brocktoon

Phenomenal minis. I'm also not going to replace my 100 clanrats with the new ones. But I bet I can squeeze another unit in there or mix them in to the old ones for some more variety.

This is the way. I'm not saying don't play tournaments, though a part of this is the inevitability of a massive company having to satisfy multiple styles of play and not really being able to. But there are other modes of playing, of setting up your own local tournaments, and different groups of people to play with which allow you to do this. More people should vary it up.

I wanted to revisit a particular sticking point on the rules starting with 3e and seemingly compounded in what we're seeing from 4e so far. I hate appeals to authority, but 3 of the 4 of us are moderately successful analog game designers, so we talk about rules quite a bit, we tweak and houserule, and we're all narrative, once a month marathon wargamers, for a little context. This past weekend was our monthly marathon, so we did quite a lot of talking about new AoS and GW rules design philosophy in general. I'm very neutral on the move away from comparing numbers to determine to hit and to wound. Completely agnostic. But I think a lot of issues stem from the cascading effect from GW moving away from comparison of stats for those things and toward a set number plus abilities on the card system in AoS and 40k. Old system, I'm a Cool Warrior with WS 6. You are a Normal Human with WS 3. We compare and it's harder for you to hit me and me to hit you because all of that fiction is contained in that simple comparison. New System, I'm a Cool Warrior and I hit on 3+. You are a Normal Human and you hit on a 4+. This is fine as it goes. But if we have two Cool Warriors, we both hit on 3+. How do we differentiate ourselves from one another without the granularity that comes from Cool Warrior with WS 6 and Cool Warrior with WS 5? Well, we add some special rules. My hits explode on 6s and maybe you do MWs on a 6. But then other people need that rule, so we need to differentiate more. So we add auras. But then the auras are stacking, so we need to track which auras overlap and we need to limit them to -/+1 after adding and subtracting our competing auras. On and on it goes. So when the word is that "everything is an ability" I don't hear "simplicity". I hear "the mental load and staring at reminders on your phone instead of talking to your opponent in this ostensibly social activity is going to increase". I'd like to be wrong but the every weapon loadout is the same stuff with SCE is not giving me good signals. Not because it's a problem on its own, but it's one fewer means of differentiation which will have to be pushed away to simple decisions or comparisons and onto a bespoke special rule.

I might just be a big dummy but remembering a bunch of colors for phases and then some symbols on top of that feels more annoying than reading "At the start of the combat phase" on the warscrolls.

I don't post much but one post I made that got traction was about how my group ran pretty cold on 3rd. I'm giving some very serious consideration to making a 2e document incorporating cool new models but with a 2e rules chassis. I need to get out from a mountain of more pressing work first, but I was brainstorming ideas before this cull. It's almost a definite now.

Hard agree. I'm sore about BoC and worried about Ogors, because they're part of my panoply of 9 armies (don't ask). But the Stormcast culls are weird. Not least because I like my weird knights, whether SCE or Space Marines, and I simply don't understand or agree with the demand for true scale or better proportions or whatever. The net effect of that demand has become a less interesting/weird aesthetic, the (now) rapid culling of masses of miniatures, and a less interesting world. If anything is fair game and culls might now come in 3 years, we're in Magic the Gathering territory on something other than just rules (which was already annoying imo). I'm a whale/casual hybrid, exactly the sort of person that they'd put in their core customer category, and I'm very skittish now.

Terrible move when paired with all those recent Stormcast going offline as well. Filing this under my 2nd edition was my edition rubric, which is mostly uninteresting, but the last thing they want medium to long term is for their operations to resemble CCG cycling on the rules AND production end.

One way I can envision it going, which I don't like, is that I'm forced to look at updated/replacement rules hunting for minute changes. Picture New command point rules are released in the GHB. There are four lines of changes. I read and the changes are subtle. It's taking me more work to find and remember the changes than I like. I get annoyed and play something else. It all depends on how they set it up but I hope they're careful here. Already we're talking buying the GHB every year as a near requirement.

Them adding more fiddly bits but taking away the weapon range because it's too fiddly, thus leading to a net increase in fiddliness, is not something I love. I totally get people not wanting more mental load/time spent on measuring the weapon ranges in melee but given that the announcement touts MORE out of turn CP spends I'm just scratching my head.

Appreciate the concern but we semi-bounced off of it before any of us caught it. Let me frame it this way. Let's say that there's some arbitrary cognitive load level which we quantify (X). At least in the case of everyone I've ever played with, which is a pretty wide group, there's always some range where we're comfortable (X-1 to X to X+1). In my experience, if the load gets outside that range it doesn't functionally matter if it's X+2 or X+50, the load for whatever reason is higher than is fun. And bear in mind here that the people I play with play campaigns, short scenarios, and casual one offs, though I've run with tournament players to a degree. If that first broad group hits that X+2 level, they don't go "let me figure this out". They play a game in the range they want. For the person going no, that's too much to track, it doesn't matter if it's a 1960s Avalon Hill clunker or the far simpler AoS 3rd, it only matters that that range has been breached. And believe it or not, despite my bit of griping here, I'm the evangelist for 3rd in my circles, inasmuch as there is one! Which is a subjective thing and that is sincerely cool. Not every game is for every person. But I'm unhappy that AoS, which I repeat was magical for the better part of 6 years, may not be that game for my crew anymore. Where it becomes GW's problem is that I don't think it's just my crew, judging from comments here and, more importantly, the sudden drop-off in interest in the major metropolitan area with about 6 thriving store scenes with a big range of people from narrative to hardened meta chasers to everyone in between. Heck, my core crew (I and one other have been long time and avid lurkers) has talked idly over the past year how TGA has changed. I don't think it's a diss on the site to say that during 1st/2nd it was one of the liveliest minis pages of any sort online, filled with long threads about personal projects, weird minis stuff, and made up lore. Now it's mostly rumors and meta discussion. Which is fine, again and absolutely sincerely, but that represents some sort of shift downward or, at the least, a constraining of what players get turned on by, which you can chart over 3rd.

This is something my regulars have been talking about quite a bit recently, so this is good timing. We're home players, though I play games infrequently at stores, as well. We're also strictly narrative players. Since day one with AoS (back in first edition), we've gone through intensive play weekends once a month where we'd do Path to Glory, build up an army to wherever we ended up with it, then stop and repeat the next month's weekend with a different army. Some stray thoughts from this standpoint. AoS2 was our main game. We've barely played AoS3. We never articulated it as a disaster, it's just that it didn't take. The cognitive load is simply higher when compared to the prior editions. Two of our four regulars aren't the sort to read rules and army books extensively and they've always been in a cycle of sort of relearning the game every month. 1st and 2nd that wasn't a problem, 3rd is. That's not to say that 3rd is complex but it is the case that whatever invisible line there is where it tips over from able to pick up quickly to I can barely manage to comprehend this after one game was crossed in the transition to 3rd. The cognitive load is just slightly too high. This is a problem with 40k, too, especially 9th. But I don't think 10th is a massive improvement. I like CPs just fine but that's where the load is. I have to remember this thing on this other sheet, then remember 5 or 10 or 15 others. I can help this by buying doodads, but if I'm a casual player I'm not going to do this. I might not even know they exist. Part of this is what we've called the stats problem. Basically, GW since the mid-00s has refused to lean on differences in stats to differentiate units and instead increased the number of additional unit rules. Casting your mind back, a 1-10 scale on stats allows for immense variety in how units behave. But instead of, say, having WFB elves use an initiative 6, they decided to do elves strike first. But then there was maybe an edge case where that shouldn't happen, or it should happen more. So they add more specific, bespoke rules to things. I daresay that this now nearly 20 year old design ethos, much as I loved earlier editions of AoS, is why AoS was created in the first place. Design for rules, not stats, and you end up in a weird cognitive load space which we're in now, where it's started to feel like a card game (I even need cards or digital facsimiles to remind me everything my unit can do). This won't be fixed. There are things I like. Monstrous rampages. I like the current use em or lose em CP system, even if there are maybe three too many generic CP dumps. PtG in 3rd suuuuccccckkkssss. You have to track so much that it's just overwhelming, and the gesture toward taking your PtG army and playing matched play with them was both useless (nobody did this) and made you feel like it sort of didn't matter because matched is what matters anyway. It's annoying for me but I know the rules; our casual players, no chance they can handle this. It's everything bad from Crusade without the regular-ish cool campaigns that at least make Crusade worth looking at. Thankfully, you've got a good attempt at fixing it in the narrative forums here at TGA, even tho our default when we do play is to just go with how 1st and 2nd did it, albeit with slightly tweaked tables. The added cognitive load doesn't really give gains across the board. By this I mean that stuff like monster rampages feel pretty good and limited, while heroic actions have expanded too much and don't feel like they gain you much (everyone is just rolling for the extra CP anyway, which you only do because of the system which increases cognitive load, which increases cognitive load further. It's not just me. AoS during 2nd was the game at local stores. AoS nights were hopping and 40k nights lagged behind. Everyone was getting on board. Now, at what should be the best time for 3rd with full suites of army books and rules supposedly finely tuned? Dead. The local AoS FB groups are down to a couple posts a week. The product is piling up at the local stores. I don't want to extrapolate from local conditions to global too much, but I think the weird pace of AoS releases compared to past years shows some sort of slowdown GW is aware of (remember the 3e rules boxes at release which didn't move, we figured was due to the pandemic, only for them to still be on shelves three years later?). All in all, the game feels sort of unwell. We mostly houserule or strip out things we don't care for and it's fine, but the magic of 2nd isn't really there (and it was magical). When we're spending time figuring out how to port new 3rd edition units to 2nd or how to make a 2.5 sort of hybrid, that's not swell.

Lovely work on this. That's mostly what I came by to say, because flogging away at a cool personal project, even one used by others, can feel thankless. You're doing well. I also wanted to ask what you see as the main problems with the current PtG system because I agree, it feels terminally bland in a way Crusade doesn't. But there are cool bits in there, too. I'd love to use the territories, for instance, but it's yoked to a very bland system of "+1 to Reinforcements". It all seems geared toward army building and collection as its relentless focus and I think that's a shame.

The thing is, I feel as though the horde thing still did ok for itself in AoS 2nd. It's 3rd that's pushing against hordes so hard. So I'm really curious to see how the Skaven thing plays out, from the ancient and quite flavorful bonus to Leadership/Bravery based on model count rule to the new reinforcement caps. My inclination is to roll with my group's idiosyncratic approach to things: just ignore stuff and/or shape it up via house rules. We do only narrative, and honestly something between narrative and open (with points). We don't like 3rd's coherency rules because we like big meaty units of cavalry, so we ignore them. I suspect that we'll ignore or adjust reinforcement limits once the horde armies start rolling out. That doesn't help the matched play at the store set, which is most people, I know, but getting a small core of player-friends you can do weird stuff with goes a long way toward tweaking things like this. Because you're right that shifting away from horde viability is going to make skaven (and goblins) feel weird.

I was just coming to check on this. With the two books out I think there's a solid base for predictions on how PtG proceeds from here: new territories and roughly how they work, 4 new quests (1 of which gives access to new missions), 6 new unit skills, and parameters for leveling up heroes. Is there any appetite for making get you by rules along those lines for the factions which will lag?

What's the hot money on next battletomes? Still Beasts and Nurgle?