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Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures Handbook
Length: 200 pages
Price: $29.95
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast www.wizards.com
ISBN: 0-7869-3281-3
So, the question is: Is it worth it if you're not interested in miniature gaming?
The answer, unfortunately, is "No." However, it's very close to being "Yes", and if you're interested in miniatures even the slightest bit, it is very much worth it. This book is everything Chainmail should have been.
The reason it's almost worth getting even if you're not interested in miniatures is Chapter One, Chapter Two, and, to a lesser extent, Chapter Three.
Chapter One is full of D&D rules -- with an eye toward the miniatures game, but these are nonetheless complete D&D rules, including several new core classes.
The first core class, the Favored Soul, is one that I thought should have been in D&D 3E from the start -- it's the divine equivalent of a sorcerer, a class that can cast a limited selection of divine spells spontaneously. The offical class fills a gap that I noticed when I first cracked up my 3E Player's Handbook, and is almost worth the price of the admission alone.
But there are even more core classes. There's the Healer class, which takes the view of "Cleric as band-aid" to its logical extreme, and would probably make an excellent NPC class for when no one wants to play the cleric. There is also the Marshal class (i.e. someone who leads armies) and the Warmage, a highly focused fighter/mage combination. These are all 20-level official core classes.
The prestige classes are equally interesting. There is the Bonded Summoner (a mage focused on summoning elementals which even gains an elemental as a companion), the Dragon Samuari (which is what it says on the tin, as it were), the Havoc Mage (a front-line fighting mage), the Skullclan Hunter (yet another undead hunting class), the Tactical Soldier (a fighter trained to co-ordinate with a group), the War Hulk (a prestige class for Large creatures, like ogres), and the Warchief (the war leader of a group of humanoids). The application to miniatures gaming, especially for those like the Tactical Soldier and the Warchief, are obvious, but others, like the Havoc Mage, would be a fine addition to any D&D party, particularly a dungeon-delving one. (In fact, with the combat focus of the book, a lot of the classes and feats seem to be excellent for old-school D&D games.)
And then the feats! While many of them, like Battlefield Inspiration, obviously relate more to large battles, many of them are, again, things I wished had been in D&D from the start. In particular, the "sudden metamagic feats" come to mind, such as "Sudden Enlarge", which allows you, as you are casting a spell, to apply the Enlarge Spell metamagic feat to the spell, without affecting its level. The DM in me thought this might be a little unbalanced compared to regular metamagic feats, but you can only do it once a day for each sudden metamagic feat. Regardless, the player in me rejoiced -- how often do you know, ahead of time, you want to enlarge something, or, as a sorcerer, are willing to take the extra time and burn the higher-level slot? These sudden metamagic feats are simple and easy to keep track of and use, a lot closer to the way metamagic feats should have been in the first place. And there's still plenty for figher types, like Martial Throw, which lets you switch places with an opponent in a combat by throwing that opponent out of your way!
Chapter Two is on magic. While it's obvious that much of the spells and magic items are oriented toward the battlefield, many of them, like Veil of Shadow (an arcane spell that cloaks you in shadow and makes you tough to see and hit), Lightfoot (a ranger spell which allows you to avoid attacks of opportunity) and Baleful Transposition (an arcane spell which switches the places of two subject), have other uses. In fact, there's even an optional rule where drow can innately cast Veil of Shadow rather than Darkness, which I think is a neat idea -- it's certainly less annoying, and in many ways more useful, than the usual Darkness spell.
Another idea that is introduced in Chapter Two is "Swift Actions". A swift action is like a free action -- it doesn't affect your ability to do anything else -- but you can only do one swift action per round. It's good for extra-fast battle spells that let you do other things (like attack) at the same time. I think this is a good concept for D&D -- it makes the idea of a front-line mage more viable, and doesn't make things much more complicated.
The magic items, while they have obvious battlefield implications, are just as useful off the battlefield as any other D&D magic item, from the Charima bonus provided by the Belt of Magnificence to the communication capability of the (aptly named) Ring of Communication, which lets you talk to anyone similarly equipped within 1 mile.
Chapter Three is monsters. There is no unifying theme here, other than "we have a miniature for that". Most notable is the "Aspect" entry, where a god or a archfiend creates a slightly weaker version of themselves to interact with mortals, with examples of such beings for most of the Greyhawk dieties and most of the archfiends from The Book of Vile Darkness. Other interesting entries (to me) include the Catfolk (can't have enough catgirls, after all), and the Walking Wall. There's something to please everyone here, even if the choices are a touch random.
Those three chapters make 72 pages of content that isn't directly connected to the miniatures game. Whether that's worth thirty bucks American is up to you -- to me, it's almost worth it, especially given the Favored Soul and the feats.
Chapter Four is about the stat cards that come with the official D&D miniatures. On one side is the information needed for a D&D game, in a greatly abbreviated format which I wish would see more common use, and on the other side is the information that is used in the miniatures game. Most notable in this section is the rules on converting the stats of a D&D monster to what is used in the miniatures game. This isn't hard -- it's really just a matter of concentrating on the combat statistics and simplifying and/or streamlining. The most disappointing is the method for determining the cost of a miniature, in terms of building a warband -- it's the old "look at the examples and eyeball" method that used to be used for ECLs. However, if you're converting the monster for a mass battle in a D&D game, this won't matter so much. The faction rules are highly generic, based on alignment, and easy to deal with.
Chapter Five is the skirmish rules. The best way to describe this is halfway between the rules for Chainmail and D&D. Movement is on squares, and damage is averaged and rounded to units of 5 and you use the D&D hit point levels, rounded to an even multiple of 5. All this should already be on the "stat card" provided for you or calculated using Chapter Four, so everything goes very fast. The rules for building a warband and placing terrain shows a lot of Chainmail heritage. The morale and command rules are obviously adapted from Chainmail as well. Since I liked that aspect of Chainmail, it's no surpise that I like the skirmish rules provided here. You even "activate" miniatures like in Chainmail, though two at a time rather than one at a time. In general, the game is more generic and flexible than Chainmail was -- I particularly like the "Squad Rules" on p. 110, which allow for very large skirmishes.
A variety of scenarios are presented, including a random table if you want to let luck decide what scenario you're playing. There are rules for team play and rules for scenarios where the challenge is building a warband with particular constraints. Most interesting is the "Challenge Skirmish", where a DM creates a scenario and sets some paramaters and the players build a warband just to see how well they can deal with the situation.
Most notable is a set of rules for a "Skirmish Campaign". However, with its random scenarios and its focus on a single warband leader, the rules for the campaign feel less like a military simulation with balanced starting conditions and more like a Magic: the Gathering league. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of taste, though I would have liked to see more interesting and detailed campaign rules.
Most useful for people using the official miniatures is the glossary in the back of the chapter, which provides information on every major term and every Special Ability.
Chapter Six is the mass battle rules, for much larger combats, where figures are organized into entire units that move and attack in unison. This chapter drifts much futher from Chainmail, with more detailed rules for morale (units get "shaken" before they rout), and more options that commanders can do, giving them "command points" which can be spent for different effects, though this did resemble the advanced command rules in Chainmail somewhat. Like the last chapter, it ends in a glossary -- some Special Abilities are different in mass battle than in a skirmish. In a lot of ways, this section reminded me of a very streamlined version of the old D&D Battlesystem rules.
Chapter Seven is a blast from the past, in that it involves the creation of random dungeons. Unfortunately, those expecting tons of tables like those in the old 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide will be disappointed. The idea in this chapter is you create a "Dungeon Deck," a set of cards outlining monsters and other dungeon features, which is drawn from as the dungeoneering group enters a new room to determine a random challenge. While this favors using the cards included with the official miniatures, there is nothing to stop you from using the rules in Chapter Four to create your own cards, customizing the challenge. About eleven pages are spent describing this sort of game, the biggest weakness of which is you still need to draw a map, as there is no method in this chapter for creating rooms randomly. This chapter screams "filler", but at eleven pages, it's forgivable.
The last few pages of the book has terrain (mostly for the skirmish rules) and templates (mostly for the mass combat rules) that you can photocopy and use in the miniatures game. If you're not interested in the miniatures game, this is more filler, but if you are, this allows you to play the game on the cheap -- in fact, with what's in the book and a good set of paper miniatures (of which you can find several different versions of on the Internet), you could play the D&D miniatures game at a very low cost, especially as I am sure you can find online copies of the official stat cards if you Google hard enough.
All in all, this is an excellent product -- at $20, I'd say it was worth it even if you could care less about miniatures. As it is, if you're interested in miniatures at all, especially with an eye to back-compatibility to the D&D game, this book is more than worth your money.
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