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 Kriswall wrote:



While the detail on GW models has improved over time, the ability to easily kit bash has dropped to almost non existent levels.

The genestealer cultists and the Skitarii kits were made specifically to be able to be kit bashed one with the other. People is going all crazy with the DG release and the Primaris, in "omg we all monopose now!" when even the most recent AoS kits aren't like that.
This is like has always been. Some kits are more poseable, others are less poseable and kitbasheable (?)

1. There are far more well-posed models on the tables. Most people can't pose models for gak so why bother.

2. GW is able to produce a ton of monopose kits for miniatures that simply wouldn't have had kits otherwise.

Are there any good poseable kits that were replaced by monopose?

I notice people are complaining about monopose but refuse to look at the horde armies with basic infantry that has been 'monopose' for many a year.

The complaint about lack of pose-ability is, from what I can see, that you don't get the option to change a model at the waist, but with the DG in particular you have so much going on in the waist area (bloated/mutated, etc) that honestly having the main bodies fixed looks fine when you consider they still have a lot of customisation options in the kit anyway

 Luciferian wrote:

 Kriswall wrote:


Yeah... in an infinite universe, all things are possible. Conversion is always a possibility. What's really missing is the ability to easily kit bash. Without separate and compatible components, it's very difficult and time consuming to add real variety to your army. The old school Marines are a great example of a model line designed for kit bashing. You can swap arms between almost any Marine, including a decent number of the mono-posed blister packs. Death Guard units aren't like this. You can't easily swap arms around, even in the same kit. You can't swap legs. You usually can't swap heads or shoulder pads. Maybe you can swap back packs.

While the detail on GW models has improved over time, the ability to easily kit bash has dropped to almost non existent levels.

Uh, did you see the picture? Those guys have pieces from the Putrid Blightkings, Mark III Tactical Squad and Possessed. I did all of that in one evening and the hardest thing I had to do was cut off a couple of heads and hands and use a file. They all still have pretty standard shoulder joints so arm swaps are easy, too. Pretty much as easy as it's ever been, plus you get to play with some really cool poses that would take a LOT more work to create with a more interchangeable kit. Telling me they're impossible or even difficult to convert and personalize doesn't really work because I know, from actually doing it, that's not true. If I made a squad of 14 guys by combining the DI and Plague Marine boxes then every single one of them would be totally distinct in a way that IS very difficult to achieve with a regular multipart kit.

Your picture was honestly a little hard to make out. I also don't play AoS, so I don't immediately recognize bits from non-40k product lines. My point is that it's possible to buy two basic Marine Terminators boxes and end up with 10 differently posed guys. Buy two boxes of Death Guard Terminators and you end up with 5 sets of doubles, barring a weapon swap or two. I freely acknowledge that purchasing $146 worth of product (Blight Kings, MkIII Marines and Chaos Spawns) to upgrade a unit of 7 Plague Marines will give you lots of modelling options. It also increases the price of each Plague Marines dramatically. I'll also acknowledge that you have some freedom as to which arms go on which bodies in certain kits. The Terminators don't appear to have much in the way of flexibility.

In any case, GW is clearly headed in a more mono posed direction. I'm not a fan. I'll wait and see what they have on the horizon, but if it's more of this, I'm probably done buying models for a time.

 Kriswall wrote:
Buy two boxes of Death Guard Terminators and you end up with 5 sets of doubles, barring a weapon swap or two. I freely acknowledge that purchasing $146 worth of product (Blight Kings, MkIII Marines and Chaos Spawns) to upgrade a unit of 7 Plague Marines will give you lots of modelling options. It also increases the price of each Plague Marines dramatically. I'll also acknowledge that you have some freedom as to which arms go on which bodies in certain kits. The Terminators don't appear to have much in the way of flexibility.

I'm looking at the sprues for the Plague Marines and Terminator kits and not having looked at them before; they don't look monopose to me. The legs and torso are fixed, but you have head and arm options both in what head/arms you choose and also how you pose the head/arms.

The linking of the legs and torso makes sense for models with so much going on. There's no way they could do what they did and keep the hips changeable.

 Kriswall wrote:
My point is that it's possible to buy two basic Marine Terminators boxes and end up with 10 differently posed guys. Buy two boxes of Death Guard Terminators and you end up with 5 sets of doubles, barring a weapon swap or two.

Well, let's look at 10 of each.





Are you really saying that being able to rotate the hips maybe 20 degrees (any more and it looks like their spine is broken) - literally the only difference - makes the bottom set more diverse?

 Kriswall wrote:


Your picture was honestly a little hard to make out. I also don't play AoS, so I don't immediately recognize bits from non-40k product lines. My point is that it's possible to buy two basic Marine Terminators boxes and end up with 10 differently posed guys. Buy two boxes of Death Guard Terminators and you end up with 5 sets of doubles, barring a weapon swap or two. I freely acknowledge that purchasing $146 worth of product (Blight Kings, MkIII Marines and Chaos Spawns) to upgrade a unit of 7 Plague Marines will give you lots of modelling options. It also increases the price of each Plague Marines dramatically. I'll also acknowledge that you have some freedom as to which arms go on which bodies in certain kits. The Terminators don't appear to have much in the way of flexibility.

In any case, GW is clearly headed in a more mono posed direction. I'm not a fan. I'll wait and see what they have on the horizon, but if it's more of this, I'm probably done buying models for a time.

I'm not trying to tell you that you have to buy GW product if you don't want to. However, you are definitely being hyperbolic. First of all, I didn't have to buy $146 worth of boxes to convert my DG, I just bought the bits I wanted to use. So far I've converted 7 Plague Marines and the Plaguecaster from the DI set for less than the cost of the new Plague Marine box. So I'm actually ending up with totally unique models, and it's cheaper. All I have to do is cut off a head here and a hand there.

If you bought two boxes of Blightlords, then yes, you would end up with pairs of very similar models. The Blightlords are a singular release even amongst the Death Guard, though. On the other hand, if you buy even one box of normal terminators you'll end up with at least 4 models that are nearly identical in every way. The only difference between the legs is which foot is slightly ahead of the other one, and as said before the only way you can "customize" them that you can't with the Death Guard is by slightly rotating their hips. Everything else you can easily do with the DG models, only the DG models will look more unique and individual when you're done unless you want to start cutting apart and greenstuffing the joints of the Terminators in order to give them better poses.

At the end of the day, it's actually much, much harder and more expensive to make generic marines look like the Death Guard than vice versa.

Being able to rotate the hips makes all the difference in the world for some minis.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Being able to rotate the hips makes all the difference in the world for some minis.

Sure it does... unless you want the model's feet and legs to be pointing in the direction they're apparently traveling or want the arms to be anything but parallel to the torso and raised at chest height or lower, in which case it makes no difference whatsoever.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Being able to rotate the hips makes all the difference in the world for some minis.

I honestly can't tell if you're making a sex joke.

 Luciferian wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Being able to rotate the hips makes all the difference in the world for some minis.

Sure it does... unless you want the model's feet and legs to be pointing in the direction they're apparently traveling or want the arms to be anything but parallel to the torso and raised at chest height or lower, in which case it makes no difference whatsoever.

It takes more than a rotating neck to change a "I want to buy this gun" pose into a "I want to shoot that thing" pose. And if you want to do any conversions that alter the model's focus from forward/forward-left, you need to be able to show how the mini's weight is distributed in a way that the standard pose simply can't. A slight twist of the hips/body is necessary for throwing a punch, for example.


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 lord_blackfang wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Being able to rotate the hips makes all the difference in the world for some minis.

I honestly can't tell if you're making a sex joke.

No, I am not. I'm thinking about the huge gap between monopose marines, guard and Eldar and the diversity of exciting poses possible with the multipose kits. Now I will make the sex joke: would you prefer missionary every day or like to add in the first third of the Kama Sutra?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Luciferian wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Being able to rotate the hips makes all the difference in the world for some minis.

Sure it does... unless you want the model's feet and legs to be pointing in the direction they're apparently traveling or want the arms to be anything but parallel to the torso and raised at chest height or lower, in which case it makes no difference whatsoever.

It takes more than a rotating neck to change a "I want to buy this gun" pose into a "I want to shoot that thing" pose. And if you want to do any conversions that alter the model's focus from forward/forward-left, you need to be able to show how the mini's weight is distributed in a way that the standard pose simply can't. A slight twist of the hips/body is necessary for throwing a punch, for example.

Showing a different distribution of weight is precisely one of the things you can't easily do with multipart models. It doesn't matter how many ways you can rotate the torso - the legs and feet are always going to be in the same, static position, pointing the same direction. Have you ever seen someone throw a punch with their legs and hips pointing one way and their upper body pointing another? If you have, I can only assume the outcome was less than impressive. What's more, it will always look unnatural to do so on a model because you can't rotate your hips without moving your legs. Go ahead, stand up and rotate your hips from side to side while trying to keep your legs completely static. Try putting your feet shoulder width apart with both knees bent at the same angle and then point your hips and shoulders 90 degrees in either direction without the knee and heel of the leg opposite your direction of rotation trying to follow. Now try to throw an effective punch, or do basically anything in that position, and tell me that it's totally natural. Try to throw a ball, take a golf swing or throw a punch without raising your back heel off the ground and tell me how it feels.

Now look at the regular terminator models pictured above. Only one of them, the Sergeant, can be seen as transferring his weight from one foot to another, and that's because he's the only one with one heel off the ground. The rest have their weight evenly distributed on both legs, feet planted firmly on the ground at shoulder width apart, and it doesn't matter how far you rotate any of their hips. In fact, the further you do so, the less natural it looks. You will never be able to naturally portray a transfer of weight with those models unless you cut every joint in their legs so that you can point their knees and feet the same direction their torso is facing and somehow add a joint to one of their feet so you can raise one of their heels.

The DI Plague Marines have only one base leg pair that does not have one of its heels raised off the ground. Almost all of them are transferring their weight from one foot to another, which is absolutely necessary in order to accurately portray any kind of momentum or athletic activity. Since there are 18 unique Plague Marine models, not counting the two that share the same legs, and you can change their arms and heads nearly as easily as you can with standard multipart kits, that means you can build 18 Plague Marines that are totally individual, equipped however you want them to be, and naturally posed in athletic positions if you so desire. To do the same thing with any multipart marine kit would take many times the bits and increase your conversion work by an order of magnitude.

Make no mistake, in a box like the SM Terminators shown above, there are only two poses. One for the Sergeant, and one for everyone else. Rotate their hips as much as you want; it will never hide the fact that all of their other joints are positioned identically.

Well put, Luciferian. I feel like that's what a lot of people don't get about multi vs. monopose models.

As someone who has now made around 16 sprues of poseable plastic models, I can safely say that it is dramatically easier to do monopose, and requires significantly less part testing, with significantly fewer resources to do monopose.

Monopose allows much more stuff to be squashed on each sprue, allows many things (capes, etc) to be explored that would otherwise not work on a model with a variable pose, and most importantly has a very simple production pipeline of sculpt -> cut -> tool, instead of trying to sculpt 4-8 interchangeable models while simultaneously ensuring their toolability (undercuts/line of draw, draft angles, part sizes, etc).

On top of that, there is very limited market demand for things to be multi-pose over mono-pose, with no companies to my knowledge having models ignored by any measurable chunk of the audience for not making them multi-part. The only reason we do it at Spiral Arm is because it is our personal preference and we enjoy models that are flexible, there is no strong market argument to do so.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Primaris were not monopose, so no. It is just a thing they did because of the artistic direction they went in with the Death Guard I guess. For armies that are less individualistic and covered in mutations and gribbly bits (and thus require simpler miniatures) they are probably going to do multipose again.

sshhhh.. don't be so inconsiderate to point out silly things like facts. You'll ruin the personal narrative drama of people telling the rest of us that they're quitting 40k and going to go play some other game.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
If I wanted to play a game where units had no loadout or personalization options, I would play Warmachine. Monopose=not buying.

Loadout options is a different issue to monopose. You can have a monopose model with weapon options.

For units that's true, but for characters, we are seeing that he is right and he will be more and more right in the future, I am afraid.

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 Luciferian wrote:
Since there are 18 unique Plague Marine models, not counting the two that share the same legs, and you can change their arms and heads nearly as easily

Some of the model is just a mirroring of another, with changed details. I can understand monopose but sometimes GW went too far.
The overpriced Plague Brethren are an example of this.
The rest of the post is great and informative IMHO.

My concern is this is an attempt to kill third-party bits, by making it very hard/impossible to replace heads/shoulderpads/arms with other kits.

Wayniac wrote:
My concern is this is an attempt to kill third-party bits, by making it very hard/impossible to replace heads/shoulderpads/arms with other kits.

Not sure what you mean

the entire primarus line outside of some parts in dark imperium is totally convertible with heads shoulder pads and arms.

Wayniac wrote:
My concern is this is an attempt to kill third-party bits, by making it very hard/impossible to replace heads/shoulderpads/arms with other kits.

Yeah, that's sort of where my thoughts are headed. It isn't so much the lack of poses, it's a fair point that many of the so called multi pose kits don't offer a massive range of choices without modifying the parts, it's more a lack of modularity that allows the easy exchange of parts between kits that I'd be reluctant to lose. In fact, easy modularity between parts within a kit is getting less common. This doesn't just affect third parties but even cross pollination within GW stuff.


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 Desubot wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
My concern is this is an attempt to kill third-party bits, by making it very hard/impossible to replace heads/shoulderpads/arms with other kits.

Not sure what you mean

the entire primarus line outside of some parts in dark imperium is totally convertible with heads shoulder pads and arms.

I'm not sure using the example of a range that's still fairly multipose does anything to refute the point?

 Azreal13 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
My concern is this is an attempt to kill third-party bits, by making it very hard/impossible to replace heads/shoulderpads/arms with other kits.

Yeah, that's sort of where my thoughts are headed. It isn't so much the lack of poses, it's a fair point that many of the so called multi pose kits don't offer a massive range of choices without modifying the parts, it's more a lack of modularity that allows the easy exchange of parts between kits that I'd be reluctant to lose. In fact, easy modularity between parts within a kit is getting less common. This doesn't just affect third parties but even cross pollination within GW stuff.


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 Desubot wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
My concern is this is an attempt to kill third-party bits, by making it very hard/impossible to replace heads/shoulderpads/arms with other kits.

Not sure what you mean

the entire primarus line outside of some parts in dark imperium is totally convertible with heads shoulder pads and arms.

I'm not sure using the example of a range that's still fairly multipose does anything to refute the point?

I guess it would depend on definition of mono/partial/multipose but regardless of that, you can still at the bear minimum on the most mono posseyest of the primarus marines still swap out the back packs and heads. with the new partial pose specific kits you can swap out heads shoulder pads and arms no issue.

it might be different for chaos i havnt really dug into those sprues yet.

Let me offer a real world example. One of my current projects is using the Crypt Horrors kit to create three Slaaneshi Spawn for my CSM.

Now, this is a pretty cool kit, it's got a lot of bits, chiefly because if used for its intended purpose it builds a bunch of different kits.

However, the three silhouettes for the models must be identical because the legs attach in specific pairs to their torso and the arms can only attach in one pose to the shoulder too.

I can partially understand this as they're organic with visible muscles, and they need to connect fixed points on the musculature to make sense.

But it doesn't strike me as being too difficult to have designed this kit with the legs joining to form a pelvis and have the torso attach to that in a universal way (a la Space Marines) which would have allowed for more variety by mixing up the legs and arm + torso combinations, and allowed for maybe a bit of subtle variety in posing by twisting the torso as well.

Sure, I can plug in different bits from the kit to mix up the details, but if I ever expand the unit beyond the initial three, at tabletop distance I'm going to have the same basic three shapes repeated.

Frankly, looking at this kit and the way it's designed makes what Lego wrote above really resonate. I can't knock the quality, it goes together beautifully if I'm not trying to do something it wasn't intended to do, but it shows all the features he described that suggest it was designed for speed and consequently low cost of design and production. Not that a company trying to keep its costs down should necessarily be criticised, but if one is positioning oneself as a premium brand with a premium price, it isn't unreasonable for your customers to expect a little bit of investment in the product.

 Luciferian wrote:

Make no mistake, in a box like the SM Terminators shown above, there are only two poses. One for the Sergeant, and one for everyone else. Rotate their hips as much as you want; it will never hide the fact that all of their other joints are positioned identically.

Yep. Many of GW's minis are about as poseable as Rock'em-Sock'em-Robots. The arms can go up or down (assuming they're not both connected to one weapon), and the head and torso can swivel a bit, and that's about it. It wasn't until I built a Dreamforge Leviathan that I knew what "poseable" could really mean. And I bet all of the Japanese hobbyists are probably giggling at this whole thread.

 Kaiyanwang wrote:

Some of the model is just a mirroring of another, with changed details. I can understand monopose but sometimes GW went too far.
The overpriced Plague Brethren are an example of this.
The rest of the post is great and informative IMHO.

That's fair to say, and to be honest, there are only so many lower-body poses you can make with human limbs anyway. You can have a normal standing pose as with Tactical Marines, Terminators etc.; you can have a transfer of weight from the back foot to the front foot which shows a forward momentum, and as you say can be mirrored on either side; and you can have a transfer of weight from the front foot to the back foot which would probably be undesirable because it would look like defensive back pedaling. Then you could have a few weird and radical poses like kneeling or lunging way out to one side or the other.

The Plague Marines across all the various kits do share a lot of similarities and basically come in two varieties: standard Mark III armor, and "potbelly" armor. Still, think of all those details each one has and what it would take to recreate that level of detail and individuality on something like a Mark III tactical squad. Comparatively, the TAC marines are all faceless, identical clones. I personally feel like GW has done most of the work of individualizing these models for me already and it's much easier to work with them as they are than to try to make a TAC squad all seem distinct from each other.

As for everyone who's concerned about the interchangeability of parts between the DG models and other kits, let me reassure you all that things are hardly more difficult than usual.


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 Azreal13 wrote:


Sure, I can plug in different bits from the kit to mix up the details, but if I ever expand the unit beyond the initial three, at tabletop distance I'm going to have the same basic three shapes repeated.

I'm still just not getting this sentiment. If you field a squad of 10 TAC marines you have one basic shape repeated ten times. I think I'd rather have three.

 Breotan wrote:
Guys? Have you ever looked at GW's old line? Most of it is made up of mono-posed models, especially the old metals. Characters have long been sculpted as a single pose, some with minor variation such as an arm that can be rotated or a head swap. Look at the Dark Eldar Mandrakes (or anything else in the Dark Eldar Elites section) as an example of entire units being mono-pose.

Of course it was, because multi-pose metal kits are unrealistic. GW's plastic technology has moved on in massive leaps and bounds since then. They can do, and have done, lots of multi-pose plastic kits.

Their sudden switch to mono-pose for the Death Guard release is a worrying precedent to set.

 Luciferian wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:


Sure, I can plug in different bits from the kit to mix up the details, but if I ever expand the unit beyond the initial three, at tabletop distance I'm going to have the same basic three shapes repeated.

I'm still just not getting this sentiment. If you field a squad of 10 TAC marines you have one basic shape repeated ten times. I think I'd rather have three.

Really? Rank and File being largely anonymous is dramatically less of an issue, repeated sculpts get more of an issue the more individual the model is supposed to be, unless there can only be one fielded at a time. Having 50 Guardsmen all in roughly the same pose could arguably be a positive and make a real visual impact, having 5 identical Comissars leading them? Not so much. That is unless there's something really distinctive about your rank and file that jumps out, in which case that can be an issue too.

Yeah its hard to argue for mono pose characters.

it really bumbs me out as gw used to make so many more variant characters.

we kinda do still but most of the time the variants are special editions.

 Azreal13 wrote:


Really? Rank and File being largely anonymous is dramatically less of an issue, repeated sculpts get more of an issue the more individual the model is supposed to be, unless there can only be one fielded at a time. Having 50 Guardsmen all in roughly the same pose could arguably be a positive and make a real visual impact, having 5 identical Comissars leading them? Not so much. That is unless there's something really distinctive about your rank and file that jumps out, in which case that can be an issue too.

OK, so since we're talking mostly about the rank and file DG models here as some kind of portent that GW will make mainly monopose models in the future, what exactly is your issue? At first it wasn't OK to have repeated poses, but now it is...

Again, I'm just not getting it. If we're not talking about rank and file models such as Plague Marines, what are we talking about? And whatever it is that we are talking about, why compare it to multipart kits like TAC marines, which are rank and file models?

Just read the last line of the post you quoted and you'll have your answer.


Edit:
Also note I was explicitly not talking about PMs in my post about converting spawn, so that's largely an assumption on your part, the thread isn't about the Death Guard release but monopose GW models in general. Let me also draw a line between 20 Marines or 50 Guardsmen that are supposed to look largely identical, and Dave the Plague Marine, who's supposed to be representative of a force of highly individual soldiers, appearing 3 or 4 times across a couple of units complete with Nurgle Sanctioned Tentacle Mutation A™.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Just read the last line of the post you quoted and you'll have your answer.

With all due respect, it doesn't really answer anything. You expressed a vague and generalized sentiment about how GW should be delivering something it's not, but you haven't nailed down exactly what that is. It would help if you gave a specific example of something that helped you create your standard. I've already argued that GW's so called multipose kits actually have less variety and little more customization than the monopose DG kits. In terms of DG characters, yes those are all pretty much set in stone, but how many Tallymen are you going to have at one time? How many Biologus Putrifiers?

One thing I can agree with the critics about is the Blightlords. They are maybe too distinct from each other in a way that will make you say, "oh you have two of the exact same guy," if there are two units on the field.

It my opinion dude, one I feel I've actually gone to some lengths to explain the thinking behind. I don't have a standard because I'm not obligated to provide evidentiary support to draw a precise line in the sand over.

I do not like monopose kits as much as multipose kits. I do not like feeling like I'm assembling something rather than creating something, even if the end result looks largely similar. I do not like repeated sculpts in units or armies. Not one, let alone several. Let alone multiple instances of Dave the Plague Marine or Johnny Deathshroud. Even if the differences are minute, if I've chosen how the parts are put together I can at least feel they're different and derive more satisfaction from that. I do not like that monopose kits often have highly specific contact points which make kit bashing more involved, if not occasionally impossible.

Now, even if you don't agree with that, it surely isn't hard to understand?