You know what they say... Every kit's an ork kit... Mega train battle wagon/odd speed freek gargant... There is actual room to think about and I love it.
This makes sense when you consider that GW miniatures have started to look more and more like collectable figurines rather than playable models in recent years.
I had this same thought the other day. They don't make minis for gaming anymore, they make minis for pro painters to show off on TH-cam. As a bang average painter, I look upon most of GW's newer sculpts with absolute dread. I don't have the time or talent to paint minis that damned detailed.
@@remusventanus5341 I think a lot of the older sculpts have more charm too, even if they're a bit clunky. Some of the newer minis look like overblown chess pieces with no sense of anima. I want to have fun painting and playing with them. I don't want to feel like I need a magnifying glass and a £500 paintbrush to do up some grunts.
Agreed. I get the impression that GW is trying to stay ahead of 3D printing by making their models so complex. So many sharp points, I should consider donating blood every time I paint. 🙂
Yep, I'm currently 15 armies strong without a single game to my name. Like Dana, I equip my units so they will be legal, should they ever see the table, but I don't expect they will. It's primarily a hobby I use for relaxation purposes. And I totally agree, having a compelling framework by way of a rich background/lore (either setting or faction specific) absolutely does help focus what creative energies I manage to muster on a given hobby project.
yeah I think the word "focus" is exactly correct! I used to do a lot of world building for TTRPG settings, and then never get to run a game! and it feels very similar. Rather than just write a novel or something, I was using that as a creative outlet
I have around 5k points of Night Lords, 3k sisters of battle, 5k night goblins or more, probably 1k night Haunts, the starter dominion set for AOS, and some other random death models. None have seen battle yet even though I really want to play
@@DiscourseMinis I eventually found that writing RPG ideas down in a notepad scratched the world-building itch. Even if I never turned the ideas into a campaign, the material is recorded in some form. Preserved for posterity, or for a game that may yet come. For me, or for whoever inherits it.
yeah, increasingly I've learned that about myself too - I really love the spectacle of gaming! Even if that's just watching some slapchopped warbands facing each other in a small skirmish game. All the prep for the game etc. has grown to steal some of the spotlight from the gaming itself :)
My God, I thought I was part of a small minority. I have nearly 100 ork Boyz and a mix of old and new death guard I painted, thousands of pts of space marines, terrain, misc others. All sit on book shelves, living in fear of my cats and displacing my sword collection. We need a support group.
Part of it I think is a major part of the hobby is having to become an advocate for the game, if more clubs were set up supported by GW there would be some much more off us playing I think
Excellent quotable moment! People who buy GW products are "buying the ghost of a game. They're buying into an aspiration." This is one of the biggest reasons why I've felt uneasy about buying GW, I just never knew how to express it. Thanks Discourse!
I love that Dana voiced over her own comment and participated in person (thru You Tube magik). I'm fortunate to play regularly play wargames... which Warhammer is not part of the menu. Warhammer is fun to think about - find me a person who's played a game and still has the lore and colour scheme of that army they always wanted to build. I'm really lucky I've met mates to regularly meet at a table get some game on. We're playing a lot of the smaller games that can play out of the box, with easy setup, and smaller lists like; Godtear, Aresteia, Defiance, Heavy Gear, and now Marvel Crisis Protocol. Infinity is our big game but it's not getting the same level of love because it's harder to set up, play casually, and less malleable to our respective calendars. Great video - Bravo Zulu
Lets be honest. If someone can play Dawn of War or a Total War Warhammer Fantasy PC game, they can easily get their fix there, similar to someone checking out a live video of a band, going "well that was interesting" and not go see them when they come to town.
"Why ppl dont play warhammer?" Have you played it? It is tireing and shitty. I have maaaaany, way to many boxes of assembled and painted armies (1-5k points) to fantasy and sifi variants. It is difficult to transport them and with how shitty rules are + commiunity going for the throat... It is not worth it. Personally, I am jsut starting to getting into playing after meaby 4 years of nothing, after I got sick of getting stomped in LGS... and I got for coop games like RAngers of the shadowdeep, space station zero. And I still paint new minitaures for those
Covid cocked up being able to meet up. When I started you used to be able to pop down the store and hang out playing a couple of games in the evening. GW used to support the gaming scene but they got away from it.
@@DiscourseMinis And there is were the big army game has it over the skirmish game: grandeur. More fun to dream big. Go back the paleo-wargaming in the 60's. Those guys dreamed about Waterloo and Gettysburg.
@@DiscourseMinis I personally have the weird objective to own every miniature needed to play every scenario, +the armies I fancy. What for? I don't know, maybe my kid will enjoy it IN TEN OR FIFTY YEARS.
Pretty much my experience, same as Dana. I played way back. But hardly played since I returned in 2019. I love the setting and the minis. But the rules are so messy and intimidating (especially the stratagems) My modeling and painting was always my favourite part
@@DiscourseMinis the only times I've played and enjoyed it was going back to 4th edition. (Broke out my old codexs and rules) USR, simpler force organisation and best of all no stratagems. Loved that.
I played 4th to 6th Those weren't too complicated even with comparative weapon-skill, initiative and vehicle rules. The problem is the lack of universal special rules (which used to mean everyone was on the same page) and the stratagems (which is just impossible to remember all of them) And all the extra special rules they've introduced to allow differentiation of units after they ditched weapon-skill and initiative.
Odd, given how all those gamers of old used to take board game counters and use the thick card to mount minis on, even going to the trouble of basing them. It's hard to use a tank the size of one of your finger segments as a conversation piece.
"40K is a so-so wargame". ... It's dreadful, lets be honest. The rules are designed with the primary purpose of selling codexes (codices?) - not providing fun. Hence the endless "re-roll 2's on a three if it's Tuesday" guff, that you only know if you spaffed 50 quid on the latest pamphlet of such trivia. But the minis are awesome and the lore is cool.
For me, the hobby is building and painting them while imagining playing with them. That's why I have a drawer full of 6mm vehicles. All journey, no destination! 🛫
I picked up some of those 1/72 scale minis as well. Man, they're sweet. They look like they'd be great for dungeon crawls and rank 'n flank battles. Another dream to add to the list!
Rules for 40K are shit, play with a real game ruleset like 1PR or something that is actually built to play, not "which army is more op than the other."
This is both wild but also very well could've been my situation now that I think about it. I got back into the hobby in February of this year while in a really locked-down situation. We couldn't really go out or see anyone so I rekindled my love of painting minis since it was something I could by myself. I always hoped I could play a skirmish match or 500 point game with my brother someday, but I mainly just liked the painting. Flash forward to June and we're able to see folks again, and I heard someone across the courtyard at a happy hour say "Warhammer 40k." I homed in, weaseled my way into the conversation and asked if he'd said something about WH40k. Turns out he was a Necron player and had missed playing the game since he moved to the area. We've been throwing Necron and Grey Knights at each other every week ever since. Neither of us had ever played in a store. I wonder if that's part of it. Going into a store to play has always been intimidating to me and cultivating a hobby group outside that context is difficult. We're lucky we just ran into each other. We're trying to break out of this fear of stores though. We went to a 2-man tournament on Saturday, got our butts kicked, but had an awesome experience.
One of my players in one of my many alt-week D&D games had purchased the PHB and read it over and over for four years, building countless characters. They knew the rules far better than I do. Yet, they played for the first time in our group recently. I think finding groups to play in person for any game is really difficult right now. I get asked to run games by friends and even strangers all the time.
Ive seen this. I wore a d&d shirt one day and several filks came up to talk to me. I think something big must have happened on Critical Roll the day before. They all loved d&d, but none had played. My game was full, but i took the names and numbers just in case
Addictive personality and tendencies are hard to get control over. Many industry tactics are geared toward very real and sometimes very dangerous addiction reactions. IMO.
I was doing pretty good at limiting my purchases.... then Nov became a full month of black Friday type sales that snowballed into the new battleboxes in Dec and finally a hugely inflated eBay purchase of all my missing Blackstone Fortress expansions. (That one really hurt the wallet).
This is true with most hobbies. Dungeons and dragons is big for this as well. So many people buy the books, make characters, engage online communities, and indepth backstories. But never actually play real games.
D&D has become so much easier because of the internet, now back in the early 90's it was like pulling teeth trying to get a group. I have some stories of great times and horror as well from answering the old peg board that was up at the gamestores I use to frequent
I had a friend who said he used to read an old monster manual in bed as a kid. I asked if he ever had played, he hadn't. So for 15 years he had wanted to, but never got the "umpf" to ask anyone. So he joined my game.
Most Warhammer fans love the lore and building and painting, thats where labor of love comes in. I think when it comes to playing you nailed the reasons in the poll. I find it difficult to get a game in due to work and when I get a day off to stop by the shop which is normally a saturday my local GW shop is PACKED! I have considered building a war room with a huge table for my wife and I to invite folks over for some sessions at this point.
I have 5000+ points of Dark Angels, 5000+ points of Ultramarines 3000+ points of Necrons, painting up 2000 points of Orks currently, and have 2000 points of Deathguard waiting, going to buy 3 boxes of Christmas knights and the Custodes box to get me to 2000 points with the combat patrol i already have. I have never played a game of Warhammer.
Easily one of your best and most insightful videos. So much of what's in my head when it comes to this hobby, never actually comes to fruition. Like 90% of what I ruminate about will always remain ethereal murmurs in my brain. I do get to play some kind of game with miniatures about once a month and that's mostly because I'm too busy being a dad and keeping my kids from starving. Maybe when I retire the space between my ideas and my actions will shrink...
Back when I started in 2002 I feel like grey plastic was much more prevalent. You would buy, build, play, and then paint when you had time between games. I feel like with the amount of awesome painters out there more people feel the need to have a golden demon army than a weekly game set up
I'm happy to hear that you have Bolt Action models. I hope that some day you get to play the game so you can follow up with a 4 hour video rant about absolute trash the clarity of their rules and FAQ are.
In January of 2020 my house burned down, I lost everything like my mtg and GW collections. It forced me into a minimalist life style, I’m not a collector or a gamer anymore. I’m an artist because nothing can take that from me
Working a 50+ hour work week makes it impossible for me to both make content and then play. I do get some friendly games in with my son when he visits. He decided to get into his Dad's hobby. -John
My first WH40K experience was in 1986, when the Rogue Trader rule book and a few models were literally all we had. I played in WA state for about three years (stationed at Fort Lewis), then took everything to Germany (Fulda) and introduced others to the game and system. It wasn't long before we had both WH40K and WFB games going on every weekend, and sometimes small skirmishes in the evenings when off-duty. I lament the demise of the boxed sets of plastic Space Marines- 40 models for $15-20 bucks? I miss the days of LEAD miniatures that didn't break the bank. Nowadays I feel such nostalgia for the game, but it's so expensive just to get a foot in the door. I'm almost tempted to full-on Old School and break out my (yes, I still have it) Rogue Trader manual. Maybe I'll try OPR a shot, too, and see how that goes. But the end result is that I haven't played a single game since 1992.
I too started with Rogue Trader and moved on to 2nd ed 40k for a few years before life changed and took me in other directions. I'm now re-visiting the world of 40k with my young son and have chosen to play Kill Team. Its smaller in all ways both rules and the amount of models you'll need. You can get a starter box that has minis for two players and some simple terrain. I'm building my own terrain right now as I just can't stomach the idea of giving GW more money for plastic. Prices were high back in my/our day but now its really obscene.
The big appeals of Gundam models for me are the enjoyment of building the kits and having a physical representation of characters and moments from the shows. If I haven't seen that show and have an affinity for the character, I'm not likely to get it.
@@ChrisKCook Airfix didn't have that many media franchises. They did, however, once have gaming rules... I still collect some of their highly obsolete vehicle kits for Chain of Command, though.
@thoughtengine I noticed on that Hornby Docco show that Airfix has started making easy to build WWII fighter planes in the same scale as Flames of War since they till people to just buy those.
@@ChrisKCook All I could find on their site was the Quickbuilds., which are listed as No-scale (and are basically a ridiculously less useful form of LEGO)?
I personally play One Page Rules with Warhammer minis, or Stargrave, Frostgrave, etc. I collect minis and I still like some of their minis but prefer other games. The only GW game I actually like to play is Warcry. You should play Stargrave and Frostgrave though Discourse instead of sitting on those minis because they're super fun!
You are wrong. You treat this as a game with a hobby attached. However, if you hunt down the OGs from Citadel back in the day, you'll find that it has always been a hobby with a game attached. This is why I find it so humorous when you young people get so worked up about what GW is doing with rulebooks. Seriously, go find a copy of Rogue Trader.
You need a bachelors degree just to build an 40k army list and a second one to read the rulebooks. Maybe I am dumb, but I dont like the fact, that I need 2 weeks planning time for a game that is boring and takes two whole evenings. Since I discovered OPR, we play on a regular basis and it's so much more fun. Thanks Discourse for spreading the word! 😁
I am in the same boat. I was a TTRPG guy prior to moving for my job and what little I got in visiting my old group stopped during covid. So I was getting a lot of anxiety and really needed some creative outlet. So I got the Indomitus box for me and my oldest kid. Turned out he was interested more in the idea than really doing it. Then my youngest (5 at the time) really wanted to build and paint. I transferred that TTRPG mindset into this. We have built terrain, made little 500 point armies for a few factions. Each army has everyone named and a story. Never played a game. Now at the age of 7 my kid rather just help make them and create stories than really play. Which I dont hate. I now have a creative outlet that is getting me using my hands more while also bonding with my 3 kids in various ways.
Totally relatable, that is why every game that I can play with my friends were so memorable and I took a lot of pictures while I can, because playing is the least time I spend for my wargaming hobby XD
Theres something super intimidating about going to a LGS and meeting tons of new people and playing with them while your learning the game. I've played like 4 games, 3 with the same person and i still feel super bad cause I feel like im making her work lol.
First off, stop thinking about it that way. If the person played 3 games with you, he or she wants to play with you and doesn`t mind the "work" (It`s no work if you enjoy the situation). He or she is probably a person like me. I was totally introvert unti i started to really play Warhammer 40K 11 years ago. Nowadays i just hop into my favorite LGS and do rules support for new players, helping them with the ropes of an easy start into Warhammer 40K or Infinity. Maybe it was the same for that person and she, like me, just wants to give something back to a community (which can be toxic and miserable but mostly isn`t) which changed her live. Enjoy the time you can play, learn the game under tutelage and once you are ready, decice if you want to start giving back to the wargamer community. For me it changed my life.
Even as someone who frequently plays and organizes Infinity Tournaments....the part of collecting, building, painting and thinking about the game still takes up the most of my hobby time. I think because the last bit is easier to realise in some sense. It is mostly the solo part of the hobby, so you can do it whenever you have some time to spend on. Organizing a game takes another person to schedule playtime. And a venue, either at your home where you have to set up your table, or go to an event or gamestore to play. That all takes some organizing and preparation. You need to be in touch with fellow players or a community. It makes a difference if you have Local Game Store nearby that organizes wargame nights. And even then: My Local gamestore is the only one in the Netherlands that has Infinity minis on the shelf. And its being sold to more people then people that come and play in the shop. Because buying a starter set is one thing....making friends with strangers to play the game is on a whole other level.
Hey Sexy,. You forgot about people who get into WarHammer. Buy and then build and finally get around to Playing and,. One,. find out others are playing competative and not for fun. (The I must win!! attitude. Two,.. that it is really hard finding honest players who,. don't try to twist everything in thier favor. Ever hear of a Necron Tachion Arrow That fires every round? Rule wise the same as a Hunterkiller missle. But then, it's the fact of,... I can't read every Codex and remember everthing for each Army. So yeah,. after time and time again the same thing,.. RULE discussions. If you can't have a decent game you tend to leave the playing aspect alone. I'll add this,. Once a cheater,.always a cheater. they will only be fair when made to and then maybe not becoz, they'd loose face. ( in thier mind).
I used to play when I first got into the hobby. It was fun, but the game itself was only ever really an excuse to meet up at the store on a thursday night and hang out with folk whilst rolling dice. I did, however, discover I loved building and painting cool dudes with swords, and also reading all the silly dudes with swords stories. So when all my friends moved on or gave it up, and then I moved away, it wasn't even really a decision to stop playing. I just kept on building the cool dudes with swords, and realised years later that it'd been years since I last stopped by a GW for anything other than a cheeky pot of paint when I happened to be nearby. In terms of enjoyment, I get about the same amount of fun out of a £40 box than I do out of a similarly priced video game without ever having to touch a d6, and when GW stabbed the Lion right in his heart with his own datasheet when he launched I got to live in blissful ignorance. It's great. I'm not actually opposed to playing a game, I just already get enough from my minis that I don't care enough to.
This was an interesting video as a member of the Gundam crowd who recently picked up a couple of Warhammer minis exclusively because I liked how they looked and wanted something I could spend more time brush painting! Over in the model kit side of the wider 'building, painting, and collecting little guys' genre of hobby we have something of a parallel to those who collect Warhammer minis but don't play: There's a small set of Gundam fans who use their customized model kits for wargaming with either a homebrewed ruleset specifically for Gundam called Build Fight System or using the miniatures-agnostic Gamma Wolves rules.
The art on the package ca. 06:42 looked akin to that used on many Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics module/book covers by Goodman Games. The name of the artist escapes me.
This video hit home. I last played in 1992 after working at GW. When they moved from lead to white metal minis, I found myself in possession of thousands of lead figures. I've recently gotten them out of storage, and had hoped to get some 80's Eldar Corsairs on the board by 10th. Nope. As it happens, the most important bit on inspiration came from a Dana Howl video the other day, in which she taunts me with a paint of the perfect colour that is not yet in stores.
Oh yeah. I have a few painted armies: 6000+ pts of Ultramarines, 2000+ points of Death Guard, Stormcast & Deathrattle for AoS... but the only GW system I've played over the last 4 years was Warcry, which I have 10+ warbands for. This hobby is mostly a solitary one for me, which is fine. Love the meditation aspect of putting together minis and painting them. And when I do play, I only play against 2 or 3 of my close friends.
13:20 Of course they're still a miniatures first company. The miniature line leads the game rules around by the nose. They're cutting everything that doesn't have an explicit kit, and making redundant datasheets for everything that does. I really lost my veterans so they could print four slightly different variations on the Infantry Squad? x_x
I've been painting for about 6 years, I have 4 armies started, five when you include HH. It's around 12k points painted. Multiple terrain pieces etc. Zero games. Painting is the goal, and seeing the uniformity and work is satisfying.
I have a friend while he did play 40K occasionally he must have had at least 10000 pounds worth of warhammer miniatures hidden in his house with the aspiration to Build and one day actually play with most of his models. But in reality even if he quit his full time job he would never have as much time to build all the models he had. I saw him take 6 weeks to paint 1 squad of costodes. He had about 5000 points of them in boxes.
That's called being normal. ^^ It's a similar case for me. I have several painted armies - depending on what you count as "army" maybe as much as 20 armies - but compared to the amount of minis I own these painted armies represent maybe 3 or 4% of my collection. But I really think that's normal for someone who's been in this hobby for decades. In my case since 1999. Let's just say you buy 1.5 armies worth of minis per year. And you're someone who actually paints one army per year. After 23 years that's still 11.5 unfinished armies sitting in your basement...
I'm pretty certain I'm that guy. It's taken me a month to build a single Deathwing Knight. Hopefully I'll have the second on his feet by the end of this week...
Modelers see cool stuff and build it. If there's a game to play with it, so much the better. You may want to consider building some model kits, especially if you have room to display them. You might just like it, and they're cheaper and often better quality than Warhammer. Bandai has ridiculously high quality.
I have a whole basement filled of miniatures from games that I have never played before. From Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, modern naval miniature, micro armor, Halo, Honor Harrington, Dystopian Wars to so much more. In fact I’m really good getting into collecting miniatures games that have been out of print for decades sometimes.
Hey. I just mainly love the lore of 40k. My engagement with Games Workshop are the books published by the Black Library. I do appreciate the fact that the fluff is intended to provide 'reasons' for the scenarios in a board game. 40K to me, is like if someone wrote a story line for the black and white pieces of Chess, and the story was awesome!
The first miniature I painted (back in like 1985-1986) was a "D&D" wizard in a show box full of old lead minies. I knew nothing about primer and sealer etc. lol so of course withing a week the paint had been chipped off the bear metal. I moved on to learn to paint by using the small single page pamphlets from GW without even understanding that it was a game. By 1989 I was in California and I was making dioramas using minies from almost any manufacturer. I had taken a Chaos marine (I had no clue it was a GW mini or what the hell it even was in the setting) and made a diorama with a few of the plastic Halloween spiders chained to it like attack monsters. When the first boxed set of Eldar Harlyquins came out I bought it and painted ALL of them right away. As I was painting someone walked by and said "Oh you play the game too?" I was thoroughly confused. I ask when he was talking about and he told me that people paint all the minies then put them on a table and use them to fight. I was confused but intrigued. Still since nobody showed me the game I just kept on buying and painting things I liked.. It wasn't till second edition that I actually played a game and started hard core collecting Eldar. I played for the next near 20 years. In 2005 I sold everything because I was spending way too much time and money tat should both have been being spent on my three sons that were now going into grade school. I had old models that were hard to find. I had titans and vehicles from Armorcast and Epicast and then later I have huge models from forgeworld. Everything got sold on ebay. The grav tanks I bought for $30 all sold for over $120 since I had customized them all and painted them all and I had won several awards for painting and modeling. So I got into the game from the painting and modeling side way before the playing side. But I did play and went to many tournies and shows etc. I even went to Golden demon when I lived in Maryland for 2 years. Recently I have considered getting back into it since my children are grown now but HOLY crap the prices are no joke!
I am a very casual player. I find my local game store a bit intimidating. I have lost interest in GW games for the most part. I do have OnePageRules Grimdark-future-firefight to fall back on and and building teams for that, but finding players is hard. Atlanta has a shit gaming scene and can be pretty toxic.
I started playing warhammer in high school because of my friends and I'm the only one who still collects and paints. I have more minis than ever before, participate in kickstarters, buy other tabletop miniature games, wargames or not, and I really enjoy the hobby aspect of painting, customizing and having some relaxing time to myself, but I hate to admit that I haven't played a single game of warhammer/kill team/warcry/underworlds... in over a decade. I would love to, but none of my friends are up to it and I don't really find myself attracted to the idea of playing a game I don't know how to play very well with strangers.
possibly the key to playing is to collect enough for more than one person to play, and have a willingness to talk people through their first game, using your miniatures, that being said, I haven't played or collected since honestly 2013 ish, honestly watching your channel has got me back into thinking about it, more likely to get into a little skirmish game, maybe Infinity, certainly not anything GW, but right now I'm too rural to find a game, and playing would 100% be the point for me, I was never very good at painting the miniatures. I have the same problem a lot of people have with minis but with books, there are books on my shelves that I plan to read someday, they've been there since 2015 or whatever, people tell me book reading and book collecting are different hobbies I do know someone into Gunpla, for them I think it's that they are a big fan of Gundam, which is what all the models are based on, but also the assembly is fun
I'm sitting on 12 armies, (Iron Hands, Admech, Necrons, Freebootaz Orks, Death Guard, Night Lords, Krieg, Iyanden/corsairs, Thousand Sons, Grey Knights, Imperial Knights, and a tiny Nurgle Deamon force.) around 3800-8000 points each, I've played 4 games this year, one of which was actually Necromunda. I've had to have my hand slapped to keep from buying myself a Tyranid force this month... twice. I don't let my mini's collect dust though. After spending so much work at painting and modeling, I tend to keep them in plastic bags and place them in organized containers before putting them on my bookshelves. I once left a repulsion on a shelf for a year after 9th ed came out and they became garbage. It took forever to remove the dust. Now I don't do that anymore. Yeah. Totally feeling some vibes.
I started the miniature and scale modeling hobby in 1987 being 7yro, painting, building, kitbashing, etc. more than I played. in all the decades I played approx. 25 times. the reason I don't play is, when I participated in tournaments, the majority of players fielded power game lists and it makes no fun to play against the same list fifteen times in a row... right now, I enjoy the build&paint part of the hobby more than playing. especially with a rule system, that needs a serious overhaul.
A little while ago, I accepted that the models I bought and painted may never be used in a game. And that this wasn't a bad thing. I could have fun collecting and painting. Filling a display case with finished models, for the sense of accomplishment it brings. But I can't really deny that, even now, I still hope to play someday. Realistically it would be One Page Rules, because it's just an easier and more fun game. Yet I also make sure to buy and assemble models with the chance of using them for Warhammer. I agonized a bit over basing my "Bestigors" (Frostgrave Gnolls with two-handed weapons) on 25mm bases, despite Warhammer Bestigors using 32mm. Before I realized "you're only going to use this for Age of Fantasy, the base size doesn't matter". The possibility that I _might_ need to have the "proper" base size to play the "real" wargame gave me psychological discomfort. It was only in realizing it was irrational that I proceeded with 25mm. (I'm also likely to use the gnolls in D&D, so having them on "Medium" sized bases is important). There are many armies I like the _idea_ of collecting and running in a game. Because I like the aesthetic, or because I could get them relatively cheaply through a third party proxy, or simply because I invented an intriguing narrative. But in truth, how many of these will I ever use? Do I need to build a whole Iron Hands successor chapter that uses the Keys of Hel to resurrect fallen warriors as crazed cyborg zombies (the "Phantom Pains" chapter, I call them)? Or would making a Kill Team satisfy this urge? Wouldn't making a skirmish warband not be more efficient, not to mention cost effective? Not to mention I paint slowly, in fits and starts, and have so many other hobbies to occupy my time. I have so many scratch building terrain projects I've meant to start, that I never got around to. All while the raw materials take up space in my house. So much plastic junk and beads and foam blocks and toys. The _idea_ inspires me, though it takes so long to manifest I get distracted by the next cool idea before I can actualize it. Honestly, this is another way in which GW takes advantage of the neurodivergant. Creating a fictional universe, a game, and a model range to go along with them. So complicated and deep, certain hobbyists can't hope but be sucked into a special interest _black hole._ The company is right there, ready to rake in the dough for the hopeless fanatics they've fostered.
Most of my 40k experience is collection and painting. I *would* play, but my schedule doesn't allow much time to set aside half a day to meet up with friends, at a place/shop with a table big enough to play 40k on. I think the most I've ever gotten was 2 game days in a month. Usually it is 1, but now with the holiday season, it's less than that.
I used to have a bedroom full of various GW armies, tens of thousands of points worth for different factions. I'd collected them over 3 years and never played a game. I just loved painting! 30 years later, I've just bought a "start collecting" set, just to see if I can remember how to paint them. If I can, this time I'll actually play too!
I buy, print and paint minis with games in mind, but wrangling a game out of my friends is so difficult with our rarely aligning schedules and the trouble of getting people and tables together in the same place at the same time. It’s something that bothers me a lot and I don’t have a clear way of changing it. I have a whole Gaslands setup I spent hours making from scratch and willingness friends, but I’m yet to get a full game out of them.
The joy of having a good gaming Club available. Truly helps with the not getting a chance to play any games. But the choice of gaming systems sometimes is still heavily prescribed. Out of the people in my gaming Club almost all have 40K, age of Sigmar, Warhammer fantasy battles, or any of the Skirmish level games by Games Workshop, but none of them get played on a regular basis. Other gaming systems are much easier to find games in including five parsecs, BattleTech, and oddly enough both Reign in hell and one page rules. A s*** ton of historicals are also played. We are a fairly large group but our demographics tend to be on the older side. At every gaming session or meeting there is a lot of talk about Games Workshop products some extremely negative some extremely positive, but no one plays their games.
I'm an anomaly. I've been part of or run multi-week Mordheim and Necromunda campaigns, a Blood Bowl League, games of 40k starting from 3rd edition until now (save for 9th edition, due to the pandemic) Epic Armageddon, Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition with 2 different armies, Age of Sigmar 1st and 2nd edition, Warmachine Mk.III, Battletech Alpha Strike, and Dystopian Wars. Mind that this has been since 2003, so I've had a fair amount of time until recently, lol. Unfortunately that did mean I was playing with grey plastic a lot of the time, as I still have a fair amount of unpainted stuff, but that is something I'm attempting to remedy now. It is so sad how many people get into the hobby and never actually get to enjoy the games though. It's a surprisingly common thing.
I have been painting 40k since 2019. Never played, and never had any actual plans to play. But I do paint my army as if I will play in the future. I just enjoy painting my models
Right now I am basically just painting, but that’s mainly because I moved away from access to other players, and will maybe travel to the last remaining mate in my old gaming group every 6 months or so to play. So my strategy going forward is smaller model count skirmish games, so I can build them around a “boardgame” strategy in order to have casual games with non-gaming friends and have a taste of different flavours of warbands or even a few different games without getting bogged down in massive army projects.
For me, the most fun I would have in the hobby is building the units and terrain. I could spend a week building and converting a unit to how I want it to look.
Well, I didn't play since 2018, but there was no day I didn't open Battlescribe to make some new list or paint (or tried to paint) some miniature I got hyped for. I ended with dozens of unfinished projects (700pts of Dark Eldar among them), a pile of shame filling one of the closets to its ceiling and an urge to write my own ruleset that won't require me to spend 400 pounds on the minimal amount of plastic to play.
I found myself (unintentionally) in a position of Hobby over game with Kill Team. Counting those from the KT boxes, kitbashed and compendium teams from my existing stock of models, my teams are in the double digits, and I’ve only played one cut down demo game at a gee dubs, and that wasn’t even with my models. If my uni friends EVER get their acts together though, I am actively trying to change that and simultaneously justify the silly number of teams I’ve collected already (not to mention I will end up with more.) by organizing a campaign where i lend oit my teams to my friends. The hope being in the new year that we’ll finally have some intersecting free time!
Living in Brazil, where just a few of my friends know what Warhammer actually is, and GW prices are borderline a bankruptcy risk, I mostly 3D print my minis and paint them for shell decoration. Occasionally I play some One Page Rules games with the wife, but that’s it.
I used to play in local and semi-local tournaments almost monthly, then I moved from the United States to Italy for work. I managed to lug with me three complete armies with two more in the works. I then proceeded to pick up and finish a sixth army of 40k and am now diving into Heresy. (It probably counts against me that I've picked up a few Kill Team boxes just for the minis and terrain rather than for KT)
In our local area we got like 10 SW Legion and ca 50 40k players enlisted. Every week there are 3 tables playing Legion and every second week 1 Warhammer table. Its a phenomen.
While I love listening to Warhammer lore and do collect some of the minis, what's amusing to me is not collecting single armies, but little bits and pieces of other armies to make a fleshed out cohesive one.
Always found it amusing how every official gaming tournament has a required painting component, which often affects the outcome of the contests, but somehow, we have lots of miniature painting competitions that don't require even a single to-hit roll. We know who's really paying GW employee salaries...
to restore your faith in Humanity, I started playing Warhammer 40k in 1993 with Space wolves, I have played with every model in that army, I then jumped in to Fantasy with Chaos and as the years went by and they got split into 3 armies (Beastmen, Chaos Warriors, Daemons) through out the editions I played with every model multiple times. I then Played Flames of war collecting French, Brits, Americans, Germans and Hungarians and have played games with all of them, I own a Metal Cawdor gang as well, that I have not played in years but have done so in the past. I have 4 factions in Malifaux and rotate through them yearly. I recently jumped into Kill team for a league and Chaos Knights for a campaign. I am currently finishing up EC for HH and have already played several games,. So there are some of us out there.. and on top of it everything is painted ... So I get it I might be a Unicorn
In Germany we say "Vorfreude ist die beste Freude" Anticipation is the best form of joy. I totally agree. Buying a new box triggers me like crazy. Thinking about building the,, painting them, build a list and play with them. The anticipation alone sparks enough joy to justify the cost of the box so most of them actually stay in the box for years bc you have so much else going on.
My GM for D&D since the OGL scandal has played less games. He has been enthralled by building and painting stuff. He has made 3 castles one of which is 11ft long by 8ft wide and it's verticality is still being worked on. He has a huge house so he has room for it. I went to his house a week ago and there are more shelves and it's wall to wall minis that are in the process of being painted or have finished. He has started selling them as well. I think it's easy to get pulled into the art of it all. Which is something that I have found myself also being sucked into. When it came to our Cyberpunk game we all made MINI'S and I haven't stopped. I have been tinkering quite a bit on several models and parts for our games.
My friend hasn't played since we played back in 1987. He is now currently selling all of his miniatures. On another note, I've switched to playing my games via the pc. It is easier for me to just sit down whem I can and play a game with someone else online or just a solo game that I can play at my leisure against the computer. I think in a way this is sad because we are missing out on being together in a social setting.
Building and painting an army seems like the biggest time sink/obstacle in getting to play a game of Warhammer and have fun until you go through the process of putting together an army list, creating/collecting terrain, and the biggest obstacle of all: learning/keeping up with all of the rules. If my group hasn't played in a while, we spend more time setting up and looking up rules than actually enjoying playing. There is far too much rules bloat in both 40k and AoS with no single official source of truth for what the current rules actually are. By myself, I have 5 40k armies, each well in excess of the 2000 points I would need. And then with AoS, I have one army right around 2000 points, and then like 6000 points of another because I love the models. I thought I enjoyed playing.... after all, I used to enjoy it with friends back in 3rd and 4th edition before I stopped playing. When I came back with 8th and now in 9th edition, and brought some family members with me, it just wasn't fun. It's not the people - we can have fun doing nothing, it's almost like the game is just anti-fun. So we tried AoS and 2nd edition was almost as bad, and then 3rd edition happened, which seemed to be an improved experience, but the special rules have continued to grow and grow. We weren't enjoying the games. And then there's the painting - we all enjoyed painting until it seemed more like a job than a hobby, and then even that wasn't fun anymore. You hit the nail on the head, Discourse, Warhammer is more fun to think about than actually engage with in any meaningful way, and the dopamine hit from buying new models and the excitement of what you can do with those new models is the best part of the whole game. This isn't wargaming. Other companies make wargames that are actually fun and engaging games. Games workshop/Warhammer is just a very efficient mechanism to separate you from your money.
I know quite a few painters who want to play, but get overwhelmed by some of the players at the local shop... sadly, some dudes don't know how to interact with portions of the community without getting intense as hell! Still, it's a lot better than it was a couple of decades ago. I'm still happy to see so many people getting into the hobby, no matter what part of the hobby they're getting in to.
This is absolutely wild to me. I don't know that I'd be a wargaming hobbyist if I didn't play consistently. I like painting and building models but ultimately getting them painted for my weekend games is the primary driving force behind getting them done.
I love painting Warhammer minis. I might one day play the game too. It’s super relaxing and I spend 25 hours a week painting and prepping models. I play some of the videogames here and there. Watch a tonne of lore videos and even read some books. I also paint whatever faction I feel like doing next but the most I have is 40k Orks and Deathguard. Will probably have nearly 2000 pts in each soon.
Bolt Action player here and we have built a pretty decent sized community where we play. We have a couple of local shops, each one specializing in a different big game with some overlap. We have a bunch of 40k players of course and it really has helped build up tabletop gaming. I do see in my game, Bold Action, many collectors (players), that have many armies without ever playing a single game. It seems like it has a lot to do with community and not having a place to play and learn, but some are just hobbyists and like the minis and the building out of different armies and to collect all the things.
Those strange minis you own are not from the 70s. They are relatively recent (for 1/72 scale anyway, which moves way slower than 28mm) by an Ukrainian brand who goes by Red Box or Dark Alliance. The Dark Alliance range is pretty great (again, for 1/72 standards) and its fantasy version has both LotR ripoffs and conan and medieval inspired stuff. Its *scifi* range is pretty interesting: Stalkers, Zombies, Survivors and Rednecks; about the only brand where you can get these in 1/72. The Stalker boxes are like Zona-Alfa-in-a-box! Finally, I heard from some random internet dude that the single sculptor of Red Box/Dark Alliance has been conscripted in the Ukrainian military, so I don't even know if he's still alive :(
I played 40k fairly regularly from about 2004 until sometime in 2017, and I still want to play. I even have severely up-to-date armies. What got to me was how much I was getting rule lawyered. Know, with Ninth Edition, I need to figure out where to start; there are too many books to keep up with. I miss the days I could show up with my army list and core codex and be good to go.
I honestly enjoy painting and building way more than playing. I do love my TT ready and speed painted Death Guard. I’ve played 10 games and have 2 armies 1500 of Custodes and 4K off DG.
Funny thing about gunpla there have been several attempts by fans to make a set of tabletop rules for them, I don't know if any were ever finished though, and obviously they never caught on.
I find this to be a very interesting topic, because I actually started buying Warhammer models very recently with no intent to ever play the game. I did look into it, but it didn't seem like something I'd enjoy. I like painting minis though, so I started doing that because I find the sculpts to be very cool. Also I do not enjoy painting busts or larger models like gunpla nearly as much. It has to be tiny. Just a bunch of little guys. Love painting them
The one game i do get to play semi-regular is Test of Honour, the historical samurai skirmish game. Setup and teardown is super fast, making it easier to get a game going.
We had that discussion in the comment section some time ago, it was something like that (enjoyment): books/lore>collecting>paint>talk hobby>play games>cleaning mould lines
I LOVE planning army projects and thinking about playing the game, painting, wanting more but I don’t know a single person who plays games younger than 40 except d&d people who want my minis for their game but will never paint any of their own.
Yeah. I'm the same. I do get more joy out of painting the minis than the prospect of playing the game since, well, it's complicated and hard to understand and requires a lot of time investment just for a single game. Not to mention having to go somewhere else to play, trying to convince friends to play, etc. With a normal board game all the pieces are already in the box, only one person has to own it, you can play in your own home, and it'll only take an hour or two. With Warhammer not only do you have to individually collect all the minis, you have to build them, paint them, pack them up, head down to a game store with terrain and tables that may not even be conveniently near you, then patiently wait for some other stranger to do the SAME THING.
I painted my first Warhammer miniatures in 1986. 2 skaven. I had the first space marine model as well as the first plastic, marines, orks, and guard. I had a 30 year hiatus but started back in 2018. In have still not played a single game. I want to but lack opportunities
Would be cool if a study was done to see common threads between these similar stories--early childhood issues, poverty issues, loneliness issues. I bet there is a link.
I returned to painting minis during lockdown and have painted around 2000 points of Tau, Marines and Necrons and I'm now painting Leagues of Votann. I've not played a game since the Rogue Trader days, I'd like to, but 40k these days is a much more daunting prospect than in those simpler times.
This is much like my board game collection. There are a good number that are still in shrink wrap and may never even get opened. I have about a hundred which isn't a huge collection relative to others within the hobby but more are on the way from Kickstarter and I honestly don't know if some will ever hit the table
Its even sadder how few model train hobbyists have ever had a proper train fight on their tables
competitive train modelling, I love it
The game hasn't been the same since they nerfed the Mallard
Big Eyes Small Mouth has a decent system for trains vs trains if you classify them as Mecha.
You know what they say... Every kit's an ork kit... Mega train battle wagon/odd speed freek gargant... There is actual room to think about and I love it.
Thomas the tank engine vs the eurostar lets go 😂
This makes sense when you consider that GW miniatures have started to look more and more like collectable figurines rather than playable models in recent years.
yeah, totally agree, I'm really not liking the change...
I had this same thought the other day. They don't make minis for gaming anymore, they make minis for pro painters to show off on TH-cam. As a bang average painter, I look upon most of GW's newer sculpts with absolute dread. I don't have the time or talent to paint minis that damned detailed.
I thought this was just me! I'm really starting to prefer older sculpts because they make better game pieces.
@@remusventanus5341 I think a lot of the older sculpts have more charm too, even if they're a bit clunky. Some of the newer minis look like overblown chess pieces with no sense of anima. I want to have fun painting and playing with them. I don't want to feel like I need a magnifying glass and a £500 paintbrush to do up some grunts.
Agreed. I get the impression that GW is trying to stay ahead of 3D printing by making their models so complex. So many sharp points, I should consider donating blood every time I paint. 🙂
Yep, I'm currently 15 armies strong without a single game to my name. Like Dana, I equip my units so they will be legal, should they ever see the table, but I don't expect they will. It's primarily a hobby I use for relaxation purposes. And I totally agree, having a compelling framework by way of a rich background/lore (either setting or faction specific) absolutely does help focus what creative energies I manage to muster on a given hobby project.
yeah I think the word "focus" is exactly correct! I used to do a lot of world building for TTRPG settings, and then never get to run a game! and it feels very similar. Rather than just write a novel or something, I was using that as a creative outlet
Until the next Codex...
How many points of these armies?
I have around 5k points of Night Lords, 3k sisters of battle, 5k night goblins or more, probably 1k night Haunts, the starter dominion set for AOS, and some other random death models. None have seen battle yet even though I really want to play
@@DiscourseMinis I eventually found that writing RPG ideas down in a notepad scratched the world-building itch. Even if I never turned the ideas into a campaign, the material is recorded in some form. Preserved for posterity, or for a game that may yet come. For me, or for whoever inherits it.
Wargaming has always just been a pretense for me to get down at table level and stare at the minis and terrain
yeah, increasingly I've learned that about myself too - I really love the spectacle of gaming! Even if that's just watching some slapchopped warbands facing each other in a small skirmish game. All the prep for the game etc. has grown to steal some of the spotlight from the gaming itself :)
My God, I thought I was part of a small minority. I have nearly 100 ork Boyz and a mix of old and new death guard I painted, thousands of pts of space marines, terrain, misc others. All sit on book shelves, living in fear of my cats and displacing my sword collection. We need a support group.
Part of it I think is a major part of the hobby is having to become an advocate for the game, if more clubs were set up supported by GW there would be some much more off us playing I think
I really like the idea of an escalation league, wish those were more heavily encouraged/promoted.
Excellent quotable moment! People who buy GW products are "buying the ghost of a game. They're buying into an aspiration." This is one of the biggest reasons why I've felt uneasy about buying GW, I just never knew how to express it. Thanks Discourse!
I love that Dana voiced over her own comment and participated in person (thru You Tube magik). I'm fortunate to play regularly play wargames... which Warhammer is not part of the menu. Warhammer is fun to think about - find me a person who's played a game and still has the lore and colour scheme of that army they always wanted to build.
I'm really lucky I've met mates to regularly meet at a table get some game on. We're playing a lot of the smaller games that can play out of the box, with easy setup, and smaller lists like; Godtear, Aresteia, Defiance, Heavy Gear, and now Marvel Crisis Protocol. Infinity is our big game but it's not getting the same level of love because it's harder to set up, play casually, and less malleable to our respective calendars.
Great video - Bravo Zulu
@@zogwort1522 him/her; Howl is a great part of the hobby community.
@@zogwort1522 ok matey, you just keep watching and commenting on discourse, fucking lol.
Lets be honest. If someone can play Dawn of War or a Total War Warhammer Fantasy PC game, they can easily get their fix there, similar to someone checking out a live video of a band, going "well that was interesting" and not go see them when they come to town.
Heavy Gear- my beloved
@@willdunn8846can't be both chief
"Why ppl dont play warhammer?"
Have you played it? It is tireing and shitty.
I have maaaaany, way to many boxes of assembled and painted armies (1-5k points) to fantasy and sifi variants.
It is difficult to transport them and with how shitty rules are + commiunity going for the throat... It is not worth it.
Personally, I am jsut starting to getting into playing after meaby 4 years of nothing, after I got sick of getting stomped in LGS... and I got for coop games like RAngers of the shadowdeep, space station zero. And I still paint new minitaures for those
Dana Howl is one of my favorite TH-camrs. Glad to see she's "out there" in the community.
yup Dana is a doll
@@DiscourseMinis what if you 2 got together and played a Warhammer?
@@fenixmeaney6170 Bit of an Atlantic Ocean in the way.
@@willdunn8846 The Atlantic Ocean isn't too big, it's certainly not Titanic...
@@DiscourseMinisis Dana trans?
Covid cocked up being able to meet up. When I started you used to be able to pop down the store and hang out playing a couple of games in the evening. GW used to support the gaming scene but they got away from it.
Daydreaming might be the secret most popular aspect of wargaming.
100% i engage in it so much lol
@@DiscourseMinis And there is were the big army game has it over the skirmish game: grandeur. More fun to dream big. Go back the paleo-wargaming in the 60's. Those guys dreamed about Waterloo and Gettysburg.
Same. 1.6k LOTR miniatures. Two 500 pts armies ready. No games yet.
I feel like larger scale wargames can be hard to get on the table. I always found Battle Companies way easier to get playing!
@@DiscourseMinis I personally have the weird objective to own every miniature needed to play every scenario, +the armies I fancy. What for? I don't know, maybe my kid will enjoy it IN TEN OR FIFTY YEARS.
Pretty much my experience, same as Dana. I played way back. But hardly played since I returned in 2019.
I love the setting and the minis. But the rules are so messy and intimidating (especially the stratagems)
My modeling and painting was always my favourite part
yeah, I think the games are really intimidating these days just with the amount of STUFF! It's why OnePageRules is doing so well now!
@@DiscourseMinis the only times I've played and enjoyed it was going back to 4th edition. (Broke out my old codexs and rules)
USR, simpler force organisation and best of all no stratagems.
Loved that.
Agree with trying OnePageRules, much less intimidating.
I played 4th to 6th
Those weren't too complicated even with comparative weapon-skill, initiative and vehicle rules.
The problem is the lack of universal special rules (which used to mean everyone was on the same page) and the stratagems (which is just impossible to remember all of them)
And all the extra special rules they've introduced to allow differentiation of units after they ditched weapon-skill and initiative.
Play a simple version with no strategems…or try one page rules Grimdark Fantasy
Last 2 years there is an epidemy going on... Playing less or nothing should be excused^^
I've said it before, I'll say it again. A miniature is not for playing warhammer. It's an expensive conversation piece or interactive desk decoration.
i think that is honestly the thinking behind a lot of them. The game is an excuse :)
@@DiscourseMinis Worst of all, the company is called Games Workshop.
Heresy! Games Like HeroQuest would never have gained it's appeal without the models for example
Odd, given how all those gamers of old used to take board game counters and use the thick card to mount minis on, even going to the trouble of basing them. It's hard to use a tank the size of one of your finger segments as a conversation piece.
"40K is a so-so wargame".
...
It's dreadful, lets be honest.
The rules are designed with the primary purpose of selling codexes (codices?) - not providing fun.
Hence the endless "re-roll 2's on a three if it's Tuesday" guff, that you only know if you spaffed 50 quid on the latest pamphlet of such trivia.
But the minis are awesome and the lore is cool.
For me, the hobby is building and painting them while imagining playing with them. That's why I have a drawer full of 6mm vehicles. All journey, no destination! 🛫
like a dog chasing a car!
I picked up some of those 1/72 scale minis as well. Man, they're sweet. They look like they'd be great for dungeon crawls and rank 'n flank battles. Another dream to add to the list!
@Ax Anax is that 54mm/Inquisitor scale or bigger?
@@ChrisKCook smaller, 20mm scale
@Ax Anax ah so hard to keep the scales straight in your head. Ratio, mm and model train scale are all different ways to decribe it.
Rules for 40K are shit, play with a real game ruleset like 1PR or something that is actually built to play, not "which army is more op than the other."
This is both wild but also very well could've been my situation now that I think about it. I got back into the hobby in February of this year while in a really locked-down situation. We couldn't really go out or see anyone so I rekindled my love of painting minis since it was something I could by myself. I always hoped I could play a skirmish match or 500 point game with my brother someday, but I mainly just liked the painting.
Flash forward to June and we're able to see folks again, and I heard someone across the courtyard at a happy hour say "Warhammer 40k." I homed in, weaseled my way into the conversation and asked if he'd said something about WH40k. Turns out he was a Necron player and had missed playing the game since he moved to the area. We've been throwing Necron and Grey Knights at each other every week ever since.
Neither of us had ever played in a store. I wonder if that's part of it. Going into a store to play has always been intimidating to me and cultivating a hobby group outside that context is difficult. We're lucky we just ran into each other. We're trying to break out of this fear of stores though. We went to a 2-man tournament on Saturday, got our butts kicked, but had an awesome experience.
I think the rules bloat is the number 1 reason I haven't played yet, nobody wants to look like a fool and remembering all of those rules is impossible
One of my players in one of my many alt-week D&D games had purchased the PHB and read it over and over for four years, building countless characters. They knew the rules far better than I do. Yet, they played for the first time in our group recently. I think finding groups to play in person for any game is really difficult right now. I get asked to run games by friends and even strangers all the time.
Ive seen this. I wore a d&d shirt one day and several filks came up to talk to me. I think something big must have happened on Critical Roll the day before. They all loved d&d, but none had played. My game was full, but i took the names and numbers just in case
Addictive personality and tendencies are hard to get control over. Many industry tactics are geared toward very real and sometimes very dangerous addiction reactions. IMO.
totally agreed
Totally agree. It's why I stopped playing MTG
I was doing pretty good at limiting my purchases.... then Nov became a full month of black Friday type sales that snowballed into the new battleboxes in Dec and finally a hugely inflated eBay purchase of all my missing Blackstone Fortress expansions. (That one really hurt the wallet).
This is true with most hobbies. Dungeons and dragons is big for this as well. So many people buy the books, make characters, engage online communities, and indepth backstories. But never actually play real games.
Sports. I bet most people that follow/obsess/attend/talk/buy merch/fantasy leagues don't actually play
D&D has become so much easier because of the internet, now back in the early 90's it was like pulling teeth trying to get a group. I have some stories of great times and horror as well from answering the old peg board that was up at the gamestores I use to frequent
I had a friend who said he used to read an old monster manual in bed as a kid. I asked if he ever had played, he hadn't. So for 15 years he had wanted to, but never got the "umpf" to ask anyone. So he joined my game.
Most Warhammer fans love the lore and building and painting, thats where labor of love comes in. I think when it comes to playing you nailed the reasons in the poll. I find it difficult to get a game in due to work and when I get a day off to stop by the shop which is normally a saturday my local GW shop is PACKED! I have considered building a war room with a huge table for my wife and I to invite folks over for some sessions at this point.
I have 5000+ points of Dark Angels, 5000+ points of Ultramarines 3000+ points of Necrons, painting up 2000 points of Orks currently, and have 2000 points of Deathguard waiting, going to buy 3 boxes of Christmas knights and the Custodes box to get me to 2000 points with the combat patrol i already have. I have never played a game of Warhammer.
Easily one of your best and most insightful videos.
So much of what's in my head when it comes to this hobby, never actually comes to fruition.
Like 90% of what I ruminate about will always remain ethereal murmurs in my brain.
I do get to play some kind of game with miniatures about once a month and that's mostly because I'm too busy being a dad and keeping my kids from starving.
Maybe when I retire the space between my ideas and my actions will shrink...
Back when I started in 2002 I feel like grey plastic was much more prevalent. You would buy, build, play, and then paint when you had time between games. I feel like with the amount of awesome painters out there more people feel the need to have a golden demon army than a weekly game set up
I'm happy to hear that you have Bolt Action models. I hope that some day you get to play the game so you can follow up with a 4 hour video rant about absolute trash the clarity of their rules and FAQ are.
i am PREPARED!
In January of 2020 my house burned down, I lost everything like my mtg and GW collections. It forced me into a minimalist life style, I’m not a collector or a gamer anymore. I’m an artist because nothing can take that from me
Ouch
Working a 50+ hour work week makes it impossible for me to both make content and then play. I do get some friendly games in with my son when he visits. He decided to get into his Dad's hobby.
-John
My first WH40K experience was in 1986, when the Rogue Trader rule book and a few models were literally all we had. I played in WA state for about three years (stationed at Fort Lewis), then took everything to Germany (Fulda) and introduced others to the game and system. It wasn't long before we had both WH40K and WFB games going on every weekend, and sometimes small skirmishes in the evenings when off-duty. I lament the demise of the boxed sets of plastic Space Marines- 40 models for $15-20 bucks? I miss the days of LEAD miniatures that didn't break the bank. Nowadays I feel such nostalgia for the game, but it's so expensive just to get a foot in the door. I'm almost tempted to full-on Old School and break out my (yes, I still have it) Rogue Trader manual. Maybe I'll try OPR a shot, too, and see how that goes. But the end result is that I haven't played a single game since 1992.
I too started with Rogue Trader and moved on to 2nd ed 40k for a few years before life changed and took me in other directions. I'm now re-visiting the world of 40k with my young son and have chosen to play Kill Team. Its smaller in all ways both rules and the amount of models you'll need. You can get a starter box that has minis for two players and some simple terrain. I'm building my own terrain right now as I just can't stomach the idea of giving GW more money for plastic. Prices were high back in my/our day but now its really obscene.
The big appeals of Gundam models for me are the enjoyment of building the kits and having a physical representation of characters and moments from the shows. If I haven't seen that show and have an affinity for the character, I'm not likely to get it.
Its like all those Airfix models.
@@ChrisKCook Airfix didn't have that many media franchises. They did, however, once have gaming rules... I still collect some of their highly obsolete vehicle kits for Chain of Command, though.
@thoughtengine I noticed on that Hornby Docco show that Airfix has started making easy to build WWII fighter planes in the same scale as Flames of War since they till people to just buy those.
@@ChrisKCook All I could find on their site was the Quickbuilds., which are listed as No-scale (and are basically a ridiculously less useful form of LEGO)?
I personally play One Page Rules with Warhammer minis, or Stargrave, Frostgrave, etc. I collect minis and I still like some of their minis but prefer other games. The only GW game I actually like to play is Warcry. You should play Stargrave and Frostgrave though Discourse instead of sitting on those minis because they're super fun!
My two heartthrobs of the TH-cam land in one video it's almost too good to be true
+1
You are wrong. You treat this as a game with a hobby attached. However, if you hunt down the OGs from Citadel back in the day, you'll find that it has always been a hobby with a game attached.
This is why I find it so humorous when you young people get so worked up about what GW is doing with rulebooks. Seriously, go find a copy of Rogue Trader.
You need a bachelors degree just to build an 40k army list and a second one to read the rulebooks. Maybe I am dumb, but I dont like the fact, that I need 2 weeks planning time for a game that is boring and takes two whole evenings. Since I discovered OPR, we play on a regular basis and it's so much more fun. Thanks Discourse for spreading the word! 😁
I am in the same boat. I was a TTRPG guy prior to moving for my job and what little I got in visiting my old group stopped during covid. So I was getting a lot of anxiety and really needed some creative outlet. So I got the Indomitus box for me and my oldest kid. Turned out he was interested more in the idea than really doing it. Then my youngest (5 at the time) really wanted to build and paint. I transferred that TTRPG mindset into this. We have built terrain, made little 500 point armies for a few factions. Each army has everyone named and a story. Never played a game. Now at the age of 7 my kid rather just help make them and create stories than really play. Which I dont hate. I now have a creative outlet that is getting me using my hands more while also bonding with my 3 kids in various ways.
Totally relatable, that is why every game that I can play with my friends were so memorable and I took a lot of pictures while I can, because playing is the least time I spend for my wargaming hobby XD
We need a Gundam wargame..... With Gundams and ships in space.
Theres something super intimidating about going to a LGS and meeting tons of new people and playing with them while your learning the game. I've played like 4 games, 3 with the same person and i still feel super bad cause I feel like im making her work lol.
ahh yeah I totally get you - this is one of the (many) reason I love love LOVE co op and solo games :D
First off, stop thinking about it that way. If the person played 3 games with you, he or she wants to play with you and doesn`t mind the "work" (It`s no work if you enjoy the situation). He or she is probably a person like me. I was totally introvert unti i started to really play Warhammer 40K 11 years ago. Nowadays i just hop into my favorite LGS and do rules support for new players, helping them with the ropes of an easy start into Warhammer 40K or Infinity. Maybe it was the same for that person and she, like me, just wants to give something back to a community (which can be toxic and miserable but mostly isn`t) which changed her live. Enjoy the time you can play, learn the game under tutelage and once you are ready, decice if you want to start giving back to the wargamer community. For me it changed my life.
Even as someone who frequently plays and organizes Infinity Tournaments....the part of collecting, building, painting and thinking about the game still takes up the most of my hobby time. I think because the last bit is easier to realise in some sense. It is mostly the solo part of the hobby, so you can do it whenever you have some time to spend on. Organizing a game takes another person to schedule playtime. And a venue, either at your home where you have to set up your table, or go to an event or gamestore to play. That all takes some organizing and preparation. You need to be in touch with fellow players or a community. It makes a difference if you have Local Game Store nearby that organizes wargame nights. And even then: My Local gamestore is the only one in the Netherlands that has Infinity minis on the shelf. And its being sold to more people then people that come and play in the shop. Because buying a starter set is one thing....making friends with strangers to play the game is on a whole other level.
Lady, En el mundo de las miniaturas, destacas por tu inteligencia, por ser diferente y por ser incisiva. Felicidades.
Hey Sexy,. You forgot about people who get into WarHammer. Buy and then build and finally get around to Playing and,.
One,. find out others are playing competative and not for fun. (The I must win!! attitude.
Two,.. that it is really hard finding honest players who,. don't try to twist everything in thier favor.
Ever hear of a Necron Tachion Arrow That fires every round? Rule wise the same as a Hunterkiller missle.
But then, it's the fact of,... I can't read every Codex and remember everthing for each Army.
So yeah,. after time and time again the same thing,.. RULE discussions.
If you can't have a decent game you tend to leave the playing aspect alone.
I'll add this,. Once a cheater,.always a cheater. they will only be fair when made to and then maybe not becoz, they'd loose face. ( in thier mind).
I used to play when I first got into the hobby. It was fun, but the game itself was only ever really an excuse to meet up at the store on a thursday night and hang out with folk whilst rolling dice.
I did, however, discover I loved building and painting cool dudes with swords, and also reading all the silly dudes with swords stories. So when all my friends moved on or gave it up, and then I moved away, it wasn't even really a decision to stop playing. I just kept on building the cool dudes with swords, and realised years later that it'd been years since I last stopped by a GW for anything other than a cheeky pot of paint when I happened to be nearby.
In terms of enjoyment, I get about the same amount of fun out of a £40 box than I do out of a similarly priced video game without ever having to touch a d6, and when GW stabbed the Lion right in his heart with his own datasheet when he launched I got to live in blissful ignorance. It's great.
I'm not actually opposed to playing a game, I just already get enough from my minis that I don't care enough to.
This was an interesting video as a member of the Gundam crowd who recently picked up a couple of Warhammer minis exclusively because I liked how they looked and wanted something I could spend more time brush painting! Over in the model kit side of the wider 'building, painting, and collecting little guys' genre of hobby we have something of a parallel to those who collect Warhammer minis but don't play: There's a small set of Gundam fans who use their customized model kits for wargaming with either a homebrewed ruleset specifically for Gundam called Build Fight System or using the miniatures-agnostic Gamma Wolves rules.
The art on the package ca. 06:42 looked akin to that used on many Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics module/book covers by Goodman Games. The name of the artist escapes me.
This video hit home. I last played in 1992 after working at GW. When they moved from lead to white metal minis, I found myself in possession of thousands of lead figures. I've recently gotten them out of storage, and had hoped to get some 80's Eldar Corsairs on the board by 10th. Nope.
As it happens, the most important bit on inspiration came from a Dana Howl video the other day, in which she taunts me with a paint of the perfect colour that is not yet in stores.
Oh yeah. I have a few painted armies: 6000+ pts of Ultramarines, 2000+ points of Death Guard, Stormcast & Deathrattle for AoS... but the only GW system I've played over the last 4 years was Warcry, which I have 10+ warbands for. This hobby is mostly a solitary one for me, which is fine. Love the meditation aspect of putting together minis and painting them. And when I do play, I only play against 2 or 3 of my close friends.
13:20 Of course they're still a miniatures first company. The miniature line leads the game rules around by the nose. They're cutting everything that doesn't have an explicit kit, and making redundant datasheets for everything that does. I really lost my veterans so they could print four slightly different variations on the Infantry Squad? x_x
I've been painting for about 6 years, I have 4 armies started, five when you include HH. It's around 12k points painted. Multiple terrain pieces etc. Zero games. Painting is the goal, and seeing the uniformity and work is satisfying.
I have a friend while he did play 40K occasionally he must have had at least 10000 pounds worth of warhammer miniatures hidden in his house with the aspiration to Build and one day actually play with most of his models. But in reality even if he quit his full time job he would never have as much time to build all the models he had. I saw him take 6 weeks to paint 1 squad of costodes. He had about 5000 points of them in boxes.
That's called being normal. ^^
It's a similar case for me. I have several painted armies - depending on what you count as "army" maybe as much as 20 armies - but compared to the amount of minis I own these painted armies represent maybe 3 or 4% of my collection.
But I really think that's normal for someone who's been in this hobby for decades. In my case since 1999. Let's just say you buy 1.5 armies worth of minis per year. And you're someone who actually paints one army per year. After 23 years that's still 11.5 unfinished armies sitting in your basement...
I'm pretty certain I'm that guy. It's taken me a month to build a single Deathwing Knight. Hopefully I'll have the second on his feet by the end of this week...
Dana Howl also makes Pronhub videos too, but the name I forget
Modelers see cool stuff and build it. If there's a game to play with it, so much the better. You may want to consider building some model kits, especially if you have room to display them. You might just like it, and they're cheaper and often better quality than Warhammer. Bandai has ridiculously high quality.
I have a whole basement filled of miniatures from games that I have never played before. From Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, modern naval miniature, micro armor, Halo, Honor Harrington, Dystopian Wars to so much more. In fact I’m really good getting into collecting miniatures games that have been out of print for decades sometimes.
Hey. I just mainly love the lore of 40k.
My engagement with Games Workshop are the books published by the Black Library.
I do appreciate the fact that the fluff is intended to provide 'reasons' for the scenarios in a board game.
40K to me, is like if someone wrote a story line for the black and white pieces of Chess, and the story was awesome!
The first miniature I painted (back in like 1985-1986) was a "D&D" wizard in a show box full of old lead minies. I knew nothing about primer and sealer etc. lol so of course withing a week the paint had been chipped off the bear metal. I moved on to learn to paint by using the small single page pamphlets from GW without even understanding that it was a game. By 1989 I was in California and I was making dioramas using minies from almost any manufacturer. I had taken a Chaos marine (I had no clue it was a GW mini or what the hell it even was in the setting) and made a diorama with a few of the plastic Halloween spiders chained to it like attack monsters. When the first boxed set of Eldar Harlyquins came out I bought it and painted ALL of them right away. As I was painting someone walked by and said "Oh you play the game too?" I was thoroughly confused. I ask when he was talking about and he told me that people paint all the minies then put them on a table and use them to fight. I was confused but intrigued. Still since nobody showed me the game I just kept on buying and painting things I liked.. It wasn't till second edition that I actually played a game and started hard core collecting Eldar. I played for the next near 20 years. In 2005 I sold everything because I was spending way too much time and money tat should both have been being spent on my three sons that were now going into grade school. I had old models that were hard to find. I had titans and vehicles from Armorcast and Epicast and then later I have huge models from forgeworld. Everything got sold on ebay. The grav tanks I bought for $30 all sold for over $120 since I had customized them all and painted them all and I had won several awards for painting and modeling. So I got into the game from the painting and modeling side way before the playing side. But I did play and went to many tournies and shows etc. I even went to Golden demon when I lived in Maryland for 2 years. Recently I have considered getting back into it since my children are grown now but HOLY crap the prices are no joke!
I am a very casual player. I find my local game store a bit intimidating. I have lost interest in GW games for the most part. I do have OnePageRules Grimdark-future-firefight to fall back on and and building teams for that, but finding players is hard. Atlanta has a shit gaming scene and can be pretty toxic.
I started playing warhammer in high school because of my friends and I'm the only one who still collects and paints. I have more minis than ever before, participate in kickstarters, buy other tabletop miniature games, wargames or not, and I really enjoy the hobby aspect of painting, customizing and having some relaxing time to myself, but I hate to admit that I haven't played a single game of warhammer/kill team/warcry/underworlds... in over a decade. I would love to, but none of my friends are up to it and I don't really find myself attracted to the idea of playing a game I don't know how to play very well with strangers.
possibly the key to playing is to collect enough for more than one person to play, and have a willingness to talk people through their first game, using your miniatures, that being said, I haven't played or collected since honestly 2013 ish, honestly watching your channel has got me back into thinking about it, more likely to get into a little skirmish game, maybe Infinity, certainly not anything GW, but right now I'm too rural to find a game, and playing would 100% be the point for me, I was never very good at painting the miniatures.
I have the same problem a lot of people have with minis but with books, there are books on my shelves that I plan to read someday, they've been there since 2015 or whatever, people tell me book reading and book collecting are different hobbies
I do know someone into Gunpla, for them I think it's that they are a big fan of Gundam, which is what all the models are based on, but also the assembly is fun
I'm sitting on 12 armies, (Iron Hands, Admech, Necrons, Freebootaz Orks, Death Guard, Night Lords, Krieg, Iyanden/corsairs, Thousand Sons, Grey Knights, Imperial Knights, and a tiny Nurgle Deamon force.) around 3800-8000 points each, I've played 4 games this year, one of which was actually Necromunda. I've had to have my hand slapped to keep from buying myself a Tyranid force this month... twice.
I don't let my mini's collect dust though. After spending so much work at painting and modeling, I tend to keep them in plastic bags and place them in organized containers before putting them on my bookshelves. I once left a repulsion on a shelf for a year after 9th ed came out and they became garbage. It took forever to remove the dust. Now I don't do that anymore.
Yeah. Totally feeling some vibes.
I started the miniature and scale modeling hobby in 1987 being 7yro, painting, building, kitbashing, etc. more than I played. in all the decades I played approx. 25 times. the reason I don't play is, when I participated in tournaments, the majority of players fielded power game lists and it makes no fun to play against the same list fifteen times in a row...
right now, I enjoy the build&paint part of the hobby more than playing. especially with a rule system, that needs a serious overhaul.
A little while ago, I accepted that the models I bought and painted may never be used in a game. And that this wasn't a bad thing. I could have fun collecting and painting. Filling a display case with finished models, for the sense of accomplishment it brings.
But I can't really deny that, even now, I still hope to play someday. Realistically it would be One Page Rules, because it's just an easier and more fun game. Yet I also make sure to buy and assemble models with the chance of using them for Warhammer. I agonized a bit over basing my "Bestigors" (Frostgrave Gnolls with two-handed weapons) on 25mm bases, despite Warhammer Bestigors using 32mm. Before I realized "you're only going to use this for Age of Fantasy, the base size doesn't matter". The possibility that I _might_ need to have the "proper" base size to play the "real" wargame gave me psychological discomfort. It was only in realizing it was irrational that I proceeded with 25mm. (I'm also likely to use the gnolls in D&D, so having them on "Medium" sized bases is important).
There are many armies I like the _idea_ of collecting and running in a game. Because I like the aesthetic, or because I could get them relatively cheaply through a third party proxy, or simply because I invented an intriguing narrative. But in truth, how many of these will I ever use? Do I need to build a whole Iron Hands successor chapter that uses the Keys of Hel to resurrect fallen warriors as crazed cyborg zombies (the "Phantom Pains" chapter, I call them)? Or would making a Kill Team satisfy this urge? Wouldn't making a skirmish warband not be more efficient, not to mention cost effective?
Not to mention I paint slowly, in fits and starts, and have so many other hobbies to occupy my time. I have so many scratch building terrain projects I've meant to start, that I never got around to. All while the raw materials take up space in my house. So much plastic junk and beads and foam blocks and toys. The _idea_ inspires me, though it takes so long to manifest I get distracted by the next cool idea before I can actualize it.
Honestly, this is another way in which GW takes advantage of the neurodivergant. Creating a fictional universe, a game, and a model range to go along with them. So complicated and deep, certain hobbyists can't hope but be sucked into a special interest _black hole._ The company is right there, ready to rake in the dough for the hopeless fanatics they've fostered.
Most of my 40k experience is collection and painting.
I *would* play, but my schedule doesn't allow much time to set aside half a day to meet up with friends, at a place/shop with a table big enough to play 40k on. I think the most I've ever gotten was 2 game days in a month. Usually it is 1, but now with the holiday season, it's less than that.
I used to have a bedroom full of various GW armies, tens of thousands of points worth for different factions. I'd collected them over 3 years and never played a game. I just loved painting!
30 years later, I've just bought a "start collecting" set, just to see if I can remember how to paint them. If I can, this time I'll actually play too!
I buy, print and paint minis with games in mind, but wrangling a game out of my friends is so difficult with our rarely aligning schedules and the trouble of getting people and tables together in the same place at the same time. It’s something that bothers me a lot and I don’t have a clear way of changing it.
I have a whole Gaslands setup I spent hours making from scratch and willingness friends, but I’m yet to get a full game out of them.
The joy of having a good gaming Club available. Truly helps with the not getting a chance to play any games. But the choice of gaming systems sometimes is still heavily prescribed. Out of the people in my gaming Club almost all have 40K, age of Sigmar, Warhammer fantasy battles, or any of the Skirmish level games by Games Workshop, but none of them get played on a regular basis. Other gaming systems are much easier to find games in including five parsecs, BattleTech, and oddly enough both Reign in hell and one page rules. A s*** ton of historicals are also played. We are a fairly large group but our demographics tend to be on the older side. At every gaming session or meeting there is a lot of talk about Games Workshop products some extremely negative some extremely positive, but no one plays their games.
I'm an anomaly. I've been part of or run multi-week Mordheim and Necromunda campaigns, a Blood Bowl League, games of 40k starting from 3rd edition until now (save for 9th edition, due to the pandemic) Epic Armageddon, Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition with 2 different armies, Age of Sigmar 1st and 2nd edition, Warmachine Mk.III, Battletech Alpha Strike, and Dystopian Wars. Mind that this has been since 2003, so I've had a fair amount of time until recently, lol. Unfortunately that did mean I was playing with grey plastic a lot of the time, as I still have a fair amount of unpainted stuff, but that is something I'm attempting to remedy now. It is so sad how many people get into the hobby and never actually get to enjoy the games though. It's a surprisingly common thing.
I have been painting 40k since 2019. Never played, and never had any actual plans to play. But I do paint my army as if I will play in the future. I just enjoy painting my models
Right now I am basically just painting, but that’s mainly because I moved away from access to other players, and will maybe travel to the last remaining mate in my old gaming group every 6 months or so to play. So my strategy going forward is smaller model count skirmish games, so I can build them around a “boardgame” strategy in order to have casual games with non-gaming friends and have a taste of different flavours of warbands or even a few different games without getting bogged down in massive army projects.
For me, the most fun I would have in the hobby is building the units and terrain. I could spend a week building and converting a unit to how I want it to look.
Well, I didn't play since 2018, but there was no day I didn't open Battlescribe to make some new list or paint (or tried to paint) some miniature I got hyped for. I ended with dozens of unfinished projects (700pts of Dark Eldar among them), a pile of shame filling one of the closets to its ceiling and an urge to write my own ruleset that won't require me to spend 400 pounds on the minimal amount of plastic to play.
I found myself (unintentionally) in a position of Hobby over game with Kill Team. Counting those from the KT boxes, kitbashed and compendium teams from my existing stock of models, my teams are in the double digits, and I’ve only played one cut down demo game at a gee dubs, and that wasn’t even with my models.
If my uni friends EVER get their acts together though, I am actively trying to change that and simultaneously justify the silly number of teams I’ve collected already (not to mention I will end up with more.) by organizing a campaign where i lend oit my teams to my friends. The hope being in the new year that we’ll finally have some intersecting free time!
Living in Brazil, where just a few of my friends know what Warhammer actually is, and GW prices are borderline a bankruptcy risk, I mostly 3D print my minis and paint them for shell decoration. Occasionally I play some One Page Rules games with the wife, but that’s it.
I used to play in local and semi-local tournaments almost monthly, then I moved from the United States to Italy for work. I managed to lug with me three complete armies with two more in the works. I then proceeded to pick up and finish a sixth army of 40k and am now diving into Heresy. (It probably counts against me that I've picked up a few Kill Team boxes just for the minis and terrain rather than for KT)
In our local area we got like 10 SW Legion and ca 50 40k players enlisted. Every week there are 3 tables playing Legion and every second week 1 Warhammer table. Its a phenomen.
While I love listening to Warhammer lore and do collect some of the minis, what's amusing to me is not collecting single armies, but little bits and pieces of other armies to make a fleshed out cohesive one.
Always found it amusing how every official gaming tournament has a required painting component, which often affects the outcome of the contests, but somehow, we have lots of miniature painting competitions that don't require even a single to-hit roll. We know who's really paying GW employee salaries...
to restore your faith in Humanity, I started playing Warhammer 40k in 1993 with Space wolves, I have played with every model in that army, I then jumped in to Fantasy with Chaos and as the years went by and they got split into 3 armies (Beastmen, Chaos Warriors, Daemons) through out the editions I played with every model multiple times. I then Played Flames of war collecting French, Brits, Americans, Germans and Hungarians and have played games with all of them, I own a Metal Cawdor gang as well, that I have not played in years but have done so in the past. I have 4 factions in Malifaux and rotate through them yearly. I recently jumped into Kill team for a league and Chaos Knights for a campaign. I am currently finishing up EC for HH and have already played several games,. So there are some of us out there.. and on top of it everything is painted ... So I get it I might be a Unicorn
In Germany we say "Vorfreude ist die beste Freude"
Anticipation is the best form of joy.
I totally agree. Buying a new box triggers me like crazy. Thinking about building the,, painting them, build a list and play with them. The anticipation alone sparks enough joy to justify the cost of the box so most of them actually stay in the box for years bc you have so much else going on.
I do still play , altho getting discouraged "here is your new codex , enjoy it now because in 1,5 years it's just paperwaste "
My GM for D&D since the OGL scandal has played less games. He has been enthralled by building and painting stuff. He has made 3 castles one of which is 11ft long by 8ft wide and it's verticality is still being worked on. He has a huge house so he has room for it. I went to his house a week ago and there are more shelves and it's wall to wall minis that are in the process of being painted or have finished. He has started selling them as well. I think it's easy to get pulled into the art of it all. Which is something that I have found myself also being sucked into. When it came to our Cyberpunk game we all made MINI'S and I haven't stopped. I have been tinkering quite a bit on several models and parts for our games.
My friend hasn't played since we played back in 1987. He is now currently selling all of his miniatures.
On another note, I've switched to playing my games via the pc. It is easier for me to just sit down whem I can and play a game with someone else online or just a solo game that I can play at my leisure against the computer. I think in a way this is sad because we are missing out on being together in a social setting.
Building and painting an army seems like the biggest time sink/obstacle in getting to play a game of Warhammer and have fun until you go through the process of putting together an army list, creating/collecting terrain, and the biggest obstacle of all: learning/keeping up with all of the rules. If my group hasn't played in a while, we spend more time setting up and looking up rules than actually enjoying playing. There is far too much rules bloat in both 40k and AoS with no single official source of truth for what the current rules actually are.
By myself, I have 5 40k armies, each well in excess of the 2000 points I would need. And then with AoS, I have one army right around 2000 points, and then like 6000 points of another because I love the models. I thought I enjoyed playing.... after all, I used to enjoy it with friends back in 3rd and 4th edition before I stopped playing. When I came back with 8th and now in 9th edition, and brought some family members with me, it just wasn't fun. It's not the people - we can have fun doing nothing, it's almost like the game is just anti-fun. So we tried AoS and 2nd edition was almost as bad, and then 3rd edition happened, which seemed to be an improved experience, but the special rules have continued to grow and grow. We weren't enjoying the games. And then there's the painting - we all enjoyed painting until it seemed more like a job than a hobby, and then even that wasn't fun anymore.
You hit the nail on the head, Discourse, Warhammer is more fun to think about than actually engage with in any meaningful way, and the dopamine hit from buying new models and the excitement of what you can do with those new models is the best part of the whole game. This isn't wargaming. Other companies make wargames that are actually fun and engaging games. Games workshop/Warhammer is just a very efficient mechanism to separate you from your money.
I know quite a few painters who want to play, but get overwhelmed by some of the players at the local shop... sadly, some dudes don't know how to interact with portions of the community without getting intense as hell! Still, it's a lot better than it was a couple of decades ago. I'm still happy to see so many people getting into the hobby, no matter what part of the hobby they're getting in to.
This is absolutely wild to me. I don't know that I'd be a wargaming hobbyist if I didn't play consistently. I like painting and building models but ultimately getting them painted for my weekend games is the primary driving force behind getting them done.
I love painting Warhammer minis. I might one day play the game too. It’s super relaxing and I spend 25 hours a week painting and prepping models. I play some of the videogames here and there. Watch a tonne of lore videos and even read some books. I also paint whatever faction I feel like doing next but the most I have is 40k Orks and Deathguard. Will probably have nearly 2000 pts in each soon.
Cimmerians are from Conan the barbarian.
Oh.look. I already commented on this video.
Bolt Action player here and we have built a pretty decent sized community where we play. We have a couple of local shops, each one specializing in a different big game with some overlap. We have a bunch of 40k players of course and it really has helped build up tabletop gaming. I do see in my game, Bold Action, many collectors (players), that have many armies without ever playing a single game. It seems like it has a lot to do with community and not having a place to play and learn, but some are just hobbyists and like the minis and the building out of different armies and to collect all the things.
Those strange minis you own are not from the 70s. They are relatively recent (for 1/72 scale anyway, which moves way slower than 28mm) by an Ukrainian brand who goes by Red Box or Dark Alliance. The Dark Alliance range is pretty great (again, for 1/72 standards) and its fantasy version has both LotR ripoffs and conan and medieval inspired stuff. Its *scifi* range is pretty interesting: Stalkers, Zombies, Survivors and Rednecks; about the only brand where you can get these in 1/72. The Stalker boxes are like Zona-Alfa-in-a-box! Finally, I heard from some random internet dude that the single sculptor of Red Box/Dark Alliance has been conscripted in the Ukrainian military, so I don't even know if he's still alive :(
Please don't let GW see this video. We'll have another "We're a miniatures company, not a games company." incident.
I played 40k fairly regularly from about 2004 until sometime in 2017, and I still want to play. I even have severely up-to-date armies. What got to me was how much I was getting rule lawyered. Know, with Ninth Edition, I need to figure out where to start; there are too many books to keep up with. I miss the days I could show up with my army list and core codex and be good to go.
I honestly enjoy painting and building way more than playing. I do love my TT ready and speed painted Death Guard. I’ve played 10 games and have 2 armies 1500 of Custodes and 4K off DG.
Funny thing about gunpla there have been several attempts by fans to make a set of tabletop rules for them, I don't know if any were ever finished though, and obviously they never caught on.
I find this to be a very interesting topic, because I actually started buying Warhammer models very recently with no intent to ever play the game. I did look into it, but it didn't seem like something I'd enjoy. I like painting minis though, so I started doing that because I find the sculpts to be very cool.
Also I do not enjoy painting busts or larger models like gunpla nearly as much. It has to be tiny. Just a bunch of little guys. Love painting them
love those lil guys :D
The one game i do get to play semi-regular is Test of Honour, the historical samurai skirmish game. Setup and teardown is super fast, making it easier to get a game going.
We had that discussion in the comment section some time ago, it was something like that (enjoyment): books/lore>collecting>paint>talk hobby>play games>cleaning mould lines
I LOVE planning army projects and thinking about playing the game, painting, wanting more but I don’t know a single person who plays games younger than 40 except d&d people who want my minis for their game but will never paint any of their own.
Yeah. I'm the same. I do get more joy out of painting the minis than the prospect of playing the game since, well, it's complicated and hard to understand and requires a lot of time investment just for a single game. Not to mention having to go somewhere else to play, trying to convince friends to play, etc. With a normal board game all the pieces are already in the box, only one person has to own it, you can play in your own home, and it'll only take an hour or two. With Warhammer not only do you have to individually collect all the minis, you have to build them, paint them, pack them up, head down to a game store with terrain and tables that may not even be conveniently near you, then patiently wait for some other stranger to do the SAME THING.
I painted my first Warhammer miniatures in 1986. 2 skaven. I had the first space marine model as well as the first plastic, marines, orks, and guard. I had a 30 year hiatus but started back in 2018. In have still not played a single game. I want to but lack opportunities
Would be cool if a study was done to see common threads between these similar stories--early childhood issues, poverty issues, loneliness issues. I bet there is a link.
I returned to painting minis during lockdown and have painted around 2000 points of Tau, Marines and Necrons and I'm now painting Leagues of Votann. I've not played a game since the Rogue Trader days, I'd like to, but 40k these days is a much more daunting prospect than in those simpler times.
This is much like my board game collection. There are a good number that are still in shrink wrap and may never even get opened. I have about a hundred which isn't a huge collection relative to others within the hobby but more are on the way from Kickstarter and I honestly don't know if some will ever hit the table