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[fenrif]

Do you just get the figs and pieces loose? Maybe they figure it's cheaper to clip things out of sprues and reclaim the excess material. That's something I'm surprised GWS hasn't started doing.

If I went the whole hog trying to make each of them unique I'd never finish. Because when it comes down to it they're all the same guy, in the same pose, and they're all wearing red armour.

When I had to paint 30 identical beastmen, I still took the time to do tattoos, different fur colors and the like. When you're in a hurry to have a painted army, yeah, you don't bother. But now I think I truly enjoy myself more when I'm creating than when I'm at the table.

I know some painters have a batch method where they paint the basic elements all the same then go back and do detail work. It can get a little mind numbing doing each fig from base coat to detailing, one at a time.

I definatly find the painting and modelling side of the hobby much more fun than actually playing, I just prefer doing individual figures to big units.

And yeah, You get sprues sometimes on the metal blisters, but only the little tabs  that connect the main body to smaller parts. If you buy a box of anything you just get the loose parts in plastic baggies.

[NobodyPro]

Last time I considered picking up the actual gaming side I ended up walking out with a Dark Heresy rulebook, it was just cheaper and I've always like the Inquisition. I've heard that the times haven't been too good on my precious Witch Hunter 'Burnmaster Inquisitorial Strike Force' either.

Though I have been considering just making my own minatures with photoshop/illustrator and cardboard. I wouldn't be able to use them in a store but I'd be able to play an actual game for once.

[sambojin]

After over 15 years of playing WH/WH40k I'm still a crappy painter. But I'm suprisingly good at modelling (in a rough and ready way). Do you know what got me good at modelling? GWs price structure.

I actually used to like the meta-game of working out what could be modelled easily into another troop type with a few simple conversions. Chaos Terminators ended up being normal space marines with big shoulder pads, spikes and some random weapons cobbled together. Two full squads for the price of a normal box. Chaos knights were Imperial knights with gubbins attached and the necessary amount of spikes. Chaos spawn were always free. Screamers ended up being made out of 40mm bases, melted "just so".

I used to love working out what I could get for my dollars out of something else. It had to have a purpose, it had to look cool, it was sort of "the game behind the game" for me. I actually think I was the first person that posted on Warseer how good BfSP was for Chaos Dwarves. A 1200-1400 point army for $80, and it was even slightly effective. It sort of led on to a bit of a CD revival, with people doing all kinds of stunning conversions out of the cheapest figures (per dollar) that you could buy. I secretly think that the posts based around that were the reason GW put CD on the back-burner indefinately. Yep, I'm a bastard....... They don't seem to realize how many BfSP sets that they sold due to people converting the hell out of them. They really should have just released an armybook and a modelling/conversion guide and be done with it. Could have earnt quite a bit of dosh selling figures from the rest of the range without having to sculpt a thing themselves.

To tell you the truth, I think I've only ever bought 2 WH warmachines in my life. One pump wagon and one spearchukka. They were only there to prove the legitimacy of my other 3-5 of them. Sprue based engines of death that had more character and looked cooler than anything GW could produce. BOs were heavily converted boyz, in 6th edition, which all of a sudden fitted in perfectly with 7th edition rules. Netters and fanatics were converted BfSP NGs. Not to mention the ninja goblins. Mork praise the ninja goblins, they were the most fun modelling project I ever did.

I guess GWs pricing policies have done some good things for the game. It's made us all into awesome modellers. As a 12yr old (with a job) the prices were too high. As a 25yr old (with a job, paying 20x what the kiddy job did, maybe more) they were still too high. They're too high now and I need more figures for a decent army. But damn did I get good with a craft knife, a lighter and some super-glue in the meantime.

And they shall know no proxies..........

[fenrif]

Didn't they once have a rule that said no proxies were allowed at all? Like not just in tournaments but that proxies were illegal anytime you played teh game anywhere, so if you fielded any your opponent could just point to them and say "rulebook says they aren't allowed, guess you just lost X points from your army list"

I'm sure I heard that somewhere long after I stopped playing, though it may have just been someone winding me up.

[GlyphGryph]

Nope, that's still a rule. Proxies are pretty explicitly banned, even in casual play, and any shop that allows them isn't allowed to run tournaments there anymore (and GW shops don't allow them even in casual games).

When I was poor, I played Starship Troopers (which was a better game in SO many ways than 40k), and I couldn't afford a single figure, so I built EVERYTHING out of cardboard and screws and tape and bits of junk in my junk draw. They came out looking awesome, and they were poseable so I could adjust to different poses and then tighten.

It was amazing fun. Still have one of them to this day. Of course, no one would ever play with me because they were all super serious game guys that only played serious games and wouldn't play with fake pieces, but that didn't matter.

[fenrif]

Haha, I'd always kind of hoped I'd misremembered that or something. That's terrible. Now I'm going to have to check my other game rulebooks to see if they have that same rule.

[sambojin]

It kind of depended on where you were playing and how bad your GW store people were. In the GC/Brisbane area they'd often let you proxy if there was a new book out and you wanted to try out the mechanics of a new rule. Not cardboard proxies, as long as it was really clear what the troops were meant to be and you told your opponent and the store members that you were doing so. Crossbowmen are crossbowmen, it's kind of obvious what you're trying to represent.

It depended though. Mention the fact that it's your payday tomorrow and you wanted to try them out on games night, so you would purchase them tomorrow and they'd usually let you. It didn't have to be true or anything. Then again, I've had staff flat out refuse to let me play with wolfrider wolves as chaos hounds (my wolves are converted as gribbly chaos hounds anyway, that's how they started life before my O+G army), based on the fact that they were arseholes. GW has some strange policies in both gameplay and staff hiring in place.

For non-tournament play I used to proxy/convert all kinds of stuff. In a gaming group it's rare to not play against armies with at least a few proxied figures from time to time. I've even played against armies made up of heaps of 25mm cardboard squares on a cardboard tray, with the unit type and equipment clearly written on a scrap of  paper blu-tacked onto the tray. They were clearly chaos warriors, it said so on the label.

It depends on your gaming group on what is allowed. GW stores tend to suck pretty bad and lose a lot of sales from it. The guy I played with the cardboard square army did end up buying a shit-ton of CWs in the end. He said he probably wouldn't have if he never got those first few proxied games in outside of the store "must buy first" system. They became pretty good in 8th as well, the lucky SOB

[nenjin]

Man, I'd forgotten about the proxy rule. I used to game with a lot of older guys who had been following GWS stuff since the 80s. So they were really salty about proxies at first. But over the years, they realized that younger kids with next to no money weren't going to come to the store if they kept being that negative about it. So it kind of slid. Except on tournament days. It was never the kind of shop where the owner would inspect everyone's game to see what they were doing.

But on their own unofficial tournament days, man, the jerk really came out of people.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

I'm hoping this is on topic enough. So here goes.

Do you guys think that the increasing technologic advancenents in 3D printers are going to have an affect on table top gaming? I've heard some people claiming that it's going to single handly destroy the table top industry. Much the same way people say piracy will kill the entertainment industry.
This is all assuming that 3D printers will reach the point to be accessible to most consumers.

Table top gaming has been something I was interested in but could never get into. The prices are just way too duanting. I could forsee in the future having an open source table top ruleset, much in like Pathfinder with P&P, where one could upload and download 3D models to print. Then it's a simple matter of painting and playing with very little cost.

I can see why that appeals to so many and why there are concerns that 3D printers might have a massive impact on table top gaming. However, if true, like piracy I think if the companies modify their business plans and keep up to date with a changing economy they might not come through it all that bad at all. 

[sambojin]

3D printing is still pretty pricey. About 1-2 grand for a fairly basic one. But then again, so are GW games. About $400 or more for a decently rounded out army on the cheap.

The plastics used in 3D printing aren't cheap, neither are the replacement bits for doing such large scale printing projects. A 200 figure army will cost you more then just the plastic cost for wear and tear on other printing components.

For big figures, yep, you could make a good profit, especially if you did break them down into peices a bit. How much is a forgeworld dragon or landraider these days? Even just printing out a LR as a single block would probably turn a profit after printing 40 of them quite easily.

Is it piracy to 3D print something called a Heavy APC with Laser Cannons? Nope. To call it a Landraider is though. It just depends on what iconography and marketing is used to sell it. Would it sell? Who knows. I'd buy one if it was cheaper and cooler than GWs. I don't play in-store anymore (or at all for that matter).

For armies you would be hard pressed to sell them. Not to mention the sheer time it takes to print out that many figures and the technical limitations of 3D printing currently. You'd still have to sand/smooth polish them a bit for a decent figurine that comes anywhere close to GWs current model quality. You probably still wouldn't be able to, even with a great, well calibrated setup. The detail of current mini's is amazing compared to what you can reliably get out of a 3D printer.

So big, expensive, figures where the only competition is GWs/Forgeworld's hideously overpriced ones, then yeah, profit away. Piracy of IPs isn't really a problem if done correctly. Will they sell, will you make money, will they destroy the TT miniatures market?

Who knows, maybe, probably not.

[GlyphGryph]

Personally, I think printing will probably still be pretty expensive for at least a while yet. As it comes down and actually becomes worthwhile, profit margins on the industry will probably get slimmer, but I could see interest spreading as the price for self-printing comes down, and high quality open sourced figurines being released. The companies might end up simply becoming rule book companies that sell cheap downloadable designs (that compete with other freely created designs).

Ultimately bad for companies like GW, but good for the industry as a whole, and the players.

I mean, D&D lets you use whatever cheap figurines you want, and noone is going to argue that no one makes any money off that game.

[sambojin]

The price and ease-of-use would have to be drastically improved to seriously make a dent in the market. No one would do such a thing if they couldn't make a dollar out of it on the side. Spending $2000 dollars on a basic setup, gaining the technical skills required and then making the 3D models required for printing out armies is somewhat beyond the investment of time/effort that the average gamer will undertake for a simple boardgame. This is in a market where sitting down and modelling your army for weeks is common practice. Devoting entire rooms to game models isn't unheard of. Having groups all pitch in cash for short-lived, somewhat pointless projects happens on a fairly regular basis. So why isn't it common practice already?

Maybe in the future. Maybe. You won't be able to use them in GW stores/tournaments or anything though, which is a turn off for some.

I looked quite heavily into 3D printing a while ago as a cheap way of rapid prototyping various things that were on my mind at the time. Of course I thought of how easy it would be to make figurines (and money) off something I wanted to use anyway. It's not quite as easy, sophisticated or low cost as it might appear.

Maybe in the future. But then again, most things in the future will be easy, cool and cheap. They always are in the future.

[catoblepas]

I wouldn't be surprised if GW is on the way out. They have some rather questionable buisness practices, such as the often pointed to constant price hikes. There are plenty of model makers catching up to and surpassing them in quality and/or price. In addition, a lot of their more recent models don't seem to have had a lot of thought put into them, such as the Stormraven, or the carts that Emprie got in fantasy. They seem to be emphasizing over-the-top 'stuff' more than ever, and a lot of the stuff the new big kits they are pressing don't really look very aesthetically pleasing, and in the case of a lot of the dual kits, they can come off looking like bad kitbashes or conversions-and rather lazy as a result. A lot of models whose inclusion seems like quite the headscratcher when you think about it for too long-the descriptions they give to justify stuff like the empire carts, the vampire chariot, necron dual kits etc comes across as a rather contrived and transparent way of padding out the codex and selling more models. Rather irritating, IMO. Somehow they managed to come up with some of the most comically over the top models I have ever seen while simultaneously making them look like lazy kitbashes-quite an achievement IMO, but not necessarily one to be proud of.

I certainly like a lot of things about fantasy and 40k, but the sheer silliness of some of the new stuff, compared to the incessent price hikes has had me looking elsewhere of late, which is a real shame considering how much the recent Dark Eldar release had filled me with optimism for the setting.

[Vattic]

In the nearest town to me GW is the only board gaming shop around. They did have to move from a much nicer, larger store recently. Most of the people I know who are into 40k only build and paint; They are mostly oldschool collectors too being well into middle age. They we're all sounding pretty mutinous when Citadel stopped / cut back the bitz catalogue as it really limits the kit-bashing potential.

My Dad is a miniature artist and enjoys messing around with 40k stuff when he isn't working on something historical. He was one of those upset by the bitz incident. In case anyone wonders what kind of things he's working on I have two badly taken photos of some WIP stuff: 1, 2.

[Sirus]

Inquisitor and his retinue?