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everybody knows about "that warhammer stuff", even tho (or possibly because) it's gotten somewhat prohibitively expensive as the years have gone on.

GW has a limited (possibly decreasing) amount of resources to spend on development. If they spend a *lot* of effort on rules to the exclusion of minis & fluff, they might get as good as a B. But the Minis and Fluff would also drop to a B due to lack of effort.

That would be suicide, because nobody is buying GW for their rules.

But if they streamline the rules, the result it might be a C+. It would be clearly better without the clunk, and the important minis & fluff wouldn't suffer.

GW players know the rules are the weakest part of the game, and have come to terms or they wouldn't be playing. So making better rules has very limited upside potential.

As a Fantasy player, I'm glad they didn't just stop working
on the rules to focus on their minis. I'm glad they refined
the rules and improved the minis.

I'm not saying they need to streamline or elaborate, one
way or the other, I want improvement.

JohnHwangDD-GW players know the rules are the weakest part of the game, and have come to terms or they wouldn't be playing. So making better rules has very limited upside potential.

Agree and disagree. Yes for immediate returs(ie 12-24 months) but in the long term, a balanced, non-confusing ruleset would be advantageous in that more people would be encouraged by avid fans, who play at every oppourtunity, as opposed to "Can we get a game in someday soon?"

I think Apocalypse might be the shot in the arm that it needs.


As far as 'respected' or 'holding sway'-yes. It is by far the most successful table-top sci-fi game in the world. $$$$ wise anyway.

Rules wise..I am not even going to touch that.

Grignard wrote:I think the secret behind 40k is what has already been said, it is highly accessible.

Historicals, particularly Napoleonics, is a much older hobby. In fact, I think it is the oldest of the "gamer" hobbies, unless you count those weird parlor games they used to play in victorian times. I know it is a lot older than what we call role playing games.

I would imagine that there a very large number of traditional miniature gamers, but I dont think they're as "visible" as 40k gamers or role players. I dont have any rational reason for saying that is so, I just get that impression when looking over websites and talking to locals. Also, I imagine there are more casual GW players, while I would think most historical guys are pretty hard core.

The ancestors of tabletop wargaming are generally considered to be two games, Kriegspiel published in Prussia about 1830 and Little Wars published in the UK about 1910.

Kriegspiel is a detailed and quite mathematical game designed as a training tool for army officers. It has recently been re-issued. Little Wars is more of a simple, skirmish level game using 54mm figures. I think it is out of print now but I was able to borrow a recent edition from the library in the 1980s.

JohnHwangDD wrote:GW has a limited (possibly decreasing) amount of resources to spend on development. If they spend a *lot* of effort on rules to the exclusion of minis & fluff, they might get as good as a B. But the Minis and Fluff would also drop to a B due to lack of effort.

That would be suicide, because nobody is buying GW for their rules.

But if they streamline the rules, the result it might be a C+. It would be clearly better without the clunk, and the important minis & fluff wouldn't suffer.

GW players know the rules are the weakest part of the game, and have come to terms or they wouldn't be playing. So making better rules has very limited upside potential.

With GW it is only 40K that has badly written rules.

They have done tons of well written rules for other games, as has been pointed out in the 5th Edtion? thread in News.

40k is the big daddy. They just can't seem to get something right. Sometimes I think it would be better played on a five foot table, say 6x5 or 5x5 rather than 4x4 and 6x4. The 4' table size being a hold over from Fantasy and other games. That probably goes a long way towards Apoc being so much fun, room to manouver.

Lots of good points touched on already.

Yes the fluff and models do draw people, but that can be true of any game system. i play gothic, 40K, B5 wars, and classsic battletech (which i have been playing far longer than 40K).

What it comes down to is as others have noted, GW is so large its kind of like microsoft, you could use a different system but why would you if you knew you could go anywhere in the world and find it (warhammer/40K) as well as find people who play it.

Does 40k hold sway? Check my sig:

Teh Space Emporer is eternally victorious!
From the most savage Warzone, to the darkest Void, in the most vicious Firefight, in Urban War, against Starship Troopers armed with the mightiest Battletech, he smashes Hordes of Warmachines in the Flames of War. Across the Aetherverse, the Space Emporer defeats them all!

malfred wrote:They don't make money selling rulebooks, though. Not
really.

malfred wrote:They don't make money selling rulebooks, though. Not
really.

30 pounds for a book as thick as the beno and they dont make money!

IA books at 40 pounds a go so you can use one forge world model and they dont make money ?

rulebooks are where the money is made which is sad. I know we ripped of by the price of figs and..... well GW in general .But books are so over priced its unreal. I play 40k, would i invest money in playing fantasy is they book was £10? prob...

My point is... the rules should be cheap to get people into the hobby and before people say "thats what the box sets are for" we all know thats waterd down **** !

Im not going to go off on a "GW is so overpriced" rant when we all know thats a fact of life us gamers have to live with.

Like it says in the badly writen full of holes inconcluseve rule book.... the main pount is to have fun!!! ( dont worry if it makes no sence!!)

They don't make the bulk of their money from rulebooks.

Sorry.

One thing that hasn't been touched on yet is the fact that Games Workshop has reached other outlets and has for quite sometime. They've been making board games for years as well as video games. It's the latter that has given them more of a "rock star" status. Dawn of War (like it or not) did a lot for the RTS genre of video games and gave GW a lot of publicity. Once Warhammer Online comes out GW will get a nice boost in profits. Then around 2010 when the 40k MMO comes out they'll have another boost in profit.

What drew me into 40k was Orks. You just have to love Orks. Of course I really liked Space Marines as well. I think 40k appeals to so many people because the armies mimic stories we love like The Lord of the Rings, Starship Troopers, Japanese anime, and movies like Aliens and The Terminator. Its close enough that it catches our attention and then when you get into the fluff of 40k and fantasy it can really hook you.

Unfortunately though, it's pricey. Obviously we all know that. What's kept me from trying out games like WarMachine, FOW or Infinity (besides the fact that the people I game with have the attention span of a gnat on crack and won't be playing the same game 2 months from now) is the fact that I've invested so much time and money into 40k and I know that when I go down to the store I can get in a game. I don't want to shell out a couple hundred bucks on a game and then sit there holding myself waiting for people to show up to play. I have to admit though that AT-43 is very appealing to me. A pre-painted line that isn't randomly sold in boxes is just genius.

As far as I can tell in my own circle of friends, 40k is seen as "old hat". There are those that like it because they've played it for ages and like to stick with what they know, and there are enough of them around to make that viable. But most people new to wargaming are trying out something new - whether that's WM, clix, At-43, FoW, SST, Urban War, or Anima Tactics or whatever - the list goes on and on and on! Also, many are fed up with 40k for various reasons - often nothing more sinister than boredom now that GW is no longer the only kid in town for Sci-fi/fantasy gaming, and have moved on to something else.

About the only place I find out and out 40k diehards now is in the GW shops where it seems to me that they are either 13 years old or wear blue-shirts with the GW logo on it.

While I am not claiming my experience is representative of the wider picture it does seem that 40k has had its day. It was like the VHS video cartridge back in the 80's - muscled its way to top spot and smothered the opposition. But then with the internet coming along and putting gamers in touch with each other the paradigm has changed and all sorts of new alternatives are just a mouse click away. A bit like when DVD came along and suddenly no one wanted pre-recorded VHS cassettes anymore. They hadn't changed, but the world had moved on.

Whenever I play 40k or WFB now (which I do, if very rarely) it feels awfully clunky and old fashioned compared to newer games. That may be just familiarity breeding contempt, but its how I feel and it means I haven't bought anything at all from GW for nearly 18 months to 2 years. It's like having lived your life in black and white and suddenly waking up to seeing the world in colour. Who'd want to go back to the monochrome world if they didn't have to? A bit of an exaggeration, but you catch my drift!

Tetchy,

What Fantasy rank and file game have you found works
better than WHFB in terms of variety and rules?

Tetchy wrote:While I am not claiming my experience is representative of the wider picture it does seem that 40k has had its day.

Yeah, it isn't really representative of the greater market. GW still dominates the market place, almost entirely. They're vastly bigger than any competitor. This will continue to be the case as long as the market model consists of people starting with miniatures almost exclusively starting with GW, and the rest competing for the market share of people sick of GW but still interested in miniatures.

This reminds me of that phase in the tabletop roleplaying. D&D was never popular amongst the avante garde of roleplaying, including me, who felt rplaying could be so much more, that better, newer games were coming all the time and D&D's fall was inevitable. Thing is, in only one month ever, when Vampire Revised was released and TSR went bankrupt (entirely management related, the underlying business was solid), did White Wolf ever beat AD&D in sales.

Things can come and go in popularity and internet trendiness and over time. But Tetchy, never mistake internet banter and the preferences of your friends for genuine sales data. Right now, in terms of market share GW is not only top dog, it's top dog by a ridiculously long way.

Tetchy wrote:...

...

...

Whenever I play 40k or WFB now (which I do, if very rarely) it feels awfully clunky and old fashioned compared to newer games. That may be just familiarity breeding contempt, ...
quote]

It's not. 40K IS clunky and old-fashioned. The core rules concepts haven't changed since WFB was released in about 1982. (WFB and 40K were roughly the same game in the beginning.)

Every other area of gaming -- boardgames, ancients, Napoleonic, SF and so on -- has advanced a long way in the past couple of decades.

malfred wrote:Tetchy,

What Fantasy rank and file game have you found works
better than WHFB in terms of variety and rules?

Well, to be honest not many. But then I've never really liked "rank and file" games for fantasy games, so that's part of what feels clunky about WFB! The idea of some manic Orcs or Goblins forming up in a neat little square just looks stupid to me. Purely aesthetics and a simplification for gameplay I appreciate. Also personal preference.

I found Armies of Arcana more "logical" and refreshing than WFB. Again, possibly a bit of "new shiney" there for me. If I'm honest, it is still a bit on the clunky side, but it did feel to me less arbitrary than WFB.YMMV.

But to be honest, unranked games - even largish ones like CAoR feel a bit fresher and more exciting to me. And GW's LotR was a breath of fresh air when it came out 5 years ago, even though many dismiss it as a mere "skirmish game". Maybe, for me, the whole concept if a "ranked up" fantasy game is ipso facto "clunky"? I didn't like the old Ragnarok game either. Far too unwieldy.

I just don't buy into the concept of buying, prepping and painting hundreds of models, most of which will sit unloved and unused in the rear ranks of units which will ultimately triumph or flee off the table, and therefore who's sole purpose is to gain a rank bonus for the unit. Just feels like ungainly, pointless effort solely created for the purpose of forcing me to buy models. SUre there's an element of spectacle there. But as I said, the benefits of seeing more models on the table are, for me, outweighed by the stupidity of seeing such things as "chaos warriors" arrayed in nice pretty uniform squares and rectangles. Spread out in a long straggly line like in "real" battles, well so much the better. But in small platoon-sized squares - nah!

Again, to be honest I have enjoyed the few games of WAB better than its parent WFB. As a friend described it to me - it feels like "WFB without the bollocks". To me having to constantly look up obscure rules in hidden tomes in the middle of the game is a negative thing. I appreciate some like it, but I prefer, for instance, more "modern" games that have mechanisms like unit rules that are concise enough to fit on a single reference card - not on 3 pages of a codex. Other mechanisms I feel are outmoded in 40k and WFB are the "IGOUGO" complete turn. Games with individual unit activations (like CAoR) feel more involving to me (I get bored watching my opponent take apart my army when I can do nothing to react to it until his turn is complete.), or even split turns like with LotR.

To some its "dumbing down", but as another poster elsewhere pointed out "simplification doesn't necessarily mean dumbification". Combining multiple rolls into a single roll with the same percentage chance of success for instance is one way of doing it. Replacing lots of tables with a single opposed roll is another. No one would describe chess as a "dumb" game. Soulless and abstract maybe, but it is at the far end of a continuum. I think things can be "fluffy" and fun without having to be extremely complex. I prefer to put my gaming effort into outmanoeuvring my opponent on the field, not in outlearning him on rulebook minutiae.

Any game that doesn't require me to look up and cross-reference 3 separate tables and saving rolls to see if I have landed a single wound on a goblin feels "less clunky" than WFB.

sebster wrote:Things can come and go in popularity and internet trendiness and over time. But Tetchy, never mistake internet banter and the preferences of your friends for genuine sales data. Right now, in terms of market share GW is not only top dog, it's top dog by a ridiculously long way.

Oh I agree. It's just that GW are now only 66% of the size (in terms of market penetration) that they were 3 years back. They are still much larger than PP, Mongoose and Rackham put together, of course. But for how much longer?

At the minute, until further data is published, it looks like the Collossus is shrinking year on year and as trends continue, the only way for them is down. Anything determined on fashion (like preferences for the use of hobby time) can see its market disappear overnight. And to be honest, so much of GW's revenue is sucked up in running its retail empire that similar or better profits might easily be made by smaller companies. It wouldn't surprise me in the least (although I will never know because PP's accounts are not in the public domain) that PP's profits are larger than GW's and set to grow, even though their turnover is a fraction of the size of GW's.

Sure GW are still at the moment "Market leaders", but to be honest, it looks to this observer that they are being reactive rather than proactive in trying to place their product offer these days, as they are only selling volumes equivalent to those they were doing back in 2001 before the LotR bubble, and at the same time making way less profit off them. Back in 2004 they were complacent in their self-confidence about the size of their fanbase. Nowadays they never miss an opportunity to promote their product because they realise they are no longer such a dominant force and they have to actually persuade us to buy their product instead of someone else's. Back in 2004, in their internal meetings, they didn't even acknowledge there was any real competition out there.

And 10 years back before the internet took off, they would have been right - Citadel had the fantasy miniatures market to themselves (apart from Ral Partha and maybe Grenadier - or had they evaporated by then?), but nowadays you have the likes of Infinity, Hasslefree, Felix Paniagua, Rackham and PP and the like producing models that get better critical reviews than GW product (http://www.tabletopgamingnews.com/?p=4622 and http://www.tabletopgamingnews.com/?p=4621) and every five minutes there seems to be a new miniatures game coming out.

GW indeed still has a critical mass of people who are "Locked in" to playing their games. But already there are too few to support the retail stores at the level they were at last year - what did we see - was it 35 or 36 stores closing worldwide? If turnover falls again next year then inevitably this will lead to more closures, and then there is a vicious circle which can only end up with GW retrenching back to a handful of stores, if any at all. And then how "dominant" will they be?

I don't think it's competing miniature companies that they need to worry about. It's other forms of entertainment... video games in particular....