One of the big challenges facing the club today is the debate in Ancients Gaming between DBMM and FOG. As in many other clubs and wargaming groups around the world at present there is a split between gamers who prefer FOG and those who prefer DBMM – luckily the AWC at least has no odd Ostriches still sticking to DBM (of course there is nothing really wrong with that if its your thing, but its a position causing a 3 way rules-set split of gamers in some areas so doesn’t help unify the scene)!
At this stage the club (AWC) is roughly split 50/50 with all the 15mm gamers and about a third of the 28mm gamers playing FOG, while the other two-thirds of the big scale guys play DBMM (plus 1-2 who are playing both at present). Regardless of which rule set is better at what the biggest effect is the temporary dilution of the available players in the area, and while it may probably work itself out in the long run (by say early 2010), it may also result in a permanently fractured Ancient & Medieval Gaming scene – an area that has traditionally been one of the strongest parts of the NZ Wargaming community, and generally united behind one common rule set that 90% of the Ancients Gamers in NZ played… This incidentally greatly facilitated planning conventions, tournaments, and competitions and helped ensure reasonable numbers usually turned up. It will be interesting to see where this leads and whether there will become a semi-permanent division of the main NZ Ancients community into two distinct rules groups, something that may not be a great benefit to the period or hobby long-term in an environment with a finite number of available players…
