[4. Who's the Beatdown?]

@gronnelg, welcome!  Glad you signed up.  This is a great place full of friendly folks.

I accept the criticism fully, and am aware.  The abstract-ness was necessary for me to think through the idea.  Can appreciate that it made reading it a chore.  Kind of like listening to some guy muttering to himself in the corner.  Hopefully as it continues to unfold it will get less and less abstract and more and more accessible.  Kind of like building a house... a foundation is pretty boring and it's hard to visualize the house, but the more it's constructed, the more "interesting" and accessible it becomes.  I hope!

[1. Introduction: Why Theory, and Why Should I Care?]

@SuperHappyTime

I just posted entry 4 and used "dearth" again.  I guess I've unofficially started a campaign to bring that word back in circulation.

Your point #2 is interesting, and resonates with my own experiences trying to get into the game.  There is so much benefit from simply learning the rules, learning the units, etc.  You will be overwhelmed and out of sorts if you don't do all of that work.  But I'm hanging on to the belief that there are theoretical principles that subsist across all of these surface differences.  I make analogies to MtG a lot, so here's another one.  In MtG, there are way more possible cards and sets than in AoS with units and factions.  But despite all of that, there are really only 9 fundamental deck archetypes that get recycled over and over again.  Someone that has a grasp of MtG theory can quickly acclimate and understand an entirely new MtG environment.  I'd love to see if we could replicate something like that for AoS.

I'll probably be working toward your point #3.  I just want to get there naturally on pace with the ideas that I'm trying to develop.

There's lots out there available to help on #4.  The Honest Wargamer and Just Saying are two AoS podcasts that are really great for that, and there are many other resources out there.   

[1. Introduction: Why Theory, and Why Should I Care?]

On 12/3/2018 at 9:09 PM, kaaras said:

Was that helpful? I do enjoy a good high level strategic discussion. 

I have to switch gears a bit to follow, but I can tell you that the image of Liberators building latrines was worth the price of admission alone.

[2. Your Units Cost Points but they have no Value]

@JackStreicher, @Overread

Capacity is capacity.  It is the potential to generate value.  The string of a bow is capacity.  If I notch an arrow, pull back on the string, aim at my neighbor and then release the string, it may or may not have generated value, depending on how you feel about my neighbor.

Look, I am painfully aware that I am swimming upstream here.  But the sledge-hammer metaphor is sincere.  Words are not the things they refer to; words only define what we are allowed to think about the things they refer to.  Creating the possibility of thinking about things in a different way necessarily involves reframing the meaning of certain words.  For example, if you understand time as what’s on your watch, what I said about presence, pressure or projection is not going to make much sense.  It would be hard to even understand how that kind of time could ever be an essential principle of AoS.  But what is time in the context of the game?  Allowing yourself to understand it differently, opens up the possibility of seeing the game differently.

I don't promise anyone that the effort will be worth it.  This may fizzle out, or run head-first into a wall.  I don’t know yet where the implications of these concepts will lead.  I will try to unfold them better and more clearly each time, and count on people like you to keep me honest.  Appreciate the feedback!
 

[1. Introduction: Why Theory, and Why Should I Care?]

@tolstedt, I agree that the book seems rushed, and given everything they are doing right now that's pretty understandable.  I do think it's the right approach, though, to just get it out there and start crowdsourcing the work.  Also from the sounds of it, you should start writing up some of your thoughts as well.  From some of the hints you've dropped, I'd definitely be interested in reading more!

@Ninelives, I think bottom-up, but I might be mixing the metaphor 🤔.  I want to try and rip it down to the studs and start over, making sure each new step maintains a clear, logical connection with the previous.  I don't know ahead of time how it will turn out.  My guess it will reaffirm a lot of what we already know, scuttle some of what we think we know, and hopefully open a couple of new peep-holes into things we don't know but should start thinking about.

[1. Introduction: Why Theory, and Why Should I Care?]

I've read it, and honestly, it was one of the reasons I actually decided to start this.  I LOVE Rob and think he's brilliant, but imo this book is emblematic of the problem I am talking about.  I don't think the book, in its current form, is the book that Rob actually wants to write.  There is much, much more that he wants to say but struggles to actually articulate because the language and concepts don't really exist yet.  I'm also guessing that one of the reasons he's doing what he's doing and trying to standardize the language we use.  He wants to build it up as well.  Read the sections on Clausewitz or Who's the Beatdown?  These are probably the two most theoretical parts of the book, and not incidentally also the weakest and least developed.  They are seeds he is planting because I think he wants the community to have these conversations, in order to develop this perspective.  That is exactly what I want to.