Well, it's been a long time since i updated this blog, not least because I can no longer access it from work lol. Hopefully this year I will try to update it a little more often, although a lot will depend on the below...
I am currently experiencing Gaming ADHD. There, I said it. Actually, I've always had it as anyone who has known me for any length of time can attest - I have the attention span of a gnat, especially when it comes to picking any one particular subject to game and sticking with it, and ESPECIALLY within the last year or so. Within the first couple of weeks of 2016 alone I have gone from working on (or at least contemplating working on) 28mm Pulp to 15mm Fantasy to 15mm SF to Epic 40K to Battlefleet Gothic to Full Thrust to Warhammer 40K to Warhammer Fantasy 8th to Warhammer Age of Sigmar to Frostgrave to Infinity to Dropzone Commander to 28mm Old West to 25mm Ancients to 15mm Napoleonics. And this doesn't even include the multiple times I've strayed off the miniatures path completely and thought about doing RPGs or Board Wargames (my first gaming love lol), each of which suffers from a similar issue of 'lack of focus' with multiple titles/periods/scales vying for my attention.
It's actually becoming a real problem and it's VERY frustrating to me to constantly find my mind wandering from whatever I am trying to work on at that moment to something else. I guess I'm just looking for that 'holy grail' project that will wholly absorb my attention to the point where I no longer think about anything else besides 'getting that done'. In fact it's gotten so bad that I've taken to telling people at the club where I game not to get involved with any project where I am the sole other player as chances are I will not be able to see it through. Now I've been able to maintain focus in the past, which is why I am the proud owner of 10,000pts of Imperial Guard, 6,000pts of Tyranids, 6,000pts of Beastmen, multiple full fleets of starships for the two starship game systems mentioned above, several thousand points of Russians for Flames of War etc. I'm just not sure where I lost my way.
A part of me wants to blame Games Workshop for being simultaneously the most complete and yet most loathed miniatures gaming company out there. They are the crack pipe of gaming and I constantly teeter on the brink of relapsing and breaking out my GW stuff again (most recently just this week!). While they were still producing Warhammer Fantasy Battles we had a good solid run at the local store where I game, with a solid core of players with fantasy armies that if anything was growing. Then the End Times campaign began, and while there was a lot of initial excitement the rapidity with which they churned out models and campaign book sets became overwhelming, then within six months of starting - they destroyed the entire campaign setting and came out with the less-well received Age of Sigmar. Now I don't mind playing AoS but it is NOT the mass fantasy battle game I fell in love with. Of course there's no reason not to just ignore what GW did and keep playing fantasy anyway but it's a lot harder to attract people to a dead system. 40K lost me with the unbelievably fast transition from 6th Ed to 7th Ed in less than two years, followed by a period of crazed expansion that saw multiple codexes being released every month! Again, if I only played one army this would not be a problem but among other issues I am a collector and a completist and if I get involved in a game I simply HAVE to collect at the very least all the books for it. 40K simply priced me out just on the books alone, without even taking into account any miniatures!
Sometimes I actually contemplate withdrawing from regular gaming at the club but the two problems with that are that I am the primary organizer for the club, and hell I *like* the camaraderie of hanging out with my fellow gamers. All I can do is continue to look for that elusive project that will be able to hold my attention for longer than a few days and hope that I recognize it when it does! In the meantime I guess I will just flail away a few days at a time with a range of projects and move them along a few figures at a time. Even just now while writing this blog entry I've been thinking that "I really must try and finish that 25mm Caesar's Gallic Wars project that is already so far along....oh and that 15mm Napoleonics project that is similarly fairly well along" even though the likelihood of still feeling this way 24 hours from now is extremely slim!
Anyway, enough rambling/whining, time to wrap this up I think! If you happen to actually ready this, feel free to comment - over the next few weeks I hope to add some pics of whatever it is that I *do* end up working on lol. Wish me luck!
Bob
Honestly, I feel your pain, I have the exact same problem. It seems like every time I see a show, read a book or watch a movie that seems like I could game it, off I go, buying stuff and never finishing anything. Pretty sure I have spent way more time Imagining how good the games would be and finding miniatures than painting or playing.
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