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Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Handbook
The Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Handbook is a D&D RPG branded supplement that is intended to “maximize the impact the v3.5 editions of the core rulebooks and the D&D Miniatures line will have on your game.” I haven’t played the new D&D Miniatures game yet, but have extensive D&D experience; the book promised skirmish and mass battle rules for D&D, so I picked it up hoping for something similar to the old AD&D Battlesystem supplement.
What I got was a fairly strange product – not all bad, but very schizophrenic.
Format
The book is 192 pages hardcover, with the high production values we’ve come to expect from Wizards of the Coast. Readable, pretty colors, nice graphic design, liberal use of good art (both color and B&W line art in the D&D 3e vein). It doesn’t deviate from the standard 3e/3.5e D&D graphical look and feel. The book lacks an index, which is a problem for a large rulebook.
The D&D Stuff
The first three chapters, which compose 67 of the 192 pages of the book, give you a bunch of new base and prestige classes, spells and magic items, and monsters. They’re all pretty nice and reasonable, but the thing that I couldn’t get over is that they have pretty much nothing at all to do with the miniatures or mass battle aspects of the game. In that way, these first three chapters of the Miniature’s Handbook are more like a 3.5e supplement for all the 3e class builder books (Sword & Fist, et al.).
Classes
The base classes are the favored soul (a cleric type that gets spells like a sorcerer), the healer (a cleric type specializing in healing), marshal (a charismatic battle leader that gives benefit to troops), and warmage (a mage w/ very limited damage-only spells that can also wear armor). The marshal is the weakest one; I’m not sure why it’s a base class and not a prestige class, and though you’d think the marshal’s powers would be useful in mass battles, its powers are not written with the mass battle rules in mind and most of them would be eliminated in the simplification process required for those rules. The prestige classes are the bonded summoner (an elemental mage with a pet elemental companion), dragon samurai (a samurai that rides dragons), havoc mage (a mage that can cast spells while making weapon attacks in combat), skullclan hunter (a rogue undead hunter whose sneak attack works on undead), tactical soldier (cooperative fighter), war hulk (Large creatures get to thrash more opponents), and warchief (leader of primitive humanoids in battle). These are all OK, if a bit random (and again, totally unrelated to the mass battle theme). The main weaknesses are that the havoc mage and warmage are basically parts of the spellsword prestige class from Sword & Fist, the war hulk and warchief are pretty much for NPC bad guys only, and the dragon samurai is one of those classes that only makes sense in game worlds with both an extremely high level of fantasy and a high level of culture-mixing (personally not to my taste).
Feats
The feats are varied and generally balanced. You can improve your base speed by 5 feet, or charge with extra force, or make better attacks of opportunity – something for everyone. The major addition here is “Sudden” metamagic feats – which I would refer to as “metamagic feats, but better”. Basically these feats allow you to apply a metamagic feat to a spell at casting time and without upping the spell level – once per day. This, in my opinion, is the way metamagic feats should have been implemented in the first place. I don’t see many people use metamagic feats because they’re way, way too inconvenient and costly. These should correct that, and they’re one of the best parts of the book.
Spells
The new spells are new spells, in many cases weapon or damage oriented but again, there’s a little of everything. There’s a couple new groups of spells – “swift” spells that can be cast like a free action but limited to 1/round, and “legion” spells that just affect more people, e.g. “Legion’s Shield of Faith” (shield of faith on everyone in a 20 foot burst). There’s also “greater” versions of a lot of common spells added. There’s a couple little “no saving throw” gems in here, like the Clr 3 “Curse of Petty Failing”, a no-save –2 to attacks and saves for 1 min/level. There’s even a new Mordenkainen spell, “Mordenkainen’s Buzzing Bee” (Sor/Wiz 1, no save, -10 to Concentration and Move Silently checks).
Magic Items
And what collection of random new d20 content would be complete without five pages of magic items? Well, here you go. Most notable are a bunch of “shirts” that give DR 5/whatnot for 50-100,000 gp.
Monsters
The entertaining thing about these 28 pages of new monsters is that the introduction tries to claim that they are “designed, in part, for miniatures play” – but these really are just miscellaneous new monsters (many of which are “Solitary”, including the nothic, which hides in subterranean caves and ruins looking to eat people). Not that they’re bad monsters. And they’ve included “Aspects” of various deities, which are similar to what have been called “Avatars” in the past; weakened-down versions of the deity suitable for PCs to actually fight. Most of the listed Aspects are of evil gods, devils, and demons (Asmodeus, Demogorgon, Orcus, Nerull, Hextor, Lolth, Tiamat, Vecna) – Kord’s aspect is listed, but aligned Chaotic Evil – looks like someone at Wizard’s isn’t reading their canon well (Kord’s Chaotic Good both in the PHB and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer) . These are designed for miniatures play in the sense that they don’t have any special abilities, they’re just big (9-15 HD) killing machines. In general, that’s their definition of “designed for miniatures play” – limited special abilities.
So, to sum up the D&D part of the book – it’s a solid collection of new classes, feats, magic, and monsters. I’d give it a 4/5 (maybe a 3/5 for the monsters).
The Miniatures Stuff
Now we get to the Miniatures part of the book. Chapter Four, “Stat Cards”, takes 10 pages explains how to make a stat card for creatures to use under the skirmish rules. First, they waste some time by telling you how to make a mildly simplified creature stat block for D&D (just like the ones you find in every published scenario). Then they tell you how to create a creature’s miniatures statistics – it boils down to level, speed, AC, HP, melee and ranged attack, and damage (a single average value rounded to the nearest 5). And special abilities. Skills, feats, etc. are discarded, and you choose a “faction” (one of CE/LE/CG/LG).
Skirmishing
Chapter 5, “Skirmish Rules”, goes on for 43 pages and covers how to build small warbands of equal point values and make them fight. These rules are still at an individual creature level; if one side has 10 orcs, you have 10 individual orc miniatures which all act separately. A lot of this chapter’s page count is spent re-explaining standard D&D combat in Miniatures-ese – initiative, flanking, who you can target, etc. Initiative is modified in that each side only activates 2 creatures at a time, taking turns until everyone has gone. There are also Morale rules, which are unfortunately not more fine-grained than “1d20 + level vs. DC 20; units that fail flee at top speed.” Creatures under command can reroll that save every round until they get themselves together or leave the map. The actual skirmish rules are only 20 pages; the chapter then continues with random scenarios like “Boar Hunt” and “Prowling Marauder”. There’s rules for playing a “skirmish campaign,” where your warband grows in strength after each win, and can get magic items for use in the skirmishes. Unfortunately, these rules don’t integrate with the D&D experience point rules, and the magic items are just a small set of Miniatures-ized D&D magic items. A lot of the complexity of the skirmish rules is hidden in the 10-page Skirmish Glossary, which explains special abilities, terrain effects, and conditions. This doesn’t do a good job of teaching the rules (it’s like learning English from a dictionary), and I found myself starting to flip pages rather than try to read and internalize this content.
The real problem with the skirmish rules is that they’re designed for very small combats (like up to 10 creatures per side), and the rules used aren’t simplified enough to over come the fact that they’re different in many particulars from standard D&D combat. If you are going to have to remember two sets of combat rules, the skirmish one had better be a lot simpler and quicker than usual, and it’s not.
Battling
Chapter 6, “Mass Battle Rules”, is an additional 35 pages which discusses large battles. However, if you’re expecting any higher levels of abstraction, you’ll be disappointed (I was). It boils down to taking a bunch of individual creatures and putting them into little trays so that they move and attack as units. Other than that, it’s still individual creatures swinging and hitting other individual creatures in 6 second rounds. Due to the unit structure, you have distinctions between formed and unformed units and a bunch of movement rules to handle pivoting, attacking formed units in their side or back, and the like. Also, when a unit takes damage, you don’t have to track damage to individual creatures; instead you just drop one creature for every creature increment of hit point damage the unit takes (for example, a unit of 5 10 hp ogres that takes 10 hp of damage from various attacks just loses one of its ogres). The morale rules are slightly better in that they account for a “shaken” state between happy and routed, although they’re unclear in that morale saves are made versus DC 20 using 1d20 plus the level of “any single creature in the unit” – whether that’s the highest level or lowest level it doesn’t make clear; I assume the intent is highest level, in which event you should never have units composed only of low-level creatures, as the morale rules will crush you (morale saves are required under many conditions, including the first combat loss or making a charge and not killing anyone or disengaging from another unit). Of course, the rules (hidden in the definition of a unit in the glossary, and not in the rules explanations) say that all creatures in a unit have to have the same “name,” I’m not sure if that means they all have to be similarly leveled. Larger formed units get morale bonuses, which is good. Anyway, expect the morale rules to be a heavy factor in your games; only by assigning plenty of commanders will you expect units of low-level troops to not break and run all the time. Appropriately, there’s several pages dedicated to commanders and their effects.
Like the skirmish rules, this section makes no reference to how this would work as part of a D&D campaign; PCs aren’t even mentioned except to note that if you have any “they’re probably commanders”. Instead, these rules are largely treated as a standalone wargame - “two or more players can play.”
Random Dungeons
Chapter 7 is a bizarre 10-page afterthought on generating random dungeons. This is the only part of the book that makes more than a token effort at integrating D&D and D&D Miniatures. You take all the stat cards that come with your minis and shuffle them together, and make a “deck” that threats get pulled off of as the D&D PCs wander about. The most obnoxious thing about these rules is that they don’t randomly generate the dungeon map itself- you need to supply one (for their demo they use the dungeon tactical map from the back of the 3.5e DMG). So it’s not really better than a bunch of random encounter tables, except inasmuch as it encourages you to buy official D&D Miniatures to have printed stat cards to put into your deck.
The end of the book is 19 pages of "terrain tiles" and suchlike to copy and cut out; in my opinion a tremendous waste of space; these should have been a PDF Web enhancement at best (giving people at least a fighting chance at printing them in color).
To sum up the Miniatures part of the book – I feel like the skirmish rules aren’t simplified enough from standard D&D to add value, and the mass battle rules are similarly cumbersome. If you have D&D Miniatures and love the ruleset, however, I imagine this is up your alley –although I suspect lots of these rules are duplicated content from the actual Miniatures rules supplied with that product. The rules aren’t terribly flawed, in my opinion – just complicated. I’ve seen d20 mass battle rules that do a decent job described in a fraction of the space (for example, those that come with Mongoose Publishing’s Slaine RPG). I give this section a 2/5 – if you already like the D&D Miniatures rules, you’d probably find it at least a 3/5.
Where’s the Integration?
I would hope that a joint D&D/Miniatures product like this might have some kind of focus on how wars and miniatures battles are carried out as part of a D&D campaign, what their aftereffects might be, et cetera. However, there is absolutely no effort made to address this! The miniatures rules start from the assumption that people are fighting with equal point-cost armies, which is an inappropriate assumption for campaign-driven play. Little of the D&D content is relevant to battle, let alone created to work with the Miniatures rules. The skirmish warband improvement rules don’t work with D&D PC advancement by experience points. You can heal units in mass battles, which can add units back using the explanation that lost units weren’t dead, just casualties – but so at the end of a battle, who all is dead and who isn’t? That’s important to a campaign, but these rules just assume you get to form you next warband with the same 100 points that you used this time. PCs are only taken into account by shoehorning them into the “Commander unit” role in battles. So if you’re looking for a way to enhance your D&D campaign with larger scale battles, this product falls totally flat.
Conclusion
In isolation, each part of this book stands alone well to its separate target audience. However, the unfocused nature of this book is a severe drawback. D&D players might want the 67 pages of good new D&D content. Miniatures players might want the 90 pages of minis rules (minus duplication from the starter pack rules). Neither group probably wants to spend $30 on half of a book. And the flaw that is ultimately fatal for this book, from my point of view, is that it in no way helps you to integrate a D&D campaign with a Miniatures game. The only thing it helps you with is how to repurpose D&D monsters into Miniatures stats, which anyone could probably figure out themselves in about 15 minutes.
So despite the fact that the book is composed of solid individual elements, the final product only merits a 2/5. I hate to say that, because I like the D&D content in it and will certainly use it (especially the Sudden metamagic feats). If they had taken that content and added to it, perhaps making a 3.5e Hero Builder’s Guidebook, it would be good – but they didn’t, so we are left with two completely separate products for two different game systems inexplicably combined into one expensive hardcover binding. I can only assume they were hoping for a "Hey! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" effect, but unfortunately the result is a somewhat less inspiring "Hey! You stored your chocolate in the same room as my peanut butter!"
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