"Avoiding "Ooh Shiny!" & Staying Focused" Topic

This thread got me thinking:

TMP link

About 6 years back I decided to do a bit of sorting of the collection. You know – get everything out of the closet, and make sure all my 15mm Vietnam was in one place, all my 6mm Civil War was in another.

As a result I turned up all kinds of stuff – from who knows where. Most of it was either an impulse purchase (one 1/600 Ironclad, a pack of Vikings) or leftovers from trades/flea market lots.

Looking at the mess I decided I had way too much unpainted lead and did a huge sort. Each project got a pile. I then prioritized and any project that would not get finished in 12 months was put on the chopping block and sold off.

I raised about $4,000 USD and used it all to send stuff off to painting services. In 6 months I found I now had enough finished figures to do all sorts of new games such as 15mm Vietnam, 6mm Napoleonics, Age of sail, etc. etc.

Since then I have again accumulated a small pile of unpainted lead, again almost all from lots that included painted (from Ebay, horse trades and flea markets) and I'll probably do another sell off this summer.

But here's how I found I was able to avoid winding up with lots of clutter (my hobby is not putting things in a closet to gather dust):

Focus on the next game. Right now I'm working on my MicroArmor. I'm planning a 5000 point Flames of War game. I checked my army lists and looked at my figures and identified what I needed. At this point not much. Some AT guns and Gaz AA Trucks for the Soviets, an artillery battery and some PaK40s for the Germans.

Be Realistic. I know how fast I paint. So when I finally pulled the trigger on 15mm Vikings and Saxons I purchased my armies and sent them off to Evil Bob for the brush work. Since that was most of my budget for the year now I just have to wait. But in a few months I'll have 1500 Vikings & Saxons to battle with – both in mass battles as well as skirmish forces. That just leaves me to paint up a Viking ship and a few houses….

Anyway, that's what has worked for me…..

I don't suffer with the "ooh shiny" syndrome, but do plead guilty to a somewhat related issue.

Seeing a new range of well sculpted 28mm Romans, or Modern Horror Zombies or 1/144 WW1 Aircraft or whatever is not a problem. I admire the sculpts and paintwork but have no desire to game those periods/scales/genres etc.

I made the decision a few years back about what scale figures I would collect, what periods interested me to game and which limited number of rule sets I wanted to use. My problem now is that leaves a list of things I know I need within those limited categories.
I know I need 6mm Heroics and Ros Afrika Korps to fight against my existing 6mm 8th Army (with KGN, Spearhead or PanzerKorps depending on the game size I want). I have no plans to buy them yet (or probably for a few years) but can guarantee that if I see someone in the marketplace or eBay selling/trading them next week I will be likely to buy them.

Not a new shiny temptation, but almost irresistable temptation nevertheless.

One thing that makes it hard to avoid the ooh shiny syndrome is having friends who like to jump on the latest flavor of the month. In the course of about two years in the 2000s, we went from WAB to Warmaster ancients to Field of Glory. Unfortunately this also meant changing scales from 28mm to 10mm (used once) to 15mmm. Fortunately when we moved on to FoG we already had 15mm armies from our DBM days.

It is precious to me, OH SHINY! I am getting better resisting but I do not have the greatest of willpower….

Appreciate you posting, Extra Crispy. I should do exactly what you did.

Skip to 4:38
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Me--I'm going to live until I'm 120 at this rate…

Tim,
Your work room is like a model shop itself, so many kits and so much paint.

I'm pretty good at avoiding shiny. I have as little in stock as possible and set lots of small targets that are relatively easy to meet so I feel as if I'm making progress. That written the lead pile has been slowly growing again recently.

I believe that I have a terminal case of the 'Ohh Shiny' disease,

In the last 8 months I have bought 4,500 ancient figures in 15mm from one recent UK kickstarter project (War & Empire), gone in for the Conan kickstarter in 28mm, bought some of 4Grounds excellent Wild West buildings. I am looking to add Sung Chinese in 15mm when Khurasan release them, and will be ordering Napoleonic Danes, Swedes, Saxons, & Spanish from Blue Moon in due course. Then there is the recent addition of GWs Man o War, from ebay, which I am just getting into (about 25 years too late).

And this is me trying to reign back my spending!!

It is getting to the stage now that I have to consider my own mortality and that, and the eyesight, of my painter. I have about 17,000 figures to paint, at even 1,000 a year that puts both my painter and I into our seventies.

Steve J

Sweet mother of mercy, those are some wargaming collections! You folks are committed

Now that I've been in the hobby for a while, I have a hobby budget, which I stick to strictly every month. $80 USD a month for the months I'm out of HS and have a job (3 months), $30 USD during the months I'm in school.

For instance, this month looks like:
Warhammer 40k Conquest: The Great Devourer: $19.99 USD
Star Wars X-Wing Core Set: $26.99 USD
Infinity Combi-Rifle Order Sergeants x3: $15.99 USD
P3 Molten Bronze: $2.63 USD
Total: $65.6 USD
And the leftover here will go into next month's budget and pay for most of a copy of Matt Wagner's "The Shadow Year One". I find that by giving myself one budget to split between all my hobbies and related supplies (LCGs, Minis Gaming, RPGs, Comics, History Books, and ammo for shooting) I plan my purchases carefully, and end up with nothing in the way of a lead mountain or books or paints that go unused. Most months, I end up spending reasonably under budget. Honestly, I'd feel kinda guilty putting any more into my hobbies.

Yes, there are shinies, and, some day, I want to do largish re-fights of Lutzen and Rorke's Drift, but, I'm a man with somewhat of a hobby budget plan, and it has served me well.

Did the same as EC but probably not to the same degree. Have that money already spent getting the figures painted.

several times a year I swear to finish my currently started projects (or at least one of them) before buying anything for another one then…..

SQUIRREL!!!!!

That way leads to madness.

Entirely too logical, and organized.

I am generally fairly disciplined, plan what I need, but it, paint it and then on to the next thing.

Even so, a steady backlog has built up over the decades, mainly second hand impulse buys 'which may be useful one day'. As long as I have the storage space for them, it isn't a huge problem.

The limiting factor is storage space of finished stuff, which is now a real limit on new projects and requires an even more ruthless approach. I even sold something last year. The horror…

Timotheus – those folks who jump around are called Windsocks, they change their hobby focus with a shift in the wind just like an airfield windsock.

Early on I focused on one scale, 15 mm, which helped. But I didn't focus on one period so I've ended up with a monster number of figures, and usually each collection itself is much too large. Then I had the 'live long enough' to paint epiphany. And, more importantly, I started thinking about how I could even play so many periods. And then I started calculating how many figures will fit on my gaming table (5' x 12' with an extendable option). Yeah too many figures for such a table – per period, mostly!

Those three thoughts put the breaks on hard, a very, very long set of skid marks. Since then I've bought very few figures. I still have some select items to buy, some of which I'll have to convince someone to sculpt (probably pay for that process if I can find someone affordable).

The next evolution in my hobby process is devolution: Cut down both the size and number of periods in the collection. Right now, I plan to keep three for certain – the American Revolution, the Old West, and my Colonial Africa Adventures (loosely based on the African explorers but on steroids and a kaleidoscopic mix of 'players' where even the US gets in the game).

The hard part is letting go. The good result will be more space, better organization (and I'm pretty well organized), and more time to enjoy the collections I do have.

So, I applaud those who get disciplined with their collections. But it sure was fun putting each individual collection together. Therein was the trap. That and a touch of miniaturized megalomania for a while.

I'm sort of in a post-windsock phase, living with too many projects. I've shut down and sold off a few that I didn't really need, and used boardgames to (hopefully) forever eliminate a need for big battle ancients, medievals, and Napoleonics (and if I can do the same for the ECW, TYW, and WSS to SYW, that'd be good too!).

I've also been pretty good at avoid new projects lately, so no Old West project, no matter how seductively it calls me.

When I look over the projects I still have though, I'm reminded of something I read once about Ingrid Bergman and her affairs with her co-stars – when she was love with one, she was totally in love with one. I'm the same way with the projects – when I'm into WWII in the air, I'm totally into WWII in the air; ditto for the others when their turn in the enthusiasm cycle comes. So even though some (all) projects will probably still be incomplete when my heirs have to go through my effects, I can still justify having them for those times when they're "on".

I suffer from severe OSD (Oh, Shiny Disorder), but have the perfect treatment: the wife only lets me have a few dollars each week for toys.

I have totally given in to "Shiny."

I do…right now on an impulse buy I decided I NEEDED 54mm WWI. All the while I have Ronin, Knights, British Civil War, and D&D sitting on the table…oh yeah and 28mm WWI…

When I was poor, I focused on 15mm Napoleonics. I did go a little wild on the books. The worst shiny impulse was about two thousand Peter Laing Marlbough figures for $35.00 USD. I have also turned to the GW 40k dark side when my son was in middle school. Reasonably restrained, but I still have a montrous great gray legion.