Path to Glory 3

[Dracovski]

The new edition of AoS has gotten me excited to start a Path to Glory campaign. Though we won't know the full rules until we get the rulebook in our hands, 
Doug from the Youtube channel 2+Tough has made some videos that go through the basics (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyIEtHBf1vpI-xYU-epSdmFSKIw6afx96).

I was wondering if there are other people here planning to start PtG campaigns, what do you think is good about it, what needs improving and what kind of army and lore are you planning to start with?

 

[NinthMusketeer]

I am planning to run one at my flgs (as opposed to Road to Renown) because the new PtG is very much matched play + extras. There isn't much in the way of crazy stuff going on and it is quite plain as a narrative system. (This is only half a criticism--I think they set up a good skeleton then didn't put any flesh on it. But it is also simply a totally different system from old PtG which is neither good nor bad.)

Because it is relatively vanilla it will serve well for my community to get into 3rd without layering a whole bunch of extra stuff on top. But in all likelyhood we will return to RtR for subsequent leagues because much of the goal for us is to specifically get away from the balance inadequacies of matched.

Edited June 24, 2021 by NinthMusketeer

[Nuno M]

I believe this is going to revolutionize how people experience narrative in their games, whether the game is full-on narrative play or a tournament.

 

For the first time, you have an official framework that players can agree on, which they can get invested in while they play, usable in any pick up game.

Thats the strength of the system: you can do it on your own, scoring stuff, even if your opponent just wants to play a matched play this time. Later on, you can use the stuff you scored to play games with the full PtG bonuses against other players who also are playing it.

 

In this way, its kind of good that it's relatively vanilla, as event organizers can layer more stuff on it if needed, but its easily slottable in any casual games wihtout much grumbling, thats why it's powerful .
Cant wait to start trying the new quests, just like in Warcry.

[RandyRyan]

I am super keen on it. Its basically the mindset I always have in my games - building an ongoing story for my characters and units. Usually they all die, but...

[NinthMusketeer]

On 6/25/2021 at 12:22 AM, Nuno M said:

I believe this is going to revolutionize how people experience narrative in their games, whether the game is full-on narrative play or a tournament.

 

For the first time, you have an official framework that players can agree on, which they can get invested in while they play, usable in any pick up game.

Thats the strength of the system: you can do it on your own, scoring stuff, even if your opponent just wants to play a matched play this time. Later on, you can use the stuff you scored to play games with the full PtG bonuses against other players who also are playing it.

 

In this way, its kind of good that it's relatively vanilla, as event organizers can layer more stuff on it if needed, but its easily slottable in any casual games wihtout much grumbling, thats why it's powerful .
Cant wait to start trying the new quests, just like in Warcry.

Yeah, there is an accessibility factor there that is powerful. I just think it hasn't been used to do anything (yet). Like, tracking the progression of your heroes... as they hit a threshold to get a command trait. That's it, there's no other hero progression. Units only unlock some once-per-game triumph abilities. Everything else is only increasing the force org limits and adding more of the same enhancements we already have.

[Ahriman]

I will be unlikely to play many games of 3rd that aren't Path to Glory ones honestly - aside from everything else it has the more interesting missions so far!

The downsides are definitely that, especially when compares to 40k's Crusade, there is little to no unit and character progression, and what there isn't terribly exciting. 40k has D6 skill tables for different unit types, as well as characterful relics that you can earn, and its a shame that's missing.

 

But that is tempered by the fact you have a settlement to grow, which i think is really evocative and ties in nicely with the new idea of Dawnbringer Crusades. And the quest system, which seems like a nice addition in the Core Book, and I'm hoping they really go crazy with in the Battletomes.

 

I'm also praying for Path to Glory supplements sent within the different Realms - giving us our Realm Rules back and maybe unique territories, quests and traits you can earn in each one.

Oh, and I adore how brutal the casualty system is, straight up losing models from squads feels much more visceral than the squad gaining a debuff like in Crusade.

 

Already got plans for a Stormcast Dawnbringer Crusade entourage and my Moulder expanding from the Varanspire into Ghur.

 

[Kamose]

On 6/26/2021 at 2:51 PM, Ahriman said:

I will be unlikely to play many games of 3rd that aren't Path to Glory ones honestly - aside from everything else it has the more interesting missions so far!

This.  

I play 40k as well as Sigmar and apart from a single Matched Play tournament and some learning Open Play games, every one of my 40k games in 9th have been Crusade games.  Crusade is excellent and the best way to play 40k.

I expect Path to Glory to be similar and I'ma play the hell out of it!  👍

[plavski]

Anyone found any tools out there to help build Path to Glory forces yet? I seem to remember seeing a spreadsheet at one point, but maybe I dreamed it

[Thostos]

Been waiting for this since the AoS release.They did a superb job with 40k Crusade and now its finally here for AoS.
Our group starts up in July with Vanguard or Warband armies.

 We tried the old PTG system a couple times over the past few years but it just wasnt balanced between factions that well at all.Started out fun but didnt take long for someones army to get uber strong.

  

[Tronhammer NZ]

Some of the previews leading up to release said you can't take unique units in your army. I could not find this in the rules at all, except for that Unique units can't be the warlord. 

I take it Unique units are OK in PTG armies?

[Greyshadow]

You can’t take unique units that’s correct. I guess that’s for thematic reasons as you are writing the history of your army as you play. I am sure if you ask your regular opponents if it is okay to house rule that you can I bet few would have a problem with taking unique units. I certainly wouldn’t.

Edit: Oops, you can take unique units! They just can't be your general (page 308).

Edited July 9, 2021 by Greyshadow

[Tronhammer NZ]

31 minutes ago, Greyshadow said:

You can’t take unique units that’s correct. 

Could you let me know where this is mentioned? It's driving me nuts.

EDIT: In fact, it's implied you CAN take Unique units because at the top of p. 315 it says that you don't take injury rolls for units that are listed as Unique.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Tronhammer NZ

[Greyshadow]

Oh, you are right @Tronhammer NZ, you can take unique units just they can’t be your warlord (page 308).

[Dracovski]

So I'm planning to use a Grey Seer as my warlord and later in the campaign upgrade him to a Grey Seer on Screaming Bell. There aren't any rules for this as far as I saw, so I figured I would create a houserule for this. Something like upgrading to a mounted hero would require 30 Renown and you have to pay the difference between the models in Glory Points. 

Are there any better options to do this or should this work fine? 

[NinthMusketeer]

You can just drop him from your order of battle and add in a 'new' warlord on the bell; the only thing you'll lose is the glory cost. Warlords don't have any benefit from collecting renown anyways.

[Ahriman]

I played two Path to Glory campaign games with my Stormcast Eternal's last week, both against a friend's Khorne Bloodbound.

Really enjoyable. The missions really helped tell a story, and we decided on attacker/defender by what fit best with our army's character and what had happened in the previous game. Felt much more 'real' than the big 2k Matched Play game we played afterwards - which was just tactics with no lore consideration.

 

Missions played were The Trap and Watchtower.

Watchtower was really fun, turning what seemed like an easy win turn one for myself (as the attacker) into a tense duel to try and be the one to get into the tower before the other as his reinforcements came in.

The Trap was a little more problematic, with the way it was scored meaning I (the defender) had autowon by the end of turn 2, as all my stuff was still alive. I dunno if the fix is to give the attackers 3 points per unit killed, or to not let the defender score in round 1, but it was fun chasing kills for renown points regardless.

Another thought is you really should play the mission as its written. We set up a nice board then rolled for the mission. The Trap lets the attacker set up the terrain, which would have meant he could have been far more aggressive and given me nowhere to anchor my flanks. So maybe we were the problem rather than the scoring.

 

Postgame stuff is fun! I spent a little glory and escaped with no deaths, but one bad roll could completely nerf an elite unit's effectiveness. I also didn't claim any new territory yet, but was able to grow my starting army from 600pts to nearly 1kpts, which is quicker than i was expecting.

 

 

Can't wait for more, and to see what battletomes bring. 

Edited July 15, 2021 by Ahriman

[Kamose]

So far I've played about half a dozen PtG games and a few sneaky not-PtG-but-I-still-leveled-up-my-army games 😉, at least one each with Seraphon and Beasts of Chaos and several with my Free Cities. Overall I've really enjoyed all of my games.  Some observations:

Having played a lot of Crusade in 40k, I have to make the comparison.  While I enjoy both systems, I feel like Crusade is definitely more fleshed out in the Core Rules.  This can be a good thing and a bad thing.  For example, in Crusade, there's a lot more unit customization that occurs and that is narratively awesome!  In PtG it seems like there are fewer changes to your army after each battle but a lot of changes in your kingdom (stronghold, barracks, territories, etc.).  This makes army progression seem slower and less meaningful in PtG.  Its good though because its fewer extra rules I have to completely forget about mid-game.  It also give your army a place in an evolving world which is definitely something missing from Crusade. On a related note...

On 7/12/2021 at 3:18 PM, NinthMusketeer said:

Warlords don't have any benefit from collecting renown anyways.

This is definitely my biggest disappointment from PtG.  Its such a bizarre design decision that I almost wonder if they forgot or ran out of ideas.  I mean the entire concept of PtG is that my Warlord is tooling around with their best army, gettin' famous, finding cool treasure, growing on a deep, personal level, and evolving as a highly complex individual or something like that.  All the previous iterations of PtG focused heavily on this concept (sometimes too much imo).  Now its completely removed from the game.  The Warlord is the Warlord and this as good as he/she/it's gonna get.  They will never change.  I sincerely hope they add reasons for your Warlord to gain renown in future PtG packs and to be fair I'm sure they will or else why have them be able to gain renown in the first place.

I usually try to start small with these kinda campaign system but I think beginning at Warlord size (800pt+) games is best.  When I started at Vanguard I found that my casualties added up so quickly that I started every game with half of each unit or more out as casualties.  The game was impossible to win and I could never get enough GP to fix up my soldiers.  I actually had to restart my Free Cities army for this reason.  So starting over at 800pts let me put a little redundancy in the army so I could afford to keep a unit out of a battle and let them recuperate.  I've also learned the value of retreating from a battle to prevent casualties.  That's a very important rule and narratively I love it!

As for the battleplans I've been rolling randomly so I've only played the first four.  Of those four I really enjoyed Sudden Assault and The Ritual.  In Sudden Assault, even though my army was losing each fight I was able to keep in the game with careful positioning and retreating from combat to keep my models holding table quarters even in the face of superior troops (Lumineth!!😤)  The Ritual just has a nice back and forth to it since its usually not worth it for your opponent to throw everything they have at the main ritual site objective.  So they send units after the two other objectives and the player performing the ritual can choose how to react or not.  I think the Watchtower could be a fun mission but the one time I played it I was blown off the table in 2 turns by Ironjawz.  Turns out Freeguild Guard are no match for 'Ard Boyz in combat!

On 7/14/2021 at 3:26 PM, Ahriman said:

The Trap was a little more problematic, with the way it was scored meaning I (the defender) had autowon by the end of turn 2, as all my stuff was still alive.

I had the same problem when I played the The Trap.  The mission looks interesting and I love asymmetrical deployment but if you don't kill at least one unit by turn 2 you cannot win (as the Ambusher).  In my game I failed kill that unit by a single model and that decided it.  It was frustrating and made playing the rest of the battle kinda pointless.  After turn two it was just waiting around until I could retreat my army to prevent casualties.

Right now I'm just waiting for the first Battlepack, whatever that might be.  Hopefully they add rules for upgrading your Warlord and I really wanna find out what outposts are!  I don't why I've fixated on outposts but I just wanna have an outpost! 

Give me outposts!

[pablolimey]

Does anyone know of a digital editable roster template?

Thanks in advance!

 

Paul 

[NinthMusketeer]

I feel like The Trap needs to push the invader's first victory point score to round 2. The ambusher cannot be reasonably expected to wipe out a significant number of units the first turn.

As to content, I personally find PtG3rd to be incredibly bland. They made the decision to have compatibility with matched play and built a great skeleton with which to do that, but there's no flesh on that skeleton. It ends up squandering a huge amount of potential on being just matched play + extras. I am sure they will introduce loads of content via battletomes but I know from Crusade that it can actually make things worse because it creates haves and have-nots. Some armies have tons of options and depth, others have a puddle. That (albeit combined with the blatant power divide of 8th-9th codex) killed Crusade for me so hard I've actually quit 40k over it.

On top of that, the 'order of battle' system really kills continuity. When units can be added or dropped at will, it isn't really a progression campaign anymore because lists can be changed as needed. PtG goes a good way to resolving this by introducing the glory cost, but the cost is so small and glory has so little things to spend it on that I don't really feel the difference. The only thing lost is xp, but the veteran rewards aren't even very good and have diminishing returns to boot. I've found I don't even bother tracking renown on my regular units, because I just don't care. The warlord it literally does not matter for, and others the only matter that numbers is 15 (or not even that, for armies that get multiple command traits). The real progression is on the army level with additional enhancements, battalions, endless spells, etc. Territories too, technically, but I've found most armies only need 2 and a basic fortress to bring everything they want anyways.

Again, I am expecting the battletomes to fix this. But only for those factions. Poor Gravelords are basically screwed for the two years at least. My fingers are desperately crossed for a PtG supplement like the one they did in 1st edition that gives bespoke content to each faction for them to perform reasonably on par until they get their battletome update. That said to some extent I see a matter of preference, and I simply prefer the old style of PtG. The execution was sloppy, but I made Road to Renown which fixed that. The upside is now I have two very different styles of narrative campaign I can run.

And it's all better than Matched Play anyways amirite? 😆

[FlatTooth]

I'm really excited by the prospect of the new Path to Glory. Unfortunately GW's kind of insane Battletome system means that Path to Glory will probably suffer in the way that Crusade does- you never know when you'll get the fun stuff added. I'm hoping a supplement will come out that adds things for everyone but we'll see!

[Blood0Tiger]

On 7/17/2021 at 1:56 PM, NinthMusketeer said:

Again, I am expecting the battletomes to fix this. But only for those factions. Poor Gravelords are basically screwed for the two years at least. My fingers are desperately crossed for a PtG supplement like the one they did in 1st edition that gives bespoke content to each faction for them to perform reasonably on par until they get their battletome update. That said to some extent I see a matter of preference, and I simply prefer the old style of PtG. The execution was sloppy, but I made Road to Renown which fixed that. The upside is now I have two very different styles of narrative campaign I can run.

And it's all better than Matched Play anyways amirite? 😆

Knowing how GW has been treating the narrative campaign books the past years I can't suggest the thought they will learn from their mistakes and release something like this built in. 

I'm not fond of the high paywall for how little they wanted to develop the system. Especially when most of the rules can and often are overlooked or ignored.

 

I've resorted to developing homebrew campaign rules using the 3.0 PTG system and looking back at old  books to see how they did things back then. 

If anyone has feedback about growing players armies over the campaign and other improvements about that I'm eager to hear everyone's thoughts on that. 

[NinthMusketeer]

I would say to check out Road to Renown and see if there are any ideas you can cannibalize from that. All my best progression ideas are already in there 🙂

[Leafs]

I'm dissappointed, but I guess the writing was on the wall. In my opinion the main two issues with the last two editions of path to glory are:

- It includes far too many factions and champion warscrolls. The original path to glory was able to provide lots of fun and dynamic hero progression that cannot be balanced to fit warscrolls ranging from a skink priest to a keeper of secrets. 

- the scale is too large, which removes the personal element of each individual member of the warbands. 

Path to glory should have stayed a chaos warbands thing, because right now it is still overextended and lacks that critical rpg element. 

[Blood0Tiger]

20 hours ago, Leafs said:

I'm dissappointed, but I guess the writing was on the wall. In my opinion the main two issues with the last two editions of path to glory are:

- It includes far too many factions and champion warscrolls. The original path to glory was able to provide lots of fun and dynamic hero progression that cannot be balanced to fit warscrolls ranging from a skink priest to a keeper of secrets. 

- the scale is too large, which removes the personal element of each individual member of the warbands. 

Path to glory should have stayed a chaos warbands thing, because right now it is still overextended and lacks that critical rpg element. 

Interesting thing to think about, the borders of the dedicated systems of narrative and competitive are blurred with very little concepts implemented playing and when not playing. 

 

What do you think about a campaign hero; grow your own character while the campaign unfolds. 

[Nasrod]

Played The Trap against Kharadaron Overlords today.

They deployed in the corner and popped Spell in a Bottle Soulsnare Shackles. 

I'm Soulblight Gravelords.

Our Path to Glory campaign officially starts in August and I think I went from being fantastically excited to dropping out of it before it even starts. 

The idea of PtG is awesome but tying win conditions to killing things exclusively amd eschewing the objective based gameplay is such a bad idea...