The “My Guy” Idea and Its Effect On RPGs

Recently I had a chance to look at a copy of the Mechwarrior RPG’s 1st edition, and realised that in some respects it was the last gasp of a very old-school approach to RPGs. You see, just as Dungeons & Dragons in its original edition had that longstanding connection to Chainmail – perhaps never actually used in the context of an RPG session, but there if you wanted to resolve a mass battle in your D&D campaign world – and just as 1st Edition Chivalry & Sorcery considered shiftng between roleplaying and wargaming to be sufficiently central to play that it included a full wargaming system in its core rulebook, Mechwarrior is an RPG joined at the hip with a wargame – in this case Battletech.

So far, so obvious; Mechwarrior never pretends to be anything other than the Battletech RPG. So far as I can make out, this extends to an assumption that ‘mech combat will be resolved via Battletech gaming; whilst a combat system for person-to-person combat and other non-mecha combat forms is provided, the actual ‘mech-based material here consists of additions to the Battletech rules, rather than a restatement of them or a reformatting of them for theatre-of-the-mind play.

Word to the Wise: Original Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader Reprinted

This hasn’t been trumpeted as loudly as I’d have thought it would be, but Games Workshop has made a hardcover reprint of the original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader rulebook.

Now, to be fair, it’s a Warhammer World exclusive, so it hasn’t been as widely distributed as it might be. But the fact that it’s out there has had a helpful knock-on effect on the price of second-hand copies of the old softcover release, so if you’ve been interested in that and have been holding off on getting it now might be a good time to give that a look.

My Tank Purchases Have Been Justified…

So, today I enjoyed a brand new miniatures wargaming experience which rekindled my enthusiasm for the hobby.

That’s right, I’ve had my first game of Flames of War. (What do you think I was talking about? Age of Sig-who?) Enough of my friends had been getting into it that I thought it was worth a look, especially considering that 15mm scale World War II miniatures are very competitively priced – for a small outlay I was able to put together a battlefield force that allows me to field a legal army at a wide range of points values and with plenty of options at each level, using a combination of newly bought miniatures from the publishers and the Plastic Soldier Company (one advantage of historical miniatures gaming is that no one company owns the IP on the past…) and some second-hand minis bought from a friend who was rationalising their army selection.

Even setting aside the second-hand purchase, this was at a fraction of the cost that required to get a comparably large and diverse force for a Games Workshop army. Even so, it’s still wasted money in my book if you don’t actually get to play with the miniatures and enjoy yourself when you are playing with them, and today’s go at Flames of War has convinced me that the game is a bit more of a keeper than my previous brief engagements with Warhammer have been.