"If this scene sucks; it's because YOU suck"
This is a poster by Xamie Hernandez, and it was pertaining to the music scene in SoCal, but the sentiment is just as true for your local gaming scene. Ron posted this post about how he's not going to get into Fantasy because nobody in his area paints their armies.
If Ron read the fluff for the armies, and looked at the models & said to himself "that's not for me", well then fine; I have no problem with that. To not start an army that you want to build however, and then blame it on the local scene .... is weak. I'm not trying to pick on Ron here (just the opposite), the man is in a very visible position in this hobby, and he has done a lot to stimulate creativity in this scene through fantastic painting and modeling tutorials and by providing access to a vast network of blogs for literally hundreds of hobbyists; so this post just seemed unnecessarily negative and uncharacteristically disparaging. Ron says he is jealous of the war-gaming scene here in Vancouver, but I say Ron can make his own scene as good as he wants for himself.
The job isn't painting models; it's getting excited about painting your models.
Ron frequently posts about his "Old-Timers league" and how they just mostly get together and chat about the hobby more than play games. I suggest he maybe throw the idea of an Warband Expansion rules (as suggested by John of Santa Cruz Warhammer in the comments) out there to those guys (to start), maybe get the local shop involved. A similar thought is maybe a "Tale of 4 Gamers" type project.
How we do it here is: set the bar at a 3 colour, table-top quality minimum pretty much across the board. Inevitably, people start to see more fully painted/detailed armies & the standard naturally raises itself.
All I'm saying is, everybody has the power to improve their gaming scene, and with all the thousands of eyeballs out there reading his blog, Ron has more influence on that than maybe he realizes. He says "I would love to see a fully painted Fantasy army outside of pictures on the internet or at Games Day", but I would argue the The Storm Wardens project should have taught us all that pictures on the internet CAN lead to painted armies in real life.
I'm not trying to bully anybody into starting a new army, my intention is to hopefully just empower people who might be on the fence. You aren't alone, there IS hope.
