Would you/do you buy miniatures without knowing their rules?

[Ian Mulcahy]

I buy what I think looks cool, and then build armies that I think will be fun to field. My first army was Sisters of Battle (not Witchhunters). I had a blast playing, and could hold my own against everyone in my group. If I didn't win, I made my opponent work for it. Well, except for one game where I made a deployment mistake and got gunned down by my opponent's IG.
I play to have fun, put cool models on the table, and hopefully win. Rules are good, but the Rule of Cool is more important.

[Anggul]

I wouldn't call it underhanded. Anyone who doesn't care gets the model early. Win for them. If someone cares about the rules to the extent that they won't buy it if they aren't good, they're going to wait, not just go ahead and buy it in the hopes that the rules are good.

I can totally understand someone feeling that way. I'm not a 'collector' and find the collector mindset rather strange. If I were buying a model just to put it on the shelf and look at it occasionally, I could just look at it on the internet or look at someone else's. I don't see how it makes any difference whether I actually own it or not if I'm not doing anything with it. It's always seemed to me like some kind of twisted materialism. I want to be able to actually do something with that model, not just have it sit there. That something doesn't necessarily have to be playing the game, it might be the enjoyment of modelling and painting it, but it has to be something. That's just me though, I don't have that collector mindset of 'I own it, it is my possession, that alone satisfies me'. It's not just with wargames, I find the entire idea of just collecting something with no actual use very odd. Like stamps to use a well-known example. They're stamps, they sit in a book not doing anything and the person owns them purely for the sake of owning them. They could just look at pictures of them and it would be functionally exactly the same. Some people enjoy it for whatever reason that I can't personally comprehend, so I'm not going to call them stupid for it, I just don't get it myself, not to say others shouldn't.

Wargaming is different in that a person might really enjoy building, converting and painting though, which is different from collecting, say, figurines, stamps or coins where you buy them and that's that, they're already done, you don't actually do anything with them. I can totally understand why someone might buy a model because they want to try their hand at building, modelling and painting it in a cool way, that's an activity and I get that. Some people have huge numbers of models and have never played a game, they enjoy modelling and painting. They're getting just as much enjoyment, but out of that rather than creating battles.

I will, of course, only buy a model that I like. I'm not going to knowingly spend out for models that are just going to sit in a box or on a shelf doing nothing though, I want to actually use them at some point, even if I don't get around to doing so for a while because I have a backlog, as long as I know I'm going to use them at some point and I like them, I'll get them. This isn't because I only use the most powerful units. I just don't want to put time and effort into a model, then just have to take it off the table and put it back in the case because it sucks and died due to bad rules. If I like a unit for its cool backstory and model, I want to have it do those cool things in an awesome fashion in the game. That's the point in the game after all, to create the battles of that setting. If the model isn't going to do that, I'm probably not going to use it, so I'm not likely to bother buying, building and painting it. I do enjoy modelling and painting, but not to the extent that I'll buy a model purely for that purpose.

Also I hate mould lines. The less of them I have to remove in my lifetime, the better.

[jd2x.pacman]

I will buy for either, with the priority on looks. I tend to stick to my armies, but I am considering getting a Riptide R'Varna simply because I think it is a completely awesome model.

[mysterex]

I'll only buy a unit that has both good rules and that I like the look of. Each edition and codex edition release units that had been good tend to become rubbish. I've got a lot of stuff that I don't play now entirely due to the current rules. (like 19 Kasrkin with hellguns), that I liked the look of but aren't prepared to bring to the table.

As I have a limited. amout I can spent I want to make sure I get value out of it.

[jonsgot]

I don't own centurions, enough said.

[SaveModifier]

I buy a lot of models with no intention of using them in games, loads of companies sell miniatures for their own sake

[Denzark]

The last model I brought without rules was a copplestone castings santa with foxy elf girl. There will be hand swops so santa has a BFO bolter and the elf gets a daeonette claw, but hey...

[Al Shut]

I voted that I buy mostly for rules, but probably it's more like 50% rules, 50% looks. Not sure if that means I'm not fussed.

That said I never bought a model just to collect it so I'll never, ever buy a new modell without knowing it's rules first. The same way I would never buy a model without knowing what it looks like.

[Eldar_Atog]

Yeah, I pre-ordered a bunch of Dark Eldar stuff before the rules came out. For the most part, I did ok.. but the Mandrakes burned me hard. I bought 2 boxes of them. Fortunately, I was able to re-purpose them as a squad of cultists.

I can't say that I wouldn't pre-order anything again but it won't be a big kit.

[Gingerpanda]

There are rules for the miniatures I buy WTF man!

In all the years of playing GW table top games I've always picked the miniatures I liked, which is why I guess these days I collect and paint more than I play.