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I agree that everyone can play the way they want. But on the other side I also have to say that many competitive players and the competitive mentality drives away narrative gamers from the game. You can even read this in the comments. There are people who want to play narrative but most of the players in the clubs don't want to play with them or don't like narrative play. 

So I can really emphasize with the people getting a little bit sick of the competitive mindset. It does not mean that me and those people don't want people to play competitively anymore. It is just because the competitive crowd often makes it seem like only their opinions matter. The first thing GW always has to do is "balance" things. But this might not be the same thing that we narrative players want. We might want fluffy rules that portray the character of our armies, which might not be "balanced" in the end.

Sometimes you can satify both kind of players, but sometimes GW also needs to choose to satisfy another half of the players, while they have to neglect the other group, just because their needs are contradictory to each other. 

I think some of us just have the feeling that they will never be heard, because the discussions about balance, lists, etc. overshadow any narrative or fluff discussions. 

For me it is a small fear, because I have seen this happen with many games I played. At the beginning of these games there was always a small and engaged minority of players who wrote stories, created art and shared their experiences and love for the game. Then after the game gets more popular and also gets a huge influx of players it often gets more and more focussed on competition and balance. And then after that some players who loved the game before have to move away from it.

Please don't get me wrong. I want everyone to play the way they want. I want competitive players enjoy this game as well as narrative players. I just want that GW listens to both groups and caters to their wishes. At the moment they do also do that by providing content for everyone. But they also now integrated things into the core rules because of the competitive crowd, which influence every playstyle for example.

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The only thing that I can think of is that narrative players should create their own narrative facebooks and narrative forums and enforce rules of discussion.

Any general discussion forum on a game will always be dominated by competitive talk unless you enforce otherwise.  But if you do that I'd have to wonder how popular the forum would be?

Please don't get me wrong. I want everyone to play the way they want. I want competitive players enjoy this game as well as narrative players. I just want that GW listens to both groups and caters to their wishes. At the moment they do also do that by providing content for everyone. But they also now integrated things into the core rules because of the competitive crowd, which influence every playstyle for example.

I don't see how the core game can cater to both unfortunately.  The competitive crowd influences Games Workshop because they are the most vocal, and it would be assumed the ones that are voting with their wallets more.  Thats just the assumption, but when AOS was released it was as I understand it 100% all about narrative play, and it struggled.  Once match play and tournament play came out, life returned to the game.

I think thats why people have a hard time wanting gw to cater to narrative play so much when its not something a lot of people really seem to want, at least based on what you read online.  I know that at our Games Workshop store there was no AOS ever until the general's handbook came out and even then the game hardly had anyone playing until this latest edition came out.

The inclusion of narrative rules into the core rules is, for me, a bother simply because we do not use those rules and it makes the ruleset cluttered.  I dont like having to have more than one book and as seems to be a common story, the inclusion of all of these extra layers is either turning people off, or they are just ignoring them anyway.

A better scenario I think would be for Games Workshop to keep the core rules geared toward a standard way to play (matched play), and then release a narrative book that has all of these extra narrative layers.  That way the competitive or matched players only need one book, and then the narrative players can buy the narrative book and add whatever they want to their game.  I think that would keep things less cluttered and would focus attention better personally.  

I really like the new edition of the game, but the one thing that has bothered me is that there are a lot of rules that events aren't using jammed into the core rules and we have to have three different books to get to the standard rules.

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1 hour ago, Infeston said:

I agree that everyone can play the way they want. But on the other side I also have to say that many competitive players and the competitive mentality drives away narrative gamers from the game. You can even read this in the comments. There are people who want to play narrative but most of the players in the clubs don't want to play with them or don't like narrative play. 

So I can really emphasize with the people getting a little bit sick of the competitive mindset. It does not mean that me and those people don't want people to play competitively anymore. It is just because the competitive crowd often makes it seem like only their opinions matter. The first thing GW always has to do is "balance" things. But this might not be the same thing that we narrative players want. We might want fluffy rules that portray the character of our armies, which might not be "balanced" in the end.

Sometimes you can satify both kind of players, but sometimes GW also needs to choose to satisfy another half of the players, while they have to neglect the other group, just because their needs are contradictory to each other. 

I think some of us just have the feeling that they will never be heard, because the discussions about balance, lists, etc. overshadow any narrative or fluff discussions. 

For me it is a small fear, because I have seen this happen with many games I played. At the beginning of these games there was always a small and engaged minority of players who wrote stories, created art and shared their experiences and love for the game. Then after the game gets more popular and also gets a huge influx of players it often gets more and more focussed on competition and balance. And then after that some players who loved the game before have to move away from it.

Please don't get me wrong. I want everyone to play the way they want. I want competitive players enjoy this game as well as narrative players. I just want that GW listens to both groups and caters to their wishes. At the moment they do also do that by providing content for everyone. But they also now integrated things into the core rules because of the competitive crowd, which influence every playstyle for example.

Frankly, narrative players benefit from competitive balance. A well balanced system (with imperfect balance) benefits all players. Having a variety of viable factions (and letting all factions be such) benefits all players. To me it boggles the mind when people who focus on narrative go "Nyah! ****** competetive players! They suck!" when.... the balance they want is beneficial to everyone. Specifically since almost everyone plays straight up matched play rules no matter what they're doing, using points and rules limiters. I wouldn't want to be able to cast the same spell over and over and over no matter what kind of game I'm playing. That would be as broken as allowing someone to stack the same command trait over and over. Most people playing narrative based games, like open war or firestorm or a custom campaign, recognize this. So, fixing the balance of armies and closing exploits does nothing but benefit everyone.

 

Gw is also clearly NOT ignoring the fluff or narrative and indeed strongly incorporating it into their development. Indeed, there is very little to criticize the way they've added narrative into the game. I dunno what else you want here. GW is doing a good job. I may have quibbles about how developed the setting is (It's not developed enough for my tastes, but that's a time and not an effort issue, which gets better every passing year.)

 

what, exactly, do narrative players want that they aren't getting? And what do competetive players want that a a narrative player would hate?

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13 minutes ago, stratigo said:

what, exactly, do narrative players want that they aren't getting? And what do competetive players want that a a narrative player would hate?

I think this discussion is less about what GW has been doing and more about how the community is interacting with itself.  At least that was my main takeaway from what @Infeston posted.

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1 hour ago, Skabnoze said:

I think this discussion is less about what GW has been doing and more about how the community is interacting with itself.  At least that was my main takeaway from what @Infeston posted.

He literally said narrative players don’t always want balance, with the idea that it is somehow fluffy to have a bad army. There’s often a sense of pride with people who go “my army is bad and I am proud of it because I don’t do competitions” like that being competetive is some sort of stain. They’re just as bad as the people who build a mean list, try and essentially cheat with it and rules lawyer, and not pick every single inch of their opponent. As someone who straddles the fence between competetive in that the people I play are very good and go to competitions, and not, as I don’t go to competitions myself and would love to play more firestorm campaigns.  

 

The ultimate thing most competitive players want is nothing but a good thing for everyone playing the game. Of course they can be wrong about how to get there, and maybe often are, but the end goal is a better game for everyone and I am boggled whenever a player bristles at it like balance is some sort of zero sum game where every thought a gw dev puts into balancing the game is taking away from some sort of ephemeral narrative thing. Which is laughable. GW has NEVER interwoven its narrative into the game stronger than what soul wars and malign portents represented. They are knocking it out of the park is presenting a developing narrative AND adding rules to reflect it

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1 minute ago, stratigo said:

 

 

The ultimate thing most competitive players want is nothing but a good thing for everyone playing the game. Of course they can be wrong about how to get there, and maybe often are, but the end goal is a better game for everyone and I am boggled whenever a player bristles at it like balance is some sort of zero sum game where every thought a gw dev puts into balancing the game is taking away from some sort of ephemeral narrative thing. Which is laughable. GW has NEVER interwoven its narrative into the game stronger than what soul wars and malign portents represented. They are knocking it out of the park is presenting a developing narrative AND adding rules to reflect it

In a world of limited time and resources this cannot be true. The more time and effort GW put into play-testing etc (which this thread has been banging on about plenty) the less would be going into producing background stories and interesting narrative scenarios. They have a budget, spending it all on keeping one (probably minority) part of the audience happy inevitably takes things away from the rest.

Balance is rarely directly bad for non-competitive players but nor is it really of much substantial value to a true narrative player. The time, effort and resources that might be dragged away from other things to chase the chimera[1] of balance would however negatively impact the very existence of things those players value. Where balance could be actively harmful for  narrative games is where rules that have a fun potential would get removed because they might also have potential for abuse - the abuse is a non-issue for narrative games while the loss of fun options is definitely an issue.

[1] The balance in a game of this kind will never realistically satisfy a certain type of person. Although written In a 40K context i probably could not improve on this article for the limitations of calling for better balance http://variancehammer.com/2018/06/04/how-would-nasa-balance-40k/

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It has been a couple pages since there was talk about actual balance changes and improvements GW could make.

This thread is going nowhere anymore and this part of the board feels like groundhog day every couple weeks... it's not like this discussion was held like a million times across several boards (and over several systems), with the same arguments, back and forth ad nauseam and without any hope of reaching consensus.

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5 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

The only thing that I can think of is that narrative players should create their own narrative facebooks and narrative forums and enforce rules of discussion.

Any general discussion forum on a game will always be dominated by competitive talk unless you enforce otherwise.  But if you do that I'd have to wonder how popular the forum would be?

 

 

I don't see how the core game can cater to both unfortunately.  The competitive crowd influences Games Workshop because they are the most vocal, and it would be assumed the ones that are voting with their wallets more.  Thats just the assumption, but when AOS was released it was as I understand it 100% all about narrative play, and it struggled.  Once match play and tournament play came out, life returned to the game.

I think thats why people have a hard time wanting gw to cater to narrative play so much when its not something a lot of people really seem to want, at least based on what you read online.  I know that at our Games Workshop store there was no AOS ever until the general's handbook came out and even then the game hardly had anyone playing until this latest edition came out.

The inclusion of narrative rules into the core rules is, for me, a bother simply because we do not use those rules and it makes the ruleset cluttered.  I dont like having to have more than one book and as seems to be a common story, the inclusion of all of these extra layers is either turning people off, or they are just ignoring them anyway.

A better scenario I think would be for Games Workshop to keep the core rules geared toward a standard way to play (matched play), and then release a narrative book that has all of these extra narrative layers.  That way the competitive or matched players only need one book, and then the narrative players can buy the narrative book and add whatever they want to their game.  I think that would keep things less cluttered and would focus attention better personally.  

I really like the new edition of the game, but the one thing that has bothered me is that there are a lot of rules that events aren't using jammed into the core rules and we have to have three different books to get to the standard rules.

The issue I have with it is that they absolutely COULD cater to both. They just can't do it at the same time. They have to be willing to create more differentiation between matched and narrative play because the direction they're heading risks smothering both.

Look at the realm rules. These are a jumbled mess of terrible ideas. Some of them seem to be 100% intended for narrative only, Monstrous beast from Ghur, Banishment, Mirrorpool, the entire Ulgu realmscape feature table. These abilities are either SO random or SO powerful or BOTH that the using them means that your realm is the biggest deciding factor in who wins and the players are mostly just there to push the game along. This means these games are a great laugh down at the club and will create cool stories to tell later, but they're absolutely useless in determining who the better player is. They also lead to situations where players walk away from the table righteously angry because he was playing Slaanesh and just so happened to roll up 'fecund whateverit'scalled' on Ghyran and got absolutely OBLITERATED because running is the entire POINT of that army and now they can't anymore. That's the equivalent of a Stormcast or Nighthaunt player trying to win a game where every unit was treated as having a -- save characteristic. MOST of their points costs are tied up in that ability and now it's just gone like a ****** on the wind.

Some of the other rules are super boring and unlikely to have any significant impact on games at all. 90% of all people will forget to even use these at least once or twice an event and a pretty significant proportion of players won't even bother with them. If they don't give you a significant advantage, why waste your time and energy on something as stupid as 'on a 6 one unit in cover takes a mortal wound!'. These add nothing but additional randomness and more rules to remember to matched play and cannot POSSIBLY be interesting for narrative play.

GW need to push matched play and narrative play further apart. Not go for these crazy amalgamous abomination they're working toward now.

And for Xasz, you want some balance improvements? Here you go: Ban EVERYTHING from the realm rules, relics included and just leave the endless spells. Then ban balewind and Umbral spellportal, and increase Cogs and geminids by 20pts. Then increase the summoning cost of all seraphon units by 6 and push the 14-17 roll for the engine of the gods to 18 and space the lower results out to compensate.  Finally, rule of one for command abilities only lets you use one of each per turn.

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4 hours ago, tokek said:

In a world of limited time and resources this cannot be true. The more time and effort GW put into play-testing etc (which this thread has been banging on about plenty) the less would be going into producing background stories and interesting narrative scenarios. They have a budget, spending it all on keeping one (probably minority) part of the audience happy inevitably takes things away from the rest.

Balance is rarely directly bad for non-competitive players but nor is it really of much substantial value to a true narrative player. The time, effort and resources that might be dragged away from other things to chase the chimera[1] of balance would however negatively impact the very existence of things those players value. Where balance could be actively harmful for  narrative games is where rules that have a fun potential would get removed because they might also have potential for abuse - the abuse is a non-issue for narrative games while the loss of fun options is definitely an issue.

[1] The balance in a game of this kind will never realistically satisfy a certain type of person. Although written In a 40K context i probably could not improve on this article for the limitations of calling for better balance http://variancehammer.com/2018/06/04/how-would-nasa-balance-40k/

See, this is the epitome of my problem. The imagination that this is some sort of zero sum game where every second balancing the game means that the narrative must go to ****** and GW completely just forgets lore or backstory and deletes the setting.

 

Balance is good for everyone. Everyone benefits from a better balanced game. If you think abuse is a non issue for narrative, I question if you have ever played a narrative game really. The idea that you waggle your fingers and go "oooooh, narrative" like you're casting a spell and abusive rules suddenly cease to matter and people won't take advantage of them is kind of laughable. Unless you're okay with someone pulling off auto win combos and just go "well, sucks to be you, but narrative right, we had fun?". Or you could, as narrative often encourages you, add in your own changes and scenarios that help shift balance (in whichever way may be most thematic or fun). Which, *legasp* tournament organizers ALSO do. Mien Gott! It's almost as if shifting and playing with the balance is important for both narrative and competitive gamers. And often towards the same goal of a better balanced system, though the last stand kind of scenarios are fun in of themselves.

 

Do you really consider infinite ripper exploding attacks a fun option for your narrative game? Is it narrative that your great big monster ridden by a hero of the ages got pecked to death by three high pterodactyls because their attacks explode on and on to infinity. That's not very narrative to me. A good narrative would see your great hero matching his blades against the vile demonic monstrosity, not dragged down because a Grot with 64 damage poked him. I can't think of anything LESS narratively climatic than a stardrake getting merced by a handful of grots. Unless you're going for a farce, that's not a great narrative to tell.

 

And you can't just go "Oh no one would do that" because, hell yes they would. Is the other option simply ostracizing players who abuse the holes in the rules? I suppose you could do that, but man that sucks for a person who just wants to play a good game. But mostly you sneer and go "oh, well, You're competitive. You have no place among us narrative players" like it's some real divide in the players. Like, are you serious? The people who exclusively play events and tournaments and the people who exclusively play narrative battles are very rare (and there's more the former than the latter). Most play both. And balance is good for everyone.

 

1 hour ago, Bellfree said:

The issue I have with it is that they absolutely COULD cater to both. They just can't do it at the same time. They have to be willing to create more differentiation between matched and narrative play because the direction they're heading risks smothering both.

Look at the realm rules. These are a jumbled mess of terrible ideas. Some of them seem to be 100% intended for narrative only, Monstrous beast from Ghur, Banishment, Mirrorpool, the entire Ulgu realmscape feature table. These abilities are either SO random or SO powerful or BOTH that the using them means that your realm is the biggest deciding factor in who wins and the players are mostly just there to push the game along. This means these games are a great laugh down at the club and will create cool stories to tell later, but they're absolutely useless in determining who the better player is. They also lead to situations where players walk away from the table righteously angry because he was playing Slaanesh and just so happened to roll up 'fecund whateverit'scalled' on Ghyran and got absolutely OBLITERATED because running is the entire POINT of that army and now they can't anymore. That's the equivalent of a Stormcast or Nighthaunt player trying to win a game where every unit was treated as having a -- save characteristic. MOST of their points costs are tied up in that ability and now it's just gone like a ****** on the wind.

Some of the other rules are super boring and unlikely to have any significant impact on games at all. 90% of all people will forget to even use these at least once or twice an event and a pretty significant proportion of players won't even bother with them. If they don't give you a significant advantage, why waste your time and energy on something as stupid as 'on a 6 one unit in cover takes a mortal wound!'. These add nothing but additional randomness and more rules to remember to matched play and cannot POSSIBLY be interesting for narrative play.

GW need to push matched play and narrative play further apart. Not go for these crazy amalgamous abomination they're working toward now.

And for Xasz, you want some balance improvements? Here you go: Ban EVERYTHING from the realm rules, relics included and just leave the endless spells. Then ban balewind and Umbral spellportal, and increase Cogs and geminids by 20pts. Then increase the summoning cost of all seraphon units by 6 and push the 14-17 roll for the engine of the gods to 18 and space the lower results out to compensate.  Finally, rule of one for command abilities only lets you use one of each per turn.

realm rules are a fine lark. Some people dig the randomness. I disagree with tournaments requiring them *stares at NOVA*, but otherwise, eh? Since I am rarely motivated to play my dwarves, and my local community tends to avoid these sort of random shenanigans, I likely will not get to play with them much, if at all. But they aren't, like, awful. What's silly is the idea they're meant for matched play. They aren't and anyone trying to work them into matched play is just making a mistake, which is why, after this summer, I am predicting it will see very little play, and none at tournaments. I'm honestly not sure if Endless spells are here to stay at all, firestorm kind of whiffed the landing sadly, even though I like what they did there after they closed the loophole.

 

 

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5 hours ago, tokek said:

In a world of limited time and resources this cannot be true. The more time and effort GW put into play-testing etc (which this thread has been banging on about plenty) the less would be going into producing background stories and interesting narrative scenarios. They have a budget, spending it all on keeping one (probably minority) part of the audience happy inevitably takes things away from the rest.

Balance is rarely directly bad for non-competitive players but nor is it really of much substantial value to a true narrative player. The time, effort and resources that might be dragged away from other things to chase the chimera[1] of balance would however negatively impact the very existence of things those players value. Where balance could be actively harmful for  narrative games is where rules that have a fun potential would get removed because they might also have potential for abuse - the abuse is a non-issue for narrative games while the loss of fun options is definitely an issue.

[1] The balance in a game of this kind will never realistically satisfy a certain type of person. Although written In a 40K context i probably could not improve on this article for the limitations of calling for better balance http://variancehammer.com/2018/06/04/how-would-nasa-balance-40k/

Dude, I’m not sure about anyone else but I don’t want a mathematician writing fluff nor do I want a writer trying to plot a curve of effectiveness.  That is like saying a restaurant can’t afford a cook staff separate from a wait staff.

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30 minutes ago, Darkfine said:

Dude, I’m not sure about anyone else but I don’t want a mathematician writing fluff nor do I want a writer trying to plot a curve of effectiveness.  That is like saying a restaurant can’t afford a cook staff separate from a wait staff.

I think it is a bit much to think that anyone on the GW team is a mathematician or even that they plot curves of effectiveness.  From what I have seen, the team that writes the rules has also tended to be the team that writes a lot of the story and background in the game books.  They used to credit those sorts of things in the older books.

That said, I do disagree quite a bit that balanced rules are of little use to narrative players.  Everyone benefits from a well written set of rules.  The only time narrative players suffer is if they make the rules overly bland and remove the flavor and distinctiveness of units & armies.  There is a nice balance that can be had there.  There are games that do a pretty good job of this and I would say that in general a lot of GW products fit this bill.  The issue are the outliers that skew things and how large the gaps are between those. 

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5 hours ago, stratigo said:

Do you really consider infinite ripper exploding attacks a fun option for your narrative game? Is it narrative that your great big monster ridden by a hero of the ages got pecked to death by three high pterodactyls because their attacks explode on and on to infinity. That's not very narrative to me. A good narrative would see your great hero matching his blades against the vile demonic monstrosity, not dragged down because a Grot with 64 damage poked him. I can't think of anything LESS narratively climatic than a stardrake getting merced by a handful of grots. Unless you're going for a farce, that's not a great narrative to tell.

 

That is exactly what Rippers have always done in Narrative games, all the way through AoS 1.0 that is what they did. And Kroak did his thing all through Narrative games in 1.0 too. Literally nothing changed on those  for narrative games. Have the discussion boards been full of narrative players having a massive problem with it? Barely  seen a comment in all that time personally.  Let us be perfectly clear - the only real balance change for narrative games in 2.0 is the fix to summoning; so far as I could see narrative players just house-ruled summoning in some way to make games more fun.

What the Narrative players got with this new edition was a massive uplift to the narrative at https://malignportents.com/stories/ and in the new rulebook. Once the GHB was out AoS was pretty good for the competitive gamer but the narrative gamers still had a valid issue with the lack of background relative to the old warhammer fantasy line. GW have made a really concerted effort to fix that.

 

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5 hours ago, Darkfine said:

Dude, I’m not sure about anyone else but I don’t want a mathematician writing fluff nor do I want a writer trying to plot a curve of effectiveness.  That is like saying a restaurant can’t afford a cook staff separate from a wait staff.

I am pretty sure that GW do not and will not ever hire the sort of data analysts that would be required to truly balance the game. Therefore the game will always have imbalance for the competitive players to simultaneously exploit and complain about. All the really good players seem to be pretty relaxed about this and just have fun rolling dice anyway - e.g. see the comments from actual 6N players on this thread that it was still a real fun event.

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