"Are we the baddies?" Topic

A late ramble about Midwinter Minis "The big problem with Historical Wargames" a bit of a rant.

"ot sure if you caught this, but a while ago (many months in fact) Midwinter Minis YouTube channel posted a piece on the problem they perceived with historical gaming and why it was less popular than Warhammer…"

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Tomorrow, When The Revolution Begins

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Armand

Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion and opinions are like certain body parts…..everyone has one.

Learning history is hard. Learning about a fantasy world is easy.

The past is over and we can learn from it, wargaming, museums, archeology, writing books, and filming movies can all help us understand those who did wrong and why, and those who did well, and why.

Playing fantasy games just means you know a lot about orks.

Bunkermeister

The problem they perceived with historical gaming and why it was less popular than Warhammer…"

Ahem. Allow me to use the oft used (incorrectly!) term "begging the question" here. I shall now use it correctly.

They are begging the question that this is a "problem". Nothing could be further than the truth. I DON'T CARE IF WARHAMMER IS MORE POPULAR. Why should anybody care?
GW pontificates about "the Warhammer hobby", as if it exists above and beyond anything else. 🤷 Okay. I'm fine with that.
By their lights, the hobbies have no intersection whatsoever.
They are as close as collecting butterflies and rap music. Fine!

I can't beleive I am saying thi but OFM is right! Why care about an unrelated hobby. Warhammer, Fishing (UK's most popular sport actually), they are both equally as irrelivant to my hobby, so not of the slightest interest or concern.

Oh, don't worry. You'll get over it. 🤷

Learning history is hard. Learning about a fantasy world is easy.

I disagree. To get a basic understanding of what is going on, you need far less materiel for history than you do for most popular (easily accessible) fantasy/scifi milieux. If the fictional property is "live", you have to continually expand and possibly re-learn the fictional one.

Also, I can go to a wide variety of different resources, many free, to get the same basic understanding of history and historical forces. I have limited options for f/sf forces. A Shermam is a Sherman is a Sherman. (Mostly) A laser is not a laser is not a laser.

When you focus on the wargaming aspect, you can even compartmentalize more easily to reduce the effort. If I want to play WWII Eastern Front, I really don't have to learn the Asian theater. Or Africa, North America, South America, Australia, the Middle East … If I want to play Warhammer or 40K, I have to learn all the forces and variants, or not know what I am going to come up against.

While there is a much larger volume of historical material on WWII than lore for 40K, there is also significantly more overlap. The last time I researched the rule books, WH and 40K had signficatly more pages.

You also come to history with much more sound corporate knowledge than you do in f/sf. From real life and growing up, I have a concept of guns. Some of that could be wrong, but rarely is all of it off base. The Warp is something where I start at zero.

These are not empircal, baselined analyses. There's more to it than BA, WH, and 40K. But I think the argument plays pretty well in most parts of the comparison.

My beef with 40k and its like has more to do with how it is increasingly monopolizing the attention of social media, paint manufacturers and retail stores. The palette of most paint lines today are saturated with outlandish colors that are useless for historicals. Painting tutorials and new techniques likewise focus on painting oversized and absurd figures.

First, I will accept that F&SF gaming is "more popular" without a defintion or any actual demonstration that this is true. Even in the face of the fact that we can't identfy "all wargamers", so we can't know what "most wargamers" think, feel, or do. But we'll go with it as a conceit for the sake of argument.

What attracted me to f/sf gaming not the ability to dissociate from the forces (BTW, if you can't dissocate your actions from historical forces, you can't do it for fantasy, either). To me, they looked cooler. A Sherman is a Sherman. And it is practical, so at some level, boring. A scifi tank can be anything, lots of impractical stuff that looks cool.

I think its funny that the video points out that f/sf stuff is harder to paint, but don't point out that at least, there are more options, so more variety. Also, if I work harder for something (and spend more money on it), I tend to value it more.

The variety in look hints at a variety in forces. This can ba another attractive element. With more variety of forces, I can have more variety of tactics, strategy, and style of play. This is an open question, since I don't know, but I would bet there are more variants of just Space Marines than total forces in WWII.

Back to visuals, even where SM play the same, I can paint them up differently. 40K started with, and I believe still has hooks where you can "roll your own".

One last bit. I was "forced" to learn history in school. I was "punished" for reading f/sf books in class. And history was taught very poorly to me in school. I am lousy at rote memorization, that that's what I got the most of in history.

None of this says one is "better" than the other. They are the same activity, and inside the divisions of "historical" and "f/sf" there are more differences than there are across them. It's just some reasons why one person might favor one over the other.

I have seen the person who was "too into" playing a historical force we currently consider "the baddies". I've also seen a person who was "too into" playing a xenophobic, sociopathic, homicidal f/sf force.

What bothers me about the video is that it fits the model of what psychologists colloquially call "lying to yourself" about your actions. "I don't play historicals because I can't associate myself with Fascism, but it's okay to revel in psychopathy when it is fiction."

"Escapism" has both adaptive and maladaptive aspects.

It's not so serious. we're playing games with toy soldiers. been doing it since i'm 5 years old. will continue till i die.

The palette of most paint lines today are saturated with outlandish colors that are useless for historicals.

Again, I must disagree. I am very familiar Contrast Paints. Most of them are very useful for historical gamers like myself.
I had to take someone's word for this (Thanks, Roger!) but Guiliman (so?) Flesh is a perfect Caucasian Flesh paint. It doesn't look it in the bottle, though. It "comes out in the wash", though. 🙄 To a historical gamer, the name is absurd. There's a perfect American Indian Contrast paint whose name I forget, but I have notes. Ditto horse colors, buckskin leather and so on.
The only drawback is the absurd names that mean nothing to me. Oh, and the price.
Luckily, there's a store 5 miles away that is full of 40K crap that permits me to buy these paints.
I have a major project on hand now, painting Comanche, their blood enemies the Apache, Spanish Cuera cavalry, cowboys for Marty Robbins "El Paso", etc.
The 60 Comanche were painted almost exclusively with Contrast. Now that I know what absurd ridiculous named pot to buy, they're fantastic.
GW would do well to clue in historical painters which to use for what. But here's the rub. We are so beneath them, they can't be bothered. Separate hobby. 🤷 I only know by trial and error which to use for what. Hint. Blood Angels Red makes a terrible British Scarlet. And none are good for straps.

The 'GW hobby' is a different animal, in some ways, but it is similar in other ways.

GW: Players need to buy the basic rules, then buy army-specific rule books for their chosen army (rarely do they buy more than one army to play with…).

Historical: Players buy the core rules, and sometimes, they buy army specific subsets of rules, or expansions for particular armies, and/or years within a given conflict. Some (many?) players only buy certain armies, relying upon their friendly opponents to buy the opposing armies.

GW: Players often take a couple of years to paint up their armies, being unwilling to play with unpainted figures.

Historical: Players often take a couple of years to paint up their armies, being unwilling to play with unpainted figures.

GW: Players are very competitive, vying for the best gameplay, and to win if they can.

Historical: Players are very competitive, vying for the best gameplay, and to win if they can. However, this is where the real disconnect occurs: historical gamers often desire the outcome of their games to be the same as the historical past outcome of the real battle fought. There is no such reference point for GW players.

GW: The history of the GW universe is quite lengthy, quite complex, filling multiple "fluff" volumes of books, and players are expected to know it.

Historical: Gamers are expected to be familiar with the historical battles, the forces and equipment involved, along with the leaders, and their qualities (or lack thereof), along with how the battle unfolded in the Real World.

Fantasy games are not always just thrown together on a whim. Some of them have their own histories, which drive the games created and played.

I made up my fantasy game world setting for my FRPG games, in the Summer of 1983. I've been running my games within that same world setting ever since, for multiple groups of players, for the past 41 years. My world setting has a developed history. My players learn it, through game play experiences. I run fantasy mass battles on the tabletop, using my world setting's countries and armies. I use the game results going forward, as my game world's history, so the players/participants are not re-enacting history, they are creating it.

The differences between historical and fantasy games are far less than most people realize. Cheers!

I found the Gulliman Flesh when the local GW store had a display with different contrast paints over different base paints, showing the range of achievable effects. You need a slightly greenish base coat whose name escapes me for the moment (but which I have found a craft paint to replace it).

Sgt Slag Clearly you play with different gamers to me. None of our band play fantasy, just no interest, its not related to real history. We play to understand real world tactics. Neither is "better" but your comparison reasons for History and fantasy do not hold true for our band. To to be honest none of our lot are really interested in the painting side, its all about the real world.

"Real history" depends on the writers, right?
Try to discover "real history" about Alexander the Great, and you have contemporary sources written by his best friend (who being a King, would naturally never lie), someone whose nephew was murdered by Alex, a treatise on table etiquette…..
And some of these were compiled by a Roman general 500 years later, with a philosophical axe to grind.
That's just one example.
We have Julius Caesar whose memoirs are very self serving. We have Romans who disapprove of him. Etc.
Martin Luther!
I only read about the Renaissance Popes by reading the snarky Barbara Tuchman. She does snark well. And how "accurate" is her Guns of August? Not as much of an ideology axe to grind there. Although her father did see the Goeben on its flight.

Had the Germans won World War 2, or even 1, I wonder how the histories would have read.
Try to drag Truth out of the written histories of Vietnam.

History is famously written by the winners, but occasionally the losers get to dissent. But all have … opinions.

Are we back to disagreeing? 😄

Anyway, I have some Cuera Dragoons to assemble, along with a Faro table for the Dew Drop Inn.

Thanks

Armand

I personally could not care less about the name given to a paint color, or if the paint is in (for example) Vallejo's Model Color Range or Game Color Range. To make a buying decision based on the name some marketing wonk bestows on a paint color is simply absurd. If "Goblin Green" is the color I'm looking for to paint regimental facings, then I happily purchase it.

In one of the first fantasy ranges to hit the market – that produced by Polly S (I hate you, Testors), Ogre Dark Brown was simply the best dark brown out there at the time. And then there was Demon Deep Red and Basilisk Green, and Hippogriff Yellow, and….

Ogre Dark Brown!!!!! I loved it.
But the color was clearly visible through the glass bottle.
Not so much with Contrast Paints. All the Browns and Fleshes look alike.

My issue with the name is that it doesn't give a clue to its uses.

They are begging the question that this is a "problem". Nothing could be further than the truth. I DON'T CARE IF WARHAMMER IS MORE POPULAR. Why should anybody care?

I agree entirely.

My issue with the name is that it doesn't give a clue to its uses.

I agree with this comment, too.

Back to normal *gren"

"Real history" depends on the writers, right?

While history is getting better, new finds, new analysis techniques. At least in histoiry we get diffrent sources.

Fantasy you get say, Tolkine, Even in one source you get contradictions and changes. Read Simarilion and LOR. If you mix it you get the Equivalent of mixing Chinese and Anglo Saxon histories. There is no source material other than the aoutjhor, to be fair some fiction is writen by more than one person but its rare and often badly done. Eben Tolkine is silen on how evene vaugely plausible logistics would be achiever with moibile trees, make for faily tedious reading when the implusibility makes it unpalatable for some.

Again Fantasy and Historic players can come from diffrent positions so there is no comonality beteen them.

Do you have any kind of Spell Check? Do you even bother to proof read what you post?
It's "Tolkien".
Do you have any comments on the Thermodynamic Properties of Balrogs? Any comments on magic rings? Palantirs?
Any logical disgust about why Tom Bombadil is immune to the Ring?

Wow was there such data available, I would love to see what his assumptions were?

Logical Disgust, where did that come from? It's fantasy logic is not mandatory so how could I be disgusted with another's mans Fantasy, it may be to ignore logic, its not for me to comment on it. It would be like asking me to comment on Football, pointless, I know nothing of it and care even less about it. The fact that other folk enjoy it is no problem to me.

I would not like to see my gaming lined up as a version of Football as that would be insulting to both side as far as I can see.

By the way I like fantasy, MR TOMPKINS IN WONDERLAND by G GAMOW is superb.

"If there is any subject on which I know absolutely nothing, it is agriculture."
—-Wellington

in the film not in life OFM

I would not like to see my gaming lined up as a version of Football as that would be insulting to both side as far as I can see.

If you know nothing about football, how far can you see?

Same question about fantasy and scifi gaming – if you're not interested in it, upon how much experience do you base your assertion that it is a completely different hobby?

"The Warhammer Hobby" is completely different because GW doesn't admit that we exist. There was a brief period with Warhammer Ancients and similar, but they do not exist anymore. And GW will not even acknowledge past existence. It's very Orwellian. In fact, one could make a valid claim that Orwell had GW in mind. "We have always been at war with East Asia."