How did you start wargaming and when was it the most fun?

[Morgrim]

My then-boyfriend played and talked about his Blood Angels a lot, and one day conversations turned to what army matched the personality of each of our group of friends. I got told I fitted Dark Eldar so I went and looked them up and then burst out laughing. He convinced me to grab the battlebox (this was just before 5th ed) and start playing.

His assessment was spot on.

[Erik Setzer]

I'll try to keep it short... but no promises.

My dad was big into miniatures games, and I used to hang out in game room of the shop he was playing at in the late '80s, watching games of Adeptus Titanicus, Warhammer, some Rogue Trader, loving all of it. I was allowed to borrow some stuff and join in a limited way, then eventually got my own models to start armies for 40K and WFB (and eventually Space Marine, and all kinds of other games over time). Since then, I've played a lot of people in a lot of stores (and in some homes).

I like just going up to someone and saying, "Hey, want to do a match, X points?" Or playing campaigns. Those are especially fun, more so when people are involved in making a narrative and keeping it going rather than just pasting each other. Big events, too.

I can enjoy tournaments as well. I do my best to win, but not too bummed if I lose, as long as the games were fun, which they typically are.

Basically, if I'm getting to play with my toy soldiers, I'm having fun. If they're just sitting on a shelf looking pretty (or waiting to be painted but still getting no use in games in the meantime), I'm not having much fun. I like to model and paint, but I do it so my toys look better when I'm playing games.

[Hendrik Booraem VI]

My early experiences with toy soldiers were with actual plastic toy soldiers - the cheap ones you could get a box of from in comic books for $5. They were flat, cheap, crappy, but they opened the door to imagining what you could do. Moved on to GI Joe toys in middle childhood - around 10ish, I guess. My friends and I amassed various different collections of GI Joe figures and vehicles, Transformers, and GoBots.

We had battles of course. Either our troops were all on the same side and we fought fictional enemies (the Soviets, of course. The Berlin Wall didn't fall until I was almost able to vote), or we piled all our stuff together and then alternated choosing units. We divided everything up into vehicles, support systems, and infantry, and made sure we each got equivalent numbers of choices of each category.

Transformers were really cool, though. Back in those days, each Transformer, whether boxed or sold in a blister pack, came with a small chart on the back that showed the levels for each attribute for that particular character. Firepower, speed, strength, etc, all rated 1-10. I eventually took advantage of this system to come up with a rule system for us to use our Transformers on a "battlefield" that I had drawn on a scrap of refrigerator box. It was almost a chessboard, and the "speed" determined how far your transformer could move, firepower determined how much damage they did, mitigated by the amount of "armor" the target had, etc etc.

I would hate the AoS model applied to WH40K. Games are actually about having rules, that way you know whether someone is "playing fair" or not. You can "house rule" stuff when a mechanic is obviously broken. For example, in my WH40K games with my 15-year old son who plays Tyranids, the "fleet" special rule means several things: a model with this rule can roll re-roll it's run distance and one of the dice for its charge distance. It also means that a model with this rule can assault on the same turn it moves onto the table (or disembarks a transport), with the important exception that movement+charge range cannot exceed 12", and the model cannot, no matter what other rules might be applied, both run and assault in the turn it arrives from reserves (or disembarks a transport). In this way, his genestealers become a serious threat to any unit left near the edge of the table, because of course they should be.

However, I absolutely do NOT want to have to develop an entire system of house rules and points. I barely have time for 2 games a month as things stand right now (go-go National Guard, full-time job, leadership role in church, having six kids, and owning a home!), and do not have time to think out how to balance all of the codexes which I don't even have. I much prefer a good, solid set of rules from GW, even if they're borked in some ways, I can fix that - I have time to come up with one or two hotfixes.

Tournaments are another thing entirely. I've so far put on two multi-week narrative campaigns that I had to design "rules" for, and while it was fun to brainstorm the rules with a co-worker, it took a lot of time. You want to play in a tournament, you absolutely should expect the rules to be different for each and every tournament organizer until they all get together and establish a set of rules they all want to work from. That's like getting into car-racing - I am sure each of the different circuits have their own rules, and all of the local, small-time circuits have different rules. As you get to the high-level of tournament circles, then you can see crosstalk between the organizers and consistency of rule-sets. If that's what you want to see, you should really be working to bring all of your favorite tournament organizers together to come up with that overlay of house rules.

I very much enjoy WH40K. I actually really like the codex system, although it would be nice if GW would be consistent in putting out a single codex per army per edition, or a digital "update to Xth edition" document. For all its warts, the codex system is better than the old Rogue Trader system where you basically bought your troops a model at a time. Creating an army list back in 1990 was a real challenge, and BattleScribe is well worth every penny that I have paid for it.

[Jewelfox]

Do D&D, Star Wars, and MechWarrior: Dark Age minis count? :P Because my brothers and I played a lot of those miniatures games from the mid-00's. I'd always thought minis were cool, but it wasn't until they marketed the prepainted ones to RPG fans that I thought it was something I could get into, you know?

I got to play a demo game of Warmachine at a local hobby store, though, and was all like "OMG ELF BATTLEMECHS WITH FORCE FIELDS AND GATLING LASERS" and the rules made a lot of sense to me! I kept checking out the minis boxes and display cases there, over the years, and eventually picked up a Retribution of Scyrah starter box. In the following months I picked up the hobby supplies and paints that I needed, and one night I cackled and held my myrmidons aloft triumphantly, after a grueling process of assembly that had included getting the fingers on both of my hands stuck to them.

I still remembered the Tau being really neat, though, from when I binge-read about them on TVTropes a few years back and watched Dawn of War videos of them. I was like "omg this is actually a thing that exists in the 40kverse???" Because they were freaking anime mecha, in the middle of the grimdark grimdarkness that had honestly scared me when I was a little kid in the games stores. And the fact that they would actually be the bad guys in just about any other story, but were the most unambiguous heroes in 40k, really sold me on the over-the-top setting as a whole.

(For srs, they're basically the Ur-Quan. Look it up.)

So now I'm almost at 2000 points of (assembled, not painted) Tau miniatures, after selling my Pokemans or whatever. And a bunch of other stuff. And seeing my vast army of painted models out on the 3d terrain boards the games store had, and getting to actually play this amazing game with them, has been the highlight of my minis gaming "career."

I'm such a noob.

Edit: Also YorkNecromancer, I'm sorry that NWoD happened. Did you see the "20th Anniversary" OWoD books Onyx Path has been putting out, though? They've got some really high production values, and the same messy rules and gothicpunk settings from the 90's.

[Kirsten]

nothing noobish about that, we all start somewhere.

[Haighus]

One of my mates at school introduced me to 40k on my 12th Birthday. He was round my house on a sleep-over for the weekend (I believe this is referred to as a 'slumber-party' for those of you from over the pond), and we popped into a GW store on the Saturday, I got a Cadian Battleforce (the old one, with the Leman Russ and the Gothic Ruins) and assembled it that afternoon- totally wanted a force with tons of tanks. My mate then took me through a little obstacle course he set up out of stuff he found in my room and took me through it step-by-step with a single Cadian guardsman to show me the rules. Kinda like basic training- there was a 'move' station, a 'shoot' station and a 'charge' station for the Guardsman to bayonet at the end. Then I played a small game against his Chaos forces and I've been hooked every since. Guard is still my favourite force in 40k too, and I still have the Leman Russ- 'Old Reliable'- shoring up my Guard line in any game I play my Cadians.

It is worth mentioning I am one of the Dawn of War generation, and I had already played the original game before taking the plunge into the models, so had some awareness of the background and forces. Have literally only just realised I must have been playing a 16 rated game at 11 y/o and I distinctly remember thoroughly enjoying the ability to zoom in on a Dreadnought shredding an Ork in 3D...

[YorkNecromancer]

Edit: Also YorkNecromancer, I'm sorry that NWoD happened. Did you see the "20th Anniversary" OWoD books Onyx Path has been putting out, though? They've got some really high production values, and the same messy rules and gothicpunk settings from the 90's.

Ummm....

I may own everything White Wolf ever published (with the exception of most Mage and Werewolf books because I never much cared for either of those two games).

And yes, that includes the 20th anniversary stuff. Which is F**KING GLORIOUS, I might add.

I may also own twenty odd kilograms of V:TES cards.

...

Yeah, around 1994, I got off the addiction of 40K and straight onto the addiction of White Wolf. And I have to say, the new game-line stuff's been pretty good; especially the new Demon rules. It's really just a WoD adaption of 'Kult', which is honestly all I wanted a WoD Demon game to be. I don't care much for their story modules, which are always a bit... crap. But the 'world-building' manuals are great: rules lite, background heavy, as all my preferred RPGs are.

And don't knock the NWoD. It's brilliant, because it's pure inclusion: everything OWoD can be fitted neatly inside NWoD with very little effort. I know a lot of people disliked it because it dropped the metaplot, but honestly, I was okay with that. The OWoD has the most wonderful atmosphere, but the metaplot had just gotten too convoluted; too many authors with too many disparate visions of where they saw the world going... Although the answer was 'always in the direction of my favourite supernatural species'.

No to mention, NWoD brought us 'Changeling: The Lost', which is utterly incredible, and 'Promethean: The Created', which, for my money, is the greatest game they ever did.

Sorry, yeah, this post was a little longer than I planned it on being... Sorry everyone, go about your business.

[Psychosplodge]

It is worth mentioning I am one of the Dawn of War generation, and I had already played the original game before taking the plunge into the models, so had some awareness of the background and forces. Have literally only just realised I must have been playing a 16 rated game at 11 y/o and I distinctly remember thoroughly enjoying the ability to zoom in on a Dreadnought shredding an Ork in 3D...

Unless it's a bbfc one like on a dvd it's only an advisory age rating isn't it?

- - - Updated - - -

Ummm....

I may also own twenty odd kilograms of V:TES cards.

...

At what point do you stop counting actual cards and start considering them by weight?

[Mr Mystery]

and 'Promethean: The Created', which, for my money, is the greatest game they ever did.

10 points to Gryffindor on that one, matey. Really superb game, and a most pleasing twist on the typical 'oh noes, you looze ur huge manatees!'.

[YorkNecromancer]

10 points to Gryffindor on that one, matey. Really superb game, and a most pleasing twist on the typical 'oh noes, you looze ur huge manatees!'.

It's just wonderful; the only game in the entire WoD, old or new, where hope is the key theme... And rightly so, because Merciful Zeus is your character going to be up against it. No other RPG has ever been so finely tuned to inflict near-catastrophic levels of suffering on player characters.

Except maybe 'Wraith: The Oblivion'.

And especially if you were mad enough to play 'The Shoah' expansion.

*shivers*

I mean, a kind-of amazing book, simply for the fact it exists, but just....

Damn.

I can't imagine anyone ever playing anything from it for obvious, OBVIOUS reasons.

At what point do you stop counting actual cards and start considering them by weight?

CCGs are the very Devil, my friend. Thank goodness V:TES was the only one I ever fell victim to.