Painting Matters: In Defense of Hobby Standards

(Editor's note: This week's post is written by Karl, a prolific gamer, terrain builder and painter, and also one of the founding members of Chicago Skirmish Wargames. He wanted me to point out that the opinions below are his and his alone ... but if you perchance happen to game with us, you won't find an unpainted model anywhere on our battlefields. Also, a portion of this article appeared in Dakka Dakka.)

I frequent a number of forums, and periodically discussions arise regarding painting and whether or not it is a necessary part of the hobby. This often comes up among players of popular games like Warmachine, where players are rewarded for buying entire factions at once just to have a competitive option against every opponent. Similarly, Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 require a player to buy many dozens or hundreds of miniatures just to play the size of game most people at the local game shop will enjoy.

Some folks inevitably chime in with "it's just a game" or "it would be just as fun with chits." In the end, the discussion usually settles around a philosophy equivalent to: "Those who don't choose to paint their models have a different approach to the hobby and it's just as valid as yours."

Balderdash, I say! Pish posh and poppycock!

I will endeavor herein to make the case that painting is an essential part of the hobby, and a standard not to simply overlook. Like many here, I have a "live and let live apart" attitude towards folks who don't paint their miniatures. My philosophy is generally, "That's fine for you, but you'll have to find someone else to play against," though I'm wiling to make exceptions for folks whose painting is in-progress.

Still, I'm not so relativistic as to be willing to give some sort of tacit approval to those who don't paint and say that they're involvement in the hobby is just as good as mine. It's not, nor should we delude ourselves to think that it is so, simply for the sake of good feelings and avoiding offense.

Like any activity, there is a hierarchy of involvement. In the tabletop wargaming hobby, those who play with painted miniatures bring more to the table, and those with grey hordes bring less. It may sound elitist or harsh, and no one seems to like the word "hierarchy" anymore, but consider that every other hobby activity has standards by which they judge a member's degree of involvement and commitment to the hobby.

Why should wargaming be any different than other hobbies that require painting?

• If you're a part of a car club, but don't paint or keep your car up, you're going to be viewed differently. 
• If you're part of a fine-scale modeling club, but just assemble and convert your models, and don't paint them, no one is going to think that you've "finished" them or want you to display with the club. 
• -If you show up to a train club with a bunch of ready-to-run "Bachman" models with plastic wheels, eyebrows may be raised.

And holding to standards is not unique to hobbies requiring painting. They exist in every sphere of life.

• In sports, it's the better players who make the varsity team. 
• In music, it's the better musicians (or better promoted musicians) who get the gig. 
• In business, it's those who get results and profits who become executives. 

Likewise, if you show up to the table with grey hordes and aren't actively painting them, you simply "aren't there yet." You have neglected an important part of the hobby, and I'm not going to applaud you for your personal "approach" to the hobby. That does not make you (or me) a bad person. It does not reflect on your character, your behavior outside of wargaming or your worth as a human being.

However, make no mistake, painted models are part of wargaming and have always been. If you're content to repeatedly bring your Bondo-patched Camaro to the car show, that's your choice, but don't expect the same degree of esteem and approval from your fellow enthusiasts. Like any hobby, there are loads of people out there ready with tips and techniques to help you get your stuff done, and many more are willing do it for you for a price, but it's up to you see that it gets done.

I do not hold myself apart from these same standards and fully realize that they apply to me as well. I paint most of my minis with fairly quick block paint schemes followed by a Minwax dip. It's a standard I'm happy with and looks good on the tabletop. I even have a few prepainted miniatures that have been rebased and dipped!

But I don't ever expect to get the same kind of props or respect as someone who paints their miniatures to a higher standard any more than I would expect a best-painted award at a convention. In fact, sometimes I'm actually a tiny bit disappointed when I receive kudos for my fully painted figures, because it means that so many gamers are used to seeing hordes of unpainted models at their local game store.

To sum up, the hobby has standards. If you choose not to meet them, or your local game scene chooses to ignore them, then that's up to you and them. However, they do exist. Pretending they do not may give a warm fuzzy feeling to a few people, but it lowers the the hobby as a whole and does no one any favors. As one of the thousands of players who was attracted to wargaming by the spectacle of painted armies clashing on a battlefield of beautiful terrain, it's simply not a standard I'm willing to let go. Nor should any of us.

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

(Photos from the four-year history of CSW and the many games we've played during that time)

From the workbench: Converted plastic mechs

A number of months ago I sat down one evening and hacked out a bunch of conversions of the inexpensive plastic mechs sold by EM-4 Miniatures, and this week I finally got around to photographing them. These are by no means finished, but I thought I'd share some of the possibilities hidden in these 20-year-old miniatures.

Formerly packaged and marketed as "Steel Warriors" and distributed by several other companies, these remain some of the most affordable figures that are near the the Battletech scale (1/300 or 1/285). The 5-figure box sells for about $4 on the EM-4 website.

For a review of them, check out this article from Reviewing Wargames, from which I've borrowed a couple of photos. Each box contains sprues with parts to build 5 mechs using 3 basic chassis (small, large, and chicken walker) and a variety of arms. Bases are also included.

Though there are many options for assembly, here's what they might look like when built "stock."

Nice enough, but there's even more potential there. Here's what I came up with and how I got there.


Small Body Mech 1

• Fins removed from both shoulders 
• Gun removed from hand/wrist of right hand 
• Gun elongated on the left hand 

Small Body Mech 2

• Shaved cockpit canopy off; upper torso rotated 180 degrees. 
• Upper barrel removed from each arm (formerly double barrel arms) 

Large Body Mech 1

• Shortened the barrel of each cannon arm to look more like a cannon and less like a laser.

Large Body Mech 2 

• File away cockpit 
• Cut body at waist and rotate 180 degrees
• Instead of mounting missiles on regular pegs, I moved them back a bit

Here's a shot of the "back" of the mech showing where I filed the cockpit away. I'll probably find some little greeble to glue on there, though it's not terribly bad looking.

Large Body Mech 3 

I'm particularly fond of this one, as it is very reminicent of the classic Rifleman mech design from old school BattleTech.

• File away cockpit, cut at waist and rotate 180 degrees

Large Chicken Walker 1 
This mech's torso is interesting because either end looks like it could be the cockpit.

• Cut off cockpit 
• Reverse body section so rear faces forward 
• Shorten cannon arm a bit for variety 

Large Chicken Walker 2 

• Cut off rear protruding section (the part used as a cockpit in the mech above) 
• Glue two random bits on that area (in this case the shoulder part of a double cannon arm)
• Saw off the rear pegs where the legs are usually attached 
• Attach legs to forward pegs where arms are usually attached 
• Attach two barrels to flat front of leg shoulder area 

Though the mechs come with either 25mm round or hex bases, I prefer the look of the battletech-style lipped 30mm hex bases. These are also available from EM-4 for the ridiculously low price of £1 GBP for 10 bases. The larger size is nice, and the lipped edge makes your basing/ballast/flock look very tidy. The mechs have little pegs in their feet, and it's easy to carve or drill an appropriately sized hole in the base. Just keep the feet elevated a bit so they will rest nicely on your basing material. Here's a view seen from the bottom of the base.

These miniatures were easy to cut, file and assemble. The plastic is a bit harder than regular polystyrene, but it glues just fine with superglue or my favorite plastic cement (Plastruct Plastic Weld). Even though I don't play BattleTech, I had such a good time with these, that I'll probably come back and convert another batch. Maybe someday they'll even be painted!

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Pizza, plaster and paint: CSW hosts hobby night

Last week a few Chicago Skirmish Wargames members gathered at my home for an extended evening of hobbying. Drop-cloths descended, bins of supplies emerged from storage and we completely took over my dining room and kitchen. About midway through the evening we paused to order Chicago-style deep dish pizza from the place down the street, which gave us fuel to carry on and make some good progress on various projects.

At the first table, Pat was hard at work on a batch of Stonehaven Dwarves, which he recently received in the mail following a successful Kickstarter campaign. They had only been primed gray, but he managed to get three of them block painted and highlighted to the point where they were ready for the dip.

He then proceeded to put a second layer of paint on a batch of roads I had been working on. They are made of latex caulk spread in sections on hardboard, then sprinkled with just a bit of sand and painted brown. After a bit of dry brushing, we'll have some nice dirt roads for our wastelands. We'll have photos of these roads on the battlefield soon.

On the opposite side of the painting table, Mike was arranging his Imperial Guardsmen for an epic mass painting effort. A veteran of 3mm, 6mm, and spaceship fleet painting, Mike likes to paint in huge batches and today was no exception. He was painting the pants and sleeves on 60 Imperial Guardsmen! Here's some of the progress he made.

Across the room, Josh was hard at work building a set of hills. He is a bit new to terrain building, so we started with basic styrofoam hills. Despite a few mishaps with the foam cutter wires, he managed to carve and prep one section of hills, and he cut out a few more beyond that. The hills are made from a four-section styrofoam shelf display arrangement that was designed to display Lemax Christmas houses. I picked up the display at an after-Christmas sale for $4!

Josh also brought along a few Pegasus Hobbies Gothic Ruins that he had glued to hardboard triangles. He took this cool project to the next level, though, by beveling the edges of the baseboard and adding real broken ceramic tiles to the floor, then scattering kitty litter around for rubble. The end result is pretty great looking.

I really like the substantial look (big pillars, etc) of the Pegasus gothic buildings. They don't have as many bits and pieces, but they look good -- and the fact that they are not covered in skulls gives them a much wider appeal outside of Games Workshop battlefields.

Lastly, I worked on a bit of terrain that is sort of a bunker or mine entrance. It was originally sold as the "Brendam Dock Playset" from the Thomas the Tank Engine toy line. I found the main section for a buck or two at Goodwill. It's scaled nicely for 28mm figs, with the walkway being the perfect height for use a firing trench. It would have looked like this when new.

I removed the storage rails behind the garage door -- which still opens, by the way -- and I also chopped off the various tabs on the building where the railway and roadway would have been attached.

I added doors, fencing, a fuel tank and some other bits. The doors and hatches are all made from a bag of precut wood rectangles that I picked up from Michael's. They come in three fairly standard sizes, give or take a millimeter or two, making them an excellent option for cheap panels for sci-fi modeling.

It's since been primed and ballasted, but I'll do a post about it later. A great time was had by all, and a lot was accomplished. We've only managed to have three hobby gatherings in the nearly three years the club has existed, but I hope we can do this more often. Maybe deep dish pizza is the key?

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Looking back on 2012

We're feeling retrospective as 2012 comes to a close, so we felt like it might be a good idea to look back on a year of gaming in the Windy City.

The year began with the club ramping up our first concerted effort to produce a series of blog posts on a particular topic. In this case, it was 28mm on the Cheap, a series that aimed to dispel myths about the perceived expense of gaming in 28mm. It's our favorite scale, and we've got plenty of tips on how to avoid breaking your gaming budget. The series actually began in late 2011, but it really gathered steam in 2012. It was also an excuse for us to share some of our favorite makers and manufacturers of affordable minis! We also expanded it to talk about cheap, DIY terrain and vehicle conversions. It's now a regular feature on our blog.

In February, we got our hands on a playtest copy of Apocalypticum, a post-apocalyptic skirmish ruleset under development by Ganesha Games, publishers of the excellent Song of Blades & Heroes. If you follow this blog, you know that CSW has a soft spot for post-apoc gaming as well as Ganesha Games. We enjoyed the game and look forward to its eventual publication.

By April we were gearing up for our second appearance at Little Wars, an annual convention that takes place in suburban Chicago. In 2011 we ran a straightforward Song of Blades & Heroes scenario. This year, we aimed a little higher: post-apocalyptic highway carnage! Check out the battle report from the game to get an idea of how epic it was.

Later in the summer, we launched our first club campaign: The Iron Isle, a Song of Blades & Heroes fantasy epic! That link goes to a description of our campaign world, as well as battle reports from the 20-odd individual games we played over the course of the summer. It was a fantastic series of games, and the campaign really inspired us as a club to dig deep into the hobby. We painted miniatures and built terrain all summer long, buoyed by the fantastic games we were playing in the campaign.

It was around this time that our recruitment efforts began to pay off. We had regular gaming space available at Pat's house and Karl's house, and our small group soon grew to number 6 or 7 regular players. We're very excited to see new faces at CSW's regular game nights!

By September, we were beginning to talk about our winter campaign. The consensus was that we wanted to try out a full-blown post-apocalyptic campaign -- after all, we had the miniatures and we had the vehicles. Time to put 'em on the table! With this in mind, the terrain bug bit a few of us that fall. Pat started knocking out various post-apoc ruins and rubble bits. Karl converted a bag full of plastic farm buildings into a table's worth of industrial warehouses. He also snagged an architectural tabletop model at an auction and reconfigured it as an urban wargames table. Tim churned out a great collection of modular modern office buildings, as well as a batch of foamcore ruins and some plaster car wrecks.

We took a break from all this post-apoc prepping to host our second annual Halloween zombie game at Games Plus. Carnage in New Chicago, the sequel to 2011's Escape from New Chicago, allowed us to really one-up our previous game in a lot of ways. We had more terrain, more zombies and most importantly, more players!

We closed out 2012 by auditioning a number of rulesets for our upcoming post-apocalyptic campaign. We tried Neutron York 3000, In The Emperor's Name and This Is Not A Test, a work-in-progress ruleset that we are helping to playtest. We're leaning towards TNT, though our recent game raised enough questions that we decided to have another go at it in early January.

Thanks to all of our readers who took the time to post a question or comment -- and bonus points to everyone who came out to game with us in 2012. Watch this space as we head into 2013! We hope to share more photos, battle reports, tutorials and gaming fun with all of you.

-- The Players of Chicago Skirmish Wargames

Still More Post-Apocalyptic Terrain

I've cleared a couple more terrain projects off my shelf relating to our forthcoming post-apocalyptic campaign. In a question posted on my previous article, a commenter asked which ruleset we were thinking of using. The answer is, we're not sure yet. It might be Blasters & Bulkheads, but it might also be Neutron York 3000, or Wastelands, or even something like Nuclear Renaissance. We're holding auditions this month and next to see which ruleset clicks for us.

On to the terrain! Up first we have a huge sewer pipe popping out of some shattered concrete. Is it a point of entry to a vast underground tunnel network? Or an exhaust vent for a ramshackle industrial plant? Only the scenario knows...

The idea for this terrain piece was shamelessly borrowed (ripped off?) from Mattblackgod, post-apoc modeler extraordinaire and moderator of the Post-Apoc Wargames Forum, an excellent source for inspiration. To wit: He made a piece of terrain that was a pipe coming out of the ground, and I was like "I can do that!" So I did. I had a length of unused PVC pipe in my basement, so I cut it at an angle, glued it to a CD base, added some foam blocks and filled in the rest with sand, gravel and green flock.

This next item is an urban ruin. It's just a few blocks of blasted concrete, really ... can't even call it a collapsed building. This my first time creating a piece like this, and I tried to create several little areas for figures to find cover. I think it turned out well (needs more little wires for concrete rebar), so I'll probably make a few more like this. It was quick and easy to put together, though it took a while to paint.

 

  

  

And finally we have this little barricade I put together using some spare bits. The main piece is a resin fortification, and I added some barrels, metal walls and a couple sandbags. A quick and dirty paintjob finished this up in no time flat. I've got 5 more little fortification pieces left, so I can make several more of these. It's a bit shiny because I dipped the finished product and it needs a matte spray to take the gleam off.

Here's another urban ruin along the same lines as the one I featured above. It's a bit bigger, with a ledge and more places to hide. I also added a few more detail bits, like the metal grating and the fallout poster.

The figures are Kolony Ferals from Pig Iron Productions -- some of my very favorite post-apocalyptic/sci-fi miniatures. I've got about 30 of 'em painted up, and they always draw comments when they hit the battlefield. Here's a closeup of two guys in this new terrain piece.

And here's a little piece of industrial wreckage. It's made out of the gearbox from inside a wind-up toy car, and the green piece is a bit from a Mechwarrior clix figure. The other debris is just twisted wire and a small snippet of plastic grating. Oh, and the figure is another Kolony Feral dude.

More to come!


-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member