Who Cares What Non-Wargamers Think About Wargaming?

Karwansaray Publishing recently dropped a link to a low effort "scientific study" that used data collected by said publisher to reveal some surprising things about wargamers.  Did you know competitive people prefer competition games, and cooperative people prefer collaborative games?  You might have thought this, but thanks to the magic of science and with the gracious permission of our technocratice overlords we now have permission to say so - we now have that all important SOURCE to which  we can link.

So dumb.

Anyway, aside from the "no shit sherlock" portion of the "study", we also have the real impetus for conducting this research:

Read between the lines here and you'll find something a little more pernicious than the usual, "this needs more study, so make sure you hit that FUND button!" conclusion.  There is a strong push underway for the entire hobby to shift its focus from wargamers to non-wargamers, and down that path leads only madness.

Madness.

As usual, the people pushing this new narrative fall into two camps: those who see our robust, healthy, long-lived, fun, and exciting hobby as ripe for conquest, and those who are already in the hobby who stink of a desperate need for approval from outsiders.  So desperate are they for approval from people who want to radically and fundamentally change the hobby that they would burn the village to the ground to prove their worth to these outsiders.

As usual, this strategy - welcoming people who don't wargame to help define what it means to wargame - is being sold as a way to save the hobby.  From what?  Dunno.  We live in a golden age where we are spoiled for choice.  Rules, figures, paints, communities, you name it, we've got more than we can handle already.  It is a fun and exciting time to be a part of this hobby, and it's no wonder more and more people want to be a part of it.  The problem enters in when people who don't participate want to define what it means to participate.

Painting is a part of this hobby, sure.  Collecting is a part of this hobby, sure.  History is a part of this hobby, sure.  Math is a part of this hobby, sure.  Writing is a part of this hobby, sure.  But all of those aspects are buttresses that support the main cathedral of...wait for it...PLAYING THE DAMN GAMES.

You laugh, but people are already asking non-players what the hobby community should do to change the hobby to suit their non-playing desires.  The answer of course is that the hobby should keep on doing what it has always done, and those who don't like it can change themselves or go pound sand.

Because you are a psychopath.

The hobby is fine.  We don't need any johnny-come-latelies and hangers-on to tell us what we should do to cater to their whims.  These locusts will just move on once they've eaten all the seed corn anyway.

Just a warning that too few will heed.  I expect that wargaming will go the way of fantasy books, vidya, comics, TTRPGs, and a host of other hobbies.  The forces arrayed against her are too wealthy, too motivated, and too experienced to be turned back for long.

And you know what?  It's okay.  We built this hobby from nothing once, and we can do it again.  Hell, within the tabletop RPG community the BROSR is actively rebuilding D&D for the second time even as we speak.  (The first was the OSR, which failed to regress hard enough.  This time around we're reclaiming the Gygaxian method of complex games that never turn off.)  All we need to do is protect our tables and our conversations and our local (internet or meat-space) implementation.  We can build our own little redoubts, free from the brain-virus that has infected so much of our culture.  And when Big Mini crumbles, which will take some time but is inevitable, we'll still be here, plugging away in delightful obscurity and thumbing our noses at our would-be conquerors.

Gatekeep your hobbies.  Gatekeep your tables.  

Thanks for the Meme-eries

 Howzabout some light hearted fun using shortcuts to humor?

This one was somebody else's:

But it inspired me to make this:

Because sometimes it really do feel like this:

Hintervale: Gondor Calls for Aid

Will you answer?

In all seriousness, I need your help.  My latest project for The Joy of Wargaming can't go anywhere without you.  Check it out.

Help a brother out.

Let me know what you think the best option is here, would ya?

Lake Sambee Post Mortem

Sometimes the best way to fight...is not to fight at all. 

Today we're talking about some painful lessons learned from a game of 2 x 2 Napoleonics.  It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to get a handle on how to work this ruleset.

In the Battle of Lake Sambee, an overwhelming force of Albans are invading the Tenebran Nation, looking to return the city of Grandepoint to the Alban fold.  Or to return the Grandepoint silver mines to Alban control.  Tomato, tomahto.  

Here's the general run of things.  As you can see, the Albans brought a large force up between the lake in the center a small farm on the north.  The Tenebrans, led by a very skilled general, took command of a large hill whose flanks were secured by heavy woods to the north, and swamps and light woods to the south.  A very defensible position.

Undaunted, the Albans used cannons to secure the farm on their left flank, and tasked a smaller blocking force in the south to secure their right.

Thanks in large part to my n00bishness, the Alban attack failed spectacularly.

The Alban right fell apart so quickly it put pressure on the center to make a move on the hill before they were really prepared.  That main attack had to break off units to reinforce the right, costing them even more momentum.

In retrospect, the Albans should have brought all their artillery - six to the Tenebran two - forward to long range and pounded away at that hill for as many turns as it took to scramble the lines, and then sent in the horses.  They had time, but pushed forward too fast.  Or, since the win conditions relate to the number of stands destroyed, they should have hung back and used everything they could to destroy that Tenebran southern flanking force before turning their attention to the hill.

Or perhaps the Alban artillery should have gone full Grande Battery, set up at 8-inch range, and just pounded that hill into rubble. Turns out a Napoleonic approach to Napoleonic wargames is a winner! Who knew? Part of it is on the nature of things. 

This comes up in later episodes, but is worth a blog post. After determining the terrain, setting up the physical space and the units, and getting everything ready to go...sometimes its obvious the smart play for one general is to refuse battle. The Albans should have backed off and waited a few days to come at the Tenebrans from a position of - if not advantage, at least less of a disadvantage. Particularly so, given that this is part of a much larger campaign where no general can afford to make a 'throw away' attack.

Calling it quits without firing a shot would mean all the set up was for naught!  Like so many generals before me, I had to learn the hard way that a poorly conceived attack is a far larger waste.  And that is a hard lesson learned on my part.

But we're getting there.  Always learning, and always improving, that's part of the Joy of Wargaming.

If you want to watch the whole battle, you can find it here:

Fantasy Campaigning Dun Rite

Using a Reaper Bones wood sprite figure as an evil personification of the deep woods and wilds are inimical to human life?  That's unpossible!

That's what happens in this latest episode of "The Joy of Wargaming" wherein four intrepid heroes wade into the wilds to put paid to a bunch of forces of night.  Including the little bugger shown above.  This is the second in a series of seven games of Nightwatch, a great little solo game that smacks of 'tower defense' style video games.  It works well, and the complexity and challenge really ramp up with each successive game.  Highly recommended.

Not a big fan of Reaper figures - the Bones were cheap, but the ones I got didn't take paint well, are squishy on the table, and the sculpts are mediocre at best.  Phasing those out when my next Alternative Armies shipment arrives, and replacing them with some proper metal alloy beasts. They look better, feel better, and play better.

From Two-Deep to Three

It's not often that I work in 2D painting, but for a special project like this...

A friend asked me to find and paint him up a few Hawaiian Warriors. Always happy to share my love of the hobby - and always happy for an excuse to craft that won't lead to more clutter around the house, I was more than happy to oblige.  He's no wargamer, so instead of building a game that would never be played, I made a shadowbox that can be hung and enjoyed.

A new experience for me, and one I was glad to do.  Learned a lot about his culture, and stretched my legs into a new era of warfare.  Look for a full report on the wargame Tribal, over on the Joy of Wargaming early in May.

 

Not Even Joking

Inspired by a deeply cogent comment left at "The Joy of Wargaming":  Tabletop role playing games, properly played, ARE wargames.

Let me take my troll face off and address your comment with more sincerity.  When RPGs branched out from the wargame hobby, they left a lot of money on the table.  Some solid scholarship is being done today to work back to that fork in the hobby road and see what happens if we take the path less travelled.  I am gearing up to run another solo campaign in this same style, but using a more Classic Gygaxian approach.  Not just the same campaign but with orcs.  We're talking about something much deeper.  An exploration of how Silvestri's work might help us understand how Chainmail can be used not as an addendum to RPGs, but as a foundational framework.

Exciting stuff, but we have to be patient.  Our forefathers left us very few guidestones, and what we have are occluded by years of overgrowth.  It will take some time to clear the vines and get a better look at the road.  

There is a deep and abiding power lurking in those time-shrouded woods.  This is no slight against today's gaming culture, merely a recognition that much of what we think we know about the Time Before just isn't so.  The only way to sort the history from the revisionist history is to go back and walk that ground ourselves.

Feelz Good Man Strikes Again

 If you're still on the fence about it, or haven't given it a chance, The Joy of Wargaming is going like gangbusters.

But don't take my word for it:

We're doing a long-form series detailing a logistical and strategic campaign using the book shown in the picture above.  It's got a lot of surprises and the action kicks off here:

Homesick

 

The Necromancer King Returns

Long time fans of the blog will recall a three-part fantasy campaign played years ago.  That campaign died when my primary opponent graduated and flew off to college and other adventures.  Well the Necromancer King has finally returned from the Land of the Dead, and you can follow along as he launches a Death Crusade against the land of the living.  Yeah, the Joy of Wargaming isn't going anywhere any time soon.



Just between you and me and the YouTube censors make three, I'm recording all these videos a week or so in advance.  That way I can skip a few days and not miss a beat.  You'll get new vids every other day for as long as my stamina holds out.  That also means that I won't be responding in real-time to any real-world goofiness.  You can expect a relatively drama free channel where we leave the fighting where it belongs - on the tabletop.

Say...that reminds me, maybe now is a good time to give Irregular Miniatures game Riot  a second look.  Been meaning to at least read through the rules of that one.

Too soon?

The Joy of Wargaming - The Pilot

The online wargaming world features a dearth of wargaming videos that feature smaller and more quirky fare.  The Youses and he Tubeses and the Twitches have plenty of chubby beard-o weird-o's uploading hours of content dedicated to the 800-pound gorilla games.  Some of those channels are even pretty good, and my personal favorite the 800-pound gorilla of wargaming channels, Guerilla Miniature Games, even dips down into the Osprey ranges often enough to keep me checking in on a regular basis.

To help close that gap in the line, I've started my own channel - a way of giving back to the community from which I have learned so much.  The Joy of Wargaming will feature a host of topics, including play-throughs, rule reviews, unboxings, and my own favorite feature, Painting Alone Together, in which I slap some paint on my figures and throw some observations, tips, and commentaries along the way. 

With plans to post every other day, and a focus on the niche corners of this niche hobby, it is a niche corner in the niche wargaming corner of this niche tabletop hobby.  And of course, we'll still be throwing shots and posts up here at the home office for those of you that are more reader than viewer.  If you're looking for somebody to keep you company during your own painting sessions, give it a shot.