How it all started...

[<Little Caesar>]

The emperor's post about guilty pleasures led me on a stream of consciousness which brought me to this post.

While I was thinking about how I put DBA armies together, I recalled how I got started in DBA in the first place. Bear in mind that while I may be a grognard to gaming, I just started with DBA about a year or so ago. It happened like this:

While at Origins some friends and I watched a DBM game being played and deciced it would be worth a shot. New to miniature gaming after a 20 year hiatus, we were looking for a good historical rules set. Looks good, we thought, but damn, we need to paint a lot of dudes.

Someone suggested maybe we can start painting and play DBA with our early efforts while we finish painting the rest of our DBM armies. Well, long story short, now we play DBA and I have two 400 point DBM armies that are collecting dust.

I was just curious if there were any similar stories, or if anyone else 'backed' into DBA the way we did.

Thanks for your your patience while reading this post.
Steve

[Neubauten]

Good topic Little Caesar. I guess my arrival at DBA was similar - I picked up Warhammer Ancients when I first became interested in gaming. I am a very slow painter and it soon became clear that to get a decent army together was going to take me several years. As soon as I saw DBA I knew it was the right route into historical gaming for me.

[Pthomas]

Started with a WRG 6th edition Ptolomaic army, by the time I had sold it to someone because it was too many figures to paint and then bought it back from them after they painted it we were playing 7th edition.

DBA came out and I was able to make over a dozen DBA armies with tons of left over elements with my one WRG army...Hmmm sounded like the way to go for someone that dreads painting.

I've even learned to enjoy painting when the reward is much more immediate.

[Spanikopites]

I was introduced to DBA back in '90 whilst attending an out-patient clinic for recovering 7th Ed players.

I feel much better now.

-Sean

[SteveW]

In the 80's I was playing WRG 6th with 15mm figures (I had built up several armies), and then along came 7th. Bought them, they seemed more complicated, had no opponents so never played them. Then my old pre school friend introduced me to the revolution in rules - DBA 1.0 in the brown cover.

Never looked back since. In addition it is more satisfying painting several DBA armies than a single 6th army.

[ December 16, 2005, 15:18: Message edited by: SteveW ]

[Sarduri II]

198? we'd been playing 6th edition since it came out, 7th edition had just appeared, and the few gamers left who still met regularly were debating its pros+cons.

A friend of mine came back from the Sheffield Triples(I think ?) with a photocopy, of a photocopy of a badly typed A4 page of "experimental" rules that Phil Barker had been demonstrating at the event [might have been their first public outing - but as I wasn't there myself I can't be sure].

My then (older) opponents, with their large painted armies, were not particularly impressed, but I, poor -bedsit living- student that I was, saw them as a gift...

[Macbeth]

In Australia, WRG6th gave way to 7th and there wasn't much of a drop-off then. Later along came DBA v1.0 which breifly took the ACT Community by storm.

Myself I was more of a holdout, as I found that one off battles under the DBx system to be a little flavourless, and over the years even brought 7th out of the doldrums during the early DBM years by running a campaign.

However with DBA I always did enjoy campaign games as a way to play lots of battles, do a bit of politicking and generally have a good time while the red wine and cheese was passed around. I took to doing more elaborate maps and adding some other very minor tweaks to the campaign rules. They became a good way to get new interest into wargaming.

With time I found that I could keep one of the wargames venues in Canberra viable by running these sorts of games. Here I am now, the self proclaimed DBA cheif in Canberra and similarly self titled Victor Mundi.

Cheers

[imported_Richard Lee]

I originally meant to go into DBM and painted up a couple of 300 point 6mm armies from Baccus. The rules seemed fine but a little heavy going to learn without someone who was used to playing them. Somewhere I read a suggestion that DBA was a good way to get used to the concepts.....

I now have two 6mm 300 point DBM armies and rather a lot of 6 and 15mm DBA armies. Please let me stress that I have nothing against DBM, it is just that DBA suits me a lot better.

[E_A_Lindberg]

I picked up the rules in '90 or '91 after being out of the hobby for ten years. I wasn't sold on DBA until '93, while on a business trip in Virginia. I stopped at a hobby store where they were playing a large army DBA game.

I'm not even sure what the sides were. It looked to be some early Mesopotamian army against something with lots of warband and light troops. The Mesopotamian army was commanded by one guy and his seven or eight-year old son. The son had been given a command of bow and told to hold a hill on one flank.

Like all children in wargames, the boy was rolling the hottest dice in the universe, and had decimated the larger force of auxilia sent to take the hill. His father had not done so well, as the enemy warbands broke through the center.

With no more reasons to roll dice for a while, the son asked, "Daddy, are we going to be done soon?"

"Yes, we'll be finished in just a little while," his father answered.

"Yeah, but sometimes when you say that, your games at home still last for hours!"

Looking over the warbands pouring through the center, he said, "Trust me, son, we'll be done in a few minutes."

That's when I realized this was a pretty good set of rules! :cool:

[Mike Johnson]

got 1.0 back in 92 and picked up a nasty old falcon greek hoplite army from the old sentry box. I read an account of marathon using DBA in an old issue of the courrier i believe, saw that you didnt need a whole ple of minis! played on and off ever scince but now it is the most common game i play

[imported_JamesLDIII]

I was introduced to DBA by a friend who is a Napoleonics advocate in 1993. I figured if these rules could drag my Napoleonics loving gamer into the ancients period they must be pretty good. Being a poor student, I liked the small armies, made even smaller by my choice of 6mm as the preferred scale. There was a long hiatus after I graduated--in the mean time the rules went from 1.0 to 2.0, now 2.2, but I like it just as much as I did over ten years ago. I was only slightly sad that my Viking warband army became a blade army through the rules changes...

[Endakil]

I started playing this year.
I am one of those Warhammer players that came upset with the continual price increse by GW and suddenly DBA appeared. I saw some Corvus Bellis miniatures at 2004 and I liked those romans a lot, but there were no gamers in my city, so I began to talk about it to my friends; a few months later there were two DBA gameres and it was time for me to join with my first hellenistic army.
Actually we are around 5 gamers in our city, which has 95.789 inhabitants, but we would like to promote the game among all those upset WH gamers here.

Actually I got a hellenistic "multi-army", a roman "multy-army" and a carthagian army. It is around one army per month since I started playing (as long as I got 10 WHFB/WH40K painted armies painting a DBA army is a piece of cheese smile.gif ) which scares me a bit.

At least my grandma preffers my DBA armies to my WH armies, considering when see look into my miniatures she starts talking about all Roman and Iberians heroes she learnt at school, specially Viriatus, who seems to be her hero ^^

[Timurilank]

Little ceasar

Someone suggested maybe we can start painting and play DBA with our early efforts while we finish painting the rest of our DBM armies. Well, long story short, now we play DBA and I have two 400 point DBM armies that are collecting dust.

I was just curious if there were any similar stories, or if anyone else 'backed' into DBA the way we did. My story followed a similar path. The WRG 7th ed. armies I had used, in the early 90s were frequently used for DBA demonstrations or games. None of my opponents had the time to paint the larger collections but did like the appeal of the smaller army and shorter game time. So, I moved with the tide and created a variety of armies based on my larger collection of Goths and Late Romans and since then I have added collections centered on a particular period of time; armies of 1000AD (from Spain to the Hindu Kush), The Baltic Crusades, The Fall of Rome, and now the Biblical period. This is now fast approaching 60 plus complete armies.

Cheers,

[imported_JamesLDIII]

Originally posted by &lt;Little Caesar&gt;:
Someone suggested maybe we can start painting and play DBA with our early efforts while we finish painting the rest of our DBM armies. Well, long story short, now we play DBA and I have two 400 point DBM armies that are collecting dust.
It also sounds like those armies collecting dust can find there way out again in some BBDBA.

Or, perhaps as Ebay DBA armies...

[Cyrus the Ringmaster]

In my case, it's all Sarduri IIs fault.

He must have been needing new opponents; he even painted my first DBA army for me in exchange for a bottle of vodka and a pizza, I recall! Little did I realise the subtlety of the snare: that was about 15 (?) years ago, and I have been hooked ever since. (And had to do my own painting.) I (still) look forward to the day I beat him. :D

[Little Caesar]

Originally posted by JamesLDIII:

[/qb]It also sounds like those armies collecting dust can find there way out again in some BBDBA.

Or, perhaps as Ebay DBA armies... [/QB][/QUOTE]

Only too true. My Fanatic Berbers square off against Early Crusaders tonight in BBDBA. As for ebay, I don't think I could part with the little fellas even if I knew I wouldn't be using them. I told my wife that they are my insurance policy. I spend about an hour painting per figure and told her to sell them off when I die to pay for burying me.

Wow, that's kinda morbid.
Steve

[ December 22, 2005, 08:57: Message edited by: Little Caesar ]

[JDE]

I drifted into DBA as a historical version of my favorite game - Hordes. I've now got 5 DBA armies with two more on the way [yeah, I answered "as long as a year" on the poll] but I'm still mostly a Hordes player.

[imported_Lee Shackelford]

Before coming out to Taiwan, I'd never heard of DBx ...... once here I started teaching D&D and RISK to my English students to get them away from computer games. The problem is/was that kids here spend about 60+ hours a week in school, so they didn't have time for long games/campaigns.

I had to find a shorter gaming system and found DBAOL accidentally. I got hooked, became a member, bought the 2.0 rulebook and some figures (first armies were Marian Roman and Thracians)...... sat down, moved elements around the table to see how 2.0 played differently from DBAOL..... started teaching DBA to my students

Took me years to find another foreigner in Taiwan who played DBX ...... he taught me DBM and I taught him DBA

Some of my students love the game.......at an hour or so per game, they have time to have fun.

Lee in Taiwan

[Andrew Richardson]

My story is similar to most; I drifted away from wargaming during 6/7th editions, then had a resurgance of interest when DBM came out. One eveing my regualr opponent didn't have much time so we experimented with DBA - and after a couple of games we were hooked and haven't done anything else since.

[Adrian Williams]

I had been playing wargames since about 1988 when I was 12 - using WRG 1685-1845 and WRG 7th as well as Zulu Wars stuff using some Tabletop rules.

When DBA came out in about 1991 one of the clubs I was playing with at Haberfield in Sydney took it up on a large scale. I played it as a regular diversion from WRG 7th, and enjoyed playing a number of campaigns. I also used it to introduce a number of non-gaming friends to wargaming.

I have remained keen player of WRG 7th and have stuck with Warrior (an American rejig of WRG 7th and a most superior game!) but have played in a couple of DBA tournaments organised by Dave (Macbeth) and have enjoyed them a lot.

DBA is also my wife's preferred wargame, though she also enjoys occasional forays into Fast Warrior as well as painting figures.

Adrian Williams

[fallschirmjager]

i started on the horrible 40K, but i could never get a full army because of the large amount of money required. then while on holiday in new zealand i found FOW, which introduced me to historics. then one of my freiends showed me DBA and i was hooked. am starting a samurai army soon.

[CT Yankee]

Roland did it!