Saving Money in this Hobby

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
I'm hearing there is an opportunity in becoming a game mule smuggling stuff across the Canadian border. Perhaps by boat. I could use this kind of justification to get a boat. Sadly for Canadians it also might be profitable for me.

You could call your enterprise The New Purple Gang.

The "original" Purple Gang was a group of Detroit area mobsters that ran booze down from Canada during prohibition.

I think some of it is the US postal service hasn't been profitable and has enemies in Congress. Where can you raise rates to that constituents won't complain about? Canada. The 51st state doesn't get any votes in Congress and there more polite about it than Puerto Rico.

The USPS isn't profitable because of its enemies in congress. They have to work with the worst practices of government and private enterprise.
 
You could call your enterprise The New Purple Gang.

The "original" Purple Gang was a group of Detroit area mobsters that ran booze down from Canada during prohibition.



The USPS isn't profitable because of its enemies in congress. They have to work with the worst practices of government and private enterprise.
I mean it wasn't really ever expected to be profitable without aid. It's goal is to service every US home at home every day for the same price. That's not going to withstand competition.
 
I mean it wasn't really ever expected to be profitable without aid. It's goal is to service every US home at home every day for the same price. That's not going to withstand competition.
True. But you try running anything that starts the fiscal year with a 2 billion or so dollar tax above & beyond all normal costs and has to dig its way out. The fact that they broke even sometimes was pretty impressive.

I wonder... Lasers & Feelings: The Wargame.

Ok, so you make... start with six models, 12 each, in four colors of plastic. Simple mod of the L&F game: lasers knock over the nearest opposing models, feelings stand back up adjacent allied models, !LaserFeelings! do both, roll one die per model, soda cans and books/dvd cases as terrain. Put it in a cardboard box. Make a website for orders, forum for people to gripe on. Claim its a valid business.
 
I do know a store owner who views it as a tax write off. I don't know how he does it. When I've asked accountants they say you have to have a "reasonable expectation of profit" to claim a loss as a write off. That hurt the first couple times :grin:
On occasion I run into expensive hobbies masquerading as a small business. Boutiques, used book stores, things like that.
 
Last edited:
On occasion I run into expensive hobbies masquerading as a small business. Boutiques, used book stores, things like that.
I think there's often an element of that even when the business is making some money. I have a friend who runs a reasonably successful comics shop. They're doing pretty well, but it's still the case that if you look at how many hours he puts in he's earning under minimum wage.
 
I think there's often an element of that even when the business is making some money. I have a friend who runs a reasonably successful comics shop. They're doing pretty well, but it's still the case that if you look at how many hours he puts in he's earning under minimum wage.
I think one should also account for the odds of a job that pays better per hour not being something one would want to do, though:thumbsup:.
 
hmmm...where's the line between cheap gaming and making money on gaming I wonder. I do know a store owner who views it as a tax write off. I don't know how he does it. When I've asked accountants they say you have to have a "reasonable expectation of profit" to claim a loss as a write off. That hurt the first couple times :grin:

Anyhow, the only way to make cheap profitable is volume. How do you get the volume to be cheap?

I did have the notion of a really high value miniatures package with 4 - 6 armies set up on a single sprue. So say you have, medieval humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, and undead on each sprue. Depending on the budget, you would have maybe 3 poses much like the old Fantasy Warriors range though I'd probably try to make head and weapon swaps more viable so you could get some variety in units. Ideally you'd have some mounts but some of the armies could use the same mount so you'd have maybe a horse, an ostrich lizard, and a wolf on there. I know, at this point you're probably looking at 2-3 sprues. For the single sprue you could do two armies and one shared mopare 48 miniaturesunt with one of the poses being easy to use for a rider. The thing is you get 20 sprues in the box, enough to do armies for all your group. A higher budget approach would be one sprue per army. But the idea is the "Battle Brick" every thing you need to play fantasy battles. At the top end you could throw in a sprue of monsters with a dragon, an ogre, and maybe a chimera or manticore. Then you could do a fantasy rpg starter with maybe 1 of each sprue. Ah well, I ramble but the rules should be under 12 pages and use d6s.

I had a plan for a one sprue Mutant Chronicles set. Basic heavy body armour in four poses with a set of shoulder pads, helmets, and rifles for each corporation. Ideally you could get a zombie head and a Kracatch on there as well so it would be useful for the Dark Legion. If you had a second sprue it would be for the Dark Legion, Necromutants, a Razide, a generic zombie body that you could throw corporation parts on with one set of legion bits, and a Nepharite, maybe even some armour plates and a templar of Illian head to convert the necromutants if so desired. I've suggested it to the latest license holders time and again because it keeps the amount of tooling down while doing something for everyone but Brotherhood fanatics.

I guess the real questions are, "are there enough cheap gamers to create a viable market for cheaper games? Would people go back to black and white books to save a buck? What about staple bound newsprint? Would retailers carry a magazine that presented an indie game each issue in an affordable format?"
Just touching on part of this, but there are a number of companies that will buy, open, and resell individual multi-part miniatures sprues online these days.

There are also a pretty good variety of sprues available these days. They've really blown up in the last few years, and I think, but cannot prove, that the non-GW companies are making a bit of an unspoken effort to make things more cross company compatible than in the past.

In that regard, it is becoming somewhat more reasonable to use miniatures in games, provided you're mostly talking about roughly human characters as the bulk of your interactions in the game.

There's also, generally again, a ton of leftovers on those sprues once the miniatures are created, meaning there's a whole lot of basic kitbash-bits floating around in the world, probably for the cost of asking and paying the postage.

For folks who are curious about this, but not really miniatures users, a sprue for something like Frostgrave (so fantasy PC types) will generally sell for about $8 USD + shipping online and usually has enough stuff for 5 miniatures of one broad type. That puts it about mid-range in cost and number of miniatures per sprue.

Other lines and companies' sprues are usually somewhere between =/- $2 and range between 3 (some fantasy, like that from Wargames Atlantic) and 8 miniatures (generally historic miniatures and more geared towards wargaming n their poseability and gear options).

Anyway, the takeaway here?

While using actual minis will never be super cheap, there are certainly ways to make it far less expensive at one go than it has been in the past. Pair that with some changes in game-setting and play-stye expectations, and it becomes even more viable. The low-cost of something like Frostgrave Sprues means that Ars Magica style multi-character per player or old-school under-used henchie/rules start to become more viable.

By comparison to something like the cost of a Heroforge custom miniature, a player could have almost as many options by buying 1-3 sprues and kitbashing something and still have enough leftovers for about a dozen other miniatures (or, y'know in a group of 4 players, not counting the GM, a spare 48 miniatures so nothing to sneeze at when just starting out).
 
Sure, but there's a whole world of new D&D players out there who don't know that or really anything at all about the wider market so there's still a market for what I pitched. Anyhow, I've been thinking about breaking down some boxes to make fantasy adventure kits with one sprue of humans, one sprue of dwarves, one sprue of orcs, one sprue of zombies, and one sprue of skeletons. It really amazes me than none of the companies that are making ranges of plastic figures have done this. The closes I've seen is that Mantic has packaged the vinyl figures from their Dwarf King's Hold game with some scenery and a dragon. The price point is too high on that one. It's a great idea but too expensive to hit the sweet spot and get people who are miniatures curious started.

Speaking of cheap plastics though, one of my other dreams is to do 54mm toy soldier style figures but of civilians, possibly with open hands so you can make French Resistance out of the Early Twentieth Century European Civilians. The idea would be to extend the market from gaming into school dioramas. I know Michaels sells a range of "Toobs" on a similar theme but if I know parents and school projects, a $10 bag of figures will outsell a $20 toob of figures.
 
Definitely have deliberately gone PDF-only recently.

But that's twofold. Not just the whole extra money for a paper copy but also the storage needed for these books I'll likely only flick through. Plus most of my pen and paperbooks are a thousand miles away. I'm slowly learning they won't fit on the boat either.

I'm kinda avoiding Kickstarter too. Because it's too much temptation.
 
Sure, but there's a whole world of new D&D players out there who don't know that or really anything at all about the wider market so there's still a market for what I pitched. Anyhow, I've been thinking about breaking down some boxes to make fantasy adventure kits with one sprue of humans, one sprue of dwarves, one sprue of orcs, one sprue of zombies, and one sprue of skeletons. It really amazes me than none of the companies that are making ranges of plastic figures have done this. The closes I've seen is that Mantic has packaged the vinyl figures from their Dwarf King's Hold game with some scenery and a dragon. The price point is too high on that one. It's a great idea but too expensive to hit the sweet spot and get people who are miniatures curious started.

Speaking of cheap plastics though, one of my other dreams is to do 54mm toy soldier style figures but of civilians, possibly with open hands so you can make French Resistance out of the Early Twentieth Century European Civilians. The idea would be to extend the market from gaming into school dioramas. I know Michaels sells a range of "Toobs" on a similar theme but if I know parents and school projects, a $10 bag of figures will outsell a $20 toob of figures.
You and I should chat sometime, because we clearly have some very similar ideas about this stuff.

Many years back, GW did a mixed box of Warhammer Fantasy Battles miniatures that were a bit like what you're exploring with that idea, but with very limited pose and head/shield options. I think it was 10 each of goblins, orcs, skaven, elves, dark elves, and dwarfs.

That 54mm idea is also very much in line with what HG Wells suggested in Floor Games.
 
Yeah, the GW Fantasy Warriors not to be confused with the Grenadier Fantasy Warriors. Right now Oathmark is doing something I always wanted to see, sprues that do spearmen, archers, and swordsmen. But I still see all the left over bits as waste. Any gamer with a little history in miniatures has boxes of sprues full of arms and heads, what we need is bodies.
 
ldYeah, the GW Fantasy Warriors not to be confused with the Grenadier Fantasy Warriors. Right now Oathmark is doing something I always wanted to see, sprues that do spearmen, archers, and swordsmen. But I still see all the left over bits as waste. Any gamer with a little history in miniatures has boxes of sprues full of arms and heads, what we need is bodies.
Tough call on those Oathmark ones. But yeah, lots of leftovers. Same with lots of historical minis, especially ww1/ww2 sprues.

So, I know this is going wildly afield, but I do think those Oathmark ( *Grave) minis sprues could and should form the core of a decent RPG minis collection, but I also think you're right in that most beginning players aren't going to inherently know that stuff even exists, or that one can acquire individual sprues.

I'll take it a step further and say that a bit of advice /method ought probably to go along with that early mixed sprue collection, so our new would-be miniatures users don't fall into the easy trap of having a partial collection that never quite does what they want it to do.

So, a couple big things really ought to be talked about:

1)Where to get stuff?
2) What to collect first, and How and When to expand that (and this is where taking a cue from wargaming army building methods could be useful, but modified and adapted to RPGs use)
3) What space are we playing on, what to collect for that, and in what order (and by implication, the impact this has on rules and collection sizes and development)?
3.5) Learn to love the recycling bin
4) WYSIWYG is great, but realistically, substitutions always happen, so how to balance that ( economically, storage-wise). Going from simple to fancier over time
5) Re-use of miniatures on the GM side (Ubiquity of the creature in setting? Comic book resurrection rules? Setting social rules favor ransom/geas/extracted promises over and above simple killing?)
6) Re-use of minis on the player side: Hard to kill PCs, but also options for a stable of sub-in/sub-out buddy characters.

I mean, yay for people like me. I've acquired many a starter minis collection for a pittance over the years because of those common frustrations and the way that leads to the abandonment of the idea of using minis in gaming at all.
 
Last edited:
The Lead Adventure Forum has a thread for cheap fantasy figures. I don't think any metal figures can manage to be cheap anymore. There are a few companies like Warrior Miniatures that offer crude sculpts at lower prices. I'd have to go look at the list I was building.

But on the other hand, not using miniatures is a sure way to save money. Steve Jackson Games has some decent Cardboard Heroes pdfs. I really wish they'd do a kickstarter to produce the whole thing on the thicker board they used for the Dungeon Fantasy Rpg.

Another fun option is what Gary Gygax did back before there were any fantasy figures, mixing and matching scales and lines to represent different races. If you've got 1/72 Airfix Robinhood sets as your baseline, the 1/76 figures will work for elves, and you can hit the dollar store for giant bugs and frogs and get a nice stegasaurus and pterodactyl to make a dragon.
 
On occasion I run into expensive hobbies masquerading as a small business. Boutiques, used book stores, things like that.

I'm definitely feeling this right now. I have serious doubts about whether I'll ever be able to get back what I'm investing in my module line currently. I'm trying to get costs down, but I'm not even going to attempt a tax write off without a good accountant.

Anyone with experience with DTRPG and making an actual profit, feel free to offer advice! It's not really what I'm after, but it would be nice to know from those who've tried.
 
If you've built a following you might try a small kickstarter for a megamodule.

That's pretty much what I've already done, but my KS goal was below what my actual costs are for the two modules that I promised.

For me, the project has functioned, and probably always will function, as a fulfilling yet expensive extension of my hobby. That's fine enough for me. And if I can get costs down without losing quality, all the better. I just wonder if there's some point at which it might actually become profitable, and the money that I've spent an actual business investment.

Is there some kind of critical mass of material you need to have on DTRPG that essentially funds new material with a small profit left behind? I'd just like to hear from those who've reached this point.
 
As a consumer of rpg products I think its great that people are motivated enough to get stuff out there. The hobby is all the better for it. Its just a really odd marketplace. Stuff gets thrown up on DTRPG and sinks without a trace. Other stuff that doesn't look that impressive pulls in $250K or some other rediculous amount of money via kickstarter.
 
A lot of the time the secret to success on the internet is consitency. You've got to be there with something new frequently and regularly. With web comics, weekly isn't often enough. Ideally you want to be there every day with something new so you become part of people's habits and locked in their awareness. Steve Jackson's Daily Illuminator blog isn't a whole lot of material but it's there every day like the rising of the sun.
 
Anyone with experience with DTRPG and making an actual profit, feel free to offer advice! It's not really what I'm after, but it would be nice to know from those who've tried.

At the moment I'm definitely spending 2-3x what I make on DTRPG on art for each book. Which is fine because it's a hobby.

But "Profit"? That would involve working out how much I pay myself per word as well. I'm so far from profit that I don't think I'd ever see the black.
 
So Pubbers... how are you saving money in this hobby?

I now try to buy most things second hand, There's still a lot of impulse buyers out there who resell things just as fast, so I'm happy to help (and I'm one of those impulse buyers from time to time). It something I already did for video games (I almost never shell out more than 20$ for video game with very few exceptions). It requires patience and it's trickier with rpgs (less copies around, shipping prices have gone through the roof and rpg prices usually don't go down with time).

I restrain myself to core books only, so it better have most of the info I need to play or it's a no-go. Of course, it's a rule I broke from time to time.

I restrain myself to buy books I actually want to read and not those I want to have (I know, sounds strange but you impulse buyers out there know what I mean).

Doesn't work all the time though, I just bought Deviants the Renegades because getting Onyx Path games in France is a pain in the butt so when you can grab one you don't wait around (and the pod prices are out of my what I'm willing to pay for an rpg range). That's Fear Of Missing Out at play here.

If I need miniatures I try to get a boardgame that fits the theme I need. With Conan, Star Saga and Zombicide Black Plague I have plenty of miniatures to go around and fun boardgames to play as well. Only buying them second hand though as they've become quite expensive. But it's still the best bang for your buck to get loads of cool minis. I tried pathfinder pawns for a while but it just doesn't work for me.

I bought one of those customisable GM screen for five bucks. No more need to buy GM screens for each game (there's never a need for that, but remember I'm still a recovering impulse buyer).

In the end, a good history book or novel has generally more ideas in it than most rpg books and it's usually cheaper :grin:
 
Is there some kind of critical mass of material you need to have on DTRPG that essentially funds new material with a small profit left behind? I'd just like to hear from those who've reached this point.

Can't really say, I don't have that many products on DTRPG (six + two in pay what you want format) but most are silver/electrum best sellers with one being a Platinum seller (considering the % there that's not so bad) which means I made a good profit on these (enough to pay the rent) and it opened an international audience to me (most of my books are translated at least in spanish) which helped build an audience for my recent kickstarter.

I also had the chance to take part in popular projects (the Knock magazine).

It's a slow process, I'm active on two Facebook groups, I post on Reddit /rpg whenever I publish something. Basically it amounts to build an audience over time. It's a slow process and it cannot rely only on the amount of products you sell. I started posting things on Itch.io as well because you reach a different audience (and I publish different things than on DTRPG there).

I could start a Youtube channel but considering my french accent that would be a no go :grin:
 
I'm definitely feeling this right now. I have serious doubts about whether I'll ever be able to get back what I'm investing in my module line currently. I'm trying to get costs down, but I'm not even going to attempt a tax write off without a good accountant.

Anyone with experience with DTRPG and making an actual profit, feel free to offer advice! It's not really what I'm after, but it would be nice to know from those who've tried.

One thing worth noting about modules is that they don't sell well compared to core rules, supplements, or other smaller products. It also makes sense as it's likely only GMs that are your potential customers. Any publishers I've spoken to agree on this and it bears out with my own, albeit rather amateur, stuff on Drivethru. I've written several 100 lists and the sales for these far outstrip my adventure modules by a long way. It's a pity because I like writing adventures. Volume does help, and a regular release schedule is a must. As soon as I stopped regular releases sales really dipped (not that they were that high in the first place). As its a hobby for me, any sale I see no matter how small makes my day.
 
I think Wizards of the Coast has the adventure module down pretty good. There's always new magic items and monsters in the back. And some stuff is pretty high interest like the demon lords.
 
I think Wizards of the Coast has the adventure module down pretty good. There's always new magic items and monsters in the back. And some stuff is pretty high interest like the demon lords.
I felt I sold more copies of Scourge of the Demon because of the fact the back half was supplemental material that fleshed the locales of the adventure into areas more generally usuable.
 
At the moment I'm definitely spending 2-3x what I make on DTRPG on art for each book.

Time to save money by using AI-generated art perhaps?

I was experimenting with Midjourney this morning and even as a complete amateur with little understanding of its intricacies I managed to produce this image for a potential BESM campaign about ninjas and commandos duking it out in an alternate 80s cityscape:

edhYY8L.png

And here's one my brother made for his Phyrexian-style baddie:

GH5UQYU.png
 
I'm definitely feeling this right now. I have serious doubts about whether I'll ever be able to get back what I'm investing in my module line currently. I'm trying to get costs down, but I'm not even going to attempt a tax write off without a good accountant.

Anyone with experience with DTRPG and making an actual profit, feel free to offer advice! It's not really what I'm after, but it would be nice to know from those who've tried.
Ran my own business for about 6 years, record keeping is key and don't comingle personal purchases with business purchases. Where I live the tax write off only applies to income from the business, so if the business is making zero there is nothing to write off :smile: Sounds like you situation is cost of materials to make your product, which should be easy to address.

I personally never tried to write off any of my home etc. used for the business. That's trickier, and audit trigger I am told, and had tax implications if ever sold the home I was also told. Again, and very important, where I live in the US...pretty sure the laws are different even in the state over..
 
yeah, I think a sourcebook with adventure material generally does better than a straight up adventure. On the other hand, you need some adventures or people think your game has no support.
To be clear, I wrote it as two separate books and combined them into a single physical product. Yes, they were related because the locales I opted to describe in detail were the sites used in the adventure half. But I had a clear division between the two and made it clear that you did not have to read the supplement half to run the adventure half. I attached a couple of pages showing the transition in the initial version.

I have seen what other companies have done in the past, and the problem is that they all force you to wade through the supplemental material first before getting to the adventure part. Or worse it intermixed.

Sorry if I seem to be nitpicking, it just even after spelling it out in the book. I still got feedback that the reader felt they had to read the entire book. I plan to do better next time. In the long run I think it is the best way to generate long term sales.
 

Attachments

  • Scourge_Transition.pdf
    1.6 MB · Views: 1
One thing worth noting about modules is that they don't sell well compared to core rules, supplements, or other smaller products. It also makes sense as it's likely only GMs that are your potential customers. Any publishers I've spoken to agree on this and it bears out with my own, albeit rather amateur, stuff on Drivethru. I've written several 100 lists and the sales for these far outstrip my adventure modules by a long way. It's a pity because I like writing adventures. Volume does help, and a regular release schedule is a must. As soon as I stopped regular releases sales really dipped (not that they were that high in the first place). As its a hobby for me, any sale I see no matter how small makes my day.

I figured that 3rd party modules will be a tough sell, especially for relatively niche horror TTRPGs. Mine are being designed to play largely on their own, however, so I don't know how that will affect things. But I agree: Regular releases will be key for me to build the line into something with some sustainability. That's why I'm trying to stay ahead and planning for additional modules even before the first two are released.

Is selling on your own website ever worth it, or is it better to stay on DTRPG at least in the early stages?
 
Last edited:
Time to save money by using AI-generated art perhaps?

I was experimenting with Midjourney this morning and even as a complete amateur with little understanding of its intricacies I managed to produce this image for a potential BESM campaign about ninjas and commandos duking it out in an alternate 80s cityscape:

I've been messing with Disco Diffusion and more recently MidJourney but not found the right prompts, obviously.

I don't mind paying for art. I definitely need to up my sales pitch. It's plainly shite.[/spoiler]
 
Last edited:
Sure, but there's a whole world of new D&D players out there who don't know that or really anything at all about the wider market so there's still a market for what I pitched. Anyhow, I've been thinking about breaking down some boxes to make fantasy adventure kits with one sprue of humans, one sprue of dwarves, one sprue of orcs, one sprue of zombies, and one sprue of skeletons. It really amazes me than none of the companies that are making ranges of plastic figures have done this. The closes I've seen is that Mantic has packaged the vinyl figures from their Dwarf King's Hold game with some scenery and a dragon. The price point is too high on that one. It's a great idea but too expensive to hit the sweet spot and get people who are miniatures curious started.

Speaking of cheap plastics though, one of my other dreams is to do 54mm toy soldier style figures but of civilians, possibly with open hands so you can make French Resistance out of the Early Twentieth Century European Civilians. The idea would be to extend the market from gaming into school dioramas. I know Michaels sells a range of "Toobs" on a similar theme but if I know parents and school projects, a $10 bag of figures will outsell a $20 toob of figures.

Having done gamer retail, these are both solid ideas: A) Starter Set o' Fantasy Adventure Figures + Mobs, and B) Starter Set o' Modern Soldiers + Civilians.

Sadly I have already seen WotC (and others, e.g. HeroClix) do "booster pack" collectible miniatures before this idea, with chase rares and all the rest of that CCG speculator baggage.

The closest I've seen of your idea was Reaper doing direct-to-consumer selling buckets of models... but it mostly cut retailers out of the loop. I mean, yeah, 250+ models for a song are great, but they are not legal for tournament games (read: Ignored by Spikes), and not already broken down and sorted for retail, so like a big, undigestible brick upon the shelves.

Those civilian sets would also double for grade school local history projects. But sadly outside of dollhouse and diorama stores, big locals like Michael's & Hobby Lobby got that market sewed up for normies and already have it at a phat mark up. The challenge for merchants is the shelf space (cargo hold) is more valuable than just about anything you can leave in there -- every day it sits there and doesn't sell is money lost.
 
I could start a Youtube channel but considering my french accent that would be a no go :grin:
Your English is better than my French, so why worry about your accent? In fact, we English speakers could use a bilingual to talk about all the stuff we can only look at lovingly from the outside in -- such as all that Call of Cthulhu stuff & Bande Desínneè comics. :grin: Be brave and provide a gamer service, you already got a niche, and the practice can only help your pronunciation!

:evil: Or I could encourage you by doing this idea myself but in reverse, butchering French publicly on Youtube -- :sun: with Do-It-Yourself hand puppets! :sun: :skeleton: Think of the colorful comment section, that I could barely read... I would shamelessly continue in happy ignorance. :devil: Mwa ha ha ha!
 
Your English is better than my French, so why worry about your accent? In fact, we English speakers could use a bilingual to talk about all the stuff we can only look at lovingly from the outside in -- such as all that Call of Cthulhu stuff & Bande Desínneè comics. :grin: Be brave and provide a gamer service, you already got a niche, and the practice can only help your pronunciation!

:evil: Or I could encourage you by doing this idea myself but in reverse, butchering French publicly on Youtube -- :sun: with Do-It-Yourself hand puppets! :sun: :skeleton: Think of the colorful comment section, that I could barely read... I would shamelessly continue in happy ignorance. :devil: Mwa ha ha ha!

That's very kind of you! I'll seriously take that into consideration, could be fun but I must confess your project sounds waaaay more appealing to me :grin:

And speaking of saving money, I just got out of my FLGS with a copy of Deviant the Rnegades and Trinity Continuum Aeon so it seems I'm not really good at this.
 
Last edited:
Having done gamer retail, these are both solid ideas: A) Starter Set o' Fantasy Adventure Figures + Mobs, and B) Starter Set o' Modern Soldiers + Civilians.

Sadly I have already seen WotC (and others, e.g. HeroClix) do "booster pack" collectible miniatures before this idea, with chase rares and all the rest of that CCG speculator baggage.

The closest I've seen of your idea was Reaper doing direct-to-consumer selling buckets of models... but it mostly cut retailers out of the loop. I mean, yeah, 250+ models for a song are great, but they are not legal for tournament games (read: Ignored by Spikes), and not already broken down and sorted for retail, so like a big, undigestible brick upon the shelves.

Those civilian sets would also double for grade school local history projects. But sadly outside of dollhouse and diorama stores, big locals like Michael's & Hobby Lobby got that market sewed up for normies and already have it at a phat mark up. The challenge for merchants is the shelf space (cargo hold) is more valuable than just about anything you can leave in there -- every day it sits there and doesn't sell is money lost.
I'm dying.

I would love to actually talk with minis-heads about this kind of stuff in another thread, along with my own idealistic/dumb ideas about better pairing of rules and playstyle expectations to get the most success out of that kind of stuff (and compared/contrasted to Wargame style minis collecting/use)!

Of course, as relates to this thread, I guess the money aspect would be more along the lines of spending more effectively, rather than spending less. Or spending while avoiding certain kinds of "traps" while building to a collection. Or spending i smaller chunks and building over time.
 
yeah, I think a sourcebook with adventure material generally does better than a straight up adventure. On the other hand, you need some adventures or people think your game has no support.
And adventures while useful in of themselves can also highlight various aspects of one's systems. Along with being an example of how the author handled their campaigns.
 
I would love to actually talk with minis-heads about this kind of stuff in another thread, along with my own idealistic/dumb ideas about better pairing of rules and playstyle expectations to get the most success out of that kind of stuff (and compared/contrasted to Wargame style minis collecting/use)!

You should absolutely make some sort of "What Advice Can Wargamers Give to RPG Mini Collectors?" thread in the Board and Miniature Games subforum.

I know that I myself, as a rank n' flank fantasy wargamer and theater of the mind GM, see the WizKids and WotC blisters of skeletons and orcs, and I'm like, "Why not just find someone else interested, and buy a box of Oathmark Skeletons and Orcs between you and swap halvsies? You'd each have 15 orcs and 15 skeletons for the price of about 5 D&D blisters of 2-3 minis each."
 
For some reason the wargame companies don't seem to view rpgers as a viable market.
Which is weird because until I moved to scf-fi 3d printing, and surplus/overstock site sales, I absolutely did buy the occasional box of skellies, demons, or gobbos.
 
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top