Peter Lee on issues facing D&D Miniatures

Peter Lee

WoTC‘s ability to co-ordinate the miniature releases with the adventurers released at a similar time continues to be less than impressive.

Yup, you’re right. I’m working on it. Here’s the problem:

The miniature path is close to 18 months to go from concept to your FLGS’s shelf. The path for getting a module from concept to your FLGS’s shelf is a lot shorter. Skalmad was put into the pipeline before the module was written — all that existed was a name for the module.

This is the biggest issue that the miniatures have as an RPG supplement. Take Dragonborn, for example — to have miniatures coincide with the release of 4th edition, they needed to start down the miniature pipeline months before the concept art was even finished! We had three proto-draconborn slated for Dungeons of Dread that ended getting cut because it didn’t match the concept art for the race.

We’re trying to reduce the time to go from concept to market with these miniatures, but for now it’s a very difficult problem.

Peter Lee

Quite frankly that is what that troll looks like. We need a green monster so mold the body from green plastic, the weapon from brown plastic, etc and assemble.

That isn’t pre-painted, but colored plastic.

While using colored plastic would potentially save a lot of potential deco, the problem is there are multiple figures in a single mold. This is the ultimate reason why I can’t do transparent commons — all the commons need to fit in one mold, so if I were to have transparent commons, all of them would result in being transparent. If I filled a mold with green plastic, I wouldn’t have just one green monster in the set, I would end up having closer to 8 parts that would be that color.

The end result is a much more monochromatic set.

Peter Lee has also posted in his livejournal about the changes.