Lets us blow away the 'Pet Peeves' cobwebs. What do enjoy about this hobby?
This.
Painting
Playing
Winning
Losing
Research
Making up the narrative
Quick playing balanced scenarios, which produce believable results.
Reading, research, creating scenarios, narrative campaigns, playing with friends, terrain making, ImagiNations, painting, winning is nice but having fun the most important thing.
Planning huge megalomaniac armies, buying large armies, painting small armies.
1/72 and 10mm figures.
Building multi-use small armies that can fight alone or merge into bigger ones with a bit of solo wargamer licence e.g. Andalusians/Berbers/Saracens or for later periods use "allied" nations that sometimes were not.
Reading military (and related) history books.
Reading every book I see on Britain 367-793 AD despite most being at least semi-fictional.
This forum.
Mooching about shows staring at trade goodies and the incredibly beautiful games/armies on show even on the competition tables.
Short summary is Never having time to be bored and feeling I am still learning stuff
Gazing upon the slain body of my foe, beholding the humiliation of his tribe, and hearing the lamentation of his women.
Not when playing Lee, admittedly.
Much the same as DecemDave
Planning large armies, buying huge megalomaniac armies, painting very small armies and not just small in scale either.
2mm to 28mm figures.
Reading military (and related) history books.
Reading every book I see on the Later Roman Republic, especially Fiction.
Mooching about shows staring at trade goodies and the incredibly beautiful games/armies on show even on the competition tables.
"Never having time to be bored and feeling I am still learning stuff" - THIS!!
* Research
* Finding odd corners of history
* Mounting & undercoating figures - when they go from silver blobs to black/white/grey blobs
* Final detail painting - when the multi-hued blobs start to look like proper figures
* The aesthetics of a completed force "on parade"
* Having spent hours researching a historical force, modelling it precisely in 10mm - throwing it at a totally ahistorical opponent - like the recent Napoleonic Brunswick vs Austrian battle.
* Tweaking "completed" armies. From the recent battles I've fought, I'm thinking to add a Prussian brigade, a French Marshall and some Cossacks. :-[
* Seeing other people's work
* New releases from Pendraken
* Proxy figures. I get inordinate amounts of pleasure from finding something in the Pendraken range that will fill a gap. They don't do Napoleonic Cossacks ... but in the Crimean War range?
Without wargaming I would have gone feral
Everything
Playing with friends
The laughs when something goes completely wrong,
Painting
Research
Planning a new project.
Best of all - Basing/varnishing when a unit really comes together and is finished
Making model tanks
hand crafting terrain
researching obscure armies and wars
playing big battles with lots of figures over several weeks
painting the models
lamenting the lack of 10mm figures for my desired armies
reading history books
The roll of the dice at that critical moment!
Quote from: Orcs on 03 January 2025, 12:23:39 PMThe laughs when something goes completely wrong,
That's just "playing Sunjester "
All of it, including but not limited to, in no particular order:
- Interacting with 'interesting' groups of passionate people with somewhat related interests
- Playing with, against and around friends old and new
- Banter before, during and after games (sometimes very long after, remember when you...)
- Researching some snippets of the vast array of military history
- Refighting historic battles and gaining insights into some of the challenges of the time
- Fighting fictious scenarios with interesting challenges
- Painting and modeling troops, vehicles and terrain
- The visual spectacle of a well staged game
- Developing cunning plans and frantically revising them on contact with the enemy
- Creating and running scenario and campaigns
- Quick pick-up games
- Writing rules variations or new rule sets
- Testing new rules with cardboard cut outs
- Learning, always learning
- ...
Being blessed with a lifelong passion that pulls together so many different facets