D&D Miniatures: War Drums

We take two steps forward and one step back.

Overall score:

It’s been roughly a year and a half since the last D&D Miniature Starter Set, part of Aberrations, and with the ninth expansion Wizards has decided to take D&D minis in a slightly different direction. Some of the rule changes were obviously influenced by the success of the Star Wars Miniature line that Wizards also makes, and others were made to speed up game play itself, however there are still some lingering problems with the rules and some new issues were created in this last rule book.

I guess it would be easier for me to just link to the review of the old starter set and just point out the differences but in the time since I wrote that review my opinions on Tabletop games have changed some what, plus it’s been five months since I’ve written anything for TWG and I’ve got to make up for some lost ground on the “Words Written Quota”, so I’ll be going over the actual rules in whole again in this article. If you’re already familiar with the basic game rules you can just follow this snazzy anchor tag and skip this next part.

The D&D Miniature game, in a nutshell, plays just like the D&D RPG, just without the leveling, shopping, skill checks and role-playing, in other words it’s just a modified version of the combat system from the RPG. Not much of a surprise there really. The game is a collectable one much like Magic is a collectable game, meaning that you buy figures that come in random assortments and rarities, and Wizards puts out about 3 expansions a year.

There are four factions in the game and you have to make up a team using only figures from a single faction, this is called a “War Band” and its point size is 200 maximum. Each figure has a total point value and you can have a maximum of 8 figures in a War Band. The four factions are: Lawful Good, high defense and hit points but low damage and on the slow side. Lawful Evil: high defense with lots of figures that rely on spells to hamper or impede an opponent but not a lot of damage. Chaotic Good: Fast with high damage and lots of ranged options but low on hit points and life. And Chaotic Evil: Fast with the highest damage output but the lowest defense.

The games are played on a preprinted map divided up into 1”x1” squares and everything is bases off these squares, so no measuring devices are needed, and play revolves around turns and phases. Turns are defined by every figure being used or “activated,” and in each phase (which are part of a turn) each player activates 2 of his/her figures. So basically you have multiple phases in a turn and multiple turns in a game. There are abilities that are useable once per game, turn, phase and action. Each figure can be activated once per turn and have two actions per activation which can either be an attack or moving (though they can only attack twice if they have the ability too). All combat is resolved by rolling d20s and adding the figure's attack rating to the result. If the combined number equals or beats the target figure’s defense score you hit and deal the predetermined damage for that attack. If a figure looses half its hit points it has to make a moral save at a staggering difficulty of 20 (i.e. you have to roll at least a 19 on a 20 sided die to make it for most figures). If you fail this roll the unit runs away and chances are out of the game completely. You do get to add the unit’s level, average is 1-3, and a commander rating if applicable, to the die result. To win a game you must get 200-victory point which are gained by either killing a figure or by having figures in a map’s victory area for a turn.

The game is fairly fast, if you know the rules well enough a single game lasting only 15-20 minutes is the norm, and while it’s more complicated then Star War Minis, that isn’t a bad thing. D&D minis offers a lot of options on play just based off of the newly featured map you choose due to terrain rules, which I really like. Terrain in D&D minis offers more options then just, “This type is hard to move through” or “this type makes it harder to hit”, they’ve got teleporters, ways to make your figures do more damage, and things that hamper one attack type but not another. So you can really build a team around a chosen map or have your team adversely affected by a map.

The big change in the new rulebook is how commanders work, previously if your figure was not within 6 squares of a commander they had movement and attack penalties which really hurt lots of figures that had fast movements or special abilities that allowed them to be placed outside the starting area, plus you can’t move units as groups so the chances were you’d always have a figure or two out of command somewhere. Now units are only benefited by being in command but not penalized for being out of command, so you would get the commander’s rating added onto moral roles as well as any commander effect listed. Commander effects are usually damage or attack modifiers though some add new abilities. This works just like the Star Wars miniature game and is a huge improvement to the D&D Miniature game, how commanders worked previously was my number one gripe with this rule system.

However one of the new rules, maximum 8 figures in a war band, has taken the number one “dumb rule” slot. In some miniature games, like Heroclix, this wouldn’t be a big deals since it’s quite hard to get a team with that many figures in it but in D&D Minis there are a lot of figures that only cost 5-10 points and some people, like me, hate investing tons of points into a figure that will just be out of the game after taking half it’s life in damage due to a failed moral save. This change was made mostly due to complaints that the game is too slow so the 8-figure maximum plus the moral rule is Wizard’s fix to speed things up. But I think that this restricts war band building too much and forces people to only play a certain way, I hate limitations placed on team building and think this one is too restrictive for a game that has a huge base of low cost figures.

Of course my other gripe is the moral rule, I’ve always seen it as a cheap way for D&D minis to try and justify itself to the fans of Warhammer and like miniature games despite the negative effect it has on the game and the more casual table top player. Most figures can’t make this save, you're lucky if you have +5 to your roll (i.e. get a 15 or better on a d20) and every time I’ve played this game I’ve always had my most expensive figure routed after only one round of combat. And now that the rules are forcing you to use more expensive figures I hate this rule even more (though I hate the rule that requires you to deal with this idiotic rule even more).

Figure wise I wasn’t too impressed with War Drums, I haven’t seen all the stats so I’m basing this purely off of the sculpts themselves, also honestly most people I know only use these for RPG play anyway. While it’s nice to have another crack at getting a warforged fighter figure do we really need four in one set? From an RPG point of view the humanoid figures are fairly dumb too -- not many good PC or NPC figures in the set. However, the large sized monsters are quite nice. But what the crap is a Khumat anyway? And why should it, a giant alligator wearing a loincloth, be one of the rares?

While the overall rule changes are for the better (as I said I’m loving the new commander rules and the way they’re handling maps), the 8-figure maximum and moral rule pretty much prevent me from ever giving this game anything higher then a five, and War Drums doesn’t quite make it there. A boring selection of figures and an addition of a new rule I don’t like hurts it.

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Written by Spriggan on May 14th, 2006