My first contact with wargames was Warhammer 40,000, way back in 1998. Third edition had just come out and I stumbled into the hobby, buying a bunch of space marines. Of course, this is a long time ago, and my memories from this time are colored by the passing of time.  The cover of the Warhammer 40k 3e box set.  Compared to roleplaying games, miniature wargames seem to have a very different nature, despite their common origins. Back then, Warhammer 40k was played mostly in one-off scenarios with very little context, using armies of the players that happened to show up. One day there would be Tyranids vs Tau, on other days there would be Space Marines vs Space Marines. The fiction was there, but it was at best secondary. The idea of a campaign was very unlike that in roleplaying games.  In the present, there are games that sort of attempt to bridge the gap between roleplaying games and wargames, especially games like Mordheim (published 1999) and Frostgrave (published 201...