I’ve been an avid fan of collecting and painting miniatures since before I even knew about D&D. Yet nowadays, I feel as if video is much easier to use than several tackle boxes of lead and ralidium-pewter paperweights. The thrill is gone baby - long live the digital revolution!

My first minis were 20mm Rafm individual blisters that I picked up in the local hobby and craft store at the tender age of 10. I liked to play with action figures so having a small collection of fantasy figures to play with was just as cool. I had a wizard, an adventurer with a backpack, and a pegasus. Well, OK, one of those was my brother’s, but we always played together. We never dreamed of painting them, just playing with them. However, the soft lead minis were no good for my baby sister, so off they went.

Fast forward three years to the D&D club meetings in Junior High with several other new gamers. We first discovered Grenadier and Ral Partha minis and began to paint them with Testor’s model paints. One of my friends used toothpicks to do the details - not exactly quality, but as long as the colors were close, who cared! I began to purchase minis by the boxful at every chance I had. I later even tried to strip the old painted ones with paint thinner and a metal brush (don’t try that at home!), but ended up with indistinct blobs of metal or character minis who looked a little blunted by their experience.

The hardest part of painting the minis was constructing the dragons and larger giants who always were packed in such a way as to maximize the number of glue joints. I became a fan of Crazy Glue (even though it never seemed to work) and experimented with many two-part epoxies in my bedroom in the middle of summer (oh, the flashbacks). I had a painting station on my desk with many prepped minis on bits of cardboard, a stack of Dragonscale metallic drybrush creams with Revlon make-up applicators to brush it on, and plenty of Partha Paints, Polly-S paints, and even some old Grenadier-set paints - all acrylics, since the oil-based Testor paints were too glossy. By this time I had accumulated well over 300 minis and only painted a small fraction of them.

Sure, over the years I continued to paint on and off, but the time involved was eating into my game time and life in general. Besides, as the years wear on, it’s harder to crouch over the minis and stare for hours at 25mm scale eyeballs, painting with brushes that only have 5 hairs coming to a razor tip. I don’t own my own house and the apartment I currently inhabit has poor ventilation. Honestly, I haven’t painted anything in so long that all the paints dried up and I threw most of the really bad ones away (but kept the brushes)!

Now I think it’s time to liquidate the collection. All the boxes are gone, some of the dragons were never painted (although they were assembled), and the majority of the collection has endured years of playing wear and tear. You can never impress on others just how malleable lead is until they decide to make their character with the slender sword do a back-flip off the dragon….

The step towards plastic minis has saved me quite a bit of heartache! But there are too many problems with the current set of minis. For one thing, they are too easy to distort and permanently disfigure. Temperature extremes and packaging conditions tend to “remold” the plastic into bizarre shapes. The paint jobs are sub-par at best, and terrible at worst. Don’t even get me started on the collectibility and rarity of the most useful of the figures! Nope, that paradigm is out the window now. Instead of buying a case of minis I don’t need, I’ll just MAKE my own digitally.

Yes, that’s right, make my own DIGITALLY! I can scan in pictures of whatever I want, make it whatever size I need it to be, add in special effects like magical lighting, glowing eyes, etc. just by using Adobe Photo Shop. Save it as a .png file and import it to GameTable (the best game accessory never made by Wizards of the Coast!) where I can use it the instant I make it. No more ordering minis (since I can’t find them in stores anymore) or waiting to see what was in stock. No expensive 3-D Dungeon Forge dioramas that require you to sub-let your apartment to own or flimsy cardstock fold-up dungeons that fly away when the fan is turned on. No more storing boxes of minis and paints in closets. Just need a scanner and a computer with an internet connection and you are ready to rock! No more easy-erase gaming mats, lumicolor pens (in various colors) that leave your hands blue or green after washing them off, or poker chips/checkers used to indicate elevation. The computer handles it all and adds nothing else to clutter your house or carry to the game. Sure, a large screen prominently displayed is required, but really, that’s all! Most television sets can easily accomodate a video cable and there you have it!

Now, WotC is planning to release some sort of dungeon mapping program like DunDjinni (which is nice looking but hardly worth the effort in my opinion). Wouldn’t that cut into their sales of miniatures? Aren’t they shooting themselves in the foot? Isn’t that the reason they gave for not re-releasing the old 1st and 2nd edition AD&D material? Am I really this bitter….?