My Little Pony LIV:E Long and Pony!

[Aotrs Commander]

I'm curious, what's so different about them?

It's a rather more staid atmosphere, then are virtually no people dressed up (aside from the occasional team of reenactors, but they're rare), there are no panels or anything, or guest speakers or whatnot, and all the trade stands are models or terrain and stuff; there's no merchandise in the same way (the first RPG convention I went to was a surprise, because even tiny though it was, they had stuff like tshirt places and jewellery and stuff; we see some of that at Expo, but just nowhere else). Mostly it's just several rooms with lots of blokes¹ standing around wargames tables (of display games with a few participation games; and the game quality really varies depending whay show you got to), surrounded on the periphery by trade stands. Where as the US-type cons are like big events people travel miles for, a lot of the conventions are just much smaller and often only a day or so. It's always fascinated me that the other conventions of my related hobbies can so massively different.



¹Side topic:

Because it is mostly blokes... For reasons I've never really understood, at least over here, wargames attracts very few females. Put it this way - the fact Lix is even vaguely interested in Accelerate & Attack makes her very unusual. Out of the maybe hundred (ish?) members of the Derby Wargames Club, there are like two or three females that come regularly, and one of those is a new recruit coming to our little bit for roleplaying on Monday. There's a few more at conventions, but mostly it's Significant Others or when the family comes, or helping to run the trade stands (as most wargames traders are small businesses). I am always honestly surprised about it. (I mean, it's not like wargamers are all those steriotypical but-probably-not-quite-apocryphal creepy guys; about half of the UK wargaming population are my Dad's age and married!) It's not an intentionally hostile atmosphere or anything, so it just seems like it just doesn't appeal to them. Why wargames should be less so, more than, I dunno, chess or something, is something I have never really grasped, as I wouldn't have thought it would have been different to any other hobby. I mean, there's loads of female gamers, generally, but there seems to be far less female wargames. It's just one of those really odd things.

...

Okay, on reflection, maybe Workshop doesn't help much in that regard, as neither Warhammer fantasy nor 40K are especially gender-equal in the way they're structured with armies and figures and whatnot in much of it (see recent history of atrocities commited to Sisters of Battle...!) But I'd have thought there would be more to it than that. *shrug* Humans is strange.