Changing appreciation of rules

My current distraction from my original wargaming projects (thanks ADHD) is a 10mm fantasy project. My intention is to use Fantastic Battles but I also took a look at the Warmaster Revolution rules. Most of the 10mm miniatures that I am looking at are based to match standards for Warmaster. So either long strips at 40mm or short strips at 20mm. I am trying to figure out how to base these models on a 40x40mm base for Fantastic Battles when I thought "what about basing them for Warmaster and using 2 40x20mm bases for a company?". I used to play a lot of Warmaster. In fact, for quite a few years, it was the only game I played. I moved on to other things once I began to hit a wall in terms of how much fun I was getting from the game.

If you played Warmaster in the past you will be familiar with the tactic of hitting an opponent in the flank with narrow based models like cavalry or Chaos Hounds and then destroying the unit over a long series of combat rounds. One of the local Warmaster players had a High Elf army that used the tactic to dramatic effect in most games. It wasn't a lot of fun to be on the receiving end of it and it also wasn't a lot of fun to be doing it to an opponent, Or at least I thought so. Once you wrap your head around the core concepts of Warmaster you would run into these sorts of 'no fun' situations that made the game less of a pleasure to play.

Games Workshop stopped producing the Warmaster rules and miniatures way back when they nuked their Specialist Games offshoot. That killed the game for a lot of people but apparently many, including long-time Warmaster grognard Lex van Rooy, took it up themselves to rerelease the Warmaster rules with some key tweaks to try to make them more fun to play. Not surprisingly one of the most often mentioned changes is a limit to the flank charge situation I mentioned.

I downloaded the rules and the new book of army lists and took a quick look through them. They do change a few, critical, things but they maintain the core feel of the rules. This is an essential thing to do if you are a fan of the game but in the years since I last played it I appear to have become less of a fan of complicated game systems. And Warmaster is, in many situations, a complex game. Arranging charges, calculating evasion, charging with or into brigades - there are any number of cases where Warmaster turns from a game into a surveying session. 

One of the things I like about Fantastic Battles is that it gives you a feel for the command and control system in Warmaster without the additional complexity. You have characters and they issue commands but when you charge you don't need to get a protractor. Another issue is that I have also become less enthused with the idea of set army lists. The system used in Warmaster is actually quite great (especially if you play tournaments) but you are limited to a handful of possible units. What if you want a Chaos army that has a touch of Chaos Dwarves? I am also working on a Vampire Counts(ish) army that has no ethereal undead in it and an odd Warlord. You really can't do that in Warmaster.

It might be my changing focus in gaming or it just might be the time constraints you run into when you get older. You have less time for games and so you want to make sure that the fun you have is exactly the type of fun you want/need. In either case, while Warmaster certainly brings back happy memories it isn't a game that I would want to play anymore.