Historical Hold-ups

 I got response to yesterday's blog post saying that all these problems can be avoided with historical wargaming. I also sent a tweet to a veteran of the beard and wooly-jumpers brigade, +Uberspoons, to write some blog posts about the pitfalls related to Historical miniature gaming. Seemed sensible to me to write a post about my worries as I dip my tip-toes in that endless ocean.

 One of the main areas of concern is scale. There are many facets to this. First of all you have the obvious differences in figure scale 15mm or 28mm for example and this can cause some issues. Some gamers may have armies in 15mm and you can't really play against them with your 28mm. You can but it will look silly, you might as well use card cut-outs at that point. Secondly there is the issue with the sheer number of different manafacturers. Initially you may think that's great, but if you need to get models from company x, y and z for your army (I have got the impression that you can't get all the models you might want from one company) and they might all have a different interpretation of what 28mm is. This problem gets worse when you factor in your opponent may have chosen a different company.

contrast between my 'Wargames Factory' Soviets and 'Warlord Games' Soviets

 In addition to the myriad of miniature producers there are also many different rules-sets being played for many different eras. I am worried this will cause miniature gamers to be spread so thin that you will struggle to get a regular opponent. There are also many different basing conventions among all of these rules sets. If I want my models to work for many different systems I will have to think for a while about how to make them work in all possible environments. There is also the obvious cost of having to get all of the different rules sets to find a game!

getting parts for conversions is difficult with many different scales. I am going to need to do alot of greenstuff for this commissar conversion

 I am also a little bit concerned about how picky people will be with historical accuracy. I have made a point before about how I like to be able to make something my own and do it my way, I don't want to be constrained by reality. E.g a friend of mine was kind enough to give me some 15mm Byzantines for DBA, I got a book from the library explaining what colours they would have worn etc. I didn't like the colour scheme. Instead I am going to depict them as they are in Medieval Total War, because they looked cool. I don't really want people to turn their nose up at me about that.

I gave my Soviet Second lieutenant a flag, it has no effect in Bolt Action but will it cause issues in a different rules-set?

Hmmm, it turns out today wasn't overly positive either. Hopefully I will be getting a whole bunch of shiny new things soon so I can rave about how cool they are. Until then.