Scale - Does It Exist Anymore?

 One of the things I remember always, always seeing in the early days of my journey in gaming, was a section explaining ground scale and figure ratios.

For me, these gave a benchmark, an idea of how things should look, and how they moved and behaved.

Indeed, I opened my newly acquired copy of Spacefarers as I attended to my morning observances, and there it was on page 1, that essential information.

They set the scene, they gave you an idea of what those figures were capable of. They were essential.

I could easily understand how to transform real world unit sizes into miniature equivalents. A 600 strong pike and shot regiment with a shot to pike ratio of 2:1 could be easily worked out based on the WRG 1:20 figure to man ratio as 20 shot to 10 pike. 

But nowadays you don't see them, or at least very rarely, and I think that it's another 'dumbing' down of our hobby to accomodate a generation who want everything to be like a video game in it's simplicity, which to me defeats the object of learning about and understanding the period/s we choose to game.

I can't be the only one who likes to get an idea of what our measuring, moving, die rolling and painting actually means or represents.

As I said, it helped me visualise what my tiny troops were doing. In facy, when I took up reenactment I had a nasty habit of timing certain actions, to see how things compared to wargame recreations.

Even when I played Warhammer, I considered 24 Orcs to be 480-500 'real' Orcs, and imagined them as a roiling, frothing mob (a bit like some of those who don't like this blog, only I could put the Orcs back in their box a lot faster) and those 12 Elves facing them were 240 or so pointy-eared whimps ripe for a damn good thrashing or 240 skilled and honed Elven warriors who could be a real threat.

'Infantry moves 4 inches' means nothing without a sense of what those 4 inches represent, I am afraid. We arbitrarily know that a longbow will reach 30-36 inches, but understanding what that means and how, without ground scale, we can end up playing games where our troops are never out of weapon range. It gets a bit boring as let's face it, many people have tables smaller than the rules they play were designed for, when using 28mm models. 

This where the smaller scales come in, of course. Those smaller figureswere designed for larger battles or periods where the efficincy of weapons was such that larger ground scale was required, to be able to get a reasonable facsimile of the warfare of the period, such as Napoleonics, ACW or WW2 mechanised actions. 15mm for WW2 is a complete farce, but sure enough, people have no problem with tanks in tightly packed lines, looking more like Medieval cavalry regiments than dispersed 20th century mechanised forces.

This is what happens when you let a generation for whome the high tide mark is 'Imperial Era' Games Workshop games. In the 80s, you walked into a GW store and there were serious gamers in there, hand picked by Steve and Ian themselves in many cases, who had a grounding in the hobby from the early days, and who could wax lyrical on this or that aspect of history or fantasy. In Sheffield we had Pete Berry, Cy Harrison, Phil Brough and John Steele to name a few. By the late 90s we had gurning idiots called 'Kev', 'Stevo' and 'Rob' or whatever, who knew - and excuse my terminology here - sweet fuck all, about anything other than Games Workshop. They ate, slept and breathed Warhammer and 40K. 

You could have fun arguing with them about why onlt Bretonnian archers could use a wedge formation, and if you asked them what the ground scale and figure to man ratios of the game they were trying to sell you were, they would look at you in the manner of a spaniel being shown a card trick. 

Actually, that's unfair as Spaniels can be trained to flush and retrieve downed wildfowl, making them far more useful than the average GW staffer these days. 

As an aside: I once went on a night out with some of these guts and Jesus, was I bored. Oh they were a sheltered bunch. They thought a Pizza Hut to be fine dining, and I had to liven things up by, when asked by the waitress 'Can I take the pepper mill?' replied, 'I don't know... can you?'.

Well, it stopped them waffling about how great GW was and how they got sweat rash from the shitty polo shirts GW gave staff, because you know, they needed to identify which of the drooling, gurning idiots was being paid and which were giving GW money (of course they all gave GW money, because the staff didn't know about the gaming world outside the corporate Chaos meatgrinder).

So, I am now demanding that all rule manufacturers make a clear statement of scale and ratios on page one. In fact it should be a legal requirement, in the manner of weights and ingredients on Findus Crispy Pancakes or  whatever processed muck is your retro poison of choice. 

TTFN