Look, a squirrel!

In my ADHD jumbled brain, I start many (many, many) projects with no clear goals.  However, here at Playing With Myself, finishing what I start is going to be job #1!   DDM has been a passion of mine for going on 10 years, and now that I’ve decided it’s OK to play with my minis by myself, I should be able to fill a blog with rousing battle reports and lively solo banter.  So what’s the deal?  To focus my time with my new hobby, here are the basic goals I am setting for myself:

1:  Collect a full set of DDM 1.0 minis (Harbinger to Deserts of Desolation), including all the promos if I can find them.  To make this challenge much more interesting than just shelling out $5000, my goal is to do this over a long period of time (I anticipate several years at least) and spend a net total of $0 doing so.  This means you’ll get some insight into how I collect things:  I like to play my hobbies for free.  The last time I was into DDM, my total net investment was around $2500; my total sales for my entire collection topped $10,000.  Through a combination of luck, timing and a touch of foresight, I’ll let you know how I did that in future posts.  I’ll also do a series of posts as I buy minis, boosters, collections, and then resell the pieces I don’t need (I’ve already purchased about $1400 worth of minis to start myself off, I’ll let you know what I got next time!).  With any luck, I will eventually break even on my hobby.  Even if you don’t collect DDM, my methods will work for essentially any collectible miniatures game…most of it is just common sense, stubborn determination, and above all, infinite patience.

2:  Post at least 1 battle report weekly.  However, these will not be just your typical OP warband battles.  I love the variety of pieces and abilities in DDM, and so my reports will be from a large number of different warbands, themes and game types.  I will be starting with Sealed (opening 2 boosters, building a 200 point army, and then pitting them against each other…I’ll keep playing the winning band against all new warbands until it loses), and then probably do some thematic good vs. evil and law vs. chaos battles, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy.  Maybe something like Beasts of the Wild vs. the Mechanical Madness of the Warforged or Demons vs. Paladins.

3:  Reward myself and this site for my persistence!  If this blog lasts 3 months, I’ll purchase a small video camera setup and start posting videos of the weekly battles on Youtube (for the 3 people in the US who are still interested in DDM!) 

4:  If PWM lasts 6 months I will treat myself and start playing a new collectible miniatures game in addition to DDM, most likely Star Wars minis, or something else cool any readers recommend.  They have to be pre-painted, as I still have a full army of new unpainted Warhammer 40k sitting in my garage.  Even though I love watching games like Warmachines, Warhammer or Malifaux, I just don’t have the patience for the full paint-your-own miniatures games.  (Well, I’d probably have the patience to play them, just not paint them!)

There you have it folks, my PWM goals!