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People get really... emotional about this game. More so than any other comparable board game (although people do get plenty angry at some competitive online games.)

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of investment in the game so much so that winning at 40k seems more important than winning at other board games.

Also, it's interesting how FAQs and the rules for the game become extremely inflexible; People become worse than lawyers in terms of interpreting and arguing the intricate points of
the poorly-worded ruleset. When a new codex/faq comes out, all previous codicies are instantly invalidated for the entire playerbase, to the limit of their knowledge; If you ask
people in your FLGS if they want to play a 5th edition or 3rd edition game they look at you funny. Heck, people don't even remember the rules from those editions.

Why are we so caught up in a game of toy soldiers?

Have you ever played monopoly?

Every time I play monopoly with people it turns into a 5 hour long fight to the death, it doesn't matter who is playing or what age they are. Monopoly ruins friendships.

The thing with 40k is that it takes a lot of time and effort and money to play which is why people take it so seriously.

Because taking it seriously can be fun, I enjoy casual games where you just toss whatever on the table and roll dice. But I also like a cutthroat competition where I do my best to exploit the rules to their fullest.

There is a difference between taking advantage of what the rules say and actually breaking the rules. Its fun to see what schenanigins can be pulled.

People care about things that they are heavily invested in. People who play 40K are generally very, very heavily invested in it.

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
Why are we so caught up in a game of toy soldiers?

Nerd noun Slang.
1. a stupid, irritating, ineffectual, or unattractive person.
2. an intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit: a computer nerd.

I think that pretty much covers it.

Rotgut wrote:Have you ever played monopoly?

Every time I play monopoly with people it turns into a 5 hour long fight to the death, it doesn't matter who is playing or what age they are. Monopoly ruins friendships.

The thing with 40k is that it takes a lot of time and effort and money to play which is why people take it so seriously.

Monopoly is an absurdly random game of chance with little room for skill which takes far too long to complete. I have never played a serious competitive game of monopoly before without people losing interest in the third hour, but I'm sure there are tournament Monopoly players out there but still a rare breed.

40k players in general all adhere to this stereotype, however.

Grey Templar wrote:Because taking it seriously can be fun, I enjoy casual games where you just toss whatever on the table and roll dice. But I also like a cutthroat competition where I do my best to exploit the rules to their fullest.

There is a difference between taking advantage of what the rules say and actually breaking the rules. Its fun to see what schenanigins can be pulled.

40k games just seem more serious than most- you can have cuthroat games of chess, but when you lose at chess you lose at chess. When you lose at 40k, it's an existential crisis for some.

greyknight12 wrote:People care about things that they are heavily invested in. People who play 40K are generally very, very heavily invested in it.

Belly wrote:

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
Why are we so caught up in a game of toy soldiers?

Nerd noun Slang.
1. a stupid, irritating, ineffectual, or unattractive person.
2. an intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit: a computer nerd.

I think that pretty much covers it.

It's not a non-social hobby, though ,it's incredibly social. You can't really solo40k (not truly unbiasedly). I am well aware it's a single minded- pursuit, but what about it makes it so?

In my case, most likely it;s just habit

I've played 40K since it began, and i can't imagine giving it up

I don't take it all that seriously though. It's a fun way to blow a few hours with friends, rolling some dice and pushing nicely painted toys around a table.

If i win, cool. If not, no biggie, as there is always next time.

One reason may be that 40k, and other TT wargames, are a large investment. More than other things can be. You get involved with your army, building, painting, etc... So it becomes an integrated part of yourself.

It's because 40k isn't like most other games. 40k is a much more total experience.

You can spend hours and hours learning how to build things with greenstuff and plasticard. You can spend hours and hours getting better at painting and producing nice miniatures. You can spend hours and hours reading rules, and your codices and coming up with new combinations of things. You can spend hours and hours just learning how to play the game competently, and then spend more hours trying to eke out just that last little insignificant bit of player skill out of it all.

You can invest a lot of time in 40k, and thus emotion. Also, there is skill, in its various forms, woven throughout the entirety of it all. In a world of insane unemployment, especially amongst young people, 40k may very well be your only serious outlet for building skill in something and practicing a professional ethic.

Put another way, you CAN take 40k seriously, which is why, invariably, people DO take it seriously.

To get more to what the OP was talking about, though, you have to start with this, and then take it a few steps further. For one, let's be honest, any fringe hobby with lots of detail and the ability to improve skill is going to get you a higher than average rate of mental disorders and associated problems. The word "nerd" has negative overtones for a reason.

Then you add to it the fact that some people just can't handle competition. They get completely sucked into it well past the point of the healthy enjoyment of sport. For some people, winning is everything because, well, it IS everything to them. Such people should be pitied, not derided.

And to put a cherry on top, you have to consider the medium - the internet. Without tone of voice or facial cues, communication is shockingly difficult. On the flip side, you can take things completely abstractly and, with the benefit of anonymity, say the kinds of things or be the kind of person that you'd never dream of being face to face with someone else.

And then, just to finish things, we're talking about what is fundamentally a dice game. Human brains simply are not designed to understand random chance.

So, why people get in a huff is a combination of an incredible amount of investment (both in money and time), coupled with an emotional sense of satisfaction from working hard and being successful (which most people, even employed, don't really get), and then take that amount of focus and emotionality and throw it into a blender filled with random chance and internet communication.

You can see why it would get messy.

Woah hold on a second. Easily the most aggressive game ever created is Diplomacy. It plays similar to risk with the single factor of needing allies to win becoming possible hour long turns as I've had people lose their voices and almost fist fight over their best friend since 3rd grade backstabbing them over 1 piece of land

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
People get really... emotional about this game. More so than any other comparable board game (although people do get plenty angry at some competitive online games.)

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of investment in the game so much so that winning at 40k seems more important than winning at other board games.

Also, it's interesting how FAQs and the rules for the game become extremely inflexible; People become worse than lawyers in terms of interpreting and arguing the intricate points of
the poorly-worded ruleset. When a new codex/faq comes out, all previous codicies are instantly invalidated for the entire playerbase, to the limit of their knowledge; If you ask
people in your FLGS if they want to play a 5th edition or 3rd edition game they look at you funny. Heck, people don't even remember the rules from those editions.

Why are we so caught up in a game of toy soldiers?

Why is it I hear stuff like this all the time, indicating that there are many players with this mindset, yet 90% of who I play against come under the exact category that you describe?

I just wanna have a good laugh and a beer while I play. But then everyones like "hurr durr I can feel no pain on my quad cannon" and other fiddly 'lawyering' of the rules that takes all the fun out of it

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:

It's not a non-social hobby, though ,it's incredibly social. You can't really solo40k (not truly unbiasedly). I am well aware it's a single minded- pursuit, but what about it makes it so?

I actually did not read the nonsocial part of that definition.

My point was thus; 40k (and wargaming in general) attracts a very specific kind of person. It's my opinion that it's not that hobby that brings this out in people, it's the people that bring it out of the hobby. At least the majority of the time. Most players i've come up against enjoy the competition, rules and making things 'optimal'. It plays to the nerdiness we have inside us all.

The game costs a lot of cash and unless your the son of a oil mogul cash is always a serious business thing.

Simple: investment.

People spend hundreds of dollars buying models, then hundreds of hour painting/modeling them. They want to win. You want to see a return on your investment.

If you spend all that time and money only to lose over and over, it can be really disappointing. I believe this is one of the main reason people take 40k "too seriously".

pwntallica wrote: You want to see a return on your investment.

That does, though, entirely depend on one's definition of "return".

Only for a certain group of people does return involve winning games.

 Ailaros wrote:

pwntallica wrote: You want to see a return on your investment.

That does, though, entirely depend on one's definition of "return".

Only for a certain group of people does return involve winning games.

I agree 100% with you. For me, having fun is number 1. But to a lot of people (at least ones I know and see frequently on forums), winning is more fun than losing. I'm not sure if that comes out right. Basically, some people get too serious because they think that only by winning can they justify their time/monetary investment.

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
When you lose at 40k, it's an existential crisis for some.

For some? Sure. For more than a tiny minority? I doubt it. I've certainly encountered people who couldn't handle losing, but there are people who can't handle losing in ANY game and I haven't seen any reason to believe that 40k has more of them than other games.

 Peregrine wrote:

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
When you lose at 40k, it's an existential crisis for some.

For some? Sure. For more than a tiny minority? I doubt it. I've certainly encountered people who couldn't handle losing, but there are people who can't handle losing in ANY game and I haven't seen any reason to believe that 40k has more of them than other games.

Pretty much that.

Everyone else has prettu much answered this thread, so ill just reply with pointing out that 40K is SRS BSNS!!

 Ailaros wrote:
It's because 40k isn't like most other games. 40k is a much more total experience.

You can spend hours and hours learning how to build things with greenstuff and plasticard. You can spend hours and hours getting better at painting and producing nice miniatures. You can spend hours and hours reading rules, and your codices and coming up with new combinations of things. You can spend hours and hours just learning how to play the game competently, and then spend more hours trying to eke out just that last little insignificant bit of player skill out of it all.

You can invest a lot of time in 40k, and thus emotion. Also, there is skill, in its various forms, woven throughout the entirety of it all. In a world of insane unemployment, especially amongst young people, 40k may very well be your only serious outlet for building skill in something and practicing a professional ethic.

Put another way, you CAN take 40k seriously, which is why, invariably, people DO take it seriously.

To get more to what the OP was talking about, though, you have to start with this, and then take it a few steps further. For one, let's be honest, any fringe hobby with lots of detail and the ability to improve skill is going to get you a higher than average rate of mental disorders and associated problems. The word "nerd" has negative overtones for a reason.

Then you add to it the fact that some people just can't handle competition. They get completely sucked into it well past the point of the healthy enjoyment of sport. For some people, winning is everything because, well, it IS everything to them. Such people should be pitied, not derided.

And to put a cherry on top, you have to consider the medium - the internet. Without tone of voice or facial cues, communication is shockingly difficult. On the flip side, you can take things completely abstractly and, with the benefit of anonymity, say the kinds of things or be the kind of person that you'd never dream of being face to face with someone else.

And then, just to finish things, we're talking about what is fundamentally a dice game. Human brains simply are not designed to understand random chance.

So, why people get in a huff is a combination of an incredible amount of investment (both in money and time), coupled with an emotional sense of satisfaction from working hard and being successful (which most people, even employed, don't really get), and then take that amount of focus and emotionality and throw it into a blender filled with random chance and internet communication.

You can see why it would get messy.

This deconstruction post is epic. You have gained a level in self-awareness!

 Ailaros wrote:
It's because 40k isn't like most other games. 40k is a much more total experience.

You can spend hours and hours learning how to build things with greenstuff and plasticard. You can spend hours and hours getting better at painting and producing nice miniatures. You can spend hours and hours reading rules, and your codices and coming up with new combinations of things. You can spend hours and hours just learning how to play the game competently, and then spend more hours trying to eke out just that last little insignificant bit of player skill out of it all.

You can invest a lot of time in 40k, and thus emotion. Also, there is skill, in its various forms, woven throughout the entirety of it all. In a world of insane unemployment, especially amongst young people, 40k may very well be your only serious outlet for building skill in something and practicing a professional ethic.

Put another way, you CAN take 40k seriously, which is why, invariably, people DO take it seriously.

To get more to what the OP was talking about, though, you have to start with this, and then take it a few steps further. For one, let's be honest, any fringe hobby with lots of detail and the ability to improve skill is going to get you a higher than average rate of mental disorders and associated problems. The word "nerd" has negative overtones for a reason.

Then you add to it the fact that some people just can't handle competition. They get completely sucked into it well past the point of the healthy enjoyment of sport. For some people, winning is everything because, well, it IS everything to them. Such people should be pitied, not derided.

And to put a cherry on top, you have to consider the medium - the internet. Without tone of voice or facial cues, communication is shockingly difficult. On the flip side, you can take things completely abstractly and, with the benefit of anonymity, say the kinds of things or be the kind of person that you'd never dream of being face to face with someone else.

And then, just to finish things, we're talking about what is fundamentally a dice game. Human brains simply are not designed to understand random chance.

So, why people get in a huff is a combination of an incredible amount of investment (both in money and time), coupled with an emotional sense of satisfaction from working hard and being successful (which most people, even employed, don't really get), and then take that amount of focus and emotionality and throw it into a blender filled with random chance and internet communication.

You can see why it would get messy.

Exalted. This is brilliant.

When you drop $1,000 into something (the price required for a competitive army these days) it tends to become serious business.

Ailaros wrote:It's because 40k isn't like most other games. 40k is a much more total experience.

You can spend hours and hours learning how to build things with greenstuff and plasticard. You can spend hours and hours getting better at painting and producing nice miniatures. You can spend hours and hours reading rules, and your codices and coming up with new combinations of things. You can spend hours and hours just learning how to play the game competently, and then spend more hours trying to eke out just that last little insignificant bit of player skill out of it all.

You can invest a lot of time in 40k, and thus emotion. Also, there is skill, in its various forms, woven throughout the entirety of it all. In a world of insane unemployment, especially amongst young people, 40k may very well be your only serious outlet for building skill in something and practicing a professional ethic.

Put another way, you CAN take 40k seriously, which is why, invariably, people DO take it seriously.

To get more to what the OP was talking about, though, you have to start with this, and then take it a few steps further. For one, let's be honest, any fringe hobby with lots of detail and the ability to improve skill is going to get you a higher than average rate of mental disorders and associated problems. The word "nerd" has negative overtones for a reason.

Then you add to it the fact that some people just can't handle competition. They get completely sucked into it well past the point of the healthy enjoyment of sport. For some people, winning is everything because, well, it IS everything to them. Such people should be pitied, not derided.

And to put a cherry on top, you have to consider the medium - the internet. Without tone of voice or facial cues, communication is shockingly difficult. On the flip side, you can take things completely abstractly and, with the benefit of anonymity, say the kinds of things or be the kind of person that you'd never dream of being face to face with someone else.

And then, just to finish things, we're talking about what is fundamentally a dice game. Human brains simply are not designed to understand random chance.

So, why people get in a huff is a combination of an incredible amount of investment (both in money and time), coupled with an emotional sense of satisfaction from working hard and being successful (which most people, even employed, don't really get), and then take that amount of focus and emotionality and throw it into a blender filled with random chance and internet communication.

You can see why it would get messy.

I agree with this, but this is missing a component.

Peregrine wrote:

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
When you lose at 40k, it's an existential crisis for some.

For some? Sure. For more than a tiny minority? I doubt it. I've certainly encountered people who couldn't handle losing, but there are people who can't handle losing in ANY game and I haven't seen any reason to believe that 40k has more of them than other games.

This plus above one. I certainly am a competetive person, and there are other people with fierce competitive attitudes that hate to lose. I have to teach myself to laugh off rolling 1 and one for rolling gets hot and the appropriate save. Looking at it that way is actually funny.

It's serious business because of the chicks. Hot chicks are impressed by winners, and there are only so many hot chicks to go around.

Because my plastic/resin/metal soldiers are better than your plastic/resin/metal soldiers.

Honestly, in all my years of gaming I'm not sure I can agree that 40k has the biggest issue with this. I've seen people get irritated and I've even seen shouting but that's about it. I've seen actual blood spilled over games of Magic. Several times in fact.

True, Magic is the only game I've ever heard of people getting killed over.

just how it goes, people spend a lot of time and $ on models,

and it takes more time to play as well,

so whereas playing dawn of war online I DRK if I lose because I can start a new game, with a new opponent, and a new army, in minutes for no extra cost.

40/fantasy you literally have 1000's of $ and hours into that one army.

OFC i love the tactile feeling of moving models, and painting/converting, I generally have more fun with the right group of people then anything...

but I have seen, the more "super serious biznizz" types, in all hobbies

motor bikes, boats, hunting ect ect

all these things I like when relaxed, but not with mr "I HAVE TO BE THE BEST HURRR DURRR"

Tycho wrote:
I've seen people get irritated and I've even seen shouting but that's about it. I've seen actual blood spilled over games of Magic. Several times in fact.

It seems to happen to video gamers more often, though.

Article

Older incident in China


Ehr meh Gehrd! 2 incidents in 10 years! Video games cause violence! :-)

Frankly, I think you MUST have a certain level of OCD in order to enjoy table-top miniatures games, as you are likely to spend more time preparing to play than you will ever actually spend playing. Simply painting an army to completion is an excellent example of obsessive behavior; judging by how much time it takes me to prep for Adepticon every year, I'd have to play about 120-150 games with the exact same army just to equal the time spent preparing to play those games.

 Janthkin wrote:
I'd have to play about 120-150 games with the exact same army just to equal the time spent preparing to play those games.

This is true.