I've loved the high fantasy genre for most of my life, being raised on books and movies like The Hobbit, The Dark is Rising, Willow, Ladyhawk, Highlander, and Excalibur. As I grew up I always enjoyed finding a new adventure of sword and sorcery. When I finally found my first Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 group, I was ecstatic! But, quickly found myself in one of those nightmare stories about D&D. My party was wiped out in the first session by a chaotic player, a couple of bad dice rolls, and a Dungeon Master that had absolutely no concept of guiding his party. As it would turn out, attempting to pickpocket a party member at first meeting, failing, and accidentally attacking the party's barbarian was a bad idea. Moreover, the Dungeon Master
deciding that the surprise attack would trigger an involuntary rage, making the barbarian immediately attack the nearest party member was....worse. The first session only lasted one hour before the party imploded on itself. Our attempt at starting again ended in three sessions due to assassins rolling a terrifying number of critical hits and downing three of our four party members before we could find a way to fight back. To say the least, my taste for D&D had been soured but not outright defeated. I would pick up my dice many more times with other groups and would forge a deep love for that wonderful game, as well as many strong friendships with my party members along the way.
Now, fast forward to my modern life. My coworkers and I had formed a party and played a good portion of the Tomb of Annihilation before having to disband for a time. In our break from D&D, the idea of trying Games Workshop's Kill Teams was tossed around. Kill Teams is a squad based wargame in the world of Warhammer 40,000 (often referred to as 40K). The more I learned about the world of the grim dark future, the more interested I got. Now, there is a HUGE difference between Dungeons and Dragons' tabletop roleplay and Warhammer 40k's wargaming. In addition to the high fantasy versus futuristic sci-fi, the method of play is very different. Dungeons and Dragons has a group of players work together to overcome a story being lead by the Dungeon Master. Warhammer 40k (or Kill Teams) is strategic combat between opposing groups in the Warhammer Universe. Where D&D can be a single night one-shot, or a years long campaign. Warhammer focusses on individual battles or skirmishes between waring factions. What drew me in was what they both have in common...miniatures. I had been an avid collector of D&D minis for years, embarking on my journey into 3D printing in order to build my army of tiny warriors even faster. Now, looking at the vast world of models available from Games Workshop, I was practically drooling on my keyboard. The Space Marines, the Adeptus Custodes, the Orks, the Knights and Titans, the forces of chaos, the xenos, the empire of man....they were all begging to be built, painted, and put into endless battles! I was hooked, even though I had never seen a game played or thrown any dice.
I went down a slippery slope with my first squad. The guardians of the emperor, the Adeptus Custodes. I'm still proud of those little golden boys. My first 40k minis will hold a spot on my shelf for many years to come. I followed them with a squad of Ultramarines (yeah, I know, don't judge me. Blue is my favorite color.) Next came the Adeptus Mechanicus, a team of technology obsessed rangers, then a squad of Ork Boys and some Tau Pathfinders and some....you get the picture. I quickly took to purchasing used models with bad paint jobs from the internet and stripping their paint and repainting them as my own. It was a very cost effective method to build a variety of Kill Teams. I liked the idea of being able to have extra teams for my friends or my kids to try if they were interested. My 40k model collection quickly grew beyond what I ever intended it to be....and still, no dice had been thrown. It had now been over a year of Warhammer collecting and not a single game had been played. But, in spite of this, I was still as enthralled with the 40k hobby as I had ever been.
I reflected on my experiences with D&D, 40k, and my miniature army and realized a few things. My D&D experiences weren't centered around my miniatures. Instead, they all came back to the stories my friends and I shared around the gaming table. To this day, we regularly reference our battle with vampire lords in their evil tournament, the time we loaded a leprechaun into a blunderbuss and fired him at one of his colleagues, or the time we pretended to be doctors in a coliseum in order to rescue one of our NPC allies from life as a gladiator. D&D is all about collaborative story telling. The group starts with a story hook and a rough outline of an adventure.
The details and events of this adventure are determined by the group's decisions and the luck of dice rolls. Warhammer 40k, on the other hand, is very different. Instead of writing stories as you play the game, Warhammer depends mainly on novels and lore books to build the world of the 40k universe. Instead of playing the story of an Ork Warboss, you read books about the world of the Orks and their war against the humans, then set up a battle between your army of Ork models and someone else's army of Space Marine models that fits within the stories you've read. The game and the story are comparatively separated when compared to D&D. Warhammer puts the player in the position of a general commanding troops on a battlefield. The story will be one battle in an endless war. D&D puts the player directly into the role of one of the characters. The story can continue from quest to quest as long as the party wants to continue. I see the two games in terms I use in online gaming. D&D is a PVE (player vs environment) experience and Warhammer is a PVP (player vs player) experience.
So, you might be asking yourself, "If you don't ever play the game, why are you still into Warhammer?" I'd be lying if I said I hadn't asked myself that same question many times. But, the answer was sitting right in front of me the entire time. I love building and painting the models. It's that simple. The therapeutic and relaxing nature of putting Warhammer stories on YouTube and losing myself in taking a tiny piece of plastic and breathing life and story into it's form is intoxicating. Each of my tiny soldiers not only receives a coat of paint while they sit on my desk, they receive a backstory, a personality, and a name. Now, many of those names and stories are lost to my memories after the fact, but in the time I spend building and painting them, they become tiny characters in my imagination. Some of them do keep their names due to odd little quarks that stuck with me. The Custodian who's leg slipped before the glue could fully set and now looks
like he's forever waiting to use the restroom...his name is Dave. The Ultramarine that my brown wash pooled a little too much on one of his eyes and now will forever look like he has a black eye...his name is Chuck. I look at my shelf of tiny soldiers with pride. I enjoy the stories and lore of the Warhammer 40k universe and enjoy imagining my soldiers were part of some of those events and battles from the stories. I'm not a Warhammer player, I'm just an avid Warhammer painter and collector. And there's nothing wrong with that either. My kids have joined me in the passion for breathing life into tiny plastic soldiers. My daughter is a devoted Ork warrior and my son likes the Ultramarines like his dad (we both like blue.) One day, maybe we'll setup a game table and try our soldiers out in a battle, but we're all perfectly content building our armies and refining our painting skills. Between mine and my daughter's collections, we have hundreds of painted soldiers sitting on shelves. Some have names, some stories, some are part of squads or teams. But they all have one thing in common: they all brought us joy when they came across our desks and THAT is what really matters. So, friends, don't let anyone tell you how to enjoy your passions or how you are supposed to have fun. Because, my kids and I are D&D and Warhammer nerds even if we don't roll the dice. Find your own fun and enjoy it to the fullest. What's important as that you continue to game on!
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