"Rick Priestley on Army Lists and Commerce" Topic

Most of us are somewhere in between

Completely agree. As well as many of us being in several places at once. For home run games I want control, modification, uniqueness, the one-off, such and soforth. For tourneys I want standardized consitency. For conventions I want something that I can walk up and play easily … which includes being able to easily grok which minis are what without an intimate knowledge of which variants have a left-handed or right-handed safety on their pistol.

(…) have created a gamer that is very use to being told you need these specific boxes in order to play the game. Thus, majority of these gamers don't really look for alternatives to the system

Gamers sometimes contacted me to say that my (free) skirmish rules looked interesting and that they needed an army list for some (precise and remote) historical period. When I answered that no list had been written for this period for these rules but that I could do a quick research and give them some broad suggestions to build their army, they looked very surprised and I did not hear from them again…

Actually, Patrice, I've had the same thing happen on a regular basis with my figures – about three quarters of the 'I will definitely order xxx of these if you re-release them', I say OK, done, last I ever hear of it.

Being a total novice to this hobby, one thing I will say for GW in particular, is that a quick study of it, in its entirety, without actually committing to it, taught me how to do it myself. Five copies of White Dwarf made me fall in love with the idea of making my own cool universe.

The hobby of finding a cheaper replacement for each "essential" product became an obsession in and of itself, from ruleset to scale to Mom-and-Pop's-Figure-Shop to table size to mindset to fluff. "Oh I see. I need all this stuff. Where can I get a better/cheaper/cooler/my-way-of-doing-it thing to replace this thing I supposedly need?" Which in turn leads to questioning absolutely all "essentials" and only retaining those that one actually finds worthwhile.

So bravo for rulesets and army lists, and Thank You for a storefront so I could actually visualize several factions as boxed armies and see people play, now I'll patronize the lines I'd like to see continued, learn to make my own platoons and play my own game my own way. I might feel different if I was looking for people to play, but at this stage I'm really not. I'm having too much fun making this game for me. Hooray for fluff. Mine.

I will say that when I went looking for rulesets, Warlord products captured my eye. Both Bolt Action and Black Powder are very attractively packaged, and also seem to provide enough to get one started in the hobby, which is all one wants, at one point, really. "How much is all of this going to set me back and how long will it take for me to get it all ready so I can play with it?" (And of course both books make lovely templates for making up your own game. Hooray for the public library).

Of course it's when one realizes that the answer is, "As much as you like" to both questions that one gets the sense of the endeavor, but at least having a couple players in the shop say "about a grand and about a year" gave me a place to learn it without having to flog about blindly.

I like the fact that in 15mm sci fi, it's very expected that one can pick and choose among figure lines, cherry-picking the bits one likes, regardless of fluff. I feel no obligation to buy the entire range. There are lots of one-man operations and they understand small scale economics and tough decisions. Plus, let's face it. A platoon is like seven bucks. Maybe twenty with HQ and HW. Two rulesets for forty bucks not one for seventy-five. I'll write the codices, myself, thank you. Thanks for showing me how.

The major problem is the inevitable growth of the millimeter, 15s and 25s aint what they used to be, but so few designers understand the effect of linear scale on the size of stands, it mostly doesn't matter.

Only those who design the stands to be congruent with the linear scale, both depth and frontage, may have problems. In this instance an increase in the size of figures could cause problems with fitting the number of figures.

One would think, if a rules set is successful figure manufacturers would accommodate to them, but they rarely do. Their sculptors are more interested in creating masterpieces of articulation, rather then thinking about how their figures may or may not fit on popular sized bases.

Cheers,

Bob Coggins

And my (late) vote for best post goes to grommet37 :o)

I see nothing wrong with the Priestley comment, people do worse things every day to keep their jobs.

The plus-side is that the ludicrous concept of having artillery on the table all the time does mean that an awful lot of obscure artillery models have been produced in 15mm that wouldn't otherwise have seen the light of day. Those daft enough to go along with the concept have made the models commercially viable to produce, which is a plus for the rest of us.

Nine times out of ten, my artillery is firmly where it should be – off table and only represented by templates rather than models. However, once in a while, those of us who like to do BIG games on BIG tables do actually need the odd on-table battery and it is very nice to have the models available.