Where and How and Why We Hobby

Having answered these questions for a Reddit rando's school project survey, I... quite liked the answers, and thought they might be worth sharing more broadly, as a getting-to-know-you exercise. 

Content warning: discussion of suicide. Further warning: if you're going to give me grief for issuing a content warning, don't. I'm usually pretty blasé about what I post, but this one gets heavy at the end.

I am not on Reddit as frankly that place scares me, but thought I would get in on this article as a means to justify my continued presence on this blog.

I was about to ASK you…

What first got you interested in hobby wargaming? Was there a particular moment or experience that drew you in?

It was a playground craze when I was a lad! During the 1990s Games Workshop was aggressively marketing to tweenage boys for the first time: someone would inevitably bring a paper Citadel Catalogue to the playground and you'd find something in there that was TOTALLY BOSS and you wanted to be that guy. I picked a Striking Scorpion Exarch and a Doomwheel. Ironically, these were from the armies the armies my longest serving friend Dr. Shiny played at the time, and I never touched them myself.

Being the bespectacled, nerdy kid that I was - and still mostly am, I do a lot more physical stuff these days, but the glasses have remained and I still don't understand the national obsession with Football -  at school I inevitably fell in with the outcasts and other social misfits.  I already played PC games like Dune 2:  Battle For Arrakis and the original Warcraft 1 (yes, I am showing my age here) and then at school I met this guy called Craig.  And Craig had a copy of White Dwarf magazine.  With big colour pictures of 2nd ed Dark Angels all over it.  And it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.  

Dark Angels are the least worst Space Marines, yes.

How did you start?

Second edition 40K big box for my eleventh birthday. Dark Millennium supplement for Christmas. Ork Codex and a White Dwarf every month with pocket money. The rest is history. 

Having seen these amazingly cool miniatures in this magazine, a few random models  second hand were purchased over the next few months (Craig sold me most of them if I remember correctly) , and then I persuaded my parents to buy me the 2nd Ed box set for my birthday.  This began an obsession that lasted the next few years.  These days I am not hyper focused the way I used to be, but I still love the universe of 40k and still have the 2nd ed core books in a cupboard somewhere.  I actually reread Codex Imperialis for the nostalgia value recently. 

How did you feel when you painted or built your first miniature? What kept you going after that?

Built? Elated. Painted? A bit disappointed. I didn't really get the hang of painting good plastic Orks until I'd done about thirty. I wanted to play a proper game though - with a proper army list and a Dreadnought that wasn't made of cardboard. I did really like my metal Dreadnought: that was the first model that I used washes and transfers and sticky backed banners on, and it was Decent.

Once I managed to unstick myself from the model (superglue be fickle stuff) and beheld it in all its glory, I was over the moon.  I ignored all the big gluey fingerprints and bad assembly and saw this little space dude who, although he didn't look like the ones in the magazine, was mine and therefore better than any others.  This process repeated itself when I first painted a model... the mess, my mother telling me off for spilling thick green paint all over the kitchen table, the paint on the model that appeared to have been applied with a brick instead of a brush... none of it mattered.  I had a painted space dude.

Is there something specific about the creative side of the hobby that you enjoy the most?

 I like building models, and I like kitbashing. I don't like painting, but I like having painted. I like looking at an army and saying "yep, I did that." And writing battle reports online, which I have done compulsively since about a week after discovering the Internet was a thing and people talked about Warhammer on it.

When I first started, everything was focussed around simply getting enough models to be able to actually play a game... these days I've slowed down somewhat.  Models can sit untouched for months before I feel ready to start kitbashing and painting.  I refuse to go near them till I've got a plan I am happy with.  Let's not talk about my heavily converted Stormraven that I've been building for about 6 months now and still haven't finished...  I find actually working on a model can sometimes be a very zen like process... although these days that often gets interrupted by my asshole of a cat.

Yeah, it's important to have a vision for models. All my worst failed projects have been the ones where I didn't have a clue how to make them Mine. Also, cats. Although mine prefers to take a more supervisory role these days. She's getting on.

Were there any challenges when you first started? How did you overcome them?

Second edition 40K was a difficult game for eleven year olds to wrap their head around: all those modifiers and look-up tables and handfuls of polyhedral dice and the endless card tokens and counters and templates. None of the games I played with my mates used the proper rules because I was the only one interested in trying, and even I didn't understand half of them. GW obviously heard my pleas because third edition was stripped down to the point where a bunch of thirteen year olds could get most of it right (and would actually want to).

Third edition was a godsend.  I think Von and I went through more or less identical trials with 2nd ed.  

Do you see hobby wargaming as more of an artistic or social outlet for you? Or both? Why?

Social. All the collecting and building and painting and writing is fun, but it's in service of playing games and discussing them. I have the kind of brain worms that don't let me just hang out with people - we need an Activity and a common interest. Thus, I play games.

Both.  As a socially awkward teen, it was great to have this place I could go to and know I would find people whom I could approach and talk to without fear of rejection because we already had a shared interest.  I also 100% agree with m'colleague in that having an Activity to do is a social lubricant that I absolutely need.  The local wargaming club is also how I first met Lamby - the girl who years later is now my fiancée.   

On the artistic side, I love the moment of satisfaction and sense of achievement I gain on looking at a completed model I am happy with, or if someone gives me a compliment on a model I did.

How has your approach to the hobby changed since you started? Have you picked up any new techniques or interests along the way?

The first shift came in my late teens and early twenties when I started stringing together a narrative between my games - when there was enough continuity and variety in them to make that interesting. 

I also used to play a LOT - two evenings a week minimum - and mostly play pick up games, one list to take all comers, that sort of thing. Now I'm older and I don't get to play as often and I want the games to be an occasion. Proper scenario, army lists picked to suit that scenario and where the story's at, full writeup. I'd like to play bigger games, but contemporary 40K doesn't let me do that without smoke coming out of my ears, and I've done my share of evangelising for other games over the last three decades. 1000 points of the thing people have heard of is fine.

I've come and gone with painting: peaked during my twenties when I was walloping out Warmachine models inspired by World of Warcraft's aesthetic and wet blending everything. About ten years ago I burned out, developed arthritis, and had to embrace a messier, lazier style. I was doing "slapchop" before it was cool.

Back in my teens, it was all about going down the local games club and playing.  Once, sometimes twice per week.  MUST. PLAY. GAME.  Then when Necromunda came out (I still think original Necromunda is arguably one of the best things Games Workshop ever produced, and I will die on that hill) I dived headfirst into that and had something of a revelation when I realized that in a Necromunda campaign, the individual games being linked into a campaign where models earned XP and new abilities meant that there was an underlying narrative.  This was the beginning of the end for me.  My dudes stopped being faceless mooks and started to get names, histories.  There was rivalries, scores to settle.  I didn't do this so much in 40k, where I had a lot of models on the table, but in games with a smaller model count like Necromunda or Battlefleet Gothic, I absolutely did.  My Emperor class battleship Heavens Fury was feared in the campaign my local gameclub ran.  Or at least I tell myself it was.  

In 40k, I wanted to play the largest games I could manage, so massive boards with many models.  Apocalypse was the ultimate expression of this for me, and here myself and m'colleague have to disagree - Von is not a fan of Apocalypse, and although I completely understand their reasons, I also have fond memories of its complete absurdity.  These days, I tend towards smaller games against people I already know - I tend not to go to clubs and play complete strangers.  I would rather play a smaller, cozier game against someone I already know, who will forgive me my mistakes and who is there to have a good time, not win at any cost.

Amen to that. Amen to Necromunda (and Gorkamorka and Mordheim which it begat). Boo to Apocalypse, but it's probably fine if you're not approaching it with "I'm gonna proxy eighteen Callidus Assassins and take Jammers in every game" as your mindset. The crowd I rolled with when it came out were not really… in the zone. They were so not in the zone that I stopped playing 40K for about ten years.

I do sometimes go out and play games with strangers, mostly because I live in the middle of nowhere and across the border from most of my True Friends, but the small cosy no-stakes game is definitely preferable. I can do three games in a day, but it leaves me shattered, and that's with sixth edition WFB - a system that's basically muscle memory at this point.

What advice would you give to someone who’s thinking about starting hobby wargaming for the first time?

Start small - 1000 points or battlebox or whatever your game of choice has to offer. You don't have to charge into big game to competition standards straight away. Own your experience - don't make up invisible rules inside your head that tell you not to have fun, or let Internet groupthink and grindset mentality tell you how to play. Read the room - you're playing the game with your chosen opponent and if they're not having a good time, you're playing it wrong.

I absolutely agree with everything Von just said - which makes a large part of my answer here redundant.  The only thing I would add is 'Don't get discouraged'.  OK, so maybe you lost the game.  Maybe you can't paint to the same standards you see all over the Internet.  As long as you are enjoying yourself, does it matter?  You will get better with practice.   

Has wargaming had any unexpected benefits in your life, whether creatively, socially, or otherwise?

Tabletop gaming is how I met a lot of my longest standing friends.  Without this shared interest, I would probably never have met Lamby, Von and Hark, or Ductape and Wookie (the spelling is intentional, before the Star Wars crowd jumps in) or Tall Mike, or Evil Dave, or... the list goes on.  

With a lot of them, we've moved on from wargaming and do other stuff these days - myself, Ductape and Wookie can frequently be found in various places up and down the country, wearing body armour and shooting at people with toy guns.  I keep trying to persuade Von to give it a try, but so far to no avail.  The point is that wargaming was the genesis for friendships that have lasted decades now, and I wouldn't trade those friends for anything.

"Yes" is the short answer. 

I have somewhat severe mental health problems, and during some of the lowest periods in my life, the fact that I have a game booked at the end of the week has been the reason I make it through to Friday night. I am not exaggerating when I say that if it hadn't been for Warmachine, and the chance discovery that one of my colleagues was the guy I played on day two of a tournament the year before, I would have been dead by the end of 2010. 

This idiot hobby is a tried, tested, and sturdy lifeline and, for all that I try not to take it more seriously than it deserves, I am grateful that it gives me a prompt and a cue and a reason to engage with people outside my own head. As with m'colleague, most of my longest standing friendships have been built on wargaming: a few have even transcended it, to that rare state of "person I want to spend time around even when we're not playing with toys." That's quite special, and it's the main reason I've stuck with this crap for twenty-eight years.

For anyone who's in that dark place, there is help to be had.
Don't face it alone.  Reach out to someone.