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I have noticed a trend on Warhammer Twitter, a place that can be wonderful or terrible. The trend pops up every few weeks and it’s basically this: Warhammer people of a certain group–the lore master, the hobbyists, and the gamers–accuse someone in the other groups of not being a true player. A while ago the term most associated with this was gatekeeping, but now the pop culture phrase is “You’re a tourist”.

(On Facebook last week someone called John Blanche a tourist. Yes, that John Blanche.)

What Makes Someone a Tourist?

In the case that popped up earlier this week, there were people in the group I’m calling “lore masters” Tweeting that you can’t be a Warhammer player if you don’t care about the lore. They’re argument, to be as fair as possible, is this: the lore is the backbone of Warhammer. If you don’t know the lore then you might as well be playing with chess pieces or checkers or Power Rangers dolls. The lore explains why everyone is fighting and what the stakes are. It is the flavor that the game needs that makes it different from other games.

Now, I can understand a lot of the sentiment here. Because lore is incredibly important to me when I rate and review games. Poor lore is the reason why I gave Kings of War a negative review: Kings of War is a good game system with decent (mostly) models. But the lore is such a mess that I cannot get into that game.

And to be perfectly fair, if Warhammer didn’t have it’s lore, or rather it’s Intellectual Property, it wouldn’t be anything special.

(Okay, it also has great rules and the premier models in the industry.)

Where these lore masters cross the line is where they say that if you don’t read the Black Library and know the minutiae, you are a hobby tourist. And that means that your opinions of the game don’t matter.

On the other hand, this comes up pretty regularly from a differnt angle when someone pops up on Twitter with a controversial (usually hate-filled, in my experience) comment about Warhammer or its players, and other people jump on this lore master and say “Where are your models? Post a model! I looked in your timeline and there’s no pictures of models. You’re the hobby tourist!”

No True Scotsman Fallacy

This is, of course, a logical fallacy. The No True Scotsman fallacy is a test of purity that disqualifies counterexamples in an arguement. It goes like this (thanks, Wikipedia!)

Person A: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person B: “But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person A: “But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”

See? Make a statement about a person’s identity, and then when a counterexample is presented, you disqualify that counterexample and say that no TRUE Scotsman puts sugar on porridge.

In our example:

Person A: No Warhammer player can ignore the lore.
Person B: I’ve been playing the game since 2nd Edition and I could care less about the lore–I just like to paint and throw dice.
Person A: No TRUE Warhammer player can ignore the lore. You’re a tourist.

Do You Have To Like All Aspect of the Hobby To Enjoy It?

Do you have to know the lore AND love to paint AND play all the time?

The answer–well, my answer–is that of course you don’t, because 95% of Warhammer exists in your own head. Whether you are reading Black Library books or collecting or painting models or analyzing the latest meta for your army list, most of what you’re doing exists in your own head.

This is a game of make believe. You can create your own space marine chapter in any color scheme and doctrine you want. You can kitbash your models until they’re unrecognizable.

But the lore is canon, isn’t it?

No, the lore is not canon. The lore changes ALL THE TIME. (It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to hear that a lot of these arguments revolve around the ephemeral bugaboo of Female Space Marines.) Lore changes, pure and simple. Look at the difference between the description of Necrons when they were released and the knowledge of Necrons now–it’s completely different. Look at Squats: the act of writing something out of the lore was literally dubbed “Squatting” because of how infamous it was–and now Squats are back! We just weren’t looking in the right place!

And make no mind of the paragraph in the rules that says that the universe is a very big place and that absolutely anything can happen in it. If you can dream it up, it’s fair game.

The writers have said that the two missing Primarchs are missing specifically for the mystery of it and…maybe players would fill it in with something of their own?

But the rules are canon, aren’t they? Surely the rules don’t bend.

Did you actually try to play games of Warhammer 40k 9th Edition and NOT have a handful of house rules. Sure, there may be a pure strain of the rules that exist at official tournaments, but even tournament players play most of their games not at tournaments.

Canon is the Exception to the Rule

Anything that we think is immutable in Warhammer 40k has all sorts of ways that it can be flipped around and tweaked and twisted and, yes, retconned. Canon, or the idea that something exists in purity and can’t change, will always be temporary. We know that the Black Library can play fast and loose with the canon, but even the rules will be retconned whenever there’s a new edition. It’s temporary.

What About Hobby Tourists?

I think that this is the dumbest of dumb ad hominems that someone can level at someone else. Don’t read enough books? Tourist. Don’t paint enough models? Tourist. Don’t play the game? Tourist.

Why can’t we simply flip the labels around: Read the books? Reader. Paint the models? Painter. Play the game? Gamer. You don’t need to be all three to be a legitimate Warhammer fan.

Imagine someone telling a Barbecue Pit Boss that he’s a cooking tourist because he doesn’t bake pastries? Or telling an food truck owner that they’re a cooking tourist because she’s never been a line cook in a diner?

You don’t have to do EVERYTHING to be a legitimate part of the club.

The sooner that we can start just accepting people as they are–someone to talk lore with or look at models with or play games with–the sooner we can take some of the toxicity out of the hobby.