Dragonmeet 2012 in One Week

And then it goes KaaBooom... Gareth is holding back the laughter. It's just the way I tell them.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am helping to run the OGRE demo at Dragonmeet that takes place on the 1st of December at the Kensington Town Hall. I go most years to this show, and this year I am providing the miniatures for rolling out the new 6th Designers Edition of OGRE.

On that note here are some more pictures from when I went to Cambridge in August to help out Daniel Jew, the new line editor for OGRE, running demo games at Congenial. First up Saturday, where I arrived around midday.

 

A case of studied anticipation by all three parties,with me being patriotic, and all, in my Stars & Stripe top. I was helping Peter, the player on the left, against the predations of Gareth's Combine Ogre incursion into the Pan European Area of Operations on the Saturday afternoon. 

Gareth has a cunning plan, judging by the smile on his face.

And here we have a sequence that goes something like me saying, "And then we do this, followed by that."

Peter smiling, says, "That sounds good."

Me, "Ooh, I've just seen something... we could reach out and crush all our enemies that stand before us in one swell swoop."

Sunday I was there bright and early and bushy tailed dressed in black to better fit in with the prevailing colour palette at the convention.

Sunday, wishing that I had an OGRE T-shirt like Gareth's wearing. Anyway, I'm pointing out to one of our first time players where I thought he should go next, and explaining the why's and wherefore's of the choice. 

It's all about using ridges to block the conventional forces. I have no doubt that Gareth on the left is of course trying to think of counter moves.

This picture is one of several that Daniel took over the weekend that just shows how much fun I was having. Gareth was a great MIB agent to be with. The games were just a blast to play. Using Daniel's miniatures for the demo games really made the difference for me, especially seeing how he used magnets for the turrets etc... 

 

Daniel on the left, off to be the line editor, and Gareth on the right, at the end of Congenial. 

Smiles say it all really. Oh how we laughed at the fact that Gareth had become a zombie, having had the top of his head cut-off earlier in the day.

So, I hope to see all those who can make it at Dragonmeet on Saturday the 1st of December.

Thanksgiving 2012

My partner is half American, so we celebrate Thanksgiving here at the Paint it Pink household. So have a good one, we did.
   

Pan European Infantry: New Pictures Added

I had painted the infantry a basic green, but then I found myself thinking that they looked a bit boring, and I didn't want to go down the route I took with my 10mm House Steiner infantry, as that would be even more boring.

Fortunately, I saw a post on the SJG forums and some really nice paint done on some infantry, which I found quite inspiring, and can be seen here. Scroll down to see the finished infantry. So here are mine ready for the Dragonmeet demo on the 1st of December.

 

Here you see 60 stands of infantry, divided into three battalion's, representing the infantry component of my 7th Demi-Brigade Légion Étrangèr (7DBLÉ). For those of you who are interested, after the French Revolution the use of the word regiment was frowned upon, because the "regi" part of the name come from royal, and anything royal was out of favour, hence demi-brigade.

 Each battalion has eight one shot heavy weapon stands. The game specifies three 18 man platoons per company, with four company's per battalion. Strictly speaking therefore, in game terms, the battalion is six figures short of being a full strength unit, which would be about 36 men in real life.

Close enough for me, and quite in keeping with historical precedence, as very few units run at their full paper strength.

I got this much better result when I re-took the picture. Still learning how to tweak the digital camera's settings to get the results I want.

One gets variant poses, which can also be tweaked a bit to add some more variety.

An extreme close-up of one the three figure squad representing an 18 man platoon, which has made me  go back and re-read my camera manual on various aspects of colour balance and exposure and retake the pictures here.

Two figures on a base for casualty reduction tracking.

 

And the last of the unflattering extreme close-ups on one figure, which is also for casualty tracking. By my calculation these pictures of my figures are at five times their original size.

Thought I would add a picture of the heavy weapon stand too.

So all the infantry are now painted and ready to rock on December the first when I'm helping the MIB run an OGRE demo game at Dragonmeet. See you on the bounce.

Warfare 2012: Reading

 

Another Warfare show, and I felt a very good one this year with a good selection of games and traders to buy stuff off. No one was grumbling. My plans involved giving Jon at GZG some Hound Dogs that I had reworked so he could cast them up, if he felt that they were good enough? Expect variant models to be added to the range, and you heard it here first.

 

Jon very kindly said nice things about them, and I reassured him that it didn't matter to me if he had to cut them up to mould them. I got given a box with two Takara F144 VOTOMS as a present, so Xmas sometimes really does come early! 

I was really pleased as the two models were ones I don't have. I will post pictures when I have assembled them in due course.

I also saw these rather nice grav sleds with lots of gribley detail. I'm not a big fan of anti-grav stuff, as I think it is the technological equivalent of magic, but these look very nice. 

Also, spotted in passing were these rather lovely WW1 aircraft on offer from Skytrek. Couldn't afford to buy them, or at least buy them and then have to make and paint them. No wonder Wings of War/Glory sell so well.

 

Then Timecast blew me away, and got me to open my purse, with their new 10mm Vietnam riverine monitor range, which I was told was specifically made to fit with Pendraken figures. I was going to make some masters of these monitors for Pendraken, but there is no way I could make anything better, so I've given up on that idea.

 

I bought the command and control boat, which is the third from the left. I really wanted to buy a whole bunch of these, but my budget is tight, and buying six more would have been too extravagant a purchase at this time. So, my plan is to buy one each time I go to a show where Timecast are trading. The added bonus for me was that I could see me using this for my Mummerset campaign too. 

Oh yes, I will have to write a post on riverine operations for the blog now.

I also bought some paint, and got a show deal on six bottles for six pounds. I also bought some D4s and D20s for the next Mummerset game, as I only had one of each at the last game, and using dice for missile allocation is just so much quicker than reading off a table. Also, while perusing the stands, one of the traders had some cheap Takara 1/144 tanks, so I bought a German Porsche Tiger for parts. Big spender me.

Moving on to the games I saw.

First off was the Spectrum versus the Mysterons game called Scarlet Thunder - Road race with Violence. Dum, dum, dum... I spoke John and Peter  from South London Warlords, as I've known them both for many years. It was good to catch up and have a chat.

 

Lots of lovely toys on a rolling terrain table, which I thought was a nice homage to the original Gerry Anderson shows that used rolling roads for their car chases. I talked to Peter about the toys, and stuff from Konami, and a super 1/50th scale Terror Fish kit he had found. John, was looking a lot slimmer from having had major surgery. Good to see him in fine form though.

Another SF game that caught my eye was from the RAF Wargaming Association called "Blinkin' Cakewalk" they said!

 

Very nice work on the terrain for this game, and much fun was being had with opening and closing doors to escape the opposition. Next, was Space Vixens from Mars, run by Gary Mitchell as part of the Southbourne Tabletop & Board Games society. A busy table with lots going on.

 

Spent sometime talking to Gary, who is the author of the Dark Horizons column in Miniature Wargames. He is also a member of the SFSFW, which I have shockingly allowed my membership of to lapse, and me being one of the founder members on the original committee and all. Anyway, Gary made some kind comments about my review of Firestorm Armada Planetfall by Spartan Games that appeared in Battlegames issue number 32.

So, a nice show, which is well worth visiting. I was there for five hours and still didn't get to see all the games as I started to flake out and needed to drive home.

Epiphany & Omega

Quite recently Randall Bills blogged that 12 years ago that he had worked for a year on producing a set of tabletop miniatures rules for BattleTech quote:

"Not to mention I still have on my hard drive, 12 years later, the fully play-tested and developed BattleTech Omega rules set that utterly reshaped BattleTech into a pure tabletop miniatures game, tossing the entire current game system out the door.  A rules set a year in the making and at the end I spent almost a month of 12+ hour days finalizing…all that work and effort and it never saw the light of day."

No CGL employee wants to comment on Omega, other than to say Quick Strike is better and trust us, we are professionals.  Fair enough, but that rather leaves Omega open to idle gossip and speculation.

My own experience of writing a rule set is that one can easily spend a year working on a book, have something that plays well with the play testers, then take it to print only to find that one has produced a game that no one really wants to buy and play.

Rick Priestly, funnily enough, has written a piece in Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy this month on why there are so few second editions of rules?

I quite like WS&S, though I prefer Battlegames for my wargame magazine fix. However, I always browse WS&S, and buy it when a good article catches my eye.

However, I don't think that Mr Priestly is right, because I can think of lots of games that have gone into multiple editions.  BattleTech and Ogre just happening to be two of my favourites, and neither can be written off as garage/back of shed productions either.

Anyway, coming back to CGL and Omega, I interpret "trust us" means that they didn't think the rules would sell, and "good reasons" stands for "this wasn't the game we wanted."

I say this because I think that the thing that stood out for me was when Randall Bills said that the "rule set utterly reshaped BattleTech into a pure tabletop miniatures game...".

That rang several warning bells to me.

First off, while the BattleTech miniature rules that were printed in the past make a fair stab of converting the hex based wargame into a tabletop wargame, to me it is very clear that the writers backgrounds are in board-games.

The next thing that springs to mind is that when BattleTech was originally designed it was inspired by Japanese animation. I'm currently watching a fansub* of Fang of the Sun Dougram, and it is interesting to compare the game with one of the shows that were around at the time.

My partner and I find ourselves making comments while watching Fang of the Sun Dougram like, "oh look a death from above attack just like in BattleTech", or "oh look a head hit" etc., etc.. The story of Fang of the Sun Dougram has those elements that Jordan Weisman didn't like, namely the youngish cast of characters that typifies the Japanese obsession with youth, and the changing of society values.

So, my point here being that BattleTech was inspired by anime** and captures the essence of what made such shows attractive to audiences. If one forgets to touch base with what makes something attractive, one can easily forget the core values.

So what are the core values of BattleTech? In my opinion they are:

It is a game where you play the pilot of a giant walking combat machine.

It is a game where the heroes are game changers, even if defeated, or broken by events.

Hence from the start BattleTech has the feel of an RPG. It is a universe where armour is better than guns, because that was a way of keeping the heroes alive in the game. The whole weapons range thing that bugs so many people is again driven by the need to keep things up-close and personal.

Change these things and one is in peril of losing the things that makes the game appealing.

All of this serendipitously connects to what I've been writing about in three recent blog posts. The first on scale conundrums, followed by more about scale, and hexes versus terrain all discuss the various problems that come from trying to convert a hex based board-game into a tabletop miniatures wargame.

Nothing I'm writing is particularly novel, or even Earth shatteringly inspiring, but it remains something that is worth discussing all the same, because taking it all for granted just leaves us playing mindlessly.

Bottom line it all comes down to what is the game all about? What is the story being told?

The answers to these questions will determine ground and time scales, combat resolution, and how the game feels and plays. This is why I started my own BattleTech house rules called Epiphany, because it came from a light bulb moment "Keep It Simple".

*fansub: a fan produced subtitled translation of the original Japanese language broadcast.

**anime Japanese animation shows.

Mecha Meme

I can't make this stuff up, I promise. The Taiwan army recruitment advert.

One day soon we shall see mecha in action.