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RhodericForgive me for being all over the place with this post. I’m responding to various points being made that don’t all have much to do with each other.
Scale creep on 15mm (should that be size creep? I await to be corrected) has now become so entrenched that we now have the new size (scale) of 18mm being universally accepted as a common point of reference. Lancashire Games for example have been tradional 15mm producers and they are now producing lines described as 18mm.!
What really interests me, and is a positive thing in my book, is when 15mm and 18mm are acknowledged as two scales that exist alongside each other, as opposed to being viewed as one thing that crept into another. Eureka and Black Hat are two companies that come to mind as having both a 15mm section and an 18mm one in their respective webstores.
I’m sure scale creep had something to do with it originally, but nowadays, it seems to me that it’s reasonable for anyone looking to manufacture new miniatures in this general scale range to ask themselves: “Am I going to make my figures 15mm or 18mm?” They’re both legitimate, and they’re both viable options independent of each other.
the hobby continues to stride forward and meet all needs
While the above quote is part of my own attitude as well, I can anticipate the counterargument that manufacturers are not just making these ranges to meet people’s existing needs, but to effectively generate new needs in the hobby scene that ultimately translate back into profitable business expansions for the manufacturers. Certainly, seeing 35mm figures has made me feel inspired to acquire, paint and game with them, when I didn’t have that inspiration before 35mm had established itself as an option on the market.
However, I don’t really view this relationship between manufacturers and customers to be wrong in any way, as long as all we’re doing as hobbyists is whatever we feel inspired to do, and it satisfies us. And while concerns over the fragmentation of standards between manufacturers is understandable, I still feel it’s a net profit for the hobby when I take into account that manufacturers might never have diverted their efforts into the better-established scales instead of refraining from investing themselves altogether, had 35mm for some reason been “forbidden” to them.
I’m sure that were I a fine scale military modelling hobbyist (the complex-plastic-kit-building, airbrush-and-decals-using, non-wargaming kind), and been one when 1/48 tanks first started appearing on the market (Wikipedia tells me this was around 2003, and I’ve heard elsewhere that this was a bit of a milestone for that hobby scene), I’d have happily gotten in on that action despite probably being deeply invested already in modelling tanks in other, more established scales. I enjoy the combination of trying new things for myself and experiencing a sense of motion (dare I say forward-motion, or is that too provocative to the old guard?) in my chosen hobby scene.
if they are designed to fit within the enclosed system then it would not bother me.
The words “enclosed system” resonate with me. A lot of my miniatures gaming projects are enclosed systems, with the exception of terrain where I strive for multi-use practicality.
Another thing about “enclosed system” games is that they are usually very conducive for having projects based on these systems be manageably small in scope. I see 35mm, due to its pros (conduciveness for characterful figures and plenty of detail) and cons (fairly limited selection of ranges/miniatures, every figure being a more significant investment of money and effort than a 28mm figure) as being mainly an “adventure skirmish”-scope scale, the sort that may have as few as a half-dozen figures on the table overall. You know, gladiators in an arena, Batman fighting a handful of assassins in an abandoned tunnel system, that sort of thing. At most, it’s at the scope of Star Wars Legion and Dust Tactics, which is admittedly grander but still not terribly grand compared to the projects many people get up to in 28mm and 30-32mm.
Then take into account that for this kind of smaller-scope sideline projects, it’s reasonable to adjust one’s ambitions in regard to terrain and scenery, so that one mostly makes do with scale-agnostic items one already owns or can buy with a view to using in other games/projects as well. For instance, I invested in a fairly large amount of Ainsty refinery scenery a few years back, before I was interested in doing any scale larger than 30-32mm. I also have lots of crates, barrels, containers and suchlike in nominal 28mm. I know that I can use these pieces to make a perfectly fine 35mm scenery set-up (in fact, I intend to use most of them for a range of scales from 12mm to 54mm).
So for me, it immediately smacks of an attempt to try and capture consumers with something new and pretty and tie them into that product, not dissimilar to some tech companies and their phones that don’t even share chargers across the same brand…
Some of the companies to have gotten into the 35mm market don’t really strike me as the kind that would make cynical decisions like that. Case in point: Gripping Beast with their Jugula range. I just can’t picture the people (person?) at GB going “Let’s make our figures a different scale, so our customers can’t mix them with 28mm gladiators from Crusader, Black Tree or Moonraker”. Rather, I think they were just enthusiastic to explore something new.
As for some other companies, like FFG with their 35mm Star Wars Legion range? Yes, I can see the cynical business thinking going on there. Despite having two similar Star Wars infantry-combat games that use miniatures, they don’t want them to be cross-compatible as they’ve probably predicted that cross-compatibility would lead to fewer sales overall, not more.
Still, even then, I might be in a forgiving mood. It’s not that I particularly want to take up Star Wars Legion, but I still appreciate the fact that it exists (mainly because people seem to actually be playing it and painting/modelling cool stuff for it, which is inspirational to me), whatever scale it happens to be.
We can’t really call it scale creep, but I suppose the effect itself should have a name, which could be generically useful as we see the same upsizing factor in many things, cars, TV screens, new borns weighing heavier, kids growing taller, waistbands increasing and mobile phones getting tablet sized, conversely of course, chocolate bars get smaller which sort of breaks my theory that if the universe is expanding, then perhaps so is everything else including 6mm, 15mm and 28mm. This doesn’t explain the creation of 3mm, though that does get us back to the chocolate bar. Einstein of course saw it more in terms of Mc2 = scale x size x (28+6+15+18-3) and who are we to argue!
I’m not convinced that scale creep is happening to “everything” in the hobby. Looking at many of the relatively new miniatures and ranges from the fantasy and sci-fi manufacturers I like to buy from, it seems to me that “true” 28mm has snapped back into place and stabilised as a scale that is expressly not trying to be the same thing as the “heroic” 28mm of certain other manufacturers. For instance, I have some of the Frostgrave plastics and I actually even find them a tad small for true 28mm! Frostgrave is a fairly popular game, so it’s not just a case of some negligible anomaly in a forgotten corner of the hobby industry.
35mm may offer more but I am primarily a gamer and not a modeller, were I modeller I would not buy wargames figures, but scale models anyway.
See, this sentence made my head go all wibbly, and turned my liver and onions into a sidestreet. Never in all my puff have I considered the things we push around on the wargames table not to be scale models (unless, of course, they are carboard counters, but I have been known to print stand-up counters to scale). For the “Airfix generation”, to which I belong, the question simply never arose; there was no question that the models we played wargames with were made to a specific scale (not always accurately, but that was the intention; and the Plastic Soldier Review seems to show Airfix achieving a pretty consistent 22-23mm figure height through most of their production of WW2 infantry). For terrestrial wargamers, it was 4mm to the foot, which was why the railway modellers sometimes called it “4mm scale” as well as OO. When micro-armour was first produced, it was explicitly stated that the scale was 1/300. When Peter Laing pioneered 15mm figures, his adverts explicitly stated that this was 1/120 scale. Nobody has ever doubted that 54mm means 1/32 scale, as agreed by Wm. Britain’s, Roy Dilley, and the BMSS. As well as there being no question that scale models were what doll’s house makers, railway modellers, aeromodellers and architects were dealing with, it was also pretty clear that it was what all air and naval wargamers who used models used; and I have never, until now, met a terrestrial wargamer who makes this distinction between a “scale model” and a “wargames figure”.
I’d sooner discuss this in a different thread as it’s a discussion-worthy topic of its own and not much related to this thread’s topic, but as we’re here:
What Mike calls scale models, I prefer to call fine scale models for extra distinction. I see the term “scale models” as a catch-all, but inside that broad category of things I definitely see a clear difference between the subcategories of “fine scale models” and “(war)gaming models”. In regard to human figures the former are, as a general rule, never stylised (exceptions such as Gunpla pilots being few and far between), while the latter are, as a well-established and dominant tradition if not an outright rule, rarely not stylised to some variable degree. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that wargaming miniatures are made to correspond to scales in regard to general size – even when they are not fine scale models in every particular – hence they are “scale models” in the broad sense (although I’m accustomed to only using the word “models” for vehicles, not figures of people).
Is it just an F&SF thing?
It’s definitely particularly well-established in the fantastical genres. In these genres, attitudes to modelling as a stylistic endeavour are especially positive because, you know, not everyone wants photo-realistic orcs. It’s more about mimicking artwork (of many, mutually exclusive but equally viable styles at that) than simulating reality “in scale”.
However, I don’t think it’s exclusive to the fantastical genres. I, too, have seen the distinction being made more than once (even if only in passing) in mainly-historicals-and-moderns contexts. I doubt many historicals and moderns wargamers see it through the same lens of “mimicking artwork”, but regardless, many of them still seem to accept, explicitly or subconsciously, the use of subtly or not-so-subtly stylised miniatures (therefore miniatures which are something other than fine scale) as natural of the established traditions of the hobby. Not all of them do, of course, but that wasn’t the question.
Does it occur only among the under-30s?
I’m 35, so no.