Three Wargaming MISCONCEPTIONS

0:00 in this video i'm going to tell you about three misconceptions about tabletop miniature wargaming some of the worst places on the internet are the comments sections specifically facebook one of the worst twitter can be real problematic sometimes um sometimes depending on the genre or the idea or whatever the video is about youtube comments can be real toxic and nasty generally not so much here because you folks are awesome that's not pandering not at all but uh there are misconceptions that get thrown around a lot of times in comments and things like that that i have seen repeatedly which is to say over and over again and uh so i kind of wanted to talk about uh like three of them because it's a nice odd number and uh i want to mention them here and hopefully i can enlighten some of you some of you are gonna be like oh yeah no i knew that but a lot of people don't know them would know that because that's well that's why they're misconceptions one that i see thrown around a lot frankly is that the majority of tabletop miniatures wargaming folks play at stores and tournaments the the uh the you know the competitive scene is the majority of all the games played which seems to basically not be true uh and i'll get to that in a sec um but uh also you know and people will say stuff like well yeah but you can't you know you always have to constantly keep up with the newest faqs and the newest versions

1:31 which is why we're always chasing that stuff and i'm like but it's your game it's your if you and your friends want to play you know the old version of the game you can do that or if you don't like a rule you can change it but then the answer is always like yeah but if i go to the store to play there those people won't play the same way they'll have to play with you know and and and as it turns out sure games get played at stores certainly obviously not so much in the last 14 months but in the most in the before times games get played at stores games of tabletop miniature war gaming okay mainly just games workshop stuff and maybe a little bit of this here and that there but for the most part it's games workshop stuff gets played at stores true but a lot more of it a lot more of it gets played at home when i first got into 40k back in fifth edition i would go to my friend john's house to play and we played there for a year year and a half and i never went to play once at a store now obviously that's anecdotal that's just me but as i've been talking to more and more people over the eight plus years of doing just this channel and the years and years and years and years of being a tabletop gamer i know that the majority of the games that get played in any given day any given week any given month get played in people's homes people's basements people's garages that kind of stuff sure there are games at stores there are tournaments and things like that but the majority of the games get played

3:01 at people's houses number of years ago and this is uh another facet of the tabletop gaming hobby not necessarily wargaming miniature war gaming it's uh collectible card games but i'll explain it i've told this story i think before in a live show i went to a seminar for distributors i went with a friend of mine who owns a store and we went and you go to a bunch of different seminars from different manufacturers and stuff like that and it's held by the distributor it's whole thing and there's good snacks too so you know anyway um we were sitting in a seminar for uh wizards of the coast the company that makes magic the gathering and amongst other things but this particular seminar was about magic the gathering so they had a person from that particular segment of the brand within the organization whatever i don't frankly remember his name um he did show up real late to this eight o'clock meeting and i think he was hungover or maybe just ill but anyway um yeah he showed up like 15 minutes late uh anyway he told us something that in that room of folks predominantly all store owners or people who work at stores those people gasped audibly when he gave them this little factoid and he said that over the last 25 years wizards of the coast has been doing everything in their power to uh survey and discover and to figure out where people are playing magic the gathering specifically and they've spent a bunch of money and they've done a lot of surveying and a lot of like just a lot of different things obviously they can't push a button and know

4:31 because it's not like a video game you can't check you know internet protocol addresses ip addresses all that kind of stuff you have to kind of figure this stuff out through again like surveys and this and that other thing and over 25 years they've determined that of all the people who buy magic cards 95 of them never play in a store and like i said people store owners in this thing audibly gasped because if you think about that number when you go into your local store on a friday night again in the before times um friday magic evidently will be starting up again next week but when you go into your local store on a friday night and the place has got 30 40 50 60 different people sitting there playing magic because it's friday night magic and that's what you do that's only five percent of the people who buy the cards the majority of the people who are playing magic are playing at home if you've played magic i bet you've probably played unless you're within that five percent you've probably played far more games at home than you have played at um a tournament or at you know your local shop even for something like friday night magic and there is no such thing as friday night magic specifically within the realm of tabletop wargaming um you know stores do different things to try to get people to come in and play on certain nights and things like that or whatever but the majority of play and you know if if you say nope no i haven't played a game at home in years at anyone's house it's only ever at stores you're in the outlier from everybody that i've talked to and people i've talked to in the industry the majority of the people play at home so you can play

6:02 the way that you want you can do the things you want you can proxy the stuff you want and not have to worry about all this kind of stuff that gets thrown around in the comments section about like no you got to play it this way or you got to do this or you got to you know you got to make sure you follow the faq and they're going to change this and it's going to hurt everything if you don't like the rules don't play that way i i got a friend we stopped playing um or just technically never started playing version 2.0 of star wars x-wing we just still played the original game and we're fine with it we like it here's another misconception and this is one that i held for a number of years until just recently and that is so there are four genres within tabletop gaming you've got your board games which include board games and also games that are like card games but they're not collectible card games they're the ones where like you buy a box and you get a bunch of stuff in there like the living card games and stuff like that you know dominion netrunner although they don't make not runner anymore but those types of games and there's also dice games they're like not collectible dice games but you get these dice you almost build a deck out of dice they're kind of few and far between but they're still lumped in with board games overall okay so you've got those types of games and then you've got role-playing games obviously like that's a huge thing and then you've also got collectible card games also like i was mentioning a little bit earlier humongous and massive and then you've got us over here with the um the miniatures games the miniatures wargaming kind of stuff and uh those are your four genres and when you go to places like gen con and you see you know the little relatively small

7:33 uh you know uh warhammer booth and you see the real relatively small uh warlord booth and you see the world and in you know amongst all these other huge massive corporations who are cranking stuff out you know hasbro and this and that and all these giant booths from all these different board game companies and rpgs and you you see stuff on twitch critical role just killing it you know huge kickstarters and all that kind of stuff you know like i said we're the smallest um except we're not hasn't been released yet this year for 2020 but there's a company there's a website called icv2 and they talk about the games industry in the comics industry and all kinds of nerd stuff industry it's a great website you should definitely check it out icv2.com anyway they've every year they put out these sales reports i have the 2019 sales report because the 2020 hasn't come out yet i think they generally come out in the middle of the next year so we'll hear about this probably in like june or july but for 2019 before the pandemic this is the way it broke out in north america okay um if you're talking about the collectible card games they're number one in sales 745 million dollars in 2019 sales of magic the gathering pokemon all that kind of stuff we expected that absolutely sure then you've got hobby board games which like i said included also the dice games and the card games where you're not it's not collectible card and you're looking at 495 million obviously board games are massive you know you look at websites like board

9:03 game geek and you look at all the different podcasts out there and all that kind of stuff and you go to the huge conventions and dice towards this convention and gen con and all that kind of stuff there's a lot of stuff out there and uh you know and then there's um huh it's interesting then then there's non-collectible miniature games that's us that's uh that's us and that's 355 million dollars in sales in 2019 i kind of expected rpgs to be in there somewhere since they're so popular and i'm not putting down rpgs but this is the interesting misconception rpgs in 2019 made 80 million dollars so you've got 745 you've got 4.95 you've got us with 355. and way down here you got 80 million from rpgs now why is that are rpgs not actually as popular as one thinks no they're actually wildly popular it turns out you don't need to buy as much stuff to get into role-playing games you need some sort of handbook for players generally and if you're maybe say mastering the dungeon then you might need some sort of book about that or you might need some sort of manual of monsters at most and then you're gonna need some dice and some pencils and paper maybe you go crazy and build yourself some dungeon tiles 3d print um what's that company dwarven forge that does the nice ones that are all pre-painted for you maybe you have some miniatures that kind of stuff but in comparison to our stuff when you get down to number of players there's maybe fewer players within

10:34 tabletop wargaming miniatures but we spend a lot more than the role-playing folks do so the idea that we're the smallest of the four genres within tabletop gaming if you look at sales we're not we're nearly up there with board gaming and who knows what it's going to look like in 2020 like 2019 that's taking into consideration foreign forty thousand eighth edition but you know 2020 was north ninth edition and also indominus and so you know we could eventually even go ahead of board games still under magic the gathering i get that but um it's it's interesting to see that kind of sales information last misconception is something i just kind of came across online recently i was watching a video and uh they were talking about um miniatures agnostic games you've probably heard that term i've talked about it a bunch lately miniatures agnostic games um think of zona alpha when i talk about zona alpha that's miniatures agnostic games like star breach which i enjoy planet 28 that kind of stuff frost grave is kind of miniatures agnostic there are miniatures you can buy for it but it's you know but there's also you could use whatever you want now the misconception i think and this is where the some people think that when you are talking about a miniatures agnostic game what you're saying is oh well with this game you can use whatever miniatures you want so you don't have to use the stuff made by the big guys you can go and get over whatever you want and the the person in the video was like well technically you can do that with any game you can play 40k with you know whatever miniatures you want you could push around pennies and

12:05 say nope that's a that's a whatever that's a that's a necron and this is a guardsman or whatever you could do that certainly you can do that with any tabletop miniature war gaming that's kind of one of the reasons especially when you're playing at home like i mentioned in the other one you can do whatever you want you can follow the rules any way you want you cannot follow the rules any way you want as long as you and your opponent are on the same team great miniatures agnostic really doesn't have anything to do with the miniatures that's the trick it's a little bit of a misnomer but it's what we as a group seem to have settled upon miniatures agnostic if anything is almost kind of like a warning which is not necessarily the greatest of all possible marketing ploys when you're trying to you know make a genre and categorize a particular type of tabletop war game but you know here we are what miniatures agnostic means is this rule set doesn't have any attached miniatures so you're going to have to come up with your own miniatures whether they are miniatures you own whether they're miniatures that you've always wanted to buy but you never had a game to play with them now you can stuff you're going to 3d print stuff you're going to kit bash miniatures agnostic is not the point of this game is that there's no miniatures for it it's again instead just an indicator to say if you want to play this game you'll have to come up with your own miniatures because there's not just a line that you can buy you know next to the rule book on the shelf at the store when you play 40k or age of sigmar or lots and lots of other games they're like cool here's the book here's the miniatures knock yourself out but smaller companies are generally like there's lots of miniatures out there we don't need to make miniatures or we it's

13:36 very expensive to make miniatures whatever the deal is they just want to make a fun rule set miniatures agnostic games are about the rules they're not about the story they're not about the miniatures they're more about the rules the reason that i like to play the miniatures agnostic games that i like to play is because i like those rule sets better than i like 40k better than i like a lot of other games honestly i'm not a big fan of 40k these days because even though you know i'm sure the rule set's getting better and better eighth was better than seventh and i some people think that ninth is better than eighth or whatever and there's all kinds of opinions my opinion is i still kind of hate the activation scheme where basically we decide at the beginning of the game you roll off to see who wins and then you kind of go from there i just don't dig that i like things to be a little bit more back and forth which is why i like age of sigmar better but if i'm really interested in something it's going to be probably war cry or it's going to be kill team within games workshop because they're not giant army games and they're also more interesting at least as far as the actual activation scheme is concerned and other parts of the rules as well that i dig but there's a lot of other games out there that have really interesting activation systems and an interesting campaign system and all that kind of stuff there may not be hundreds of books you know published about them you know novels and things like that there's not 50 years of story or whatever all that kind of stuff there's not you know hundreds and hundreds of pieces of artwork but i can kind of come up with that in my head you know there's different people who are like i the story and the miniatures are the most important the the whatever the

15:07 mechanics it's fine i mean i like i gotta have good mechanics and i'll make up the rest so that's really what miniatures agnostic means it doesn't mean ha ha you can put one over on the man and play with whatever miniatures you want because you can do that with any game frankly if you want to there's nothing stopping you the police aren't going to come but what it's telling you when you hear that the game is miniatures and agnostic is it's just a book probably or a pdf or something like that and you're just going to get what you get and then you get to um or have to depending on how you look at it come up with the miniatures so i hope this uh helped to answer a couple of questions for you if you know these things were questions that you had or maybe you didn't even know that you didn't know and and you know now you know um if you've got any other questions about tabletop wargaming whether it's the hobby portion the painting in the building or the more gaming stuff um you know drop them below and if i can't answer maybe somebody else in the comments can hmm