Reply To: When Playing with Plastic Army Men…

[zippyfusenet]

I didn’t actually have good guys and bad guys in my games.

My parents were kind of anti-military, not that you could say that out loud in the early 1960s in the Midwest, but I figured it out later. So, while I got some war toys, I didn’t get the fancy Marx playsets and Johnny Seven Nuka-Bazooka toys that my schoolmates enjoyed – I got a couple bags of generic armymen and a cap pistol that didn’t shoot anything. Obviously this deprivation laid the foundation for my life-long obsession with toy soldiers. Now you know.

So all the toy soldiers I had were Americans. Green army and tan army. I had some ACW figures, Yanks and Rebs…well, they were all Americans, too. So neither side in my games were really ‘bad guys’. They were just having a big argument, for some unspecified reason, maybe a street party got our of hand. The sides would take turns shooting and blowing things up. Rat-tat-tat, a machine gun fires and a squad goes down. Boom, their tank blows up the machine gun. Ba-wham, the other side’s cannon fires and blows up the tank. Back and forth, until pretty much everybody got wiped out. No objectives, just a lot of explosions.

To his day, although I’m a history buff and a hard-core historical gamer, I prefer playing games where neither side is really objectionable, where I can identify and role-play either side without feeling dirty. Why would I want to play with someone I loathe?

You'll shoot your eye out, kid!