Hates, loathes, detests, despises...(I'm not talking about anyone here)...

[FierceKitty]

* Opponents who never read the rules, then complain they're being unfairly treated when they find they can't do something ridiculous.
* Players who maintain that for most of military history troops fought in lines and columns and wore uniforms for the sake of ritual, tradition, and keeping the blimps happy.
* Players who call halberds pikes (you too, Sir Terry).
* Historians who act as if the only conflicts of interest involved the pink-skinned races who spoke romance or Germanic languages.
* Japanese games with ten figures a side.
* Rule sets that can't be played from a cheat sheet after a few goes.
* Anything with more props than regiments (order cards, frames, templates, sliding measuring sticks....)
* Flat bits of cloth representing a forest.
* Players who treat the 18th century as a rehearsal for the Napoleonic wars.
*   "        "      "     "   Napoleonic wars "  "  "         "    "    ACW.
*  Players who never set brush to a figure and are then cavalier and destructive in handling other people's armies.
*  Rules written in pidgin English by people whose surname suggests an antipathy to cats equal to their hostility towards punctuation.
* People who use Boxer figures in a Ch'ao army, since we all know eternal Asia never changes anyway.
* People who do the same with legionaries carrying semi-cylindrical shields, since we all know that Rome was unchanged over a millenium.
* Rule sets that still try to treat a longbow as a kind of early bren gun.
...............
Feel free to inflate your posts add your own betes noir.

[Leman]

That Roman thing particularly irks me in Hollywood films.

[FierceKitty]

Right! And the absence of metal armour, Huns with stirrups and horseshoes, monochrome uniforms and unpainted shields, matchlocks that never miss...but perhaps this would do for a new thread, once we've worked off our spleen in this one.

[fsn]

• Armies consisting only of guard or elite units.
• Those who decry rather than educate
• Rule sets that require expansion sets fro you to play the bit you're actually interested in
• Rivet counters

[Le Manchou]

 Agreed!

[Luddite]

Players that decry, condemn, insult, or ridicule games that other players enjoy.
Bad rules that get played, not because they are good,  but because 'everyone is playing them'.
Rules that are unnecessarily complex.
People that book a club table, and then don't turn up.
People at the club who insist on the heating being on despite the fact that its hot enough to roast a chicken in the room.
45º shooting arcs for formed units.
Regiments represented by 20 28mm figures.
The lack of non European figures ranges.
The cost of good looking pre made terrain.
The time I have to spend painting when I should be gaming.
FoG for destroying the superior DBM.
Dice when they screw up my brilliantly executed battle plans.

[Westmarcher]

That Roman thing particularly irks me in Hollywood films.

Another Hollywood hate for me is Dark Ages and Medieval soldiers acting like robots and exercising the same discipline and drill as the Prussian Army of the SYW. You know the kind of thing - sentries standing to attention, file marching in step before cadenced marching was introduced in the 18th Century, etc.  

[FierceKitty]

Oh, and people that get to the club five minutes early and hog enough of the limited table space for any three games by other players.

[fsn]

In "clip clop swish swish" and "clip clop pop pop" films everybody giving up any form of fighting in concert for individual hand to hand combat. "Let's form a shield wall, then when the enemy gets close, let's pick one and dance with him".

[FierceKitty]

Since it seems to be turning into a movie gripe session, how about cavalry who carry shields but never use them to protect themselves, and scouts who attack single-handed instead of reporting to the main force, Mr Jackson?

[Subedai]

Don't get me started on Hollywood and its depictions of history -any history other than its own...and even some of that is suspect. Although, there again, the British film industry is not totally blameless in that regard, (Cromwell being a case in point).

Sets of 'rules' that are 5 pages of actual rules, then 28 pages of colour pictures of beautifully painted 28mm figures on fantastic looking terrain as examples of play and cost an arm and a leg, (old school, me).

Sets of rules that are published and then, a couple of months later, an errata list is published. Then, six months down the line, another copy of the same rules is published with the errata added. This is why you proof read the bl**dy thing first time so as to get it right!

Sets of rules that have so many follow-on glossy publications, all costing another arm and a leg each.

Ancient rules that cover thousands of years of combat.

Sets of rules with specific base sizes at odds to every other set of rules.

Sets of rules that require a bucket load of dice to hit and the same amount in saving throws!

Rivet counters.

Wargamers who poo-poo 6 and 10mm figures.

People who can't be ar*ed to research the army they have.

[FierceKitty]

The centipede approach to chiselling the customer.

[fsn]

Wargames mags that give historical descriptions but army lists for one particular rule set.

[Ithoriel]

Amazed to see how few of these things irk me.

People who don't bother to learn the rules.

People who roughly handle the figures/ terrain (or players!)

The medieval English machinebow and similar.

That's about it.

Having had quite a bit of fun with CoC, despite it involving German Space Marines fighting Russian Eldar because none of us had appropriate single based figures, I'd be hard pressed to complain about Early Imperial Romans fighting either the Carthaginians or the Vandals!

[Westmarcher]

[Heh! Just realised, this is the pet hate topic re-visited. Anyhoo - probably time for us all to have a good moan again. And so .... ]

Regiments represented by 20 28mm figures.

I think I'm more comfortable with that kind of thing than I used to be now. Although I do believe that the smaller the scale, the more figures you should use per unit. But that is as much to do with base sizes, measurement and handling purposes as anything else. Aesthetically, more figures per unit are impressive but, for the larger scales, particularly 28mm, I think large numbers of figures tend to diminish the artistic skills of the hobbyist with brilliantly painted figures 'lost' in the crowd.
 
I don't wish to hi-jack this thread (for too long, anyway - I'm sure we'll soon get back on topic) but I would be interested to know what constitutes the perfect number of figures before individual wargamers' minds accept that what they are looking at is a regiment or battalion. After all, whatever our minds come up with as 'acceptable' to enable us to cross our own credibility thresholds, it still does not compare to a 1:1 unit. The first time I saw a 1:1 unit (a French Napoleonic Young Guard battalion in 15mm), I was blown away - and so was all my angst about unit size. In the absence of seeing the real thing, it was the most effective way for me to imagine what a real battalion looked line in line, column and square and thereafter, typically scaled down war-games versions were simply incomparable.

Now that I think of it, I suppose my own pet hate is spacing as often seen in the movies ("OK, you hundred guys - spread out to look like a thousand") and then copied by wargamers.

[Aaah. That's better. I needed to get that off my chest.]