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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


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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...


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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.