"The Future: Spend More on Rulebooks, Less on Miniatures" Topic

My armies are getting larger! Mind you they are 6mm! ;)

In all seriousness, I've cut back on buying 25/8mm armies more due do space requirements and painting time more than anything else. So, 6mm is king for me at the moment.

The only rulesets I'm buying for 28mm models either use figures I already own or are skirmish rules.

I have a friend of mine who, I think, exemplifies the hobby quite well. For the longest time he was into 15mm. As he got older it became more of a strain to paint 15s so he went to 25s. I put on some 25 mm 7YW games. He liked them and started collecting a 7YW army. After a while he came accross a sets of Napoleonic skirmish rules. He collected enough Napoleonic figres to play the these skirmish games. He found some really cool WWII figures then found a set of rules he liked. He got interested in WAB. He is now collecting a Macedonian army.

In otherwords, there is a symbiotic relationship between rules and figures. You may go out and buy figures because you are interested in a particular set of rules. I did this with a set of rules for the Franco-Prussian War. Or, you may have found some figures which you simply must have. Now you need a set of rules so you can game with them.

The only trend I see is that as you age you tend top drop the smaller scales and go to the larger scales. As I look back over the years I don't see any trend toward smaller armies. I think gamers intuitively know what I learned in getting my MBA. You can only effectively manage 10-12 units (people or wargame units). Get much beyond that and things begin to bog down. If you want larger battles, you simply invite more gamers.

With this as a guide, price is not the commanding issue. I determine what I need for my 10-12 units. I calculate how many I can paint in a month. I only buy enough figures for a months painting. While the overal cost may be large, I don't feel it because the incremental costs are kept small. This allows me to buy from any manufacture regardless of the figure cost.

Rich

Bring on workable VR….then we'll only be paying for "the rulebook" (so to speak) and nothing for figures..:D

I must be a freak. I spent years building 25/28mm armies for ACW, Mexican-American War, Warhammer, 40K, Wild West skirmish, while at the same time off and on painting WWII MicroArmor and 15mm Napoleonics.

Recently (the past 2 years) I've been painting 15mm exclusively, for Seven Years War and WWII. I painted roughly 70 12-figure units for SYW in a less than two years, and have painted around 200 Germans for FoW in the past 4 months.

And what's my next project? 15mm Mexican-American War as I take my old 28mm Old Glory figures and rebase them for Brother Against Brother. I'm using Eureka's figures which are just outstanding.

I'll be painting 15mm as long as my eyesight holds out. 43 years old, and doing good, so far!

Gee, Aloysius (D),

That is he gist of my argument for the future of gaming as it is:

That it will become an information technology.

At that point, whether you display the "toy soldiers" as instantiated models of physical "stuff", or put them in a virtual environment to play with makes no difference.

What you mean by "Workable" VR is also an issue… technically, we have VR right now that is very good… It is just expensive as all heck…

However, byt the same dates that I have given for affordable Instantiation technologies (2012 – 2015), we should be near-full immersion VR for a relatively inexpensive price. You probably won't be able to afford your own VR set-up, but odds are likely that you will find plenty of VR environments that you can enter at a VR center.

by 2020… Then you will see Home R become as common as the cell-phone or home computer is today…

At least, if you follow the existing trends. So far there is no indication that there is a reason not to do so.

Cost is definitely a factor in my version of "workable" VR :D

I don't want to play wargames by VR. I like having a table set up with loads of figures on that have weight and I painted and based them and so on. That's not to say I wouldn't play a VR game, but it could not replace the same experience for me.

That is he gist of my argument for the future of gaming as it is:

That it will become an information technology.

While I very much enjoy reading your posts on these sorts of subject, JI, I strongly disagree. An analogy: has computer art completely displaced conventional oil, watercolors, pastels, sculpting, etc?

The same thing was predicted by many wargamers I knew in the late 80s/early 90s as computer games swept up many. However, there will always be people like me, Killkrazy, and others, for whom wargaming is about the modeling aspect of things. Downloaded images or whatever entity is used are in the same boat as ready painted armies or folks who get others to do the modeling work for them. Certainly there will be a new market for this sort of thing, but there will still be those of us who are in it for the craft.

I think gamers intuitively know what I learned in getting my MBA. You can only effectively manage 10-12 units (people or wargame units).

Actually I think you're wrong – many of us out here don't realize that! Thus the reports of "oh yeah, we had a game where I had two hundred figures individually based"…

One thing about digitalisation of media is that ownership rights tend to pass from the buyer back to the publisher by the means of the licence agreement. We've seen this in application programs and it is the way things are moving with downloadable online games. A lot of online music is offered on subscription and the same will probably happen to movies.

20 years from now we could all be logged into our FoG v2028 server for some battle and suddenly Osprey could pull the plug and we would be left with nothing. the software, the models and everything would be on the server not owned physically or legally by the end user.