It's author's work, not any firm.

All those minis for Warhammer really look nice. I t would be good to have some of them while running a session with friends.

bernh said:

Are these for sale, anywhere?

We should be so lucky....

Seems if you want Warhammer roleplaying minis, you pretty much have to have the time and talent to sculpt and cast them for your game.

bernh said:

Interesting minis. Must have. How much do they cost and where I can buy these? Please tell us. Thanks.

Regarding DnD MInis. I love them! They are much superior to lead minis and most non prepainted plastic minis.

Why?

1. They have developed a good quality standard in the meantime.

2. They are SOFTPLASTIC. This means easy to store than metal minis (eg. simply throw them in tupperware boxes). This is handy if you have to store 2000+ Minis and have no room for it.

3. DnD Minis and Reaper Minis are extremely durable and CANNOT BREAK!.

4. They are light. I can take several hundreds with me without borrowing out a crane.

5. I dont like painting. I find it tedious and boring.

6. I think that most many of the more modern dnd and reaper minis have a much better paint-job than the average painter can ever achieve.

7. Many of them are much cheaper than metal minis. I buy many typical mass minis (eg. an orc, skeleton or goblin) for under 50 cents at specialist shops on ebay.

8. Prepainted plastic minis are the future. Lead is the past.

So prepainted plastic minis (reaper or dnd) fullfill everything I want in minis. As pragmatic non-elitist I use them for play. And I need many of them because I play mainly dnd4 and Savage Worlds today and in some combats there are 50+ Minis on my gaming table. Minis are not art for me. IF I WANT ART I GO TO AN EXHIBITION.

There are valid and cheaper alternatives for plastic minis which are also interesting. Eg. the paper minis of One monk. The advantage of using paper minis instead of plastic is that you can always produce the perfect minis for your game by yourself in photoshop.

superklaus said:

Thats why so many companies are starting up and doing a quite great job of making money on lead-plastic-resin minis at the moment and competing quite even with games workshop?

Anyway, those that hate to paint and all that, then prepainted is the alternative, or paper cutouts.

Me, I keep minis for war gaming, not in roleplaying (may use counters ore something for quick this is where you are compared to each other - but more often then not a whiteboard.).

KjetilKverndokken said:

Me, I keep minis for war gaming, not in roleplaying (may use counters ore something for quick this is where you are compared to each other - but more often then not a whiteboard.).

Counters are not good enough for our group. We like the tactile feel of our minis during combat. We use also Wotc battlemaps, Paizo Maps and 3D Terrain from Fat Dragon. The combination of all these things gives often a similar rich picture of combat than you are used to have on a tabletop. Just try to play a city riot scene in Altdorf with 80+ minis and 20 timber framed 3D houses. I have all the models on shelves in a neighbor room, so building such a szene is under 3 minutes. The experience to roleplay such things really rocks! (btw. we use Savage Worlds as our prefered system for Warhammer and not 2nd edition which rules are much too slow for minicombat of this scale)

Thats why so many companies are starting up and doing a quite great job of making money on lead-plastic-resin minis at the moment and competing quite even with games workshop?

As I said. Prepainted are the future. Games Workshop tries to indoctrinate especially young gamers to paint by theirselves because they make alot of money with acryl colors. But this is a special case and not every company can do this. In 10-15y from now most lead companies will be only small niche producers for those who like to paint or go the way of the dodo. The most sold minis will be prepainted plastic from bigger professional companies and normal non-painted softplastic (produced with home fabricators connected to your PC)

PS: the edit and insert text function of this forum is extremely tedious. Who invents such unintuitive things?.

superklaus said:

Too many tens of thousands around the globe who wargame with a growing hobby, will not happen (if it does it will not be witin a decade or two as this is a 300 year old hobby). So many companies are in extreme good growth: Privateer press, Warlord Games, Spartan Games to name a few of my favorites.

I heared that minis made from rice, soy, tofu, and lentils is the way of the future. They will be cheap, green-friendly and most importantly nutritious and delicious

What about these guys from Warlord games?

I sculpt a little my self and have made a Spawn and a mad dwarf that also could be interesting:

http://schwartz.typepad.com/schwartz_engine/2009/01/almost-ready.html :

http://schwartz.typepad.com/schwartz_engine/2006/11/ready_to_make_t.html :

And after all I think Jay owes us a session demo video

Wow, cool. Do you cast from these, too?

Ok, forget that, I read your page.

superklaus said:

I doubt it.

While prepainted miniatures sure do sell well among the casual gamers demographic, prepaints are nowhere near competing with the lead, plastic and resin miniatures used in hobby painting and converting.

Machine painted minis are just way to shoddy to have a chance of competing with the miniatures that painters paint themselves. If you don't believe these arguments, check at coolminiornot.com

Would you seriously believe that the many members at that site would just stop buying unpainted miniatures because some company release decen prepaints? Not very likely...

Varnias Tybalt said:

I agree with Varnias here... Painting miniatures is also an art, and there will always be people interested in them, the same as there are still people interested in paintings or manual cameras, even though taking good photographs with automatic cameras is so cheap and easy nowadays... The feeling is not the same, and that's what matters.

Pre-paints are the future.........for thoes who don't enjoy/want to/can not paint minis. It's about that simple. I still maintain that the majority are ugky. Bout the skulpts and the paint jobs.

Parzival said:

Personally I don't use minis much. But I largely agree, Pre-paints tend to be cheap, ready-to-use and durable on the downside they are also not very high quality. Lead or Plastic models are usually expensive, more fragile and require painting, however a well painted plastic or lead mini is far superior to any Pre-Paint job.

So basically if you have time, money and the ability to paint buy lead or plastic minis, there are lots of good lines available (several have been mentioned above) personally I like Reaper.

If like me money and time are an issue and your painting skills leave something to be desired then the pre-paints are quite a good option.

Parzival said:

again...thats why painting services are out here like my self, that do full painting and flocking of minis.....a normal 28mm reaper human size figure is only $6.50 US for total service with flocking and everything or you can 25 bucks on prepainted junk....

Foolishboy said:

That's true, it is an option if you don't feel like painting or spending a little extra cash on minis.

But when people say things like "pre-painted minis are the future", that implies that many companies will just production of unpainted minis in favor of pre-paints. I find that highly unlikely, since the reason why most buyers actually buy nonpainted minis is because they enjoy painting them.

Half the fun of Warhammer and Warhammer 40K have always been assembling an army from scratch and watch it grow along with your painting skills. Sure there are some who only enjoy the gaming aspect of the hobby, but I doubt they are in any sort of majority.

I don't think either choice, pre-paint or unpainted miniatures will ever force one another off the market. I paint miniatures because I love the satisfaction that I get when I complete one. I've spent years going to classes and ReaperCon and learning from just about anyone that will teach me. I also play Warhammer Fantasy Battle from to time, though I'm no where near being a die hard player. It's just for fun every now and then.

That said, I also own a great number of the D&D pre-painted miniatures that have always worked just fine in my WFRP games. Sure they might now be top of the line paint jobs or sculpts, but you know.. they orcs look like orcs, the goblins look like goblins and generic rogue like miniatures are plentiful. I've never had a time where I couldn't find a decent facsimile of the opponent that I was using in a combat. I'm not sure why every miniature has to be a perfect sculpt with a perfect paint job. I only care about the player characters really, and if you can't find something between all the miniatures out there then honestly, I think that you aren't looking hard enough.

Reaper Miniatures has tons of great miniatures under their townsfolk line that make very good commoner type characters. On the opposite end of the spectrum, websites like MiniatureMarket.com have tons of common type miniatures that make for great orcs, bandits, or whatever monsters you might need, and many of them cost anywhere between a quarter to a dollar.

Shadowspawn is pretty much dead on. The two different sorts of minis generally appeal to two different types of gamers. There is some "cross over". But until the day that some one starts pumping out meticulously painted prepaints in historically accurate regimentals, I doubt a large portion of min gamers will be switching sides any time soon.....

KjetilKverndokken said:

I beg your pardon.
One character miniature from the WHF line is $15.
One box of D&D miniatures, that's 5 miniatures including a guaranteed large figure, and possibly a second is 14.99.
I seriously don't see where you're coming from on this.

Gorehammer said:

May have something to do with the exchange rate between dollers/punds to the Norwegian krone - But if to just take a maybe metal char from whatever system, and compare to one box, instead of comparing it to the amount you can get for a price. For 40 dollars I can buy a very high quality elf battalion 28mm scale that have 50 minis in it, of archers, soldiers and warmachines from Kings of War. Or a whole medium starter fleet from Spartan Games. One to one miniature buying to try to compete with a low quality box is not a good way to compare as induvidual minis always ave higher cost to make money. But buying armies as a whole would be devestatingly costly if used with the prepainted prices around (all seen from the use in wargaming - as I do not use miniatures in rpg'ing, maybe counters from time to time to very fast show where someone are compared to each other in a complex situation.)

So I have good experience with whats expensive and not expensive in the miniature hobby.

The most experience I have with prepaints are rackhams (about 60-69 euros for 5-8 minis) - who did very beautiful metals, and they are what the best in prepaints supposed to be like - The DD and Star Wars I have seen from time to time looks more like soft fantasy versions of military men with splurts of color on them.

Foolishboy said:

This reason is ok, but by far not the only reason. There are people who can paint (I think I can paint quite decently), BUT who dont want to waste precious time with tedious painting when they could prepare an rpg adventure at the same time or take a walk with the family. Its just the matter how important one estimates painting is in his life. In my list its importance its very low. But I love to use miniatures in my rpgs because they are fun so I buy the prepainted.

And again - all those of you who say that prepainted DnD figs are crap quality didnt see the new ones. These are fine and sometimes much better than most figs I have seen from experienced painters. And they are cheaper than lead. Show me a lead troll for 3,50$ with the size of 9cm from any company. No? Right...you cannot. Only possible in the new Legendary Evil Line of DnD.

superklaus said:

I have seen then, and they are pretty "meh" IMO

But that is because I don't much care for the aesthetics of D&D. Or fanatsy "art" in general. particularly where arms and armor are concerned.

But you see it's a matter of taste.

You, Superklaus like them. Great.

More power to ya.

Let me know when they produce a War of the Roses Line, or a 30 year war line, or an English Civil War line, an American Civil Warline or a Desert War 1 line, that are as detailed as detailed as other companies lines. And are painted to the standards as those who use them, and I'll say yeah. prepainted Plastic are the future.

The point is yes, D&D prepaints are a cheap, "serviceable" mini-for those who want cheap and serviceable line for RPGs.

The thing is, most people I know who are buying and using minis, play war games with them (and there a many, many other mini based war games other then WFB/40k out there) . And, well these prepaints don't quite work for that purpose.