Jump to content

Moldek

Members
  • Posts

    411
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    6

Posts posted by Moldek

  1. 25 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

    It seems a few of you should probably look into playing a different game, so that you can enjoy your time more.

    I think AoS tournament play is a different game than narrative, open or even casual matched play. It's probably futile to hope to reliably score high in tournaments with a single army that you've kept for 10 years, true. But a lot of people still have great fun games with "low tier" armies, and a lot of people are able to have decent win rates with fluffy unoptimized lists. Most people who stick to the hobby do so because they enjoy the visual spectacle, the social interaction and the craft of painting and building. It takes a lot of investment to have even one fully painted army.

    So while I have zero problems with the way you approach it, I think you're part of a tiny minority. Changing armies twice a year to place at tournaments and not having any attachment to the miniatures is pretty far from what most player's experience of AoS is.

    I think one of the problems is people have different expectations and they don't often match. If you main regular opponent enjoys cheesy "broken" lists and you only play unoptimized compendium wanderers or pure dispossessed, you're gonna have a bad time. The rarest, most precious resource in wargaming is not books, minis or terrain : it's a good gaming group that match your playstyle, that you like and are available!

    • Like 8
    • Thanks 1
  2. 1 hour ago, Dr Ben said:

    I can join the list of folks with more ideas than time/willpower to follow through. I was thinking of going with the betrayal storyline. There are many details to fill in and conveniently timed events for 'plot reasons' which would need actual reasons for happening. But anyway the basic sketch of the plot was:

    A woman fleeing chaos/stormcast conflict gets taken in by a village. She makes a new life and friends in the village but something isn't quite right. Turns out the fertility God the village worships is actually Nurgle. One of her village friends becomes pregnant with a baby which is going to fulfil a prophecy about a blessed 'messiah' who will bring Nurgle's true 'blessing' to the land. Horrified, she secretly contacts the stormcasts, but the woman goes into labour before they arrive. She is attending the birth and gets handed the baby (who does appear very 'blessed' by nurgle, the whole thing would probably be pretty gross). This presents her with the moral dilemma of killing her friends baby or risking the deaths of thousands, or even millions, if the prophecy is fulfilled and the baby grows into a great champion of Nurgle. She raises a knife to kill the baby but can't go through with it and runs away. As she is pursued by the angry villagers, she finds the stormcasts answering her call. The chase reverses as she and the stormcasts try to hunt down the nurgle cultists from the village, including her friends and the baby. It reaches a point where the stormcast can't find the cultists, but she knows where they will be. Knowing the stormcast will kill the child and her friends if they find them, she is faced with the same dilemma all over again.

    And...... then I hadn't decided how it would end.  Maybe the protagonist betrays her friends and then gets killed by the stormcast herself because of her exposure to chaos. That would definitely be the miserable but tidy way to go. Also doubling up on the whole betrayal theme. Maybe she decides baby killing isn't the way to go, and lures the stormcast into a trap before falling to the worship of nurgle.

    Cool story! I think you could probably write it in a much more condensed version, say starting with the girl hiding in the woods with the baby, trying to decide wether she should run away or go to the stormcast who are currently raiding the village. With a few dialogues and recollections you can deliver the story piecemeal as you reveal what exactly she’s hiding and why...

    • Like 2
  3. I’m pretty happy they are implementing the full faction deck thing. That’s what has stopped me from buying more warbands, since I’d probably be lending them to friends to play, and I don’t want the hassle of building a bunch of decks balanced against each other. Deck building requires a lot of investment into the game, I’d rather use that time to paint or play!

    • Like 2
  4. 2 hours ago, Redmanphill said:

    I would very much hope that they keep the game within the narrative theme they have established. Simply adding factions in to the game randomly would break that. I simpy don't see the Cities of Sigmar (Freeguild) turning up in the Eight Points.

    My hopes for future expansions would be for the basic eight Chaos Warbands to get new models and at the same time a second set of cards would be printed for the twelve AoS factions that are currently present in the setting. Lets build depth rather than breadth to the system.

    I agree that they should keep the setting coherent; I want freeguild rules to be able to convert all kind of weird treasure hunters, but I don’t see it as essential.

    • Like 1
  5. Maybe not feasible but I’d love to see them release warband boxes for the non-chaos factions at some point. Just so that you have an easy point of entry for beginners / low budget. For instance the gloomspite gitz could get their underworlds warband sprue + a couple of aos sprues + the cards. Also release cards for easy to build models like sequitors and banshees! 

    Faction wise if I had to pick, hmmm :

    sylvaneth & KO could be interesting, or the new kurnoth-centaurs from beastgrave. A multi-race free cities warband would be really cool.

    aren’t trolls a bit big for a warband? If not I’d say something weird, like troll(s) + wild squigs a la Mollog’s Mob. And ogors, with a few options for very cheap grots chaff. Bonus points if you have a leader option that allows you to field a full on gnoblar waagh.

    For death, ossiarch bonereapers seem like the obvious choice, but I’d love to see a « living » shy’ish death cult. Could be lead by a vampire priest :D

    • Like 2
  6. I feel like if you’re mostly reading about it online, it’s easy to feel like the only way to play is full competitive...

    But that’s just not true. I only have the nighvault core set and I play like 1-2 games a month. The game works really well as a self-contained boardgame, no expansions, no rotations, nothing.

    you don’t have to buy anything more to have fun. You can even bring your core set deck to a tournament and play! Probably won’t win every game, but could win some. If you’re invested in it you’ll easily find info about the rules change from beastgrave.

    I think the main problem is the fear of missing out. When I see all these cool warbands released that i really would like to have, or think of all the possible strategies I could access with every card, It can feel frustrating. But 90% of players are like us, they have a couple of warbands and play with friends, without worrying about the meta etc.

    How many games have you played? How much will your games be affected by beastgrave? Not hypothetical games but actual ones?

    I’m sure you can work together with other players to have interesting matchups. Just play a bit and get your money’s worth on nightvault, it’s a great game :)

    • Like 1
  7. 1 hour ago, Azlak the Damned said:

    Thanks @Moldek. Love your idea, will steal that and incorporate that into the next one of that's ok.

    Oh yeah I’d love it! I don’t get to play much so I’ll enjoy your batreps :)

    16 hours ago, Pickle The Hutt said:

    Deluge should make your models move slower, not faster. Climbing a 3 inch piece of terrain would take 6 inches of movement (rain makes climbing harder). Also, I don't think you can let your opponent go first if you win initiative (that's a Warhammer Underworlds thing).

    You’re right about deluge; it’s supposed to slow down climbing. But the player with the initiative does get to chose who starts, as said p.39 in the « combat phase » paragraph (not sure if correct term since my book is in french).

  8. Cool battle report.

    I like that you go into the tactics going on, seems like a fun battle!

    I also liked the narrative flavor you gave in your introduction, I hope a bit of that makes it into the next batrep :) 

    I think the main « problem » with objectives in narrative play is that they can feel a bit abstract. I plan to use idols and treasure chests in my games, maybe even stuff like food rations so it gives a reason for the warbands to fight over them.

    • LOVE IT! 1
  9. 11 minutes ago, exliontamer said:

    I hear you, but I think Yoshiya hit the nail on the head:

    So much this. They half-assed the narrative rules to cater to people who don't even want to play narrative games to begin with. Yes Mordheim was "unbalanced" and "broken" at times...that's kind of the point. You are telling a story with your friends week to week, more like D&D, and sometimes those skewed matches happen and they are (or should be) hilarious. And in the aftermath, along with rolling on injury tables and acquiring more gear/loot, you gather yourself up and prep for next week. And the horrible losses or storied victories add to the flavor and shape your warband's characters. Warcry's sterile tickboxes have none of this feel, and for me that is what I miss. I will check out the thread you mention though for sure...I saw its initial post but never really caught up on it.

    Trust me I totally share your preferences! But I also think they are aiming this game at beginners or people who don't have the time for Mordheim style book keeping. I loved the brokenness of mordheim, I remember a beastmen shaman who had his legs severely mangled and could only move 2''; he had to rely on a spell to get anywhere. That's fun. If they do release an "advanced campaign" supplement I'll be all over that, and I'll check out every fan expansion as well as write my own. But I still think you can have a nice campaign with their basic structure, as long as people stay in the narrative spirit, like @Yoshiya said. I do wish we'd  gotten a bit more to chew on :)

    • Like 1
  10. 6 minutes ago, Lior'Lec said:

         I like the narrative you’ve built but on the second battle you’re potentially going to have a similar issue as some convergence and story battles (as pointed out in the Unmade Convergence thread). If the players know that a battle group always starts on the table then players are encouraged to stack that group with their best fighters rather than a balanced warband.

         One idea I’ve had to address the issue is to make it a random group: roll a die, on a 2-5 they use the same group that the deployment lists but on a 1 or 6 another group is used (dagger, hammer, shield; remove the deployment’s normal group and 1 becomes the first 6 becomes the second). This could be applied to any scripted battles that have a single battle group always starting on the field. 

    Yeah that's true. I like your idea of randomizing the battle group. I think I'll either do that or have the players choose their battle groups for the whole campaign, and make sure that the deployments are diverse enough so you're incentivized to keep them balanced. I don't expect this to be a problem with my opponent but I'd like to make the campaign reasonably fair so that I can share the final document for other people to use.

  11. In a couple of months I'll be meeting an internet friend IRL, and we are planning to have a small warcry campaign.

    I am designing 3 scenarios. The idea is that our warbands are searching for an ancient book called the Liber Oculus, hidden in a forgotten and cursed library. The power of the book is said to have turned everyone who read it insane, but surely that won't happen to our dear protagonists 😁

    Here are the scenarios :

     

    1 - After a long search, the warbands have found the old realmgate that leads to the cursed library. But a rival is here! They need to get their men to the library first.

    Terrain : lots of terrain, with a realmgate placed in the middle on a platform. 3 random doorways on the battlefield are marked with a token.
    Deployment : something like "bloodbath" (3rd one in the rulebook, p.154)
    Scenario :
    The realmgate is activated by killing a model next to it. For that purpose you can attack your own models. It has to be with an attack of range 3 or less.
    Roll a dice for each model that goes through the activated realm gate: on a 1 the realmgate malfunctions and the model is transported next to one of the marked doors, opponent's choice. On a 2+ you get to the library.
    The winner is the first player to get 3 models to the library.

    2 - Books are scattered amongst the ruins of the library. Many contain arcane secrets and deadly traps, but only one of them is the Liber Oculus. The one who finds it and escapes will obtain tremendous powers.

    Terrain : not many platforms, but a lot of walls set up to evoke a twisted labyrinth.
    Deployment : Asymetrical, where the loser of the previous round only has it's dagger first round and has the shield and hammer coming in 2nd and 3rd; and the winner has everyone on the board.

    5 treasure tokens are placed on the table, more than 4 inches apart from each other and the table's edge. 2 or them are traps (one invokes a chaos beast that attacks the model immediately, the other teleports the model anywhere on the table, opponent's choice), 2 of them immediately grant a randomly determined minor artefact to the model, and 1 is the Liber Oculus.
    When a fighter first takes a treasure, the contents are revealed immediately. Once the Liber Oculus is found, the winner is the one who manages to get off the board with it. The corrupting power of the Liber Oculus is such that the model carrying it has to roll on a random madness table every turn; that can cause him to drop it, run towards the center etc.

    3- One warband has seized the book; but to harness it's power, a dangerous ritual must be completed.

    Terrain : An empty space or big platform around the middle to act as an altar / pentagram, surrounded by spikes and other dangerous terrain.
    Deployment : Something with the previous winner's forces set up near the center, with the attacker coming in from various table edges.

    The victory condition is similar to the card "The Ritual" : one objective token (the Liber Oculus), every round the defender scores 1D6 ritual points, with maluses if there are ennemies within 3 inches of the objective. If after the 4th round the total is equal or inferior to 12, the ritual has failed and a powerful demon appears, attacking everyone in sight. Then the goal is simply to get your warriors out of here.

    As you can see I'm going more for narrative flavor than competitive balance. I'm open to all ideas and feedback, especially if you spot stuff that could make the game to lopsided, or anything that could be improved. If that helps we'll be playing Cypher Lords (just a one box warband I think) vs Legion of Nagash (with a bit of every unit in it).

    • Like 1
  12. I’ve recently purchased the smallest GW case to transport warcry warbands. I can fit about 15 minis max in it, you kinda have to be careful when putting them in/out but I like that it fits in a small backpack. If I start moving my minis more often or playing larger games,  I think I’ll go with a magnet case of some sort.

    • Like 1
  13. 30 minutes ago, zedatkinszed said:

    Totally agree. Delighted to see Beasts of Chaos and Everchosen warband rune marks. It's exactly what the game needs going forward. Also happy with the Allies list. I would love a Forgeworld monsters supplement where you could add in Skinwolves etc but so far so good imho.

    Yeah I’m definitely doing a beastmen warband as soon as I can, heavy old-school realm of chaos influences 🤓

    also I have a bunch of chaos hounds I was planning to use as furies since I don’t have the starter set, but now I think they are getting their own profile!

    • Like 1
  14. @exliontamer I wouldn’t say the campaigns are garbage, but I agree they are a bit too light. I think I get why they went this way though, it makes the game more accessible for people with a limited time to play. From what I remember playing mordheim, the game itself could be broken quite easily (I read an article by tuomas pirinen where he said he intentionally prioritized narrative over balance), but the after battle sequence was always fun. There’s a thread on here about making Mordheim rules for warcry, and you can also check out this project on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCry/comments/cyvxf4/killing_grounds_warcry_fanmade_supplement/

    @Yoshiya I think you make some great points, narrative play is in my opinion best approached as you would a roleplaying game; not try to break it but try to make it sensible within the story :)

     

    • Like 1
  15. Honestly the review makes it seem like a decent book. The mercenaries look like decent additions and it won’t be too hard to print out their stats and make custom cards as needed. Plus the fact that it’s cheaper than the main rulebook, I think I’ll buy it as it adds some interesting stuff to the game.

    • Like 2
  16. 37 minutes ago, Overread said:

    I think the only "too soon" problem is that they've not released the second wave of armies for Warcry. Some forces (eg Skaven) still don't have a warband set of rules for the game. 

    Well to me having rules for aos factions is a bonus. I would have been fine with only exclusive chaos factions. I think the audience is split between seeing it as a necromunda-like, heavy on narrative and campaign play, and as a killteam-like, with a focus on matched play and one off games.

    I love being able to play my SCE but I do worry that having all those factions could lessen the atmosphere (and maybe balance) of the game.

    • Like 3
  17. On reddit I see a lot of people complaining about it being too soon, ruining the game etc. It’s a bit tiring sometimes seeing so much negativity; makes me understand why tga has pretty strict moderation...

    I wonder how many people actually play that much. It’s the same about complaining about factions being OP based on calculating a best case scenario damage output. I doubt a lot of people are going to show up with a terrogheist and demand to play it against someone’s starter box warband!

    The card problem is what I’m wondering about the most. A free pdf seems like the most convenient solution, even if it’s nice to actually have a pro quality printed card. I doubt they’ll do a reboxing of 60+ units, and I’m not sure I’d want to buy a 15$ pack with all the cards just to be able to use a single model (not saying I wouldn’t, but I sure as hell would moan about it on reddit!).

    If I do get the book, this will probably be my excuse to buy a cygor kit down the road. Or minotaurs...

    what models are you guys interested in?

×
×
  • Create New...