Nostalgia

The miniature gaming hobby is old. The original Dungeons and Dragons came out 45 years ago. The first tabletop wargame is far, far older. Even if we ignore games like Chess and Go, which could be considered wargames, because they are played using set pieces, and on a set board, early, commercially available, variable wargames have been around since the late 18th century, the first commonly credited being introduced in 1780. That's nearly 240 years.

With this long history, games have come and gone, scales have shifted, design ethoses have changed, and so on.

Most gamers have fond memories of the first games they played, the first miniatures they bought and built and painted. When we first encountered the hobby, everything was new, games were so much better than the disorganised play we knew as children, miniatures seemed so detailed. Essentially, for those of us who stayed in the hobby, we fell in love with one or more aspect of the hobby. As lovers, it's all too easy to view the old as beautiful and the new as a crass imitator, since it doesn't have the history we have with our older models and games. Unfortunately, the truth is often that we are viewing the past through "rose tinted glass".

I can't comment on how much better modern D&D is compared to older editions. For someone who's been gaming as long as i have, I've never played D&D with any interest. I grew up on a diet of newer systems, like Fighting Fantasy, Warhammer, and Das Schwartze Aige (apologies if I've misspelt it, my German is very rusty). Of those, Warhammer Roleplay is the only one I've played more than one edition of, and, while i cut my teeth as a GM on first edition, playing through numerous scenarios and campaign packs, the second edition was simply so much better, less restrictive, less clunky. Of course, third edition changed all that, and i dropped away, and have yet to try fourth edition, but hold high hopes off the back of the publisher's headline system, Victoriana.

Tabletop battle gaming, and the associated miniatures, are something that i can comment on.

Games began as fairly simple, so they were quick to set up, easy to play and so easy enough to get a game set up with a new player. This, however, quickly went wrong. By the time I started, roughly 30 years ago, rule books for most systems had grown to mighty tomes filled with exceptions, clauses, variations, special circumstances, etc. Take Warhammer 40,000, since it's one of the most popular games in the world now. In first edition, movement varied by race, then was further modified by the weight of equipment and armour, and affected by terrain, and then, to top it all off, in a campaign, wounded soldiers would have additional restrictions for a set number of games, or permanently. This level of detail is fine for a roleplay game, but just adds to headaches when you try to fight with a full company of soldiers.

The miniatures, too, have come so far in those 30 years. 30 years ago, plastic figures in Heroics scale were very simple, and, for the most part both generic enough that they could be used for any appropriate system, and stiffly posed because they were either single piece or push-fit with 2 or 3 components each. Metal figures also tended to be generic, and, while some efforts were made to provide more exciting poses, the technology didn't allow for as much detail as we have now.

Then there are the embarrassing little things that we'd probably prefer hadn't been there. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the miniature gaming hobby was almost exclusively populated by men, many with limited ability to socialise outside the hobby (the internet was young and the world wide web was still aways away). With this in mind, a lot of miniature ranges from the time, including the big names, had a tendency to have models of rather poor taste. There were a number of "Naked girl in..." models as terrain pieces for dungeons, most sorcerers wore full robes and a hat, often with a cloak, while sorceresses tended towards a  loincloth or thong, and little else, and the anatomy was more that of a saucy postcard than anything real. Then there was the toilet humour: search Chaos Toilet and Inconvenienced Dwarf, for 2 of the most famous examples.

Of course, not everything is better now than it was 30 years ago, but that's a rant for another day.