Pewter, and Plastic, and Lead - Oh My!

I've suffered most of my life from OCD - obsessive collecting disorder.  When I was a kid I collected just about everything: rocks, stamps, coins, trading cards, you name it.  Most of those minor dalliances fell by the wayside at the age of fourteen when I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and found a new focus for my compulsion: those fascinating little metal miniatures.

I still remember my very first miniatures: a package of large-nosed floppy-eared goblins with spears guarding a naked woman in shackles.  I can't, for the life of me, remember the company that made them, but I do remember taking the bus downtown early Saturday morning to buy miniatures for my very first D&D game; I was running my friends through Keep on the Borderlands later that afternoon and needed some goblins for the Caves of Chaos.  The naked chick was an added bonus.  I rushed home and quickly painted my new miniatures with a thick coat of glossy Testors enamel paint and a new obsession was born.

From that day on, whenever I manage to scrape up a couple of dollars, a new Ral Partha would be added to my ever-growing collection, and by the time I graduated from high school I had a fairly impressive selection of the miniatures of the early '80's.  Sadly, few of them survived my mother's rather ruthless purge of my childhood treasures after I left home, but I do still have some of those early miniatures to look back on - usually in horror, given the awful paint-jobs.

My miniature collecting was curtailed sharply during my 'living-out-of-a-dufflebag' years while I was in the navy, followed by my 'scrambling-to-find-money-for-food-and-rent' years while I was in university, but middle age and disposable income has allowed me to grow my miniature collections to heretofore unseen numbers.  I've finally been able to indulge in Warhammer - something I've been longing to do ever since the game was first released, and I've recently added War of the Ring and Warhammer 40K to my repertoire of miniatures games.

One of Britain's earliest palaeontologists, a physician named Gideon Mantell, who found the first Iguanodon fossils, had such a mania for fossil collecting that, according to legend, he moved his family to a hotel to make more room in the house for his growing collection.  My wife, perhaps fearing a similar fate, has often asked "don't you have enough miniatures?"  My usual response is to stare at her as though she had just grown a second head.  She recently asked me what was to be done with them all when I die.  I hope she wasn't posing that as an immediately relevant question.

I must admit that storage is becoming a bit of an issue.  I have shelves laden with miniatures and several Chessex boxes filled to capacity, not to mention several boxes of miniatures that I still haven't unpacked from my last move (seven years ago).  This makes things difficult at the game table, since I often have to pause after describing a scene to run around the house trying to remember where each of the miniatures I need is.  What I really want is a bank of custom storage drawers lined with foam tray inserts near the game table, where my entire collection can be stored and labeled for quick access.  I have a set of  2" deep drawers of exactly this type at my painting workstation:

Given my thirty-year long love affair with miniatures, discovering, via internet forums and blogs, that many old-school gamers don't use miniatures in their games hit me like a Power Word, Stun spell.  Indeed, some people consider miniatures to be antithetical to old-school play.  Now this is an extreme position that I consider to be overweening backlash against 4E' requirement to use miniatures, probably designed to create a market for WotC's line of ugly, cheap plastic D&D miniatures.  The most common objection to the use of miniatures is that they impair the player's ability to visualize the scene in their mind's eye.  This is an objection that I can certainly sympathize with; I feel much the same way about Hollywood adaptations of books that I love.

Using miniatures in the game also tends to force players into a more tactical, gamist, mode of play, rather than a fast-paced, seat-of-the-pants, free form play style.  This, however, is more a function of the game rules in use rather than miniatures themselves.  Counting squares of movement, and worrying about the exact placement of the miniature is important for a miniature wargame, but does tend to detract from a role playing encounter.  Thus, I'm coming to realize that AD&D's one-minute combat round is ideal for eliminating such hindrances.  When your character is able to move 120' in a round, you really don't need to fuss with counting squares in the 30' x 40' room you're fighting in - you just move your miniature wherever you want it.  That's how we played back in high school and I'm coming to realize that its a much more elegant and simple way of playing than systems that break combat down into shorter rounds and require you to move your figures like chess pieces.  Its funny how I've been increasingly introducing house-rules to my C&C game to bring it more in line with AD&D as I come to really appreciate how that system worked.

With respect to miniatures impeding the mind's-eye visualization of the encounter, I believe that this is true.  But my experience playing without miniatures during my impoverished university years taught me that what one player visualizes in his mind's eye is seldom the same as what the other player's are visualizing, and that none of them are visualizing quite what the GM is describing.  This inevitably leads to confusion and bogging down play as everyone is arguing about what is really going on, and in some cases even leads to character death due to misunderstanding.  In my experience, using miniatures sets the scene unambiguously, allowing everyone to understand at a glance what the situation is.

Over and above their use in the game though, to me, collecting and painting miniatures is the hobby within the hobby.  Even if I were forced to give up gaming tomorrow I would continue to collect and paint and probably will the rest of my life.  As for what is going to become of my collection when I die, my hope is that my daughter, Elena, will take them.  Although she is only four-years-old, she loves to sit and watch me paint and has already told me many times that when she is older she wants to have her own paints and brushes so she can paint monsters just like me.  Hopefully I have a future game-geek in the making.