WFB – Dark Night of the Soul

It’s two in the old ante meridian. I’m staring at the hobby desk, looking at my Vampire counts, and I don’t quite know what’s happened here. Questions throng my tired mind, and they demand answering.

Somehow I’ve gone from “wouldn’t it be nice to have my old Vampire Counts army back?” to “I have forty-five new Zombies and thirty new Ghouls and three new Corpse Carts and three new Banshees to paint on top of all the repainting and repairs and I need two bags to carry the army as it is and even then it seems to demand over £150 in new pieces just to join in with eighth edition effectively…”

… and that feels like work, kids. Worse, it feels like work I have to pay for, and work I don’t want to do. In my hobby time. Which is supposed to be my time, damn it.

WFB Is Not Plug And Play

So, it’s been a month, and the case foam has turned up, and I… sort of still haven’t actually played a game with my Vampire Counts, owing to an outbreak of Real Life, and the deadly West Midlands Man Flu. This is Not Good. I haven’t even written an army list. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about army lists, but haven’t actually gotten one down.

The thing is that I’m not really a fan of pick-up games, or indeed of points matches; in an ideal world some chaps who want to play a game can sit down and discuss scenario, forces and so on beforehand, negotiating the objective and style of play like civilised adults.

For a variety of reasons, some more valid than others, this doesn’t get to happen as often as I’d like, and so sometimes I do actually need to make lists happen. Now I like my lists to reflect the way I imagine my army is, because at heart I’m a little fluffy bunny hoppity-skipping through the forest… but I’m a bunny with a steel core and if you try to run me over, I want you to break your front axle doing it.

Ask Uncle Von: Too Much, Too Soon?

Robbie emailed in (again):

Got some more angst I wouldn’t mind Uncle Von’s thoughts on……

Legion, to sell or not to sell, that is the question?

I like the Legion background and the idea of the whole thing being underpinned by the conciousness of Everblight. The art is nice and I can see how you can build and run some nasty nasty lists but………………..

I’ve realised I’m not keen on the minis, started to paint em and decided I don’t like the idea of painting pale blue and black yet can’t think of a different colour scheme that works.

They are pretty cheaty, if it wasn’t for Cryx everyone would cry foul everytime somebody played Legion. My current mindset is to leave them in the case and learn to play properly with Cygnar. Legion ignore so many rules I find myself not learning to play the game!

I wonder if I bought my second faction too early into my Warmahordesing? I enjoy Cygnar and I think I might better off selling the Legion to invest in more Cygnar

Or (I know this contradicts the above) I keep having lustfull ideas towards Ashlynn themed Mercs and/or Farrow!

Settling Series: Endgame

So, let’s recap.

We have a Warriors of Chaos army which failed largely because I allowed peer pressure to dictate the way in which I played with my toy soldiers; should have bailed out of that poisonous meta and found myself an alternative play environment in which I could do the sort of things I wanted to, or at least negotiate the development of my Chaos more effectively.

We have an Empire army, mentioned in passing, which failed because it was simply too dull and too numerous to paint.

We have a Dark Elf army, which failed because it was purchased wholesale rather than established slowly, and bound me into a playstyle which wasn’t really my own; it functioned in that style, but something else would have done better.

We have a Tyranid army, which – despite my efforts – is failing, because it lacks something for me to project myself onto; it isn’t mine, no matter how I think about it, and I think that part of that is the way I’m building it, and part of that is that I only even started playing 40K for the sake of other people (and since I’m leaving my job shortly, the need to have something that’s compatible with the school club is rather less pressing than it was back in October).

We also have some increased insight into my goals in gaming; I’d like to refer you back to my very first Meta post, in which I attempted to unpack what had gone wrong vis-a-vis being able to enjoy my defeats, and concluded that there wasn’t enough narrative or emotional investment in the games I was playing these days.  Now that I have a semi-regular club to attend, maybe I should start encouraging the kind of play that I enjoy there, and, counter-wise, attempting to match my gaming goals to the way that systems get played out there?

It seems, at the moment, that pickup games and tournaments with Warmahordes are the norm, so maybe that should be my ‘trying to win’ game (since I don’t invest as much in the less personalised narrative of the Warmahordes setting), leaving Warhammerses as my ‘theme/narrative’ game, one for story-driven play and extensive modelling?

The general thrust of my thinking over the last few months has been that, in following either the opportunity for a bargain or a mix of tactical advice and Frugal principles, I’ve picked a couple of armies that I just can’t sustain interest in, and ended up wasting time and money that could have been directed towards things that I’d actually have enjoyed and can’t stop thinking about, even if they weren’t ‘the best’ by whatever standards they were being judged.

I’m determined not to beat myself up over this.  2010 was a year of false starts, both in the hobby (with the Tyranids and Dark Elves) and out of it (with the job I took in September, which hasn’t been working out too well – some valuable experience has been gained and I’ve met some lovely people, but it’s time to move on for the sake of health, wealth and well-being).  2011, so far, has presented so many opportunities to make good on the career mis-step; time for the hobby to follow suit.  The extant projects are being scrapped and I’m going to follow my heart – and take it slowly this year, so that I don’t end up squandering my resources if they do turn out to be wrong ‘uns.

Shiny put it quite nicely:

So we have a new theme for 2011′s Von-gaming: “guilty pleasures”.  Armies you kind of think you shouldn’t play, but you’ll enjoy playing them and that’s the point of the exercise.

By curious quirk of fate, this came on while I was writing:

It feels strangely appropriate.

Settling Series: I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

Tonight, I’ve had a couple of long conversations with old comrades LexingtonNet and Herr Doktor Shiny on the matter of hobby projects.