Most Battleplans are rarely played?

[EMMachine]

Hi,

Age of Sigmar has created many Battleplans in the last two years (about 140) but when I search for BatReps I have the feeling that since the Generals Handbook came out, we mostly see the same 6 "Pitched Battle" Battleplans over and over again.

In february I wanted to start a discussion in another forum about the combination of the other battleplans with the rules of the pitched Battle rules of the Generals Handbook (what rules would work with the battleplan and what wouldn't, like having to spend Reinforcement Points when a unit comes back and thats part of the battleplan). Or how to work with Points when in most cases of early battleplans there was only that rule if one player has 1/3 more Models.

Perhaps the battleplan has a flaw itself or something. Many battleplans are written for one fraction, but perhaps some of them could be used with other fractions, too.

Sadly the discussion failed, mostly because there was only one post that was not made by me and my view through some of the battleplans was more theoretial because the lack of having a gaming group and can't test the battleplans myself and the other case that because of copyright your very restricted what you can post of the battleplan itself (and so only people who have the book could be part of the discussion).

Some times I have a feeling that some rules of Matched Play were a little too strict, so they would reduce the atmosphare of the game, but sadly some people need some harder restriction, when I look at some of the "Meta-Lists". Perhaps some sort of gamemode between narrative and matched play could help but I have the feeling that something like that would have a long exceptionlist like the old Tournament restrictionlists.

Perhaps we have to see, that the Generals Handbook 2017 brings and would really like to see more BatReps with other Battleplans and perhaps, GW needs a book like "Altar of War" in 40k.

Do I have a wrong picture of the situation or does the community only uses 4,2% of all Battleplans?

Regards,

EMMachine

[RuneBrush]

You're right, and it's something the my gaming group has discussed quite a few times.  

I think some of it comes down to organisation - many people want to rock up to a store/club and randomly play a game so it's nice and easy to roll a D6 and use the appropriate matched play battleplan.  Other people will be wanting to hone their tournament army so will want one of the matched play battleplans for practice (there aren't many matched play events that don't use them).

To run one of battleplans outside the generals handbook can prove tricky as it's reliant on both parties having the appropriate book and agreeing that's the one to play.

My local group has started to dip into different battleplans (using matched play rules) and have found them really enjoyable - but they do add an extra amount of organisation to a game because they're all quite varied in deployment, extra rules and scoring.

[EMMachine]

17 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

many people want to rock up to a store/club and randomly play a game so it's nice and easy to roll a D6 and use the appropriate matched play battleplan.

Yeah, that could be a mainpoint. Random Battles in a gaming store isn't the same a local group where you could test things or make the organisation before the actual game (and you could share the books in your local group).

I would love to have a gaminggroup with a more narrative focus, because I don't really care about Tournaments anymore since 6. Edition 40k, but I have the feeling it's quite difficult to find the right people (especially in some parts of Germany), so my only choice (after the rest of my gaming group has no interest to AoS) would be playing in a store, but didn't want to come against those meta lists.

[Praecautus]

I do like king of the hill, but forces have to be small to allow a quick rotation. The wounds inflicted scoring is nice and adds to banter through the game.

I also like the battle plan that involves battle line vs skarbrand or other monster. Quite fun with my son - how quick can you kill daddy ?

[wayniac]

I have a very small AOS group and we rarely use any battleplans at all. It's too much hassle and 90% of the time people go straight to kill anyways, so they usually just say ****** it and play a kill points game. I've been trying to get people to use more plans and terrain rules (which everyone, including myself, often summarily forgets about once we start) to add variety.

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[RuneBrush]

39 minutes ago, wayniac said:

I have a very small AOS group and we rarely use any battleplans at all. It's too much hassle and 90% of the time people go straight to kill anyways, so they usually just say ****** it and play a kill points game. I've been trying to get people to use more plans and terrain rules (which everyone, including myself, often summarily forgets about once we start) to add variety.

That's a shame for you, I've found battleplans make AoS significantly more tactical and enjoyable, especially the ones that mean you can win even if most of your army is dead   Terrain can be a pain to remember, but I've found lots of practice and ensuring you've marked up the terrain helps a lot.

[EMMachine]

1 hour ago, wayniac said:

I have a very small AOS group and we rarely use any battleplans at all. It's too much hassle and 90% of the time people go straight to kill anyways, so they usually just say ****** it and play a kill points game. I've been trying to get people to use more plans and terrain rules (which everyone, including myself, often summarily forgets about once we start) to add variety.

Hm, sounds pretty bad to me.

I mostly like the idea of some battleplans that feel like you could tell a story with them while playing (not only the them "the player that kills more wins or "the player that captures more objectives wins"

It's interesting seeing battleplanes like "Breach the Line" (where you have to get to a point of the map thats behind the enemy), "Path of Retreat" (were your General has to reach a realmgate, with the enemy general, and retreat from the enemy army), Pre-emptive Strike (where one player has to defend a realmgate), (On Thin Ice) where you can decide to win the game by breaking the ice by attacking the battlefield so your opponent can't reach you, or parts of your army are falling to death) or that battleplan, which I forgot the name, where both players compete with hunting monsters and don't attack each other.

It feels more natural to me, if one player has to reach a goal and the other has to prevent that.

12 minutes ago, Auticus said:

We're in the middle of our summer campaign and I had a couple guys complain that battleplans outside of the GHB we're allowed, because "they aren't fair".

That sounds like people whose maingoal is to win, not to enjoy a game with friends. Even it's true, that the chances are different.

[chord]

I have played more non-matched play battleplans than other types. Mostly because I just say "Let's play this battleplan" and thankfuly many are open to trying it.

But there is one store where all they play is matched play battleplans. I don't shop or go there very often because I find it to be horribly boring.

And Times of War rules!  They are so much fun

[RuneBrush]

I've just had one thought.  In the past 30-odd years we've seen a rise in the number of computer games which have a set "the best way to undertake mission/objective A with player 1 is to do a, b, c".  

Do people feel that this approach has rolled over to tabletop games like AoS, where people try to hone the same by focusing on a handful of battleplans with a specific army list?

[Bradifer]

I feel like there is already so much variation in gameplay due to dice rolls, different armies, different lists between armies, play style, the terrain pieces used, deployment etc...

 

Even then having a set 6 game modes is nice. I like letting the players do the playing and not having to re-learn the rules every time this slowing the game down and opening the path for huge mistakes and that halfway through the game "ohhhhh I get it" moment.

 

We have all had a few of those with the 6 pitched battle plans, and it's nice to just focus on strategy and skill instead.

 

I think of it like the pitched battle plans are levels in a shooting game (OverWatch, GoldenEye, etc..) I wouldn't want to play 100 levels as I would spend so much time wandering around doing nothing or simply lost, instead of focusing on outplaying my opponents.

 

 

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[Sleboda]

2 hours ago, wayniac said:

I have a very small AOS group and we rarely use any battleplans at all. It's too much hassle and 90% of the time people go straight to kill anyways, so they usually just say ****** it and play a kill points game. I've been trying to get people to use more plans and terrain rules (which everyone, including myself, often summarily forgets about once we start) to add variety.

Sent from my SM-G930T using Tapatalk
 

No offense, more in the category of "insight" really, but this really puts a different light on many of your other posts. I wonder if Killax and some others are in the same boat.

Playing only "kill" will give you a very different opinion of the game.

For instance, in WFB 8th, if I played just killkillkill, my TK were hopeless and the games were boring and unbalanced. When I played Watchtower or Blood & Glory it was another matter. 

Scenarios/battleplans matter. They are part of the balance.  Skip them and you are only playing part of the game.

Do you use turn limits or play to the last model?

[Sleboda]

2 hours ago, Auticus said:

people only want to play what they think is "tournament-official" and that is the matched play core six. 

 This is a highly disappointing,  but accurate,  reality. 

[EMMachine]

1 hour ago, Auticus said:

In my experience, 99 out of 100 players main goal is to win yes.  That is how they are enjoying the game.  Additionally they want a global standard on the type of games (battleplans) played so that they can discuss it on forums and it has a common context. 

And the 1 person is a Narrative Player or Roleplayer? I was talking with a friend about playing the game more storydiven and how there could be a posibility of getting another form of balance (because most stories where one player was tabled in two turns would suck), instead of playing only profit-oriented so only using the strongest units of the armies. He said, that I'm the only one he knows who would play that way . I don't like it anymore, when everygame is just an anonymous win or lose counter and many pitched battle battleplans feel more like an Blood Bowl Arena Fight instead of something, that could be type of a story (in that case I perhaps evolved to some sort of Roleplayer in the last years).

 

1 hour ago, Auticus said:

Talking about how you won against your buddy while playing a scenario no one touches is not as rewarding as talking about how you played against your buddy's tournament list in a tournament sanctioned scenario that everyone else plays as well because the former has a context that no one else can share but the latter is common.

Or put another way its like winning a football game playing on a 50 yard long field when the standard is 100 yards.  

Why is that important?  Thats something that has been around for around twenty years now.  

By reading that I get the feeling that the tournament community made hude damage in the tabletopcommunity if efficiency is taken much higher rated that creativity.

51 minutes ago, Auticus said:

Its also hard to master the game when you play several dozen scenarios, because you don't spend enough time on one scenario mastering it.  I find that game-mastery is a primary objective of the vast majority of people I know that play and is one reason why they don't want to deviate from "the core-6"

Hm, I think to master the game it's more important to know some tactics like in https://aos-tactics.com/

Playing more different scenarios means, that you have to be more flexible how you get your goal, instead of playing the game in autopilot because every game plays the same.

 

[wayniac]

58 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

No offense, more in the category of "insight" really, but this really puts a different light on many of your other posts. I wonder if Killax and some others are in the same boat.

Playing only "kill" will give you a very different opinion of the game.

For instance, in WFB 8th, if I played just killkillkill, my TK were hopeless and the games were boring and unbalanced. When I played Watchtower or Blood & Glory it was another matter. 

Scenarios/battleplans matter. They are part of the balance.  Skip them and you are only playing part of the game.

Do you use turn limits or play to the last model?

Usually last model (or concession) or until someone has to leave, at which point it's "Well I killed more, so I win".  The way it was described is "Kill is also a valid scenario" which is true, but it's also a boring/one-sided one.  But even when I use a battleplan, it often gets ignored in favour of killing the enemy anyways.  Same with terrain; we are limited in what terrain we have to either official GW terrain (if playing at a GW store) or a mishmash of mostly 40k-esque (think ruins) or like pillar type terrain (like rocky outcroppings) and some small forests at the FLGS, so for example nothing truly LOS blocking.  It absolutely does indicate why i feel the way I do about a lot of things, because we are limited in what we have and our tables often have little to no LOS blocking terrain because we just don't have it available.  It's a little frustrating, especially when I try to throw a bit of a narrative around and its ignored.  For example, my friends were doing a 2v2 like ~3000 point per side game on Sunday (I was not feeling that great so I didn't participate), and I set up the terrain to be like a lot of rocky terrain, and was waxing about the "narrative" being that the forces of Nurgle and Tzeentch (i.e. one team) had put aside their differences to pillage an area in the Realm of Beasts, but encountered a nomadic tribe of Ogors (i.e. one of the other players) and had aroused the spirits of the slain (i.e. the other player with her Nighthaunt).  The response was basically "Well chaos versus anyone else, that's really all the narrative we need" and I stopped even suggesting that they use a scenario (it was basically the Fog of War one without the random teams) because I knew it would just turn into who can kill the most.

[Nin Win]

Skirmish has been a god send for me for getting people to do more scenarios.  They're already going in knowing that we're not playing the "normal" way so they tend to be up for whatever.  Have a gaming evening on Friday with someone who has never done skirmish and we should get through the first three scenarios in the skirmish book.

I'm working on going through battleplans in other places and adjusting as needed for skirmish, but I must admit I was truly shocked to see just how much game content is going unused.  I saw it in the new 40k as well.  There's this huge section of scenarios and special rules for certain locations (like times of war) and people just post on the local FB group looking for 2000 point matched play games.  And it's not that the matched play scenarios are something they enjoy more, they have never played any of the others.  I know what's going to happen though, some tournament organizer is going to grab stuff from the other sections of the book and they'll go to that event and then rave about how good the event was and applaud the organizers for their bravery for innovating.  I catch an undercurrent of that all the time listening to AoS podcasts whenever people report on tournament they really liked.

[Criti]

The Tampa Bay Wargaming Assocation has recently started going through a lot of the off-the-beaten-path battleplans as we gear for our upcoming narrative map campaign,  and the results have been very promising. 

Everyone is having a good time and more stories are being told of epic in game events (such as last week when Archaon's Slayer of Kings managed to double 6 off a big model every time he got into combat) rather than citing win/loss records.  We particularly enjoy the Realm of Fire Time of War sheet to go hand in hand with our scenarios. 

[wayniac]

51 minutes ago, Nin Win said:

Skirmish has been a god send for me for getting people to do more scenarios.  They're already going in knowing that we're not playing the "normal" way so they tend to be up for whatever.  Have a gaming evening on Friday with someone who has never done skirmish and we should get through the first three scenarios in the skirmish book.

I'm working on going through battleplans in other places and adjusting as needed for skirmish, but I must admit I was truly shocked to see just how much game content is going unused.  I saw it in the new 40k as well.  There's this huge section of scenarios and special rules for certain locations (like times of war) and people just post on the local FB group looking for 2000 point matched play games.  And it's not that the matched play scenarios are something they enjoy more, they have never played any of the others.  I know what's going to happen though, some tournament organizer is going to grab stuff from the other sections of the book and they'll go to that event and then rave about how good the event was and applaud the organizers for their bravery for innovating.  I catch an undercurrent of that all the time listening to AoS podcasts whenever people report on tournament they really liked.

Yep.  Because if it's not Matched Play, it can't be balanced so is "unfair" to play against.  That's usually the attitude I see in a lot of places; matched play "has" to be fair, ergo everything must "not" be fair and can't be trusted because it isn't two armies lining up across from each other.

[Tiger]

3 hours ago, RuneBrush said:

I've just had one thought.  In the past 30-odd years we've seen a rise in the number of computer games which have a set "the best way to undertake mission/objective A with player 1 is to do a, b, c".  

Do people feel that this approach has rolled over to tabletop games like AoS, where people try to hone the same by focusing on a handful of battleplans with a specific army list?

Not just games but most people's approach to life in general.

[Trout]

4 hours ago, Auticus said:

There are only a couple of us that use battleplans that are not the matched play ones from the GHB.  The other battleplans might as well not exist to a lot of people.

The top two reasons are:

* people don't want to buy books.  The GHB is the only book they likely own.  Now that takes us to #2 (because there are other battleplans in the GHB not matched play)

* people only want to play what they think is "tournament-official" and that is the matched play core six. 

We're in the middle of our summer campaign and I had a couple guys complain that battleplans outside of the GHB we're allowed, because "they aren't fair".

Personally, I do want to buy books. What I don't want to do is spend $60+ on a book that contains mostly story and art. I would gladly pay half that price for a book that contained just the game content and skipped the fluff and art. I don't know if that's really one of the top two reasons or not, but I just wanted to add that slight adjustment: it may not be that people don't want to buy books, but rather that the books are not a good value for those uninterested in the fluff (which may be a significant number of players, perhaps even most).

[Sleboda]

1 hour ago, wayniac said:

Usually last model (or concession) or until someone has to leave, at which point it's "Well I killed more, so I win".  The way it was described is "Kill is also a valid scenario" which is true, but it's also a boring/one-sided one.  But even when I use a battleplan, it often gets ignored in favour of killing the enemy anyways.

 

It absolutely does indicate why i feel the way I do about a lot of things, because we are limited in what we have and our tables often have little to no LOS blocking terrain because we just don't have it available.  It's a little frustrating, especially when I try to throw a bit of a narrative around and its ignored.

 

 The response was basically "Well chaos versus anyone else, that's really all the narrative we need" and I stopped even suggesting that they use a scenario (it was basically the Fog of War one without the random teams) because I knew it would just turn into who can kill the most.

Wow, man.  Just wow.  Thanks for the insight/honesty. I truly feel for you and will account for that in other responses to you. 

Need a hug?

 

Damn, that sucks. Ppl really need to stop treating AoS this way.  

I wonder how many other "hidden" experiences other posters here have that are coloring their posts without everyone knowing. 

Wow.

[wayniac]

Probably It is frustrating, I mean I'm not super into the narrative, but I like a theme.  I try to make the table look at least something resembling more than a random collection of terrain (like the aforementioned "lots of desert mesas" realm of beasts table) but it's hard when it's limited supply and not much interest in it.  It does frustrating me a bit because I like to play games "properly"

[chord]

I felt the same way about the campaign books.

Then I bought GodBeasts (because it had the most battleplans).  After reading through it I realized my folly.  Those things are great.  Sure its a lot of artwork, but wow, it really helps get one jazzed to play narrative style games!  Additionally really fleshes out the lore.

Then I picked up some more.

[Sleboda]

4 minutes ago, Auticus said:

They only care about the mechanics, and if you strip the mechanics out of the book, they expect that to be a small pamphlet for $5 - $15.  The books in their current format don't appeal to the vast majority of people that i know.

If they sold both... the books in their current format, and a cheap pamphlet of only the mechanics/rules... I'd honestly expect for every 100 that sold, 99 would be the cheap pamphlet.

GW tried this with 40K codexes a few editions back. It was a major misstep and was quickly corrected. Yes, we need the rules, but I think ppl don't fully appreciate how much the other stuff actually matters to them as well, even pseudo-subconsciously. 

GW's rules writing has never been a strong suit. It's the fluff and art that grounds us and keeps us, even if we don't think about it. 

[Trout]

5 minutes ago, Auticus said:

Yeah.  When I say that people don't want to buy books, it is as you say.  They don't want books with art and fluff.  Or rather, they don't want to pay for the art and fluff.  They only care about the mechanics, and if you strip the mechanics out of the book, they expect that to be a small pamphlet for $5 - $15.  The books in their current format don't appeal to the vast majority of people that i know.

If they sold both... the books in their current format, and a cheap pamphlet of only the mechanics/rules... I'd honestly expect for every 100 that sold, 99 would be the cheap pamphlet.

Yeah.

 

I think in the future, the app will make this a moot point. They already sell just the game content for $20-$25 through the app. But many of us are old enough that we still need physical copies. I don't think that will be a problem for the kids getting into the hobby today.

[Trout]

16 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

It's the fluff and art that grounds us and keeps us, even if we don't think about it. 

The fluff that we never read?

 

I highly doubt that.

 

If GW released all the game content from all of the campaign books on hardcopy for $20-$30 a pop today, I would pick up a copy of every book at the store tomorrow.

 

My local store can't keep Skirmish in stock. It's constantly sold out despite being restocked weekly. It's a perfect model of how a campaign book can work. It has a story, a series of battleplans, some special campaign rules, all packaged together at a reasonable price. They can't keep the thing in stock.