Miniatures, Bases, Beastmen, and Hassles

 

One of the challenges of being involved with miniature wargames is basing. It's been a question for a long time, sometimes tied to questions of scale. Do you build your Pictish army in 15mm or 25mm? Then once you decide that are you going to base it for DBA/DBM, WRG Ancients, or some other game. if you're lucky your favorite game, or one of the popular ones, will be on smaller bases and some other game of interest will be on bigger bases meaning you can use sabot bases which is a fancy term for putting a larger base underneath the smaller base to increase the footprint to the proper size. In many games you can actually mix scales if the basing is correct, which can look pretty weird when someone's 6mm Gauls go up against someone else's 15mm Early Imperial Romans but I get it. Do you want to play a game right now? Even if it is Romans vs. blue-painted hobbits? Sometimes you just have to roll with it.

With the Warhammer family of games - and a lot of modern miniature games really - this attitude is less present. I blame it on the competitive-first mindset that's become so prevalent over the last decade or so. A lot of us play these same games far more casually, more "narratively", but so much of the focus online is on tournament stuff and efficiency and point costs that people forget that's not the only way to play the game and one of the sticking points is basing.

So space marines and orks originally came on 25mm bases. Ten years or so ago the went to 32mm round bases. Now leader characters for marines are mostly on 40mm bases, even if they are not in terminator armor, and some leaders have gone to 50mm rounds. My beloved Captain Banderas of the Crimson Fists started on a 25mm and got moved to a 32mm and now ... will probably stay there as I have bigger Primaris versions with a similar look that would fit on those much larger bases without looking lost in that space. 

Old Azrael

In casual play it doesn't really matter - and realistically game-play-wise it doesn't really matter - but people can get snippy about it. It doesn't really matter because smaller bases let you pack more figures into a smaller space - this can be important in a big melee fight - while bigger bases block some figures out. In contrast if your unit has aura abilities, with a radius effect, a larger base will let them cover more area on the table. So yes a marine character on a larger base can do leader effects over a bigger area but gets blocked out of some combats if they are part of a squad. There is actually some balance there but there is still some community pressure to put your models on whatever the current official base size happens to be. My metal Chapter Master Azrael of the Dark Angels came on a 25mm. Later I put him on a 32mm to modernize, as I did with the 6th edition starter set Captain that looked an awful lot like Azrael but was plastic and slightly bigger. Then somewhere in 9th or 10th they put out a new Azrael and he's on a 50mm base. (insert furrowed brow here) As much as I would be fine continuing to use one of my older models it just looks silly putting Old Az on a base of that size. So at some point I will probably break down and buy the new one - I'll grumble about it, but I will probably do it.

New Azrael

The other challenge is when they just change up the whole damn thing. I built a lot of armies for original Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Those were on square bases, typically 20mm and 25mm for infantry. In 2015 they killed off WHFB and launched Age of Sigmar with round bases. Now it's been long enough this doesn't make me angry today on its own but the aftershocks still rumble through. 

Around 2023 we had been playing around with some AOS and I decided I might as well unify my Beastman army that had been in various stages of development since the old WHFB days. So I pulled a bunch of Gors - the main Beastman troop type - off of their square bases and put them on rounds. This was some 40+ of them so it took some time. I picked up some other units too, building them all on the current round or oval bases for Sigmar. 

Then in early 2024 the rumors started up and were eventually confirmed that spring: The "Beasts of Chaos" were being dropped from Age of Sigmar. They were being added to The Old World, which was sort of good news as I was interested in the new version of the old game, but it also meant I would need to look at rebasing a bunch of stuff less than a year after rebasing them the first time. 

No, I was not happy. 

No, I still haven't rebased them ... but I'm looking at it because a bunch of them are painted and playable and would be good to get on the table again.

One of the main expediters of this is the creation of movement tray expanders. I've talked about these before when discussing using my old armies as Old World bumped up base sizes too, of course: all the old 20mm based figs are now on 25's, and the 25's mostly went to 30mm bases. Well, they also make them to convert round bases to fit in the footprint that a square-based unit would take. I already had them so I printed one out for my 50mm based Bullgors (minotaurs) and yes! - they fit perfectly! Now I've printed out some that adapt 32mm bases so my Bestigors are viable. No rebasing needed!

The only real dilemna here is with the Gors - of course the most numerous unit in the force would be the problematic one. Gors, years ago, were on 25mm square. Sigmar moved them to 32mm round. With Old World, for various reasons, they left them on 25s instead of bumping them to 30s like every other larger infantry unit. You can fit 32s into the space for 30s, but you can't fit 32s into the space for 25s. Looking at how almost everything else in the army needs minimal work I am leaning heavily towards bending the official rules and just leaving them on their round 32s. It saves me a ton of work, potential damage to painted figures, and the only reason I can see that they left the 25s in was to allow one specialty army to combine Gors and Ungors (a lighter, weaker type of beatman) in a single unit. I don't really care about doing that so I'm not hurting my options. I also don't trust GW not to put them on 30mm bases anyway in a year or two so that decision is probably made. 

I have to admit this is giving me some ideas now ...

So yes, when not working on the 40K stuff I do dip into the fantasy side and try to make some progress. Movement trays and adapters and similar utility aids are a great reason to have a 3D printer around but even if you don't they are widely available online and it's a great feeling when you realize you can just put some new shoes on an old army and go.

Bottlecap Orcs - RPGs, Miniatures, and Terrain

 

Still have these guys today

I've been using miniatures in RPGs almost since I started playing them. We used tokens at first - boardgame pawns, chess pieces, monopoly tokens, bottlecaps, pieces of glass ... whatever we could find around the house. I had army-man type knights and cowboys and revolutionary war soldiers and space people and of course dinosaurs and some of the weirder monsters you'd get in those packages.* The problem was scale - these things were all wildly different sizes. So while these were games of imagination it's tricky when the PC miniatures vary in size from half an inch to 2 inches high and tend to come in bright primary colors.

So while we used whatever we had at hand getting into D&D (in particular) meant one became aware very quickly that there were miniature figures made that could be used with the game. They tended to come in sets so you could share them with your friends. Getting one of those was a big deal. And no, we didn't worry about painting them at all at first. I had been building models for years before this  - cars, planes, tanks, ships - but they were all plastic and larger. All I had were Testor's paints and brushes and anyone else from back then can tell you they were not well-suited for painting 25mm human figures. I mean, I did eventually try it and for the figures I tested them on it is pretty much still there to this day. It doesn't look good, but the paint is still there. The main draw was having some kind of fantasy-looking miniature to represent your guy as we lined up in 10' wide corridor formation. Henchmen and hirelings still got to be tokens and chess pieces. 

My first set of monsters

Monsters were trickier. There were so many different types! You needed multiples, not just one wizard or one fighter! We didn't really try too hard here. If someone had something close enough great! If not we didn't care. I'm pretty sure we fought the ogres of the feared "Eraser" tribe more than once alongside the Bottlecap Orcs and the Bouillon Cube Bandits, the M&M Goblins and Kobolds. Anything edible was iffy as someone not paying attention could seriously disrupt a fight by eating the reinforcements. Chocolate chips were the worst for this as on top of being edible they tended to melt at inconvenient times too. Despite these many challenges we managed to battle on as the point of the game was the scene and the environment and the conflict in your head - not the specific layout of the terrain or the kinds of minis being used. 

I mentioned much of the focus was on miniatures for the PC's. These served as a kind of anchor for your imagination - my guy looks like this, your guy looks like that ... the PCs are the one constant of the game so it helps to have them solidly represented. The rest might look like a storyboard, or nowadays an untextured 3D mesh - we kind of knew what was there but most of the color was added in our heads. Even the terrain - maybe "especially the terrain" - because we didn't have any. There were various dungeon tile sets even then to give some color and style to your 10' passageways but that was a)more money you might not want to spend on that kind of thing and b)often a thing that had to be cut apart by hand and then kept together in a box or bag and not lost between games. Most of the time in the early days we just sketched out a rough map - very rough -  on notebook paper and put our minis in the general area of where we wanted to be - over in that corner of the room, blocking this doorway, etc. We weren't counting squares. We didn't care about that level of precision. We had an idea of roughly how far apart things were and we had the DMG diagrams where 3 characters could fight side by side in a 10' wide space so we had a pretty good idea of who could fit where and it was enough.

At some point in the latter half of the 80's someone introduced us to Chessex Mats and that's when the square-counting began. They were a revelation at the time and the hexgrids were an especially welcome addition as it made playing Champions (and later GURPS) feel much more organized - keep in mind this was still fairly early on on a 50+ year old hobby. Overhead markers and a vinyl mat made us gods ... "see the water in this room is blue! The trees have a brown dot for a trunk and green squiggles around them for leaves! The lava flow is red!" I can't say much negative here - I still do a lot of this today for D&D type games. Even with this method it is just enough structure to trigger the imagination.

...still have this box too

The weird thing is that even as time went on (and many miniature wargames were acquired and many armies built) I never felt much of a call for detailed physical RPG terrain. The sketched out maps or just a good description pretty much handled it for me. Going further, I don't even really like dungeon tile type options. They feel limiting because you're constrained by the available tiles, they take time to assemble - though granted it can take time to draw the map too - and they can make your dungeons or towns or countryside feel all too "samey" because you're using the same pieces over and over. Now sure I can describe it as a rough and rocky unfinished floor but if we're all looking at cobblestones on the piece of cardboard sitting out there it's a disconnect. This isn't theoretical for me - I bought multiple sets of the boxed D&D city/country/dungeon tiles whenever they came out thinking I would up the production value here and the mix of annoyance at set mix limitations and players not really caring  led me to just set them aside.**

I feel the same - but more so - with physical terrain like Dwarven Forge years ago and now the infinite seas of 3D printing options available. It looks cool, sure, no argument there. But how much of it do I need to encompass the things my crew might run into? The answer is "a lot" and I already have another expensive and space-eating hobby called "miniature wargaming" - RPGs are supposed to be my less-expensive hobby. Plus people sitting around the table can't always see over the walls or trees, it takes time to set up and take down unless you're restricting the action to just what's on the table and that feel like volunteering for a straightjacket so no, absolutely not going to happen here. I have a 3D printer so I could do it but I just don't see much of a point. For a special big finale encounter, sure, I could see that. But online I see things like "I'm building a 28mm model of the Keep on the Borderlands for my players" and it just boggles the mind - why? If you're playing out a siege of the keep, ok that could be cool but otherwise how much are you going to use that? How long does it take to set up and take down? How are you going to store it? How is it better than a flat map when it comes to actually playing the game? It's a spectacle, no doubt about it, but what if we're really just trying to play through an adventure? 

I haven't printed it out yet but yes I have the files for this

I know there are die-hard fans of having a table full of terrain out there and if that's your thing then hey, go for it. It's a separate thing for me and more of an obstacle than a feature but I know not everyone feels the same. My latest attempt to be cool and trendy was to jump on the projector bandwagon where you have a computer or a phone hooked up to a small modern projector on a stick - a tripod or a microphone stand - and shine a nice colorful, possibly animated map down onto the table. I did research, bought a couple of projectors and some software packages and was all set up to use it for our Mutants & Masterminds game and ... it lasted about 3 sessions. My players just didn't see it as an improvement. Having the projector and stand up next to the table was kind of a hassle for moving around as it's a little tight around the table with a full crew and this extra equipment. A ceiling mounted rig might have helped but there is still some extra prep to be done, hardware issues to fight though at times, and while I'm sure it would have gotten easier with more experience I'm just not going to disrupt the game - you know, the actual reason we get together in the first place - to keep pushing it. So for now that stuff is in a closet and in the "maybe someday" file. I tried it, don't regret it, but it wasn't right for us.

So yes, after 40+ years of doing this we do play with a lot of miniatures in our RPGs, both PCs and monsters, but we mostly do it on the flat terrain of a tabletop, or a battle mat, or scribbled sketch maps on paper. That's jut what works for us.

Yeah these too, multiples

*Yes I remember having things like the original Rust Monster and Bulette inspirational figures. They were all lost to time and various sandboxes spread across Kansas, Tennessee, and Florida though, before D&D really came along for me. 

** The only dungeon tiles I've ever found really useful are the Star Wars ones WOTC put out back when they had the Star Wars RPG license. Considering most Imperial architecture looks the same everywhere it actually reinforces the setting by having base interiors, star destroyer interiors, and imperial prison interiors all look the same. It just works.