Hello everyone...

Been quite a while since I posted here, but there are reasons. I penned a few thoughts on Age of Sigmar for the TTG, copied here:



Over the past few weeks, I have been steadily coming to a conclusion – I have something of an issue with Age of Sigmar…

Throughout the Realmgate Wars, I was pretty heavily into the game – nearly 2,500 miniatures painted, used in nearly a hundred battles, all following the storyline in the campaign books and Battletomes.

And then, around the turn of 2016/2017, things just stopped.

This first cropped up in Battletomes such as the Kharadron Overlords. In previous books, narrative Battleplans always had a story behind them (that would be the narrative part), that charted the progress of characters, the introduction of new armies, and events occurring within the Mortal Realms. These ‘minor’ characters would pop up in several Battleplans (like Slann Starmaster Zectoka), or at least be linked to others (the Vampire Mistress Cyssandra, a hand maiden of Neferata and whose sisters appeared in other battles).

This all served to create a cohesive background to the Age of Sigmar, giving it a great deal more weight.

When the ‘new wave’ of Battletomes (such as the Kharadron Overlords and Disciples of Tzeentch) started dropping, new Battleplans were included – but they were now absent story. They were instead ‘representative’ of the army, in a ‘this is how they fight’ kind of way.

I could understand this approach. It was a shame, but I could understand it.

People had been asking more from Age of Sigmar, and these Battletomes were a response to that – Matched Play was now a thing, and ‘hobby’ articles had started to appear. All good stuff, but it had been at the expense of the ongoing background story.

Things looked up with the release of the Blightwar box set. Included within this set was a new chapter in the Age of Sigmar story, along with three connected Battleplans – best of all, they had a solid story behind them.

Granted, instead of the 4-5 pages of story Battleplans in the past had featured, these only had one page a piece. But, you know what? That was fine by me. Bit of a shame we were not seeing more, but I understood that space was needed for other areas of the game, and it seemed the best of both worlds. Matched players got their bits and pieces, we Narrative gamers got our storyline.

I’ll ignore the fact that this major Blightwar does not seem to have been revisited in other books since…

Then Malign Portents appeared, an advance on the storyline as significant as any chapter in the Realmgate Wars. And, it looked pretty funky – Nagash getting up to new tricks, with the forces of Destruction, Chaos and Order marching off to stop him. Couldn’t wait.

But there is very, very little story here.

A couple of handfuls of pages cover the scope of the battles taking place and, while there are Narrative Battleplans in the book, they have no story attached to them.

Well, you say, simply make up your own stories for them. Sure, I could do that. But I could also do it for the Matched Play Battleplans the book also includes. I could have been doing that all along – but without the story being put front and centre, Age of Sigmar loses a lot.

I have a suspicion that (miniatures aside which are, of course, up to GW’s usual climbing standards) things are being done for a price, and GW is no longer justifying big hardbacks for something as trivial as story. Malign Portents is an 80 page book – 80 pages to introduce a major new plot development. The Realmgate Wars books (five of them) were each around 300 pages.

This is a big difference.

It is not as if I can delve into the Black Library to support the narrative behind the game – after a strong start with the Realmgate Wars, fictional support for Age of Sigmar all but disappeared for well over a year, and it has been fairly lacklustre since. They are now recycling short stories from their older compilations as digital releases and, aside from that, there have been precious few substantial books.

A year ago, I was worried about having to make a choice between a revived Age of Sigmar storyline and new Warhammer 40,000 campaigns. I had thought that GW had slowed work on Age of Sigmar to prepare for the new edition of 40k (which might well have been the case), and there were certainly major wars in the new rulebook that would make for great narrative campaigns – the Konor campaign they ran was a great start, and one we engaged in. For all five battles…

After that, nothing. I have a nasty feeling that the majority of feedback GW received on both games revolved around one term – Tournament Play. Even if people never went to tournaments, they wanted everything ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ and woe betide either game if their opponent received any special advantage.

So, where do I go from here?

Well, absent a new range of campaign books from GW (and I would, at this stage, happily accept such things from Forge World, regardless of the inevitable high cost), I might well be going into a state of semi-hibernation.

You will still see new armies being painted and posted here (I have a hankering to do a Daughters of Khaine force), and I am still slowly plugging away at Heresy-era armies for a Prospero campaign (the Forge World book for that is more than adequate for the kind of games I am after). I did consider the new Star Wars Legion, but I have certain philosophical issues with the way FFG are approaching that kind of game.

For now, I think I will carry on painting up some more Crypt Ghouls and get round to doing my Kharadron ships – after that… I’ll see where my fancy takes me.

I just don’t think the Sigmar narrative is going to be part of it for a fair while.

We talked about this when the matched play thing became a reality iin 2016... that the story of the game was about to take a massive backseat to tourney play or default play.

GW gambled on narrative. They put a lot of resources into producing the realmgate war books and the campaign material.

That gamble failed.

Failed massively.

I say that because it would seem very few people gave a damn about those things. In my CITY (which had five full game stores at the time) there were 2-3 of us that bought any of these books. The rest... roughly 150 players... had no use for anything that didn't have points or impact gameplay at all.

This seemed to have been verified in many peoples' areas when we talked about it a couple years ago.

Very very few people care about the story. Narrative gaming is something we give lip service to, but few care about, and even the narrative gaming circle and the NEO movement largely create tournament weekends and slap a story in the front of it to call it narrative. Having come from a historical and battletech background, narrative meant a little more. Not only was there the story, your forces reflected the story, instead of being cherry picked min/max monstrosities. But I digress. Get off my lawn.

The sigmar narrative has been relegated to some army book blurbs. The gaming side of things, GW has responded to what the fans want. What the fans wanted were points, matched play, tournaments, and thats pretty much it.

The Realmgate failure has been rectified with a minimal investment in thiings like Malign Portents. I would expect to see something like that every year... a small book and a small global campaign. Also black library posting free short story snippets.

These things require few resources and they don't have stacks of books on pallets in warehouses that no one wants.

Even the Black Library AOS books are few and far between. The vast majority of fictiion is still 40k 40k 40k 40k 40k 40k.

So yes. Matched play and AOS are going to be pretty much all we get, because thats what the playerbase cares about for the most part.

At least they tried. We saw where it got them, but now we have a metric. In the past, there were commonly arguments about how important narrative players were to the community too, but GW had never tried just catering to them. Now they have, and they appeared to have lost their *** in that, so turned the boat back around to tournament play, which is what most games today require to be profitable.

I have minor issues with the narrative being shoved into a corner too, but my main problems with AOS is the overly abstract nature of the rules and how they bust immersion. Thats another topic for another time though and one that I've spoken to at length already (and got banned from the tga boards for going on about lol)

Fantasy gaming is my #1 love. AOS fell short for me as well. I'm hoping perra bellum's conquest delivers as much as I think it will, because thats where I will be spending most of my fantasy gaming. Fantasic art, fantastic models, fantastic narrative, detailed narrative, and engaging game that doesn't destroy immersion.

I always thought the big hardback AoS campaign books were incredibly cool.
But I never bought one, because they are 50€ a piece that would be missing from my gaming budged.
Even with Malign Portents, I thought it was cool and flipped through it, but in the end, even the 25€ they asked for it was spent better elsewhere.

And I pretty much think that's the problem.
It's a game and for most players a budget for this hobby is a thing.
And this budget is better off with new miniatures, paints, rulebooks or whatever than sinking it into campaign books that might be really really cool, but not all that helpful.

I have no idea how this dilemma could be solved, because if they make a big campaign book with essential rules, gamers will complain at the price.
So it would have to be a thinner book, and I think they tried it with Malign Portents. They included special rules in it.
Not sure who really uses them or how good the book did, but at best, I think GW will continue with these release format.
At worst, we will only get a Blightwar styled campaign box with models and a small booklet each year.

I don't think it's that people want no story it's that people want balanced games more than a narrative game that's unbalanced.

For example I'd love making a story out of battles but there's no point without balance. I remember before matched play came out I lost every single game except one because the sides were that unfair and the game I did win was when I had the OP army.

I think even if the game was perfectly balanced, very few people want something liike malign portents or the realmgate wars books because they are nothing but narrative and some battleplans that are not tournament standard.

Malign Portents includes the prophecy rules as well as battle plans, but again no one in my area bothered buying it because none of it is tournament or "real AOS" standard. I'm running a malign portents two-month narrative campaign in sept and oct for my GW, and said you need the malign portents book, and that generated a fair amount of backlash and complaining.

The same was true with storm of magic, the sigmar campaign in 8th, the old siege book, or going into 40k , city fiight, planetstrike, etc... few peoeple touched because it wasn't "real 40k".

The exception to this rule is the old General's Compendium from 2002. For whatever reason THAT book could never be kept in stock and was always sold out. But that book was crammed with different campaign engines and ideas.

Players seem ok with some stories being in the army books (though you will always hear battlecries for GW to just release pamphlets wiith the rules and leave the art and story for people who care) and are ok with buying black library novels if they care enough about the narrative, but very obviously will NOT spend on a game book that doesn't effect the standard game, which in AOS is matched play usiing the standard tournament scenarios. If you affect those ... people will buy the material. They will likely complain about it but they will buy the material.

The number of people that care about narrative will differ from game group to game group. In my area when we run events we do a pub quiz which is all based on narrative and out of 10 people, 1 will be able to answer the questions and the rest will shrug and not care (unless the questions are really dumbed down like "what is the name of the faction sigmar created that started the realmgate wars by marching against the followers of khorne in Aqshy" 0r thiings like that)

pm713 wrote:

For example I'd love making a story out of battles but there's no point without balance.

The story often comes from the imbalance

MongooseMatt wrote:

pm713 wrote:

For example I'd love making a story out of battles but there's no point without balance.

The story often comes from the imbalance

It's a boring story when it's always the same story of "The Dwarfs lose".

pm713 wrote:

It's a boring story when it's always the same story of "The Dwarfs lose".

Our way past this (and this really won't work for some groups) was to get one person choosing both forces - you then need players who really do care more about what happens on the table over who wins...

you then need players who really do care more about what happens on the table over who wins...

There's your key lol. And definitely not something I think you can spin a business plan around in modern game design and culture.

 auticus wrote:
And definitely not something I think you can spin a business plan around in modern game design and culture.

It has been a while since I have seen their games (and this does not apply to Bolt Action) but Warlord's Black Powder series of games were released without points/lists, and they stated in the books that they were intended for the use of 'gentlemen'

My question would be... how successful are those games? Where I am, no one plays anything from them. I have hail caesar and love it but the people who play it are very limited.

It's what customers buy. Narrative, story, campaign book, these things didn't and don't sell as well so it's difficult to fault GW for producing what more people want to buy. I love fluff but I will say in regards to alternative play styles like Malign Portents that I don't have a lot of motivation there--when I'm getting one game a week in I just want to enjoy 'regular' AoS rather than throw a whole extra rule set on top of it. When I do narrative I prefer things like Path to Glory where the mechanics of the game itself are more or less the same. What I did like the campaign books for was extra battalion diversity (even if a decent chunk of them were kinda bland) a ton of cool scenarios, and of course a story with a continuous thread. I don't like how the big Tzeentch plan seems to have been forgotten and Blightwar seems to exist nowhere in the fluff beyond the starter set (they could easily tie that loose end by writing 'the Stormcast won' too).

I think bringing the campaign books back could work as softcover, making the scenarios matched play friendly (even lopsided ones could include 'this force only gets 75% the points' or easier/harder objectives, etc) and point costs for the battalions within. It would be a great place to add in simple allegiance sets (like those from the GHB2) and update warscrolls for armies not slated for a battletome release. Since the warscrolls are free and battalion ones can be gotten individually for a few bucks on the app players wouldn't be forced to buy the book either.

A lot of really good points in here and I think the first post really nailed it on the head..GW took a Gamble and lost hard. They basically picked a target audience at random.

Now I don't wanna go into the quality of the story because that's an entirely different topic but one that does need to be brought up, if to only used as a point.

AoS as a whole is still in a really weird place. Because everything about it, from launch until now, have been a Madrid of three stooges levels of comidic screw up. AoS game and story wise has been a rule Goldberg machine of changes and development which an end result no one really knows. Launch was a nightmare, wether or not you think over writing the old world was a good idea, it pissed off a lot of people rightly so, so that drove people away. They squated 2 armies at launch so that droveore people away and acted as a deterrent because there is no telling even now if AoS will squad old armies. The lack of matched play, the driving factor to the game was not out for a year. The lack of coherent rules and army building. The CONSTSNT influx of storm cast which I get it's the new space marine in fantay but it was release after release of them.

Story wise it's still not sure what it wants to be. It tried being epic/cosmic fantays which was such a niche fandom, its now trying to be a more generic fantays but because of it's original inception in epic and cosmic it's making it very hard for average people to be worthwhile at all. They also just recently opened a way for old hero's for fantasy to come back which is a slap in the face to old players and are just ham fisting them into AoS. It's like a bandaid over a bullet wound.

All in all AoS has come a long way from it's start. But it's got a long way to go and a lot of work to get there. It's still left a bad taste in people's moths for more then just squatting the old world, so it's not a matter of "just salty Whfb fans" the game has so issues and so does the story. I hope it gets fixed because it's got possibility to be a good setting and a good game.

I don't see them altering the game rules to be honest. It has attracted a great many fans who like super abstract quasi-boardgames. AOS is the only "wargame" that I can think of that performs as abstractly as it does, borrowing heavily from board and collectible card games in how it is structured and played, and there are a lot of people that love it for that.

 auticus wrote:
I don't see them altering the game rules to be honest. It has attracted a great many fans who like super abstract quasi-boardgames. AOS is the only "wargame" that I can think of that performs as abstractly as it does, borrowing heavily from board and collectible card games in how it is structured and played, and there are a lot of people that love it for that.

And thats totally awesome, that they created this weird in between, But its still seems likes its struggling to find what it really wants to be in the grand scheme of things. And the way it handled becoming what it is, was not well executed and still has left a lot of people bitter over it and rightly so.

It being totally awesome is subjective If a couple of the abstractions were removed I'd be a super fan.

I have a huge investment in fantasy models stretching back to whfb 5th edition that need a game to reside in.

 auticus wrote:
It being totally awesome is subjective If a couple of the abstractions were removed I'd be a super fan.

I have a huge investment in fantasy models stretching back to whfb 5th edition that need a game to reside in.

What abstractions? I don't think AoS is any more abstract than other wargames.

AOS is hugely more abstract than any wargame.

Most wargames emphasize movement and maneuver to position your troops. AOS you largely don't need that. You have freedom of movement and excessively large movement ratios so if you get out of position you can get back into position in a turn. You have troops that can alpha strike and just appear wherever they want and even charge from the get-go.

Almost every wargame prevents missile uniits from shooting if they are tied up iin combat. In AOS you can shoot whatever you want even if you are in combat.

In almost every wargame, cover is a huge thing. In AOS, if you can see the enemy model's pinky behind a forest which is behind two layers of enemy models, you can shoot it just fine with no penalty.

In any wargame, shooting into combat is either not allowed or you can hurt your own guys. In AOS you can blow mortars and dragon fire and massed rifle fire into a swirling melee and its abstracted out where you only hurt your opponent.

In even the most annoying of wargames that use IGO/UGO you at least get some kind of response to your opponent. In AOS you can take a fun double turn to the face and sit for an hour without responding to a single thing your opponent has done, in essence your battle line stands there in awe while they take two full turns of dragon fire, arrows, spells, and melee. Definitely not how any battle in literature or the movies plays out, but abstracted for gamey mechanics in AOS.

These are abstractions that abstract away how a battle would operate in literature or cinema in favor for gaming mechanics. Immersion is removed in favor of gamey mechanics. I have played or do play over a dozen different wargames, and none come close to the abstraction or lack of immersion that is an AOS battle.

In having discussed this topic, a great many proponents of AOS will openly praise the abstraction because for them iit makes a more fun "game" and abstraction is what attracts them in the first place.

Actius is right AoS is a very abstract game. It's basically bare bones what is required in order to have a "game" it's very free flow and in a twist or ironic fate, AoS actually benifts really well from using movement trays, and not even putting terrain on the field. Because aside from the buffs the terrain gives and the look, terrain mostly gets in the way.

But he also hit on another big issue with how AoS launch was handled that is still very off putting and unfortunately nothing GW does will rectify it. That is the squatting of armies. He even said he has models going way back to 5th. Tell me would you want to get into a game were at at point your army could be just unsupported at the drop of a hat? Bertonia and tomb king's. I mean if I was a free guild player or a disposesed player I would be really hard pressed to get into AoS because there is no indication that my army will ever get any attention, updates, or second thoughts ever again. It would be like if you were a eldar player in 40k and they said all the craft worlds exploded your eldar are still there though and you can use them but here are super eldar we are gonna focus on.

As a dispossessed player AoS is not easy to like. My army was basically shoved to the side, had bits cut off and ignored. That was the good treatment.

GW just showed complete disregard for their players and haven't done anything to deal with it. I play AoS because I want to still use my models and because the rules are free. If you gave me a chance to rewind to before End Times I'd do that in a heartbeat.

pm713 wrote:
As a dispossessed player AoS is not easy to like. My army was basically shoved to the side, had bits cut off and ignored. That was the good treatment.

GW just showed complete disregard for their players and haven't done anything to deal with it. I play AoS because I want to still use my models and because the rules are free. If you gave me a chance to rewind to before End Times I'd do that in a heartbeat.

Second

I do have a large tomb king army. I don't mind as much because the tomb king warscrolls and GHB 16 values still exist and I still play them.

What gnaws my craw is that what pulled me into all of those models was a system that represented a battle you'd read about or watch in a movie.

What we have now is not anything you'd see like that. I have a huge investment into a system that totally transformed itself into something that would never have attracted me in the first place.

I have a feeling we'll see an ancient dead come out with the tomb kings models returning. The sphinx, for example, was a relatively new model for them to just take away forever.

However it does burn a lot of us that factions have been ignored (like the dwarves above) for almost three years now. That kills the product too. And I agree the massive fapping over stormcast in our face 24/7 is also a big contention point, because they are quite obviously trying to recapture their space marine lightning in a bottle selliing point.

It's because not only at the same time they ignore previous large factions that also push others so much that they became hated for it, SCE.

Enjoy the game if you can and if you can't, let it go. I know there will be a point when I'll put AoS on hold or let it go. I did it with Infinity, I don't think AoS is going to be any different at some point in the future.

Personally, we are at the point of no return here, they should have kept the models on squares, and offered 2 game modes, skermish plays as AoS now, and a battle mode with more ridged and defined movement and bonus to attacking in spicific ways. Similar to old fantays. But also simplifed some of the rules that was the rediculousness of 8th.

But that's just my pipe dream

Parra Bellum Conquest is mine lol.

 auticus wrote:
Parra Bellum Conquest is mine lol.

Enlighten?

http://www.beastsofwar.com/para-bellum-conquest/
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/740261.page

Company called Para Bellum. Game is Conquest. Written by Alessio (he who did whfb 6th and kings of war). Demo'd at Adepticon.

You can youtube a bunch of stuff on it.

Comes out early summer. It is very close to what I want a fantasy game to resemble.

Maybe White Dwarf should become an avenue for releasing narrative battleplans and adding to the developing storyline of Age of Sigmar. As said, the 300 page expensive hardback book to advance the story isn't going to sell well. But some story advancement every month with a narrative battleplan would be pretty cool. And might be possible for mortal humans to keep up with the story. I think MongooseMatt is probably the only person who even attempted to keep up with the army building required to follow the Realgate Wars books.

 Albino Squirrel wrote:
Maybe White Dwarf should become an avenue for releasing narrative battleplans and adding to the developing storyline of Age of Sigmar. As said, the 300 page expensive hardback book to advance the story isn't going to sell well. But some story advancement every month with a narrative battleplan would be pretty cool. And might be possible for mortal humans to keep up with the story. I think MongooseMatt is probably the only person who even attempted to keep up with the army building required to follow the Realgate Wars books.

So this is something else that really has started happening in the last like 10 years or so and I still don't understand it. The need for story advancement. Why? Why does the story need to advance, Warhammer started out as a setting that was fine for 30 years and only fell because GW got a really bad CEO that tanked the game.

As a narrative gamer, the story advancing makes the world feel more immersive. As a narrative gamer, the storyline and the setting and events happening is the primary motivator for participating.

A stagnant setting that doesn't move is not as attractive.

For a gamer-gamer playing in the setting, the setting moving doesn't really matter. For someone like me it is vital to keep my interest.

 auticus wrote:
As a narrative gamer, the story advancing makes the world feel more immersive. As a narrative gamer, the storyline and the setting and events happening is the primary motivator for participating.

A stagnant setting that doesn't move is not as attractive.

For a gamer-gamer playing in the setting, the setting moving doesn't really matter. For someone like me it is vital to keep my interest.

But it can, WHFB had a very deep and rich story and for theost part it did not move and any time there was a big advancement it pissed everyone off ie end times and storm of chaos


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I love narrative but I just see major advancements as always creating issues.

Is it story advancement or just a story? Because it's easy to make stories and keep a setting still.

The thing that pissed people off about whfb advancing the story wasn't that the story was advancing, it was that GW would retcon it right away.

Storm of Chaos - as soon as it happened they said "nevermind, none of that really happened" and it felt like a huge waste.

End Times pissed everyone off because it went right to AOS and blew up the old world, not because the story advanced.

pm713 wrote:
Is it story advancement or just a story? Because it's easy to make stories and keep a setting still.

This.

I hated End Times because the story was bad. For example Dwarfs just died. Kadrin fell to a gas bomb. It was incredibly disappointing. Some factions had epic battles and some got butchered in the sideline.

Story advancement is a good thing done properly. Done by GW it is a terrible thing because they can't do it.

pm713 wrote:
I hated End Times because the story was bad. For example Dwarfs just died. Kadrin fell to a gas bomb. It was incredibly disappointing. Some factions had epic battles and some got butchered in the sideline.

Story advancement is a good thing done properly. Done by GW it is a terrible thing because they can't do it.

It got to the point of killing characters off because they were board I mean HARRY THE MOTHER FREAKING HAMMER, died like a bitch. It was just horrible.

I think it boils down to preference. My preference is that the setting moves along and doesn't sit still. I'm not a traditional modern times gamer and have not been one for over a decade now.

Personally I'm happy with just a story. For example you could make a campaign about the Dwarfs restoring some of the Undgrin Ankor while they're attacked by Orcs and I'd be happy.

For setting advancement you just need to not go crazy and have world shattering things happen (which GW doesn't seem to understand).

 auticus wrote:
I think it boils down to preference. My preference is that the setting moves along and doesn't sit still. I'm not a traditional modern times gamer and have not been one for over a decade now.

Now that's not to say a story can't move forward, don't get me wrong stroy progression is great and awesome, the reason I'm against it is because I'm jaded as hell when it comes to settings story moving forward because every time it happens, they end up dicking over someone, unless of course you are fighting some npc army but that's not really possible since the big baddy of Warhammer was and is chaos....which is a massive playable section so someone has to loose for story progress to happen.

The good thing about the mortal realms is that they are so large that chaos gettiing a foothold in a realm doesn't screw everyone over.

Lord knows AoS has had massive ups and downs, but there is a serious lack of consistency with it. Fluff wise it was just ok. I am thinking that the mix of old and new in an attempt to appeal to more people had the opposite effect. Taken for just the AoS originals (and disconnect from old world, AoS can stand on its own two feet, but its still the little brother) its not too bad. I dont think it has the same appeal as warhammer did. Something that may be a game changer overall is the RPG coming out from Cubicle 7, It may add more to the story and get more people into the mortal realms as a whole.

For my self, AoS is pure escapism. I play it once maybe twice a month and limit my self to non deamon Tzeentch (Gors and Acolytes) as troops as that's the aesthetic I like. It's perfect as a beer and pretzel game as the miniatures are stunning and the game is full of nonsense rules.

 AaronWilson wrote:
For my self, AoS is pure escapism. I play it once maybe twice a month and limit my self to non deamon Tzeentch (Gors and Acolytes) as troops as that's the aesthetic I like. It's perfect as a beer and pretzel game as the miniatures are stunning and the game is full of nonsense rules.

You what grinds my gears though about AoS models? Who ever is doing them, has got a ranging hard on for putting super top heavy models on little ittle bitty breaky bits that are a bitch to keep from falling over.

Glue a penny on the bottom of the base. Makes the models way more stable, and only cost $.01

 EnTyme wrote:
Glue a penny on the bottom of the base. Makes the models way more stable, and only cost $.01

Yeah learned that trick with horros but still GW latly has got a hard on for making stuff stand on a single tip toe

I play at my local GW store. While I admit that I haven't played very much at all, I haven't ever seen narrative games being played that weren't written by someone in the store or the manager. No one ever used the narrative missions in the AoS books (at least that I'm aware of).

And all of those Narrative games were either Escalation League games or Matched Play with a story behind it.

SG

Precisely. Very very few people understand or care about narrative gaming or even what it is beyond slap a story behind a tournament ruleset and plow into each other.

 AaronWilson wrote:
For my self, AoS is pure escapism. I play it once maybe twice a month and limit my self to non deamon Tzeentch (Gors and Acolytes) as troops as that's the aesthetic I like. It's perfect as a beer and pretzel game as the miniatures are stunning and the game is full of nonsense rules.

Same. I scribble, read, write and play occasional tabletop game. I'm not the biggest fan of the rules but I find enough joy in other areas to not matter.

 Backspacehacker wrote:

 Albino Squirrel wrote:
Maybe White Dwarf should become an avenue for releasing narrative battleplans and adding to the developing storyline of Age of Sigmar. As said, the 300 page expensive hardback book to advance the story isn't going to sell well. But some story advancement every month with a narrative battleplan would be pretty cool. And might be possible for mortal humans to keep up with the story. I think MongooseMatt is probably the only person who even attempted to keep up with the army building required to follow the Realgate Wars books.

So this is something else that really has started happening in the last like 10 years or so and I still don't understand it. The need for story advancement. Why? Why does the story need to advance, Warhammer started out as a setting that was fine for 30 years and only fell because GW got a really bad CEO that tanked the game.

Lots of good points here.

For the good of the game health in general and the mass releases GW does on a pretty much weekly basis, the game needs to be completive and built for tourney play. That's there you make money.

Did the story tank for awhile in that transition? Sure did! But I think with the Potens book and the 2 short stories a week, you get more details on the world. Its ever expanding, and with the advancement in story come the rumors of summer, Slaanesh arc will happen and change a lot id bet.

Brings me into the quoted point above. Story needs to advance. It refreshes old players, and brings new ones in. It lets them create new races, abilities, models, etc. One thing that grinds my gears is hearing people who don't like that. That's the thing I cant understand. Fluff becomes stale and it ends up being the same premise of why people are fighting for thousands of years Plot always needs advancement. That said, it needs to be interesting. There's many choices in advancement for GW games that I don't get, or are so far off I cant understand, but id have them do it all again a million times then keep it "Just the way it has been".

The main point I think which nearly every conversation I have on 40k and AoS is there's just way better games out there. Models may not be as nice or may not have the mass releases, but the systems and stories of many other miniature games are, have been, and always will be better then GWs stuff and this is coming from someone whos invested tens of thousands at this point into GW. (Like many of you im sure!)

 Backspacehacker wrote:

pm713 wrote:
I hated End Times because the story was bad. For example Dwarfs just died. Kadrin fell to a gas bomb. It was incredibly disappointing. Some factions had epic battles and some got butchered in the sideline.

Story advancement is a good thing done properly. Done by GW it is a terrible thing because they can't do it.

It got to the point of killing characters off because they were board I mean HARRY THE MOTHER FREAKING HAMMER, died like a bitch. It was just horrible.

What book does Harry die in?! I have all the novels (haven’t finished), and have the boxed sets of 1, 2 & 5.

I forgot the novel but it's literally like a off scream death, and ironiclly iirc he dies to krell and undead...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Sorry he died to Vlad

I have no idea who Harry is. Were they important? I am being reminded about Gotrek just disappearing and Felix leaving him and why did that hurt me as well!?

pm713 wrote:
I have no idea who Harry is. Were they important? I am being reminded about Gotrek just disappearing and Felix leaving him and why did that hurt me as well!?

Harrybthe hammer was a really obscure character but he was THE orginal Warhammer weirder. He was the guy on the front cover of the very first Warhammer rule book and was the only character who the undead actually feared, mechanic wise as well he could make undead run. He got 2 models his really old lead one, and a pewter one released for GWs 25th anniversary

I personally think that the narrative of aos has never been stronger. The original realmgate wars was a little uninspired for me. There were some cool elements but it was pretty much epic battle after epic battle with not enough in the way of context or stakes.
Malign Portents has been all about setting up context and stakes ( what could be more important than the risk to your soul)
While I too was a little disappointed by the slim malign portents book, it has more been more than made up for by the awesome series of short stories on the malign portents website. We are now at 35 stories and counting. Many of these stories could easily be converted into a battleplan.
As for black library it is simply not true that Aos releases have dried up. The original realmgate wars series had ten books. There are now 24 Aos novels with 4 more coming in the next 4 months. Some of the best books are the more recent ones. City of Secrets, (which is getting a follow-up trilogy starting in June), spear of Shadows and Overlords of the Iron Dragon are particularly enjoyable.
The recent global campaign with its choose your own adventure format was far more interesting than the typical fight over area X format we have seen before.
The complaints that GW us darling back the high fantasy aspect of Aos seem pretty rediculous in light of the most recent release.
I think GW will eventually return to a linear narrative style campaign book but they realised that they need to spend more time fleshing out the setting first. Malign portents is there ongoing effort to do this. I am sure the upcoming soul wars box and novel will build on this

 Albino Squirrel wrote:
. I think MongooseMatt is probably the only person who even attempted to keep up with the army building required to follow the Realgate Wars books.

Still haven't found anyone else who did that

Old Warhammer Fantasy had a lot of narrative, even if it didn't move the timeline. That's where most of their iconic characters came from, right? They had those campaign packs with narrative scenarios to play thought specific stories. And they didn't have specific scenarios, but a lot of info about things like Vlad and Manfred's wars against he empire, even though they were in the past.

I thought the WHFB setting was more interesting.
There were a lot of parallels with our world, and most of the struggle was between ordinary humans and monsters.
You had a better sense of scale and the stakes, which makes for a more compelling story.

With settings like AoS and 40k you don't have that, as everything is so over the top and bizarre. WHFB was the serious setting and 40k was the goofy one. Now there are 2 goofy settings and no somewhat reasonable ones.

Maybe that will change with the release of the Free Guild. Maybe not.

I doubt it will change. They seem pretty committed to what they have. Some of it's good and some is bad.

auticus wrote:The thing that pissed people off about whfb advancing the story wasn't that the story was advancing, it was that GW would retcon it right away.

Storm of Chaos - as soon as it happened they said "nevermind, none of that really happened" and it felt like a huge waste.

End Times pissed everyone off because it went right to AOS and blew up the old world, not because the story advanced.

You know, one of my favorite parts of WFB was in 6th Ed. when they took Eltharion, possibly my favorite GW created character of all time, and had him blinded. He wound up becoming a better character for it, and set up some really cool work later. 7th Ed. army book? RESET BUTTON!!!!!!!!!! Oh, and garbage army wide special rules that started the 7th Ed. arms race. Mostly, though, just the annoyance factor of all the reset button hitting from 6th to 7th.

Albino Squirrel wrote:Old Warhammer Fantasy had a lot of narrative, even if it didn't move the timeline. That's where most of their iconic characters came from, right? They had those campaign packs with narrative scenarios to play thought specific stories. And they didn't have specific scenarios, but a lot of info about things like Vlad and Manfred's wars against he empire, even though they were in the past.

5th Ed. had these really cool campaign packs that had characters created specifically for them. One of my dream projects is transcribing those to 6th, since the paradigm shift was significant. There was constant change and motion going on in the setting and in the story line in WFB, but the main timeline stayed still. This basically left the "present" and "future" up to the individual gamer, and catered to narrative play. I don't need to have my hand held and to be walked through the results of the High Elves reclaiming a colony in Lustria, I can write that myself. What I DO need is a tight enough rule set that I can play out any sort of scenario, no matter how challenging, and know that the parts are going to interact correctly. AOS didn't have that at first, and judging from the way the releases and style of gaming in AOS has progressed, I'm not the only one who needed that.

Chikout wrote:City of Secrets, (which is getting a follow-up trilogy starting in June),

I haven't been paying close enough attention, but that is such good news.

 Just Tony wrote:

auticus wrote:The thing that pissed people off about whfb advancing the story wasn't that the story was advancing, it was that GW would retcon it right away.

Storm of Chaos - as soon as it happened they said "nevermind, none of that really happened" and it felt like a huge waste.

End Times pissed everyone off because it went right to AOS and blew up the old world, not because the story advanced.

You know, one of my favorite parts of WFB was in 6th Ed. when they took Eltharion, possibly my favorite GW created character of all time, and had him blinded. He wound up becoming a better character for it, and set up some really cool work later. 7th Ed. army book? RESET BUTTON!!!!!!!!!! Oh, and garbage army wide special rules that started the 7th Ed. arms race. Mostly, though, just the annoyance factor of all the reset button hitting from 6th to 7th.

Albino Squirrel wrote:Old Warhammer Fantasy had a lot of narrative, even if it didn't move the timeline. That's where most of their iconic characters came from, right? They had those campaign packs with narrative scenarios to play thought specific stories. And they didn't have specific scenarios, but a lot of info about things like Vlad and Manfred's wars against he empire, even though they were in the past.

5th Ed. had these really cool campaign packs that had characters created specifically for them. One of my dream projects is transcribing those to 6th, since the paradigm shift was significant. There was constant change and motion going on in the setting and in the story line in WFB, but the main timeline stayed still. This basically left the "present" and "future" up to the individual gamer, and catered to narrative play. I don't need to have my hand held and to be walked through the results of the High Elves reclaiming a colony in Lustria, I can write that myself. What I DO need is a tight enough rule set that I can play out any sort of scenario, no matter how challenging, and know that the parts are going to interact correctly. AOS didn't have that at first, and judging from the way the releases and style of gaming in AOS has progressed, I'm not the only one who needed that.

This is one of the other things that really rustles my jimmies, are people who say "WHFB got stale because it never advanced." If thats the case how was it not a problem for like 25+ years, but then only recently became and issue? As you said the arms race really screwed over WHFB, and i pin the death and lack of interest on it directly at the feet of kirby.

People have complained that the story wasn't advancing on forums since portent.net was the big site. I was iinvolved in many discussions... particularly when they retconned storm of chaos, about how gw needs to do something with the story.

I wonder how many people regretted wanting that when End Times happened?

pm713 wrote:
I wonder how many people regretted wanting that when End Times happened?

I imagine a lot of them

The Blightwar seems to have been the interlude between the Realmgate Wars and the Malign Portents. And at least with the two recent Aelven factions, their introduction has been part of the narrative - Morathi has just recently revealed herself as a big snakey daemony thing and the Deepkin are only now rising above the waves. It's not like they're saying "these guys have been heare for years, you've just not noticed".

So, while I continue to burn offerings in the hope that "competitive play" withers away and everyone starts playing the way I want them to, I'll take what I can get.

With both of the Aelf factions, it is "these guys have been here for years...but".

Daughters of Khaine were just thought to be some crazy cult dwelling in the outer parts of the towns and things like that. It's now being revealed that "they rule over the Realm of Shadow"(so I guess we're not getting Malerion and his Shadowkin ). Morathi was just thought to be a High Priestess of a dead god, but now she's been revealed as something far more sinister/powerful.

Idoneth have always been there but they've taken great pains to either leave no survivors of their raids or to erase all memories of their having been seen. There's a great bit in the Idoneth book where a Freeguild guard is talking to someone about the things he witnessed during an Idoneth raid, but he talks about "dragons" and "great behemoths" and has to stop talking when he starts describing the Idoneth themselves because he's suffering debilitating headaches.

Well honestly there's nothing 'just now revealed' about DoK. The various gods and those 'in the know' have known Morathi is a big snake since the age of myth, along with the existence of mutants made from stolen elf souls. But the greater 99% has never known about Morathi's snake form, snake people, harpies, medusa, true extent of her temples, etc. And still don't. They still think of DoK as a crazy elf cult conposed of 'normal' elves and led by a 'normal' elf. Pretty sure she doesn't rule over the realm of shadow either, but rather has a strong influence. Note that Malerion is more powerful than her and has his own Shadowkin.

The bit about Idoneth is spot on.

Warhammer Community via Warhammer Legends wrote:In the Background
The Dark Elves ruled the cold lands of Naggaroth with arrogance and cruelty. If you got a kick out of collecting the most depraved army that the world-that-was had to offer, then you need look no further than the Daughters of Khaine, who now reign over the Realm of Shadow in the Age of Sigmar.

I mean, it might be that Malerion and his Shadowkin are going to be billed as the rulers of a kind of 'Shadowrealm' in the Realm of Shadow...but that might be too on the nose.

I'll give you that quote, but I still think the battletome takes precedence over a snippet in warhammer legends

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'll give you that quote, but I still think the battletome takes precedence over a snippet in warhammer legends

To be fair, we've also had things fleshed out a bit more with it seeming like Slaanesh is being held somewhere 'between realms'.

Maybe they're planning on that being Malerion's realm?

Ooo, that's a cool theory.

A quick note, balance is very important, from the meta where I come from people are very, very happy to finally have a balanced meta where they can bring more or less what they like to the table without being tabled turn 2 or 3. These people, myself included take much more pleasure in playing balanced games where we can create a story out of epic moments and games where something truly amazing happened.
Like a unit of 30 plauge bearers holding off: Elven cavalary, sword masters, elven spearmen and 10 paladin for 2 turns while the bloatflies made their way into the safe backfield with the relic under the desperate fire of the storm casts to bring the flies down.

In a competitive game it would be impossible due to the lacking diversity of units and the absurd dryiness of the whole situation.

While I do regret the removal of the story driven battleplans although I did enjoy them only through Mongoose's battle reports, they still bought a sort of joy and knowledge that Age of Sigmar would be story focused, but in my opinion a stroy focused game is immposible without a stable meta.

It's been said multiple times on this forum: it's MUCH better to play a narrative game with a tight balanced rules system than to try to take a narrative system that cares nothing for balance and try to tighten it. You start with a good foundation, not a pit of loose gravel and sand, when you build a house. A game is no different. From there it could be a free form jazz hall or it could be a rigidly held scientific study hall. As long as the foundation is sound, it could go either way.

To be fair to the notion that players aren’t interested in non-tournament gaming... GW does not generally do narrative gaming well. I know there are exceptions, but to GW narrative = casual. Some sort of quasi competitive one off games designed to do little more than pad out expensive books. They’re very low effort affairs. They hire some intern to write a one page blurb about it doesn’t make a scenario narrative.

I play Bolt Action as well and the difference is night and day. You can just immediately tell the difference when you open the latest BA campaign book.

Running a narrative game/campaign is actually a lot of work. If anything it’s less casual than your typical one off competitive pick up game.

As long as GW treats “narrative” gaming as nothing more than a stripped down version of matched play it’s always going to be less popular.

A great example is the most excellent cooperative, fan made expansion for X Wing called Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. It’s awesome, it’s cooperative, and is a lot of fun. But it also involved some serious work on the design, and a little investment from its players.

dosiere wrote:
To be fair to the notion that players aren’t interested in non-tournament gaming... GW does not generally do narrative gaming well. I know there are exceptions, but to GW narrative = casual. Some sort of quasi competitive one off games designed to do little more than pad out expensive books. They’re very low effort affairs. They hire some intern to write a one page blurb about it doesn’t make a scenario narrative.

I play Bolt Action as well and the difference is night and day. You can just immediately tell the difference when you open the latest BA campaign book.

Running a narrative game/campaign is actually a lot of work. If anything it’s less casual than your typical one off competitive pick up game.

As long as GW treats “narrative” gaming as nothing more than a stripped down version of matched play it’s always going to be less popular.

A great example is the most excellent cooperative, fan made expansion for X Wing called Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. It’s awesome, it’s cooperative, and is a lot of fun. But it also involved some serious work on the design, and a little investment from its players.

This is a good point, though in GWs defense I will give them Path to Glory.

Yeah, fair. They’ve done quality narrative stuff before. I remember a long time ago they had a series of articles in white dwarf detailing a campaign for WFB. It was good, interesting stuff that I know people at least tried, because it actually had fleshed out rules you could use straight out of the magazines rather than just a vague hand waiving of “you should try finishing designing this idea, it’d be a lot of fun if you did.”

I just wish they’d take narrative gaming seriously; as seriously as they are trying to take matched play. I’d play the hell out of it, especially in GWs case as I don’t like playing Warhammer competitively anymore.

Absolutely love your blog, Matt. I hope the new edition brings some narrative that inspires you.

I think you might have been one of the dozen people in the world who cared about the narrative battleplans GW was putting out at the start of AoS.

It's awesome they inspired you, and it made for the best AoS blog around, but I think they weren't doing anything for 99% of the demographic.

I just wish they’d take narrative gaming seriously; as seriously as they are trying to take matched play.

A wish I have been echoing since the long ago as well. The general's handbook in 2002 was really quality material in that realm and from there they just kind of went downhill. They attempted the Storm of Chaos narrative and then hand waived everything as not happening and that was the last time they really tried up until now.

Where they really give lip service to it but no one really knows what it is unless they've played other games that have it for real.

So in regard to several thoughts I have had these last couple of years, that seem to broadly fit into this topic, and out of laziness and ennui have not bothered to type down or start my own topic. I present some of my issues that I have with AoS that are, despite my best efforts, stopping me from enjoying the game. I am certain most of them are not of any general value, since I have never seen much discussion about them online.

Someone said, that one of the problems with WHFB and its masses of troops were that they felt that most of them were just glorified wound counters and had no effect on the battle. While this is a fair point of view, my issue with AoS is that the models are dead. What I mean by this is that there are no rules for psychology and the rules for morale are lackluster. Imagine this, you want your 30 goblins to charge a huge angry dragon. In my world that would take some serious coaxing and would not be a proposition easily enacted, since goblins as we all know are cowards. How did WHFB of yore handle this? Well, by giving the goblins poor leadership and forcing them to take a test to see if they were up to the task this day. (Remember, there were 8 editions of whfb, not just one) Most likely, without a brawny goblin big boss with a magical hat or some such, they would not. Or imagine that you want the trolls that you command, known to be dumb as bricks, to charge a group of decidedly average humans. Would they conform to your orders or would they be more interested in examining that toadstool they found just under their noses? Or lastly, would your frothing fearsome berserkers be able to enact your command or would they loose all sense of self and by extension you the battle?

Well, in AoS, all these questions are non-existent. Your models do what you want them to do, they are after all just dead gaming pieces, not living. Because of this, for me, warhammer (because AoS is warhammer) has lost all connection with its rpg roots and thus, suffers as a vessel for narrative gaming.

I find it fascinating that I can find pages upon pages discussing the (lack of) balance, but almost nothing concerning these issues, maybe I am out of touch with what is wanted since AoS is not alone in going into this direction. Most miniature games these days seem to find rules that concern characteristics like psychology or morale to be sacrificeable on the altar of "streamlining". Well, I for one think that miniature gaming is lessened by that direction.

Finally, I just want to comment upon issues concerning "the story" or "time-line progression"

Saying "the story" implies that there is one overarching story line. Which is preposterous of course, Whfb was a world that contained a massive amount of stories, the mortal realms are by all account vastly superior in size to the world that was and as such should be filled with different "narratives". And lets not even get into the ridiculousness that a Galaxy with between a 100-400 billion stars, and an untold amount of humans, has one storyline. The problem with having "a story" is that it makes the world, galaxy etc seem very small. Easily digested, sure, but what is the issue with having dramatic regional, localised events, that can be sufficiently interesting and flavourful. That said, it is not impossible to progress the timeline, and having major events have an effect on the world/realms/galaxy. The issue then becomes one of touch. Too heavy-handed and it will seem like your average unreadable fanfic, with everything larger than life. Too subtle and a lot of people will question "why bother".

I have actually started to like the visual direction and the general feel of AoS background, even though I dislike the centralisation of narrative. And I like much of the aesthetics from the newer releases. But the lack of life in the ruleset is too large of a barrier for me to overcome. I feel that in spite of AoS being launched without points, it has a much more competitive direction as of 2018 than whfb ever had.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'll give you that quote, but I still think the battletome takes precedence over a snippet in warhammer legends

To be fair, we've also had things fleshed out a bit more with it seeming like Slaanesh is being held somewhere 'between realms'.

Maybe they're planning on that being Malerion's realm?

Malerion and Morathi both rule in the Realm of Shadow. Morathi rules a small region called Umbral Veil (gifted by Malerion), while Malerion rules the rest of the Shadowlands.

I find it fascinating that I can find pages upon pages discussing the (lack of) balance, but almost nothing concerning these issues, maybe I am out of touch with what is wanted since AoS is not alone in going into this direction. Most miniature games these days seem to find rules that concern characteristics like psychology or morale to be sacrificeable on the altar of "streamlining". Well, I for one think that miniature gaming is lessened by that direction.

I have posted similar topics on various sites over the past three years and what I have learned is that narrative RPG elements in a tabletop wargame were popular in the 80s and 90s when I starttetd, but are not in the least bit something that the current gen really wants.

Tabletop wargames today are competitive affairs and you'll often be told if you want to have RPG elements, then go play an RPG.

I learned that in tthte past three years since AOS has been released that what I want out of a game (things like whatt you talk about) are largely dead today, and thats something that I had to adapt to a while back.

To me, WFB at its heart was all ABOUT psychology. It's the reason that there weren't very many wounds done in unit per unit exchanges. It's also why after a certain many wounds you ran the risk of your units freaking out and bailing. 7th started killing that with the wounds cause cranked up to eleventy TEN!!!! (Sorry, my 5 year old daughter came up with a number that means more than pretty much any number in existence, I felt the need to use it) and rather than dial that back, Psychology paid the price.

Yeah, you can't have a game based off of classical combat without having psychology, because classical combat was all about psychology.

The entire point was to keep your nerve for longer than the enemy. Whoever broke first gets slaughtered.

Trying to "simplify" it by stripping away those mechanics completely misses the point of having a game based on that style of warfare.

auticus wrote:

I find it fascinating that I can find pages upon pages discussing the (lack of) balance, but almost nothing concerning these issues, maybe I am out of touch with what is wanted since AoS is not alone in going into this direction. Most miniature games these days seem to find rules that concern characteristics like psychology or morale to be sacrificeable on the altar of "streamlining". Well, I for one think that miniature gaming is lessened by that direction.

I have posted similar topics on various sites over the past three years and what I have learned is that narrative RPG elements in a tabletop wargame were popular in the 80s and 90s when I starttetd, but are not in the least bit something that the current gen really wants.

Tabletop wargames today are competitive affairs and you'll often be told if you want to have RPG elements, then go play an RPG.

I learned that in tthte past three years since AOS has been released that what I want out of a game (things like whatt you talk about) are largely dead today, and thats something that I had to adapt to a while back.

There's nothing wrong with either approach, it just is what it is.

A few years ago, I was having a discussion about why we don't see many (any?) point and click adventure games anymore. The conclusion we came to is that, despite loving games like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, they are a hard sell these days because FAQs and walkthroughs are so readily available, and once you've won the game, there's very little need to keep it or replay it. To add insult to injury, narrative games require a bit more talent in a broader range of skillsets, such that in the game industry, there's very few people left who could make a game to the same level as Monkey Island (and I say this as a dialogue writer who worked with the creator of Monkey Island).

I think that in the early days of video game development, inspiration came from a wide variety of places, but as the industry matured over time and new blood came in, they were inspired only by the video games that came before. Monkey Island was based on a book. Tales of Monkey Island was based on Monkey Island. Baldur's Gate was based on DnD. Dragon's Age was based on Baldur's Gate. Everquest was based on MUDs, World of Warcraft was based on Everquest. And so on. There's a sort of flanderization that naturally happens as an industry moves past its roots of outside influence and becomes its own roots for the future. Miniature gaming is old enough that it isn't the grognards running it, but their children and grandchildren.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Always in motion, the future is. Still, it is hard not to miss things that you loved from the past.

At least with video games, amateur development took up the mantle for a lot of dead gaming. There are large communities based around interactive fiction, roguelikes, old school JRPGs, visual novels, point and click adventure games, pixel art, and all sorts of things the industry (as an industry) has left behind. There's no reason why you need GW to provide narrative gaming for you. I mean, you may live by their rules, but you play by yours.

I didn't mention anything being wrong with it, just that I had to adapt my own mindset because mechanics > everything else is something I never really liked, but for me to have continued playing I had to learn to get over that because thats how its been for many years now.

One thing to keep in mind is that trends come and go. Tabletop gaming is like any other industry. We're in the middle of a boardgaming renaissance, so it's only natural that some of those mechanics will bleed over into other similar industries. Even videogames are currently experiencing an influx of mechanics mostly seen in boardgames. In a few years, the industry will shift again. It may go back toward narrative gaming, it may go in a direction we've never seen before. With the rise in popularity of tabletop RPGs (I seriously saw the cheerleading squad from a local high school playing D&D unironically at my FLGS a few months back), I wouldn't be at all surprised to see AoS 4.0 implement a gamemaster mechanic. It would be equally unsurprising for it to require some form of app integration (the current trend in boardgames). An evolving hobby is a good sign. It means it is doing well.

https://ttgamingdiary.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/i-have-an-issue-with-age-of-sigmar/

Another poster has similar issues with where narrative went.

auticus wrote:
https://ttgamingdiary.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/i-have-an-issue-with-age-of-sigmar/

Another poster has similar issues with where narrative went.

That's MongooseMatt's blog. It is literally the same text as the OP.

auticus wrote:
GW gambled on narrative. They put a lot of resources into producing the realmgate war books and the campaign material.

That gamble failed.

At least they tried.

It's not a complete failure - GW did manage to streamline the ruleset from something unplayable down to something understandable. That's no small accomplishment.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, you can't have a game based off of classical combat without having psychology,

That only works when EVERY unit in EVERY army suffers psychology, no matter how elite or powerful.

If any armies are Fearless or Without Fear, then psychology is garbage, and the game becomes better without it.

If you replace it with something like the old WHFB crumble rules for undead it can work alongside psychology and humans breakig and running, but adding dwarves and elves that are just rolling anything but boxcars with rerolls to hold it becomes a waste of time.

Or something as stupid as "Immune to Psychology"...

 Sqorgar wrote:

auticus wrote:
https://ttgamingdiary.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/i-have-an-issue-with-age-of-sigmar/

Another poster has similar issues with where narrative went.

That's MongooseMatt's blog. It is literally the same text as the OP.

Its been a while since I've read the original post and the two different names threw me off.

Oh well.