Editor's note:  The following post is a guest post by Karl "Hop" Hoipkemeier, my uncle - the one that got me hooked on gaming as a kid.  In the coming months, guests posts will be increasing in frequency as I add the ability for multiple bloggers to the site.  Hopefully this should mean a more steady stream of content!

I have probably played Star Wars Miniatures for about a year. The starter set didn’t do much for me, but after a few boosters, I was hooked. The thing is that I like building the squads almost as much as I like playing the game. It’s a lot of fun to create the theme-based squad or the historical squad and see how they fare in combat against other squads. That brings me to D&D Miniatures.

Considering that I like Star Wars minis, I recently decided to try D&D minis. D&D minis is a much more frustrating experience, and it didn’t take me long to figure out why. Building squads (known as “warbands”) was the problem.

In Star Wars minis (expansions aside), you have three basic factions, Separationists, Rebublic, and Fringe. While you can’t combine Separationist and Republic figs in one squad, you can use Fringe figs in a squad of either faction. That means when building a squad, you have access to about two thirds of the total mix of figures.

Now, compare that to D&D minis. Instead of having two opposing factions, you have four, accounting for the combinations of good-evil and law-chaos (LG, LE, CG, CE). You will rarely have a unit that has more than one faction (roughly 10%). So, when building a warband, you have access to a third or less of your total figs. Given that I have about 75 figs, that means I have roughly 25 to choose from when making a warband of a given faction.

Another problem with building warbands is that each warband needs a commander. In Star Wars minis, there is no penalty if you don’t have a commander. D&D minis rules penalize units in a warband that are not under command control, so you need a commander to field an effective warband. After purchasing a starter and eight boosters for D&D minis, I still don’t have a commander for one of my factions. About a quarter of my figs are completely unusable until I can get a commander for the faction.

This brings me to one final point that applies to both Star Wars and D&D minis. In the case of D&D minis, I need a commander for one of my factions. You’d think it would be an easy thing to find a list somewhere so that I’d know which figs to look for. Wrong. WotC wants so very hard to protect their copyright on these games, including the stats of the various minis that they are prohibiting anyone from posting them on the web. I can’t find out simple information on a relatively trivial matter because of what? Is someone going to download the stats and play the game with pennies? If so, who cares? It’s frustrating for me, a player and legitimate owner of the game, that I can’t find out something simple like this to better enjoy the game. It’s just sad that WotC can’t see this.