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Reply To: Inaccessibility of Historical Wargaming

July 27, 2018 at 2:05 pm #1240720

phaidknott

7023xp

I don’t mind if someone “corrects” me on my paintjob (as long as it turns out to be correct info), you learn a new thing every day (and it’s a start of a conversation that is usually started by someone new to you). Rivet counting is ok, rivet obsessive compulsive disorder (like refusing to play a game because the opponents army isn’t factually correct in their eyes isn’t.

I DO however think the major barrier into historical gaming is due to the fact we are in the “golden age of wargaming”. For example when I started wargaming, if you played WW2 there were only two scales (6mm and 20mm), and probably a couple of rulesets.

Now you can buy ww2 minis in 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 28mm. There’s a vast amount of rules (many with their own specific basing system). So these days if you buy in, then there’s a good chance that about half the players in the club have ww2 but it’s either in the wrong scale or based differently.

For Fantasy and Sci-fi things are a bit different. It’s mostly 28mm (and GW dominated), so if you buy a load of Space Marines then there is a very good chance that most ppl who play Sci-fi games have the same scale and use the same rules.

For a while FoW dominated things in WW2, but that seems to have cooled off in favour of BA (again here we see a shift in scale). So it’s the fact for historical gaming things never seem to settle on a scale and ruleset for a long period of time.

EDIT: Just read Torros’s post and realised I basically repeated what he said 😛