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So, I've been encountering more and more people playing apocalypse, and showing them my titan. And a couple of times I've had people say that they scratch built things too. On further questioning it would turn out that they had built a stompa by turning a flower pot upside-down and painting it red, or another person who wanted to build an emperor titan by stacking some cardboard boxes. And after spending a lot of time making my titan this sort of talk has started to offend me. I'm not saying scratch build should be a milimetrically perfect representation, and god knows my titan isn't perfect, but the question stands. Should there be standards for these sorts of things? Am I wrong to think that just ductaping garbage together is not acceptable, especially when all you want to do is bring an emperor titan and be the big cheese.

Of course this would depend on the atmosphere of your FLGS, but is it wrong to be offended by stuff like this, and should there be some sort of standards, especially when unpainted armies are (not common) but generally accepted.

My few points on scratch building:

1) Your titan is awesome!!!!!!!!

2) In my gaming circle the rule is that if you want to use a scratch build as a quick proxy (I.E the Tau player's foam devilfish that he used for a bit...kinda looked like an incredibly blocky batmobile), and we all say ok to using it, then it's fine.

3) If you wanted to use a pile of cardboard boxes as the model purely for the sake of not buying the actual model, that's not ok.

4) If you scratch build and it looks awesome (see #1), then you don't have to buy the original model.

Rule of cool: are you and your opponet "ok" on it? Nice. Some of you are not happy... Sorry.

By myself, i would follow Dr. What definitions (those are good), but i would not call for an awesome thing on 4, only something good (and by good I mean, original and/or well built).

If you scratch build a Titan (like yours) that is ok.
If you scratch build a ork trukk, that is ok.
If you scratch build something tottaly new to use as a trukk, im ok.
If want to use a converted toy as a Titan (or ork trukk), im still ok.
If you come with a box painted to resemble a Rhino i will laugh, and them be ok...
If after a year your army is bigger and you still use that Rhino, i will stop to be ok...

well, you have to acknowledge, that when someone does this, you are at liberty to do the same. Depending on the size and shape of your army transport case, just plow it onto the table as a proxy it as your mobile command fortress.....

if somone is tabling this thing two or three times to try it out, that's fine, no big deal, but if the person continues to insist on a negligent display toward the hobby, I'd kibosh their "scratchbuild". There are certain limits though, say someone did their best possible work, and ended up with something that's below your skill level, bear in mind, it's not necessarily your own evaluation that decides if it's decent or excrement.

EDIT: 1+ for what Dwarf Wolf said. Very good points. IF you are using it to fill points, grow up. I'm fine with people making their own papercraft rhino and fielding it, just, please, take the effort to have it look appropriate or better.

 poda_t wrote:
well, you have to acknowledge, that when someone does this, you are at liberty to do the same. Depending on the size and shape of your army transport case, just plow it onto the table as a proxy it as your mobile command fortress.....

if somone is tabling this thing two or three times to try it out, that's fine, no big deal, but if the person continues to insist on a negligent display toward the hobby, I'd kibosh their "scratchbuild". There are certain limits though, say someone did their best possible work, and ended up with something that's below your skill level, bear in mind, it's not necessarily your own evaluation that decides if it's decent or excrement.

EDIT: 1+ for what Dwarf Wolf said. Very good points. IF you are using it to fill points, grow up. I'm fine with people making their own papercraft rhino and fielding it, just, please, take the effort to have it look appropriate or better.

I understand that me saying this having scratch built stuff myself may seem hypocritical, but its a matter of scale and scope. For instance, my titan has set me back almost three hundred dollars in parts, bits and such; and just in building the foamcore frame it set me back over a month. So understand my stance here. My problem is that some people seem to think that a simple box with toilet paper tubes taped on is an emperor titan. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but to me a scratch build (especially a centerpiece like a gargant or a titan) should be a labor of love.

The opposite perspective is a labor of ingenuity. Taking something pre-finished and applying it in a use where it assists you could be more of an effort on ingenuity or simplicity.

There is a fine line between taking readily available parts and using them in a creative way and out and out putting the cheapest thing you can out there. Some people enjoy the assembly portion of the hobby, others the painting, and others the gaming. You have to give at least that... now.... if the individual in question is just using this thing to win, and isn't even being sportsmanly with it, and using it to nuke you from tomorrow's horizon every time..... and no effort is being made to improve the design, construction or detail of the thing....... that's not cool.

Well, frankly I strive to go out of my way to do decent scratchbuilds. However, that being said... my group plays pretty fast & loose with the counts-as rules for apoc. One guy uses a cardboard cutout that's a basic silhouette with no details whatsoever as tigersharks. I do kinda feel a bit taken aback by that personally, just because of all the time I take & the love I put into my scratchbuilds for him to cut them out in 5 minutes & say "here's my army, a fleet of tigersharks".

Some would say I'm too hard on such things, so I guess it really depends on your group. I don't expect everyone to put as much effort in as I do, but I do expect them to put some amount in, not just treat it as a throw away, because I feel that kinda cheapens my effort.

 Red_Starrise wrote:
Well, frankly I strive to go out of my way to do decent scratchbuilds. However, that being said... my group plays pretty fast & loose with the counts-as rules for apoc. One guy uses a cardboard cutout that's a basic silhouette with no details whatsoever as tigersharks. I do kinda feel a bit taken aback by that personally, just because of all the time I take & the love I put into my scratchbuilds for him to cut them out in 5 minutes & say "here's my army, a fleet of tigersharks".

Some would say I'm too hard on such things, so I guess it really depends on your group. I don't expect everyone to put as much effort in as I do, but I do expect them to put some amount in, not just treat it as a throw away, because I feel that kinda cheapens my effort.

see that's not cool. If he'd at least gone through the effort of taking the tigershart cross-sections and aligned the planes.... I would have let that fly, but just a straightup cutout? simply put, i stopped playing with my friends when they decided to print off magic cards from on line and stuff them into the card protectors....I would have been okay if it was a joke card, or if it was one he made himself with fair rules, but he didn't want to pay money to get real cards for his infinity decks, so instead he went and printed his cards, and played with them every time....

 bibblles wrote:
...but is it wrong to be offended by stuff like this, and should there be some sort of standards, especially when unpainted armies are (not common) but generally accepted.

It is absolutely wrong to be offended by this.

You're talking about a game of toy soldiers. Expecting other people to adhere to the standard that you personally consider acceptable is an exercise in futility, and way over the top.


Far better for everyone's blood pressure to just accept that different people want different things from this game, and that awesome modelling isn't a priority for everyone. If you don't want to play against models that you don't conisider acceptable, just don't... but don't waste your time getting annoyed about it.

I don't know... I have seen tons of really badly built scratch build.
But if they put in the effort, I'll acknowledge that, no matter how ugly.
A lot of those apocalypse items are from FW, and really expensive, I have sympathy that they can't purchase the real thing.

Effort is all I care about I guess?

Rule of Cool

If it looks cool, it plays.

The only thing I might get worked up about is the comparison they continue to draw of your titan to their upturned flower pot stompas.. If they put zero work into it and its literally just something turned over, its basically calling your work junk by even assuming to relate.

As for playing with scratch-builds/proxies, well... Sometimes things are more expensive then we'd like at the moment and you just have to have a stand-in to see if its worth its money or not

Proxies should be a one time only thing. IE this flower pot is my Stompa this game. If he wants to run a Stompa next month then it better not be a flower pot.

And if it doesn't at least resemble the actual model it counts as a proxy. Unless of course it's totally different yet somehow way better.

Then apply the rule of cool.

I can understand feeling gypped, having spent lots of time, effort, and possibly money on a labor of love, yet receiving no more than a handful of compliments over the guy who tossed his together in an hour out of naught but bits of recycling - then you both plunk them down and are expected to play, just the same. I would likely feel the same way.

I also realize that I have higher standards than many, not to mention some (meager, when compared to many here on Dakka, let alone the wide world of gaming) degree of skill. I'd make my model to the best of my ability and judge theirs as an embarrassing (well, at least, I'd be embarrassed displaying/fielding it) pile of ugly, but I don't think I could justify being mad at them, unless they were flagrantly disregarding established standards of quality for a club, or some such thing.

Sometimes, I feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick, simply because I can't help but care, when others don't and get along just fine. That's me, though, and my satisfaction at my own efforts are enough. Would I prefer to play with others that shared my standards? Sure, but that's rarely the way things happen.

A lot of the time people scratchbuild things. Titans, superheavy tanks, and Thunderhawks usually. And Ork stuff.

And 99% of the time, these scratchbuilds suck. I recently played against someone with scratchbuilt tanks in his army. He'd obviously spent a bit of time on them, and they didn't look completely awful, but at the same time they were quite obviously home-made. The detail was awful, the scale was wrong, the basic construction left a lot to be desired with gaps between pieces and corners not fitting flush, and so on. I gave them some lip service compliments to be polite, but they didn't really deserve any.

Now, obviously I can't tell people what to do. You want to scratch build something, then go for it. But, don't expect anyone to praise it (especially on the internet where we don't have to worry about hurting your feelings) unless it genuinely deserves it.

In my opinion, scratch-building should be something we do as a project. Because we want to test our skills, or display our skills, and show people how awesome we are at building models. Scratchbuilds should look like this:







But unfortunately most of them end up looking more like this:

honestly I wouldn't count any of your counter examples as overturned flower pots. While I agree that they are not the same standard as the first two I can also see from a quick look that they took time and efforts to build. I'd also say that the first 2 are by pro or semi pro and the others by amateurs.
PS:
I am biased as I like paper crafting and I really wouldn't like people to look down on what I build specially since it does take considerable amount of time.
I included spins (360 views) of the kind of papercraft I am talking about. I don't think anybody would mistake them for propainted plastic models but I have seen badly assembled and barely/badly painted official model that look worse

stormraven
http://arqspin.com/s/369t3u0m992qt
dark eldar venom
http://arqspin.com/s/ymumyi80hgnt
bloodraven stormtalon
http://www.bcerrina.com/stormtalon_spin2/config-storm2.html
ultramarine stormtalon
http://arqspin.com/s/epzwin6agmco

I think ork stuff could be crapy scratchbuilts because they build it like that

 Terrinecold wrote:
honestly I wouldn't count any of your counter examples as overturned flower pots. While I agree that they are not the same standard as the first two I can also see from a quick look that they took time and efforts to build. I'd also say that the first 2 are by pro or semi pro and the others by amateurs.
PS:
I am biased as I like paper crafting and I really wouldn't like people to look down on what I build specially since it does take considerable amount of time.
I included spins (360 views) of the kind of papercraft I am talking about. I don't think anybody would mistake them for propainted plastic models but I have seen badly assembled and barely/badly painted official model that look worse

stormraven
http://arqspin.com/s/369t3u0m992qt
dark eldar venom
http://arqspin.com/s/ymumyi80hgnt
bloodraven stormtalon
http://www.bcerrina.com/stormtalon_spin2/config-storm2.html
ultramarine stormtalon
http://arqspin.com/s/epzwin6agmco

Yeah, papercrafting can be really sogging cool, especially when someone pours their heart and sould into their work like in the examples. But that's not really what I was talking about, I guess my problem is more to do with laziness or lack of effort.

To me, stuff built out of cardboard boxes and hot glue is like school-project quality. Which fits thusly on the scale of acceptability:
cardboard cutout<
school project<
unpainted kit<
toy with some bits glued on<
table top quality kit
ctual plasticard scratch build, well painted><
showcase quality kit<
pro quality scratch build or sculpt.

Now if you want to pit your army that you've spent months on, painting every detail and filing every gap against little green plastic army men with DA decals and tissue boxes for land raiders (exagerration, probably) then go ahead. Who you choose to play with is totally up to you. The fun thing about this hobby is that the fun part is different for every one. I like painting, some people like collecting, some just want to throw dice and play a game.

Think the big question really needs to be...why would it bother you?

I spend many, many hundreds of hours on scratch building, converting, casting, designing, researching and otherwise twiddling away on this sort of thing. It is the part of the hobby which I enjoy. Quite often, I may end up spending more on something built with my own hand than buying something comparable outright - almost always if I were to actually place a value to the time I put into it.

However, I know a lot of people who hate to paint, hate to model and hate to research. They love to game though. Most appreciate well converted, designed and painted models and figures - and some actually do go out and commission someone to paint or build stuff for them.

Their hate doesn't impact my enjoyment though, and quite often it is even used to subsidize my enjoyment some (once I have molds made for a vehicle or set of figures - they often buy casts off me). Enjoy each aspect for what it is.

MiniPaintingV wrote:
I think ork stuff could be crapy scratchbuilts because they build it like that

Which of course is absurd (all joking aside).


Doing proper orky conversions/scratch builds is an art in and of itself and isnt easy to pull of.

People who say "yeah its a sucky cnversion but its orks" is being lazy...

My gaming groups expectations are simple. If you can't tell what it is from ten feet away, you can't play it. It's not exact, its more of 'it's a Titan' instead of cardboard boxes.

Rule of cool, and rule of effort would apply methinks -

IE -
Game one - Flowerpot Stompa Proxie
Game two - flowerpot now has a smaller flowerpot for head, and some bitz
Game three - continues to grow as Stompa

and so forth.

But using the same flowerpot with "Stompa" written on it in sharpie, not so much.

But hey, I play with a group where we sat down on the house rules before we started to play.

Like has been said by others, there are many levels of scratch building. While I tend towards scratch building myself, if I am building a new army I am not above using wooden blocks and appropriately sized boxes to proxy an army for a game or two as I learn the army and figure out how I would want to field it. Once that is out of the way I spend the money to buy or time to make the models how I want.

That being said, while I personally have a fairly high standard for myself but I understand that others do not have the skill to execute to that level. I only get a bit rumpled when they insist on using said overturned flower pot time after time with no attempt at improving it.

Here is a basic build of a Chimera I did. Bear in mind this was done 3 editions ago and I have been continually improving my modeling skills. I look at it now and can pick apart so many modeling flaws, but so long as you keep improving you are good in my book.











Bear in mind this was done 3 editions ago and I have been continually improving my modeling skills. So long as you keep improving you are good in my book.

I've never had trouble judging for my self between something that is tossed down just to be able to play a unit someone doesn't have, and something that is obviously modeled to represent a unit even if it isn't quite successful.

Kaldor wrote:
In my opinion, scratch-building should be something we do as a project. Because we want to test our skills, or display our skills, and show people how awesome we are at building models. Scratchbuilds should look like this....

....But unfortunately most of them end up looking more like this:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

I'd happily play against any of the "unfortunates" you showed above. They.re not perfect by any stretch, but they're worlds ahead of the cereal box titan or the flower pot gargant. Also, they are painted, which is a prefference of mine and a must for a scrathbuild. I'd much rather play against someone's painted scratchbuilt titans like the above, than someone's unpainted forgeworld titan.

For me it's rule of cool, sometimes giving way to "rule of fun" for models that show alot of work, even when the execution isn't quite there.

All this talk of the flower pot stompa has me thinking one must be made -