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Having to rely on pickup games sounds like hell, not gonna lie :(

I think thats probably the closest source to truth. A lot of people just want random pick up games, and that REQUIRES a huge pool of players.

Smaller games... you won't get that. Sometimes at all. Frostgrave requires some organization and is suited for campaign play which is not a popular thing.

Cronch wrote:
Having to rely on pickup games sounds like hell, not gonna lie :(

It can be. The issue is that you have a circle:

Everyone plays AOS/40k so nobody wants to try any other game because everyone plays AOS/40k and there's no guarantee anyone will want to play a new game, so everyone keeps playing AOS/40k in spite of it.

Like auticus says, there's this sort of "path of least resistance" approach, which is a big reason Warhammer is so dominant. Stores don't support other games, people don't care to look at them because they aren't sure if anyone else would want to play them. Warhammer is the "comfortable" choice that you can be reasonably certain will have game store support and a large number of players in your area. Both of those things, in the USA at least, are pretty huge. A game store has a massively unbalanced amount of power in regards to what games get played because they are often seen as the "hub" of gaming. A game not sold at the game store is unlikely to get any traction from the players if the store even allows people to play it there in the first place.

I'm not sure what the rules are about promoting your own posts, but his is an interesting discussion, so I decided to create a poll over on Dakka Discussion.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 DarkBlack wrote:

So why do people keep going on about how much better 8e 40k/AoS is than everything that's come before?

The rules were cleaned up and it's a really low bar.

Sim-Life wrote:People accept GW mediocrity because its an easy game. Not everyone wants to play something as strict and precise as Warmachine or as complex as Malifaux or Infinity. Sometimes people just want to get cool models on a table, throw dice and have a laugh without having to think too hard.

Ever heard of Gaslands or Frostgrave? D&D 5e?
Mantic games are not hard to learn either, because they are well written and designed to be. Winning takes some thinking, depending on how well your opponent plays though.

Yeah but you know who plays Frostgrave and Gaslands? Hardly anyone. Its much easier to find people who play 40k or AoS because most people starting the hobby start with Warhammer and already have a financial and time investment in it. D&D isn't even comparible, its a totally different type of game and social commitment, I don't even know why you'd think to compare that.

You know what part of the point might be? Pointing out that GW is full of gak so that people might consider trying other games.
Those two are low investment games that are the easiest to get going.

I was responding to:

Sometimes people just want to get cool models on a table, throw dice and have a laugh without having to think too hard.

D&D 5e is great for that. The point being that there are other ways to get that kind of experience.

Except the games you mentioned aren't wargames. D&D especially is nothing like a wargame. Frostgrave is the closest, but the analogous games would still be Necromunda, Kill Team, and Warcry.

I'd be happy to jump in on a KoW, Conquest, or whatever other wargame that offers better rules. But I can't play them. There's no day I can show up and get pick-up games, and if I join a schedules league it means I could end up driving an hour to meet with someone. I can't just play the game I have to jump through hoops to get to the point where models are being put on the table.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

ccs wrote:

 DarkBlack wrote:

40k 8th edition made me realise what "the future" with GW looks like. They had a new edition with better rules. They had indexes with armies on roughly the same level. They had a chance to turn things around.
Then they started releasing codexes a few months later. I would have liked more use out of my index, but that was alright.
Armies with codexes were better though. Fine, give them a chance to get all the rules out.
Some codexes were better than others. Not even the new ones, just the ones GW seemed to favour. How did they feth that up? If the wanted to do it right they could have, but they chose not to. AGAIN
That's when I realised that they had no intention to. The next thing your hopes are pinned to for a better game is to string you along.

I see that you're relatively new to GW games....

See, GWs been using this model for at least 30 years. Maybe longer, but I'm not familiar with WFB 1st or 2nd edition. They aren't going to stop.

So why do people keep going on about how much better 8e 40k/AoS is than everything that's come before?

Some editions are better than previous ones.
Current AoS IS better than it's original incarnation. 40k 8e? My opinion is 50/50. I like about as much of it as I dislike. Wich is an improvement from 6th/7th 40k for me.
AoS is largely a completely different game from WHFB. So I will not judge AoS based on WHFB. They play differently & I can enjoy both.

But that doesn't have anything to do with GWs pattern on how they make books.
They make the base game. And then they add stuff. Armies, special rules, new expansions, etc etc etc. Some of these are great, some awful, etc. And they keep doing this until: The system completely breaks, sales decline to some point, they've written themselves into the proverbial corner/run out of ideas, or they come up with something completely different for the core that just can't be shoehorned into the edition as it exists. Then they put out a new edition & the treadmill begins anew.

Which is just the result of GW's design method

They don't design/make a game, they design models, design a rule book and design faction books

each independent from each other, one finished long before the others which makes changes hard to come by.


If GW designs Games, and has the possibility to test it, the results are quite good. Kill Team, Warcry or Apocalypse as an example.

Problem is, if there is no game, testing is also pointless and adjustments can only be made to a half finished product.

I have a relatively enjoyable community (minus a couple arrogant people who think the sun sets when they sit down). The manager at my local GW has become a friend by this point, and I love going there for painting, playing, or generally just hanging out. It’s good community, awesome models, and I’ve got too much going on at this point for “complicated and difficult to find people to play with”. So I went back to my original roots with GW. And not at all disappointed. Some games will be hard, some easy. But it’s rewarding for me as it is now.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Except the games you mentioned aren't wargames. D&D especially is nothing like a wargame. Frostgrave is the closest, but the analogous games would still be Necromunda, Kill Team, and Warcry.

I'd be happy to jump in on a KoW, Conquest, or whatever other wargame that offers better rules. But I can't play them. There's no day I can show up and get pick-up games, and if I join a schedules league it means I could end up driving an hour to meet with someone. I can't just play the game I have to jump through hoops to get to the point where models are being put on the table.

Thats the roughest spot for me recruiting conquest.

“Its a great game and awesome but i cant get pickup games when i want”

We have a monthly get together and a regular league starting in january. But i doubt we will get beyond 15 players until a year has passed and people see us still playing.

 auticus wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Except the games you mentioned aren't wargames. D&D especially is nothing like a wargame. Frostgrave is the closest, but the analogous games would still be Necromunda, Kill Team, and Warcry.

I'd be happy to jump in on a KoW, Conquest, or whatever other wargame that offers better rules. But I can't play them. There's no day I can show up and get pick-up games, and if I join a schedules league it means I could end up driving an hour to meet with someone. I can't just play the game I have to jump through hoops to get to the point where models are being put on the table.

Thats the roughest spot for me recruiting conquest.

“Its a great game and awesome but i cant get pickup games when i want”

We have a monthly get together and a regular league starting in january. But i doubt we will get beyond 15 players until a year has passed and people see us still playing.

The irony here is that for all the people who say how they can't find anyone who plays certain games if they all played the other game there would be enough for pickup games.

That is a strange argument. How does the fact that something has a new leadership now, somehow change the stuff that happened in the past. Because that ends with bad things happening to you over and over again. Specially as the new GW doesn't seem to be very new. The design team, and the people that decide in the end what rules stay and which don't are the same people that worked a few years ago.

Plus if someone things that the wrong done to him was substential, a change of leadership means nothing. My grandmother hated germans and russians till the day she died.

Wayniac wrote:

 auticus wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Except the games you mentioned aren't wargames. D&D especially is nothing like a wargame. Frostgrave is the closest, but the analogous games would still be Necromunda, Kill Team, and Warcry.

I'd be happy to jump in on a KoW, Conquest, or whatever other wargame that offers better rules. But I can't play them. There's no day I can show up and get pick-up games, and if I join a schedules league it means I could end up driving an hour to meet with someone. I can't just play the game I have to jump through hoops to get to the point where models are being put on the table.

Thats the roughest spot for me recruiting conquest.

“Its a great game and awesome but i cant get pickup games when i want”

We have a monthly get together and a regular league starting in january. But i doubt we will get beyond 15 players until a year has passed and people see us still playing.

The irony here is that for all the people who say how they can't find anyone who plays certain games if they all played the other game there would be enough for pickup games.

Its certainly a self fulfilling failure yes. They don't want to risk it, and the very easy path is to just back whats popular right now. The gamers I have known my whole life tend to not really be interested in having to put a lot of effort in community building because its not an easy path to walk down.

For me it's pretty simple why I don't play AoS. I tried to get into it on a few occasions in it's lifetime (at launch, with the General's Handbook and more recently when Gloomspite released) and I've just never found it to grab me enough to justify the buyin. My main gaming group are also not interested in it on a mechanics level (same deal with 40k) even though we'd all be very interested in something GW fantasy. Blood Bowl and then Warcry scratched that itch a bit but now LotR is hitting the fantasy vibe perfectly with a game that we prefer more.

There's also the issue of the gaming industry having a glut of skirmish games and the fact that I play a lot of them. My group tends to play smaller model count games because it's lower investment, quicker to get fully painted and easier to move on to something else or come back to. They're also a lot easier to expand when I have to buy and paint just 1-2 models to add to a crew as opposed to 10-20 man units to an army. Different strokes really, the mass battle doesn't hit me like it used to and I prefer to get 2-3 games in on a gaming day instead of one slog

Wayniac wrote:

 auticus wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Except the games you mentioned aren't wargames. D&D especially is nothing like a wargame. Frostgrave is the closest, but the analogous games would still be Necromunda, Kill Team, and Warcry.

I'd be happy to jump in on a KoW, Conquest, or whatever other wargame that offers better rules. But I can't play them. There's no day I can show up and get pick-up games, and if I join a schedules league it means I could end up driving an hour to meet with someone. I can't just play the game I have to jump through hoops to get to the point where models are being put on the table.

Thats the roughest spot for me recruiting conquest.

“Its a great game and awesome but i cant get pickup games when i want”

We have a monthly get together and a regular league starting in january. But i doubt we will get beyond 15 players until a year has passed and people see us still playing.

The irony here is that for all the people who say how they can't find anyone who plays certain games if they all played the other game there would be enough for pickup games.

Yes, but you also cannot reasonably fault players for wanting to put the effort to get into a game system on what is essentially a gamble that has a long history of failure. I've been the one trying to get a foothold with a new game or game system before, and I've wound up burned by it multiple times. That happens enough and one simply does not want to bet on anything short of sure thing.

ccs wrote:
...They make the base game. And then they add stuff. Armies, special rules, new expansions, etc etc etc. Some of these are great, some awful, etc. And they keep doing this until: The system completely breaks, sales decline to some point, they've written themselves into the proverbial corner/run out of ideas, or they come up with something completely different for the core that just can't be shoehorned into the edition as it exists. Then they put out a new edition & the treadmill begins anew.

Which is why I'm not playing Sigmar. It's exactly the same barely-functional crap as came before but this time all my armies have been dissected and my choice is to play their mutilated corpses or buy a bunch of new minis I don't particularly like.

Yes, but you also cannot reasonably fault players for wanting to put the effort to get into a game system on what is essentially a gamble that has a long history of failure. I've been the one trying to get a foothold with a new game or game system before, and I've wound up burned by it multiple times. That happens enough and one simply does not want to bet on anything short of sure thing.

The cost of course is to your own morale. But I totally get it because thats why I was holding on so long and just doing house rules to make the game palatable.

And to your wallet...

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
And to your wallet...

True, but let's be honest most non-GW games aren't that pricey and often have a 2-player starter set, so you're not out THAT much money to get a 2p set for doing demos, even if nobody bites. It still sucks, of course.

To relate, my kings of war investment has been minimal because I can use my warhammer collection.

However Conquest has set me back some $$$. When I saw it at Adepticon I already made the decision I was pushing that at home, even if that meant me just playing myself and making battle reports.

That has grown and we now have (16) players in Conquest, but it started very small.

But I also backed and pushed probably a dozen games in the 2010s that no one wanted to touch, so I have also been burned on those.

I had to accept that if Conquest never caught on that I'd have to just play with one or two people with my painted models and be ok with that. I am used to running campaign events in whfb with over 50 players so that is a stark difference, but my AOS events have been anemic because AOS never fully caught fire here.

I keep getting tempted to jump into AoS because of the miniatures, but at the end of the day they don't have the same narrative behind them as any of the armies in 40k do.

Firstly, I have no idea who is doing what or where, there's no geographic frame of reference for anything, and I don't even have any incentive to learn about it in the first place because the realm gates basically make that irrelevant.

The whole setting just feels like a collage of disparate high fantasy elements without anything strong enough to tie it all together. It's all hopelessly, hopelessly, fragmented.

To make matters worse, the Stormcast are essentially there to replace humanity on the center stage. Every time we could see something different we just get more Stormcast Eternals. More and more Stormcast Eternals, never ending. I don't even find them that interesting, much for the same reasons I don't like the mortal realms.

Just like the mortal realms, the Stormcast have no identity because they're just a blank canvas, where the only defining feature that they have is how powerful they are, which as far as I'm concerned is not very interesting.

So I guess that leads me to the last point. The Stormcast are a child's power fantasy, they're basically comic book super heroes in an RPG setting. Not even Space Marines are this on the nose, where you can literally insert yourself onto them and continue on as normal.

It's at this point where the usual defense would be "but you can ignore them", to which I would say "No, you can't". As I mentioned earlier the setting has basically used Stormcast as a replacement for humanity, and they're far, far less interesting.

Ignoring Stormcast Eternals in Age of Sigmar is about as easy as ignoring an elephant in the room.

The narrative is at it's best when they began focusing on the little people.

City of Secrets
Spear of Shadows
Callis and Toll
All the Gotrek dramas
Cities of Sigmar tome.

The much maligned Stormcast actually have some interesting characterizations in a lot of the BL releases since the mostly cringey Realmgate era books.

I totally understand the whole playing games outside the GW walled garden. I did that for longer than I have played GW games. Most of those games where played by disgruntled GW players (the 40k 6th-7th edition folks) that finally had enough and crawled over the wall. A good number of them probably went back after the introduction of 8th edition 40k.

Previous Gaming Experiences Rant



What I can say is by-and-large, GW players are an incredibly hopeful lot. They will break out or start an army at the slightest hint that GW game isn't completely horrible. It seems an even split if they will just shelve their army and wait for the game to be 'balanced', 'good' or whatever they are looking for when that GW game turns out to inevitably not be. Another portion will continue just to play even if it looks like they aren't having a great deal of fun (sunk cost fallacy maybe). My experience has been, even if you do manage to get a group going outside of GW games, all it takes is the hope of an idea that this edition has turned it around this time and players will leave whatever game they are currently playing to go back. By the time they discover it isn't all they hoped for, that other gaming group has long since dissolved into other games or just stopped playing altogether and there is no going back. Games Workshop games apparently get infinite re-tries, anybody else get a single shot at best and should consider themselves lucky to get that shot. That is my observation.

I started playing GW games mostly because I had no more interest in trying to recruit or maintain another gaming group. I just wanted to show up a FLGS and find out what night is their 40k night and play. I didn't want to have to lug two armies, setup and waste a couple hours mostly doing nothing trying to get people to play demo games. I also found that GW miniatures were a heck of lot easier to make me look like a better painter than I am. I also was actually looking for an accessible and ultimately shallow gaming experience as I knew I wouldn't have the same amount time/money/effort to break down some of the best ways to build an army and play them on the table.

Managing a Gaming Group Tangent



I started Age of Sigmar because of the Kill Team group I am in, and I have been wanting to play a platoon/army game and can't really make it to 40k night. I was also under the impression that AoS was slightly better designed than 40k. Maybe it is, but my first impression says it isn't. I am going to keep plugging away in this Escalation League for AoS I am in. Currently, I am far less impressed with AoS than I have ever been with 40k and I started at the tail end of 7th edition 40k. Maybe is was perfect storm of not knowing how to play, my first game, not really being a demo of the game, playing an A tier vs. an F tier a small point game. But I generally consider a game not worth pursuing if I could have done better by literally taking no action all game long like what happen in that game.

I am hopeful (see what I said about GW players) that the new S2D battletomb allows me to play my army like how I want to play it. I really don't think a core of Chaos Warriors and Chaos Knights is a crazy idea for a S2D army. But right now, I can't see in anyway how that army can compete with a similar Bonereaper army of Mortek Guards and Kavalos Deathriders which looking over their stats make them look like Chaos Warriors 2.0. What is getting to be worse is people offering up what seem to be canned answers to the Bonereaper's weakness like they aren't the same in a Chaos Warrior and Knight army but worst.

After the Escalation League ends, I don't know if I will bother with AoS anymore. It seems too much like 40k with the advantages of not having a bunch of stratagems and being more melee focused. Otherwise, it seems a rather shallow experience of what actually happens on the table compared to what goes in the army list. Still way too early for me to tell though.

Let us know your thoughts after your escalation league concludes. I feel the way you do, and that feeling never changed after four-plus years of plugging away at it.

That matches my experiences too with GW games. GW gets infinite passes; most people who branch into other games often do it only because they're frustrated with the current edition of Warhammer, and as soon as the next edition comes around they all come crawling back abandoning whatever game they clearly enjoyed playing in the meantime, often in spite of that game running circles around Warhammer as far as rules and balance. But no, as soon as the next shiny from GW comes everyone forgets how much they hated the game and goes back.

It's a very strange phenomenon, honestly. I don't get why there's this "battered spouse" syndrome (I hate to use that example, I really do, but it's accurate) with GW even when they find something else. I've seen a few games crumble as soon as a new Warhammer comes out, as though GW is suddenly going to change 30 years of crap. It's all smoke and mirrors from GW (8th edition 40k the most recent example) and yet people continue to fall for it.

So it goes back to the cycle: You can be reasonably certain people will be playing Warhammer (often applies to 40k since AOS was pretty divisive) and can't be certain that will happen for other games, even when you have a group playing it, so Warhammer remains the comfortable choice which also means GW never has to really change anything because they stay profitable doing the same stuff and people still return to them time after time.

As it happens... I think I am coming back to Age of Sigmar.

That narrative campaign system for Mawtribes in the latest White Dwarf went right up my flagpole and got saluted. In built storyline, lots of variation in enemies and Battleplans. I went straight out and got myself a Gutbusters force, and will be painting them up over Christmas.

Watch out for the battle reports next year

Wish I had gotten that WD. I don't have an interest in mawtribes but i like to see how GW feels you should do narrative campaigns, even if they often are pretty poorly thought out.

At the end of the day, AoS is a lot of fun to play when it's working. More fun than others I've tried. That wombo-combo/forge the narrative/crazy stuff that gets tea-bagged is often really fun when everyone has the same level of it. Something I feel games that focus on balance often miss out on. The reality is people go back to GW games despite the balance, and attributing it to some mass instance of abusive psychology is absurd.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wayniac wrote:
Wish I had gotten that WD. I don't have an interest in mawtribes but i like to see how GW feels you should do narrative campaigns, even if they often are pretty poorly thought out.

I approach them as toolboxes I can pull pieces out of for use in my own content and get a lot of mileage that way.

So what's the reason then? Why do people inevitably go back to GW after seeing what things are like over the hill? The only thing i can think of is that it's that odd sense that you can do casual or competitive. Like when I played WM/H it felt bland, not because the game was bad (it wasn't) but because the way the rules were you couldn't really do anything but tournament-style games even if you tried. The tight rules and focus on precise maneuvers didn't fit playing in a laid back, fast and loose narrative style no matter how hard you tried.

On the other hand Warhammer has the opposite problem where the rules are pretty crap for competitive play but can be made to kinda sort maybe if you squint work well enough, but are also loose and malleable enough to play those crazy casual/narrative games and not feel like they don't fit the serious tone of the rules.

Wayniac wrote:
So what's the reason then? Why do people inevitably go back to GW after seeing what things are like over the hill? The only thing i can think of is that it's that odd sense that you can do casual or competitive. Like when I played WM/H it felt bland, not because the game was bad (it wasn't) but because the way the rules were you couldn't really do anything but tournament-style games even if you tried. The tight rules and focus on precise maneuvers didn't fit playing in a laid back, fast and loose narrative style no matter how hard you tried.

On the other hand Warhammer has the opposite problem where the rules are pretty crap for competitive play but can be made to kinda sort maybe if you squint work well enough, but are also loose and malleable enough to play those crazy casual/narrative games and not feel like they don't fit the serious tone of the rules.

Tight rules don't really affect me in that manner. What matters is the people who are playing it.

Everyone plays Warhammer and/or X-Wing here, but very few people play WMH. A lot is how they come in, too. I was lucky enough to get a few small games in on the one WMH night I could make it, and one of them mentioned that they didn't come prepared for a small game. On the Warhammer side, especially with 40K, all I have to do is show up with a big enough army, and I can find a game (which I don't have right now). X-Wing is only a little less difficult. Infinity, WMH, Legion all require advance notice if you show up on a "non-regular" night. Heck, we even have a local Battletech group that can make arrangements to get together, but arrangements still need to be made.

I think part of it is that the ruleset is loose, but also the buy-in factor. Getting rid of a good sized army is a challenge, so some are almost always available. Of course, part of the reason X-Wing took off was because of the lack of hobbying with it, and it has a pretty tight ruleset.