Money, Moving and Miniatures

My guess is that I am not the only gamer who is feeling the pinch. It's not that I am flat broke but money is tight. I am worried that I am about to get shafted by work and of course Christmas is Coming. Add this to the increased uncertainty about what the next months ahead are going to bring.

Having spoken to the people I know in the gaming market, things are not good. Prices are up across the board and margins are tighter than ever, just to stay competitive. Nobody seems to be on the edge, well except my local gaming cafe, but they are worried about the future. So buy it now whilst it's cheaper and whilst you still can. I wonder what the new year will bring? 

I spent some money at Partizan but not as much as I would under normal circumstances. I have brought some Star Wars:Legion stuff of eBay but only because it was ridiculously cheap. Right now I suspect that I will get more figures as gifts that I will buy for myself this year. My brother in law gave me a box full of 40k bits. There is not a lot that is of instant use but I can see some uses for it. There is a knackered Rhino and a Hammerhead that I have no practical use for but I can see them being used as terrain pieces. 

There are a couple of itches I want to scratch but I am guessing that I will be waiting until next year. Stargrave has been the main focus this year and there is some new stuff for that I really want.  I have developed an urge to make a couple of Sludge armies. As there are no other players I would need to do two armies so this becomes a bigger project. Then of course there are all the existing projects on the bench already. 

Right now I don't really need any more. I have a grey legion sprayed even greyer which is based and ready to go. This hasn't got much smaller this year but I have kept almost kept pace with painting and buying. This is not such a good thing as I would have liked to get more figures painted but I have been saying that every year recently. 

The solution is consolidation. So I am moving in with my other half and hopefully that will sort out some of the problems. Most of my stuff is now boxed up and ready to go. As I posted last week, I have trimmed a load of stuff from it's sprues. This has freed up a whole 35l RU Box and been replaced with a couple of mid sized zip lock bags. Maybe I will get round to finish a few before the move (I said it was boxed up I didn't say I'd moved the boxes off the bench) but I guess I am done for a while. My biggest gaming purchase of the year, so far at least, has been on a couple of KR Multicases. These are now a week passed their dispatch date so I am getting a bit twitchy. I wouldn't have brought these but for the move. They are really just to protect what I have whilst I am moving.

Moving in is something I want to do but I have a feeling it is going to keep me away from painting. Space, at least for a little while, is going to be at a premium. Every time I move I complain about the space I have for a work station. I have managed to work out a paint station that works but is not my ideal but this looks like something I am definitely going to miss, This time should hopefully be the low point with the prospect of moving on up thereafter. I've gone from having a room to considering a large travelling makeup case.

If anyone has any suggestions about semi-portable paint stations (it's not going to be moved out of the house but needs to be able to fit in a corner) I would appreciate it?

So two posts in a week. It's funny how things change. I really have the urge to paint but I guess that's because I am tired of looking at boxes. Despite that I might get a chance to cheat a little.

D&D Why I Love To Hate It

Setting aside Airfix figures, my first real gaming passion was role playing. I got started with Tunnels and Trolls. I have a lot of love for that game but I recognise that it isn't really the best game on the market and that over time it has become even less like the first choice. Great for solo play but then so was Fighting Fantasy. Even then there were better games.

I moved on to Basic D&D and quite liked it. It was a better game. I played a few games of AD&D and then kind of forgot about it until 3e. I didn't really want to play D&D even then. We had been playing Harn, which is a system I really love. Harn was a series of experiences that I loved and even made me cry. Then Butch brow beat the DM into converting the characters into 3e. I cried again when I figured out that my somewhat flawed but courageous holy warrior would have to become a paladin. I mean a paladin. It's just not me. Lawful Good, well it's just crazy.

So this became the norm for a few years. Roleplaying was just not as fun anymore. Three big books later and I was really done. Then 3.5e came along and then a load more money went out the door. It didn't really improve the game, it just changed it. Too much detail in the rules lead do what I called "real life lag" as the rules lawyers got into it with the DM. Most of which was Butch trying to get his own way. It very quickly ceased to be fun.

4e came along and somebody else tried to talk me into it. This justs seemed to take some of the ideas of magic, tapping abilities and the like. I never ran the game as I just could not wrap myself around the ideas. I got persuaded to play a Warlord. This meant that most of the time it was better for me to give another character an extra action than do something myself. This is just not worth playing.

I cannot comment on 5e as I never played it. I was bored before I even started. This would have been the fourth set of books in ten years or so. D&D just seems to be so wrapped up in itself. In fairness this is not the worst abuse of the fan base, I am looking at you GW. That said, most contemporary RPGs require a significantly lower cash outlay to get into the game.

Modern D&D has a number of backgrounds but they are just absurd. It moved away from sort of the classic high fantasy races to those that were created just to make the races look different. As a figure painter I like to have figures for the characters and it is only comparatively recently that this was actually possible. They seem to tinker for the sake of tinkering. This allows them to charge the players even more money.

Probably it's just me. D&D has the same number of players as Columbia has people (that's 50 million). I see the game being played by a particular type of player. They are less about the story and more about the ability to kill  every mother f{}%ker in the room. It makes the game less for for the few of us who love the story. 

Yet this is the game people want to play. Even now there are better games to play.