What has the hobby meant for you?

[Mr Mystery]

Evening all.

This seems the most appropriate board for this particular discussion, as it's not game system specific.

In short - how has our mutual hobby affected your life?

For me, pretty immensely.

First got started with the release of Heroquest, and have been gaming ever since. Pretty much everyone I know can be directly, or indirectly linked back to my local GW store, and the halcyon days of youth. If my current social group aren't gamers, I've met them through gamers. Vast majority of those I met way-back-when (I will not use the cretinous 'back in the day' because it's cretinous. Except there.) are still active in the hobby to one extent or another. Most are my closest buddies and drinking goons.

But it doesn't stop there. I've worked for my local GW store on three occasions. First two bouts were as an additional, part time job - and yes, I was totally in it for the discount. But my third stint genuinely changed my life. Lost my full time job, so asked my then Manager if I could increase my hours. Instead, he said he was moving stores, and there was in fact a full time position going at his destination. One thing lead to another, and I went for interview. And you know what happened next?

I blew it. Not so good.

Then, for the first time in my adult life - I was actually given feedback on the interview. Turns out, I was a bellend in the interview, and rubbed the guy up the wrong way with arrogance poorly disguised as confidence. I was pretty gutted - but it did give me not only the chance to take a step back and look at myself, but also a less than positive perspective to do so from.

Stayed on part time, and a couple of months later managed to blag the chance to run a store over a weekend - no staff left (won't go into why, or which store. That's immaterial). Funnily enough, the guy I persuaded to give me this chance was the same guy who turned me down for the full time position. Because of his frank and honest feedback, I'd seriously belted the eff up.

I got the keys, and a weekend turned into four weeks and an offer (gratefully snapped up) to go on the GW Management Training course - that was as a result of taking poorly performing store to top of the region for sales. 4 months later I promptly failed the course! Sadly, redundancy then happened - this was....2010ish, and they were ditching part time staffers across the company.

So another harsh lesson - I was good, but I could be so much better. Moving on from that, one of my friends (who I first met when he was a GW Staffer) put me onto a job where he worked - in Car Insurance. Went for it, got it, and I've never looked back. My involvement in the hobby has given me an awful lot.

And fun aside? The friend who put me onto the Car Insurance job just had his final interview for my current (completely awesome) place of work. The Great Plastic Tactics River flows on!

So you could say the hobby very much is my life. It's given me untold hours of enjoyment and gaming pleasure, and even taught me some invaluable life lessons (like it's so much easier when you're not a total ****).

Hopefully that's set the tone. It's not about comparing X to Y in gaming. I just want to hear about your history in gaming!

[Erik Setzer]

Yowza. This could be a crazy discussion.

You know what... I'm going to be full honest here, too. You've been warned. (You'll know what I mean when I get to the parts I might otherwise be "less than honest by omission" about.)

Oh, and this is almost certain to be long. Get cozy.

I first got introduced to miniatures games back around, hmm, I believe it was 1989. Maybe the year before, but early years for me are a little fuzzy. (Born in 1981.) I was a nerdy kid, even read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by the time I was eight. Not sure if that could be considered bragging or a cry for help. Anyway, my dad was big into miniatures gaming. He'd been playing before then, but either I wasn't around or I don't remember. My earliest memories were of him playing Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine in the back of Xeno's on University Blvd. at Atlantic Blvd. here in Jacksonville. I was enthralled by it. The game, and especially the world. I'd go to school and draw Titans all day. Mercifully, I had understanding teachers, who encouraged an elementary student to draw giant death machines rather than stifle creativity. Yay!

As time went on, I'd play the occasional game at a convention, usually with other people. GW games of all sorts (loved Space Hulk), and other games as well, especially Seekrieg (my dad loved that as he had been in the Navy). Warhammer, 40K, Man'O'War, Space Marine, so many others. We'd go to all the conventions in Jacksonville, especially JaxCon and Skirmishes (that one was mostly historical gaming). I remembered people playing games well into the night, when I would just pass out at the table and be woke up for my turn. I was actually pretty good with destroyers. (That may explain my love for them in Battlefleet Gothic... but that's also because they were awesome.)

Miniatures gaming was one of the hobbies my dad was into that I could really enjoy with him. I honestly wasn't much on basic model building (can't do your own thing so much with them), or trains, or cars. But I loved miniatures games. When 40K2 came out, he got me some Blood Angels, and I also got Orcs and Goblins for WFB (4th edition at the time). I ended up getting Orks for 40K, too, and fell in love with greenskins in all their games... even carrying that into Warcraft when it was released on the PC, playing the Orcs every time. I still have some of my original models with their paint job still on them. There's a Blood Angels Sergeant I'm not sure I can bring myself to repaint, even though he's not that great and wouldn't fit with newly painted models. But he was one of my first.

I played a lot of other games. HeroQuest, Tyranid Attack, stuff like that. When GW did BattleMasters with a board game company (too lazy to look it up), we picked it up to play... and then realized you could put the models on bases for WFB. That's where a number of models in my armies are from. Empire Archers and Crossbowmen and Knights; Beastmen; Orcs, Goblins, Wolf Riders; Ogres; Cannons. It was a windfall when they were selling for $5 a box at Pic'N'Save. On one of my birthdays, I was given Space Hulk; on another, Titan Legions (admittedly, that was likely a way for my dad to get my mom to let him buy it).

We played at a range of stores. I remember this one small place called The Bugler's Cry. I kick myself every day for not pointing out to my dad the copies of the old Ork books from Rogue Trader they had in their used book boxes. War Dogs in its various iterations and locations, too. Sanctuary was a great place, until the owner sold the stock and closed up to move on in life. Borderlands Comics and Games was nice, until my dad screwed that up in a tiff with my brother that got him banned. (I was never banned, actually. And I think the ban on my dad was lifted over time either because the owner just forgot or felt it was well past time.) There was a store in Georgia, just over the border, run by Kris Wolf (Wolf Creek Emporium), it was fun. I ran a campaign there. It's the location of my favorite dice story. Sadly, Kris was kind of a paranoid lunatic. Shame, that.

As I grew up, I got seriously into the games and their universe. I'd write stories, even using the setting of 40K for school assignments. (Yeah, that was interesting, but hey, it was still better than that story I wrote about a kid nuking Disney World which I had to read to the whole class... Oi! I was a creative youngster. And the teachers seriously encouraged it. That one got me to write an Ode to My Dying Pen, which she got published in the school newspaper. Bit off topic here, but yeah, 40K wasn't my only oddity.) I also made up all kinds of house rules, and even wrote new codices and stuff. It was fun. Some of my early ideas were seriously broken, but I was a teenager. We don't worry about balance as much as "cool."

The rise of the Internet gave birth to another way to enjoy the hobby. Back in '95 I started playing with the web and decided to ditch computer programming for web coding as a hobby and possible career path (yeah, it became my career). GeoCities provided a location to put together a hobby website and share my crazy ideas and stories with the world, with the website "Kaptin Gavrin's Web Site." Named after an Ork Warboss of mine, Kaptin Gavrin. Who was named for Gavin Thorpe. Again, I reiterate: I was a kid. My dad followed suit with his own, "The Realm of Inisfail," and then separated WFB and related stuff into "The Old Sage." Back then, Geocities gave you like 5MB of space, but you could pay a monthly sum for 25MB. I remember one guy asking my dad why he'd pay for that. "You'll never use 5MB!" Oh, we did. And then some. So many ideas. New rules, tactics, painting, modeling. People submitting stuff. It was crazy. After a while life caused us to slow down on the updates. A couple years ago, my dad passed away, and sadly my mom didn't warn me about a notice of his domain names coming up for renewal, so some vultures got them just before I could. I've put the websites back up in their old glory, which includes a lot of broken links and images for now, because many old sites no longer exist, but hey, they're the way they were, including backgrounds set for 1024x768 monitors:

[url]http://www.kaptingavrin.com/[/url]
[url]http://inisfail.realmsofinisfail.com/[/url]
[url]http://oldsage.realmsofinisfail.com/[/url]

I'm doing a new site with the lessons I've learned in design and all, but I think I might borrow some old ideas from those sites. But yeah, that brought two of my passions together.

Okay, let's jump back a little bit, too. Examine GW on the web.

Around '97 or '98 (or maybe earlier?) we came around The Ultimate GW Website, which had a guestbook that ended up becoming a forum. Good times were had there, some good friends made. There were a lot of fun sites on the web back then. A lot of us got our legal threats from GW at some point, too, but let's not go down that road. (It was stupid. I'll leave it at that.) There were also lots of great mailing lists. When Battlefleet Gothic hit White Dwarf as a test game, I set up a mailing list for it, as well as part of our websites, and as the game hit stores, I managed to get Andy Chambers to join the list. He answered questions, provided rules for playtesting before they were published, all kinds of great stuff. The guy was awesome. Oh man, GW's people were great back then. IIRC, Jervis was on the biggest 40K mailing list and occasionally engaged in discussion. Tim Huckelberry did a newsletter with tips submitted from people and engaged in discussions. You could actually send emails to people and get responses. So hopefully that helps explain why I'm not enthused with their current lack of web presence.

There were some fun times - I use fun sarcastically, mostly - starting in late '98, or '99, somewhere around then. Jimi Tubman led the charge in leaking some playtest codices to the Internet (Orks, Sisters of Battle and their allies, and one other that I don't recall at the moment). That led to some serious madness. Somewhere in there, some kind of website wars sprung up, or something. Someone made a parody of my dad's site that was, um, quite vulgar. The culprits were linked to rec.games.miniatures.warhammer, the Usenet group for GW games. My dad went there and got into quite a tiffy with the people there. I, being a good son, followed along (also, since I actually did the work on his site, I felt personally attacked, too). That led to some of the most insane Internet wars I've ever seen. It was nasty, and vicious, and stopped just shy of physical violence. But here's the thing: Over time, as I stubbornly persisted there (and some parties came to light as the culprits in stirring things up and were shunned), I came to be on pretty friendly terms with some of the people there, and at worse "tolerable" terms with others (it's a mutual thing). The place is pretty dead now, Usenet is almost completely forgotten, but it was a unique and fun experience. I look back at that old stuff and laugh now. I mean, RGMW was, at its height, the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in the GW online world. But that's what gave it charm. One of those old guys who I used to have creative online "shouting matches" with has me as a Facebook friend and has sent me some figures he had no use for and wanted to provide to a good home. The point of all this is, basically, that I learned that anything can be forgiven, enemies can become friends, and stuff that's not fit to even mention here can be very, very funny. *Sigh.* I miss old RGMW...

Ahem. So. Bit more story. (Are you still awake?)

So yeah. I've played in a lot of places, had all kinds of acquaintances. When we had a room in the back of our house that could be used for gaming, we sometimes had people over for games, and I remember teaching a young lad how not to pile up Orks for pie plates to murder (he's an adult now, knows better, and has a cool Freebooterz army he gets into the spirit of).

I've played in a lot of tournaments, too. Mostly the best award I could hope for was army appearance, because I just don't have a "killer instinct" in the game. But it was a source of pride for me that I did win that award a few times, or my dad would win, but since he had arthritis I was painting his armies, so I knew it was a win for me. I'm not some amazing painter, either. I throw together random ideas and try to make something that looks good on a table. Some of the armies were painted in a month's time. And then there was the board for his Skaven army he took to Games Day and placed second with, I did that board, too. It was a lot of work but looked awesome. Sadly, it's a bit chipped right now, because it was on a high shelf and one of my cats tried to walk on it (thankfully, the cat wasn't hurt). I also got high sportsmanship scores, too. But! There *was* a tournament I won overall once. (Mind you, this is with the old Rogue Trader Tournament scoring: Battle points, sportsmanship, painting, and comp.) It was late 3rd edition 40K, I think. I know I was using the 3rd edition Ork codex, and the CSM book with the legions was in play, so Iron Warriors had their four Heavy Support and access to skills. I ended up playing three Iron Warriors armies in a row, actually, with my dad being the last person to face. I was just done with the whole trying for a serious win, and just went balls-to-the-walls insane with my army... and it won. My dad was for the top spot, and his army folded in two turns. He had no idea what I was doing or how to react. Unfortunately, he wasn't keen on that, and bickered until I agreed to mark it as a "draw." I still won best overall, but he was upset I didn't give him best sport (my first opponent was ridiculously nice), so he claimed I cheated him out of an overall win that he shouldn't have even been in contention for if we put down the actual results of the game. The trophy for the tournament was an actual war hammer. Awesome replica, but an actual weapon, too (pointy spikes, heavy, all that). When I moved into my own place, it wasn't on the best terms that I left, so I left behind some stuff, including the hammer because I didn't know where it was. Turns out he put it under his bed in his room... which was subsequently buried by the roof when the place burned down in 2012. Last year, I relayed the story to my closest friend, after learning just what had happened to the hammer. When my birthday came around, she gave me a big box... which I opened to find a hammer that is very, very close (if not the same "model") as the one I had. I have that one on display proudly now, and it reminds me of that win and how awesome my friend is.

After my dad passed away at the end of 2012, I got all of his gaming stuff that survived the fire (I went in to the house to recover what I could before it was demolished, too). The Skaven, Empire, Space Marines, Iron Warriors, and Dark Eldar I occasionally play with were originally his. I did paint them all, sure. But I remember when I use them whose they were.

We didn't always have the best relationship, but gaming was something that could bring us back together at times. The same could be said for other people I've met, where maybe a disagreement happened here or there, but we bonded over some games and became friends (or better friends) for it.

Gaming has been a huge part of my life. I've dabbled in some Flames of War (Brits, yeah!), have an old Capitol force for Warzone, a few L5R models, some Warmachine figures... but GW has always been the core. I've had armies, gangs, warbands, fleets, whatever for 40K, WFB, Epic, Mordheim, Necromunda, GorkaMorka, Man'O'War, Battlefleet Gothic, Warmaster. I've played the RPGs. I've played a lot of the board games. So throughout my life, one of the constants has been Games Workshop games.

That's why I'm passionate about GW's games. That's why I don't like the idea that it'd ever go away. I have a lot of great memories. It's influenced my life a lot. Painting figures is still a therapeutic exercise (especially when listening to dubstep while doing so). And every Saturday, I go to the Games Workshop store that opened up right in the shopping center I do all my grocery shopping, literally in walking distance, and I play games with a lot of awesome people, and I encourage them to keep going with the hobby, to expand their forces, to bring in new people. I play from noon to 8, the hours the store is open, then spend the next couple hours at Tijuana Flats (who close at 10pm), hanging out with the guys I play games with.

Hopefully that helps explain a bit about what this hobby is to me.

And my thanks and condolences to the people who read all of this.

[Arkhan Land]

1 - Love of Scifi
2- Nostalgia

yep

[Lord Commissar Maxwell]

To me, the modeling is an amazing stress relief, Im currently going through some hard times with my family and school at the moment so I need something to take my mind of the things I cant change. I have an artistic background and when Im able to work with my hands and create something awesome I get a massive moral boost that does the trick every time. To be honest this hobby is one of 3 things keeping me sane right now, so I suppose it does me quite a bit of good at the moment, and Im sure it will continue to keep my spirits up.

Also I simply love the universe of 40k!

[40kGamer]

A lot honestly. I was introduced to gaming after my dad died from cancer way back in 88. I was still a school kid and one of my teachers who was not all that much older than I was introduced me to board games and 1:72 plastic historical figures and wargaming. From these humble beginnings it grew from a curiosity, to an interest into a lifestyle.

I found GW when I went to college. I worked part time at a comic store and they carried GW products which seemed so exotic since they came from the UK and I had never ventured much out of the hill country of WV. I couldn't really afford anything but the store couldn't get them to move so they marked everything down 50%! this prompted me to go on a strict Ramen diet so I could pick up the box games for Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine. Over the years I continued to gather the odd game that came along, Advanced Heroquest, ManOWar, Space Hulk, etc all the while slowly building a stash of WFB and 40k models with a focus on the WFB as I found it a more enjoyable game than RT or 40k 2nd.

By 1999 I had realized I had all of the available WFB armies and I still wasn't enthusiastic about 40k so I concentrated on fleshing out mass historical armies for the next several years. Over this time I gathered and painted tens of thousands of the little fellas in 6, 10, 15 and 28mm scales across all periods from Ancients to WWII. I still have a strong emotional connection to historical gaming as a direct result of how I entered the hobby. There is just something special about the spectacle of playing on a 4 x 10 foot table with thousands of figures.

40k really hit my radar when GW did the huge Apoc releases... for those who remember you could get an entire Space Marine company or 10 x Leman Russ tanks at huge discounts. Being a sucker for a deal, and the fact that I have a bit of an obsessive compulsive collecting disorder I bought multiples of all the Apoc sets that came out to form the core of the various 40k armies. Still today I'm building out the lists for every 40k army in production.

At this point I'm probably what GW considers a 'perfect' customer. Flush with cash, fully invested in the models and totally ambivalent about the actual gameplay.

From a personal perspective the hobby has brought me my closest friends over the years and seen me through both good and bad times. The largest part of my early retirement plan actually revolves around painting, modeling and playing games with friends! I can't imagine what I'll be able to do with an extra 60 hours a week! I've also developed an interest in game theory and design and play around with probabilities an matrices in my downtime for giggles.

Fun fact is that I've noticed a direct correlation between what I am doing in the hobby and my emotional state.

Sick or tired of everything = reading rules / books
Feeling so-so = assembling models
Feeling good = converting and painting
Feeling great = playing games

I often wonder what those who have no hobbies do with all their free time and money.