My Life As A Gamer: Never Confuse Playing The Game With Using The Tokens

There is one thing--and only one thing--I agree with Stupid British Toy Company about: that playing games and painting miniatures are separate hobbies.

A wargame does not need miniatures to play. You need tokens to mark where units are, and--as the rules require--show facing (i.e. mark which end is Front). If you doubt this, then you never so much as looked at Car Wars let alone anything of serious heft like Advanced Squad Leader.

Yes, this does mean that you can show up at a SpaceMace 39K game with a ZipLock bag full of counters as the entire army- and I mean one of the bigger army sizes commonly used. Yes, this also means that you can show up for that BattleTech game with a repurposed cigarette tin full of unit counters so that you can stomp the Capellans or Smoke Jaguar with your Phone Company Customer Support Brigade. What will it cost you? $10 in supplies and an evening or two cutting and marking them while listening or watching to stuff on YouTube, in addition to whatever time you need to fill out Army/Unit/Mech record sheets.

Sure, people will complain. Fuck them; you're there to kick ass and have fun, not peacock for e-gamer clout some Instragram whore.

The only people who have any weight that will complain are those who make their money pushing pewter/plastic and paint (e.g. Stupid British Toy Company) and thus exploint Muh Officialdum to do just that, and you don't need to listen to them.

Same, by the by, goes for terrain and other accessories; random widgets with oral or written markers denoting what they are will do, as will paper maps or vinyl mats with lines drawn upon them. If MegaMek can do this, you can on your tabletop- hell, you can do even less and get the same result.

The quality of a game is entirely a product of the design of its ruleset. It is not, and cannot ever be, dependent on external qualities such as the tokens used by players during gameplay. That's what miniatures are, and why I don't give two shits about collecting them and object to insistence upon their use. If you need miniatures to play a game, then that game is shit and shouldn't be played.

That's one of the things that kept me in Car Wars and BattleTech; those respective companies didn't demand miniatures to play. Stupid Company does. I'd rather show up with a bag of bottlecaps for my army than waste time and money on things I don't need to wreck shit on the tabletop; that's more time spent mastering the game and how my army works, and it is gameplay that matters- not how pretty my tokens are.

I see miniatures as no different than Gunpla, and as such I do respect those who (a) see it as a seperate and distinct hobby and (b) develop mastery in the skills necessary to really make those things look good, but I do not need such things to play and win. I need a ruleset that isn't trash--something Stupid Company is not known to accomplish--and I need a scene that values getting shit done over looking good doing it (ditto).

Thus it is necessary to recognize that selling games and selling miniatures are two separate businesses, and it is in the best interest of both to never allow either to yoke the other. This is best accomplished by divorcing the two, something that a lot of incumbents will have a hard time accepting even though it is ultimately for the best all around.