An exercise in budgets and motivation. Painting Points, go!

So among my closer gaming group, consisting of my brother, girlfriend, and a few other friends, I've been known to have a particularly large case of army ADD. Besides my long loved Dark Eldar, I jump from one army and project to another, rarely fully completing the prior one before being distracted by new shiny miniatures. Sometimes even buying an odd box of basic troops for an army I have nothing else, and likely will not get anything else, for.

Usually the stuff just finds it's way onto ebay eventually. After a recent huge downsizing of my collection, the hording has proved useful. Selling off my old Necrons, Tau, Eldar, Sisters of battle, and other assorted units and partial armies has paid for my Pretty Marines, most of my girlfriends Orks, and a bit of my new Dark Eldar fancy bits. But it's all run out now, and my expenditures are all out of pocket from here on out.

So in an effort to keep myself focused, and budget my spending so that eventually I'll have the money saved up for the next army I will surely fall in love with, I found a system to try. I've seen a few Warhammer bloggers now using a system of "Painting Points." Basically, you assign a value to each variety of miniature (Infantry models, vehicles, monsters, etc) and for each one that you fully finish, you get that many Points.

Now, what are the points for? They are to keep your budget in line. For every point you have accumulated from finishing up already stockpiled miniatures, you allow yourself 1 dollar to spend on the hobby.

I've decided to run with a system of:
Infantry: 1 Point Each
Infantry Sized Characters: 2 Points Each
Bikes and Cavalry: 3 Points Each
Monsters and Walkers: 4 Points Each
Vehicles: 5 Points Each


Part of the decision is just what'd be most logical for price/quantity/work involved for each type of miniature. In addition, I weighted it so that the things I like working on and painting most, are worth less points. The ones I will drag and whine and complain to myself about finishing net me more points. So that I may use the desire of new shiny boxes of toys on the gaming store's wall to motivate me to, say, finish off that Battlewagon I've been putting off for months.

And because there are very diminished returns, it will keep me from building up too much excess and winding up with so much extra stuff again. If I have to finish off 20 troops and a vehicle to gain enough points to buy a box of 10 Wyches, eventually I won't have endless piles of petwer and plastic staring me down every time I'm in my garage.

Plus, at the moment, I'm just excited about accumulating points for points sake. It's strangely like a reward in it's own right.