Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction | Hacker News Reader

Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

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117 pointsrobinhouston72 comments

I haven't played the game since about 2001, when my friends decided it wasn't cool any more. They (we) moved on to Magic: the Gathering instead, which was a problem as I was the teenager with by far the least money in our group. My parents had just about accepted that Warhammer was expensive but intricate and time-consuming (equivalent to my dad's train set in the 1950s), but 15 cards for £$€? No way. I more-or-less agreed with them.

So anyway, in anticipation of having plenty of spare evenings and weekends in the coming months, I went to the Warhammer shop yesterday, and picked out one of the fantasy races. I bought the "Starter Pack", a 10cm high hero I liked the look of, and the biggest and most expensive monster-heroine-sorceress-something for that race. Plus some paints.

It was probably a life goal of mine, age 14 or so, to be able to afford to do this.

Being an adult warham is kind of a mixed blessing, at 19 I had no money and all the time in the world, at 36 I have no problem affording my plastic addiction but little free painting time.

At least now with the virus I'm 100% work from home, which gives me an extra 90 free minutes a day from not commuting.

I think what I'll miss is having 20-year-later eyesight, so working on intricate details with artificial light will be less appealing. (By now I know what my dad would mean when he'd say things like "how can you see that in this light?") Once I've finished a more important assignment, I'll push my work-from-home hours to the mornings and evenings, leaving the afternoon free.

If the isolation should somehow continue to the winter, I'll also miss out on evening daylight, since I live 4° further north.

get a loupe!

Add lots of light. Lots. Good for the soul and good for the eyes. Check the research coming out of China over the last 10y regarding eyes and light, and there are lots of studies on mood and light levels from the Nordic countries.

Back in the day I built a 6x40w flourescent ramp right above my work desk, 3 phase staggered for effective 150Hz to eliminate the flicker. Worked wonders to get me out of my Murder-Winter-Zombie state during my PhD Up North.

Nowadays there are sooo many good diode ramps available. And fortunately I can take lots of time outside nowadays as well. Still 20/20 vision :)

Yeah, I've the problem that I can afford what ever I want, though I think I've done a pretty good of keeping the majority of it painted. Probably got about 20,000 points of Age of Sigmar painted. Oddly I think my time spent painting has gone down since I started working from home a year and a half ago. Probably because I now work at the same desk where I hobby, so I don't want to sit there after work.

Magic, yawn. I played it back in the 90s. The pinnacle of P2W, no matter the format. If you play Type I you face the very expensive power nine cards. If you play Type II every time a new expansion comes out, all your old cards are a goner. If you play something in between, its a hybrid between these two. Hearthstone successfully copied it.

Total War: Warhammer II is a great game which you can play solo and coop. Same for Borderlands 3, a steampunkish FPS (on sale for 50% on Steam until the 20th).

A few of us have did successfully a Non-play2win format, called "Commoner decks". All cards have to be commons.

Also, commander games in groups also defeat the P2W ideal - if one person grows too fast and is too big a threat, everybody else will smash them. I've played games with 11 people before. The nail that sticks high gets the hammer.

Isn't commons only an established format called Pauper?

Yes, and its becoming extremely popular.

I don't play Magic much anymore, but the Commander format is a good balance. The decks stay competitive longer, and the format is mostly casual anyway so most players are there to have fun rather than to win. The format encourages a lot of jank and fun play styles that aren't possible in competitive games, and the cards needed are therefore a lot cheaper.

Even outside of Commander, most players keep a few "casual" decks around which aren't especially competitive, but are designed to play with interesting ideas. If you ask someone to pull out a casual deck, they'll usually agree.

Sounds like a fun format. Yes, formats can (somewhat) work around the P2W issue. I've played various experimental formats (back then these were suggested in mags such as Inquest).

There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG.

I had very expensive Type I decks, and could not be bothered with the hypes around Type II because I disliked how I suddenly wasn't allowed to use certain cards. Which sucks if you got them not right away but later in the game (hence the hype to "buy a box" in start).

The most fun for me, with MtG, was trying to build decks, and win with them (or polish them, and then win with them). Unfortunately, we later found out that the competition was skewed: we had to pay 1 guilder (~half an EUR) to enroll, but the guy who ran it always opened the packs and replaced expensive rares with cheap ones something he previously denied doing.

I had a faerie deck back in the days, with only one expensive card: Pendelhaven. It was a quick weenie deck, and I could add some more expensive cards if my opponent had these as well, such as Nevinyrral's Disk.

> There's also a format where you pay for packs. You open a pack, grab one card, and then pass it on to the player left of you. Repeat. Sealed deck or something it is called, but sealed deck itself involves too much around RNG.

Close. Sealed is when you get 6 packs yourelf, and construct the best deck you can out of the cards therein. You are thinking of limited, in which everyone gets 3 packs, and takes one card, and passes the rest along, until every person has 45 cards they use to construct a deck.

These are both fun, but as you said, it adds additional RNG to the RNG already present in the gameplay. There are strategies that come with that additional RNG, but there are certainly players who simply find it a turn off. More importantly to me is that it requires buying 3/6 packs per person (~$12/$24) every time to play.

Cube formats are becoming a popular alternative. Instead of opening a set of brand new packs to play, players construct their own card pools and simulate a limited or sealed event from it. This eliminates the need to rebuy new (and potentially already owned) cards, and also allows for players to create interesting card pools that aren't available from packs. But it requires significant upfront investment in terms of planning.

Probably the best format these days for those not interested in the steep costs is Pauper. Its traditional Magic in that you construct your own deck from the pool of all existing cards, but it's unique in that only Common rarity cards are legal. This eliminates a lot of the flashier cards out there, but Magic has been around long enough that there is still lots of creative space in terms of designing unique strategies. There can still be expensive cards, as some are quite old, but because they are all common rarity, really expensive decks tend to cost in the tens of dollars rather than the hundreds.

> The pinnacle of P2W

I bought one deck, and maybe two booster packs, total.

My friend's sister's boyfriend was very wealthy, and would buy several entire boxes of booster packs (like a shop would have on display) when a new expansion came out. In return for helping him open and sort these, he'd give anything he couldn't use or didn't want to my friend and me. This worked OK for a while, as we had fairly similar strength cards.

The one day, the third player in the group bought 8 rare cards from eBay for about £20 (maybe even each?) and was unbeatable. That basically ruined the game for us.

You could play Limited, where everybody gets six booster packs. Everybody opens one pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their left. Once the first pack is all picked up, everybody opens their second pack, takes a card, and passes the remainder to their right. Repeat until you're out of booster packs.

Now you have 6*15 cards, and you need to compose a deck of at least 40 cards out of them. You can add as many basic lands as you want. Play your deck against everybody else's.

This avoids the idea that you can just buy strong cards to win, because you only get what's in the booster packs. And if you take only the strong cards from each booster, there's no guarantee that your deck will actually function as a deck - do you have a good mana curve? Are all of your cards the same colour?

Even once you start drafting to put together a deck instead of just grabbing all the strong or rare cards, you have to figure out which colours the people upstream from you are drafting so that you can try to draft the colours they're passing over, otherwise you'll be competing for the cards they want.

Anyone interested in getting into the hobby and would like something a bit different, then you may want to give Infinity a look. I often describe it as X-Com meets 40K. Infinity is similar to 40K in the sense that it’s in the future and sci-fi with aliens, but a few key differences:

* Rules are free and available on the official website for download.

* Gameplay is much more dynamic with the non active player getting to react to moves made by the active player during their turn. (Much less waiting/doing nothing)

* More near future with current nations represented at places

* Fewer religious overtones

* Bladerunner/Manga aesthetics

* Smaller company, but much more community driven

* Played with fewer figures. A typical full length game will have between 10-20 minis per side.

* Well organised digital competitive play tracking with online leaderboards and tournament organising tools. (This makes tournament matchups much more fair as newbies will be matched against other newbies right away etc)

* Rules are quite a bit more complex than that of 40K. Great for people who like that, but certainly a bit of a learning curve for newbies. (Code One mitigates this, see below)

There’s also a new version coming out called Code One that was just announced for pre-orders and is shipping next month. Seems like a good starting point as it’s a slightly simplified and quicker version that can serve as a jumping off point to the full game.

https://www.infinitythegame.com/

One of reasons i bought Necromunda Dark Uprising - the terrain there is awesome and can be used for infinity too... and for Kill Team.

I have few friends that are into wh40k, but i want to stealthly convert them to infinity :>

Definitely going to give Necromunda Dark Uprising a look then, especially considering the "compatible" terrain. Havent touched Necromunda in a very very very long time, so love the idea of giving it a shot again. Thank you for the tip, and goood luck with your stealth mission ;-)

I have to wait for all the magnets to arrive before i assemble it though. The terrain is very modular and it has pre-made spots to fit in magnets.

I am still drilling spots for few other pieces to make is as modular as possible.

It might be a bit hard to get some of them with all the pandemic going on. At least my paints arrived already.

The complexity of the rules turned me off of Infinity. I also didn't like the miniatures - they're smaller and less stylized than Warhammer 40k.

Which is too bad, because I _loved_ the lore of the game. Some absolutely fascinating writing there.

"A friend who plays more tabletop games than I do tells me that — in terms of the mechanics — as tabletop games go, it’s middling" absolutely, just played my first few games of Infinity recently (yes plural each game took around an hour) and was blown away by how much more fun it was to play. The next day we were trying to organise the next session. That never happened with 40K because the games were exhausting and more something you 'got through'.

However as the author says Games Workshop have created an incredibly engrossing setting which pulls you in and enhances all the other aspects of the hobby.

The fun for me as a teenager was always in the painting and stories. I wrote a few of my own if I recall right.

I think I actually played it as a game twice :)

Try playing Kill Team instead of 40k. It's smaller, faster, and more story-forward.

I actually used to prefer at43 as they where pre paints - I still have the wooden spoon from the uk at43 at games expo from a few years back

My whole group was in on Infinity for a long time.

But eventually the intricacies of Infinity rules gets to you. It is a dense DENSE ruleset that requires constant referral to the rulebook.

It is fun. It is a great setting. But I know it wears on some people due to its complexity.

After a week of work where I'm heavy on the brain-stuff, I've decided I want my games dumber than Infinity.

Since we were only playing the most basic rules (it was our first time) I did wonder if it would be as much fun playing with more of the rulebook. There is a new simplified version coming out so I'm hoping that maintains the fun/complexity balance we found.

I'm curious how video game sales will be affected by COVID-19. Anecdotally, I've noticed all my friends who were never previously interested are now messaging me about setting up group matches in Age of Empire, Fortnite, Civilization.

CS: GO just broke an all time record [0] for the concurrent players recently.

Gaming industry is doing well.

[0] https://invisioncommunity.co.uk/csgo-breaks-a-record-with-ov...

I know there's several sales going on right now (GOG even has a nice selection of games discounted to free to get started). https://www.gog.com/partner/stay_at_home Anecdotally my twitter feed seems to have more people gaming now than normal. Empirically, steam stats show a marked increase in logged in users and those playing games: https://steamdb.info/graph/

itch.io also has had a whole bunch of devs drop their prices or make their games free for the moment.

https://itch.io/c/757294/games-to-help-you-stay-inside

What about the implications on bandwidth as well? Internet will be pushed to its limits in streaming and teleconferencing, among other things.

At least for streaming, most big, non-realtime, streaming platforms like YouTube or Netflix have caching inside ISP networks, to limit the requirements on the global network.

I think this already happened back in february during the chinese lockdown. I remember the google forms we were using suddenly started changing every time someone submitted a form, the data they entered would replace the field labels.

I've already noticed issues in my inner ring suburb. During the business day, my 200Mb Charter cable connection is only pulling 20-50Mb. I've never had capacity issues in the last 10 years.

There was an interview with Valve's Gabe Newell a day or two ago where he said something like "Entertainment industries will either think about how they adapt to this now, or they will wish they had adapted later"

On Tuesday afternoon Lichess (a popular free and open source chess service) showed a notification that they're "dealing with connection issues due to peak online users".

The live stats panel showed around 60k players in around 25k games.

Is it just rounding, or is there some way for more than two players to participate in a game?

Likely people are observing games.

Similar anecdote from me; it's been much easier to get friends together for an online game night.

I rediscovered yesterday around 2AM why I stopped playing Civilization...

"Just one more turn..."

The Emperor protects.

But it is simply amazing to see the amount of work being output by The Gaming Workshop in this Universe.

The amount of audio books and novels and depth of world building is simply mind boggling and here I thought Lord of the Rings/Wheel Of Time was huge.

I actually started reading some of these novels for this exact reason. I figured that if I liked them, I'll have plenty to keep me occupied for the next several years.

Didn't like the Inquisitor novels, so I stopped that series. The Horus Heresy got a little bogged down in the second book, so I read a summary online and decided to skip the other 50 books (LITERALLY). But the first book in the Gaunt's Ghost series has me intrigued so far, so we'll see how that goes.

I totally agree: The sheer quantity of lore that Games Workshop produces is truly mind boggling. It's more than Star Wars and Star Trek combined I'd bet. Truly insane.

Ciaphas Cain is a fun series of books ... he plays a cheesy anti-hero who always seems to win, but it's fun in that it's set in the 40k universe.

Well they finally got to Horus and his legions attacking Terra in circa 2019 ... the first book in the series was published in 2006.

I normally just check out the author (Dan Abnett) or the particular storyline of the plotl (Emperor/Custodes/Alpha Legion/Mechanicus/Titans) before committing myself to listen to the audiobook as they are very well done.

The zenlike state relates quite well to painting and why so many people still choose to paint/draw in this digital age. And all comes down to doing manual work I think. Some of us are more wired for it, others for different tasks. To me, when I paint it feels I was made for doing this and feels i could do it 24/7 without getting bored. My rational self tempers this urge though.

I agree - I get this too. I've often wondered if the John Carmacks of the world have the same thing for coding, in which case, I envy them for being addicted to something so lucrative (as opposed to taking up an activity which is worth next to nil, financially, and is frowned upon, pricewise and socially)

Most likely for John Carmacks of the world. One ingredient of the equarion is doing what one wants and is attracted to. I too enter a zen like state when coding sometimes and it’s been happenning less and less lately because things got too complicated to fit inside my brain. Recently I started playing in DrRacket and I had a few zen moments so far.

Well, isn't that nostalgic...

I haven't touched my paints and brushes for... let me see, since 2011, when I graduated and started working. Nine years. Huh. There was a time, after I got bitten by the warhammer bug that I would apply paint on just about everything that would take it.

Only the other week I was moving some stuff about the house and found some of my GW stuff and a bunch of my 1/72 historical minis.

Here's my little 1/72 Italeri Indian Warrior:

https://i.imgur.com/EPe38S4.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/FMRCP3h.jpg

I think I started by painting some Zulu Warriors in Goblin Green (a GW colour). They made nice Orks. Then I thought I'd paint some Conquistadores for the Empire and perhaps Romans for Elves, Vikings for Dwarfs etc. At some point I felt the historical models (well, _some_ of them) were so pretty they deserved a better fate, so I started painting them in more realistic colours. I still have boxes of the gorgeous 1/72 historical models from Zvezda. See these guys for instance:

Greek Infantry

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=335

Or the Samurai infantry:

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=448

Or the War Elephants:

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=349

Oh god. I am _never_ going to find the time to paint all of those minis... :(

"Burn the Heretic! Kill the Mutant! Purge the Unclean!"

And I sit in my, partial empty, office and have to work - damn :(

"But I am already saved, for the machine is immortal. For even in death, I serve the Omnissiah."

I never really got into the miniature / battle side of Warhammer. It just doesn't appeal to me for some reason. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, on the other hand, I greatly enjoyed. It's a fantastic world in which to create stories and it's also a heck of a lot cheaper. The mechanics are bit clunky compared to modern roleplaying systems, but it is easy to adapt modern systems to the setting if you so desire.

The battle game must be a much better product from the business point of view, due to the need to buy a lot more stuff to participate, and I imagine that is why it has continued whilst WFRP has mostly been sidelined.

Update: I see a new edition of WFRP has been published in the last few years. I played the first edition. I don't know what the other editions are like.

I thought the career / profession mechanics in WFRP were very clever. Never bought it myself, just coveted my friends' copies back in 1991 or something.

Character development in WFRP was so attractive coming from D&D, but dammit, gameplay was so deadly and lethal.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2020/03/04/primarch

My oldest son (10) also started with W40k - thanks to Warhammer Conquest.

Woah! Had no idea that PA is still around :) Two decades and still going strong!

Check out PAX and Child's Play if you haven't heard of them :)

https://www.paxsite.com/

http://www.childsplaycharity.org/

My favorite RPG theme comics:

Order of the Stick: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html

Keep on the Borderlands: http://thekeepontheborderlands.thecomicseries.com/comics/fir...

Both are SFW.

I would add that I recently started getting into Bolt Action, a WWII based miniatures game. It's got surprisingly clean rules, the lore is more realistic, there's even some movies about the lore, and it's way cheaper than any Games Workshop game.

As I'm new to the hobby, I'm a slow painter, but I can see why people do it.

That's cool to hear. I didn't even know there was lore. I bought the Bolt Action book but haven't cracked it yet. Operation: Whitebox and Osprey Black Ops are just ahead of it in the queue here.

I did recently test out One Hour Skirmish Wargames and One Hour Wargames, and discovered that I'm a major house-ruler. So where minis are concerned, I've been curious to try out that side of the hobby and see if I'm somehow better suited to kit bashing my own minis, which I would guess might be the equivalent there. Currently I use LO Draw and Inkscape for playing out games.

Oh and I've also been impressed by some of the Ogre minis I've seen...

Anyway, you got me excited. Fun stuff. :-)

Why the shame? Self-deprecation I hope. Because there should be no shame in having a productive and creative hobby.

I wish I had the patience to paint such tiny figures but whenever I've tried my hands start itching, I even feel itching behind my eyes, in my brain, and I just scream and throw things on the ground.

When I was at secondary school I was in a group that was big into warhammer. We spent more time war gaming than we did in higher education, but we never spoke about it at school! At that age it was hard to imagine any girls would even speak to us if they knew how dorky we were.

Part of our concealment of this extremely uncool hobby was the method we used to enter the games workshop stores, which we dubbed "the nonchalant walk". It involved walking "past" the shop entrance, pointedly not looking its way, then making an abrupt ninety-degree turn when we'd reached the shortest distance to it.

It must have looked very odd to anyone who did glimpse it.

There should be no shame, but in reality, there's no end to the number of people ready to take the piss out of you for "painting toy soldiers". I couldn't have a few Space Marines on my desk at work for example, like I might have Lego.

Warning: it is a very expensive hobby to get into. With the complete lack of time I’ve had, I have a box pile of shame that I really should start working on...

expensive hobby compared to what? for a hobby it really isn't that expensive at all.

If you want an expensive hobby, get into modular sythesizers! Other stuff is of course even more expensive, but this one's the worst I've personally ever dipped into. It's a bit like CCGs, only instead of booster packs you buy that fascinating cool new $300 module. Argh!

I have been working on making space to start painting minis again. The zenlike trance I was in for hours when modeling did wonders for my attention span.

The minis are expensive but I collected quite a bit over ebay.

40k Kill Team makes the game much more affordable too.

Does anyone familiar with the community have other counterpoints or hypotheses about its friendliness? I can't help but feel that's the most important part of the article.

I hate you all, cause I have less time then before and I am more tired then before. Now I have to cook the lunch instead of just going next door and I have to play teacher cause kids wont do homework by themselves.

And my team expects me to work normally (rightfully) so it is not slacking from home anymore then it was in the work.

For me it's video games. I do have my music and drawing hobby to compete against it though.

and I am re-playing Metal Gear Solid 2 for the nth time, a postmodern gem. Never ceases to amaze me.

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