JPjr

these loots crates are genuinely baffling nonsense. so in my region €80 for the underworlds one. there's only €156.50 worth of Underworlds stuff left on sale right now (Beastgrave box, deck holder box, model carry case, terrain, playmat), so assuming it's not some really old stuff they found down the back of the sofa you basically get all that, or some combination. Knowing me I'd open up the box to find 15 ****** playmats staring back at me. I'd be very, very, very moderately interested if it definitely included the Beastgrave box as that's got the only units I'm missing and I wouldn't mind having the terrain just for modelling but it's a bit random.

Let's play spot the shareholder... 😜

Funnily enough was discussing this, in a roundabout way, yesterday and saying how the multiple load outs and options for units is one of the things that puts me off 40K. Which is odd because before I'd got into AoS I probably would have said the exact opposite, indeed I remember as a kid spending hours going through various weapon options and trying to decide on how to load out my little men. I think the apotheosis of this was when they published the Confrontation rules in White Dwarf over several issues and the equipment lists, and info on different gangs, came out about 6 months before any rules did. 6 beautiful months of just playing virtual quartermaster without having to even bother thinking about playing a game, bliss. Which would be better if the game was set up so that you built your army list at the table. But since people either just run up to games with one list in mind, or if it's a tournament have to submit their lists well before the game even started you're not actually tailoring your list to counter either your opponent or with the scenario in mind. It's why I don't really give list building as much respect as others seem to. You're not showing tactical acumen by responding to the situation at hand you're just going for what is, generally, the most one-dimensionally powerful build and in most cases that's pretty obvious or easy to look up (this is for tournament style play here, of course, not the far superior narrative form of the game). If the world finally bowed to the inevitable logic and made me the benevolent dictator I was born to be then I'd institute a pre-game round. Each player must reveal, say, the first 1000 pts of their army and then they can fill up the back half in secret and in response to the new info. Of course I'd then take it a step further and include special rules that allow you to do things like scout the enemy so as to see more of his army composition but at this point we might as well just play 3rd edition and start including outflanking forces and the like. Basically this is a very long winded way of saying I've bought some 40K models and I'm paralysed trying to decide how to build the bloody things and it's annoying me (and no I'm not magnetising anything, get real).

Just noticed something (really very very, mildly, if not at all) interesting with the 40k starter sets. i wouldn’t bring it up it’s so dull but I guess it could have some bearing on future AoS editions and it’s not like we have anything else to talk about. Anyway the biggest set, the “command edition“, so the equivalent of the Dark Imperium box in 8th and our Soul Wars box gets you the hardback “rules” book but it’s not the same as the “Core” book that came with the Indomitus box and that is on sale now. It’s half the page count so I guess basically everything but the rules stripped out, still comes in just shy of 200 pages though. Maybe me but feels like a slightly odd choice for a starter set. you’d think they’d want to really lock newcomers in with all the juicy lore and whilst i’m sure there’s plenty of people that would like a lighter, more condensed book like that to take places with them I’d thought those people would be less likely to buy a starter set and prefer something even more slimline, condensed and lighter like the AoS Gaming Book. Fascinating, eh?!

wanna come round here and paint some of mine then...

it makes sense they're getting the starter sets out right away. would be a bit weird to release them a couple of months after the hype of the new edition launching had died down. starter sets then a couple of weeks of specialist games releases Underworlds, maybe Warcry and then back on it in September. I mean sure like any good little capitalist I can't wait to hand over money to them for stuff I don't need but are people really trying to tell me that they don't have a small eco-catastrophe's worth of unpainted plastic tucked away somewhere that they can't be getting on with in the mean time?

BRING BACK ROUTS

LOL. You ever met one? Miserable ****** never happier than when they’re whining about one thing or another. Right now there’s large sections of the 40k community throwing a ******-fit because the intro text (all the blah blah blah emperor sits on his carrion throne blah blah blah) has been slightly modified and because they’ve been told that if they’re racists they might not be nice people. It’ll take more than a few community articles tickling their bellies to put a smile on their faces.

this actually has me thinking... what would AoS look like if they actually had given themselves much more of a clean break from WHFB. imagine they'd kept the central conceits. The End Times happened, the winds of magic went haywire, the world blew up and then the winds coalesced into the magical mystical mysterious Mortal Realms that we all know and love today. but what if they'd then started from scratch, declared that WHFB models were WHFB models and not usable at all in AoS and they wouldn't let the new game/setting be constrained by trying to shoehorn in or reinvent old factions. complete year zero, scorched earth policy. now the answer would probably be that it would resemble a game with hardly any players but if it had taken off from scratch, if they could have created a whole new set of 'races', creatures and the like, not just ramped up existing themes but totally reworked what an elf or dwarf was (if they even included them), oh what wonders would we have seen?

Well... I have now successfully (ish) painted 3 (three) whole models this lockdown. Go me. I had actually, if somewhat hopefully, planned to smash through about 20 Squigs this weekend thanks to a rattlecan of Khorne Red but well it's about 36 degrees here now so ****** that. TBH after berating myself at the start, early stages, mid point and late period of lockdown I had managed to find some kind of peace with my indolence so I wouldn't mind, so much, but then also having vowed that I wouldn't ever go near 40K I may have done something really quite stupid and bought a ****** load of Spacecast Eternals, whoops.

I know a lot of cavalry units get some kind of bonus when they’ve charged, which makes sense, but I’d change it up more. I say cavalry should all basically have some equivalent of the ‘Fly’ keyword JUST WHEN THEY CHARGE that allows them to move through units, causing x wounds as they do so and then ****** off. basically like hex wraiths and indeed Squig Hoppers. Makes a lot more sense for me that cavalry units should hit fast, smash through enemy units, cause havoc (like mortal wounds and a bravery debuff for any tests that round, after all having several tonnes of beast flesh scythe through your unit would be genuinely ****** terrifying) & ideally then be out of reach and off. As a counterpoint to that you then make it so that some of them are then less effective in normal melee combat. After all if your cavalry units gets bogged down and caught up in static fighting then they lose all advantage and they’re at much greater risk of being pulled down and swamped by foot slogging peasants. make it so they are absolutely devastating on the charge but you have to really position and play them well to make the most of them. As you don’t have to worry about things like which way they’re facing and deal with ****** like wheeling now that’s not making it too complicated it’s just positioning them for the charge. implemented well this also opens up space for making troops with things like spears & pokes more interesting as they become dedicated anti-cav units. Any unit with melee weapons with more than a 1” range could do x MWs to cavalry charges or something.

yeah see this is the crux of it. there's been this resistance to incorporating more tech into games because, very understandably, we're playing an analogue game and a large part of the appeal is the tactile nature of it, and I think to a large degree a sense of nostalgia. (same as why millions of comment section bores under any news story about pop music are utterly convinced that music or whatever just happened to magically peak when they were around 16 🤔) I think here there's also an element that we don't want to change things not just because we're comfortable with the slightly awkward out of date elements of wargames but we actually like, or have convinced ourselves we like, those awkward elements. it makes it feel more REAL. whether we actually put them down or not (and hearing most people's complaints about players we don't) it feels like it's a break from our laptops, phones, whatever. it's artisanal, organic wholemeal wargaming. It's a pain in the ****** but it tastes better and is healthier for us. but then as soon as we try something, say dice towers in your example, we go oh actually yeah that's fine, in fact it's improved things in some way. and that's why I wonder if this pandemic will or has accelerated a paradigm shift. as I said loads of blokes my miserable age and up who I've always seen grumbling about online gaming have, when forced, taken to it likes duck to water. suddenly realising hey yeah I love that getting together with mates but now I can do this from the comfort of my house on a work night, and this bit actually works better etc etc. and that's when we're still to most intents and purposes just trying to recreate the IRL experience but online. what I'm interested in is when we start developing games that actually take advantage of that. already you people going from basic sketched drawings to these really nice maps on roll20 or wherever, and as we get more familiar with it we're incorporating more elements that actually think digital first, rather than just creating a facsimile of the tabletop experience. things like fog of war on maps, or the DM being able to have private conversations with characters without obviously tipping off everyone else. NOW... Obviously with Wargames, the whole collect, build, paint models part is fundamental. take that away and yes you would just be better off with TW or something like that (saying that it totally has it's place. I would actually like an exact simulator of the bare Warhammer game). But if you look at the random plucked from my head ideas in my OP then not much of that actually takes away from the tactile experience of Warhammer. You still have your models on the table and you still have to think about what you do with them, where you move them etc and then perform that action yourself. A dice rolling app is the only physical action that you'd be replacing, and obviously that could be just an optional extra. Everything else would be replacing either books, or mental calculations. So... picture the scene (you can really tell I'm unemployed now can't you...)... New AoS app. £X per month, but within that you have access (paid or with subscription) to all the updated errata'ed rules, all the battletomes, all the extra supplements, all the warscrolls the lot. Straight away you've cut down on several kilos of baggage for when travelling to games. But you get to mess around building army lists, saving them, sharing them with friends. Before a game/tournament you submit your lists via the app, then you go into your upcoming events section, and it gives you the rules pack for that event and all the lists of your opponents to check out at your leisure. On the day you turn up with your army and a tablet, again go to the events section and click the game you're about to play. It syncs with your opponent. You tick what units you set up etc and then start to play as normal. In each phase you have a checklist of what models you currently have on the table can do in that phase, (basically AoS Reminders kind of thing), so you can run through all phases quickly without having any 'oh sorry I meant to do x with my battlemage 2 phases ago can I go back and do it' situations. You move and play as normal but when you go to combat you just tick which unit you're attacking with, and which unit it's attacking. It looks through your other units and maybe prompts is Hero X within 6", if so click and it automatically works out any modifiers. Then it either just tells you what to do (Roll 30 dice, 3+ to etc etc then do this, then do that), or you use the dice app or it just resolves it for you. None of what the app's just done has taken anything away from the tactile, tangible nature of the game it's just prompted you or done the maths for you, so you can relax and have fun at 9pm in the evening and not sit there feeling frazzled. The game's take less time, hurrah, and leave you feeling less drained. Hurrah, maybe this actually makes the game MORE SOCIAL. as you can relax more. The app allows you to take photos mid game and upload them both to a feed in the app that your friends can see and to other social media, along with what happened. 'CHECK OUT MY MAWCRUSHER HE JUST DID LIKE 40 MORTAL WOUNDS, BLAMMMMMM! #Aos' etc After the game the app keeps tracks of models being killed etc and who or what killed them, so you (and GW have access to all those stats). And it creates various leaderboards etc with friends and people you've played but also the wider community. You can save several photos of the models, of your oppentns cool models or you and your opponent just having fun along with the record of each game, so you have this record to remember them by. The whole social side doesn't have to be just fixed to the game. It can even have in app challenges. Play every week for a month and get a special badge. You've played 50 times unlock an achievement etc. But then also upload a photo of a model this week and get a badge. or hey ! It's the August paint a 20 man unit from scratch challenge, all that kind of thing. Anyone whose used something like the Nike Running app knows how addictive these meaningless stupid ****** digital awards can be. I SHOULD SAY AT THIS POINT I HAVE NOT DOWNLOADED THE WH40K APP SO NO IDEA IF ANY OF THIS ALREADY FEATURES IN IT. None of that except a dice rolling app changes how we play the game in person. And in fact it makes it more of a community experience. Here endeth the sermon (for now).

so things like this, the push in AoS has been towards streamlining and simplicity (at least at a core rules level) which I think most of us agree is in general a good thing but throws up these kind of things. go more digital and you can have more stats etc to better represent how, for example, behemoths interact with horde units without it slowing down the game or adding to brain load.

Something I've been mulling over the past few weeks and thought I'd see what the TGA brain trust have to say about it. TLDR: As the pandemic makes it harder to play games in person and we switch to playing online, do you think this will have an effect on both game design and our attitudes towards using more tech in our 'analogue' gaming? Over the past few years there's been a huge push, with both RPGs and wargames, towards simpler, more streamlined systems. I'd say 80%+ of the games I've bought recently have been billed as 'Rules Light' in some way or another. Generally speaking it seems to be a popular trend, much as WHFB 3rd edition is my holy text I can't imagine actually ever having the time or brain capacity to play it again and I'd take Warcry/AoS over it nearly ever day. Same with RPGs, like I love WFRP but honestly I think Soulbound is a more 'fun' system and most the games I've picked up recently make even Soulbound look crunchy. At the same time there's still been quite a bit of resistance to using more tech in games to speed things up. People like rolling (buckets of) dice & messing about with their paper character sheets and whatever. Part of that was, I thought, a generational thing, people have an emotional attachment to playing games like they did when they were kids or first got into it and we all know how resistant, violently so sometimes, people are to change. But with the pandemic it feels, certainly with the RPG community, that as the pandemic has gone on a rubicon has been crossed. Faced with a choice of playing online or not playing at all I've seen nearly all the old greybeards I know at first grudgingly give playing online a go and now in many cases they're embracing it enthusiastically. So what I've been wondering is as people get more comfortable playing games online and incorporating tech into their games will this see a change in game design. If people are more willing to rely on apps and the like to handle the backend stuff could we see designers take advantage of this to return to more complicated, 'crunchier' systems, even getting rid of things like universal resolution mechanics. You keep the player facing side still relatively simple, but underneath the hood there's a lot more going on, what I'm thinking of as 'Rules Hidden'. Likewise with wargames, I brought this up a year or 2 ago about how we could incorporate more tech into our games just to speed them up and make things easier and generally most people seemed aghast at the idea, which is fair enough, as there's always a point where you think well why aren't I just playing Total War or whatever. But can you see this changing as the crisis drags on? Let's assume that 2020 is a write off for large tournaments and even just playing in shops and the like and if we're being honest 2021 is going to be touch and go. Does that change your view on things like, for instance, digital dice. What if a tournament said ok, to cut down risk by speeding up games and removing a possible infection vector you need to use an app rather than a bucket of 50+ dice to resolve things, that was a sticking point for a lot of people before but now? And if you're more open to that does that change your overall attitude towards incorporating more tech into games? What if the next AoS app allows you to not only build your army lists in it but then when you play someone else you submit both armies in the app for the game and you can pull up warscrolls etc for the opposing army easily. What if since it then has all your units logged when you decide to make an attack you can click in the app which unit is attacking, which unit it is attacking and any units nearby giving them buffs and automatically works out all the to hit/to wound/save rolls etc (just think you'd never 'forget' to apply a rule or bonus/malus that way). What if it then works out all the targets and you can either roll yourself OR it just resolves the results itself within the app from that attack and determines the number of wounds, models removed etc and keeps track of everything in the app. What if it then keeps track of all your games so you can create leaderboards with your mates, and it gives you constantly updated stats on how your individual units/models perform, allowing you to constantly refine your lists. What if it uploads that info to GW so they can keep track of what models are over/underperforming or just getting used or not across thousands of games each weekend and so effect changes quicker and more effectively? What if this allowed 2000+ points 5 round games of AoS to be resolved in say 60-90 minutes rather than 3 hours or whatever, so you can play more games and whilst playing games you can relax more, especially at the end of the day, not having to remember 50 different rules, abilities etc as the app either resolves it for you or gives you a prompt. Like in any phase you literally get a checklist come up of all things that models in your army can do. What do you think? Has our real world End Times changed how you think about any of this? Have you read this far? Why? Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/07/28/the-rumour-engine-july-28th-2020/ GOTHIC SOULBLIGHT VIBES

talking of how the Aelven factions mesh together I kind of mentioned this before but I've been thinking about how all the factions play together and what I'd love to see next edition (or whenever) is essentially a refinement of that multi-player matrix in the new GHB adapted for normal games. and instead of just a list of allies that you can take 20% of whatever there's a sliding scale, of 3 or 4 tiers, tied to how "friendly" the factions are. so for example... Daughters of Khaine and Malerion's faction or Lumineth and Idoneth are ranked best friends forever and you could take say something like 30- 40% of them as allies and they synergise better. Keep it pretty tight and thematic and it would really act as a boost to those factions with smaller model counts.

This the same Boris Johnson whose most famous trait is that he’s pathologically incapable of telling the truth? in that case I better tell my parents to stock up on beans, pasta & bog roll again & order in a litre of Agrax Earthshade myself.

Mechanical/cog work/clockwork Freeguild Handgunners from some Chamon technocracy, I’d love to see some necrons with little green stuff tricorn hats on.

Oooh and up until this point you were doing so well to convince me...

yeah I agree with @Overread, I know some people will laugh at this but I think they kind of backed themselves into a corner with space marines, despite that obviously making them a tonne of money. maybe at some point far in the future we could see that with SCE but even then what split them up by chamber or stormhost? but nah can't see it yet. the next tome will expand probably the subsections in some way, and hopefully a kind of create your own sub-faction (something I'm hoping every 3rd gen Battletome will have) that's why I can see the next chamber possibly being a small limited release of large models. keep their range, vaguely, sensible and things roughly equally distributed amongst all the AoS factions (very roughly I know). tbh I could even see them using the other chambers, or 1 at least (there's supposed to be 5 right?), in other games in the future so as not to further bloat the SCE range. I could imagine say one of the 'unopened' chambers being introduced for a kind of Man'o'War/Dreadfleet style game

well I think it's probably more that Season 4 would/should, I assume, have been released around late August and if/when that rolled around with no sign of it there'd be an outpouring of "OMG GW are dropping Underworlds, it's a dead game, I'm burning my cards and smashing my minis" though they did also do this with Necromunda (though c19 messed it all up) so it could be a new thing for the specialist games, it would make more sense with those rather than the big core systems. Hmmm. whilst I certainly don't disagree with all your points this is the internet so I'm going to... or at least some. See the way I look at it they've got the core rules pretty refined and defined now, sure a bit of a polish here, some new wording there and the like but personally I reckon (of course with absolutely nothing to go on but gut feeling and just looking at what they have done) they want to keep things down to 4 or so pages for the main ruleset and keep that free. Then they shift all the complexity and janky stuff onto the battletomes. You'll be able to dl the core rules for free and the core book will essentially be a lore book, a lovely looking big chonky boi to sit on the shelf and be 95% fluff with the core rules (perhaps expanded a bit but just to give clearer examples) and a few extra bits for narrative players and realm rules or whatever, so people with no interest in the fluff still want it. But it's main function will be to set the scene for the next story arc and introduce the world to new players. Then we get a new round of battletomes, which again are half if not more fluff anyway advancing the storyline and giving every faction that needs it a general boost, updating warscrolls, giving them some abilities than BTs released before them might have introduced and introducing their own janky new rules that make them different and powerful for a few weeks. I reckon even with the core rules shifting slightly most people will still buy a new battletome every 3 years say, as it means their army gets a power boost and most probably a few new models.

it would be interesting if they increase the synergy of allied units into armies, rather than feeling like you're being punished as they don't get allegiance abilities. that would open up the space to create much smaller factions that thematically (or for practical reasons) aren't designed as full standalone factions (but can be expanded upon at a later date). you could look at Sons of Behemat as tilting that way, they're what 4 warscrolls (and 2 kits). sure there will be people running pure SoB armies because it'll be LULZ but they'll probably see most action allied into armies, so hopefully they make up for the lack of AA in that case in some other way. Grotbag Scuttlers could potentially work well like that too. Maybe just 2 or 3 units to start, like 2 airships and 1 kind of marine style pirate raiders, eventually they could be expanded into a whole army but they could start off like that with rules that make them work particularly well as allies to certain factions. It would free up the design team to do lots more interesting, weird stuff that just needs a couple of kits.

OK see as an example eliminating the Grand Alliances is exactly one of the things I can see a 3rd edition doing that wouldn't be a dramatic change to the rules system but would shake things up. It's essentially a kind of very basic idea that made sense at the start of AoS but has less and less relevance now and in fact just causes more problems than it fixes. We're already at the stage where lots of the factions can only ally with very specific ones from within their GA, and I think the big matrix in the new GHB for team games is a prelude to how things are going to go. It's much more lore friendly, but also it opens up some more interesting space for people to do more interesting things. Instead of these 4 monolithic groupings what if it's much more subtle and flexible, some factions can never mix, some can mix but with problems but it opens up more space and allows people to feel like they can buy more different things (yay for friendly capitalism) and create armies based on their own lore. If you're waiting for 3/4 years for new models for your army and then you just get say a new hero or WHU war band that's a recipe for bad feels but there's no way GW can do more than that. This way yeah it might be a year or 2 till you get a new Gloomspite unit but in the mean time you can pick and choose a few new cool things that you like the look of, and can use in say Warcrym and of course you might then expand upon. (yay again for friendly capitalism). So if you run a Cities of Sigmar army that's based in Shyish, just maybe you can take some ghosts or skeletons because in your city you fight alongside your ancestors, or it's just a matter of convenience but this allows you to do that. Or Fyreslayers, they kind of did this last year with mercenaries but just make them available to be included in nearly all armies, that represents their nature. They're a small range and updates will always be few and far between, but this means that anyone whose collected them can re-use them with anyone other armies they collect and get some use out of them. Plus doing away with the GAs means there's less of that feeling that oh we (destruction) have so much less than order, or whatever, that's always going to be a false equivalence and this way armies stand on their own.

I think it's a bit like DnD, 5th edition has been around for ages now but why spook all those new fans and risk a tedious edition war. If/when DnD 6th comes (Q3/4 next year just before the DnD film drops would be my bedt guess) I imagine it'll just a new set of the 3 core books with some key but not game changing edits. Just some of the best of the new Unearthed Arcana stuff that's been introduced added in and stuff that's clearly not worked subtly excised, my bet for a big change would be on something like alignments getting radically changed or ditched, TBH I doubt it would even be labelled as the 6th edition. Likewise GW can look at AoS and 40K right now and say holy ****** we're going gangbusters, why mess with this. we just need to make little changes here and there, there's plenty of design space to change the game without messing with the basics of how it plays. Just changing things like how points are scored can dramatically change the nature of the game without anyone needing to learn a whole new set of rules or have their army instantly invalidated.

yeah I get that totally but I honestly the way I see it now, for both 40K and AoS, is that we're really in an age of living rulesets. I suspect that from here on in, what will happen is just every 3 years (or so) we'll just get a new "edition" that just takes everything that's been introduced in supplements during the previous iteration's life, work in anything that's worked in 40k (or vice versa), and then package it together with a lovely big new hardback book, a big new storyline and a big box of new models. the rules will essentially at their core remain the same so in our case 2nd edition battletomes, like 8th edition codexes, will still work and the latter ones released will have been made with the new edition in mind. after 30-40 years of tinkering with both systems I think they know they're roughly in the right spot, they have these other games (Warcry, Kill Team, Apocalypse etc) to explore slightly different ways of playing but the central system can just be subtly amended with each new edition, without having to rush out 'indexes' for all the armies or have people's armies unplayable for ages until they get a codex/BT. each new edition then just becomes basically a big jumping on point for new players and an advance in the story. I'm sure sales of Soul Wars, Tempest of Souls and Storm Strike will have tailed off now (outside of say Xmas), so a new edition becomes more about marketing, getting people excited and on-boarding a new generation rather than making dramatic changes to the rule system.