids and do a lot of wacky and out there conversions. Since I use plumber's glue, plastic works better, because that stuff actually melts and reforms the plastic together. Metal is hard to get to stay together without risking an obvious fault line.
Heck, I even made silicone molds of all my metal peices, just so it was easier to customize and convert them when I made plastic copies. (Naughty I know, but I still haven't used the origional metals, and I only made one copy each. Rationalize I do!)
Now, unpainted figures on a sprue.... I haven't asked about that specifically, but I imagine that the tooling costs are similar. Wizards has set the bar pretty high with the quality of their miniatures line, so I imagine that people might be disappointed to buy a "pack" of sprue-mounted minis and discover that you have to cut them apart and paint them manually.
I wonder if there's a market for "PC parts" type plastic sprue sets. My game doesn't use monster minis, just more cost-effective tokens. My players really go for customizing PC minis, though.
If there were a shop that sold a variety of interchangeable torsos, arms, legs and heads (allowing the player to specifically craft his chainmail clad dwarf with the battle axe and shield, fer instance), I know I'd be buying.
I wouldn't know how to maket it, mind you, or if the limited sales would off-set the set-up fee. All I know is that I can't find a mini for my bard and if I had a mix of parts that let me choose a studded leather torso, an arm holding a longsword, another arm with a whip, and a mandolin to glue to his back, I'd be all over it.
I personally like plastics - I carry enough stuff to the FLGS to run my weekly game, anything that makes the load lighter is a blessing.
For critters that you want a bunch of, anyway, plastic sprues of a whole gang at a time (even if they're identical) is great. So for something like the Goblins, that's a good way to go, IMO.
3/2/07 press release:
Reaper Miniatures is proud to announce the release of its first series of prepainted plastic miniatures.
This new product line will be released under the brand name Legendary Encounters.
Offered in an open, non-blind, non-random format, Legendary Encounters prepainted plastic miniatures will be packaged using Reaper's standard blister card. Both single and multiple piece packs will be offered.
Unlike the several existing blind-sale prepainted plastic miniature lines currently available, Legendary Encounters will not be produced on a limited edition basis and will be available at any time.
Drawing on Reaper's vast experience in miniatures and a catalog of 1000's of metal models to design Legendary Encounters, Legendary Encounters will quickly become the most popular prepainted plastic miniatures line on the market.
Reaper has always focused on the creation of evergreen product lines and Legendary Encounters™ is the first product line of Reaper's new "Ready to Fight" (RTF) series of games and gaming products.
Available this June Legendary Encounters initial release will include: Undead and Orc warriors of various types, an Ogre, Troll and Minotaur. Like our Dark Heaven Legends miniature line, future releases into Legendary Encounters will include every type of creature imaginable.
Reaper Miniatures, is a worldwide leader in the design and casting of pewter science fiction and fantasy miniature figurines. Based out of Denton, Texas, Reaper products are available in fine shops around the world.
For more information about Reaper Miniatures, visit the Reaper Miniatures website at ReaperMini.com.
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Drawing on Reaper's vast experience in miniatures and a catalog of 1000's of metal models to design Legendary Encounters, Legendary Encounters will quickly become the most popular prepainted plastic miniatures line on the market.
This actually concerns me; WotC and WizKids both found out the hard way that plastic behaves very differently from metal, and knowing how to do metal minis does not in any way mean that your plastic minis are going to be any good.
Hopefully, though, Reaper will learn from the experience of their forerunners.
Reaper, Paizo, Necromancer, and Goodman Games -- just imagine the havoc they could wreak by working together!
MWAAAHAHAHAHAHAAA!
-The Gneech, bringing a tear of joy to his own eye just contemplating it
I've worked for many minis companies (anyone remember Agents of Gaming and the Babylon 5 minis? That was me, and I've worked at Reaper and Ral Partha/Iron Wind Metals, among others...) I can tell you several things:
- pewter minis are so common in this industry because it's relatively cheap to sculpt and produce a low-production-number piece; in other words, you can do many very strange or esoterice minis for relatively low cost
- injection molded minis are sculpted and created much, MUCH differently than pewter, so different in fact that there's virtually no overlap in the two processes. A vulcanized rubber or silicon mold for producing a pewter fig costs under $100; an alloy metal mold for producing injection molded plastics generally runs around $10,000. You do the math :-)
- prepainted figs aren't as easy to create as calling up a plant in China and saying "yeah, please send me fifty thousand skeletons," because you need to check and assure consistent paint quality, lead content and hazardous chemical content and the like. It's a long, money-consuming process, and one of the reasons it took Reaper so long to get into the business - they wanted their prepainted plastics to look fantastic, and finding just the right place to make them wasn't easy.
SO if you called up someone like Reaper and said "could you please sculpt a one-armed dwarf with no beard, a half-chain suit, pointy boots and a big bow strapped to his back?", they could make that mini relatively easy and produce a couple thousand copies for sale and be profitable. You can't do that with plastics because in order to make your money back, you need to sell tens of thousands of minis, so they need to be much more generic or common, as the case may be.
It's a crazy business...
I certainly hope injection plastics molds are reuseable, and I don't mean for the same miniature thousands of times, otherwise, how the heck are you guys still in business? At $10k a pop, unmodifiable for different miniatures, you're looking at millions of dollars for all those different molds for all those different non-interchangeable DDMs. Wow.
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Thanks for the info, Phil. So injection molded plastics are out. What about using resins in a rubber mold similar to THIS type of technique but on a larger scale?
FH
I certainly hope injection plastics molds are reuseable, and I don't mean for the same miniature thousands of times, otherwise, how the heck are you guys still in business? At $10k a pop, unmodifiable for different miniatures, you're looking at millions of dollars for all those different molds for all those different non-interchangeable DDMs. Wow.
You'll notice that Wizards DDM and Star Wars Minis have very low level of detail and are made of a softer plastic. Wizards won't release their process, of course, but I theorize that they use non-metallic mold (I know their 'originals' are at 1:1 scale, which implies it's a direct reproduction).
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I don't know if anyone else has looked at these, but I've used them for gaming before: Heroscape minis. Heroscape is a board game from Hasbro that uses a multitude of different minis from various fantasy genres and time periods. http://www.hasbro.com/heroscape/ is their website. The minis are prepainted, non randomized. A booster pack of 5-7 figures runs about $10 at most big-box retailers.
-Skeld
I don't know if anyone else has looked at these, but I've used them for gaming before: Heroscape minis. Heroscape is a board game from Hasbro that uses a multitude of different minis from various fantasy genres and time periods. http://www.hasbro.com/heroscape/ is their website. The minis are prepainted, non randomized. A booster pack of 5-7 figures runs about $10 at most big-box retailers.
-Skeld
Their individual humanoids aren't really all that cost effective (this hasn't stopped me from buying them for some reason), you'd be better going to a website that sells individual DDM figs, besides which their bases are too large (why hasbro did this considering it owns both Heroscape and D&D, I don't know). Which means you either squash them together or have to cut them off and put them on new bases. But what I have found a good deal is their large creatures, especially the packs with their dragons. You don't have to take them off their base, just glue the whole thing to a large square base and they are good to go.
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Their individual humanoids aren't really all that cost effective (this hasn't stopped me from buying them for some reason), you'd be better going to a website that sells individual DDM figs, besides which their bases are too large (why hasbro did this considering it owns both Heroscape and D&D, I don't know). Which means you either squash them together or have to cut them off and put them on new bases. But what I have found a good deal is their large creatures, especially the packs with their dragons. You don't have to take them off their base, just glue the whole thing to a large square base and they are good to go.
I buy the Heroscape figures because I like Heroscape. The fact that I've been able to use them for D&D is icing. The Heroscape figure bases aren't compatable because they aren't/weren't meant to be compatable since they are completely different gaming systems. I think Heroscape is meant for younger gamers as a gateway. Personally, I think the Heroscape minis are higher quality than D&D minis. The fact that they aren't blind purchase I also find appealing. I agree about the dragon packs; they were some of my first purchases becuase they were so readily usable a thte game table.
-Skeld
I was just over to Reapers. Couldn't find any pictures - just the announcement. What's the word? When's the release? Any promos I'm missing?
June I believe is the first set of releases, so it's likely there won't be anything up for...wow, we're only 4 weeks-ish from June. Hmm. Maybe any day/week now?
I admit I'm intrigued by the idea.