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Reply To: Inaccessibility of Historical Wargaming

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bureaucrat
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167xp

Inaccessibility kind of happens on the player side of things and isn’t really limited to historical, although historical can become some of the more problematic and unwelcoming.

So historical games have inaccessible issues on a community and personal side. Communities have unfortunate rivet counters, where someone will jump on you for having the wrong markings on your tank or troops, or will berate you for having the inappropriate color of uniform. It can easily leave someone with a bad taste for the entire genre. On the personal level, it can seem overwhelming trying to put a force together, balancing how much fun you want to have with risking becoming a rivet counter yourself. Example: right now I am working on a bolt action Indian north african force. So I am working with Perry Miniatures desert rats and lopping their heads off to be replaced. Now I am considering how to kit them out so I start looking at other manufacturers and doing a bit of research when I find that the Indian forces opted for a different light machine gun than the Bren which is all I had with the desert rat kit and for a moment I almost scrapped the whole thing, but then I realized that no one I played with would actually care, so I will press on and embrace not giving a crap. Had similar issues trying to get the ‘correct’ uniform color for my soviets, but there is no such thing so I could legit not care. Analysis paralysis is a thing especially in historical settings where there is a ton of information available.

For fantasy or sci-fi you can have similar issues depending on how deep the lore is for the game and how long it has been around. Some long running game worlds can even have the added excitement of edition wars and their own style of rivet counters. Because of lack of competition you can also run into an issue where a game may be economically inaccessible. I look at 40k and it’s a system I was deep into about 20 years ago, but if I was trying to get into it now, I would be out a couple hundred bucks in rulebooks, codexes, and cards alone, then you pick an army and are a few hundred more into it before you have a decent starter force.

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