RAW17 - Critique

[Mitzy]

Evening All,

If you are anything like me you are feeling pretty blue right about now... After a year of planning RAW17 - Leviathans is over. Jimbo, Ming, Steve and myself just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported the event and made it such a rip-roaring weekend.

We litterally couldn't have asked for a better bunch of players to have made it to the event. You all literally made the weekend for us.

We have emailed you all and would ask that you all complete the short sharp survey to help us make RAW18 even better still.

But should you wish to add anything else please do so here.

Cheers Mitzy on behalf of EatMingsFoote 

[Ollie Grimwood]

I posted a series of photos from the final game on Twitter I feel they some up the weekend well 

I thought this was pretty much most AoS thing I’d seen happen in a game.  Then this happened

which I’m sure we can all agree is an epic AoS moment. However I was yet to be surprised by this 

Yep that’s two Rogue Idols having a punch up on top of a Realmbeast while a Mawkrusha rides on its head and yes those Wrathmongers did get killed in combat by the Realmbeast ? (with awesome results)

This was the story of the weekend just when you thought you’d reached the AoS pinnacle along came a whole load more AoS.  Very much a case of “we heard you like AoS so we AoS’d your AoS” 

One may pose the question, “when does more AoS become too much AoS?” 

The answer would be “never you berk and shame on you for even thinking it”

This is the sort of thing AoS was made for.  

Of course balance was an issue, so we used blutac to make sure the Mawkrusha didn’t fall off ?

[Paul Buckler]

Well a day to calm down and return to normality.  What can I say but Bravo chaps, another stellar RAW performance.  From Friday night to Sunday evening it was a great event.

Top notch refreshments as always, Tea/Coffee fruit etc every morning, enough to last the day (suspect you're still eating the apples now!).

Of the 2 Days the pizza went down the best, Fish and Chips was decent, but think I am spoiled by the standard we get locally.

Gaming was truly awesome, loved the skirmish, probably the best single player games for me.  

Triumph and Treachery ran really smoothly finished mostly well before time giving us time to tidy away faster.

Have to say my highlight was the Saturday evening Leviathan clash, that was so much fun.  A great way to keep the group together on the night.

Changes for next year - Hmm its tricky because everything went so well.  As well as the intros maybe some sort of post event short 'summary' for the players to send in and publish, to wrap things up (gonna see what I can write this week, post it up in the main thread). 

Would really like to see you guys get more involved in the games somehow as well, possibly a running chart of each players 'karma' and help or hinderance arriving via each NEO'S Favour. (So destruction helps those fighting, or punishes the pacifists etc).

But overall it's a 9.5/10 for me (Perfect 10 would mean nothing could improve, and you always want something to get better!)

 

 

[Untimention]

RAW for me is now my 1 AOS event for the year and the only AOS gaming I'll be getting in so I'm looking forward to RAW18 being announced. 

For next year I'd love to see

- TO's being more involved in the games
- Explanation of the missions from the TO's before we start.... lots of people played missions/ rules differently over the weekend interpreting the pack differently 
- It would be nice to publish the final score standings for all attendees so they can see how they stood overall 
- Understand gaming scores aren't the focus and getting 1 draw and 3 losses, it wouldn't of affected me but I think it could rank a little higher 

Great things from this year include:

- Monstrous Arena - I'd love to see this return in some form next year even if it means just bringing a contender 
- Best games for me were skirmish and T&T

[HobbyHammer]

RAAAAWWWWW! Yo guys! 

Firstly and for mostly, what an event, again. You guys somehow went bigger than last year, which is ridiculous in itself. The tables looked superb, the atmosphere was great, the players all played (well as far as I could see) in the spirit of narrative.. (except one incident which I won't go into, as it was all to do with player and not a critique or the event).

Of course there are a few small critiques but please keep reading above as you read through them as it was a majorly amazing event! 

• Monstrous Arena was a genius idea and great addition to the event, although, being in the evening and pretty fast and furious really drained me on the Saturday. Last year, the Saturday eve was my fav when there was a crowd of like 15 of us eating and drinking at the pub opposite, really wound me down from the day. So thats one small critique. Maybe 7 battle rounds wasn't needed, but of course this was the first time you had seen this in play. 
• Another C&C for the battle plans. This is by far the hardest thing to do at a narrative event, try and get everyone on board for the narrative and not just winning the battleplan criteria. The battle plans didn't feel like there was much story progression, I of course understand that we were growing and capturing our leviathans as the main story but it was difficult to focus on story and not the win condition of the battleplan. Last year, between rounds you read through the battleplans and really got people in the story mood, perhaps this was all that was needed more. The battle plans in themselves were great and really good fun, just the links between them seemed missing, if that makes sense.
• For the Custom Characters, there were a few too few options of upgrading  and they didn't really feel personal. Last year the Legend model felt very customised and there were stories (Like my game against Andy Burton) where the legend took out multiple monsters. I didn't feel that I could create these stories with my Hunter or Leviathan this year. They just died too quickly in the game if they charged into things. 
• Finally, the T&T game. Now the Realmbeasts were ridiculous. Like literally, most were better than any terrain even at WHW and you guys deserve a medal just for thinking of doing stuff like that. Whether it was the long day before or something else, but it really felt hard to get into it from the beginning. It didn't help that a lot of people had never played this style before and people like myself really had to explain every move and phase 8 times over before it stuck. The bookkeeping also really slowed play down, factors like being able to ambush and attack the realm best in every phase also slowed play. (But of course we would never of known this without it actually happening). 7 -8 players was just too many in my opinion. Personally I would have preferred 4 player T&T using the same board space. So the board would have 8 players on it, but there would be 2 different games, this would have made the games quicker and easier to manage. T&T is fantastic at a narrative event though and needs to be there! Major kudos for doing it though, I wouldn't have had the balls to try a whole day 7 player game and it did certainly create some fantastic narrative and got people in major group participation which I suppose is the point. 

What was great to see was the attention to detail across the board, the score sheets were simple and effective, the complexity level was down from last year (which is a good thing), the realms looked just as good, if not better, the quality of painted armies there was up 3x from last year. People embraced what you wanted to achieve and most importantly... I won so.... haha! 

RAW will always be my No1 love as an event. Nothing else even comes close.

Cant wait for next year, Im going to go Steve Foote style on it. 

[HadrielCaine]

RAW team for president!

Awesome event chaps. Have a listen to Hard 6 Episode 70 (!) I tell Jay how I got on and give some critique. http://www.hard6.co.uk/

In short-

RAW= yay

Skirmish= BOOOO

Monstrous area was awesome!

Food was great. Fruit and tea etc. is such a nice and helpful touch.

I think the strength of Narrative events in general is that in encourages everyone to just have fun and be generous with their opponents. I loved all of my games which is weird because I also hated skirmish (thanks Ollie and Owyn for making them fun). Everyone buying into the ethos is the symptom of an excellent event.

Extra huge thanks to the realm of beasts team!

See you next year... unless there's skirmish games again. I'll show up on the Sunday otherwise... 

[Dan Hadert]

Hi guys,

Sorry it took so long to leave some feedback.

Overall I had an awesome time and Tom and I are gutted we couldn't  make the monstrous arena.

It was a huge step up from last year which is quite and achievement.  So thank you for all your hard work! If we could book for next year we would immediately.

Im going to mirror Untimentions and say that I think everyone would love to see more TO interaction on the table, you guys are kings of narrative and it would have been cool to see you directly steer some on the tabletop.

Painting wise I am extremely proud of my Best hunter trophy and its on my desk currently and Im looking forward to pushing myself with my project for next yeah

The only thing I would change, would be to change the best army selection back to 'coolest army'  (which I love compared to best painted or best army and set last year apart) I was obviously delighted with an army nomination, but I was gutted that a couple of armies that I thought should definitely have been up for 'coolest army' didn't get the opportunity to showcase themselves. And I would hate for those people to be discouraged from  making the effort again. I understand that 'Coolest' is still very subjective but I think it helps people with there voting choice and the judges selection. That said the top 3 armies would have been in the same place anyway so congratulations to those guys they were all stunning.

Overall my best tournament experience of the year, thank you.