Some WEIRD OPINIONS About Wargaming

in this video I share four weird opinions that I have about wargaming why I have them and why you might have them as well I keep a big list of video topics on my phone so if I ever have an actual good idea I can put it in there immediately my memory has always been pretty lousy so if I don't type it into my phone right away I'll lose that idea I generally go through that list when it's time to start figuring out a new video for the week and I was doing that recently when I noticed that kind of a bunch of those ideas I guess you would call them uh they weren't really a whole video's worth probably right you know but they all had one thing in common they were all perhaps a bit controversial I've never meant for the ideas that I talk about on this channel to be controversial for the sake of being controversial but you know if you love a hobby like I love TableTop wargaming and the Miniatures hobby then you have a tendency to think about it a lot like when you're driving somewhere or you're taking a shower or you know whatever you think about the things that you like and the things that you don't and then you kind of think about why you like the things that you do and you gain opinions and stuff and sometimes your ideas and opinions fall in line with most of the rest of the fans of the Hobby and sometimes your opinions are weird and that's you know okay reasonable people can have differing opinions about wargaming it's just a game so I'm going to run through these kind of four ideas these four opinions of mine about war gaming and uh as it turns out you may or may not agree I feel like there may be a little bit more disagreement than agreement but I'm also frequently wrong about stuff like that the idea is to to make you the viewer think more about your hobby opinions and why you have those opinions sometimes we hold opinions that we get from others and we just assume that well we must feel the same way but upon actually sitting and thinking about it really thinking we might find that we actually believe differently okay first one a Miniatures war game that's played on a hex map or a grid map with no actual 3D terrain is actually a board game or maybe uh a Gateway game at best I've talked about Gateway Games in the past Pacha and they're basically games that help bring kind of board gamers into war gaming right kind of a bridge between if you will I used to see uh Warhammer underworlds as a pretty good Gateway game or zombicide was also a pretty good one as well both had minis but they also had like hex's or grids and there was no 3D terrain and all that kind of of stuff for me 3D terrain is kind of important I think I probably like really first noticed this at Gen Con years and years ago with battle teac I'd stand over there by the Catalyst kind of you know gaming area uh in the gamer Hall and watch people playing big games of the you know venerable Mech property and they just have a bunch of Macs on this huge hex board and there wouldn't be anything else on there right like sure like the hills and the elevation and the forests and stuff like that would be marked on the board but it was still just actually flat this is why I prefer Alpha strike from BattleTech there's no hex map if you don't want to you can play it with a hex map if you want to and it's also designed for 3D terrain the starter box even comes with cardboard buildings and trees is it just a case of semantics perhaps but for me the the better the terrain and the board the better the immersion and tabletop wargaming is all about immersion and how things look in my mind the game rules are important as well you know but but without the craft of it Hills trees ruins scatter terrain and all that kind of stuff then it's just kind of a game on a board to me a board game right and I've never really been into board games my wife and our friends will tell you here's another opinion robust lore isn't needed for a Miniatures game as it turns out nearly no lore is actually needed for a Miniatures war game case in point one of my favorite war games is space weirdos it has no lore except for the name space weirdos this implies that like the game is sci-fi based cuz you know space and you come up with whatever kind of rag tag group of weirdos that you want also I think that the the excellent cover art does kind of some heavy lifting for the lore to a degree but you get to make up whatever head Cannon you'd like and that's better than lore as far as I'm concerned now can lore sell a game absolutely of course compelling lore is one of the main reasons that Warhammer games continue to do as well as they do many many people love the lore and it keeps them buying and playing the game and if they don't play the tabletop game then they might play the video games that are you licensed out to different companies and all that kind of stuff and if people don't play those they probably read the books which are published through black Library also owned you know by by Warhammer and then they talk about them online and then they make memes and then they cosplay and like all that kind of stuff it's an incredibly effective marketing tool but it's not a requirement and frankly it doesn't really work for smaller Indie Games I find that if a small Indie Skirmish game has like 20 or 30 pages of lore at the beginning of the book I find myself wondering if maybe the person creating it would have been better served to just write a novel instead of trying to design a game right like personally with small Miniatures agnostic games I would rather come up with the lore for my small gang in my head I I don't want to be fenced in with the lore if I want to enjoy a cool story then I guess I'd just rather read a book or watch a movie here's another one there should be two versions of Warhammer 40K and two versions of agis Sigmar for each game there should be a version for tournament play and then there should also be a version that's fun gentle ribbing aside I I understand that there's narrative play and there's match play already available in both games and that those two versions are kind of kind of what I'm talking about here sort of however they're generally the same rule set and more so they're usually perceived as the same rule set so the more narrative style players get kind of lumped in with the tournament folk I did a video last week about some of the things that are driving people away from wargaming pachow and uh one of these main things that people cited in the comments over and over again was the constant rules changes for 40K and age of Sigmar ostensibly the rules changes are to sort of try and kind of balance the game and the tournament scene is where that data comes from watching the stats and the wins and losses of dozens if not hundreds of tournaments each weekend all across the globe and the tournament scene is generally where the desire for more balance comes from as well but if the narrative version of the rules was considerably simpler fewer tactics cards fewer strategems no rules changes every 3 months I mean they come up with a new version of the rules every 3 years that should probably be good enough for most narrative players right then you know all of that might help to keep more people in the Warhammer ecosystem if that's what they're looking for which is tournament mode for the hardcore with all the updates and the balancing and the stuff that we see now and then also a more chill version with fewer rules and no big changes until next Edition for the other folks plus they could sell more books Lord knows that they'd love that right in my opinion The Narrative versions should also fully be available free online not just like the core rules portion of the book but the whole shoot and match so that narrative people who you know love hard copy uh versions of the books can still buy a fancy book but other folks who prefer free digital rules will still get in there as well and get access to everything right to many people that are more interested in narrative style play the constant search for balance doesn't really make for a fun game rule set feeling comfortable with stable rules and enjoying themselves is what they want lastly I'll leave you with this round bases are better looking than Square bases but integrated bases those weirdly shaped bits of ground between the Mini's feet usually on some companies metal Miniatures but sometimes they're also on resin ones and even plastic as well um those are the worst those are if absolutely by far the worst they're technically like there to help the miniature stand up without the need for a round or a square base but they're kind of generally pretty thin and then the mini has a tendency to either tip forwards or tip backwards right the integrated base is starting to become a bit of an endangered species thankfully and that's actually a good thing in my mind the worst part of the integrated bases comes from when you want to put the model on an actual useful round base or you know square base I guess if that's what you're into because then you either need to cut away the weird terrain snowboard that they're standing on and that can be really a pain if the model is metal uh or you have to like put a lot of basing texture over the integrated base to sort of hide it and then your model kind of looks like it's standing on a tiny burial mound Maybe like something you know for sensient mice or or or giant ants I'm not sure neither way is good so for good or for ill those are my four weird opinions about wargaming you might agree with me which might make you a bit weird too it's okay you know or maybe you haven't really thought about it and now that you're thinking about it you agree with me or perhaps you disagree either way the point is to make you think think about what you actually like dislike in wargaming and maybe that'll help you to focus more on the things you enjoy and less on the things that you don't if you really think about things and not just kind of agree with people you know like me online or people at the shop you win so what do you think about my weird wargaming opinions do you agree disagree do you actually like those integrated bases it's very strange anyway let us all know down in the comments below and drop your own weird wargaming IDE ideas down there as well opinions You' got about wargaming that you think me you know other people don't think this way and I'm going to try to explain my my point of view on your way down there of course uh show your opinion about this video via the depress mation of the like button it helps the video and the channel to reach more people and to hopefully create more war Gamers if you'd like to see more videos from this channel every single week then hit the Subscribe button down there as well it's free thanks for watching [Music] I [Music] oh [Music] [Music]