Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures from WizKids.
 
In mildly annoying news, and once again indicating communications problems between somebody and retailers, the release date for the Superman and the Legion of Super Heroes set for HeroClix got pushed back from February 12th to February 26th.  I did not learn this until I called my Alliance sales rep to see about adding some items to the shipment and found the date had changed.  A date shift like this should have gone out to every Alliance account ahead of time, especially since some of us do take pre-orders and run special events tied to new WizKids releases, even though the company doesn't support them, meaning we had three days' notice to contact players letting them know we had to push the booster tournament back two weeks.  A lot of contacting of people in a short period of time.
 
WizKids announced this week the company had acquired the rights to release a line of Dungeons & Dragons pre-painted miniatures, somewhat similar, I assume, to the late lamented D&D Miniatures line put out several years ago by Wizards of the Coast.  According to the release, WizKids will have two separate releases for the line, a six figure pre-set starter and a 50+ set that comes randomized in booster packs, similar to HeroClix but hopefully without dials.  I really look forward to this as customers still come in looking for the D&D Miniatures, even though the last set released back in 2009.

What I really hope they do, but I doubt if the company will since it violates the whole collectable motif on which WizKids has based its brand, is release sets of monsters, such as a skeleton pack, a goblin pack etc.  Customers do not particularly want to open up pack after pack of boosters just trying to assemble a horde of goblins.  Rather, they like the surprise of finding a new, unique monster or a couple of character figures.  Players, it appears, can never have too many character figures as our D&D Miniature singles of those outsell monsters by a factor of 4 to 1.
 
I expect D&D Miniatures, once they hit the market, to outsell the Pathfinder Battles figures by a wide margin, simple due to the greater "versatility" of the D&D line.  As the Pathfinder RPG has grown in popularity over the past several years, it has also developed a number of game-specific monsters only usable within the confines of the Pathfinder game, while D&D miniatures tend, at least the ones made by WOTC, worked well with almost any fantasy RPG as the figures were fairly setting neutral.
 
Interestingly, at least to me, the completely blind boxed D&D miniatures of the earlier sets sold much better than the later few sets that came with one visible large figure and four smaller hidden ones.  I think it was because customers only wanted one of the large figures.  If the large figure came in a blind box, that was OK since the customer could blame randomness on it.  Removing the randomness from one of the figures made it harder to sell them as customers did not want duplicates of the larger figures.  Players can always use more goblins, more demon lords, not so much.
 
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.