Ancients

A Different Group
of Historical Gamers

by Fergueson Fourmile

I think that a lot of the cause is that the Ancients people have always had a strong, well organized, and independent (from any geographical base) international organization in the Society of Ancients, which every other period lacks, and their own newsletter, and the society has always been dominated by WRG or some avatar of Phil Barker's rules, which though they are pure dreck in my opinion, nevertheless have continuity. These rules are literally designed from the bottom up for tournament play, always seeking a zero-sum between the players, and mandating a balanced inequality at worst. I also think, that while matching, say Old Kingdom Egyptians versus Mongols is rather absurd, the fact is that given the vast expanse of time and geographical area represented by the ancient period, and now (as opposed to 20 years ago) the ready availability of figures in virtually any army from within that expanse of time and space, I don't know if they have a choice. If the rules were predicated upon historical opponents I suspect the ancient period would be infitesimallly balkanized with everyone having their own favorite army and no one else to play with. As to your question "Why don't we have hundreds of W.W. II players hunkered around boards for example?" I think the answer is the flip side, perhaps even the "dark side" of the above. It's nice to have a standard, but unless one is careful, standards can too easily become straight-jackets. Almost all ancient rules generally (or used to) conform to WRG basing requirements simply because to gain acceptance they had to. WRG was first and few wanted to publish a set of rules that would force players to re-base their collections. They felt, and to a certain extent, rightly so, that it would be a big factor in non-acceptance. But the problem there is that the basing system you use DOES influence what you can do with rules, and in a lot of ways mandates what rules will come out. This of course is a good example of the tail wagging the dog, but what of it, there are hundreds of them in daily life. The problem is that you can only do so much with a certain basing system. Other branches or periods did not have the "benefit" of these standards and hence didn't care, and their rules tended to more independent and individualistic, but that also meant they couldn't have big interchangeability. Standards Perhaps the most obvious example of the deleterious effects of "standards" and "authority" is the new and emerging hobby of Warhammer. I say this because I don't believe it is part of miniatures gaming, and especially not Historical Miniatures, and that it will soon "calve" and go its own way just as fantasy role-playing did and board games did. In Warhammer, make no mistake about it is the Games Workshop People who are in control, and they determine what the hobby does. Warhammer is pretty much the refuge, in my opinion, of the terminally unimaginative who can't have a battle, paint a soldier, or conceive of a game unless "it's in the book" which is completely foreign to most historical and mini-gamers. I don't even consider it wargames any more, but merely a scheme for the inventory control people at GW to keep their costs low and profits high. Everything in Warhammer is a standard handed down from on high, and if you talk to a Warhammer person about how you paint your own troops, make up your own armies, design your own scenarios, and buy what you want he'll look at you like you're some kind of nut and can't understand how you're not cheating. (Editorial Note :See item #4 in this newsletter.) I suspect there's a lot of that attitude in the Ancients Tournament gamers who always seemed to me to be a rather dull unimaginative lot. As to your point about segregating it from the bulk of historical gamers, I suspect that that may be another part of the hobby that is going to "calve" off into its own trajectory. At the same time, if that is what they like, then let them do it. As to doing a disservice to the bulk of the historical miniature gamers I'm not too sure. From what I've seen most tournament player wouldn't be caught dead in the type of game you and I play, and most of the guys in the "vast bulk" of ancient gamers not in the tournaments view the tournament players as "nerds," "geeks," "anal retentive" and "rules lawyers." They have a point, whenever I've seen them in "non-tournament ancient games" they get very curmudgeonly and generally act like Puritans at an orgy. I also think you have to remember that a lot of people game for a lot of different reasons. and I also think that not a few of these reasons are unknown or dimly realized by the players. Remember what we talked about at Historicon, and I am not even more firmly convinced that Wargames forms for many people a way to give physical play and verisimilitude to a very "Mittyesque" secret life. If you doubt me, listen to some of the absolutely convoluted, high flying, pompous, pretentious, and arcane reasons people give for playing games. You KNOW they're bullshitting, and they may even believe their own bullshit. If you really want to understand what's going on with gaming you have to get deep inside a person's head and that may not be a very nice place. You may not like what you find. Bring a shovel. Back to Veteran Campaigner September 2001 Table of Contents Back to Veteran Campaigner List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Pete Panzeri. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com