Imaginations in 42mm

[Phil Dutré]

My latest efforts: http://snv-ttm.blogspot.be/2016/07/imaginations-in-42mm-6.html

[willz]

Fantastic stuff Phil, cheers for sharing.

[nheastvan]

These are awesome. I ended up going with 54mm but 42mm looks like an amazing scale for a classic toy soldier imagination. I ended up going back to your blog and reading all the 42mm tagged pages. Love the Major General style mountain backdrops as well as the BRP hardcover book. 😀

My Blog - Galugadesh, a colonial imagi-nation and a star system

[Phil Dutré]

And some more pictures:

http://snv-ttm.blogspot.be/2016/08/imaginations-in-42mm-7.html

[nheastvan]

Love the Mechanisch Geschut. The blue country B guys look great.

A subunit neatly occupy a single Kalliastra hex. The rules – which still have to be written – will accommodate for this.

This is really smart. So many rules start with abstract ideas about the period or what the designer wants to represent or whatever, but starting with the practical activities like putting figures in a hex is such a great way to start thinking about actual game play.

I’ve never really followed blogs or feeds, but I’ve added your feed to an aggregator. Along with phdleadhead, yours is the first blog I’ll be paying regular attention to.

My Blog - Galugadesh, a colonial imagi-nation and a star system

[Phil Dutré]

Thanks for the nice comments, and thanks for following my blog.

nheastvan wrote:

but starting with the practical activities like putting figures in a hex is such a great way to start thinking about actual game play.

That’s how I usually develop my rules. I tend to think about practicalities such as hex occupancy first, and then I build the gaming engine around that. Another example: for our scifi skirmish games, the entire game system was build around the idea of using a firing mechanism in which you had to roll a die, and exceeding the distance in hexes. That was non-negotiable. Most other things flowed from that.

The advantage is that you end up with a coherent gaming engine, instead of a hodge-podge of different rules and procedures. The disadvantage is that the original ideas might prove to be too limiting, and you have to adjust the initial core principles after a few games.

[nheastvan]

I read your latest post about the bridge between hobby and professional wargame developers.

I’ve actually spent some time doing playtesting for some of the hex and counter games that have been used in the classroom of military colleges and officer training programs. Our key directive as playtesters was to try to do what was done historically (when we have the record of when formations where where on the battlefield) and see if the game produces the historical result. Not in a determined or forced way, but in an emergent way. Do the various components of the game (movement rules, turn structure, combat rules, organization/breakdown of units/commands, etc.,) organically produce historical results? And then add in variables and variations as directed by the designer/design team. Keep reporting back. Once you have a system that produces historical results just by using it, and does so consistently across similar situations in a given period, making the next hobby game of a different battle in a given conflict becomes more a matter of research than game design. And when you take the same system and try to produce the results of a different battle and it works, it’s like the equation solves for the right answer.

Early miniature wargame designers got this as well. A lot of the stuff from the late 50s and 60s is based on modelling historical results in very direct and simple ways to make an organic system. It was only in later decades that people got this wrong headed idea that realism can only come through complexity. This idea that complexity equates to realism has totally poisoned the well when it comes to talking about these issues, especially on the internet.

My Blog - Galugadesh, a colonial imagi-nation and a star system

[Phil Dutré]

Some more additions to my 42mm imagination armies:

http://snv-ttm.blogspot.be/2018/01/imaginations-in-42mm-11.html

 

[Howard Whitehouse]

Why have I not been following this? What’s wrong with me?

Brilliant stuff. I was hoping the ‘new’ figures were from a current manufacturer, but that’s how it goes.

Here’s what I’ve been up to in the same scale lately, Germans made by John Bertolini, who makes them as a hobby rather than commercially:

The German horde

I do all my own stunts.

[Phil Dutré]

I’ve added some Schneider and Schildkrot figures to my armies:

http://snv-ttm.blogspot.com/2020/02/imaginations-in-42mm-19.html

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