Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 chromedog wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Back in my day, players and GMs worked together to create a good time for everyone. Antagonizing each other was for Stratego, or worse, Monopoly.

Diplomacy. The king of piss-everyone-else-off games.

Arch-villain Henry Kissinger was reportedly a genius at this game.

My group played it. Once. After the dust had settled, it was ruled off-limits, because everyone was soft and weak.

New grumpy "old" git irritant - bloody consolidationists.

Back in my day, it was always cool and interesting when new units and new equipment got added to the game - sure, some of it was overtuned and some was undertuned, but we didn't sit around and claim it was just adding "bloat" to the game.

Now we've got these posters who - going by their Joined dates here - are generally a bunch of Johnny-come-lately's who want to strip much of what makes the game fun and/or interesting out in the name of "consolidation" and "simplification".

They don't get it, they don't want to get it, and I really wish it didn't look like their insidious mind virus has infected the Design Studio, leading to monstrosities like the Combi-Weapon we've seen, or what's happened to the variety of Nemesis Force Weapons.

Can we just consolidate them down to one account, please? And possibly use a car crusher to consolidate them into one body, too?

 Dysartes wrote:
New grumpy "old" git irritant - bloody consolidationists.

Back in my day, it was always cool and interesting when new units and new equipment got added to the game - sure, some of it was overtuned and some was undertuned, but we didn't sit around and claim it was just adding "bloat" to the game.

Well in my day, we didn't need 31 flavors of the same weapon system. Boltgun, bolt pistol, storm bolter and maybe a combi-bolter were enough. You didn't need bolter carbines, bolter LMGs, reduced calorie bolters, bolters with cheese, bolter 'n' chips and so on.

You could have one weapon be the workhorse for multiple armies.

Now generation Participation Trophy has given every faction - no matter how small and insignificant - some sort of Very Special Episode of their weapon.

No. The Universe is big, impersonal, hostile and no one cares about whether the grips fit your small soft elfin hands. Weapons are produced on an industrial scale of "one size kills most."

This isn't a coffee shop where you can demand your lasgun be a frappe with a caramel drizzle. You get black coffee, period. Shut up and drink it.

 chromedog wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Back in my day, players and GMs worked together to create a good time for everyone. Antagonizing each other was for Stratego, or worse, Monopoly.

Diplomacy. The king of piss-everyone-else-off games.

Henh. Fond memories.

A friend of ours was a big Axis and Allies fan. He home-brewed some rules allowing a 'free for all' for world domination. Took me and a friend all of about five minutes to break it. Turns out when Russia and Germany ally, the only thing that kept Britain and Japan in the game for long was them being islands... but we quickly reduced them to ONLY their home islands, and bombed even that meager income out from under them.

Good times...

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

No. The Universe is big, impersonal, hostile and no one cares about whether the grips fit your small soft elfin hands. Weapons are produced on an industrial scale of "one size kills most."

This isn't a coffee shop where you can demand your lasgun be a frappe with a caramel drizzle. You get black coffee, period. Shut up and drink it.

This really made me laugh

Probable photo of the Necromunda designer's coffee order:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
No. The Universe is big, impersonal, hostile and no one cares about whether the grips fit your small soft elfin hands. Weapons are produced on an industrial scale of "one size kills most."

This isn't a coffee shop where you can demand your lasgun be a frappe with a caramel drizzle. You get black coffee, period. Shut up and drink it.

This is also the universe where each and every coffee shop is using half-remembered recipes of something that can vaguely fall under the umbrella of "black coffee" but with different beans, grind sizes, ratios of coffee to water, brew times etc.

So yeah, you get your black coffee, you don't get to choose what goes in it, but the black coffee you get from your corner coffee shop doesn't taste the same as the one you get from across town, and if you have the ability to access multiple coffee shops and know what the differences are, you can get the one you prefer.

But the guard regiment that just buys a thousand coffees from whichever shop is either closest, cheapest or the one which is Administratum approved? They don't get to choose

 Vulcan wrote:

 chromedog wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Back in my day, players and GMs worked together to create a good time for everyone. Antagonizing each other was for Stratego, or worse, Monopoly.

Diplomacy. The king of piss-everyone-else-off games.

Henh. Fond memories.

A friend of ours was a big Axis and Allies fan. He home-brewed some rules allowing a 'free for all' for world domination. Took me and a friend all of about five minutes to break it. Turns out when Russia and Germany ally, the only thing that kept Britain and Japan in the game for long was them being islands... but we quickly reduced them to ONLY their home islands, and bombed even that meager income out from under them.

Good times...

We also came up with FFA axis rules. IIRC our fix to the Britain problem was letting them shift some of the value from Canada to the home isle, and getting a free industrial complex they could put on any of their territories after pregame diplomacy but before the start. We also gave Russia something ot help in the far east. Because the US/Japan alliance was also bad news for game balance.

We played so much of the basic axis and allies it started to feel like a solved game

Balance is not supposed to be balanced and living rule books spoil that. Halflings should be harder to use than Orcs or Chaos warriors. When you try to fairly balance everything you remove player freedom to play worse but fun armies. Managing animosity or bad stats are part of the fun to some people. Wargaming is too inexact to be an esport and it doesn't need to balance for them. No one worth listening to will complain halflings are underpowered and not tournament viable. You can have your super hard armies full full cheese. But leaves vets with jank factions to use in store leagues or events to even the skill gap

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


Terrain should be made of packing foam. Or sprues. I have a "pumping station" that actually uses fixtures pulled out of a toilet tank. Looks great, btw.

Oh! So I guess yours must look quite similar to mine

Adapted terrain is best terrain....

What happened with the Chaos Dwarves? And no I don't me that Forge World resin trash.

I hate the 2000 pts list fad. Before all those kids landed in the game we used to play 1500 pts all the time. But the little Timmies cannot budget the way out of a wet Battle for Macragge box so we had to scale up to 2000 pts. Meaning I had to buy, and, even worse, paint more IG.

M.

 legionaires wrote:
What happened with the Chaos Dwarves? And no I don't me that Forge World resin trash.

They looked daft and deserved their burning?

*ducks and covers*

New grumpy grognard point - people who declare a model production medium that they are personally not keen on to be "trash".

Exceptions can be made for truly terrible mediums, such as early Finecast, but we need the tar and feathers breaking out otherwise.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
They looked daft and deserved their burning?

*ducks and covers*

I'm old enough to remember when just about ALL the GW model ranges were goofy in the extreme. Empire Elector Counts waving swords whose blades would have been six inches wide at that scale come to mind. Just about everyone had enormous hands, too, clearly showing that Basketball, not Bloodbowl, was the preferred sport of the Old World. Those guys could palm 20-inch mortar rounds.

Yeah, they were silly but they were cheap, and that counted for a lot. Who cared if they had the proportions of "Nude Descending a Staircase," they worked and that was all that mattered. Kids these days demanding 20 skulls per model and the proper number of visible fingers and things - luxury!

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
They looked daft and deserved their burning?

*ducks and covers*

I'm old enough to remember when just about ALL the GW model ranges were goofy in the extreme. Empire Elector Counts waving swords whose blades would have been six inches wide at that scale come to mind. Just about everyone had enormous hands, too, clearly showing that Basketball, not Bloodbowl, was the preferred sport of the Old World. Those guys could palm 20-inch mortar rounds.

Yeah, they were silly but they were cheap, and that counted for a lot. Who cared if they had the proportions of "Nude Descending a Staircase," they worked and that was all that mattered. Kids these days demanding 20 skulls per model and the proper number of visible fingers and things - luxury!

I would rather have a goofy hat and a plank for a sword than cookie cutter copy and pasted cad designed space marine given a new gun. Goofy or not, there's personality in old sculpts you lack in todays digital technology

Plus I like novelty hats and underdog factions. Chaos dorfs were the first army book I ever bought and I always wanted to make an army of them. I still have like 30 plastic chaos dwarves but no where to use them. They're so cool but don't fit my play style at all.

Back in Rogue trader era playing Space Marines vs WHFB dark elves on the floor of my boarding school dormitory and the DEs smashing the SMs because one was a skirmish game, and the other rank and file.

The rules were fantastically compatible (DEs stayed in ranks and SMs were skirmished) except close combat where we made a couple house rules.

Yo7 wrote:I still have like 30 plastic chaos dwarves but no where to use them. They're so cool but don't fit my play style at all.

Play classic Warhammer Quest with them!

The old-school plastic monopose minis suit boardgames perfectly.

(WHQ 1995 counts for the Grumpy Grognards thread because it's run by an utterly ruthless and lethal GM made entirely of cardboard and dice. None of this newfangled "exciting and enjoyable adventure carefully fine-tuned to thrill, but not destroy, the players" nonsense. You go with three other idiots down a dungeon full of monsters? You deal with the consequences. )

 Waaagh_Gonads wrote:
Back in Rogue trader era playing Space Marines vs WHFB dark elves on the floor of my boarding school dormitory and the DEs smashing the SMs because one was a skirmish game, and the other rank and file.

The rules were fantastically compatible (DEs stayed in ranks and SMs were skirmished) except close combat where we made a couple house rules.

IIRC the "Siege" supplement of the time encouraged games like this, small squad of maureens taking on the unwashed natives of some primitive planet, and seldom the walk over you expect.

I think it let both sides keep their own melee bonuses, so anything rank and file had a good chance when it got to melee range to win with the static bonuses and weight of numbers

which seemed fitting really

also fun with a high elf dragon dogfighting some imperial airborne contraption made from an airfix kit

Two grumps for the price of one!

Postie delivered my 2nd Ed Codex Orks (a book wot I ‘ave never ‘ad before) just as my lunch hour ended.

Still had a cursory flick through. Oh…..oh those poor Boyz. How much you lost to the merciless “baby, bath water, and sod it why not the bath too” approach of 3rd Ed.

No Clans! Boring support weapons! No Mad or Boarboyz. A sickly anaemic thing we instead thrust upon an unwilling audience. Even the Shokk Attak Gun would be gone for years.

Oh cruel 3rd Ed.

Mad Boyz were wonderful, the way you could run half the fantasy line as primitive orks too was excellent

still have the Waaargh the Orks book, a wonderful book, zero rules but gods a lot of flavour to it

Got me a complete set of the Rogue Trader stuff, and barring the Astronomicon Book, they’re all wonderful!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Got me a complete set of the Rogue Trader stuff, and barring the Astronomicon Book, they’re all wonderful!

totally, a level of character and of chaos that the modern more 'corporate product' books lack

Just two 2nd Ed books to go now. Space Wolves and Angels of Death.

I do however need to go sort out my book shelf. It’s not as orderly as it should be. Not fussed for exact chronological order, but all editions should be lined up together.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Two grumps for the price of one!

Postie delivered my 2nd Ed Codex Orks (a book wot I ‘ave never ‘ad before) just as my lunch hour ended.

Still had a cursory flick through. Oh…..oh those poor Boyz. How much you lost to the merciless “baby, bath water, and sod it why not the bath too” approach of 3rd Ed.

No Clans! Boring support weapons! No Mad or Boarboyz. A sickly anaemic thing we instead thrust upon an unwilling audience. Even the Shokk Attak Gun would be gone for years.

Oh cruel 3rd Ed.

I was knocked out how many vehicles we lost in the 2nd ed codex.. all those wonderful Gobsmashas, Braincrushas, Lungburstas etc all gone

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Just two 2nd Ed books to go now. Space Wolves and Angels of Death.

I've kept my copy of Angels of Death. The 2nd ed. Blood Angels paint scheme was better than the 3rd ed. one, even if it was a pain for me to paint. (Kept slopping the black trim onto the red and having to go back and fix it.) Same way I've kept the other older books; the paint schemes were better. However, I was also younger then, and so often used my own schemes to be original. Not so fussy now, but the main reason I switched from historical to fantasy or sci-fi minis gaming was so I could do my own thing, not 200+ identical infantry, 20 of this type of cavalry, 20 of a different type of cavalry, and 20 of a third type (the fancy elite boys as opposed to the disposable schmoes in the first two regiments). This is why Frostgrave and Stargrave are more to my taste now. Full creativity; Joe Mc created both 'verses, but he lets you populate them as you please*, not the way GREED WORKSHOP dictates.

* Well, mostly. But there's plenty of his scenarios where an obscure critter is used and will never show up again. My response is, "In this universe, long-haired twixgibbets are hairless and only have four limbs, and just so happen to look like hippos from our world!"

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Just two 2nd Ed books to go now. Space Wolves and Angels of Death.

I do however need to go sort out my book shelf. It’s not as orderly as it should be. Not fussed for exact chronological order, but all editions should be lined up together.

I've got 'em all, even Codex Battles, which is a WD compilation and kind of hard to find. A bunch of battle reports from back in the day (spoiler alert! The newer army always wins), and the rules for the Razorback, Battle Bunker (the cardboard insert in mine was missing) and Adeptus Arbites.

The old Orks had ten times the character of their later selves, particularly when it comes to firepower.

I'm old enough to remember ork players going through tons of yellow paint!

Pretty sure I’ve got battles. I got super lucky when I started my collection a couple of years back, and got SoB and Assassins for really low prices.

Having said that….where the bloody hell is my Sisters of Battle codex???

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Pretty sure I’ve got battles. I got super lucky when I started my collection a couple of years back, and got SoB and Assassins for really low prices.

Having said that….where the bloody hell is my Sisters of Battle codex???

The gremlins took it. Trust me, they'll give it back once you've bought a replacement.

There is a single book of what I previously thought to be Just Magazines left from my house move last year….

I reckon it’s in there.

AHA! Naughty Stuff Goblins! They’d hidden it amongst the Rogue Trader books!