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What’s over the horizon?
As we wind down on this year and start to reflect on all the things we have accomplished and all the memories we have captured, we look to a new year and promise ourselves to do it all again, only better. So what is in store for next year? There are a lot of things that are going on behind the scene and have been for quite some time. Work has been super crazy this year as I was catapulted to a National Travelling position, which has taken some time to get used to. I have a strong conviction that this really is the catalyst to everything that is about to happen with this blog. I have been writing to myself for years. Coming up with projects in the name of creating content for the blog. I would get to the end of the day and I never blogged about it, half the time I just got caught up in the excitement of doing it I didn’t even take pictures! I am a product of the nation I was raised in, and I am mostly proud to be an American, but with that comes the inability to do anything without trying to make a dollar off of it.
Like I will look at a box of miniatures and I will tell my wife “I could totally double my money, if I painted these and sold them online” and she is just looking at me like I’m some kind of idiot. For a while I would get mad and say “You don’t support my dreams” which really is short sighted, because I have been selling this dream for like 20 years now, and my wife is the same customer who is tired of the sales pitch. Looking back further on my childhood, Warhammer was accepted in my house, but since I was the one that brought it into the family my parents stayed away from it, and I felt they thought I could do better things with my time. Warhammer is a hobby, it’s not any more expensive than any other hobby, people will just use the large price tags as an excuse to not play the game. If you hit someone up to go fishing and you told them they had to spend 500 dollars on gear and spend a bunch of time messing with it before they would get to see if they even enjoy fishing! I saw an opportunity to make money by doing more chores and helping mom around the house, this would turn into mowing yards for people, shoveling snow out of driveways, even raking leaves up. This helped me learn that if you want something you should just go out into the world and work to earn the means to get what you want.
As you grow up, you realize you have to work everyday to pay the bills that keep you alive. Funny how when you want to do something it’s fun and when you don’t it’s not as much. Same thing, just different points of view, so keep positive! So you escape to hobbies where you pay your fee and you get to feel alive like a kid again, and help you process all the crap that goes through your day. If you get good at your hobby you will naturally feel like you deserve to get paid to do it, because what wouldn’t be better than getting paid to do your hobby. This is exactly the loop that I was stuck in, I felt I deserved money for the effort I put into what I was doing. If I wasn’t putting the models out for everyone to gawk over, or find ways to get people to want to pay me for some stupid reason then it wasn’t worth my time. Yet, when you listen to me, I am so clearly passionate about this blog and the game, so where do the two not meet up?
It’s all about the money, if I could just make money doing this I wouldn’t have to do that, we feel it will solve our current problems, but it will only stress other parts of your system and end up creating more problems. I was buying more models than I knew what to do with, then I developed this trend of not liking building models, sure that’s me trying to be cute and funny. Hindsight just tells you that you are an Idiot who has to spend his money on everything just to make people think you have money. So I would compromise with myself and say I’ll just turn it into a blog post or make something from the process of making it. Usually I would just throw it on the desk, then clean the desk and bury it under all the other crap I have bought over the years, until I need it for a tournament in which I don’t do any of the plans and just rush to get it on the field. During that process I found joy again, but because of all the stress I have applied from all the procrastination, I didn’t feel like blogging about it.
Now I have really given up playing video games for the most part, I’ll still play with my kids or if a buddy wants to play. I just have more focus on the hobby side and even more so for planning out Scrubs as a whole. Right now we are building Star Wars Legion, Necromunda and Malifaux collections so we can start talking about those games here. We aren’t just a Warhammer 40k blog, we are a game blog and a life helping blog, the games we play are just the mediums we picked to meet each other. We can share our experiences and learn from each other’s shortcomings and figure out how we can all enjoy our toy soldiers in a sportsman and friendly way. I have also dipped my toes back into the realm of Fantasy and have built a Bretonnia Army.
With all of these systems I look at my area around me and I don’t see them as equally represented as Warhammer 40,000 which if you compare to all the card games that are out, it would appear that no one plays that game at all! These games take time and effort to get into, and some people just aren’t drawn into the Sci-fi realm, not to mention one of the worst reputations of a competitive game which we should all be ashamed of. There are plenty of other systems for other players to play, but they just might not be aware of them, so if we go to these stores to set up these different games, we should eventually start driving engagement. Small skirmish games are a great way to dip your toes into the miniatures realm, and there are plenty of challenges involved getting into the systems. Some people will have never built a model at all, so you have to take that into consideration, most people have never painted a model of any kind either. We have to establish a baseline to help people get started and that is what a community is for.
We just need a guiding light for the community to follow, and my attempt is to be that beacon of light. If we want to get new players into our games, then we should look at our pile of shames and perhaps use that to go up to a store and teach people how to cut out the pieces from sprues, following the instructions, dry fitting the pieces, cleaning off the edges. We can write those things and the articles are just a reference point for everyone to go back on when they need a reminder. We could also build the models and have them primed with different colors and show people the different ways to paint, be it the contrast or normal paint method. Skirmish games are also a little more rules heavy which I believe helps people focus more on the game, because there are a lot of rules in between rules, things simply as a rule saying “you MAY.” If it says you may, then you don’t have to do it, usually it’s good to do it, but sometimes you have to see the bigger picture to see how that rule can affect the sequence of events. It also feels bad to pick up a model that you spent so much time painting and never got to see what it can do, and if you play war games then usually you multiply that feeling by that unit’s squad size. It can be really easy to let the negativity of the gaming culture bleed into wargaming, because unlike video games we have to remember the rules and hold ourselves accountable when we inevitably get the rules wrong. It’s how we respond to those actions that dictate us as a community, and right now it really feels like Warhammer is just jumping from one hot thing to the next at a speed that has never been seen before. This is the recipe that keeps new players from playing, people want to play in tournaments, they don’t want to spend the next 10 hours of their day getting grilled about how the internet said don’t run that, like some of us enjoy the process of getting better. Plus if you were actually good at the game, wouldn’t you encourage people to play more, or look for every opportunity to play more?
We like to all think we are good players, and spend a good amount of time on the board, but the truth is we spend most of our time reading over lists and ideas online which we turn around and half bake them in our heads and we get high off the grandiose odors it puts off. Then when we get to the table we are surprised that our ideas sucked because the game is in a different state than whatever you perceived it as, this my friends is called a reality check. This is why if you have played a game with me in the past 2 years I have been on a crusade to eradicate this side of me so that I can try and make sense of what is going on in this game we so dearly love. I believe that it comes down to ego, people tie their ego’s into this game and by accident they have decided that winning games is the only measure of success. This is an insane thought, and I too had this thought, it’s not a healthy thought to have, you can have fun and not win a game. The goal of the game is to have fun, so if you won the game but didn’t have fun, then what are you doing with your time? Is the couple hundred dollars of store credit really worth your integrity, or how people perceive you in the real world? Do people honestly think people forget? People will forget your beautifully painted army, they will forget that model you spent three months converting, they won’t remember how many GTs that you won, but you bet all the dice rolls in the universe the one thing that they will not ever forget is the way that you make them feel. So just remember that next time you decide to pull a gotcha out on your opponent, you can be a really funny guy but that one moment of time hurt me and I won’t forget that. Now with that being said, we have to always be the bigger person and call a judge and talk about how it made us feel. You shouldn’t be expected to make changes to the game, but I believe that we need to engage the behavior to prevent feeling bad, because it always starts with a choice.
Scrubs Against the Meta 