Minis Problem

[alchemyprime]

So at the game store I go to, there were some guys who abandoned their minis and moved away. The game store owner was tired of having free minis around, and realized I run the only game that uses these sorts of minis anyway. So he gave them to Lady Luna (my fiancee) and I.

Well, three of the boxes were all wonderful! So many little monsters and a whole box worth of minis for players to use (I tend to run minis light games, but for big boss battles, minis can be fun).

Then we got to the last two boxes. Two thirds of the female sculpts in this box? Were painted to be naked. Like painting over the clothes with flesh tones, painting parts onto them that didn't need to be there... So we're wiping these ones clean and repainting them. Some brake cleaner should kill off the paint, because a lot of these minis would be beautiful sculpts, but the paint jobs were terrible.

Me: Why is that necromancer-ess painted naked over her dress?
Luna: Say that to the bard woman, this elf... a lot of these minis look like they got violated...
Me: ... Poor minis. We'll help them recover.

So over all: three of the five boxes are great, one was okay, one needs to be salvaged and probably repainted... or melted into scrap...

So how about you, Playground? Any minis based complaints or fun stories?

[Savannah]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait....painted naked over a dress? How does that even begin to make sense?!

[SleepyShadow]

A few years ago, I was at the local game store flipping through the Call of Cthulhu rule book when someone over at another table playing some battle-minis game had a temper tantrum, grabbed one of the minis, and threw it on the ground. He scooped up the rest of his stuff and stormed out of the shop, making sure to stomp on the mini on the floor as he left.

Once he was gone, I went over to the fellow he had been playing against. The mini was a dragon of some sort, and in spite of the young man's best efforts it was still relatively intact save for the wings which had broken off. I talked to the other fellow for a bit and found out that the young man had lost, gotten mad, and stormed off. I offered to fix it for the fellow, but he told me that the angry young man had stomped on his own dragon.

So a few drops of super-glue later, I scored a free dragon mini.

[RandomNPC]

A friend of mine got into Mage Knight when it was just being released and got some of the odd beta style ones, like an Ogre Chieftain with necromancy. He saw my "first edition" version and thought it was mediocre, so he traded his to the store keeper for something else. When the guy saw the necromancy and verified it was the correct creatures base, my friend started going off about how cheap it was that the store would steal a necromancer from him. I told him to chill and the store owner (VERY politely) explained that he should have checked his own mini, but with an attitude like that there would be no trade backs and if he said another word he wouldn't be welcome in the store again.

He just had bad luck, once he sold off a limited edition dragon he didn't know was limited, then tried to find one three months later, things like that.

[OracleofWuffing]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait....painted naked over a dress? How does that even begin to make sense?!

Well, it's hard to get naked necromanceresses directly from the manufacturer, so they just grabbed the nearest facsimile...

Sadly, I had to make all my minis, so nothing that's too interesting to complain about.

[Malacode]

Haha, niiice minis. Lot of effort went into those.

My biggest mini complaint has to do with GW and their newish Finecast minis. GW may be expensive, but if you wanted a big model, you used to be able to rely on them for quality. Used to. Now they have this terribad Finecast stuff.

Terrible material to work with if you want to drill into it for pinning or magnets, but that's not why I dislike them. I dislike them because they look like they're done in a green sand mold, which then gets reused a few times too often. Shelled out 50 bucks on a miniature, got home and it was basically a huge glob of inclusions, flash and just plain terribleness. Luckily, in that case, the miniature was getting taken to pieces for a conversion, and the worst parts of the mini were going to be discarded anyway, but it's put me off GW entirely.

Other complaints are my own fault, really. Needed to do up a bunch of minis for a game I was DMing that was happening the next day. Didn't prime them, got them all painted up and packed them away one they were dry. Didn't have any plain tissue, so used some scented stuff. Yeah, not a good combo. The oils in the scented stuff is bad enough, but that plus the lack of primer on smooth metal minis meant that by the time I unpacked them, they were nearly entirely stripped of paint. So not cool.

[OracleofWuffing]

Haha, niiice minis. Lot of effort went into those.

Everyone wanted to play as the dragons. The dragonborn? A dragon. The bugbear? A dragon. The Tiefling? Dragon. Dwarf? Dragon. Got to the point where we identified who was a player and who was an enemy by who was a dragon once or twice.

[Soylent Dave]

I once had a kid who was playing in my (then) shop throw a tantrum which involved taking all his models and throwing them out into the road.

Most did not survive contact with the traffic.

And by 'kid' I mean 'in his early 20s'.

(he got even more upset when I banned him for a month)

[Destro_Yersul]

My biggest mini complaint has to do with GW and their newish Finecast minis. GW may be expensive, but if you wanted a big model, you used to be able to rely on them for quality. Used to. Now they have this terribad Finecast stuff.

Terrible material to work with if you want to drill into it for pinning or magnets, but that's not why I dislike them. I dislike them because they look like they're done in a green sand mold, which then gets reused a few times too often. Shelled out 50 bucks on a miniature, got home and it was basically a huge glob of inclusions, flash and just plain terribleness. Luckily, in that case, the miniature was getting taken to pieces for a conversion, and the worst parts of the mini were going to be discarded anyway, but it's put me off GW entirely.

That's because GW Finecast is made of resin, instead of plastic. It's the same stuff they use for the forgeworld minis. Allows for a lot more detail, but resin requires a lot more preparation for painting than plastic does. Mould lines, flashing, inclusions, all that stuff is standard with resin miniatures. Just something you got to deal with if you use resin.

[DigoDragon]

I remember one time I was setting up a boss encounter, and my 3-year old daughter decided to make an edit to the playing field by adding her My Little Pony Applejack and Twilight Sparkle, replacing the ranger and wizard villains I had set.

The uncannyness of it made our group laugh so much we decided to continue with the encounter as is.