Disenfranchisement, Age and Hobby (Part 1 of 2)

In this week's introductory post, I mentioned that I want to document all of my journey into the Oldhammer hobby, and that I want to do this chronologically. When I look back at how this interest awoke, I see that I could not possibly talk about the beginning without talking about my relationship with the hobby in general. As I drafted this post, and it got longer and longer, I also realized that it would need to be split. This first part will be about the company that created Warhammer in the first place - it will be about Games Workshop. Save your sighs (or hide your disappointment); this will not be a rant. Well, maybe a little.

Before I was even a teen, I discovered some 40k miniatures in the window of my local game store (not that I knew back then what a game store was). I did not really get what was going on with those little guys on their green felt mat, but it was excitingly different - those were not toys, but it clearly wasn't a boardgame either. My mother took me into the store, and the rest is history. I will not bore you with details; chances are that if you are reading this blog, your experiences will have been very similar.

My first purchase was a box of miniatures, no rules yet, and by the time I wanted to learn those as well, the second edition of the rules, colloquially called "2nd ed.", had taken over. Although I have very fond memories of that edition, in hindsight I see a lot of the seeds that would grow into my eventual disenfranchisement, but we are not there yet.

Back then my armies grew erratically, as the miniatures were rather hard to come by, so I (and many others) bought what was available rather than something that we actually planned to buy. This meant that armies back then were very much a "looks first, rules second" affair, and the armies showed that with a diversity that I have never encountered since then. To supplement my ailing forces, models from other manufacturers were mercilessly pressed into service, and nary a vehicle that could not be represented by a card box after the clever application of some straws, aluminum washers and left-over bits.

Terrain was all home-made; apart from the cardboard ruins from the boxed starter set, and some cardboard-and-plastic-bulkheads fortifications, there simply was none to speak of. So, guided by my own, still very childlike, imagination and a heap of helpful suggestions from White Dwarf magazine, every piece of scrap in the household was salvaged and turned into *something* by me.

My games were chaotic, zany, unimaginably fun affairs as you can only have them in your early teens. To this day, I remember my friend's Inquisitor hiding behind a building to wait for reinforcements, just to be incinerated by an Ork buggy's multi-melta after it careened off its intended path, or Makari the Gretchin slaughtering that poor Screamer-Killer one day (true story).

All was fine until 1998, when third edition dropped. To this day, I would love to see my face after opening the White Dwarf highlighting the most important changes: Gone were my army compositions that had served me faithfully for years (quite a normal thing in wargaming really, but the first time it happens is always a shock I guess), gone was the ability to hide, provide overwatch fire or even throw a grenade (as opposed to ramming it into your opponent's mouth at point blank), three thirds of the weapons profiles were eliminated... it was a disaster that catapulted me right out of the hobby for a number of years.

This is great news!

A few years later, somewhere in the middle of third edition's life time, something changed again and slowly drew me back into the fold: I was still reading White Dwarf, and Andy Chamber's column "Chapter Approved" had evolved from simply providing errata, beginning to present variation army lists that cared little for the availability of models and often required you to convert everything. Now, that was something I could get behind, and I did. Also, the codices returned to their old format, containing rules as well as background and hobby sections. Although I continued to play little up to fifth edition, I found myself buying codices, assembling small forces to use in games and building some new terrain that fit the current rules. Without me really noticing at first, the hobby returned into my life.

Fast forward to fifth edition, which was an iteration of the rules that made me rather happy - vehicles were actually useful, the rules were sound, and many of the codices were good or even brilliant. During this edition, my group gradually dropped WHFB, which had become a mess in seventh edition, and took up 40k until it was played almost exclusively. The rush of creativity that had been injected in third and fourth edition had subsided again, as Andy Chambers had left the company by then, but the new design ethos was to include as many previously abandoned models and options in the codices as possible, which helped to increase diversity despite the reduced number of armies to choose from. Expansions like Planetstrike and Battle Missions compounded this even further and always kept the game fresh, and there were even a few White Dwarf articles that introduced new ways to play the game. Despite missteps like the Grey Knights or Space Wolves codices, when the predetermined end of fifth edition's product cycle was reached, nobody in my gaming group felt that more than a little fine-tuning to the rules was needed or planned. Oh boy, were we wrong.

For us, sixth edition was a train wreck almost from the get-go. Casualty removal from the front, flyers and certain aspects of the hull point system were suspected to be the chief offenders, but it was the allies rules - something I was incredibly happy about at first glance - that really killed it for me. What should have been an instrument to reclaim some of the creativity and freedom that had been lost over the years, potentially at the cost of reduced point effectiveness, instead was a powergamer's toolbox that could not decide whether it wanted to reflect the background ("No allies for Tyranids!") or be a pure game choice ("Tau are battle brothers with whom?"), resulting in a heavily lopsided, entirely unfair set of possible combinations. Add in the much-maligned dataslates (0-points upgrades to your force for real money), ill-advised expansions like Escalation, English-only publications that are leading to a fragmentation of the international player base and, last but not least, new units that only exist because every troop kit has to be "dual use" these days, leaving you with aesthetically compromised sculpts and a heap of practically unusable bits from every box of troops you bought, and it's easy to see why sixth has become one of the most reviled editions ever.

Even other parts of what could be called the "Warhammer 40.000 franchise", like Black Library's publications or the video game licenses, have notably changed their character in the past couple of years. Black Library's cash cow, the Horus Heresy series, is coming apart at the seams as more and more books are crammed into a series that originally had a pre-defined end point which Black Library has no intent on reaching anymore. Also, the switch to a "collectible book series" model and subsequent gutting of their Mass Market Paperback release cycle was a bizarre decision for a publisher that only carries pulp literature. Licenses, formerly rather rare and exclusive deals, nowadays get used for gems like Dark Vengeance, a Plants vs. Zombies clone made by the creators of the Worst Game of 2013, or Warhammer 40.000: Space Wolf, the free-to-play collectible card game by the renowned publisher and developer HeroCraft, hailing from Kaliningrad.

Look at how you've changed!

So, what happened? Did Games Workshop really change so much, or did I? To be frank, the answer has to be a resounding: "Both," and it is neither one's fault. 

Games Workshop is not a giant garage business anymore. It's a publically traded, internationally operating company, where the design team is a just component of the greater whole. There are no mail order trolls to handpick individual model parts for you (at a loss for the company) or slap together sales simply because they feel like it. There is no Andy Chambers to make up units or even whole armies on a whim. There is no White Dwarf with how-to-guides, freebies and expansions for your games. There is still Jervis Johnson, although he does not design cool one-off games anymore, but... actually, nobody seems to know what he really does at Games Workshop these days. 

When Games Workshop's brick-and-mortar stores begin to fail, like so many stores in various industries do under the onslaught of online business, the company has to react, by making them smaller, by making them keep less stock, by reducing staff and opening times. As bad as this is for the community, I really do understand how little of a choice there is about it. When WHFB and Lord of the Rings do not sell anymore, I understand that there is a limited amount of resources that can be allotted to solving the problem before these lines begin to get phased out of the release cycle.

And to be fair, I am not a teen anymore, either. I am less impressionable these days, and I am critical of sculpts that I would have liked as a teenager simply for lack of a frame of reference. It takes more for me in order to suspend disbelief ("No, a vehicle does not gain improved terrain capabilities if you give it four sets of little tracks instead of wheels."), and the common tropes that they use often feel tired these days when they introduce another one, although I realize that I only came to know a lot of them through 40k in the first place. I knew 40k as a platoon-level game; when flyers and Titans take the field, I feel that they do not belong, while others, who do not yet have their expectations so set in stone, see exciting additions in them.

The background of Games Workshop's games has accompanied me for 20 years now, and I react poorly to changes that I would not even have noticed back in 2nd ed. I have also developed my own personal interpretation of all this background, and whenever a designer, who has sometimes known the game for less long than I do, comes into conflict with it, I find myself to be forced to ignore yet another bit of writing that the newer members of my gaming group readily integrate into their view of this fictional universe, separating us further in our expectations codex by codex.

The most important change, though, has to be my transformation from a teenager, who tries to conform with what the grown-ups are doing, to a grown-up of my own, who takes the liberty to find his own ideas superior to those that are presented to him. I am playing a game. Using toy soldiers. With each passing year, I find the notion of the existence of a correct way to do this more ludicrous. As a consequence of all this - my nostalgia, the current state of the rules that I do not really like, the fading vision for the game, the preference of my own take on the background - I simply do not feel attached to Games Workshop as a fan and consumer anymore. I am attached to the universes they created and the games they made that I love, but I do not need the company for the enjoyment of either. It might be their fault, or my age, or any other reason; it does not matter. 

For I can simply return to a Games Workshop where Rick Priestley, Andy Chambers, Gavin Thorpe and Alessio Cavatore worked, and Jervis Johnson still wrote codices instead of marketing blurbs. I can do this by returning to the thoughts they committed to paper these 20 years ago.

Paper is patient.

Take care!

Allod

Do not miss the second part of this entry, featuring Gaunt's Ghosts, the Cold War and Hair Metal! Who could resist?