Realm of Battle Rules: What are your experiences?

[Gecktron]

I haven't tried the realm rules as of yet, but Im looking forward to. 
I had much fun with the open war cards before, so the random nature of these rules doesnt bother me too much. 

In my opinion the realm rules really help in grounding my army in the narrativ. Having my Daughters of Khaine hail from the Realm of Metal now has a in-game effect, and isn't just something I write down and immediately forget about it. 

[svnvaldez]

12 hours ago, Rhellion said:

 I would bet Adepticon will use them.

My hope is that LVO will use them as well and if any modifications are made it is to set the round/realm/realmscape order. I would much prefer this to the LVO TOs making up their own houserules/ITC comp. There is so much good stuff and I hope people just use whats in the book.

For those that hate realm rules may I just suggest using the 18pg core rules + FAQs + Battletomes and Allegiance Abilities. At least that way you are still playing AOS2. Albeit a subset of the full game.

 

[svnvaldez]

3 hours ago, ScottR said:

Why would you have to use the Realm Rules if those events do?

Many people view LVO and Acon as the most important/prestigious events of the year.

I am sympathetic to the competitive player that would like to run and play in events that are similar in nature to LVO and Acon as to get practice and help them preform better in these big events..

[EMMachine]

Somesome in a german community said something (don't know if it was AoS or 40k) but I have the feeling that is true:

"If an optional rule is made to restrict the game further it is used without asking, but if an optional rules gives the game more choices it's getting ignored."

Reading through this thread I get the same feeling.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, EMMachine said:

Somesome in a german community said something (don't know if it was AoS or 40k) but I have the feeling that is true:

"If an optional rule is made to restrict the game further it is used without asking, but if an optional rules gives the game more choices it's getting ignored."

Reading through this thread I get the same feeling.

I think you're probably right. People who believe that the natural, obvious, default state of the game should be one of balance are more likely to view restrictive rules as a highly desirable way of reducing uncertainty and other variables - these are rules that GW 'got right'. Whereas anything that opens up options adds more variables and takes away their ability to control the situation, which therefore 'hurts the game' (the version of the game that they think everyone wants to play anyway) - these are rules that GW 'got wrong' and need to be removed or 'fixed'.

The sad thing is that the people who think this way also like to imagine that they play the game primarily for the tactical challenge - when in reality unpredictable situations or having the odds set against you are as much a tactical challenge (if not more so) than one in which both opponents begin on a level playing field.

[Dead Scribe]

6 hours ago, ScottR said:

Why would you have to use the Realm Rules if those events do?  You can run your event anyway you want.  I’ve read packs that use the rules, use modified versions, or have avoided them entirely.   I would like to see a world where people run the event that they want and people go to the events that sound good to them.

Because we run events that emulate the grand tournaments because we are grand tournament players and all of our games we want to be using the same rules.  This helps us get better at the game using a standard set of rules instead of having to change rules all the time.

We don't go to events that don't follow the standard rules set forth by the LVO and Adepticon.

If they do indeed use the realm rules, then we'll bite the bullet and get the rules for the realm rules and start including them.  My gut tells me there's a good chance they won't be in there at all, but if they are that it will be a specific set that we'll know far in advance, so we can just stick to using those.  Obviously we won't know until later in the year, and right now none of the tournaments around me are using them and so we are also not using them in any of our tournament prep games.

[Tittliewinks22]

4 hours ago, AaronWIlson said:

Out of interest when you you say LoC with the 6+ version, he didn't roll a 6+ for the each model in the unit right? As Firestorm is roll 9 dice and each one is D3 MW, it's very different to the GS blanket 4+ MW for each model in range of the spell, which I think he also must of done wrong as with a range 6" you're not catching even half the unit. 

Treason of Tzeentch. It's errattad to roll a d6 for each model in a unit and cause a mw for each roll of a 6+.

[AaronWilson]

7 minutes ago, Tittliewinks22 said:

Treason of Tzeentch. It's errattad to roll a d6 for each model in a unit and cause a mw for each roll of a 6+.

Right, that makes way more sense Even so, with both those ranges being limitd to 6" & DM saves, it seems incredible he killed 48 skeletons? I don't think you can even fit 48 skeletons within 6" of a portal, unless there is a perfect place to put the portal in the centre of the unit and the skeletons deployed with a hole in the centre of them.. 

[Tittliewinks22]

5 minutes ago, AaronWIlson said:

Right, that makes way more sense Even so, with both those ranges being limitd to 6" & DM saves, it seems incredible he killed 48 skeletons? I don't think you can even fit 48 skeletons within 6" of a portal, unless there is a perfect place to put the portal in the centre of the unit and the skeletons deployed with a hole in the centre of them.. 

It wasn't just those two spells, he also had the one that does AoE to everyone nearby (I think d3 mw) and tzeentch firestorm from a herald.

It was around 60ish MW total. But I was able to deathless minion a couple.

I'm not a fan of MW being so commonplace, and it's crazy how many tzeentch could spit out.

On topic - the only reason I even had anything in range turn 1 was because of realm of Shadows. Even if range wasn't reduced to 6" I still deployed out of range of the spell portal if it were set up in 18".

One last off topic gripe- destiny dice + Lord of change = busted for unbinding.

[AaronWilson]

I won't derail the thread but I don't understand how it was 60 MW, he must of had some insanely hot dice. Because I understand he put the portal wherever, but the range of the spells were limited to 6". So the GS spell would only affect models within 6" of the portal, Treason gets the whole unit but again it's only 6s for MWs. 

Tzeentch really only gimmick right now is Magical Gunline, which sadly is uninteractive but effective but again that's not for this thread. 

[Someuberdude]

I'll be running a tournament here shortly in our local group, and I won't be using the realm of battle rules. When playing a pickup game with a friend, I think their great. Most of them add a nice, fun addition to the game to think about. However, in an event in which people may pay a decent amount of time or money to travel to, I don't think they have a place. Some of them are just too extreme like the ignore all rend characteristics or the 6 inch range attacks. Imagine a player assembling, painting and bringing a new Kharadron army only to find that their effective range on their guns is 6. It's not the end of the world for that player, there may be ways around it tactically, but it just doesn't "feel" right, especially if their matched against an all melee force. In a casual pickup game, that wouldn't be a problem as you and your opponent could just agree to re-roll it. In a tournament setting, I just don't think it would work out.

Also, I can't even imagine how the Realm of Beasts would be played in a tournament setting. I'm at work right now, so don't  have the book, but don't you need to setup a monster for each player? I guess the TO can limit the realm of battles, but once you start limiting them to a select 4-5, I just don't see the point anymore. 

 

[Dead Scribe]

I know that if I spent a few months training for a tournament and then at the tournament some random rule from a realm was put in that altered how effective my list was, I'd be pretty hot and not be interested in attending any event that that TO put on again.

[Richelieu]

5 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

I know that if I spent a few months training for a tournament and then at the tournament some random rule from a realm was put in that altered how effective my list was, I'd be pretty hot and not be interested in attending any event that that TO put on again.

Nobody is arguing that's how tournaments should use them.  Like any tournament pack, explain up front exactly how they will be used and when.  You wouldn't expect a tournament pack to leave out the scenarios you'll be playing, or how scoring is done, do why would you expect them to leave out info about the realm rules?

[Somnicide]

27 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

I know that if I spent a few months training for a tournament and then at the tournament some random rule from a realm was put in that altered how effective my list was, I'd be pretty hot and not be interested in attending any event that that TO put on again.

They would have released the pack before hand, so presumably you would have been testing using that.

[Mephisto]

On 7/12/2018 at 9:41 AM, Richelieu said:

This thread was inspired by a comment  @Kamose made in the Six Nations takeaways thread about how there are all sorts of new goodies in AoS2 but many content creators are focused almost completely on the brokenness of a number of new lists that are possible.  It got me thinking about how I've been using realm rules in my matched play games and they have been fun and seemingly balanced. 

So... What about everyone else?  Have you been using realm of battle rules?  Have they been fun, balanced, broken, silly, useless overhead? 

Regarding 2.0 in general. It's new so we're going to have the fire and brimstone hot takes and negativity as the hype of hope for a new thing clashes with the reality of it. It happens every new edition every time in everything. Expectation breeds resentment when folks don't get exactly what they want. That wave of malcontent will recede soon enough though as people play more games and realize just how awesome 2.0 actually is.  Sure, there's a few boogeyman lists out there to scare people and feed the rhetoric but for the most part everyone got delicious candy for their armies...

That Candy? Realm Artefacts.

Command Points have been pretty contentious because quite simply different armies get different Command Abilities that do wildly different things. Realm Artefacts at least start from the exact same list that everyone can use and the fun is figuring out how your army best uses them - or what one thing your army is missing that might be in this list of artefacts. Sure, a Verminlord Corruptor can probably make better use of the Sword of Judgement than a Wight King because the VLC has ten attacks and is re-rolling failed hits thus giving two chances at those 6s and that's awesome. I don't even play Skaven but just thinking about that amuses me and besides, you only get the one artefact. Go through your entire army, go through the pages of artefacts, and figure it out. That's customization. That's fun. My only criticism really of the realm artefacts is that there's some unnecessary redundancy but if GW had to write through coming up with a few repeats to make other cool stuff, I'll forgive them. The only crime they've committed here is being too ambitious. 

Playing in realms and realm spells? That stuff is... neat... for Narrative/Open play. It's very thematic. It's very cool. It does add another random factor to a game with plenty of randomness already and so I'd like to see it stay away from Matched play. Which seems to be the trend so moot point. Basically, Banishment is real talk the actual worst thing. I'd rather get blown up by stupid grots than have some guy's cheetoh hands set up my model on the board edge every turn for 4 or 5 turns. Like seriously, dude, cheetohs at the freakin' table and you make me sound like the dbag for doing that "you just point and tell me where to set it" thing? I'd rather you just had a 50/50 killed my model outright than that BS. You know how I know it's the worst? Because despite my devious, necromantic nature, every time I think about taking Banishment myself, I feel dirty. Like the cheetoh is in my pores and I'm suffocating and gagging and it's gross. It is the definition of anti-fun.  It's...

Where was I? I blacked out there. Last thing I remember I was talking about how I like realm stuff and then... Oh God, was I raging about banishment again? Sorry. 

Aaaaaanyway, I think GW got 2.0 like 85% right. There's some organizational stuff I personally would've liked for them to cater to me specifically on. They didn't. I'm not mad and knew I was going to buy every book anyway. All the armies got candy. Some armies got more candy than others, sorry Wanderers players, but that's going to happen in a game this robust. I look forward to playing many games with many cool folks and watching the game evolve. Heck, I might even let the GM part of me meet the AOS-freak in me and come up with some rad narrative tournament thing that uses realms but that would be crazy. And I'm not crazy.

[PJetski]

I think GW is just throwing stuff out there and letting the community figure out if they want to use it or not.

[Deja vu]

My over all view of it is good, I do think they need to rework the realm of Ulgu.  I have to admit I have not played in every realm yet though.  The realm of fire, death and life all seem good to me through! 

I like the added depth. 

[MacDuff]

In actual wars troops have to fight in rain, snow, jungles, mountains, deserts - you name it, the ground has been fought over. The Realms are much the same, but their magical nature makes for unique environmental effects. To be a great general you'd want to be able to master all battlefield circumstances, which will make use of your forces more versatile. I wonder if some fear the challenge?

[Bellfree]

20 hours ago, EMMachine said:

Somesome in a german community said something (don't know if it was AoS or 40k) but I have the feeling that is true:

"If an optional rule is made to restrict the game further it is used without asking, but if an optional rules gives the game more choices it's getting ignored."

Reading through this thread I get the same feeling.

Optional rules giving more choices get ignored because the new choices tend to revolve around winning the game for free.

59 minutes ago, MacDuff said:

In actual wars troops have to fight in rain, snow, jungles, mountains, deserts - you name it, the ground has been fought over. The Realms are much the same, but their magical nature makes for unique environmental effects. To be a great general you'd want to be able to master all battlefield circumstances, which will make use of your forces more versatile. I wonder if some fear the challenge?

It's a tabletop game, not an actual battle though.

Also, even in a real battle you can't possibly be ready for all terrains at once. Think about what it would be like for a soldier to have his transport open up when there is an equal and totally random chance that his new theatre of war is in a desert, or in an urban environment, or in a rural area, or in the jungle, or underwater, or on the moon. He'd pick one and if it was one of the others he'd just be dead. "Whelp, I guessed jungle and it was underwater. GG, this was fun.'

Secondly it's only a challenge if you were the superior player with the superior list to begin with. If you and your opponent were of equal skill and had equally strong armies, then the battle comes down to who benefits more from the realm rules. You play Stormcast, I play Slaanesh; we roll Ghyran along with Fecund mud; your army doesn't care about that at all, my army completely shuts down. You play DoK, I play mixed order gunline; we roll Ulgu 6" shooting range, all my stuff dies whenever you decide to kill it. If you were already the stronger player and the stronger list and randomly got a realm that makes your opponents army better than yours, THEN it becomes a challenge. It's still stupid though because all that did was reduce the chance the better player wins(which is the exact opposite of what competition should do) AND could just as easily go the other way and turn a foregone conclusion into a disemboweling.

 

But, as many people are going to say, tournaments no matter what will NOT be doing random realmscapes and things like no rend for anyone(f**k you nighthaunt, haha anyone who thinks they can kill sequitors. 40 wounds at 3+ rerolling that I can resurrect? Good joke.). They'll either forgo the realmscape aspect or select realmscape features in advance. But what does that actually ADD? What about the game is BETTER because of those rules? What do you GAIN?

Firstly, the realm specific spells. There's one hideously OP spell per table at the minimum so that plus the additional options make casting heavy armies significantly better off the top. There's no 'interesting decision value' because the ones that are good are SOOO much better than the alternative using anything else would be silly. Banishment is the best spell in the game, Mirrorpool makes Allarielle, Nagash, and Archaon almost literal boogeymen, etc.

Then you have the realm trait and the realm CA, these are mostly underwhelming but still benefit certain armies/units over others.

Then you have the realmscape feature. Some of these are unusable in a tournament setting (monstrous beasts, no running, no rend,  most of the ones that force people to buy wyldwoods, roll a 6+ to get a second combat phase and end the game 45minutes earlier than you thought, the giant wall of text ones, etc) so those can be ignored. After that it mostly splits into 2 categories; The ones that don't matter(+1 wound on a Hero!) and the ones that are extremely random and super annoying(roll a D6 for every unit not in cover, on a 6 ****** over anyone not playing sylvaneth.) These abilities are either so incredibly random that no one can possibly hope to plan for them or too minor to be worth building a list around.  The remaining handful of realmscape rules just make some strategies clearly better or clearly worse, reducing shooting range to 18" still kills most shooting armies, but doesn't totally remove shooting from the game.

The realm rules add nothing. They shuffle the 1-5 slots of the most powerful armies, move a handful of units around in the tier list and occasionally sc**w you over in ways that are completely outside of your control. They're tedious random nonsense and I honestly don't really understand how they would be enjoyable even for narrative players. They don't even open up new tactical options because they're either weak enough to be irrelevant, SUPER random or they shut down units/strategies/armies in the listbuilding phase. No one is going to take daemonettes that can't run, no one is going to take Long-gunners that can only shoot 6", no one is going to take nighthaunt when they're paying out the behind to be rend immune and suddenly there isn't any rend. The rest of it is just 'roll a 6 to see if you're the better player or not.'

 

[Bellfree]

21 hours ago, Jamie the Jasper said:

I think you're probably right. People who believe that the natural, obvious, default state of the game should be one of balance are more likely to view restrictive rules as a highly desirable way of reducing uncertainty and other variables - these are rules that GW 'got right'. Whereas anything that opens up options adds more variables and takes away their ability to control the situation, which therefore 'hurts the game' (the version of the game that they think everyone wants to play anyway) - these are rules that GW 'got wrong' and need to be removed or 'fixed'.

The sad thing is that the people who think this way also like to imagine that they play the game primarily for the tactical challenge - when in reality unpredictable situations or having the odds set against you are as much a tactical challenge (if not more so) than one in which both opponents begin on a level playing field.

That's utter nonsense. First of all, if the uneven playing field is in your favor, that massively reduces the tactical challenge. And if the uneven playing field is TOO much in your favor, that totally eliminates tactical challenge. The hardest part about playing a game where you have a clear and obvious advantage is staying awake until the end.

This also 100% relies on the  better player being on the s**t end of the stick. If you were already better than your opponent and now the uneven playing field suddenly makes your army even stronger out of nowhere, the biggest 'tactical challenge' either player is going to face is not losing all of their sportsmanship points.

Winning with 'the odds stacked against you!' is great for a movie, and is dramatic as all hell when it happens, but it's luck based more often than not and more importantly is absolutely terrible game design.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Bellfree said:

That's utter nonsense. First of all, if the uneven playing field is in your favor, that massively reduces the tactical challenge. And if the uneven playing field is TOO much in your favor, that totally eliminates tactical challenge. The hardest part about playing a game where you have a clear and obvious advantage is staying awake until the end.

This also 100% relies on the  better player being on the s**t end of the stick. If you were already better than your opponent and now the uneven playing field suddenly makes your army even stronger out of nowhere, the biggest 'tactical challenge' either player is going to face is not losing all of their sportsmanship points.

Winning with 'the odds stacked against you!' is great for a movie, and is dramatic as all hell when it happens, but it's luck based more often than not and more importantly is absolutely terrible game design.

So more negatives. Jamie much sadness for you. 

[EMMachine]

2 hours ago, Bellfree said:

They're tedious random nonsense and I honestly don't really understand how they would be enjoyable even for narrative players. 

I don't think that narrative players will role for the realm (only if exploring a unknown Realmgate). Its all about the story and the players are know Ing where the battle takes place.

[Warfiend]

I played a game with my stormcast vs my friend's nighthaunt. We used a random battleplan/realm and realmeffect. We got relocation-orb and chamon the realmeffect was the one where double casting rolls are always a succes and can't be unbind but cause mortal wounds to the caster and units around it. It was a pretty one-sided game because my lord could get within range of the orb on turn 1 and for the follow two turns the orb moved away from my opponent who's slow units couldn't catch it. At the end of turn 3 I had 12 points and couldn't lose anymore.

However the realm rules where pretty fun, my evocator on a balewind vortex threw mortal wounds all over the place as she casted four double rolled casts in the battle. 

 

 

[Dead Scribe]

Winning with 'the odds stacked against you!' is great for a movie, and is dramatic as all hell when it happens, but it's luck based more often than not and more importantly is absolutely terrible game design.

I don't know if its terrible game design but I don't think it has any place in matched play or the core rules of a game.  If people like to use things like this, I think that's fine, but don't put it in the core rules.  Make it an optional extra in a different book.  The standard core rules should be about balanced play.  Anything extra should be an expansion that players can opt into or not as they want.

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

 

 

I don't know if its terrible game design but I don't think it has any place in matched play or the core rules of a game.  If people like to use things like this, I think that's fine, but don't put it in the core rules.  Make it an optional extra in a different book.  The standard core rules should be about balanced play.  Anything extra should be an expansion that players can opt into or not as they want.

Much as I like to wave the flag for narrative and open play (and tend to rail against anything that casts matched play as the default or 'normal' option) I have to agree. The realm rules would find a more natural home in the narrative play section of the GHB. Same goes for the terrain table.