Damned if you do, Damned if you don't

I have stumbled across this rather interesting interview with Rick Priestly on the Realms of Chaos blog. It's short but well worth a read as he is very candid.

It also contains a couple of gems of information I didn't know about. Specifically that Warhammer 4th edition was put together on the cheap. This seemed odd because 4th edition always felt to me to be the point at which Games Workshop shifted from being quite anarchic and random, to much more organised. I have written before about how hard it was for new players to start, something which changed notably during 4th edition.

Thinking about it though, it does make a lot of sense. It was certainly the point at which the number of artists and writers working on Games Workshop products decreased and, if you don't have a pot to piss in, you have to be organised. There isn't the money around to throw at any old project the studio comes up with because you have to get a decent return.

The really interesting comment comes in answer a question about 3rd edition being the least playable version of Warhammer. He equivocates a bit, but generally agrees that it was very sluggish, a comment I can certainly agree with, but it is a throwaway remark that is most interesting to me.

The next edition [4th]was way more energetic and actually got people playing Warhammer again (sales had really slumped prior to that).

The revelation that sales of Warhammer had slumped in 3rd edition certainly fits with my experience. 3rd edition was current when I started playing and the interests of my friends and I was focused firstly on Warhammer 40,000, secondly on Epic and thirdly on some the other games GW produced at the time (such as Space Hulk and Advanced HeroQuest). Warhammer was not on our radar until 4th edition came along and we all started collecting Warhammer armies (I actually had looked at Warhammer prior to this and had the rule books but hadn't persuaded any of my friends to take an interest).

However, I am not sure the reason for Warhammer's poor sales prior to 4th edition had much to do with the rules. My friends and I had never played a game and had no idea how it played. I think the sales slump can be blamed on the absence of new material for the game and the consequent lack of coverage in White Dwarf.

Amazingly it was a good six months or so of reading White Dwarf before I even registered that such a game as Warhammer existed. This may sound odd, but by the time I started reading White Dwarf in 1990, Warhammer and Warhammer Armies had long been released. The only new Warhammer material was from the forthcoming "Realms of Chaos: the Lost and the Damned" book and these articles were titled "Realms of Chaos" so I was assuming that it was a separate game in its own right. The only other Warhammer material were a few 'Eavy metal images, scenery articles, which were effectively generic, and material for other games set in the Warhammer world like Advanced HeroQuest and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

This did change a little over time. White Dwarf started to run a series of spotlight articles on particular players armies, starting, memorably, with Andy Chamber's skaven in White Dwarf 138. It was these articles that sparked my interest in the game. But when 4th edition came along, White Dwarf was saturated with coverage of new models, new rules (mostly army book previews), background (also from army books) and battle reports, then a relatively new idea that really show cased what a Warhammer army could and should look like. All of this did a lot to encourage us to take an interest in the game and build our collections.

For us, and I suspect for many others, what turned our attention to Warhammer wasn't the rules, but an explosion of new models and content.

If my supposition is correct, then it has some intriguing implications. Games Workshop is often castigated for churning out new rules and new editions endlessly in order to cynically encourage sales and "force" players to update the armies in order to keep up with rules changes. In fact Rick Priestly says as much in the interview when he describes the current design studio as "the promotions department of a toy company". But if sales drop when rules and models are not constantly being updated then the question is 'what else are they to do?' To keep up sales you need new material which means, once a game has reached a certain maturity you need endless revisions. Games Workshop are caught between a rock and hard place, castigated for releasing new material, ignored if they don't.

Not that this excuses every bit of bad behaviour from the evil corporate behemoth, but it does make me consider their position in a slightly different, and maybe more sympathetic, light.

New Years Resolutions

So we've hit January 6th and the Christmas decorations should be down if they were ever up in the first place, the Christmas Radio Times is in the bin, the last of the chocolates used up and things are starting to feel properly like January with all the fog, rain and gloom that that implies. Nice upbeat start to the new year there.

And yet, 2013 feels like a year of possibilities. If 2012 was the year in which the wargaming community collectively went nuts about Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and every company felt it had to crowd source the funding for something, even if it was just their new Kitchen, then 2013 ought to be the year in which a million projects come to fruition.

Of course, to some extent we are already there, Dreadball, Sedition Wars and Zombicide have already made into the shops, but there is still a great deal to come, from Kings of War goodies, to new Bushido models, to Relic Knights, Reaper Bones and a whole bunch of things to which I wasn't paying much attention. So this year should be a fantastic boom time for new miniatures and games.

Either that or it will all be a tremendous flop and we will learn a valuable lesson about not having hope or faith in anything.

Not that the boom is over yet. Rick Priestly and co have just launched the Beyond the Gates of Antares Kickstarter. It's hard to know what to make of this. Other than some nice illustrations, a few bits of background and a list of gaming noteworthies associated with the project we really don't have much to go on. This is apparently the plan however, as the aim is for the players to co-develop the universe and for it to be based around the games we actually play, using the Internet to have players games impact the development of the game Universe in a measurable way.

This is all quite interesting, but I can't help but be a touch sceptical about mixing an online concept with an inherently traditional physical game. Can analogue and digital concepts mesh comfortably? This will be one to watch, though I may still through a few quid at the Kickstarter based on Rick Priestly's name alone.

Turning to myself, if I have an overarching plan for the year, then its to try and be more focused. 2012 was characterised by much activity to only limited effect. I got a lot of models painted, not to mention scenery, acquired a whole new bunch of stuff and yet used very little of it in an actual game. My Inquisitor warbands remain nicely painted (by my standards) in a cabinet, but unused, while the gaming I did do was either with largely unpainted models (Warhammer, Kings of War, Warpath) or with games that don't need painted models at all (Last Night on Earth, Small World, Ticket to Ride).

With that in mind, I have set myself a concrete goal, and only one concrete goal. I will finish painting my Chaos Dwarf army, after leaving it unpainted for nearly twenty years, make some scenery and a new gaming table appropriate for it and actually play a game. I have already made a good start, my Chaos Dwarf warriors and Blunderbusses are done, as is my Iron Daemon and my Bull Centaurs are well underway. Pictures soon, promise.

More important than the goal, however, is my approach to it. This time I will fix on this goal, set no others until its done and not allow myself to be distracted by any other wargaming projects until then. I can play games, even buy new stuff, but no new painting or building until the Chaos Dwarfs are ready.

I really mean it this time, I'm confident I will hold until at least February. And you can hold me to that.