How old is "oldhammer"?

Fimm McCool said:
If you're going super hardline on it as saying 'hammer' has to relate only to warhammer then maybe, but you'd have to say 1983 onwards
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Also, 1990 is probebly wrong.. As that would be half way through (well.. 3/5ths I think) 3ed as 4ed didn't come out till 1992, It's also AFTER Rogue trader main period, and while 2ed 40K wasn't released yet (1993) alot of the changes in style had already happened with Space Marine being released in 1989. Though I'll point out they hadn't butchered the Genestealers into being Tyranids by 1991.

of course, this also brings into problems of things like the second Realm of Chaos was on the bordered line as it was released in 1990...

And if only Citadel.. that means Marauder Miniatures is out? atleast until they got sold to Citadel.. (okay, Citadel cast and distributed the minis but they were a separate company when founded in 1988.

I think the best thing I can say right now is:
"That would be an ecumenical matter"
 
Starting in, the mid 70s my forces included Minifigs, Garrison, Hinchliffe, Essex, Lamming, Asgard and a few other odds and sods in addition to the "regulation" Citadel, Chronicle and Raw Partha.

My intent for my Warhammer Ed 1 game, on the 27th March, is to use "regulation" Citadel pre slotta, which will include Ral Partha and Chronicle.
 
orkwrangler said:
I believe this is called beardyness. I do not know the origin of the term.
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I remember an article in White Dwarf, somewhere around issue 200 discussing powergaming in casual games and calling powergamers "beardy".
As I said, I have nothing against powergamers. If they want to powergame and enjoy themselves, more power to them. I chose army lists or similar stuff mainly with aesthetics in mind and around some favorite unit I like the look of. I'm not a challenge to powergamers and could easily be defeated without any min-maxing, so when I play powergamers, the atmosphere is still relaxed and fun.
ManicMan said:
Also, 1990 is probebly wrong.. As that would be half way through (well.. 3/5ths I think) 3ed as 4ed didn't come out till 1992, It's also AFTER Rogue trader main period, and while 2ed 40K wasn't released yet (1993) alot of the changes in style had already happened with Space Marine being released in 1989. Though I'll point out they hadn't butchered the Genestealers into being Tyranids by 1991. of course, this also brings into problems of things like the second Realm of Chaos was on the bordered line as it was released in 1990...
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Cor, might you be overthinking this? Pick any date around the 1990 mark that suits you. Again, there's no Oldhammer police to come and confiscate your army standard because it uses an arm and a slotta base only relaesed in '95.

Originally, I was trying to make the point that attitude towards games and minis are personal motives that draw individuals towards Oldhammer which in and of itself cannot be as rigid and 'serious' as modern games which are meant to be played competitively. The old rules used to be diving boards for players to come up with their own stuff, often out of necessity to clarify thinks or fix obviously broken stuff. This spirit of amicable making-do is an essential part of this retrogaming and some folks are still drawn to that
 
Nickinsalak said:
My intent for my Warhammer Ed 1 game, on the 27th March, is to use "regulation" Citadel pre slotta, which will include Ral Partha and Chronicle.
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Have you seen the 1st ed game report I did in 2012? Using only stuff from the time of Forces of Fantasy? It has Prince August, Warrior Miniatures, Essex and others, as well as Citadel.

A written version is on this forum:

First Edition Warhammer Battle

This is an experiment I had wanted to do for a long time – like a reenactment of my earliest days playing warhammer. By that I mean playing a wargame using first edition Warhammer rules, and using only figures and scenery available at the time. I have tried to make it as ‘authentic’ as possible...
forum.oldhammer.org forum.oldhammer.org

But there's a fun two part video version with more pictures at ...

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And ...

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Sorry for the post if you've already seen them.
 
I think we're all overthinking it. But then I'm in the "vibes" camp. While I understand there are people who are committed to the idea of some kind of "Oldhammer Contract" I think the hobby has clearly grown beyond that. And probably extended further begin with as there's really no way a thing that is basically by definition ignoring the official doctrine out of Nottingham can possibly be defined as having a single origin. We're quite literally the protestant reformers arguing with GW's One Holy Catholic and Warhammeric Church. Maybe one person stuck a missive to the space marine at Warhammer World, but there were other people protesting the new editions well before that, even if they got burned as heretics at the local Warhammer store and had to go elsewhere.

We're not centralized. There isn't a single body saying "this is Oldhammer." There kind of can't be. So . . . vibes. ;) Be nice and have fun. Play nicely together, however you do it. And make sure the story goes first. Sola fabula, sola ludus, sola oblectatio. (And yes, Padre, I used google translate. So sue me. I thought about the whole seminary school thing, but skipped it for the theatre instead.) We have no doctrine, but here, have some doctrine anyway. :grin:

Just wait until someone says to me "No, Oldhammer isn't the Reformation, it's Orthodoxy. There's no one leader, but there is one scripture, and there's definitely a Patriarch who is the first among equals in Stoke-stantinople. And all ye colonials can suck it!" *sigh* Maybe. Maybe that's true. But I like my heterodoxy better. It's ancient and honorable and recognizes the fact that the tradition of playing make believe with toy soldiers predates Warhammer anyway. By a lot.
 
I use Google translate all the time. And still get it wrong nearly all the time. I have no knowledge of any language but mine own. My only test is to switch the translation back and forth and see if it stays the same. Crazy thing is I don't even know if this is a valid test.

Sometimes I ask Ruth my partner who happens to be good at French and ok at Italian. But if it means running up the stairs to find her, I often don't bother. Let's face it, it's all for a fantasy world and who's to say if their fictional languages are the same as our modern or historical languages?

My efforts at using the internet to gain correct pronunciation are also more miss than hit. 😜

So worry ye not, I shall neither be suing you nor understanding what you put there (unless I plug it into Google translate).
 
ManicMan said:
And if only Citadel.. that means Marauder Miniatures is out? atleast until they got sold to Citadel.. (okay, Citadel cast and distributed the minis but they were a separate company when founded in 1988.
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Marauder was barely a separate company, it was mostly on paper. I used to do all their mail orders and I was a GW employee. Yes they had their own offices, but they were more like a separate department of GW than an entirely separate entity.
 
yeah, but it can still get messy ^_^ and you.. well, you might not, be surprised at how that very tiny difference can matter to some
 
Michael Stockin said:
Could you describe as best you can that vibe?
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For me (who's firmly at the later end of Oldhammer as I mostly played fantasy 4th edition with 3rd edition models, and 2nd edition 40k), the vibe is freedom to use house rules, more freedom of choice in what to pick (a very visible change to me at the moment in the teams for the new blood bowl basically being fixed to what's in the boxes). Being encouraged by the company to tweak the game to suit the players, fun being more important than victory, those kinds of things. From the, admittedly limited, exposure I've had to the modern games, they seem to be very much, "you'll play on these size boards using these missions because we've decided that's balanced".

It feels like the difference between the freedom of D&D 3.5, compared to the restricted actions of v4 (or was it 5, with the "action cards"?)
 
There's me thinking my 5th edition Bretonnian's are Oldhammer! Well they are old but then Warhammer Fantasy is completely brand new to me so I guess they are Newhammer. Confusing... All I know, is I dig them, and between 5th and everything that came before or after I would choose 5th every time. They just look better. Better than the really old stuff, and much better than the new. And I've got no interest in painting and modelling something I don't really like the look of. Some of the old stuff will be included, none of the new.
 
Clio said:
There's me thinking my 5th edition Bretonnian's are Oldhammer! Well they are old but then Warhammer Fantasy is completely brand new to me so I guess they are Newhammer. Confusing... All I know, is I dig them, and between 5th and everything that came before or after I would choose 5th every time. They just look better. Better than the really old stuff, and much better than the new. And I've got no interest in painting and modelling something I don't really like the look of. Some of the old stuff will be included, none of the new.
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wait till you learn of 'middlehammer' ^_^ not just Old and new. Of course, then you think of all the citadel figures they released BEFORE they created Warhammer.. Prehammer..
 
I still maintain Midhammer sounds more, err oldhammer (!?) than Middlehammer, much more like a city in the Old World and would have been a better title! There are all kinds of wonderful categories, poorhammer raising a smile with me as I remember playing some WFB with Lego knights and castles bits at one point before we had suitable sized units in our armies. Certainly made movement trays super easy, that's for sure!
 
Michael Stockin said:
Could you describe as best you can that vibe?
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I certainly can! Maybe not well, but yes. It's the 80s. I want big hair and big shoulder pads. I want things to scale well with 80s metal. I want my sci-fi to have a bit of a fantasy in space feel to it. I want it to be simple enough that I can read the details without a magnifier. (Even if I have to use one now sometimes to paint. This getting older thing is . . . challenging.) I want the game to be more concerned with fun and story than points and winning. (More casual, a bit more roll play and a bit less wargame.) I don't even personally care if you use any Citadel miniatures or GW rules at all. The former are getting too expensive unless you already have them sitting around, and the latter were, if I'm honest, never my cup of tea anyway. (I really prefer rules light games, as I don't have the patience for that amount of math or more than about five or ten pages of actual rules. I played 40K for about five years before I got around to buying a copy of Rogue Trader in 92 or so. And once I bought it . . . I mostly used it to look at the pretty pictures. The rules? Oh boy do they make my head hurt. Even if I sort of "know" them more or less at this point.)

But honestly, the thing I care most about is having fun with friends. The vibe is fun. Have a good time and play nice. Which means I sometimes have to shut my mouth about my style preferences, but I really get bent out of shape by people who insist "This thing must be played according to this obscure thing on this page in the gospel according to Priestly/Johnson/Ansel and if you don't do that it's not Oldhammer!" Don't get me wrong. They wrote some great stuff, and if you want to play it that way, absolutely do it. But the only gospel I see there is "Have you ever walked out of the movie wanting to tell your own story?" Well, go do that. That's Oldhammer. The Oldhammer vibe is the one where my friends and I get to have fun making things up and laughing the whole time, even when we crit fail and faceplant our favorite character into a canyon wall.
 
Michael Stockin said:
Could you describe as best you can that vibe?
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It's interpersonal familiarity.
Provided I have painted a Bloodbowl team and want to use it, so I head out to a gaming venture for a pickup game with a stranger. Him and me will automatically assume that everyone looking for a game of BB is going to use the most current and widely available ie currently official rules set. If during the game it tunrs out that the other guy is a) a nice fellow and b) just as up in arms as me about the recent changes to the official BB team rosters, we can agree to different rosters for our next game.
Now the longer a bunch of guys plays games together, the longer their set of house rules is going to get. It's just guys liking each other and accomodating each other's intentions and purposes in the game. If these guys are relaxed and want imaginative and creative games, they'll have different rules than a group of powergamers who are looking for practice to become better competitors.
 
symphonicpoet said:
I want the game to be more concerned with fun and story than points and winning. (More casual, a bit more roll play and a bit less wargame.)
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This is how I played all my wargames, from big sci-fi battles, to Conan style desert comic books style skirmishes, to 6mm Napoleonics and to 25mm WFB.
A lot of people I know from other forums play like this with their various games, covering all scales and all genres and periods.

But if these would be classed as oldhammer despite not being old or warhammer, does the phrase oldhammer mean anything relevant to warhammer and old versions of it?
These games are new and not warhammer. Are they not better called 'casual' ?

The Serene Badger said:
From the, admittedly limited, exposure I've had to the modern games, they seem to be very much, "you'll play on these size boards using these missions because we've decided that's balanced".
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GW said to use 8x4 tables, they even had instructions on how to make a table that size and if I remember correctly many of the scenarios in WD were based around setting up on an 8x4 with very clearly defined deployment areas within that size?

The Serene Badger said:
more freedom of choice in what to pick (a very visible change to me at the moment in the teams for the new blood bowl basically being fixed to what's in the boxes)
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In terms of models used, force composition or both?
I can name many 'modern' games that follow that philosophy. In fact given that any gamer can go and just do that anyway despite what the rules say annoys me, when rules proudly proclaim figure agnostic, as if you could not use what you wanted anyway.

Over on other sites that are GW focused there are lots of people after proxies for GW models for use in ToW.
Using whatever models take your fancy for the rules you are using is still very much a thing, even more so with the glut of 3d prints available.



I controversially ? Think it is not about playing with a certain vibe, but that if you play certain rules/periods then that vibe is more likely to happen by default.

I play WFB 3rd, that talks about scratchbuilding, the rulebook had no army list so you had to freeform and make stuff up, and when the army book did come out there was a bit that talked about altering the rules if it suited your games better.

It had story based scenarios, the earlier Regiments of Renown were all about the story and how that unit was formed.

The earlier scenario packs were chock full of roleplaying elements. The Riding was essentially a roleplaying game guide, it was just about villagers and detailed their lives and was not in anyway balanced if you decided to 'game' it.
McDeath and Lichemaster again, very much about the story.

The early sculpts had names which made it personal and low level and story biased.

I think if you play warhammer fantasy with 3rd edition or earlier rules as they were intended that is oldhammer and that vibe people like happens by default.

Once 4th came out and things became prescribed as @The Serene Badger notes then you enter a different world.
Army books with named characters rather then champions and generals to whom you could assign your own names and stories.
Monoposed plastics to bulk up regiments, no more individuals with names and their own story.
A book for each army.
Models that cost more if they were more powerful in game.
More corporate identity and an ever growing denial of games outside the GW brand.


From 4th there was it seems a clear shift away from a casual play style to a defined prescribed one.
I maintain that anything prior to 4th is oldhammer. As the playing style shifted from 4th to what is still current.

I also maintain that casual vibe we all seem to prefer can be found with any game, regardless of scale period or genre.
Casual gaming is not unique to old warhammery type stuff, and I would worry that anyone who says it is is doing a disservice to other gamers and may make us sound a bit exclusionist?

Mind you when all is said and done it is a term adopted by people with a connection of some sort.
I don't really mind or try to get too vexed by it.

What does vex me is when people say they play Warhammer.

That tells me very little.


Warhammer Fantasy Battle* 1st edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 2nd edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 4th edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 5th edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 6th edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 7th edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle 8th edition?

*Warhammer Fantasy Battle/s The Game of Fantasy Battles, even the name of the fantasy battle game was changed a lot.



Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader?
Warhammer 40k 2nd edition?
Warhammer 40k 3rd edition?
Warhammer 40k 4thedition?
Warhammer 40k 5th edition?
Warhammer 40k 6th edition?
Warhammer 40k 7th edition?
Warhammer 40k 8thedition?
Warhammer 40k 9th edition?
Warhammer 40k 10th edition?


Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition?
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition?


Warhammer Quest?

Warhammer Age of Sigmar?

Warhammer 40k Kill Team?

Warhammer Warcry?

Warhammer Underworlds?


Total War: Warhammer?

Warhammer Vermintide?

Warhammer Combat Cards?

Or one of the gazillion games that have been produced by Games Workshop that doesn’t have the word Warhammer in it?
Or one of the gazillion games that have been produced by Games Workshop that does have the word Warhammer in it that I have not listed?


You may as well tell me you play Sony.


Anyway I am going to have some warpstone snuff now and chill.

(By the way, this rant? is just me having a chunter amongst hopefully online friends and I am certainly not saying anyone here who does not prescribe to my own definition is wrong, a fool, or a snotling fondler. I certainly do not think less of anyone for not agreeing with me and I hope that is reciprocated)

I don't really take myself seriously at the end of the day, as this shows?

me.jpg

At least, I think that is what I think?

Peace Out.
 
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Michael Stockin said:
This is how I played all my wargames, from big sci-fi battles, to Conan style desert comic books style skirmishes, to 6mm Napoleonics and to 25mm WFB.
A lot of people I know from other forums play like this with their various games, covering all scales and all genres and periods.

But if these would be classed as oldhammer despite not being old or warhammer, does the phrase oldhammer mean anything relevant to warhammer and old versions of it?
These games are new and not warhammer. Are they not better called 'casual' ?
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That's a fair question. I suppose I feel like Oldhammer is, in the end, just the term that's caught on for what in tabletop RPG world would be Old School Rennaisance or OSR gaming. Or the 8 bit is enough movement in computer games. Retro gaming. I wouldn't count historicals as Oldhammer, but there Warhammer had so very little competition for such a long time in the Sci-Fi fantasy wargaming space that it's easy to mistake "Hammer" for the entire hobby. Full Thrust was clearly a part of a whole suite of wargames intended to be a more generic alternative to GW's line, but apart from Full Thrust I don't know how much traction any of them ever really got. Maybe there's a better term for the generic Sci-Fi fantasy wargaming hobby, but I really don't know what it would be. And Oldhammer is easy, rolls off the tongue, and recognizes the importance of the fearsome foursome and their brothers in arts to the industry. It does also help to distinguish it from the anime inspired giant robot stuff, or the stuff that's specific to Hollywood IP like Star Wars and Trek. It might be easier to define what Oldhammer isn't than what it is. Maybe we need a new term. Maybe what I do really isn't Oldhammer. But there's enough Hammerlike elements in it I'm not quite sure what else to call it. It'd be a rare game indeed where I didn't put at least some Citadel lead on a table. And the term "bolter" is pretty much mashed into my poor little brain with a stick.
 
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