Quite what these modern rulesets are is never made clear, and neither is it what makes these rulesets modern. But then I guess this sort of thing is simply a function of the internet age.
Speaking of historical gaming, I was rather pleased to find that the 40k for Old Men podcast has morphed into 6's3Hit. I was equally pleased to see that the morphing had led to the podcast losing it's pointlessly sour tone towards the subject, based largely on the insanity of interwebz forums. The show has returned to it's good natured approach to the hobby, helped by widening the topics to more than just GW games.
Which brings me to my historical gaming reference, as the host, Simon, is roughly my age and he was reminiscing about his hobbying career and I was amused to see how it mirrored mine. I can claim to have been involved longer (which as we know on the interwebz makes me more of an expert), having first become really involved with the purchase of Miniature Wargames no21, but no matter,
My point is more to do with the pre-internet age, and the law of eternal return,
What strikes my about 'modern wargaming rules' is that they are not modern at all. All they represent is a return to ideas that fell out of favour for one reason or another in the dim and distant past, for one reason or another - usually because people couldn't find an opponent.
But then according to the those who wish to further the meme, we are currently living in a golden age of wargmaing, in which we have never had more choice. Which may or may not be the case, but I recall back in the olden days being able to go to the local model shop, and among the sparse offering of Navwar ships, Roundway minis and the odd Dixon, was a choice of rule sets, 6 or 8 for all the main historical periods - and these were just the main rules, If you wanted to go down the mail order route the choice was just as varied and numerous as it is today.
The only difference was that you had to put a little more effort into making your choices - and perhaps had to cross your fingers that you could find a club, or a friend, locally who would want to play the scale, period, rules that you had chosen.
What I find amusing about the criticism of GW rules as archaic, is that they were archaic at the time they were written, seeing as they were a rip off of WRG 6th edition ancients (with the figure and ground scales removed so as not to confuse the role players at whom they were targeted, and the casualties tables simplified to removal of whole figures (a la Charles Grant)). When Warhammer Fantasy came out WRG was already moving toward not removing casualties and a faster playstyle that would eventually result in the Marmite DBM, WRG at the time was the major ruleset, and funnily enough came with a series of army books, and was pretty much everything that GW is today - but without the internet,
And as we know nothing existed before the internet, and nothing is true unless the internet says so.
peace:)
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