People have all sorts of objections to wargaming with particular
periods, wars, or types of unit.
For example, if you're playing a Second World War game in Europe,
someone's going to have to be on the Axis side. Ordinary German
soldiers are probably acceptable to most people, but the Waffen-SS?
The child soldiers used in the final defence of Berlin, among other
places?
If you're the sort of wargamer who cares deeply about getting the
models right, which a lot of wargamers are, then when you paint a unit
you're committing to using it in quite a few battles. I wouldn't have
objections to playing a defence of Berlin game once or twice, but I
wouldn't want to do it every week, and I wouldn't want to have the old
men and children sitting in my figure case waiting to be taken out
again. I'll fight that sort of thing occasionally, but not all the
time, and I don't have the time or space for a huge figure collection
that I'm not going to use.
I feel similarly about the Waffen-SS, with the additional complication
that a guest in the house might reasonably wonder why one has
lovingly-detailed figures of what's pretty canonically regarded as The
Really Bad Guys. (When it's orcs or Imperial Stormtroopers this
doesn't arise in the same way.)
I know people who won't play Cold War because they remember it too
clearly. Or who won't play any conflict that's still going on
(particularly if they know people who are or have been involved in
it), or of which veterans are still about. (I suspect that last is a
bit disingenuous; I don't suppose they're eagerly awaiting the death
of the last Great War survivor in order to play a game about him.)
One approach is to take a step back and admit that this is a game of
toy soldiers, with no real death or suffering involved. Another
approach, and one that I favour, is to step forward, to admit that
these are representations of real people and play them accordingly;
I have very little time for people who sacrifice units lightly, and I
detest the approach found in many games played mostly by young or
competitive players that one keeps throwing men into the grinder until
the game's over rather than trying to preserve any forces for the
next fight (even if one's not actually going to play out that next
fight). One of the things I very much like about Chain of Command is
that one generally loses a battle by running out of morale rather than
by running out of warm bodies.
In the end I don't think there's a single set of rules that one can
apply to everybody, apart from the obvious: we're here among other
things to have fun, so to a first approximation doing stuff your
opponent regards as non-fun is a bad idea.
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