Steps towards "Rationalizing" an excessive collection?

[Dentatus]

So, if I'm 'rationalizing' then I know - on some level - there's a cause for concern. I need to face that and address it in a healthy manner.
Easier said than done, but there it is. For me, anyway.

I certainly admit to being an 'impulse buyer' when it comes to the hobby; I envision a certain game or campaign, then order the necessary ingredients. Those are cool. I'll get this done right quick and it'll be great. Poor, poor fool...

That's the major contributor to the 'basement of shame'. (or 'basement of potential'. tomayto, tomahto) The build up these past few years (I own my decisions, but Covid didn't help) has led to inventorying the unpainted mountain/unfinished projects twice a year.

The event sobers me up. I get a grip on what I have, assess which projects can be reasonably accomplished, and come to terms with what should go. 

It's been working by degrees. My spending is intentional, my efforts more focused. And occasionally I get to either pass on some stuff that makes someone else happy, or pleasantly surprise myself when I uncover some forgotten minis/terrain that'll actually be put to use in the foreseeable future. The next assessment will most likely see a sell-off to buy me some time to write. 

[AdamPHayes]

Not to brag, but I have been very good at not chasing the shiny.  I have nothing in my Pile of Shame, and do not have any unpainted models in my projects.  I mostly attribute this to not buying stuff I do not need.

And we now all hate you.


I am another in the process of trying to make sense of the storage nightmare, made more painful by almost having it under control. Then the relatives of two friends asked me (somewhat desperately) to assist with collections they had left behind and what are you going to say...

I would love to be able to donate figures or small armies to new/ young/ poorer gamers but I have yet to come up with a serious way to achieve this...

[Elbows]

Oh, to add to the conversation, I'd also say...a huge key for me is simple: do not open and build until you paint.

I have a side hobby of selling peoples Warhammer stuff for commission on eBay.  I've sold nearly $20,000 worth of 40K stuff on eBay in the past several years, so I'm very finely attuned to how that market works.  There's a simple pecking order in value:

1) New in box.
2) New on sprue, box missing.
3) Assembled nicely, not painted.
4) Assembled adequately, not painted.
5) Assembled poorly, not painted.
etc.

And painted stuff slots in there, depending on quality around spot 3-4.  The reality is most people don't paint well enough to make it a valued addition - it's often the opposite.

What's my point?  Don't game with unpainted stuff...and don't build models until you're going to paint them and they're going to see tabletop use.  There's nothing worse (value-wise) than having a huge collection of adequately assembled stuff that's primed, etc.  You're just literally burning money.  So if you have a large stash, it's all well and good if that stash is still in box (you can rip off the cellophane and check out the sprues...but leave the stuff in the box till you're going to actually build and paint it!)

I've quit several projects and made 90% of my money back because I bought 3-4 kits...built one...changed my mind and was able to recoup my money by selling off the unused kits, etc.

I have several friends who still do the 12-year old "get home and rip it all open and throw out the boxes and glue stuff together and put them on bases!" within like an hour of receiving something.  Then it sits in a garage for eight years and is sold at a flea market for pennies.  Keep your stuff in boxes and you can easily get rid of it later for at least 75-80% of whatever you invested (if not more - sometimes that stuff becomes collectible).

[Citizen Sade]

I would love to be able to donate figures or small armies to new/ young/ poorer gamers but I have yet to come up with a serious way to achieve this...

Fellow LAF members mcfonz & Highlandbevan might still be looking for donations for their clubs.

As I recall, mcfonz works with children in the care system and Highlandbevan runs a school D&D club.

[tikitang]

I don't mean this offensively, but I genuinely can't even imagine owning so many miniatures! 40,000! It blows my mind!

Owning even as many as 100 would make me very nervous; I get anxious when I start to believe I have too much stuff, and it's often the perception of having collected "too much" which has led to my various wargaming projects collapsing over the years.

I've told this story several times now on LAF, but, between 2012 and 2015 I amassed a huge collection of 90mm pre-painted, PVC figures. Probably somewhere between 100 - 200 figures. I had great plans to play small skirmishes with them, but apart from a handful of moderately successful attempts, this didn't become as frequent as I'd hoped for. In the end, the collection became a mental burden to me, something I hated rather than something I enjoyed.

That sense of burden became so heavy that the desire to get rid of the collection massively outweighed the desire to regain any of my financial losses from it, nor did I fancy the amount of effort it would take to sell it all. As such, although it took a huge amount of both mental and physical exertion, I managed to pack the entire collection into a bike trailer and toss it all at once in a dumpster! The sense of relief that came afterwards was immense, and still hasn't left (and it's been more than six months)! I have no regrets about ridding myself of that burden.

THAT SAID, since doing that (in the summer of 2022), I have come to learn that people on Facebook Marketplace will often travel for miles to take away free stuff from you. I had no idea, at the time, just how willing people were to do this. Over the last few months I've shifted all kinds of junk (that I would consider worthy of nothing but scrapping) thanks to people who seem to regard it as treasure. If I were given the opportunity to time-warp and do 2022 all over again, I may have posted up the whole collection on Facebook Marketplace and hoped somebody would pick it up from my doorstep, but there were other complex factors at play during that time which may have made that unworkable.

I actually kept hold of one or two of those models, because they were still in their original packaging and were OOP. I've seen those particular models on sale for ridiculous prices on eBay if they're both OOP and still packaged, so I was hoping to make something from those. Turns out, people were only willing to pay peanuts for them, so the perception that they had value was a myth. And those were still packaged! Imagine how little people would have paid for ones which had been handled and glued to 60mm acrylic bases!

So, while I'm not saying you should follow the same pattern (i.e. binning the lot), I can't stress enough how little I regret doing that with my excessive collection when I think about how awful the mental burden had become to me. Having that burden lifted in one moment was better than any financial recoupment I might have made when considering the amount of work it would have taken to organise a sale.

[dwbullock]

But what does one do when conversion and kitbashing (and generally being an ork at heart) is the prime aspect of the hobby?  My bits box overfloweth, far more than my actual model count.  I go through every 6 months or so and really clean out the boxes.  There is a small part (maybe not too small) that says 'one day, I might need that gun hand from the dwarf kit that is no longer produced to create the ultimate goblin badass.' 

Not to mention the broken toys that have really cool parts.  I do at least toss all the useless parts (are there useless parts?) ...

[Elbows]

Bits are just bits though - they can be tosed in a box, and no one would feel bad throwing them out if you shuffle off this mortal coil. 

Now if you're sitting amidst a huge room filled with old kids' rollerskates and half a broken vending machine...then yeah, throw stuff out.  You'll survive.

[dwbullock]

.....

Now if you're sitting amidst a huge room filled with old kids' rollerskates and half a broken vending machine...then yeah, throw stuff out....

MAN!  Do you know how many good thingamajigs I could find in a half broken vending machine!!

[v_lazy_dragon]

I've had a few clear outs in my time (despite only being on my mid 30s), and over time I have mostly concluded its due to several years of parental conditioning that I have 'too much stuff' and 'really need to thin things down'.

I have done this in a few ways, the easiest and lest successful long term has been to sell projects I have butterflied on from. A few I have butterflied back to... and eventually resold in other cases. Think I  am on 3rd set of Foundry Blackfoot for example. Sometimes when I butterflu back, figures are no longer available and I have a degree of regret.

The improved method is to look for duplications... at one stage I had fairly similar projects, with the same vehicle types in 20mm, 28mm and 40mm. They made an easy decision point AND I still had an option to persue the interests if they flaired again.

The latest, most successful, route is this:
I am only allowed one scale (you're basically already there)
I am only allowed one set of scenery (in my case autumnal trees and green grassy bases -good bye desert and post apocalypse wastelands)
Everything is based to match  the scenery (good bye mexican revolution)
I can have different types of buildings (old west, tudor style, etc), but each 'type' has to work for multiple periods.

When it comes to periods themselves:
I ask myself what sort of games do I want to play? And what size?
Are there any projects where figures can do double duty?
What really attracted me to the period? Could that aspect be brought out in a different period?

[FifteensAway]

Well, I guess I touched a nerve amongst some of us with this thread.

Here is where my thinking currently lies with my dilemma after reading all of the replies so far:

Start by settling on a set of rules - leading contender is Fistful of Lead (including Big Battles variant) because it can adapt across the spectrum - and then get enough figures painted within each period to at least be able to run a one-on-one game so that I can play it and see how it feels.  If it doesn't feel so enjoyable, that period goes away.   Seems workable. 

The real challenge with that is a 'temporary' one, my Drive for Twenty-Five to get as much of my AWI figures as possible painted in time for the 250th anniversary pending, I am using Lexington and Concord as the start date of the anniversary but allowing until the end of the first year to allow more time and then continue painting through to the Yorktown 250th and even beyond - the collection is large enough to need ALL of that time (this is a Permanent and very fond period for me).  And I am committed to getting enough Old West/Pony Wars figures painted this year to start gaming that period as well.  And continue painting my Slightly Cracked Colonials to the same end.  That will give me seven gameable periods by the end of this year, if not sooner (ACW, FIW, Pirates, and SYW all already there).

Those three goals reduces the opportunity for all those other periods but it does not eliminate the possibility.  So, I hope to sneak in one or two collections this year with the following being most likely: Banana Wars, Robin Hood, Three Musketeers, and French Foreign Legion.  And maybe enough to get Star Wars on the table.  Probably only two - maybe! - three of those can get slotted in on a rather small scale.  (That hopeless optimism creeping in.)

It is a small step but I think a logical step. 

Most likely periods to go first are Vikings and ACW, or at least face considerable downsizing.  This may seem counter-intuitive but ACW can't go until I finish a couple hundred figures to bring at least the infantry up to a standard - and probably same for cavalry.  Doing so greatly improves the marketability of the collection - a definite sell, not give away period.  The money realized from that would probably fund the rest of my miniatures ambitions until I go toes up.  Hopefully! 

At least with FFOL rules, it doesn't take large numbers of figures to field gameable armies.  While I only paint average game table standard figures, I can paint them fairly fast, can easily get north of 100 figures in a good month, and north of 200 figures in a great month.  And I started a hard rule for myself this year, a minimum of 48 figures per month. 

One small step...along a long journey.

edit: I will have the AWI gameable this year - only need to texture bases on most recent painting set (86 figures in March, a loyalist brigade) to be there.  So, should have eight of twenty-two periods gameable this year.

[Easy E]

There are really only tow ways to go about this from a mechanical aspect. 

Either output of painted models has to vastly exceed inputs

OR

There are no inputs and miniatures being output through the door

Everything else is gilding the rose, lipstick on a pig, dressing up a scarecrow, etc.   

[Spooktalker]

Up until 2021, on the one hand I was relatively selective about buying new, and on the other I had an ebay habit that was at times out of control. I thought of myself as an opportunist, and I amassed an amazing collection. Then a lot happened in the first years of the pandemic. Prices for local things in my area seemed to rise almost 40%. There were the global shipping problems. Companies seemed to be really hit hard. I was told by two heads of companies that lead prices doubled. People weren't sure where to put their money and for myself I was in a wait and see mode.

And if I loved miniatures before, now what they meant to me took on a new dimension. I realized what a golden age of miniatures we live in and how lucky we are to have it, and how it might change with all the risks surrounding it. How shipping was stabilized but far from a sure thing, how material prices could rise more, how 3d printing and hard plastic was chipping away at the metal industry that I see as the heart and soul of the hobby.

So, my rationalization process was to stop the flow of my money into the secondary market and put it in the primary market, directly to the companies I want to support. With my job secure and entirely remote, and expenses down, and some other personal matters meaning I didn't need as much for things I had been planning, my budget was intact and then some. Over the last six years or so I had amassed a wishlist of projects in asana, ranked and detailed, etc, and I started hitting it. I basically got everything that I hadn't managed to cross off the list. Everything there had persisted for a few years at least so I knew I they were things I wouldn't lose interest in.

Also, while there is this element of altruism as I say, it it definitely also the case that is is win-win in that, ironically, I literally have never experienced a better time to shift metal overseas from Europe to me. Miniatures are literally cheaper than they were in 2009 or however far back, and I mean in absolute terms, before factoring in inflation. Somehow, companies only rose prices 10-20% in 2022 while the dip in pound-dollar entirely compensated all through 2022 and beyond.

So I kind of went YOLO. And I'm not at all sorry.

Also, for all the stuff I amassed from ebay, prices have soared since people came out of the wait-and-see phase. So that has both made it easier to kick the ebay habit, which I fully did and it feels wonderful, and also it makes me think twice about idly moving forward on the stuff I amassed with the assumption I would get to it all or die trying.  I never thought the effort would be worth it to sell figures back but now it is. Now it definitely is. People want all the stuff I casually scooped up over the years a lot more than the stuff I'm buying new now, which is also ironic.

Another part of the rationalization is while I struggle to finish things, I have a very steady hobby practice a lot of free time, and it's one of the most enjoyable way for me to spend that free time. It feels good knowing I have everything I need to do anything I want in our little worlds.

Lastly, there is a factor that dents the rationalization, but not enough to stop me, which is reason. If I lead a pragmatic, science-based life before the pandemic, I came through it doubling down on approaching everything purely rationally. It seems to me that miniatures is my one thing, this Lacanian thing of excess that somehow allows me to approach most other things with reason. I should have a harder time buying projects I don't have time for (any have a dashboard view to just how long everything will take and track every moment of hobby time) and in this sense it is a big dent in the rationalization, but even so it is also another sort of rationalization, because I start to worry that without this outlet for excess and unreason, other parts of my life that are well ordered and working well might falter.

[Spooktalker]

I have long accepted that I am no longer a tabletop gamer in any meaningful sense. I am a planner of, researcher for and purchaser of projects that I will never complete, let alone game. It's a hobby in and of itself and you can't persuade me otherwise.

I feel you on this. I love the researching and planning. I have a few key points of interest in history, late antiquity and 16th century, and from those I move in both directions discovering, planning and purchasing. That and Middle Earth. It's my preferred way to end the day, entirely disengaged from the problems of the world. Instead I take fun problems to bed related to projects. If I don't solve them, great, because it puts off my next purchase another day. If I do solve them, even better.