12 October 2009

After completing my Scout Squad I am left with a decision to make. If I paint the Razorback that's on my painting table the 750-point Space Marine list I originally came up with will be completely painted. I could finish the unit of Easterlings for the Lord of the Rings game and work toward the goal I set a few posts ago to try to get all the partially-painted stuff done. Or I could work on a Dreadnought and also be closer to finishing partially-painted stuff. I'm leaning toward the Razorback, as that would finish out a small but playable army list. I could probably do the Easterlings in a few hours as well and knock out two projects. I'd really like to paint some Orks and have two playable fully-painted forces for small games of 40k. But all that will have to wait for the weekend or later. I've got plenty of schoolwork and other stuff to get to over the next few days.

One of the more difficult decisions while finishing the Scout Squad was how to paint their hair. I see the Space Marines as a sort of clone army, as the Marines of a Chapter all get infused with the same genetics and would theoretically start to resemble one another. I wound up painting the Scouts with different hair as it was more fun than painting five guys with brown hair. I reasoned that Scouts are newly-recruited Chapter members and would not have undergone the full range of treatments to make them full-fledged battle brothers, so they would still look much as they had when recruited.

I was at the new Hobbytown the other day and saw another thing that makes me reluctant to actually play a game with strangers. There were a couple of guys playing 40k; Black Templars vs. Tyranids. One guy obviously was teaching the other guy how to play, but wasn't doing a very good job of it. At one point he rolled a bunch of dice, looked at them and announced, "Two wounds, power weapon." So I assume one of his Space Marines had inflicted wounds with a power weapon, which ignores armor saves, so the Tyranids guy was supposed to remove two wounds from his unit. The Tyranid guy hesitated for a second, working through it in his mind, and looked at his cheat sheet to make sure of what he was doing. Instead of explaining that power weapons ignore armor saves and that the new guy should remove two models, the Black Templar guy just kept saying, "Two wounds, power weapon!" until he was saying it more like, "TWO WOUNDS! POWER WEAPON!" and startling the women and children who were looking at science toys in the next aisle. I think I would prefer to stay home and paint than go to a shop and stand at a table for four hours while a sweaty guy yells at me. If I wanted a sweaty guy to yell at me about rules I don't know about yet I'd join the army and go to basic training.

I would like to paint some Terminators, especially one of those new Wolf Guard ones with the big wolf-fur cloak.

2 comments:

  1. That's a bummer about what you witnessed. You do take your chances around an FLGS table, but sometimes it's worth it.

    If I were you I'd knock out the Razorback just to get it done with, then move on to the next project. Your spotter-servo skull was pretty cool by the way...

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  2. It's fairly typical to see stuff like that locally. It's a small sample size, but the three times I've dragged my figures out for a pick-up game at a local shop I've gone home wishing I'd done something else with my time. I guess the common thread in my bad gaming experiences is me.

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