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minisnatcher wrote: I can very well understand realm rules in narrative games and campaigns but what are other TO's doing?
We opted to do our upcoming tournament in 2.0 without realm rules.
We thought this would most likely be too time consuming as everything is new and people will just be doubting there time away, but I can imagine at some point it becoming a thing and a new dimension to the game. (like giving each table nr a different realm in a tournament) My concerns to use them are:
Giving wizards access to 6-7 extra spells without extra cost seems a bit to cheesy as people would be forced to take wizards (there are already pitched battleplans were only wizards and artifact carriers can score objectives and this would be an extra push in that direction). Giving people access to so many option will make a lot of player consume a lot of time. (With 2u30 to play a game, 30 min setting up you would only get 10 min/15 min per player per turn which most players don't make without these rules in my experience)
Also endless spells can become more powerful by just lucking out your realm so another push.
If you need to pick what realm your army is from, it becomes a roulette when you get certain benefits and when not. So it would just be adding an extra luck factor to the game which a lot of tournament players do not like. (=> we are talking about tournaments, so catering for tournament players)
What do you guys do/think/plan on doing with these rules?
6 nations was the first major event post AoS 2 so they basically get to set the tone for how the rules will be taken and they said relic=yes, everything=no, which is honestly the fairest compromise between the twq.
The realm relics are busted, many are flagrantly more powerful than even the most powerful relics in existing battletomes, but a relic is inherently limited by being tied to a single model. This makes them a begrudgingly accepted addition.
The spells massively benefit spellcasting forces over non or limited spellcasting forces and some of them like banishment are stupidly op. They are also dead in the water because:
The actual full realm rules are idiotic and completely unfit for tournament play. For example, Ghur is the most asinine bullgak thing I could ever possibly imagine from both a balance perspective AND a logistical perspective. Oh, I have to paint, base, and transport TWO extra monsters, just in case we roll up Ghur? I brought a mostly magical army, rolled up Ulgu 6" spell range, packed up my crap and left. I didn't even read the rest of them I was so disgusted.
Using the full realm rules tells me that your event is accepting that the REALM rather than the PLAYER is what wins games and in a narrative event, that's perfectly fine. We can have a great laugh putting 6 archaons on a table between 2 players on Ghur. In a competitive event absolutely not.
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auticus wrote: And thus we will see the end of GW providing rules such as this very soon.
I GODDAM WELL HOPE SO.
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EnTyme wrote: As Kanluwen said, it's easy enough for the TO to announce a specific realm for the whole tournament or for each round.
It's still stupid. Get ulgu? No one will bring ANY shooting OR magic. Get Ghur? Better hope no one gets the double combat phase when you're not in a position to deal with it. There's stupid crap like that with all the realms too. And if you select the random part as well, then why bother with them at ALL? If all you end up doing is tacking on two stupid rules and a lopsided AF spell table, then what are you REALLY adding to the game other than book-keeping and balance problems?
Like I said before, I don't even think the RELICS are fit for matched play. The full realm rules are a joke.
This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2018/07/12 04:05:04
So I finally have my book with me, so let's see what "fun" things you can do with the realm spells combined with the realm rules. I'm going to start right here by saying these rules are 100% designed around forcing you to buy wyldwoods. I would even wager that that was the primary purpose of realm rules from the beginning.
We'll stick to what's going to be legal at Nova.
First and foremost, if you have less than 4 spell slots, don't even bother showing up, because there's nothing for you here.
I'm going to spoiler the rest of this because it's long and ranty and give my summation at the end.
Spoiler:
So the Ghyran spell table highlights are Mirrorpool, which is 'On a 6+ get a free charge with any powerful monster that is also a wizard anywhere on the table because we included a teleport that you can move after because we thought Archaon being able to jump over screens and kill anything he wanted turn one would be SUPER fun to go against.(Yes it's an 18" range and 9" away but these guys are rocking at least 12" movement most of the time and 37" on average is most of the board)' and Flesh to Stone which is 'make any monster that is already a wizard largely immune to conventional damage.'
So already you're MASSIVELY incentivized to bring multispell Wizard Monster and punished for not having one available. Nagash, Archaon, and Allarielle are about 35% more effective in this scenario off of those two spells alone. The realm command ability giving them another spellcast for just a CP is just cake.
Verdant Landscape is the first realmscape feature that Nova will be using that actually impact the battlefield. Landscape's affect is: On a 6+ give any Sylvaneth players a pretty big advantage. Unless you're a Sylvaneth player there's a 90% chance you're not even going to HAVE a tree to put down, so it's random stupid book-keeping plenty of people are just going to ignore out of convienence. It being a 6+ means that honestly, the best thing you can do for yourself and anyone not playing Sylvaneth is to just not bring a Wyldwood to use. It being on a 6+ means that A. about a quarter of the players are going to forget to make the roll, and probably another 50% of players on top of that will just be like 'you wanna not do the stupid tree thing?'. It's tedious, boring, lame, and somehow STILL has the potential to win a game completely at random, completely by itself. It's a cavalcade of bad rules design.
Seeds of Hope is a giant middle finger to daemon players while also being to random to plan for and being powerful enough to win a game by itself, no skill necessary. It's like they were actively searching out the worst possible design paradigms they could when they made these.
I'm gonna level with you though, the realmscape features are mostly just gakky, pointless, unnecessary, tedious, useless, overly random versions of the normal terrain rules. If it wasn't for how busted their unique spells are, I would say that this was just 'pointless and dumb' instead of 'putrescently terrible' that it is.
Let's have a quick look at the other 2 just for funsies, huh? Well hidden festering corruption is so bad, but HOLY gak is Fecund Quagmire bs.If you EVER get Fecund quagmire playing Ironjawz, Slaanesh, DoK or even Nurgle and Khorne; pack it up, your game is over. Especially against armies like seraphon, Stormcasts, Tzeentch, and mixed order. All of those armies either bypass needing to run or can do their damage from anywhere on the table. Not to mention how much slower the game would be. Terrible.
And that's just Ghyran. Chamon is next.
Chamon spells: Transmutation of lead is a stupidly brutal debuff, Curse of rust is extremely strong too. A solid horde clearer in Rule of Burning Iron and an 18" Stardrake chomp. Pretty tame all said, but still favors magic heavy armies like all the spell tables do and Transmutation will be brutal for armies like stormcast that have crap spells to cast anyway.
Adapt or die is mostly for flavor, although putting 6 of them on 1 unit would be fun. Rust plague just means no one is going to take cover ever. It's almost totally irrelevant and once again NO ONE IS GOING TO REMEMBER THAT PIDDLY bs. Irresistable force is a massive bonus for wizards on top of the already massive bonus another spell chart gives them. Not only do you make your spell impossible to unbind you also get to deal free mortal wounds to enemy units whenever you roll a double in combat. You will NEVER hit your own units with this except the caster itself, which would be a fair trade for an un-unbindable autocast spell even without the free mortal wound explosion. Though, again, that's all if anyone remembers to do it.
For the ones NOVA passed on, Iron Trees is stupid because A. most of the time people are in Wyldwoods they'll be out of LoS, so it only really impacts melee B. It only impacts games with Sylvaneth players in it unless you use Wyldwoods as your table terrain at which point if anyone remembers to use this rule they'll hate you for putting these on the table. C. It massively benefits things with high armor saves and rerolls like stormcasts compared to something like DoK. But again, unless your event uses Wyldwoods anyway, no one is going to use this unless they're sylvaneth. Brittle isles is idiotic. I makes anything with rend pointless and is a HUGE feth you to Nighthaunt armor who already ignore rend but can't get any bonuses to their saves! A stormcast army in a game like this is completely impervious to non-mortal wound damage.
Conclusion: The realm rules add nothing to matched play. The spells are either better or worse versions of spells that already exist. Which means they're either overpowered (Mirrorpool, Flesh to Stone) or irrelevant(Glittering Robe).
The realmsphere magic just tips the balance ever so slightly in the favor of magic heavy armies while not even adding flavor to the battle. Oh yeah, I feel so much closer to Allarielle being able to cast a crappy version of the Sisters of the Thorn's spell.
The realmscape features are either so weak they don't matter(rust plague, Lifesprings), powerful enough and random enough to be ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING if they do come up(Steel Rain, Seeds of Hope), a cheap cashgrabby way of forcing you to buy Wyldwoods(Irontrees, Spontaneous growth), or stupidly, brokenly asinine for certain armies(Fecund Quagmire, Brittle Isles). They also tend to be so ungodly boring and random that they'll be forgotten or deliberately go unused constantly. People don't even remember to use triumphs or terrain rules most of the time,and they're supposed to remember some stupid thing about a tree in the hero phase? Also some of them bog down the game with a bunch of extra dicerolls(steel rain).
NOVA cherrypicked the realmscape features and realm rules that are the least likely to cause major issues and in doing so masterfully highlighted why these add nothing at all to competitive play. The realm rules are designed to accomplish 1 thing and 1 thing only, they feth people over. fething people over it what makes them interesting in narrative play. If the realm rules don't feth someone over, then they're pointless additional memorization at best, something you and your opponent look at each other and go 'wanna just not bother?' at worst. Right now I guarantee that the spells are the only thing 70% of the field will actually bother utilizing, because they're the only thing anyone will remember. If they want these rules to ACTUALLY impact the game in a meaningful way(other than, 'I have more mages so I get an advantage for free') then they HAVE to feth people over.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2018/07/12 06:36:30
ERJAK wrote: The realm rules are designed to accomplish 1 thing and 1 thing only, they feth people over.
This is your core thesis and your entire argument hinges on us accepting this as fact.
Naturally, I challenge it.
Realm rules simply move the balance needle, they don't break it. If all the strong units in your codex got a 50% price cut that's fine, and the game is still balanced and ready for tournament play. Right? Because points=balance?
Galas wrote: I remember when Marmatag was a nooby, all shiney and full of joy. How playing the unbalanced mess of Warhammer40k in a ultra-competitive meta has changed you
Bharring wrote: He'll actually *change his mind* in the presence of sufficient/sufficiently defended information. Heretic.
ERJAK wrote: The realm rules are designed to accomplish 1 thing and 1 thing only, they feth people over.
This is your core thesis and your entire argument hinges on us accepting this as fact.
Naturally, I challenge it.
Realm rules simply move the balance needle, they don't break it. If all the strong units in your codex got a 50% price cut that's fine, and the game is still balanced and ready for tournament play. Right? Because points=balance?
I agree; his position is unreasonable. Quite so.
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auticus wrote: Well if you think about it you are already pigeon holed into taking certain units (the most optimized and efficient). To me this is just changing the meta around day after day so that the most efficient and optimized changes during the event.
Yup. Have tried it at a tourney, loved it. Realm changed each round but list had to stay the same, so I felt rewarded for having the tactical skill to adapt in addition to bringing a good list.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2018/07/20 19:00:15
