The Fine Art of Winning Pretty

 

I was walking down the street today when I happened to pass a guy who I don’t know that well, but who once gave me a fairly spectacular drubbing at a game called 40K (the kind of game where you want to apologise to your opponent afterwards for wasting their time). It occurred to me, as it often does, that for someone who’s been playing these games on-and-off since the late 1980s my win-loss record is not that great. And as usual I consoled myself with the thought that my armies, while far from all-conquering, are aesthetically pleasing selections of miniatures.

I don’t mean that I’m the world’s greatest painter when it comes to individual figures, but I’m fairly confident in my ability to paint what looks like a good army when they’re gathered en masse. And beyond this, I’m also happy that they are thematically coherent: I used to get a bit peeved when confronted with Space Marine armies led by Captains with jump packs and Chaplains on bikes, who would operate unsupported and terrorise my own force. I could never bring myself to take that kind of terror unit, simply because I couldn’t imagine it happening in the fictional universe of the game.

There you go, I referred to it as a game: an exercise frequently concluding with a winner and a loser. Given that it is a game, surely I should just abandon my ridiculous scruples about staying in-character for my army, and making aesthetic choices of units, and just go all-out for the win? Well, maybe, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. It would be winning ugly. Losing a lot is one of the consequences when you write your lists for beauty rather than victory.

Musing on all this I was reminded of some of the comments my writing tutor has made about the problems often experienced by people when knocking out their first couple of novel-length stories: rather than writing a story about the problems and motivations of actual characters, they try to write about grand themes or ideas with the result that the whole thing falls a bit flat. To be even remotely successful as a writer of this kind of story, you have to get that base – a strong, involving story – covered. And people are, just on that basis: look at Jeffrey Archer and Freddie Forsyth. Not great prose stylists, no deep themes or insights, just rather basic craft. They’re winning ugly, but at least they’re winning.

You can win pretty as a writer, of course – it’s entirely possible to incorporate big themes and subtleties and startling ideas into a novel, but only as supplements to the basic story. Which leads me to wonder whether it’s also possible to win pretty when writing an army list for a wargame.

I would like to think you can. I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that my most successful tournament list was what I’d call a fairly pretty one. At the time the fashion amongst competitive players of WFB (the game in question) was for armies composed entirely of heavy cavalry, fast cavalry and skirmishers. You only saw infantry blocks in certain specialised army lists. I always felt slightly uncomfortable leaving all my footsloggers at home, but happened upon the old Beastman list. From this I was able to contrive an army containing large numbers of skirmishers, attack dogs, centaur cavalry and fast monsters, which ended up competitive while remaining characterful. All right, I still stuck a block of heavy infantry in there, but I already had the models at home.

The result got me my only ever placing in the top half of a UK results table, and I was paid the ultimate compliment of having my army design ripped off by one of my regular opponents (although he chickened out of painting the army shocking pink and metallic turquoise, as I had). I think the lesson here is that writing an army list is not that dissimilar to writing a novel – you can be as high-minded or thematically-focussed as you like, but you won’t meet with any success deserving of the name. Get the basics down – landing the reader, winning the game – and then start worrying about the additional whistles and bells.

I have recently come to the conclusion I need to completely rethink my approach to writing long-form fiction. I now have to accept that my approach to writing army lists is similarly in need of root-and-branch reappraisal. All I can say, having come to this conclusion, is one thing: buggeration, more work?!?