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.

clively wrote:
Along with this - there are way too many special rules. Shrouded/stealth are a prime example. Why do both of those exist? They could have just said shrouded(+1) or shrouded (+2), like how fnp has a default unless otherwise specified.

One of the original rumor fo 7th was that you'd have something like that, Instant Death would have a number behind it, so Eternal Warrior would compare the number to see if they die. ID(1) kills someone, but not if they have EW(1). To beat EW(1) you need ID(2).

As is often the case, the random rumors seem to know what people want then GW release something entirely different.

First thing they need to do is have a real play-testing community. I'm not talking about the guys and gals who work in GW as their main 9-to-5 job, but a group of people, numbering thirty to fifty in size, from ages 12 to 60, that are given the pre-print versions of the book and told to play the game.

If you've ever read a battle-report from the in-studio folks, you will notice right off the bat that they do not play the game the way other people play it. They do not even play the game the way their rules are written. Their games are full of "illegal" units, "illegal" armies, mixed-up FOCs and other shenanigans. Are they "forging the narrative"? Possibly, but no one wants to pay the money these books cost for poor guidelines.

The playtesting team goes through it page by page, testing every unit, every rule, every possible way the rules can interact that they can think of, and they write down anything that the testing team finds broken, confusing, ambiguous or non-sensical. As mentioned previously ITT, one problem the rules-team has is that they wrote the rules, they already know what the RAI is. An outside perspective is required to highlight areas where RAW and RAI are unclear.

The playtest team is also tasked with finding balance issues. "Hey, so, this army here has Unit X that can do ABC, but these other three armies have to spend three times the points in these other units to have a chance at killing Unit X, but those units otherwise don't do anything" or "We get what you're going for with this rule, but the situation in which this rule will actually be useful is 1 in 1000 games. It either needs to just not exist or needs to be simplified to be more useful, as it seems to be the reason this unit exists."