What I game with (part three: the army lists)

Army lists are a strange thing. On the one hand they provide a bit of order so the an army is both balanced and represents the background a game is set in. (As I have mentioned, this is not 'fluff' unless you think that background is light and no real substance to a game. An approach I avoid like the plague!) On the other hand it encourages the belief that all armies must look a certain way and must conform to this and the game is about maximizing forces to beat an opponent, not participating in the playing out of an event!

When reviewing Ravening Hordes, Warhammer second editions army lists and expansion, Rick Priestly stated that the book was not a scenario (like the previous 2nd edition releases) "but a scenario construction kit." (White Dwarf 90 June 1997 p.2 I knew there was some reason for keeping a magazine for 29 years!)

Some army lists yesterday.

'Warhammer Armies' the third edition army lists states that

"The purist approach is to use army lists as they stand, with no alteration , and to use the rules for scenery deployment and the like as given in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Alternatively, the players may decide to allow a certain amount of leeway ('if you let me use an extra Level 25 Hero, I'll let you use your homemade Orc Ornithopter'). Scenery could be organized by discussion rather than random generation, with players using special buildings or terrain models."
Nigel Stillman and Friends 'Warhammer Armies' 1988 p.4

I would also like to point to the statement on p.5 of this book which states "Players shouldn't feel over restricted in their choice of models...these guidelines have been formulated to make games easier to play- not to restrict players or make them use specific models."

Over the years many army lists have been released by Games Workshop and other companies. Some have continued in the tradition of facilitating the playing of games. Others seem to be more geared towards getting people to buy models. A particular pastime has arisen in the past 10 years on the internet involving gamers moaning about army lists making armies overpowered/ underpowered. Those of you that have read my last two posts won't be surprised to think that I feel they are missing the point and if the army list is that much of a problem, they shouldn't use it and agree another way of forming a force with their opponent! As suggested, lists should just be a tool to get a representative force for a scenario or campaign, not to enslave choices. If you are going to use an army list (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't) ask three simple questions.

1) Does it represent what you want it to represent?
By looking at the background of an army it is possible to give you an idea of the force you want to represent. A narrative should already be forming in your mind about what you are building and why. For a scenario you should already have a strong narrative, likewise a campaign should give you an idea of the starting point for your army with it's history up to that point.

Historical gaming enables you to actually read up about the forces that you are going to use and then search for a force that represents this. Likewise, fiction can be an inspiration. My current interest in Warhammer started with being given an Araknorak as a present and building an army around this. The list I used was the Warhammer eigth edition 'Orc and Goblin' army book. But this list was used as a guide to builfd the force I wanted, not the definitive list. I considered using other list published but stuck with this guide, adapting it for the version of the rules I play with (see my last post). What I didn't allow was for the list to dictate what I was my force would look like.

Some lists are specifically built for campaigns (for example the lists in Forge Worlds Imperial Armour books or Flames of Wars briefings). These tend to need little work done to them since they are based on the background. Conversely, other lists are simply aimed at all games with in a rules set. These generic lists can be used to represent a narrative army with some work. But they also seem to suffer from the Max-Min competitive gaming mind set. basically the ideas that you must take this and never take that in order to win your games. Basically ignore that, use what you want and move on to the second question to gain balance.

An example of some excellent campaign themed army lists which can be used to add to narrative, rather than simply restricting your force.

Finally, it is also worth mentioning that some lists expect you to buy and assemble massive units of rank and file just so you can play the special models you want to play. Ask yourself is this really necessary? Will adjusting this aspect of the list really matter? If it does perhaps you should use another army list and if there is no other try a different rules set. After all these are tools to allow you to play, not restrictions to prevent you from playing!

2) Will it allow balance with in the game I am playing?

So you carefully select the list that will provide the guide for your themed force and then you realise something, it is looking a bit different from the other army. In fact it has bigger, harder units and they are all elite. Now it can be interesting to play out famous massacres and walk overs, with the challenge being  allowing some of your army to survive through heroic actions, if you want the narrative to continue beyond one game, every game being a walk over (or massive defeat) soon becomes boring. Likewise, having your army composed of if it's unit variety your after)lite units might be interesting for a one off game but will soon become boring and will not produce narrative gaming.

3) How can I adjust it to do these things?
The best way of adjusting is too have a narrative in mind when assembling your army. The list is a guide and should be used to work with the narrative and adjusted with it. Always have a theme for your army, giving an idea of why they are at war who they are fighting and let this then be reflected wit the list you choose. From here adjust the list as you want and talk to your opponent about adjustments used.

These adjustments can take the  form of altering the profiles if your list is form a different edition of the game (but gives a better variety of troops or is more reflective of the background your after. Other changes can be adding or taking away troops, ignoring minimums or maximums and so on. The main thing is to get the army you want  to collect and play with represented on the table and not to be slave to someone else's idea of what that army should look like.

As a rough guide I find that for every adjustment made to a list that gives it an advantage,  you should also make an adjustment that reduces its abilities elsewhere. However it is entirely up to you. The only real rule is to stick to a narrative since your developing an army and a story aimed at making your collection more than game pieces and also discussion with your opponent of both the narrative and how you see it playing. You then have a starting point for your scenarios.

With this and the previous two posts in mind, I am now going to stop the lecturing posts and continue this blog writing about what I am doing for my hobby and why. This will probably take the form of sporadic posts about what I've been painting and  the background I'm using, with a few comments on how I play the games. I also aim to put up my recently completed Orc and Goblin army to show how the vague principles I write about actually work.

What I Game With (part two: the games)

I have already outlined my approach to gaming with the introduction to this blog. With this post I want to show how I use rules system. It is a post that could potentially go on for ever as I go through every rules system that I like and want to try. So instead of doing this I will focus on one games system, the bi one that was the first wargame I played and one that has a rich enough background and rules to support roleplay. This post will focus on Warhammer!

Before I get distracted with writing about the different editions and intricacies of the rules I want to share this interview with Rick Priestly. In the interview Rick Priestly is talking about the inspiration for the design of his game 'Black Powder'. I have not had the pleasure of trying this game but the interview does give some insights into the design process and also how the Games Workshop designers approached gaming. Rick Priestly describes playing games (not necessarily Games Workshop games) with the Perry twins, Jervis Johnson, Ali Morrison, Dave Andrews and Tim Adcock. All of them were big names in the history of Games Workshop and have made a significant contribution to either the look or the design of the games. I believe only Jervis Johnsons still works full time for Games Workshop, but I could be wrong about some of the others.

The most telling bit is how Rick Priestly describes their gaming. He does not start by saying "We decided to try out the new Codex and suddenly realised they had 'nerfed' half my units so put the models away with disgust." Nor does he say "We play to try out as many unbeatable combinations as an army list allows. We don't really care for the background, it's the winning we love." He certainly doesn't say "We realised that Games Workshop had stopped supporting our preferred rules set a month or so earlier, so Alan Perry twins took all his models outside and burnt them!" Yet what he does say is very telling.

Rick Priestly starts by talking about how the palying of games were a social event ("we’d turn up of an evening, gobble a curry, start a game and the two sides would just begin to engage around about midnight by which time my pumpkin was ready outside"). He then goes on to menton how the rules he developed with Jervis Johnson for Black Powder were based upon allowing a game to be played in these circumstances and to enable quick movement of large numbers of figures that were in their collections. The rules were there for providing solutions to problems with the way they wanted to play, not for dictating the way they played.

Returning to Warhammer, it is possible to see the strengths and the weaknesses of the various editions coming from this style of play and games design. The first edition of Warhammer was meant as something to do with your roleplaying figures. It also meant that players were more likely to buy more figures for the parent company. An immediate clash of styles can be seen. Roleplaying can have lots of rules or very few rules, but it always relies on some form of initiative from the games players to make a session successful.  Wargaming can have very complex rules or very few rules. But it always needs some kind of firm basis to cover basics to enable tactical competition. In other words it needs agreed rules on movement and combat, followed by an agreement on what the game is actually representing (Company level combat? skirmish? overall command sweep or individual unit commanders having the initiative? and so on).

By the second edition, Warhammer had moved from it's roleplaying roots and had an agreed set of combat rules that could be used in most scenarios. Work on the game was required from all players, with a Games Master being helpful and a scenario being very useful (even if it was simply the Dwarfs had to defend a bridge from Goblins attempting to raid their territory. This was fine between friends and players familiar with roelplay scenarios or fantasy stories. But two unfamiliar players would be lost. Gamers who had a win at all costs mentality (rather than just enjoying the tactical challenges of  a specific scenario) were liable to take advantage. the attempts to set up Warhammer competiitons (or tournaments) had to deal with these problems. Cue third edition.

Third edition (building on Ravening Hordes supplement released earlier in 1997)  tried to sove these problems by keeping the possibility for narrative play but also by having rules fro nearly every possibility that could arise playing the game. It was suggested that a certain degree intelligence was needed while usingthe rules and that the majority of the rules were optional suggestions. With friendly play it worked fine. The Realm of Chaos warband skirmish system perfectly complemented the rules and everyone had fun. Or almost everyone. If you wanted to use all the rules, apart from having a  massive task of learning lots of rules for situations that might never arise, the flow of the game ground to a halt. This was fatal for competitive play, but then so what. It also turned players away who were a lot happier playing one of Games Workshops (or another companies) more streamlined games that had just as much tactical challenge. If you doubt me, compare third editon Warhammer to Space Marine/epic. Or Space Hulk. Or Blood Bowl. Or Dark Future or whatever you want. The problem was Warhammer was still fun to play and was good at putting an interesting background into action on the table top, allowing the players to develop depth and charaters to their armies. But Games Workshop needed a big selling game to keep selling it's models around. It tales a lot of investment ot build a Warhammer army and Games Workshop were very keen for people to invest!

So fourth focused on getting games played, removing ambiguity and the need for agreement over rues (or a games master) by having exact rules. And the problem developed, because to get more games played, you had to develop a system of rules that enabled to strangers to play each other, rather than one focused on people with common interests developing a narrative. Although the narrative role of gaming remained in place, this approach to rules gradually evolved into the mess that was eight edition; rules were like laws, the games were not representations of events but competitions between two equal armies and variation were discouraged with constant changing army books driven by the latest model releases being necessary to prevent even tournament gamers becoming bored.

"Don't you think were all focusing a bit too much on me, rather than maximizing our army list and using the tightness of the rules to defeat them? After all, I'll provide an unbalanced game and possession of the Necronomicon encourages fluff based play, distracting from the seriousness of fantasy wargaming tournaments."

Fourth and fifth edition are labeled 'Herohammer' because the game allowed interesting heroes but competition games abused this and built unstoppable heroes. The fact that this is only a problem with people who don't see the game as a development of a narrative, but as a competition to crush all opponents, was lost on many people. I see the real problem hitting home just before seventh edition. Lord of the Rings was a big seller, the remaining narrative based games had been pushed into a tiny part of the company called 'Specialist Games'. The rest had to be a big seller focused on getting models sold on mass, not the actual fun of playing.

So returning to the original point of this post, my approach to the rules. Rules are just a guideline, otherwise your missing the whole point of miniature wargaming. That is to play out a narrative with your collection of models. Third edition provides a great loose basis for fantasy games that only becomes rules heavy and hard to play if the rules are taken literally. Once you learn the basics for maneuvering and combat the rest is optional and can be added to are then away from. If something doesn't seem right, don't let it spoil your game, improvise anther rule. Warhammer third is just an example, the  same applies to every game I play and to be honest I'm happier for it even if it means that finding opponents becomes an almost impossible task (at times some tools for randomized decision making can be used for some solo play!)

So I'm saying, remember that wargaming is about fun and the rules are to facilitate fun, not provide constraints. If you are representing the events of a war, real or fantasy, the rulebook must be a guide and also allow almost any possibility to happen. For this to happen the rules don't need to be complex,  just flexible enough to allow the numerous possibilitys that the background offers to be played out.

What I Game With (part one; the models!)

I aim to have a loose approach to gaming, with the interaction of characters and the narrative being the basis for playing out of tactical challenges. I play a small number of games but seem to have ambitions to prepare for and play out a wide variety of games. I am happy to play some of these, such as Flames Of War, with home made card characters, with the background being more important and lack of time and funds preventing the purchase and painting of miniatures. Others, the collecting and use of models plays an important part, with the painting of a well sculpted model which represents an interesting character providing a large part of the inspiration to continue playing and develop this characters story. My painting skills are not  that great and due to dysgraphia, related to dyslexia, they will never improve. So a miniature inspiring me and firing my imagination is a vital part of enjoying it since I will never aim to display the finished product as a work of art.

There is now a large amount of companies providing decent miniatures and the ability to order using the internet means that any player is spoilt for choice.  But at the moment there are several companies I either keep returning to or have used a great deal in the past. Here is my summary of what I see they have to offer.

A modern Citadel/ Games Workshop Nurgle Champion (Left) next to a classic (1989-1990) Citadel Nurgle Sorcerer. Both from my slowly building/decaying Nurgle army. Both fulfilling my desire for character and individuality in models! Apologies for the poor photo, but it is not meant to illustrate my painting skills.

Old Citadel Miniatures
Not a separate company.  Although give Games Workshop time and they might develop a separate Forge World type company selling classic sculpts. They might of dropped the ball and lost what made them the leader of the market, but seem to be learning from their mistakes. However these old models form the corner stone of the Oldhammer movement and are the models that I originally got into gaming with.

I will not get into a debate about what is an old citadel miniature and what is a modern one or what counts as Citadel's golden era. However, I agree with the arguments that citadel started to change their design in 1992. This year marked the attempt of Games Workshop to grow (and pay debts) by deliberately aiming at a a younger audience. It also marked the beginning of the red era of painting. Models became a lot chunkier and cartoon like and generally moved away from what was a believable and heroic look.

Prior to this their are a number of classic models, with each sculpt being individual. They were produced in huge numbers with the variety dwarfing that offered by the modern collectibles' based company and meaning that no army was ever quite the same. I think part of the reason this happened was that the models were produced to compliment the games, rather than the games being a promotional tool for the miniatures. Games Workshop was happy to produce a large number of games and the sculptor's appeared to have more freedom to produce around their understanding of these games as opposed to having a strict brief focused on the large unit sizes needed for just two games.

I collect from all pre-1992 ranges, with a developing interest in the pre-slotta range. It is particularly interesting  discovering the variety of poses that plastic sculpts can't give you despite the variety of pieces these plastic sculpts come in.

It should be noted that not everything was gold from this era. I feel their are a large number of average sculpts and some that are plain bad. Introductions of things such as plastic arms for metal models and attempting to provide for regiments by having static variation on one model design did not help. But when they are good, old citadel models are great and more than pull their weight against the modern products from the same company.

They are widely available on the Ebay, with the average (and what should be the maximum) price being £8. It can get very costly if you want to build whole armies out of them. Their are also a large number of people who have noted the popularity of these models amongst collectors and aim to make as much money as possible from them. Generally you will see models that are over priced and it is worth weighting and continuing searching before paying an inflated price. It is also quite funny seeing some of the prices charged. Believe me, they are collectible but they really aren't as valueable as some people would have you believe.

New Citadel Miniatures
Actually I'm not sure if they are even called Citadel Miniatures anymore. But in my mind they'll always carry that name. The stereotypical image of the modern models' amongst who have fallen out of love with the modern Games Workshop output is of computer generated, over the top models lacking character and laden down with skulls. But like the older models the truth is slightly more complex. Basically they are a mixed bunch with some good and some bad and a lot of average.

Coinciding with Games Workshop winning the Lord of the Rings franchise, they improved the rest of their range, ditching the over the top cartoon images and while maintaining the heroic look, allowing the models to at least look vaguely realistic. Or as realistic as a fantasy range can look.

The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit range, like the films' and books' they are based on, are hard to fault. The only thing I can say about them is that I wish I own more of them. Hopefully I will be able to over the course of time. The Warhammer and Warhammer 40K models are also generally good, suffering from three main faults. The lack of variety that having a range mainly based on plastic kits provides, the tendency towards over the top exaggeration and the increasing move away from models useable in wargaming to huge models that are only really useable as collectors pieces.

The first problem would only really a problem if there wasn't a large amount of alternatives both from Games Workshops past and other miniature companies, to provide some variety for your army. Your third rank of spearmen doesn't need to look that interesting, they are basically casualty markers. Games Workshop tried designing their games so that you have to use more and more models. The best way round this is to ignore the 'need' for units of 50 elf spearmen or an army of 200 imperial guardsmen and not to even try such a boring painting exercise. Either play smaller games or use older rules sets which relied on less models. Don't assemble 50 versions of the same figure then torture yourself by turning your hobby into a repetitive painting task that goes on and on and on. Obvious? You'd think so, but there seems to be a large number of teenagers who are set on doing this and seem to enjoy doing it.

The second problem, the exaggeration, is an on going issue with Games Workshop. A human becomes a steroid crazed superman, a model can be seen to be evil because it is covered in skulls. This used to be unnecessary and the quality of the sculpts were used to build character rather than lots of muscles, skulls and weapons that are so big you would need a crane to lift the thing. This is one of the reasons why people stick to earlier citadel miniatures'. Personally I think some models are better than others. I would not touch the latest sigmarines produced for Age of Sigmar because of this. But I don't think it is a universal problem effecting everything they produce. Unless you believe Games Worksop when they say you can only use their models for their games it is simply a question of being choosey with what you buy. More specialist ranges tend not suffer from these problems. Forge World, for example, appears to be set on correcting problems with the range produced by their parent company and at one point Games Workshop started doing runs of mail order only miniatures. I guess they have worked out that over the top sells to their core audience and so have to keep at it for a large proportion of their range, toning down what they expect to sell to people who are not in their early teens and new to the hobby.

The move to huge models is part of Games Workshops attempt to make more profit from what is a shrinking market share. This is covered by the claim that they aren't a games company but a seller of collectibles. If this is true, then they sell some very nice collectible kits that are great for a modeller and useless for a game player. With 40K, a game I feel never really works with tanks because of the model size, huge tanks and war machines' are now sold, with the rules adjusted to encourage people to buy these. Never mind the fact that, as Rick Priestly once said,  this causes the scale to break down and so the game mechanics breakdown (if you fire a pistol at one end of a tank and the model standing at the rear of the tank  is almost our of range the principle f scale in the game is busted).  Pictures of 40K games that looked like traffic jams were printed in the late White Dwarf. All aimed at getting people to buy oversized models. Fantast  went the same way with increasingly big kits to represent Daemons, Heroes, monsters and so on. Nagash is the classic example. This model dwarfed regiments that were meant to represent 100 men (if 1 model represented 10-20 people) and appeared to be an excuse to get people to buy a £70 model conveniently boosting the turnover of a company that had been struggling over the previous year.

Of course the cost of the models also should be mentioned. The quality is good, but not that good. The prices regularly rise above the cost of inflation and you increasingly get less for more. While there are always people willing to pay the costs, the rises partly reflect the poor management of Games Workshop, a company that has increasingly rested on it's laurels and enjoyed no real competition has saturated the market with Space Marines and sold to teenagers who quickly give up the hobby due to no real support other than an increasingly hard sell and catalogues mascarading as a magazine. as the pointless updates to rules increase, with the occasional new unit demanding a full re-organisation of players collection in order to stay competitive, people sell their collections on Ebay at knock down prices meaning a bargain for people like me and increasingly desperate price rises to sell that recycled model design and give the image of a profitable company that has cornered the market through leading, not following the needs of their customers.

Reaper

Three adventurers, Rene, Margarat and Emily, outside an Inn on route to Bogenhafen from Nuln. An Imperial Merchant can be seen on the far right.

The above picture features three Reaper Miniatures used to represent WFRP characters used in the unique way my partner and I play that game (maybe more in a future post). The noble/ merchant is a Victoria miniature and the Coaching Inn was assembled by my super skilled partner who will not paint miniatures or play wargames but was very keen to try the modelling workshop articles and house building I showed her in my classic White Dwarfs'.

These three quite neatly illustrate what you get from Reaper. They are characterful models which are primarily designed for use with roleplay, although can easily be used for wargaming. There is a very wide variety of models and they easily out do the limited number of heroes currently offered by citadel. People who are primarily painters might complain about reduced detail on the sculpts, particularly on the 'Bones' polymer range, however being mainly a gamer and collector I'm happy with this.

The models are in slightly different scale to citadel, having a slightly more realistic look, next to citadels heroic sculpts. Yet they work very well with pre-1992 citadel mini's and most other ranges that don't adopt the massively over sized modern citadel heroic scale.

Finally, the best bit is the price, providing cheap well sculpted alternative for all games :-)

Perry Miniatures
Price was the first thing I noticed about Perry Miniatures. The ex-citadel sculpters historical range sells characterfully sculpted, historically accurate models for historical wargaming at giving more than twice the number of models in their box sets that Games Workshop mange in theirs. Even making allowances for differences in the amount of plastic used due to size difference, this shows how you are not getting value for money with modern Games Workshop box sets.

Now the average reader of this blog is probably wondering why I'm including what is an historical miniatures company amongst the list of companies I use. While I have an interest for historical wargaming, other than Flames of War, I do not participate (although I am very tempted to try a campaign based in the War of the Roses).  Perry Miniatures, at first glance, do not stand up well against the range of Fantasy models available. Although the sculpting can not be faulted, the models are made in true scale rather than the varying degrees of heroic scale used in fantasy.

But then you realise peple come in all shapes and sizes (go on, have a look). A large over sized model can stand next to a smaller Perry one and look OK providing their is some consistency. Thus, Perry Miniatures have provided me with a large number of perfectly sculpted rank and file models to populate the old world (or at least my imagined version of the old world). This in turn enhances the fantasy elements by, in my opinion, giving the games a clear relation to the real world.

Grenadier Miniatures/ Mirliton
Grenadier miniatures was a rival to Citadel in the '80s. I understand they were a US run company that was mainly aimed at the Dungeons and Dragons market. The modles they produced had a similar flavour to Citadels, although seem to lack some fo the humour that is apparent with early Citadel. They tend to have a distinct style but also mix well with Citadel models from the same era.

Currently, a sizeable proportion of their range is being re-cast by Italian company Mirliton. I recommend looking at it, particularly if you want a more old school style of model that is not reliant upon the cold precisions of computer design. In particular I recommend looking at the monsters, wood elves and barbarians. But just generally browse, since the whole point of this post is to show there is more than just Citadels current range and back catalogue.

 Victoria Miniatures

An unexpected final choice for this list? Well not really. Victoria Miniatures is  a small Australian company that I have bought from a couple of times. I chose them to represent the large number of small manufacturers who produce interesting, well sculpted but slightly different models that can bring games to life. All that it takes is a little hunting using the internet. The Spanish Inquisition above are an example of their work and a I find it hard to think of a 28mm game they would not brighten up (unless you area tournament gamer and take your games very seriously). The point of the hobby is to have fun and help to survive the alienation and stresses that everyday life can bring. As such, it is important to have fun with every aspect of it including collecting and to let the models you have in your collection represent exactly what you want not what a games manufacturer wants. The days of relatively huge companies dominating wargaming have gone and it is worth embracing the variety and using this as a way of actualising what you imagined and want to imagine on the table top.

By using the large variety of manufacturers, my gaming is probably looked down upon by purists playing both modern games and Oldhammer. The argument is that the collecting and building armies using a limited pool gives the satisfaction. I see that, but that is not what I aim to get from my gaming. I am not simply collecting, I am trying to play out narratives and the use if miniatures enables this but does not take precedence over the importance of having fun attempting to play  out and represent a narrative using the theatre of wargaming.

An introduction.

On the surface this might appear to be yet another blog by an ageing miniature collector detailing his hobby. A bit of scratching below the surface will hopefully reveal that is exactly what this blog is all about. You see I do aim to use this to detail my hobby, a hobby that basically separates me from most people my age and indeed many of my friends, but I also want to try and get across what I see as important to me in the hobby and why I get satisfaction from collecting (and badly painting) small figures as well as being able to occasionally play games with them. It is the narrative of these games and trying to bring a narrative to life through the representation of characters.

Like most people my age (39) involved in what can broadly be based as wargaming, I started in roleplaying games and progressed from there. My first experience was aged playing Dungeons and Dragons, the grandfather of roleplaying games. Here I had fun with friends playing simple adventures with friends using very basic characters we developed. We did use citadel miniatures that we all first heard of years before through older brothers, hobby shops, the back of Lone Wolf books (40p a model if you could find them) and so on. But the figures were only used to illustrate the characters, the fun was in the game and playing your character as he tried to get some where. Basically the story, the narrative was the game and the rules came secondary to what you wanted to do and represent.

It should be noted that although I have chosen this as the starting point, the interest in Dungeons and Dragons came from an interest in narrative roleplay books such as the classic Lone Wolf books and Fighting Fantasy. Here the story was once again most important, not the actual game and it's mechanics. I also had  toy soldiers since I was about 7, as any boy in the 80's did. I played with them to act out stories, not for a super balanced tournament. But I digress, I might put blog posts about this in the future. For a simple introduction I'll say it all started with Dungeons and Dragons and of course an interest in this game was fueled by an interest in fantasy.

Dungeons and Dragons did not stay as the only fantasy roleplaying game that I played. Games Workshop and it's various managed to replace it. As I have mentioned, Citadel Miniatures were already known and as I got into the hobby their production levels seemed to be greatly increasing, but I think Games Workshop gained a dominance for a number of reasons. This was partly through the dominance of it's magazine White Dwarf (and only promoting Games Workshop products through this) and partly through the increase in Games Workshop stores and their promoting of the hobby amongst under 16's. But I also think it was the fact that they were selling interesting games with a strong basis in characters and story driven events.

While Dungeons and Dragons allowed you to play characters such as Dwarfs and Elfs (later allowing these races to have specific jobs with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons), it was very generic. The world building of  Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay allowed you to built characters with a background and previous careers in the Warhammer world. It appeared to be trying to build more than a collection of statistics t role a dice against. This rich background then expanded into other games. While it was entirely possible to play the games produced by Games Workshop while ignoring the background, this appeared to be against the aim of the games.

However time appeared to change. I would say the big change came with what became one of my favourite games: Epic. Or to be precise Space Marine (2nd. edition). The big difference was that this game was written to be based upon pick  up games with modular armies and the same scenario for each game. As players we didn't care. The background that was shared with the Warhammer 40K universe and was both rich and already spread across numerous games. We simply saw the games as using that detail and enjoyed the tactical challenge of a well written wargame.

The problem was this represented the new marketing strategy of Games Workshop. Games Workshop, as a company functioning in a capitalist world, had to sell the commoditys it produced at a profit to survive. The basic equation is commodity plus labour power equals a new commodity that can be sold at profit. The first edition of Warhammer was specifically designed to get the roleplayers Games Workshop sold  games to, buying more Citadel Miniatures instead of being happy with the small (or non-existent) number that were being used as an optional extra in roleplaying games. Since the second edition of Warhammer, every edition has encouraged ridiculously high miniature numbers despite the fact that this does not necessarily make a better game, increase the enjoyment or allow carefully painted models and details to shine through and rise above being a simple blur. Eight edition took this to ridiculous extremes by having a rule that actively encouraged players to field regiments of 50 plus models of extremely similar models which would be quickly swept off the table in a blur of dice rolling. I presume,since I never felt the need to play this version of a game that I owned three previous and very workable and enjoyable older editions, reduced tactics to setting up what were called on forums tar pits and smashing these into each other before hoping that your horde dice rolls wore down the other hordes dice rolls more quickly. But I digress.

To continue to sell games, they had to be easy and quick to play. Having to emerse yourself in background and then theme your army around this, while trying to come up with a way to win the unusual scenario and find an opponent to do the same, might work for a lot of people. yet it got more people into gaming by having simple set up games that had easy victory conditions and to worry about narrative details later. The games increasingly followed this format. This did not matter that much, since as I have mentioned, a well written set of rules could be used as a tool to put your narrative ideas into action. No one was stopping themed armies, complex scenarios characters, campaigns and so on. In fact they were still encouraged. It was just the main marketing of the actual games was the quick sell followed by the sell of even more miniatures with a few more of them on top.

By 1992 Games Workshop had got rid of it's roleplaying games and had changed the style of the miniatures they sold. In order to sell quickly and attract younger gamers the models began to resemble cartoon parodies of fantasy and sci-fi heroes. They were less something that brought your heroes to life and more something rejected from He-Man for being over proportioned. I lost interest in the hobby, although not in fantasy and science fiction. Although to be fair, my life had moved on and I had other interests and no real time for such a hobby. If this rout had not been adopted I would of probably still have dropped the hobby, but perhaps more gradually and without the feeling that I was definitely too old for it.

The internet is full of lots of blogs with similar tales and details about how a previously loved hobby went wrong around 1992-1993 due to changes in marketing and style of games and hideous cartoon miniatures with terrible paint schemes. Collectively this is a central ethos of the Oldhammer movement. I suppose this blog is an Oldhammer blog. However there is more to it than that.

Between 1992 and 1997 I basically played no games. I did nearly participate in a vampire roleplaying game at university with a house mate and her friends, biut never got further than rolling up and developing the basics of my character. I'm not sure if the game ever started, I just happened to be around when the characters were being prepared and was interested but not really that into the idea of trying roleplay again. after leaving university and living away from London, in a dull job and back home, I did notice that Games Workshop released a new version of Epic; Epic 40K. It looked good and gave freedom to develop detatchments as opposed to company cards which were all the same. I bought it and loved it for it's simplicity, the  freedom it gave you to develop scenarios and the way the game played like you were commanding an army, rather than getting stuck on detail or bound up in complex rules that simply slowed down the game and moved away from the grand narrative. I also did not have to worry about the cartoon miniature design that Games Worshop were still producing. In 6mm it does not matter. I agree with the designers, Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers, it was the best game that they have produced. Sadly the rest of the universe disagreed and the game sunk like a stone. This was coupled with Games Workshops belief that anything that didn't sell (28mm) Space Marines was worthless and did not warrant support. I didn't care and started devising ingenious ways (previously occasionally tried as a teenager) to play solo.

I ended up putting it on the back burner for a couple of years but kept an interest and discovered a couple of things. Despite the marketing there was still a lot of potential for narrative gaming with Games Workshops products. Inquistor, Battlefleet Gothic and  even Warhammer and 40K had a big amount of narrative support helping to expand the background and mean that fantasy wargaming was about playing out events rather than simply lining up rival, nameless armies and playing by strict rules to score points. The other thing I discovered was that a lot of the company and the people who bought their products, were not interested in this.

Games Workshop stores became scary places to enter, full of teenagers talking about best combinations and statistics, while the store staff gave you the hard sell and looked at you sadly if you suggested that you played anything other than Warhammer or 40K and might want to use rules and armies in different ways. Epic was eventually remade into a neutered version which had over detailed rules, modular armies and one scenario written for tournaments. On the plus side, the 28mm miniature ranges were improving and although I didn't play, I rediscovered how relaxing it can be to paint a figure. This was coupled with looking at the more interesting bits of background and narrative that escaped the corporate hard sell.

I now am at a point where I have started collecting armies and playing games. However the I also recognise that the company that produces the models for this is in no way providing what I want with its current rules and background. I have already mentioned some of my thoughts on eight edition. I also reject the majority of internet gamers who play as a means of competing and are obsessed with strict rules and tournaments. One word that particularly somes up the problems with a lot of modern gamers is 'fluff'.

A quick internet search gives the definition of 'fluff' as entertainment or writing perceived as trivial or superficial. Basically it refers to the background and most current (internet) gamers consider it superficial and unimportant. yet the whole point of playing a wargame is to act out an event, not to take part in a competition. You carefully assemble forces to represent something, not to be an unbeatable combination (although that could be the elite army you aim to represent). You then see how it acts in a narrative situation. This is how I want to paly my games and collect my models. If I was into long distance running I would say I do it to run interesting routs and see scenery  while experiencing running. I would not be doing it to run round a track and be faster than other runners doing laps of a track. I feel that is a metaphor for how separate I see myself from the majority of the internet gaming community.

I feel that there are plenty of good miniatures available now, both old and new citadel as well as those produced by other companies, to not to have to over fetishize the models that were produced in my youth. I aim to collect what I like and even play with counters if it suits what I want to do with a game. I want to play games again, but not have to stick with the rules if it impedes the narrative. For now I'm going to bbase things on Warhammer third edition with ideas grabbed from the 6th.edition and my head. But I also want to play and collect for other games that I can use to present events and show caharacters interacting. These games I aim to play include flames of War, Blood Bowl 2nd edition, epic 40K (yes Epic 3rd. edition), Battlefleet Gothic, Inquisitor, 1938 A Very British Civil War, Warhammer 40K, WFRP, Aeronautica Imperialis and anything else I can think of. I want the games to be part of an unfolding story that I have developed the characters for and I want to enjoy myself. I might only get as far as painting some miniatures but I want them to represent a story! That is what this blog will be about.