V for Vondetta

Oi! This is the final week of the HoP Idol contest over at the ol' House of Paincakes: last week I managed to creep over the horizon by the skin of me wossnames and a similar performance this week will spell triumph, readership, modest acclaim and a cessation of interruptions to your regularly scheduled bloggery.

 

VOTE FOR VON

I know, I know, I've been neglecting you.  I've spent the last couple of months actually, y'know, being Frugal.  It's the not having any money that does it.  Most of the hobby I've done has been other people's, for money, although I did find the time for a quick Warmachine tournament and I do have a NEW PROJECT on the go too.  Incidentally, if you happen to have some models that you want painted and can't be bothered with doing yourself, drop me a line here or via GAME OVER and we'll have a chat.  I'm no Marike Reimer, admittedly (she's better looking), but I'm cheap, quick and tabletop quality.

Anyway.

I'm doing a thing, over at the House of Paincakes blog network, sort of a contest thing where the winner gets a weekly series in front of a larger readership than I have ever dreamed of amassing.  Have been for a while now.  Didn't want to talk about it on this blog because Posting About Blogging is something I try not to do.  Content uber alles, and all that.

On the other hand, failure to leverage available resources in a competitive endeavour is the mark of a nebbish who shouldn't have signed up in the first place.  And I do have a credible shot at winning, which was... unexpected.

AND, AND AND AND, if I win, I'll never write a post about 40K.  Everyone bar Loquacious on the ol' HoP does that, as do most of the blogs on the roll, and it's getting boring.  I won't cheat and do Warmahordes either.  Vote for me, and be guaranteed a shot of something different every week - might be WFB, a historical, a Specialist Game, an RPG, a board game, a book review, something that isn't 40K.  A vote for Von is a vote for diversity - and that's not something this straight white able-bodied British bloke ever thought he'd be able to say with a straight face.

So I suppose you should pop over to the International House of Paincakes and vote for me in this week's HoP Idol, so I can say more things like this, this,  this, and this.  No SPESS MAHREENS, ever.  Promise.

Frugalnomics: Increasing Cost, Decreasing Value

Price rises, price rises, all I seem to hear about these days is price rises!  Personally I think everything's more expensive these days, but Dethtron (first and second links) has a point when he establishes that GW's prices are in fact behind the rate of inflation (whether they were marked up to the point of lunacy to begin with is perhaps another matter).  Still, that's not what I'm here to bore you about today.

I have, in the past, been heard to discuss the notions of cost and value; that having low point cost kits and making them both essential to building an effective force and expensive to purchase in terms of real money is the gaming company's road to profitability.  Dethtron has been caught remarking that you don't want your ubiquitous and essentially mandatory METAL BAWKSES, included merely to transport models across the board and provide an additional layer of insulation against the rain of hot lead/laser/microwave death outside, to eat up huge chunks of your army's points that you could be spending on cool stuff.  I say that I prefer spending my money on transport vehicles that contribute something else to the game, hence my love of anything Fast with good guns that can move and still shoot, Land Raiders and even, at a pinch, the Ork Battlewagon, but that's still not the point that I'm trying to make here.

My point is that price increases are only half of the way that gaming companies can, if they so wish, diddle and fiddle you out of your hard-earned wonga.  The other way they get you is by devaluing what you already own.  We are familiar, I hope, with the various justifications for new editions that invalidate your previous rulebook purchases; some of these are more valid than others but I think that by the time you're on, say, the third edition of a game you're either a bad designer or a deliberately poor designer trying to set up pendulum swings and/or release bloat for business reasons (which, as I keep saying but will continue to restate every time lest I be considered a ninny, is a valid business model and not something unethical and vile that it's worth starting a protest march over.  Go on the ones to preserve teachers' pensions instead and at least do me a favour while you're there...).

What some of us are perhaps less familiar with is the really obvious under-your-nose phenomenon that I never see emerging from discussions of How Things Were Better Value In The Mid-Nineties.  Stuff was worth more then.  When I started playing, a Space Marine squad cost 300 points for ten lads before any upgrades.  Buy them a Veteran Sergeant with weapons and wargear, special weapons and a transport and you'd be running something in excess of 400.  With 1500 points established as the Holy Grail of game size, that means an 'army' might comprise three of those squads, the mandatory Captain and, I don't know, a Chief Librarian or a couple of Predators or a Bike Squadron (the New Hot Sexy Release during the month I started playing, sixteen years ago...) or something. 

Third edition 40K slashed the points value of that squad - and it's interesting that we talk about 'points value' as often as we do 'points cost', don't you think? - in half while continuing to present 1500 points as the 'standard' game size.  Suddenly you 'need' twice as many d00dz in order to roll up to your games night, unless you're the sort of person who asks insightful questions like "what's so special about 1500 points anyway?"  The later editions of 40K have been nudging the game toward a sweet spot closer to 2000 while continuing to gently nudge point costs (Ork Boyz dropping from 10 to 8 or 9 to 6 over the course of three Codices, anyone?) to the point where your old stuff, even if still playable, won't amount to what people are conditioned to expect.

Now, lest I be accused of favouritism here, let's take a swing at a couple of other companies.  Privateer Press managed to pull off the double whammy when they released Warmahordes Mark II, changing the entire points system in order to revalue pieces and change the expectations about what constituted a game.  Alas, rummage as I might I can't find any of my Mark I lists anywhere to run an Edifying Comparison, but there was a lot of effort sunk into creating a formula that would unpick exactly how the points costs and values converted between the two systems, and it was at first rather tricky to establish how much you now had and whether you'd been played like a stringed instrument or not - which, a cynic would argue, is what they wanted.  Wyrd, meanwhile, set out with two different game sizes and, while I don't follow the Malifaux gossip too closely, I'd npt be surprised if their first expansion brought with it an emphasis on the larger of them.  Changing costs is only half the game; sometimes companies change the value of what you own as well.

Some Frugal Alternatives To Popular Spendy Games

Enough, I say!  Enough!

I wrote a post.  It was about increasing prices and decreasing points values and the two-way gouge perpetrated by miniature wargame companies.  It wasn't bad.  I'm just sick to the back teeth of doing nothing but advise people on how to negotiate with these big bad corporate entities, how to play the popular games without being played for fools.  It's possible to play that game and win, but a better way to win is to not play.  With that in mind, here are some of the free or cheap things I've been painstakingly hoarding, in waiting for the day when I can persuade people to play them and not something you buy in the shops.

War Games

Hordes and Heroes, by Kallistra, is a 10mm fantasy game revolving around abstract units made of several models on a single base.  It uses a very clear, very clinical hex terrain system, which is probably the clearest set of rules I've seen for terrain pieces in a long while, but is perhaps incompatible with your existing terrain collection unless you're prepared to do a bit of work or invest in Kallistra's proprietary terrain sets.

This is why I'm also going to recommend Hordes of the Things, by the Wargames Research Group.  It's currently out of print (I bought one of the last paper copies, it would seem) but the WRG have been good enough to provide a download of the current edition as a stop-gap until they can bring it out again  (and thanks to arabianknight for pointing that out!).  Hordes of the Things is another very tight rules set with the advantage of working in a variety of different scales - the measurement distances and number of models that qualify as a 'unit' changes, but the actual mechanics don't.  Both games use generic unit types that are wide open to choice regarding which manufacturer's miniatures you use, and both have a historical variant (Hordes of the Things is in essence a clone of major historical system De Bellis Antiquitatis, also by the W.R.G., with rules for dragons, gods and magicians bolted on) if that's more your bag than outrageous fantasy.

On the skirmish side of things, allow me to big up Dave King's Skulldred.  Skulldred is currently in beta testing and has been for some time, largely because Dave wants it pretty much as tight as he can make it when it does finally go to a commercial release.  At the moment, it's free to download, and has the advantage of being open to use any set of miniatures in the same scale (although, as is my way, I recommend 28-32mm for anything where individuals matter and 10-15mm for anything that's more about regiments).  You'll need to perform some jiggery-pokery with dice, either using the wraparound template Dave provides or investing in some blank d6s to make your own.  Or you could use a look-up table, but that'll get a bit wearisome if you have to do it for every roll.

Roleplaying Games

Swords and Wizardry is a free-to-download open-source 'retro-clone' of several early editions of Dungeons and Dragons rolled together (I confess to not being up on the game's early history to the point where I can tell you what's been rolled into it; furthermore, I confess to not caring).  The point is that it can do pretty much whatever you want to do with Dungeons and Dragons - scale up, scale down, convert settings, make your own setting, imitate Basic, Advanced or Old Dungeons and Dragons - and it doesn't cost anything or come with the promise of splatbooks ranging out into infinity.

If you find Marxist taxonomies of characters and rolling tons of dice to be faintly distasteful, meanwhile, allow me to point you in the vague direction of Atomic Sock Monkey Press and their excellent free-to-download Prose Descriptive Quality system for diceless roleplaying.  They also make a few settings for that system to be used in which, while technically costing money, come with enough free downloads for you to bodge your way through it with a bit of imagination (and let's face it, you'd need at least a bit of imagination to play a diceless RPG).

Computer Games

Battle for Wesnoth!  It's free, it'll run on damn near anything, and it's a charmingly addictive hex-based turn-based fantasy strategy game.  I recommend Wesnoth doubly because of an active user base that's forever churning out new single-player campaigns and offering multiplayer if that's your thing.  The only bad thing I have to say about it is that large battles with three or more computer players get pretty boring; you can skip the computer players' turns but then you'll start yours with half your units missing and no idea what killed them or what to avoid when you save and reload - which you'll be doing a lot, since the AI is intelligent enough to go after things that you don't want to die and very, very cut-throat in its application of attack probabilities.

Torchlight is in essence a Diablo clone.  You remember Diablo.  It was a one-armed bandit thinly disguised as a fantasy dungeon crawl game where you hit monsters to see what loot fell out of them.  It was single player World of Warcraft, in essence, and it was mindlessly addictive.  Torchlight did not set my world on fire, but the demo's free, the game's cheap, and it even looks suitably old-school.  I've just been spoiled for single-player games by the chat-to-other-players aspects of MUMORPEGGERS, I think.

Guild Wars is one of those MUMMORPEGGER things, only it isn't subscription-based: you buy it, you play it, and the only money you need to spend is on expansion packs if you want to play through those.  Looks like World of Warcraft with more sophisticated graphics and less bad pop-culture jokes.  The former stopped me from really getting into it, as there was enough lag to break any sense of immersion or engagement before it really had the chance to develop, and I get the impression that it's a slow-burner anyway.  Not designed to addict with quite the same cunning and effectiveness as World of Warcraft - definitely more of a make-your-own-fun kind of game that relies on you interacting with other players in some meaningful way, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Champions Online is closer to WoW in terms of its early-game-hook design, although operating in a different genre, and is nominally free to play, although the free version is so cut-down that you'll probably end up spending some real money to unlock some options for yourself.  Still no subscription fees, though.

Given my druthers, I would play all of these and not their more expensive counterparts, but the trouble with games and gamers is that they are in essence social pastimes and if you want to share other people's play time you often end up playing what they play.  I can sit up here in my Frugal castle with my sense of self-satsifaction and full wallet but that's piss all use if everyone I know wants to play Pathfinder.  That said, I still want to fly the flag for alternative games; they are cheaper than what people already play, they are often more flexible and freeform and imaginative than what people already play, and they are probably every bit as much fun as what people already play.  I'd know, if I could persuade people to play them.

Warmachine On The Cheap

A while ago now, arabianknight posted about his proxy Trenchers for Warmachine, and made a convincing case for the act of proxying the more generic-looking miniatures in a Warmahordes army.

Now, Warmahordes is my tournament game, insofar as I have one at all, and so the decision is largely made for me; whatever I want to take to an Official Event (TM) more or less has to be Official Miniatures (TM) as I can't rely on the discretion of the tournament organiser being in my favour.  Nevertheless, I understand the case for proxying and accept that if you're never going to play in an environment where officialdom matters, th'art free to do as thou wilt.

Aleister Crowley approves of proxying.
No wonder he's the Wickedest Man in the World.

This morning, I stumbled upon an idea for expanding a Warmahordes collection past the initial investment that seems to dovetail well with the proxy practice.  I'll link to it in a moment, but first I want to brief the non-Warmahordes readership about a few truths.  Those groin-yards among you who already know their Slaughterhousers from their Doom Reavers can feel free to skip a paragraph.

Warmahordes revolves around the one figure at the centre of your army; the warlock or warcaster.  Change that, and keep the rest of your army list the same, and you change the way the whole army list plays.  The pieces still do what they do, but they're supported differently and often take on different strategic and tactical roles (what was once a line-breaking destroyer of meat and metal alike can become a disposable beatstick, a screening piece or a tough objective taker, depending on context).  The game also incorporates a variety of mercenary troops which can either join armies from one or more other factions or do their own thing as 'contract' or 'pact' forces with their own agendas.  The nature of mercenaries is such that, barring a few excellent pieces, they tend to appear in armies of their own kind; it's very rare that you'll see a faction army including more than one or two mercenaries.


Which is odd, as Raptor of Spite for the Unblighted pointed out this morning.  Building a solid core of generic mercenaries or minions and then adding faction pieces - mainly warcasters/warlocks and the warjacks/warbeasts that they control - to that affords a similar kind of variety to the change-your-warcaster-change-your-army approach described above, just on a slightly grander scale.  It occurs to me that proxying that core of generic mercenaries and then adding small faction battlegroups - possibly even the discounted starter boxes, which tend to include something for free - would result in a satisfactory-if-not-brilliant Warmahordes army, certainly good enough to just play the game.


Warmachine probably affords the best opportunities for this, given the greater variety of mercenary troop types available to the steam-powered factions, and the fairly generic nature of those troops (there's not much demand for giant crocodile men or pig-headed rifle-blokes, you see, so cheap ranges are harder to find).  Units of dwarfs with whacking great hammers or rifles plus tower shields aren't that hard to come by; neither are armoured infantry with polearms or firearms, matching cavalry and a mounted officer; and while the specific characters belonging to Privateer's proprietary fantasy species might be a bit tricky, pirates with cutlasses, pistols and rifles, plus a few gentlemanly character-solo-ish types are less so.  Build a core of faux-Rhulfolk, Steelheads or Privateers, with all the rules synergies that having broadly the same sort of stuff implies, and then add the starter battlegroups to create up to six different armies (depending on whether you can get hold of the old Mercenary starter sets or not) sharing a core of cheap proxied troops.

Things might not match up perfectly in aesthetic terms and you'll get Privateer fanboys and tournament players looking at you strangely, but you can laugh them off as you go to sleep on your pile of scrupulously saved money.  Except me.  Don't laugh me off.  I did tell you how to do this, after all.  Just wish I'd thought of it first...


ADDITIONAL: for those who care about the viability of this approach in terms of rules, Raptor is currently running a faction-by-faction breakdown of the various mercenary options available.  Go and have a look.

EXPO-say: Von's Frugal Picks from the UK Games Expo

There's nothing quite like attending a gaming convention with no money to sharpen the old critical faculties and make you consider the value of the beautiful, shiny objects being paraded about before your eyes.  I'd recommend it to anyone.  Leave your wallet at home.  Take your ticket and a packed lunch.  Just look at things and think about them.  You might notice, as I did, that many contemporary RPGs are needlessly bloated behemoths that attempt to meld the best of four or more existing systems and disguise the stitches with glorious full-colour and glossy paper; you might notice that those very nice lizard-persons are glorious but at £10 for two owning sufficient numbers of them to use them in any sensible context is ludicrous; you might play and discuss the hot new skirmish game in town and finally work out how the design principles generate sales past the buy-in.  I will talk about all of these things later in my usual meta-contexty way but first I want to talk about the bargains that you might find and endorse at such an Exposition, because I told these lovely people that I would.

You might, at this hypothetical event, have a nice chat with the lads from Arkenstone Publishing, whose names are too Finnish for me to remember or spell (sorry chaps) and who are pimping out the Nordic approach to Old School Roleplaying and the rather curious Inquisitio, which reminds me of the party game Werewolf, complicated by the idea that everyone is guilty of something and some amount of guilt will come out.  They described the game as 'a race to not lose'; it sounds like it requires a lot of concentrating but apparently it's possible to play fairly randomly without paying much attention and still end up somewhere in the middle.

You might encounter the excitable Benjamin Dale of Tied to a Kite Games, who produce the marvellous old-school D&D clone Blackswords and Bucklers, which strips out the hippy fantasy nonsense and replaces it with a grubby, low-fantasy Elizabethan English vibe that's pitched halfway between Call of Cthulhu and Blackadder.  The core rules are fifty clean, accessible pages with a heavy emphasis on making the details up as you go along and not burdening the system with unnecessary personalising-my-special-snowflake cruft - the first of a range of supplements adding further classes and mechanics (usually one new class and one new mechanic per book, delivered in detail) is already out - and did I mention it's a fiver?  Five quid for a roleplaying game that won't put your back out.  Bargain.

On the subject of bargains, they also make a came called Numerix, an 'abstract chance strategy' game that reminds me of Go with dice.  It's easier to play than to explain and an explanation is helped by a picture of the board, thus:

Action shot!

Basically, the dice give you three options in the placement and moving of pieces (either place one piece on a square with that number, or move an existing piece into an adjacent square with that number).  It's up to you which of those options you take, and the objective is to enfold the other player's pieces on three sides to remove them from play.  There's a lot of control over what looks like a very random mechanic and the minimal number of pieces means it should be fairly quick to play.  Again, it's very minimalist, without any unnecessary context of the sort that gets Coop so agitated and drives up the cost of everything with the need for pictures and stories and suchlike woven around it.  The wooden one is a cautious £16, the laminated card and plastic one is a trifling £2.10!  Lovely.

In the act of endorsing Tied to a Kite, you might be noticed by Oliver Piotrowski of Table Warfare, who present themselves as the ultimate frugal miniature manufacturer.  After a good whinge about How Those Other Companies Think They Can Get Away With This, the chaps might present you with the notion of a free rules system with an open-ended time travel narrative that allows more or less any miniature or terrain to be slotted in around the Table Warfare factions.

Now with 100% more reflections of your intrepid reporter!

They also make some rather nice fantasy figures which picked up the Best New Miniatures award, and well deserved it is too.  Photographing them was a bit hard what with all those mirrors and Mr. Flash not being my friend, but I did my best.

Trust me, they're pretty.

Oh, and they price the whole lot at around £2 per infantryman and sell them in single blisters rather than the 'buy one for lots or buy more than you want' straitjacketing engaged in by other firms.  It's a small range but it's definitely one to keep your eye on.  Again, endorsed heartily.

You might, finally, pass by the Mantic Games stand and see Jake Thornton, author of Dwarf King's Hold, doing demos and explaining the future for what looked at first like a rather closeted little game.  I like the idea of Dwarf King's Hold, but I frequently find myself needing games for more than two players; while team play seems like a viable option, it's always nice to have a sense of ownership over what your little mens are doing.  Fortunately, it seems that Mr. Thornton agrees; after a similar start-up set involving Orcs and Elves, he has plans for a pseudo-roleplaying approach with named heroes and a multiplayer option involving multiple factions, all on the same dungeon-tile-based grid - part Warhammer Quest and part Song of Blades and Heroes or similar skirmish endeavour, it would seem.  Interesting stuff.  At £35 it's a little steep for a board game, and I'm not sure about replayability with six fairly tight scenarios and not much apparent randomly generated fun to be had, but I'd be interested to see how it develops and how it might synchronise with other Mantic releases (for instance, it could top up the armies from Mhorgoth's Revenge, and adding another game to your collection and adding miniatures to your armies with one purchase seems like it might have some merit).

Also, the 3:1 scale demo figures Mantic take to shows are fit.

Termite Art, Branded Materials, and DIY in the hobby

Every so often, my blogging worlds (all this nonsense and Doctor Who fandom, in case you're keeping score) collide.  It's been a while since the last one, in which I was chattering about the Doctor Who roleplaying game, and so this has probably been a bit overdue.

Who pundit Lawrence Miles has (unless he's deleted it, as is his wont from time to time) been pontificating of late about brands, making things, and TV spinoffs.  Specifically, the rather cool Deadly Art.

But Deadly 60 has its own pilot-fish programme, Deadly Art. This is the latest and most carnivorous offshoot of the Take Hart format (or Art Attack, if you're dead common), and you can probably see how it all fits together. We get a precis of the accompaying Deadly 60, and then two artists in the studio - usually young women, y'know, like with Tony Hart - make A GIGANTIC SODDING PRAYING MANTIS WITH GLOWING EYES OUT OF SCRAP METAL. Only pausing to run off a smaller version out of the sort of thing you might find, ooh, in your bins.

I mention this less to rattle on about children's TV and more to pad the entry while explaining the term 'Termite Art'.  Y'see, Miles goes on to make an Interesting Remark:

If the Termite Art version of television provokes the viewer into going outside and poking around to see what's there (and I still hold that this is what most good telly does, especially children's telly), then this is more like siege conditions. Branding always closes the gates. This is your product, you don't need anything else.

Now, you can probably sense where I'm going with this.  Back when I was a lad, there was a lot of the miniature wargaming hobby that one was largely encouraged to Do For Oneself.  Sure, Citadel made trees (they weren't very good) and produced their own paintbrushes and paints and clippers and stuff, but there was never a particular drive for everything to be Official.  White Dwarf ran frequent articles on how to make modular chipboard battlefields, with terrain crafted from of bits of toilet and the ridiculous amount of white packing material that their larger kits came in, and they showed this stuff in battle reports; it was part of the Right Way to do the Hobby, and it was mostly pretty damn cheap.  Names were dropped in painting articles - Humbrol, Tamiya, Airfix - and there was a culture of crossover and usage between manufacturers.  Furthermore, it meant there were relations, however tenuous, between my hobby and the sort of shops my grandfather loved to visit.  The hobby sent me off into the big wide world looking for stuff to do things with (or things to do stuff with, if that's what you prefer).

Nowadays, of course, there's a Citadel-branded everything, and a definition of the Games Workshop Hobby that actively avoids mention of any other kind of Hobby.  The terrain you see in White Dwarf these days is exclusively the stuff you can buy in kit form in your local GW.  Mention of other manufacturers' paints and tools and miniatures and goodness knows what else is strictly off-limits.  I'm going to be fair here and point out that Privateer Press tried to go this way as well - Formula P3 paints, their own brushes and tools and even brass wire for pinning, not to mention the ill-fated Warmachine terrain kits - that Battlefront makes its own proprietary terrain kits as well, and that every bloody gaming company ever does it with dice, templates, tape measures and other accessories to play.

This saddens me, and it does so beyond the staggering expense of the stuff (this blasted thing is a particular offender).  I like to keep the gates open and to have a steady flow of people outwards as well as in.  I like initiative, and re-use, and re-cycling.  I like putting things to strange new purposes.  I don't like having the Official Product and being told that I don't need anything else.  Especially not when it's four times the effective price of what I've come up with.

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Gaming Company

Okay, not fifty, but I'm sure Paul and I can manage a few.

Imagine, for a moment, that you're a gamer.  Shouldn't be too hard; you're reading this.  Now imagine that you buy most of your gaming gear from one company, and that that company isn't necessarily offering the value for money you'd expect.  Hopefully, you don't want to indicate support for their decisions by continuing to spend money on their products (we've already discussed how that works) but you still want to play their games.  I have a few suggestions in that line.

1. Know what you want.  What's your actual problem with the company?  Can you continue to play their games in good conscience, or is your seething righteous fury at the injustice they perpetrate too much?  What is it about their games that makes you want to keep playing them?  Is it story, scale, mechanics, funky miniatures, funky gamers, gamer funk or simple habit and ignorance of the alternatives?  You need to know why you're doing or not doing things before you can make an informed decision about whether or not to keep doing them.  If you like sword and sorcery skirmish games, do you really need that huge army of flying space tanks?
2. Stop and take stock.  What do you own?  What is built and ready to go; what has been sitting in a box since New Hot Sexy Release Day and never looked at since; what can work with what at a pinch and what's mutually exclusive?  Work out what you've got, what you can do with it, and how much work and expense it would take to do something with it if you need to make an investment.  I tend to find the people with the biggest dead lead piles and collections of mouldering, dusty sourcebooks are the people who only buy from one company but have lots of projects going on within that - who buy Company X's complete new release every time but never really get very far with it before picking up the next one.  The downside here is that all those projects require ongoing investment, and if you're suddenly unable or unwilling to continue making that investment, you have a pewter mountain on your hands that, in many cases, would embarrass the European Union.
3. Diversify.  Once you know what you're most likely to continue using, sell the rest.  Go on.  Get rid of it.  Use those resources to explore new games and new environments, to boldly go where no nerd has gone before... or at least where you've not gone before.  You're not going to dissassociate yourself from the company if you have no idea what the competition has to offer.
4. Use the secondary market, Luke.  Unless your name's not Luke (metaphorically speaking, that means 'unless you have some pressing need for as-new material', like a wargamer who likes to kitbash and thus won't be as keen on assembled and painted kits), the secondary market is your friend; it enables you to complete and extend projects without directly supporting the company with your own money.  This is, of course, psychological double-talk to an extent - that eBay bargain has, at some point, been purchased from the company who made it, and the money you spend on it will like as not find its way back to them, so this isn't one for the ideologues who've decided that the company is run by Satan and all his little wizards.  If your problem is simply "man, I can't afford the new Cyber-Knights, they are too spendy at umpty-seven pounds for two, but I still really like Star Pogrom and what it's about", you'll probably be more comfortable with this.
5. Avoid prescriptive environments.  Many companies have officially designated spaces in which they control what can and cannot be used there, whether it's "Dungeon Bash 8.4 is the only edition that's on sale at the event, therefore the only edition that can be used here, and official dice, character sheets, measuring implements, status tokens, floorplans and pencil shavings are a requirement" or "you must use branded Nerd Emporium paints, brushes, glues, pins, chewing gum and wishful thinking to build your Cyber-Knights in the Nerd Emporium".  Fie on this nonsense, says I.  Fie on it!  Such policies are nearly always designed to burden the consumer with expensive and unwanted purchases - get out of the environments that force those on you and find or create an environment where you're allowed to do things your own way, substituting in cheaper equivalent miniatures, homebrewed rather than supplemental rules, and materials that don't cost the Earth.
6. Disengage from what you've left.  Try not to get excited about Sexy Hot New Release Day for a game you don't play any more.  Don't let yourself be seduced back in.  Remind yourself why you quit - it doesn't matter how pretty that new book/miniature/dice block/paint-pot/staff member is if it doesn't fix what drove you away in the first place.  Likewise, fight the urge to get into Internet arguments (or, goddess forbid, actual arguments) about how rubbish Dungeon Bash is compared to Castle Brawl, or how Nerd Emporium is secretly controlled by the New World Order.  You're still thinking about something you were supposed to be getting away from, and that's the sort of behaviour that will see you sucked right back in.

Yes, she's lovely, but that doesn't mean she isn't trying to sell you devil droppings in a blister pack.

 For those of you who are still reading and haven't slavishly followed the above link, it might be worth you pointing your browser toward this week's Gaming on a Budget, which has some excellent advice on avoiding hobby burnout and, possibly, avoiding the kind of conditions that lead to you needing this sort of advice in the first place.

Vonnington, Vonnington, where have you been?

Or, as they say in the old country, "'ere bey, where you bin?"

It's that time of year again: the time when actual gaming begins to edge out typing nonsense about gaming on the Internet.  Life on the miniatures front has slowed down somewhat of late, since I don't live anywhere near the Dice and Decks lads any more and have yet to rally the local Warmachine crowd around my banner (steps are being taken and I've been pleasantly surprised to find battle boxes hiding on various people's shelves around the town - now to get the wretched things onto the table!).

However, life in roleplaying has kicked up a gear, and with remarkable frugality too, as I'm currently playing a game I actually own nothing for.

via absoluteastronomy.com

See, the thing about roleplaying is that not everyone needs everything, if you catch my drift.  Most seasoned roleplayers possess dice in abundance (although recent events have led me to believe that I could do with another d20 or two).  If the gaming group has access to two or three core rulebooks and one copy of any supplements that are needed, that usually does the job.

via onceuponageek

This sort of thing is hardly a requirement just to play the game a couple of times a week, after all.

I recently parted with my hoard of No Quarter magazines, in accordance with certain sage wisdom that invites us to inquire whether we actually gain anything for our time and money.  Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I did at the time; the roleplaying content in No Quarter is generally of excellent quality and the terrain building articles are very inspirational, if unhelpfully US-centric in their materials listings and purchase advice.  However, the magazine is not endlessly re-readable, and hoarding paper copies as insurance against that One Day when the article might come in handy is somewhat cumbersome, especially when you move house as often as I do, so I've traded them all away (except for the two which cover new model types for Warmahordes - it's still cheaper to buy two magazines for the sake of two articles than to buy a whole new rulebook for the sake of four pages).  Before I passed them on to their new owner, though, I did take the liberty of scanning in the articles I was still interested in, just in case that One Day comes around.

Mo' like DUH-ngeon Tiles...

Today's crafty tip and fiddle from yer uncle Von is all to do with RPGs and maps.

Even for an armchair-theatre type like me, roleplaying sooner or later ends up generating the need for maps.  Now, necessity is the mother of invention, and consequently many RPG manufacturers have invented things for you to spend your money on in order to establish just how far into ur base the characters are, and how many d00dz still require killin.  Things like this.

Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty, but it a) costs money and b) only represents the one thing.  I am a) poor and b) inclined to run lots of different roleplaying games, in lots of different settings and with lots of different environments coming up in the space of one story, sometimes even in one session.

That's why I use one of these instead.

Oh, I admit it doesn't look as nice, but the thing is, I'm not limited with this.  I can choose to have a grid, or not to have a grid, can choose whether this blank white space is a dungeon, or a field, or a lava flow, or whatever I like.  If I'm feeling terribly artistic, I can even draw out multiple areas in different colours and use them to trigger events in play.  I also don't have to spend a fortune on graph paper.  I tend to whip it out for any particularly busy encounters and then put it away again, rather than tracking the entire course of an adventure on it, but in theory, smaller pieces could be used to track out quite a substantial area.

In the UK, Wilkinson's sell the board and a black pen for £2.  They also, for just over £4, do a larger board that's half whiteboard and half cork, allowing you to pin resources like world maps, interesting documents and other stimulating papery things onto, but since I can't fit that one in the Nerd Bag (of which more later), it's so far been a no-no.

Scorched earth? Send in the druids...

Another month, another radical shift of priorities.

A combination of real-life serious-business type stuff has necessitated a long, hard look at What I Own and What It's For, and most importantly, Whether I'm Using It.  This consideration has brought to light certain essential truths about what I play games with, and why.  The short version is that I've recently come to realise that getting back into WFB was a grave error, and so my Warriors of Chaos have been shown the door.

My Skorne have also gone - while I enjoyed playing them, I did not enjoy painting them, for reasons which have been explored previously. M'learned colleague Neal was good enough to take them off my hands, and since he enjoys uniform colourschemes and resilient, stand-up-and-fight forces more than me, I think he'll enjoy them.

The Chaos Warriors, who cost me £60 in three lots, have been sold off for £93 in two, thanks to the local Tale of X Gamers and an apparent high demand for cheap Beastmen on eBay (must be something to do with them being best in units of forty-odd and costing £15 for ten).  I did also part with a GW figure case in the process, but I've had years of loyal service out of it and see this as an opportunity to liberate myself from buying and cutting so much custom foam for the cases, and look into cheaper storage solutions for models not in the current away game force.  Admittedly some of that has gone on long-considered new Cryx toys, and a little more was eaten by postage and packing costs, but I've still turned a net £30 profit on the exchange.

The Skorne, meanwhile, were straight swapped, along with the case foam they live in and a pile of my old No Quarters - while an excellent mag, and improving all the time, it doesn't have infinite rereadability, and lugging them up and down the country every time I move house was becoming tiresome - for a Circle Orboros army, mint and untouched in its boxes.


Circle still fulfil my original goal of having a Hordes faction, they give me an alternative to Cryx that still plays fast and tricksy, the way I like, and they offer a much broader variety of 'looks' than the Skorne do, with great big hairy barbarians and armoured, uniformed paramilitaries and robed druids and big stone stompy things all sort of co-existing together and encouraging me to paint by offering me variety.  Oh, and they'll fit in with my terrain collection a lot better than the Skorne did, and allow me to use my neglected Nyss Hunters across two game systems, since they'll hire out to both my main factions.


As far as getting into a new force goes, acquiring a whole collection of stuff like this means that the limited-toolbox-at-the-start, which I talked about last time, is less of a factor, especially if the collection happens to include some known expensive/good stuff and the job-lot nature absorbs the cost of buying that on its own.  Its being unassembled and unpainted, from somebody else's hobby dead pile, where it's lain neglected for a good two and a half years, is a bonus, and trading it out for something they'll get more enjoyment out of than you will is even better.

So, monthly review: I've gotten rid of some belongings which were frustrating me, replaced them with stuff I'm more interested in and excited about, and I'm £30 up on the trading process, which covers March's bus-fare-club-entry-and-chip-run budget very nicely.

This time last year was when it all started to go wrong, of course, but this time I appear to be consolidating rather than expanding, and that's a good thing.  Almost all my hobbying has been self-financing, and I have a lot to be going along with, so the temptation to spend more money is offset by the 'in progress' pile.  So far, Von's Second Frugal Year is a proper bobby-dazzler.

"Why can't you just make do with what you've got?"

My grandmother's been asking me that for as long as I've been gaming, and in that decade and a half, I've never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.  Given that I've built Warriors of Chaos and Ork armies three times, and Undead, Dark Eldar and Chaos Space Marines twice each, with occasional dalliances off to the side, it's a valid question.  Why do I, and others, feel the need to swap all the time?

I blame Noel.  He hypnotises you into it.

Originally, I'd have said it was down to design limitations and boredom.  Particular factions in games have particular aesthetic and tactical styles, usually dictated by the game's background.  Chaos armies in Warhammer, for instance, tend to involve small units of armoured hardcases, covered in spiky metal trims, paired up with hordes of lesser minions, often under-armoured and fur-clad.  The army will feature only token ranged elements, top-end-of-middling magic, and overwhelming combat potential, and (if well designed in the particular edition) will have the mobility and control required to deliver it with some degree of effectiveness.


This is cool.  After a few years, though, it gets boring.  You end up playing essentially the same game all the time, which was the end result for my poor Vampires.  Some factions have more variety in them than others - a large collection of Dark Elves could play combat-heavy, range-heavy, magic-heavy, monster-and-chariot-heavy, skirmishy, hordey, anywhichwayyoulikey, but they'd still be M5, T3 and wear tinfoil armour painted in dark moody colours.  Eventually, you'll come up against the fundamental limitations the designers chose to place on the army, and I'd bet my bottom dollar that that will eventually become boring, although I suspect the game system itself may grow wearying and the player will either drift away or an edition change will occur before this boredom becomes truly endemic.

Historically, then, I've changed armies once I've become bored with the way they look and play.  Occasionally - more often in recent years - I've done so because they don't live up to my tabletop demands.  The problem is that changing armies doesn't help one escape from that - if anything, it exacarbates the issue, thanks to the inherent tactical limitations of small collections vs. large ones.

When you're starting out, you can lose during list-building, because you simply don't have the pieces available to engage meaningfully with what your opponent's bringing.  I'm finding that a lot with my Skorne - give them a target-light environment and they do all right, but give them a horde of stuff that they can't trample through or a small set of well-buffed targets and they flail horrendously.  I can tell what they require in order to do better, but it's quite a lot of stuff - more than I can afford to invest in, more than I'm able to prioritise effectively, and more than I want to paint (those uniforms are really starting to get to me).  Can I enjoy a game where it's possible for me to lose before I've even started, simply because I can't afford the variety of pieces to open up an interesting range of tactics?  Honestly, I have trouble giving a 'yes' to that one.

The issue is further raised by many game systems' privileging of expense.  40K5 likes high-cost low-value transports; WFB8 favours large units of increasingly-expensive plastic infantry (£15 for 10 Gor is bad enough, now factor in that it'll take 30 to make any sort of meaningful impact on the battlefield and you'll see why I don't play Beastmen), and Warmahordes has an internal kink that means units start to be a better buy than single models after the initial buy-in (it also has a bad habit of patching poor design choices with unit or weapon attachments, or solos that do the same job, which means your crap unit now 'needs' the new solo to make it worth the investment).  This may make sense for the companies, provided they don't go crazy with it (arbitrarily doubling the cost of Orc Boyz models that have been out for around ten years is my new benchmark for 'going crazy with pricing', in case you're wondering), but it's frustrating for the player who's trying to branch out.

Stelek said something about this recently, while exploring and justifying his own Skorne and explaining why he doesn't branch out into a third faction:

Also, I realized in my quest to figure out the kind of army I wanted to run in those other armies, that I could probably ‘make do’ with some upgrades to my Skorne.

Despite myself, I reckon I probably could have made do with my Cryx, very happily, especially if I hadn't been an idiot and sold off a good chunk of them during my Masters' year (to be fair, I did need the money...).  At the very least, I could have gotten by with just adding new pieces to the collection and extending what it could do.

The reason I didn't make do with what I had for Warmachine, is partly down to other people.  In the UK, the faction is both overplayed when compared to others, and annoying to many opponents because they don't 'play fair'. That combination of things tends to result in... not necessarily in butthurt, but just in a display of weariness from across the table as someone sees me unpacking the third Cryx army they've been 'cheated' by in one day.

You get used to these as a Cryx player.

What I'm trying to say is that I may not have taken up Skorne if a bout of frustration with my Cryx collection hadn't co-incided with frustration from others that there were too many Cryx players around the place.  Beyond that, I'm not sure I'd have taken up WFB again if Dave and Shiny hadn't been around, with their models going unused, or 40K again if I hadn't decided to run the school club and wanted to play the game the kids played.

If I didn't think about what other people play, and how they want to play it, I'd never get any games in, or at least not any fun ones. It can't be argued, though, that attempting to address the needs and goals of others does create additional opportunities to spend time, effort and money.  It's with that in mind that I'm refocusing my efforts onto one faction, and that faction is Cryx.  Other people's sensibilities are less important than my wallet, in the end.

Frugalist, Know Thyself

It happens to us all, at some time or another.

Sometimes we realise that our project has aspects that become a chore (working on lots of models that all look the same is a HUGE barrier for me, which is why my armies don't tend to wear uniforms or spam the same unit/model type), sometimes we come up against a strange quirk of game design that means our COOL PLAN can't work out, and sometimes it just turns out we've made sub-optimal choices early on and end up stuck between trying to use pieces that we either don't enjoy or that don't work (usually both), or selling them on at a loss shortly after purchase.


This makes starting new projects hard, as it's unlikely that a small, economically-manageable starter collection will include a wide range of tactical capabilities, and equally unlikely that you'll be equipped to make wise choices straight off the bat if you're coming into something that's new to you.

At this point in most blogs, the author would start listing resources that you can use to make wise choices. I'm not going to do that - I'm driving towards something a bit beyond recommending intelligent websites here. Y'see, most advice posts/blogs/sites tend to concentrate on the tactical opportunities and costs involved in selecting a force, and take a few important aspects of the choice as read. What I want to do today is to look at the questions that I think gamers should ask themselves before they even start thinking about collections, lists and tactics.

The first question to ask yourself when selecting a new force is the hardest one to answer: why do I want this?

Image taken from http://bluegroovecrafts.com

Allow me to illustrate with an example. I play Cryx in Warmachine. I like them, but the game designers made Choices when they created the faction, Choices with results including "it's not very tough" and "it needs to do tricksy things to be good". The net effect here is that whatever I do with this collection of figures, it will always operate within these limitations, which means I occasionally want a change. The fundamental nature of the faction, while certainly to my liking, occasionally frustrates other people: Cryx are tricksy and popular, and that tends to create a little tension when five or six Cryx players turn up to an event and proceed to debuff, deny and generally annoy their way through the proceedings.


I bought into Skorne as a second faction because the Skorne are very tough and tend to be more direct in their approach, hitting the enemy very hard and basically 'playing fair' in a way the Cryx simply don't. They are also very uniform, whereas my Cryx are more anarchic and colourful, and so I thought they'd provide aesthetic variety. Finally, they're a Hordes faction, and so they provide an alternative means of exploring the game's rules, which I wouldn't get if I picked up a second Warmachine faction.


Once you know why you want your new toys, you have another question to answer: why won't I want this in six months' time?

Image taken from http://sandalsandsocks.typepad.com

This is where self-knowledge comes in handy. If you know how you like to do something, you can try a spot of clairvoyance and ask yourself whether you'll be able to approach this project in a manner of your choosing.

For instance, I don't like painting the same models for any sort of extended period of time. Half a dozen of the same colour scheme and I'm bored - less, if it's at all intricate or complex.

My Cryx are fully painted primarily because I don't give a damn about making a 'uniform' army where everything looks the same, and have opted instead to paint each unit type in a different scheme, relying on bases to tie the whole lot together.

Skorne are very uniform - lacquered armour, metal trims and big shiny weapons. This is proving to be something of a deterrent; the Arcuarii have been used a lot, but I've been shying away from painting them because there's eight models there and they're not substantially different from the last models I painted, to whit the Skorne battle box. What else is on the hobby table at the moment? Warriors of Chaos - so that's more armour with trim details and big shiny weapons.

See where I've gone wrong here? I know I have a problem with painting the same thing for too long, and I've set myself up with nothing to paint but similar models across two projects. Regardless of how valid my reasons for choosing the two armies may have been, I've erected a barrier between myself and having fun.  Small wonder I've been making terrain and (re)painting Cryx instead.

A Tale Of N Gamers, Where N = Some

A long, long time ago, I can still remember, when White Dwarf didn't suck on chodes...

The Tale of Four Gamers is perhaps one of the most persistent memes that's ever done the rounds in the wargaming community, although I suspect FOOTDAR will give it a run for its money in time.  See, once upon a time, in the hallowed years of the mid-nineties, when 'Wiki' was just the Hawaiian word for 'quick' and Jervis Johnson was a pillar of the community instead of the laughing stock he's been made into by the kind, merciful kiss of the Internet, White Dwarf ran a series about four staff members who pledged to construct Warhammer Fantasy Battle armies to a budget which, all these years later, seems frankly laughable.  I recall those articles fondly, and still have a tendency to count meat-filled sandwich products as a gaming expenditure and refer to small children as Noise Familiars as a direct result of their influence on my unformed brain.

I was clearly not alone in being strongly influenced by the article - White Dwarf and, in later years, the GW website, counted it among their greatest successes, referring to the requests for a rerun, a 40K version, a follow-up on the armies, anything at all to do with it, on an increasingly exasperating basis.  I've never been active on a wargaming forum where there isn't some version of it on the go.  Privateer Press, as has long been their way, followed in GW's footsteps and recently got in on the act with their Studio Challenge articles, although these cheerfully omit the budgetary restrictions.  Only this morning, I came across The Western Immoren Economy Tours, a Warmachine blog which is pursuing the endeavour in the original spirit and style, with a tight £30 a month limitation on purchases.

All of this sets questions a-moving in my fragile, agile mind, chief among which is "why do I have neither pig-flesh nor baguettes in my house at this present moment?"  Hot on its heels, however, is a query more pertinent to people who aren't sufficiently fortunate to dwell in the House of Von, and this is it: "why is the Tale of N Gamers format so popular?"

Is it the sense of joy that comes from achieving a goal, in this case the construction of successful forces on a tight and inflexible budget?  Is it the sharing of your experiences with an audience?  Is it the slow pace of construction, which enables an emotional investment to be made in a force and a serious attempt at actually painting it all made?

I'm not sure.  It's possible to do all these things in isolation, although personally I fail badly at the first and third elements - whenever I've tried to set myself a monthly budget, it's exploded within the first two instalments, and when I'm set on a project all unfetteredly-like, I tend to rush forward, seeking broader and deeper gaming experiences than can be achieved at entry level.

I think it's the shame.  I think it's the knowledge that your fellow Gamers will rib you rotten if you go over budget, and rightly ridicule you for not managing to paint one lousy box of new models in twenty-eight days.

All right, there's a bit more to it than just humiliation.  I also think it's the guarantee of games against others who are similarly constrained by circumstances.  As recent events have reminded me, it's not always fun playing with people who can afford a more tactically viable force than you, and a player base that's subscribing to the same limitations levels off that playing field, especially when cheats will be punished by withdrawal of snack van privileges.

That said, recent 'official' Tales of Four Gamers have left me cold, and I believe the format may be dying a death as the realities of modern gaming hit home.  The truth is, games companies have a certain vested interest in sweeping the precise costs of new forces under the rug, particularly when their game doesn't scale down as well as it used to (I'm looking at WFB here, although I'll be following the Warmachine effort with interest, since the buy-in cost for that game is lower and it's the long-term maintenance of the army and expansion of its tactical portfolio that hurts, financially speaking).

This limitation was pretty obvious in the first ever instalment; Paul 'Fat Bloke' Sawyer's Beastmen, available only high-cost low-value combinations and yet requiring the second-highest model count of the forces involved, ended up as a small, top-heavy army, shackled to expensive point sinks and not necessarily equipped to handle its competitors.  Funnily enough, the Beastmen are in the same old predicament today, as I learned to my cost when I contemplated them as an army... so I suppose some things don't change.

Anyone for a bacon butty?

A Budget Battlefield

Evenin' all.

I recently acquired a digital camera, and intend to spend at least part of this weekend clearing the backlog of hobby posts I've been meaning to make since.. actually since I left Plymouth last year.  To start with, here's a series of reliable images of some terrain, which I'm having enormous fun building and which, through a combination of thrift, hoarding, careful selection of supplies, re-use of old project materials and above all getting someone else to spend money for me, I am not actually paying for.

This is what happens when two art-and-craft types move in together.

Allow me to explain.  Much of what you see on this board is being constructed not on my dime, for my own purposes, but for the greater good of Dice and Decks, proud hosts of (ahem)

and therefore being paid for by the club - that's the stuff that isn't made out of stuff I was hoarding anyway.

Joining a club is frankly great for this sort of thing; it's a way of doing something which I really enjoy (building terrain) without the usual opportunity cost (having to spend my miniatures/rules/entry-fee/bus fare on materials for it) - and there's a certain warm glowing feeling which comes from knowing that I'm making something which other people will play on and derive enjoyment from, even in my absence.

Taking a closer look at a few pieces now, we have the Troll-sized adobe huts -

Squint and you'll see the Trollblood I used to test the doors' scale.

- which are basically soup pots covered in modelling clay, which is pummelled into a suitable texture before a rim is added and carved into to create the appearance of crudely hewn stone blocks.  I bought the modelling clay from Hobbycraft, which was a mistake when there are places like the Gloucestershire Resource Centre in the world.  Incidentally, that's another great reason to join a club; a non-profit organisation running an all-in community activity is well positioned to take advantages of opportunities which simply aren't available to private individuals.

We also see the return of the Wire Trees, which I cover in a black-brown ink over the green-grey Milliput for a more sort of blighted, nasty, industrial-waste-tainted kind of look (seriously, brown trees always look like a children's drawing).  Witness these half-finished ones and marvel!

Hark textured one in the time it took me to do five.  She's a Proper Artist, you see...

I also have a collection of stirrers, which are going to be made into plank fences, and am under orders to produce some linear obstacles (that's 'lines of sandbags' to non-Warmachine types) out of more modelling clay when I can be bothered to pick some up.  Best get a move on - this is the last weekend before the tournament!

Von's Adventures in eBayland (and Elsewhere)

I'd like to take this moment to refer you all back to this post of Dave's from last year, in which he talks about how to make loadsamoney on eBay.  I'm following most of Dave's tips, albeit not quite all of them; in particular, the starting and reserve prices for my items are curiously similar to the final prices of things I recently purchased, meaning that (if we're going to get technical here) my moment of weakness actually cost me nothing.

On that note: the moment of weakness.  I am, technically, not breaking my resolution involving no new figures until everything I own is painted, since the Dark Elves and Tyranids are no longer mine to paint, which left me with a grand total of twelve Skorne to worry about.  Like last edition's army lists, my resolution drifts forlorn on the breeze, to be looked back on with fond memories and bitter regrets, until an opportunity arises to redefine and reimagine it in the cause of nostalgic entertainment and something resembling innovation.

Replace the words 'Dark Elves and Tyranids' with 'Warriors of Chaos', though, and the point still stands.  Yes, I was weak.  No, I regret nothing.  Why?  Because I scored sixty classic Warriors of Chaos, the ones which are frankly cast from nothing less than pure happy memories for me (my first WFB army was composed almost entirely of them, and they were renovated into the first army I was really happy with the looks of), armed with exactly what I'd want sixty Warriors of Chaos armed with, in the appropriate numbers, and - shipping included, mark you - they cost me fifty pence each.

Fifty pence.
Each.
That's cheaper than they were when they came out, and they were pretty good value then at a rockin' eighty-three-and-a-third pence a head.  And they're primed (red, admittedly, but I can work with that).  That's about eleven hundred points, all the Core infantry I could ever want, ready for me to start painting, and they cost me fifty pence each.  Which, by the way, pretty much exactly corresponds to the fundage raised by flogging off the Dark Elves they're replacing (five hundred points worth, and fewer models!).  All I had to do was stay up for an extra hour on Sunday and snipe like I've just been given a NERF gun, a laser pointer and a roll of gaffer tape.

I was hardly going to pass that up,  was I?  Neither the chance to own a shiny new Nikon digital camera with a 5cm macro setting (the sort of thing that's just about perfect for the aspiring miniature blogger with an artist life partner who really needs to kick their online gallery into gear - and that's Hark, by the way, not Shiny, although they're both very talented people and you should totally buy paintings off them when they eventually sort themselves out to sell said paintings).

It's been a pretty good month; I've cleared out the doomed projects of the previous (failed) Frugal year, bought myself a thing that's going to improve my blogging and help us make some money by selling art, kick-started a new, cheap, sensible hobby project, and the whole thing's been zero-sum.  Even the terrain I'm working on has been gratis, having come out of the budget for (ahem)

- which I'm working on scenery for in between testing out the Cryx army I'll be ringering with at the event.

I have, admittedly, still spent some money (£3.50 bus fare and £2 admission to Dice & Decks once a week, skipping one when I was ill, and £10 petrol money plus I-think-it-was-£5 admission fees to a little mini-tournament over in Evesham, oh, and the WoW fees at £7.99), so that's still well over thirty quid in a month, which could stand to be less.  It's a good start, though - certainly better than last year.

eBay II - Return To The Bargain Basement

Evenin' all.

 Just a quicky to let you know that there are some ex libris Von Dark Elves, Tyranids, World of Darkness roleplaying books, Warmachine Mark I rulebooks and a few other odds and ends currently up on eBay, should you be into that sort of thing.

If my new camera had mysteriously arrived within an hour of being bought - unlikely - I'd be filling out this non-post with pictures of models which I (very Frugally) either rehabilitated with bits I had lying around the house, or built out of stuff I'd traded an unwanted GW gift voucher for.  Unfortunately the camera has yet to transcend the laws of time and space, and so you'll have to make do with me telling you that I've done some conversions until it arrives.

Time And Motion

At the dawn of my previous Frugal Year, I spent some time burbling on about the different kinds of investment we all make in our games.  I believe I've chewed your ears off about emotional investment more than enough already, 'specially if you're already a GAME OVER reader, and this blog tends to focus on money and time (indeed, the Frugal struggle is often expressed as convenience vs. expense, for example in choosing to make your own terrain/war machines/accessories or buying them).  One thing I haven't looked at too often, though, is how these notions all fit together.

I also recently had a dispute with m'colleague Neal (he of the pink Menite fame) about this.  I have, in the past, been known to be a bit stingy about away-days to play games.  I tend to think that the kind of money we spend on transport, accommodation, event admissions, food and the inevitable booze doesn't offer the world's best return on investment - after all, a tournament is over when it's over, and if you're anything like me, memories really don't last forever (some days, I can't even remember the word 'pencil', never mind anything complicated and intense like a tournament).  If I'm going to spend more than a fiver on something, I'd usually expect years of service out of it...

However, I've recently been forced to admit that spending modest sums - for instance, on attending club nights, which usually cost me about eight quid by the time you've factored in bus fares and entry fees - to ensure that the larger sums spent on miniatures actually result in said miniatures being used and not simply possessed for the sake of possession, might actually be worth a go.  I had a lovely time at Evesham today and it only cost me a tenner (well, it cost me twelve after I picked up some Epic Order dice to use as extra spell tokens ahd a plastic High Elf mage for conversion purposes, but shh!); realistically speaking, getting to use my Cryx against some nice new people with unfamiliar armies was probably worth the money.

At the end of the day, what's bought needs using, and the same old uses every time end up becoming stale and unfulfilling, like the yoghurt I had for breakfast yesterday.  In that same spirit of using stuff that I have rather than mindlessly accumulating possessions, I'm going to focus my gaming time and funds onto expanding and revitalising my Cryx army, adding a few new pieces to inject some interest into a collection that hasn't seen full use for quite a while.  The Cryxies will be visiting a few events this year; I'm not the biggest fan of tournaments, but my eyes are always peeled for things that aren't tournaments, and a bit of money spent on ephemeral experiences can't hurt if it means that the money I've spent previously continues to reward and return on its investment.

I'm also planning on putting to use something that's lived in the bottom of my bookcase for many moons, but never actually seen any love; Advanced Fighting Fantasy, which has been out of print for so long that it would be effectively irreplaceable if I parted with it, but which I've only ever tried to play once.  I've read and reread those books so often that they no longer amuse me in their own right, so let's try something crazy like actually running the game!

Finally, I'm going to make an admission.  Ready for this?  Here it comes...

I no longer have the time, or the inclination, or possibly even the ability, to paint in the volume and speed that I did four years ago.

Painting a new army, on the scale that a Games Workshop mainstream game requires for entry-level play, is simply too major an endeavour for me, and I'm too attached to the spectacle of gameplay to really enjoy playing with unpainted miniatures; so I'm attempting to make painting a minor endeavour by sticking to low-model-count mods of the game like Killzone.  If I do go so far as to start a new army for a Games Workshop game, it'll have to be painted with the minimum of effort; I might go so far as to suggest dipping, or possibly greyscale, with dashes of colour a la Sin City - how awesome would the Micro Art Studios Orks look painted up like they've escaped from a black and white war film, and how easy would that be to do with an airbrush and maybe a bit of blending?  I'll be trying to make a major endeavour into a minor endeavour, through careful choices of techniques and steady expansion.

At least, that's the plan.  You know what I am for plans.  I'll have to think about whether I'm actually going to go through with it... in the meantime, here's another picture of time in motion.  This one's for you, Lawrence: it's the Prague Astrononical Clock, in all its eldritch glory.