Here that oh people of Wizards.
I know you can do it. And it's a no brainer product and you could package it as if it was a tiles set.
I just want tokens, lots of tokens, sets of tokens.
Monster Manual 1,2,3 sets for instance. I know you can match the art to a round disk.
Monsters from the other books too. Underdark, Open Grave, the Planar books. Anywhere you have stuck new monsters.
I want them as they appeared in the Monster Vault ie nice mixes. I don't need maps, adventures, books etc crammed in and making the item costly. I just want reams and reams of tokens on useful colourful thick card stock.
I like being able to get the occasional treat for a few bucks eh.
It's easy to sell me a quick easy 10 dollar item.
I COULD make these damned things myself, I have the tools eh. But I also have the occasional 10 dollar bill and I am often justlazy enough to let YOU do it for me.
Forget your damned minis, you dropped the ball on them admit it and move on.
Let's get those tokens moving out the door.
Sell the tokens in packs, outisde of the boxed sets.
Like they do with Dungeon Tiles. A pack of 6 or 10 token sheets.
I'm loving Monster Vault but I don't use tokens so I have like 10 sheets of tokens I paid for that will never be of any use to my group (we bought almost all of their minis, yeah I know the paint on them sucks like it was made by a chinese infant, but hey it's not a problem for me). If the tokens were extra stuff I wouldn't mind but part of the price of the box is the tokens.
I support this proposition. You get your tokens and remove them from the boxed I want to buy.
And everybody's happy.
That being said, I also want miniatures. Both methods of representing monsters on grid have their own merits, and it saddens me if Lords of Madness was the last miniature set.
Maybe you could package them by their category, like "Small natural beasts" would be filled with vermin and insects, and medium natural beasts would have wolves and stuff. That would be amazing! A useful addition to my D&D Collection for sure.
But yes. Even if it's a bit late for me (perhaps)
Often times WOTC displays actual illustrations of the monsters on the website. All you'll need is a computer printer, a paint program like PHOTOSHOP and some card stock, which could be bought at the local officemax store. It will take about 1 hour to make a sheet of tokens for the monsters that you'll need in your next adventure.
1 Hour versus $20.00 of your hard earned cash!!!
Part 1: Making your own MONSTER Tokens for free!!!
Often times WOTC displays actual illustrations of the monsters on the website. All you'll need is a computer printer, a paint program like PHOTOSHOP and some card stock, which could be bought at the local officemax store. It will take about 1 hour to make a sheet of tokens for the monsters that you'll need in your next adventure.
1 Hour versus $20.00 of your hard earned cash!!!
The point though is mainly, what is worth more to a person, 20 bucks or an afternoon fiddling on a hobby.
Here is how I 'could' make tokens. Page sized labels, a token image making program, and a bag of poker chips. Brain dead simple really. If you work in an office, you can likely even sneak the colour copy or two. I mean we are not talking copying a book here. 5 or 6 print outs is a lot of tokens.
For me, it's basically the cost of the colour copy.
Past a certain point, I have just spent the cost of a redundant Monster Vault. I have lots of friends that role game, I could likely sell off the redundant book.
And the poker chip idea breaks down the second you go past medium size counters too.
And the cost of a proper plug cutting drill bit is interestingly about the cost of a second Monster Vault eh.
And I don't think many of you will find any thrill locating a means to cut 'huge' type tokens aside from scribing with the correct cutting tools (but I am more a modeler and I have all these tools lying around).
This is as I have more or less stated, a very easy product for Wizards to exploit. Oodles of artwork based tokens they can shove out the door with their eyes closed.
I could even work during this one hour and make more than 10$...
Plus the fact that the end result would probably be better if I buy it than if I make it myself considering my craft skills.
www.fierydragon.com
Their tokens are relatively cheap for what you get ($40 gets you 700) and are similar to the WotC ones in that they have a bloodied side. In fact, I almost prefer the fiery dragon tokens because you get to see the entire monster, not just its face. Also, the simpler color art is easier to see when it's shrunk onto a 1 inch square. They have many sets available now, in fact I think you can get everything except the epics from MM3.
I have the heroic 1, heroic 2, and paragon 1 and that's all the tokens I will need until I hit level 25 or so. Seriously, these are great tokens. Try them, you won't be disappointed.
I want to throw in my support for this idea. I would love tokens of the MM3 and Demonomicon especially.
I'm agreeing with you. I just wrote this down on my calendar. ;)
Anyone who doesn't want your tokens, put them on Ebay. I know a lot of us would like extras without having to buy the whole Monster Vault again.
How much would someone pay though, including shipping?
The boxed set itself is pretty cheap, I find it more trouble to put 'em on eBay than what I guess I could have for it (around what? 10$ at most?)
I'll turn the proposition around, buy a second box and sell us the monster book only, keep the maps and tokens
Myself, I think Minis might be re-introduced as singles or adsorbed in the Heroscape line. Perhaps have multiple Minis for monsters.
You do realize that the Heroscape line has been cancelled, as in no more.
Halber
Ended up selling myself and 3 other DM friends several hundreds of packs of minis in under a few months. And they were great products too, not garbage no one wanted.
But you know, 600 lead minis is both hard to store, as well as hard to carry.
What seemed like a great idea, fell flat on it's face in execution. In 3 years time, I finally accepted that A. I was unlikely to paint the things, and B. the guys had made it plain they weren't really serious about using them for table top warfare.
So I kept a number of the PC type items, and dumped essentially several armies worth of monsters and races like Orcs and all manner of undead on my buddies who not having quite as many hobbies as me, had no beef cluttering up their own shelves. Just saved the biggies like giants and monsters of legend like Manticores and Titans.
But have you ever picked up a 5 inch tall Frost Giant made in lead? Yeah they make nice shelf ornaments, but good luck carrying these around
So even though my recent purchase of Monster Vault left me scratching my head for the 'ideal' carry device (work in progress), one thing is certain. Tokens beats minis if you have to carry them anywhere.
But I am still wondering if I have talked myself into a funny quandry. I still need to carry them, and I am already carrying the laptop and 1 or 2 books dice and all. And I walk with a cane, and I am NOT overly mobile. If I buy it, it has to work and work well and not be any form of hype
The idea of finding 175 bucks for a massive sum of tokens from Fiery Dragon, to be honest, 175 bucks is likely easier to find, than an ideal way of carrying 175 bucks worth of tokens
I speculate, the collection would never actually be portable. I'd sure need to KNOW which tokens were in need for any external games.
And if I can find 175 bucks, well I can buy colour laser printers for cheaper, and likely mass produce my own tokens for that matter. It's always about the thresshold of interest I guess.
In for a penny in for a pound.
And if they want to keep minis around, they need to sell them in sets and get rid of the random factor. They also could throw in stat cards for the new boardgames to help sell them to a new crowd.