D&D 5e has failed

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Post by Chamomile »

5e can seem very successful because, by all available evidence, it is absolutely thrashing its current competitors. The problem is, 4e sucked like whoa and caused a massive contraction of the market, so dominating that smaller market isn't actually much of an accomplishment. There is some evidence that 5e has grown the market at least somewhat since then, but not to the level that it's keeping pace with 3.X in its heyday.

In fairness, counting any level of success below that of the best selling game in the hobby's history as "a failure" isn't a very reasonable standard, and calling ISP stupid is a worthy goal. On the other hand, you can reasonably call a product a failure when it is inferior to an existing product that serves an identical or near-identical function (i.e. 5e might not be a failure if it were bad compared to Vampire: the Masquerade or Star Wars: Saga Edition, but being bad compared to an earlier edition of the same game is a failure, because that game is still an option), and there are plenty of other reasons to call ISP stupid.
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Post by Mord »

jprepo1 wrote:ICv2, self released sales stats, amazon, stores, et al. seem to indicate it as not just not a failure from a sales perspective, but a roaring success.
That's funny. We've discussed the ICv2 numbers at length in this very thread and sussed out a ballpark sales figure for 5e that didn't exactly break any records. But that was a while ago now; maybe it's time to revisit those numbers. I grabbed the ICv2 numbers for market size each year as well as the numbers for Top 5 RPGs each Spring quarter of the corresponding years:
Rank Spring 2012 Spring 2013 Spring 2014 Spring 2015 Spring 2016 Spring 2017
1 Pathfinder Pathfinder Pathfinder D&D D&D D&D
2 D&D D&D Star Wars Pathfinder Pathfinder Pathfinder
3 Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/Deathwatch Star Wars Shadowrun Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars
4 Dragon Age Iron Kingdoms Fate Core Shadowrun Shadowrun Adventures in Middle-Earth
5 Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/Deathwatch Numenera Iron Kingdoms Fantasy/Dragon Age Shadowrun

Year 2013 2014 2014 Revised (+Kickstarter) 2015 2016
Total Hobby Games Market $700m $880m $920m $1,190m $1,440m
RPG Market $15m $25m $25m $35m $45m

Also, though not easily put in tabular form, the "hobby store" market has apparently been growing every year since the "crash year" of 2008. "Fourth Consecutive Growth Year for Hobby Games" (ICv2, published March 2013). This is not same as the total hobby games market, since the market includes sales of products through hobby stores as well as other retailers.

So what's it all mean?

If we take these numbers at face value, you can spin up a narrative that a moribund Pathfinder-dominated RPG market got shaken up in June 2013 by Edge of the Empire, then totally turned upside-down in 2014 by the release of D&D 5e, which ushered in a renaissance in RPGs that has yielded remarkable year-over-year growth with D&D capturing the lion's share of the increase. But, that doesn't really jive.

For one thing, RPGs are a tiny footnote in the overall hobby games market. ICv2 alleges that from 2013 to 2016, the RPG market grew 200%, but in the same span the overall hobby games market grew 105%; the market share of RPGs in the hobby games space went from a paltry 2.1% to an also-paltry 3.1%. We are dealing with such tiny amounts here that any specific developments internal to the RPG market are likely to be no more influential than the rising tide of increased sales in all other categories (or just plain bad estimates from survey respondents).

There have been very few shakeups in the quarterly sales rankings since D&D 5 dropped in Fall 2014, and those are concentrated in the #4 and #5 spots. I assume that this is because sales in those positions are so tiny as to be essentially statistical noise; I don't think there's any insight to be gained in the random variations of 2015-2017 quarterly sales in marginal brands like Shadowrun, Fate, Adventures in Middle-Earth, Dragon Age, and Iron Kingdoms. The fact that Iron Kingdoms can be #3 in Spring 2013 and then #5 in Spring 2015 and Dragon Age can be #4 in Spring 2012 and #5 in Spring 2016 is telling, since both of these bridge the release dates of the new top brands. Even after D&D 5 and Star Wars dropped, you see the same names bobbing onto and off of the bottom of the list quarter over quarter. This suggests to me that the difference in sales between these brands is negligible and that they are all small potatoes compared to Star Wars, Pathfinder, and D&D, which remain comfortably in the top spots quarter after quarter.

The facts that we have available bear out that despite the reported market growth in absolute terms since 2014, no single one of the also-rans has captured enough of that growth to displace any of the existing top-level brands. We don't know exactly what the pie chart looks like quarter to quarter, so we can't say if the Big 3's overall market lead has been growing, shrinking, or remaining constant relative to the also-rans, much less how D&D's market lead over the other major brands has fared. However, we can make a few logical inferences from what we do know.

D&D 5e's release schedule has been inarguably anemic in the years since its launch. Attributing the growth in the RPG market principally to D&D 5e invites the question: is it plausible that D&D 5 would have so few new offerings each year after its 2014 release if the brand really brought in up to $10m in 2014, up to $20m in 2015, and up to $30m in 2016 (these are the maximums if D&D 5 represents 100% of RPG market growth since its launch)? If we were really seeing 100% sales growth year-over-year for two years straight, we should be seeing a 5e shovelware rush. Hell, Onyx Path deals in numbers a literal tenth of what we're talking about here and their pipeline is positively bursting in comparison.

From this, I'd infer that D&D 5 dropped into the top spot immediately based on strong core book sales (fueled by brand recognition) but hasn't realized meaningful gains in sales volume since then - hence there's no impetus to expand the range of titles on offer, which in turn keeps sales growth down; vicious cycle. D&D 5 has likely maintained a steady or gradually shrinking lead over Paizo, Fantasy Flight, and the also-rans since then due to continuing strong core book sales and weak splatbook offerings across all brands. It's not hard to stay on top even without splats if your core product is a hot item and Pathfinder is churning out bottom-of-the-barrel crap (and Starfinder doesn't appear to have changed the world). I don't think there's been anything in the recent releases for any of those 3 brands that would lend itself to any interpretation other than these 3 brands staying pretty much at status quo relative to each other.

Given the known fact that the relative market shares of the Big 3 have not reordered themselves in the last 3 years, can we say anything about the growth of also-rans versus the Big 3? To put it another way, can we determine if the proportion of the market eaten by the Big 3 has grown or shrunk since 5e dropped? The observable facts from places like Roll20 don't seem to support the narrative that there is a profusion of also-rans eating up an increased percentage of market share and leaving the Big 3 on a dwindling iceberg of market dominance; to the contrary D&D 5 composed almost half of all Roll20 games in Q3 2017. Consider once again that Dragon Age and Iron Kingdoms have been bobbing around, cork-like, in the Top 5 since 2012. I think the most reasonable explanation for this since D&D 5 released is that the Big 3 have eaten most of the growth, increasing their relative share of the total market without any reduction in sales volume for the also-rans in absolute terms (even absolute increases, depending on how much growth you think is actually happening in the market).

I am deeply skeptical of the ideas that 1) the RPG market has actually grown by 200% from 2013-2016 and 2) D&D 5 has experienced accelerating or even consistent sales growth year-over-year. Overall, I believe that the RPG market is a very static place, despite the nominal absolute increase according to ICv2. I think that the ICv2 numbers are broadly accurate for the hobby market as a whole, but that the specific RPG numbers are so tiny as to amount to a rounding error. I think D&D 5 is selling well relative to other RPG brands and much of those sales come from new money that wouldn't otherwise have been spent on RPG products, but I do not believe that D&D 5's year-over-year sales are increasing much if at all. (Consider again the anemic release schedule for D&D 5.)

I think it's most likely that RPG sales have risen proportionately with the broader hobby market, as people for the most part are just buying whatever is already on the shelf when they pick up Magic cards or a Cards Against Humanity expansion. I think that D&D will continue to be the market leader purely on the strength of name recognition and core book sales regardless of what other titles they publish (or not) in the near future. I think that D&D 5's sales growth relative to the overall hobby market has been pretty much nil since it dropped and that therefore the D&D line will not see major expansions in the near future.
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Post by virgil »

I want to bring attention to one company's behavior I wish to laud, Evil Hat, who have been releasing quarterly reports of their product line for years, with hard numbers. FATE Core, in its first two quarters (circa 2013), sold ~13k physical copies and an unknown number of PDFs (max of 1.5k). Its lifetime physical sales are ~25k, showing an obvious and expected slump. However, Evil Hat's actual product line is staggering in comparison, which makes their total sales figures arguably on par with 5E, which is a testament to its failure.

Now, where 5E has been succeeding is in RoI. They are putting in a tiny fraction of the effort and getting profits that are in the same ballpark as a dedicated company's product line. Sales for their PHB aren't experiencing the standard downward slump; and to not believe brand recognition is a huge factor in this is incredibly dishonest.
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Post by Voss »

That the Iron Kingdoms RPG pops up in the top five is really embarrassing for the industry. It is an amazingly terrible pile of shit.

Character creation defines everything, and you can either build for offense, not being hit or survivability. If you don't build for the latter, you can be one shot by just about everything, as the game is built on the back of the wargame, where normal people are expected to just die.
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Post by erik »

Well, I can thank jprepo for stirring up this tired old crap argument again.

This was interesting for informing me that Adventures in Middle Earth is a thing. Apparently it is a 5e DnD OGL mod. Of course not made by WotC, because who would be stupid enough to give a license for Middle Earth to the people behind Dungeons and Dragons who actually created that game engine when there's a company with gravitas like Cubicle 7.

What's funny is that 5e may be a semi-decent engine for the setting/genre. The things that are flaws for a proper DnD fantasy game work for Middle Earth. Heroes and monsters being brought down by bunch of mooks is accurate. Not having setting altering powers in the hands of players is appropriate for Middle Earth. It's still shit, but the right-ish kind of shit. If they actually added rules for things like stealth and such then it would seem to be quite a proper fit.


Oh my ghost. This is the closest I've ever been to being interested in 5e!
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Post by Mord »

I came across this article in my Chrome recommendations the other day and two things about it really stood out to me.

First was some really cringeworthy gladhanding from Nathan Stewart, who I had never heard of before but is apparently a Hasbro goblin that answers to the title "Senior director of D&D":
some fucking weasel wrote:“We’re trying to show a pretty diverse group of people playing D&D,” [...] “It’s a value of the company. We want people to feel accepted and welcome in our groups.” [...] “One of the things we see our role in cultivating [Twitch live-play shows] is to show people what we’d consider the best stuff: the best DMs, the best actors, the best storytelling, the best diversity,” [...] “Some people like the DMs who are tough and challenging and put them on death’s door, others who do a good job reading the table and making sure everyone has fun.”
"The best diversity." Uuuuuuuuuuuuugh.

Second was a (totally unsourced) claim that I just had to follow up on:
some fucking hack wrote:Dungeons & Dragons, the grandaddy of role-playing games, dates back to 1974, but it’s never been more popular than it is today. According to Seattle-based game publisher and Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, D&D had its most profitable year ever in 2016, and is on track to surpass it in 2017. A huge reason for that surge is the rise of “liveplay” or “actual play” broadcasts.
What does Hasbro have to say on the subject? Through their investor relations releases, not a whole lot! Even so, we can dig in a little to their recent releases from Q2 2017 and Q1 2017.

The relevant info in these articles is all under the heading "[X] Quarter 2017 Brand Portfolio Performance" and is a little bit tricky to parse, because it's not clear exactly where everything we're interested in falls. We have a "Franchise Brands" category that explicitly includes Magic and Monopoly as well as the rest of their real revenue sources. The "Hasbro Gaming" line item is where the rest of their game-related crap lands; adding together these specific "Franchise Brands" with the "Hasbro Gaming" line item yields us the "total gaming category" that they don't actually put on the table but refer to repeatedly in the text.

All dollar values in millions.
Q2 2017 Q2 2016 Q2-vs-Q2 % change Q1 2017 Q1 2016 Q1-vs-Q1 % change Q2-vs-Q1 2017 % change Q2-vs-Q1 2016 % change Six months 2017 Six months 2016 6mo-vs-6mo % change
Franchise Brands (row 2 + row 3) $545.7 $452.3 +21% $430.8 $416.4 +3% +27% +9% $976.5 $868.6 +12%
"Franchise" non-gaming brands (Transformers, Nerf) $406.3 $351.0 +16% $313.2 $285.5 +10% +30% +23% $719.5 $636.5 +13%
"Franchise" gaming brands (Magic, Monopoly) $139.4 $101.3 +38% $117.6 $130.9 -10% +19% -23% $257.0 $232.1 +11%
"total gaming category" (row 3 + row 5) $273.3 $227.7 +20% $253.3 $231.1 +10% +8% -1% $526.6 $458.8 +15%
Hasbro Gaming (D&D, Operation) $133.9 $126.4 +6% $135.7 $100.2 +35% -1% +26% $269.6 $226.7 +19%

Holy shit, Magic: The Gathering is an actual big-boy property! As for D&D... Well, it gets mentioned in the same breath as:
Image
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And in Q1, it was outshone by such luminaries as "SPEAK OUT, TOILET TROUBLE, and FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS."

"Small potatoes" pretty much nails it. Note that there was slightly negative revenue growth in Hasbro Gaming between Q1 and Q2 2017, because there do not appear to have been any significant new gaming releases in that time span. The statement "D&D had its most profitable year ever in 2016, and is on track to surpass it in 2017" may be true, but it's still fucking pathetic. D&D is almost certainly realizing that level of profit because it has fewer expenses than ever before: fewer staff, reduced physical printing costs thanks to PDF sales, no development pipeline to speak of, and major marketing efforts being directed towards Twitch streaming, which is effectively free. The conclusion to be drawn here is that "Toilet Trouble" represents a larger source of revenue growth for Hasbro than D&D. Wouldn't you know it, all this jives exactly with my market analysis based on the ICv2 numbers a few posts above this and with common fucking sense as applied to the last 3 years of the D&D 5 release schedule.

Speaking of the ICv2 figures, if we assume that they are in the right order of magnitude and that the RPG market overall has revenue of up to $100m per year, we can estimate some broad upper and lower limits to the D&D brand's revenue. If D&D were the only brand in the RPG market and therefore captured 100% of $100m annual revenue, that would mean that D&D accounts for 20% of Hasbro's ~$500m "Hasbro Gaming" revenue. Charitably splitting the franchise brands revenue evenly between Magic and Monopoly, that says that a brand has to pull in about $250m annually to qualify as a "Franchise Brand" in Hasbro's eyes; D&D is obviously nowhere near that. That's compatible with the ICv2 account, so maybe - just maybe - the ICv2 figures are reliable on the number of zeroes in the RPG market. I'd estimate the bounds of D&D's annual revenue to be $10m and $50m; if you put a gun to my head I'd guess that the truth is somewhere in the vicinity of $20m. That's something like selling 50,000 books every month at $30 a pop, which is decently plausible IMO. FWIW, I think the RPG industry as a whole is probably in the $60-80m range.

Anyway, even though we can't zero in on exactly how much of the "Hasbro Gaming" revenue is attributable to D&D, it's very clear that you'd have to be a gullible fucking moron to believe that the proliferation of free marketing material on Twitch signifies actual commercial success. D&D is a fine old brand, but it's flatly impossible for it to be a success by any big-boy metric; neither the people who make D&D (Hasbro) nor the people who sell D&D (ICv2) regard the property as being worth more than two good handfuls of cow shit. It's a good thing for Nathan Stewart that geek media is made up of exactly the right type of gullible fucking morons.
Last edited by Mord on Tue Nov 21, 2017 12:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by tussock »

Is this a thing where their 30% of $20m is a bigger percentage than 20% of $100m and so they are "more profitable", because if Hasbro puts all the rest of that old D&D running costs into more profitable things then they totally are? Feels a bit that way.
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Post by EightWave »

Voss wrote:That the Iron Kingdoms RPG pops up in the top five is really embarrassing for the industry. It is an amazingly terrible pile of shit.

Character creation defines everything, and you can either build for offense, not being hit or survivability. If you don't build for the latter, you can be one shot by just about everything, as the game is built on the back of the wargame, where normal people are expected to just die.
Every warmahordes player I know owns at least the core iron kingdoms book and dreams of running a campaign. I doubt it actually gets played often.
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Post by Mord »

tussock wrote:Is this a thing where their 30% of $20m is a bigger percentage than 20% of $100m and so they are "more profitable", because if Hasbro puts all the rest of that old D&D running costs into more profitable things then they totally are? Feels a bit that way.
"More profitable" could possibly refer either to a greater percentage of revenue being retained as profit or more actual nickels being added to the D&D piggy bank this year than last year. Since the article provided no source for that claim and Googling turns up only references to that article, I have no idea who that assertion originated with or what context may contribute to correctly understanding its meaning. Another sterling example of ethics in (role-playing) games journalism... :razz:
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Post by Kaelik »

tussock wrote:Is this a thing where their 30% of $20m is a bigger percentage than 20% of $100m and so they are "more profitable", because if Hasbro puts all the rest of that old D&D running costs into more profitable things then they totally are? Feels a bit that way.
It's probably that 10 years of inflation and population growth and firing all their staff and not having employees, and having no one actually write books resulted in a technically higher profit total in 2016 than in each specific year in the past? Although maybe not honestly.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

I'd expect that it is total revenue divided by total costs is a higher number now than it was before. Ie, 250k in costs and $1m in revenue is a 4x return on investment while $10M in costs and $11M in revenue is only 1.1x return on investment (but it yields $750k more in actual profit).
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Post by Username17 »

The D&D Brand is currently putting itself on a lot of things that aren't books. I just played a game of Betrayal at Baldur's Gate, which is a licensed product that is port of Betrayal at the House on the Hill with a few minor rule improvements and a D&D skin. The cost of making that by the D&D people is essentially zero, because it's actually made by a different part of Wizards of the Coast altogether (Wizards/Hasbro also owns Avalon Hill). So D&D is making money without the D&D team doing or contributing anything. Any number divided by a near zero number is a very large number, so D&D's rate of profit is very high at the moment.

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Post by Voss »

The reprints of old modules probably help too- Tales from the Yawning Portal consists entirely of old stuff, including a lot of formerly Greyhawk stuff. I'm not even sure what if any money they'd owe to the original authors. (If TSR writing agreements involved royalties, if they were long term and if WotC has any obligation to honor them)

And of course they're following that up with licensing Goodman to reprint other old modules, which pretty much guarantees no costs to WotC, just income from licensing fees.

The new crunch book is almost entirely reprints of net stuff from the unearthed arcana articles that Mearls doodles. Apparently they consist of light revision work that generated more errors- the arcane archer moved an ability to a later level, but didn't alter the text of the 3rd level ability that depended on that ability as a function call. This was discovered by someone with a preview copy, not the design team.
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Post by erik »

FrankTrollman wrote:I just played a game of Betrayal at Baldur's Gate, which is a licensed product that is port of Betrayal at the House on the Hill with a few minor rule improvements and a D&D skin.
I feel terrible that this sounds like something I can almost not prevent myself from buying. I know I'm a sucker and I cannot help it. Having a party of adventurers exploring a dungeon keep with various traps and such, that sounds perfect.

Thankfully it is using Forgotten Realms branding, so maybe that will help me resist.


probly not tho
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Post by Username17 »

Betrayal at Baldur's Gate is basically strictly superior to Betrayal at the House on the Hill. Now, I found House to be kind of minimally acceptable as a board game, so something that's better than that is pretty much acceptable by definition. I wouldn't feel bad about getting the Forgotten Realms version, but I also couldn't really imagine it being in anyone's top three board games.

Betrayal at Baldur's Gate does seem to be better than 5e D&D.

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Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote:Betrayal at Baldur's Gate does seem to be better than 5e D&D.
That's not exactly high praise either.

Does it have a bunch of nice minis, at least?
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Post by Pixels »

Looking at a few pictures, it seems to have minis for the players and tokens for monsters and environmental effects. If you want to use a sweet dragon mini for any dragon-related scenerios you will have to provide it yourself.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Pixels wrote:Looking at a few pictures, it seems to have minis for the players and tokens for monsters and environmental effects. If you want to use a sweet dragon mini for any dragon-related scenerios you will have to provide it yourself.
This is consistent with Betrayal at House on the Hill.
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Post by Koumei »

Pixels wrote:Looking at a few pictures, it seems to have minis for the players and tokens for monsters and environmental effects. If you want to use a sweet dragon mini for any dragon-related scenerios you will have to provide it yourself.
I have the (Huge? Gargantuan?) Black Dragon from the D&D minis thing but of course, the D&D monsters are the harder things to come by when it comes to minis. Outside of actually buying D&D minis. You can get heroes from about a dozen sources (board games, war games, independent mini retailers), and stock-standard things like orcs, goblins and lizardmen, but if you want a demon that isn't a succubus or balor then you're probably out of luck, likewise chimerae and shit like that.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I hate Betrayal so very, very much.
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Post by erik »

Koumei wrote:
Pixels wrote:Looking at a few pictures, it seems to have minis for the players and tokens for monsters and environmental effects. If you want to use a sweet dragon mini for any dragon-related scenerios you will have to provide it yourself.
I have the (Huge? Gargantuan?) Black Dragon from the D&D minis thing but of course, the D&D monsters are the harder things to come by when it comes to minis. Outside of actually buying D&D minis. You can get heroes from about a dozen sources (board games, war games, independent mini retailers), and stock-standard things like orcs, goblins and lizardmen, but if you want a demon that isn't a succubus or balor then you're probably out of luck, likewise chimerae and shit like that.
I haven't checked lately. But a few years back you could buy individual minis from the various dnd mini pack sets. Coolstuffinc.com was one of the best if I recall. Just checked them now and navigating on phone sucks. And a lot of them are out of stock what with them being almost 10 years out of production. Still may be worth a look. I'm still waiting for 3D printers to be the solution for all my miniature desires.
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Post by spongeknight »

erik wrote:
Koumei wrote:
Pixels wrote:Looking at a few pictures, it seems to have minis for the players and tokens for monsters and environmental effects. If you want to use a sweet dragon mini for any dragon-related scenerios you will have to provide it yourself.
I have the (Huge? Gargantuan?) Black Dragon from the D&D minis thing but of course, the D&D monsters are the harder things to come by when it comes to minis. Outside of actually buying D&D minis. You can get heroes from about a dozen sources (board games, war games, independent mini retailers), and stock-standard things like orcs, goblins and lizardmen, but if you want a demon that isn't a succubus or balor then you're probably out of luck, likewise chimerae and shit like that.
I haven't checked lately. But a few years back you could buy individual minis from the various dnd mini pack sets. Coolstuffinc.com was one of the best if I recall. Just checked them now and navigating on phone sucks. And a lot of them are out of stock what with them being almost 10 years out of production. Still may be worth a look. I'm still waiting for 3D printers to be the solution for all my miniature desires.
Why wait? There are $200 3d printers on the market already.
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Post by erik »

I don't think the ones that print to the quality level I want are $200, but point taken. I think it has been a couple years since I seriously looked at the market. Also it seems the amount of designs available has steadily grown.
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Post by zugschef »

Whipstitch wrote:I hate Betrayal so very, very much.
Why if i may ask?
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Post by OgreBattle »

I enjoy betrayal from the simple joy of flipping over an unknown tile and getting an unknown card. There's not that much player choice involved but it's amusing to experience.
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