Auld is archaic Gaelic dialect for Old. (As in Auld Lang Syne or Rare Auld Times.) an alternate would be Oulde or Ould.
Grump, is well, a grumpy person.
I have had the nickname for a long time, since a character in Changeling: the Dreaming, or a bit before.
I will admit that part of what annoys me about
AoS is that I can see it killing the company - and I actually used to
like GW games and minis.
I do not believe that it can sustain the niche that Warhammer occupied.
Hell, I do not believe that it can occupy the space that Warhammer Quest used to occupy, let alone Mordheim.
Some of the
GW minis are still excellent - but then you get things like a giant eagle with a trailer hitch. Or an undead engine that was greatly improved when somebody turned it into a carousel. (Not joking - Tin Racer did an awesome job of it. But then the leader of his Vampire army is about ten years old when she was turned into a vampire....)
And, over all, I think that
GW have priced themselves beyond the elasticity of their market.
When push comes to shove, they are selling one inch tall plastic toys for playing games with - and there is a limit to what people are willing to pay for toy soldiers.
I reached that point three years ago - the last
GW purchase I made was some plastic terrain kits at half price when a store was closing. (
GW still makes some excellent terrain.)
But it was as much the rules as it was the prices - I am a wargamer.
Strategy and tactics should be important - but with the last edition of Warhammer it seemed that much of the planning had instead been handed over to the gods of the dice rolls.
So, I swapped to Kings of War - which is all about the strategy and tactics. (Like Age of Sigmar the rules can fit on a very few pages, and can be found for free on the Mantic site.)
Warhammer was a large unit tactical game -
AoS is a small scale skirmish game that... has some serious issues.
I think that it really was aimed at kids under the age of fifteen.
And I do not think that is a sustainable audience. The target audience has other things to play - from Magic the Gathering to video games.
Hell, I played games with more complex rules when I was fifteen. (I have been a wargamer since the seventies - I started with Napoleonics.)
I buy miniatures to paint and to play games with. I play fantasy role playing games, which gives me a lot of use for a wide range of toys.
Fantasy wargaming gives me a theme for larger numbers of miniatures - but the rules are an important part of that.
Warhammer attracted me because of the pseudo Thirty Years War German aesthetic that they went with.
I like blackpowder fantasy.
The rules used to be adequate - not the best, but far from the worst. All the army lists were in one book, while all the rules were in another.
But the setting was always the best part of the game - and that setting has done been blowed up.
But I can still use my existing armies because there are games where the setting does not matter nearly as much. But the rules are more than just 'adequate'.
So, we are playing games in the Warhammer setting, using the Kings of War rules.
In a month or two one of the players is getting a Nature army from the
KoW 2 Kickstarter.
I am getting Abyssals from the same Kickstarter.
And nobody has ever been all that hung up on where the minis came from -
GW was convenient because it was easy to buy large units of plastic toy soldiers.
And now they are dropping the toy soldiers that we liked.
The Auld Grump
