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Hello everyone...

Been quite a while since I posted here, but there are reasons. I penned a few thoughts on Age of Sigmar for the TTG, copied here:



Over the past few weeks, I have been steadily coming to a conclusion – I have something of an issue with Age of Sigmar…

Throughout the Realmgate Wars, I was pretty heavily into the game – nearly 2,500 miniatures painted, used in nearly a hundred battles, all following the storyline in the campaign books and Battletomes.

And then, around the turn of 2016/2017, things just stopped.

This first cropped up in Battletomes such as the Kharadron Overlords. In previous books, narrative Battleplans always had a story behind them (that would be the narrative part), that charted the progress of characters, the introduction of new armies, and events occurring within the Mortal Realms. These ‘minor’ characters would pop up in several Battleplans (like Slann Starmaster Zectoka), or at least be linked to others (the Vampire Mistress Cyssandra, a hand maiden of Neferata and whose sisters appeared in other battles).

This all served to create a cohesive background to the Age of Sigmar, giving it a great deal more weight.

When the ‘new wave’ of Battletomes (such as the Kharadron Overlords and Disciples of Tzeentch) started dropping, new Battleplans were included – but they were now absent story. They were instead ‘representative’ of the army, in a ‘this is how they fight’ kind of way.

I could understand this approach. It was a shame, but I could understand it.

People had been asking more from Age of Sigmar, and these Battletomes were a response to that – Matched Play was now a thing, and ‘hobby’ articles had started to appear. All good stuff, but it had been at the expense of the ongoing background story.

Things looked up with the release of the Blightwar box set. Included within this set was a new chapter in the Age of Sigmar story, along with three connected Battleplans – best of all, they had a solid story behind them.

Granted, instead of the 4-5 pages of story Battleplans in the past had featured, these only had one page a piece. But, you know what? That was fine by me. Bit of a shame we were not seeing more, but I understood that space was needed for other areas of the game, and it seemed the best of both worlds. Matched players got their bits and pieces, we Narrative gamers got our storyline.

I’ll ignore the fact that this major Blightwar does not seem to have been revisited in other books since…

Then Malign Portents appeared, an advance on the storyline as significant as any chapter in the Realmgate Wars. And, it looked pretty funky – Nagash getting up to new tricks, with the forces of Destruction, Chaos and Order marching off to stop him. Couldn’t wait.

But there is very, very little story here.

A couple of handfuls of pages cover the scope of the battles taking place and, while there are Narrative Battleplans in the book, they have no story attached to them.

Well, you say, simply make up your own stories for them. Sure, I could do that. But I could also do it for the Matched Play Battleplans the book also includes. I could have been doing that all along – but without the story being put front and centre, Age of Sigmar loses a lot.

I have a suspicion that (miniatures aside which are, of course, up to GW’s usual climbing standards) things are being done for a price, and GW is no longer justifying big hardbacks for something as trivial as story. Malign Portents is an 80 page book – 80 pages to introduce a major new plot development. The Realmgate Wars books (five of them) were each around 300 pages.

This is a big difference.

It is not as if I can delve into the Black Library to support the narrative behind the game – after a strong start with the Realmgate Wars, fictional support for Age of Sigmar all but disappeared for well over a year, and it has been fairly lacklustre since. They are now recycling short stories from their older compilations as digital releases and, aside from that, there have been precious few substantial books.

A year ago, I was worried about having to make a choice between a revived Age of Sigmar storyline and new Warhammer 40,000 campaigns. I had thought that GW had slowed work on Age of Sigmar to prepare for the new edition of 40k (which might well have been the case), and there were certainly major wars in the new rulebook that would make for great narrative campaigns – the Konor campaign they ran was a great start, and one we engaged in. For all five battles…

After that, nothing. I have a nasty feeling that the majority of feedback GW received on both games revolved around one term – Tournament Play. Even if people never went to tournaments, they wanted everything ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ and woe betide either game if their opponent received any special advantage.

So, where do I go from here?

Well, absent a new range of campaign books from GW (and I would, at this stage, happily accept such things from Forge World, regardless of the inevitable high cost), I might well be going into a state of semi-hibernation.

You will still see new armies being painted and posted here (I have a hankering to do a Daughters of Khaine force), and I am still slowly plugging away at Heresy-era armies for a Prospero campaign (the Forge World book for that is more than adequate for the kind of games I am after). I did consider the new Star Wars Legion, but I have certain philosophical issues with the way FFG are approaching that kind of game.

For now, I think I will carry on painting up some more Crypt Ghouls and get round to doing my Kharadron ships – after that… I’ll see where my fancy takes me.

I just don’t think the Sigmar narrative is going to be part of it for a fair while.

We talked about this when the matched play thing became a reality iin 2016... that the story of the game was about to take a massive backseat to tourney play or default play.

GW gambled on narrative. They put a lot of resources into producing the realmgate war books and the campaign material.

That gamble failed.

Failed massively.

I say that because it would seem very few people gave a damn about those things. In my CITY (which had five full game stores at the time) there were 2-3 of us that bought any of these books. The rest... roughly 150 players... had no use for anything that didn't have points or impact gameplay at all.

This seemed to have been verified in many peoples' areas when we talked about it a couple years ago.

Very very few people care about the story. Narrative gaming is something we give lip service to, but few care about, and even the narrative gaming circle and the NEO movement largely create tournament weekends and slap a story in the front of it to call it narrative. Having come from a historical and battletech background, narrative meant a little more. Not only was there the story, your forces reflected the story, instead of being cherry picked min/max monstrosities. But I digress. Get off my lawn.

The sigmar narrative has been relegated to some army book blurbs. The gaming side of things, GW has responded to what the fans want. What the fans wanted were points, matched play, tournaments, and thats pretty much it.

The Realmgate failure has been rectified with a minimal investment in thiings like Malign Portents. I would expect to see something like that every year... a small book and a small global campaign. Also black library posting free short story snippets.

These things require few resources and they don't have stacks of books on pallets in warehouses that no one wants.

Even the Black Library AOS books are few and far between. The vast majority of fictiion is still 40k 40k 40k 40k 40k 40k.

So yes. Matched play and AOS are going to be pretty much all we get, because thats what the playerbase cares about for the most part.

At least they tried. We saw where it got them, but now we have a metric. In the past, there were commonly arguments about how important narrative players were to the community too, but GW had never tried just catering to them. Now they have, and they appeared to have lost their *** in that, so turned the boat back around to tournament play, which is what most games today require to be profitable.

I have minor issues with the narrative being shoved into a corner too, but my main problems with AOS is the overly abstract nature of the rules and how they bust immersion. Thats another topic for another time though and one that I've spoken to at length already (and got banned from the tga boards for going on about lol)

Fantasy gaming is my #1 love. AOS fell short for me as well. I'm hoping perra bellum's conquest delivers as much as I think it will, because thats where I will be spending most of my fantasy gaming. Fantasic art, fantastic models, fantastic narrative, detailed narrative, and engaging game that doesn't destroy immersion.

I always thought the big hardback AoS campaign books were incredibly cool.
But I never bought one, because they are 50€ a piece that would be missing from my gaming budged.
Even with Malign Portents, I thought it was cool and flipped through it, but in the end, even the 25€ they asked for it was spent better elsewhere.

And I pretty much think that's the problem.
It's a game and for most players a budget for this hobby is a thing.
And this budget is better off with new miniatures, paints, rulebooks or whatever than sinking it into campaign books that might be really really cool, but not all that helpful.

I have no idea how this dilemma could be solved, because if they make a big campaign book with essential rules, gamers will complain at the price.
So it would have to be a thinner book, and I think they tried it with Malign Portents. They included special rules in it.
Not sure who really uses them or how good the book did, but at best, I think GW will continue with these release format.
At worst, we will only get a Blightwar styled campaign box with models and a small booklet each year.

I don't think it's that people want no story it's that people want balanced games more than a narrative game that's unbalanced.

For example I'd love making a story out of battles but there's no point without balance. I remember before matched play came out I lost every single game except one because the sides were that unfair and the game I did win was when I had the OP army.

I think even if the game was perfectly balanced, very few people want something liike malign portents or the realmgate wars books because they are nothing but narrative and some battleplans that are not tournament standard.

Malign Portents includes the prophecy rules as well as battle plans, but again no one in my area bothered buying it because none of it is tournament or "real AOS" standard. I'm running a malign portents two-month narrative campaign in sept and oct for my GW, and said you need the malign portents book, and that generated a fair amount of backlash and complaining.

The same was true with storm of magic, the sigmar campaign in 8th, the old siege book, or going into 40k , city fiight, planetstrike, etc... few peoeple touched because it wasn't "real 40k".

The exception to this rule is the old General's Compendium from 2002. For whatever reason THAT book could never be kept in stock and was always sold out. But that book was crammed with different campaign engines and ideas.

Players seem ok with some stories being in the army books (though you will always hear battlecries for GW to just release pamphlets wiith the rules and leave the art and story for people who care) and are ok with buying black library novels if they care enough about the narrative, but very obviously will NOT spend on a game book that doesn't effect the standard game, which in AOS is matched play usiing the standard tournament scenarios. If you affect those ... people will buy the material. They will likely complain about it but they will buy the material.

The number of people that care about narrative will differ from game group to game group. In my area when we run events we do a pub quiz which is all based on narrative and out of 10 people, 1 will be able to answer the questions and the rest will shrug and not care (unless the questions are really dumbed down like "what is the name of the faction sigmar created that started the realmgate wars by marching against the followers of khorne in Aqshy" 0r thiings like that)

pm713 wrote:

For example I'd love making a story out of battles but there's no point without balance.

The story often comes from the imbalance

MongooseMatt wrote:

pm713 wrote:

For example I'd love making a story out of battles but there's no point without balance.

The story often comes from the imbalance

It's a boring story when it's always the same story of "The Dwarfs lose".

pm713 wrote:

It's a boring story when it's always the same story of "The Dwarfs lose".

Our way past this (and this really won't work for some groups) was to get one person choosing both forces - you then need players who really do care more about what happens on the table over who wins...

you then need players who really do care more about what happens on the table over who wins...

There's your key lol. And definitely not something I think you can spin a business plan around in modern game design and culture.

 auticus wrote:
And definitely not something I think you can spin a business plan around in modern game design and culture.

It has been a while since I have seen their games (and this does not apply to Bolt Action) but Warlord's Black Powder series of games were released without points/lists, and they stated in the books that they were intended for the use of 'gentlemen'

My question would be... how successful are those games? Where I am, no one plays anything from them. I have hail caesar and love it but the people who play it are very limited.

It's what customers buy. Narrative, story, campaign book, these things didn't and don't sell as well so it's difficult to fault GW for producing what more people want to buy. I love fluff but I will say in regards to alternative play styles like Malign Portents that I don't have a lot of motivation there--when I'm getting one game a week in I just want to enjoy 'regular' AoS rather than throw a whole extra rule set on top of it. When I do narrative I prefer things like Path to Glory where the mechanics of the game itself are more or less the same. What I did like the campaign books for was extra battalion diversity (even if a decent chunk of them were kinda bland) a ton of cool scenarios, and of course a story with a continuous thread. I don't like how the big Tzeentch plan seems to have been forgotten and Blightwar seems to exist nowhere in the fluff beyond the starter set (they could easily tie that loose end by writing 'the Stormcast won' too).

I think bringing the campaign books back could work as softcover, making the scenarios matched play friendly (even lopsided ones could include 'this force only gets 75% the points' or easier/harder objectives, etc) and point costs for the battalions within. It would be a great place to add in simple allegiance sets (like those from the GHB2) and update warscrolls for armies not slated for a battletome release. Since the warscrolls are free and battalion ones can be gotten individually for a few bucks on the app players wouldn't be forced to buy the book either.

A lot of really good points in here and I think the first post really nailed it on the head..GW took a Gamble and lost hard. They basically picked a target audience at random.

Now I don't wanna go into the quality of the story because that's an entirely different topic but one that does need to be brought up, if to only used as a point.

AoS as a whole is still in a really weird place. Because everything about it, from launch until now, have been a Madrid of three stooges levels of comidic screw up. AoS game and story wise has been a rule Goldberg machine of changes and development which an end result no one really knows. Launch was a nightmare, wether or not you think over writing the old world was a good idea, it pissed off a lot of people rightly so, so that drove people away. They squated 2 armies at launch so that droveore people away and acted as a deterrent because there is no telling even now if AoS will squad old armies. The lack of matched play, the driving factor to the game was not out for a year. The lack of coherent rules and army building. The CONSTSNT influx of storm cast which I get it's the new space marine in fantay but it was release after release of them.

Story wise it's still not sure what it wants to be. It tried being epic/cosmic fantays which was such a niche fandom, its now trying to be a more generic fantays but because of it's original inception in epic and cosmic it's making it very hard for average people to be worthwhile at all. They also just recently opened a way for old hero's for fantasy to come back which is a slap in the face to old players and are just ham fisting them into AoS. It's like a bandaid over a bullet wound.

All in all AoS has come a long way from it's start. But it's got a long way to go and a lot of work to get there. It's still left a bad taste in people's moths for more then just squatting the old world, so it's not a matter of "just salty Whfb fans" the game has so issues and so does the story. I hope it gets fixed because it's got possibility to be a good setting and a good game.

I don't see them altering the game rules to be honest. It has attracted a great many fans who like super abstract quasi-boardgames. AOS is the only "wargame" that I can think of that performs as abstractly as it does, borrowing heavily from board and collectible card games in how it is structured and played, and there are a lot of people that love it for that.

 auticus wrote:
I don't see them altering the game rules to be honest. It has attracted a great many fans who like super abstract quasi-boardgames. AOS is the only "wargame" that I can think of that performs as abstractly as it does, borrowing heavily from board and collectible card games in how it is structured and played, and there are a lot of people that love it for that.

And thats totally awesome, that they created this weird in between, But its still seems likes its struggling to find what it really wants to be in the grand scheme of things. And the way it handled becoming what it is, was not well executed and still has left a lot of people bitter over it and rightly so.

It being totally awesome is subjective If a couple of the abstractions were removed I'd be a super fan.

I have a huge investment in fantasy models stretching back to whfb 5th edition that need a game to reside in.

 auticus wrote:
It being totally awesome is subjective If a couple of the abstractions were removed I'd be a super fan.

I have a huge investment in fantasy models stretching back to whfb 5th edition that need a game to reside in.

What abstractions? I don't think AoS is any more abstract than other wargames.

AOS is hugely more abstract than any wargame.

Most wargames emphasize movement and maneuver to position your troops. AOS you largely don't need that. You have freedom of movement and excessively large movement ratios so if you get out of position you can get back into position in a turn. You have troops that can alpha strike and just appear wherever they want and even charge from the get-go.

Almost every wargame prevents missile uniits from shooting if they are tied up iin combat. In AOS you can shoot whatever you want even if you are in combat.

In almost every wargame, cover is a huge thing. In AOS, if you can see the enemy model's pinky behind a forest which is behind two layers of enemy models, you can shoot it just fine with no penalty.

In any wargame, shooting into combat is either not allowed or you can hurt your own guys. In AOS you can blow mortars and dragon fire and massed rifle fire into a swirling melee and its abstracted out where you only hurt your opponent.

In even the most annoying of wargames that use IGO/UGO you at least get some kind of response to your opponent. In AOS you can take a fun double turn to the face and sit for an hour without responding to a single thing your opponent has done, in essence your battle line stands there in awe while they take two full turns of dragon fire, arrows, spells, and melee. Definitely not how any battle in literature or the movies plays out, but abstracted for gamey mechanics in AOS.

These are abstractions that abstract away how a battle would operate in literature or cinema in favor for gaming mechanics. Immersion is removed in favor of gamey mechanics. I have played or do play over a dozen different wargames, and none come close to the abstraction or lack of immersion that is an AOS battle.

In having discussed this topic, a great many proponents of AOS will openly praise the abstraction because for them iit makes a more fun "game" and abstraction is what attracts them in the first place.

Actius is right AoS is a very abstract game. It's basically bare bones what is required in order to have a "game" it's very free flow and in a twist or ironic fate, AoS actually benifts really well from using movement trays, and not even putting terrain on the field. Because aside from the buffs the terrain gives and the look, terrain mostly gets in the way.

But he also hit on another big issue with how AoS launch was handled that is still very off putting and unfortunately nothing GW does will rectify it. That is the squatting of armies. He even said he has models going way back to 5th. Tell me would you want to get into a game were at at point your army could be just unsupported at the drop of a hat? Bertonia and tomb king's. I mean if I was a free guild player or a disposesed player I would be really hard pressed to get into AoS because there is no indication that my army will ever get any attention, updates, or second thoughts ever again. It would be like if you were a eldar player in 40k and they said all the craft worlds exploded your eldar are still there though and you can use them but here are super eldar we are gonna focus on.

As a dispossessed player AoS is not easy to like. My army was basically shoved to the side, had bits cut off and ignored. That was the good treatment.

GW just showed complete disregard for their players and haven't done anything to deal with it. I play AoS because I want to still use my models and because the rules are free. If you gave me a chance to rewind to before End Times I'd do that in a heartbeat.

pm713 wrote:
As a dispossessed player AoS is not easy to like. My army was basically shoved to the side, had bits cut off and ignored. That was the good treatment.

GW just showed complete disregard for their players and haven't done anything to deal with it. I play AoS because I want to still use my models and because the rules are free. If you gave me a chance to rewind to before End Times I'd do that in a heartbeat.

Second

I do have a large tomb king army. I don't mind as much because the tomb king warscrolls and GHB 16 values still exist and I still play them.

What gnaws my craw is that what pulled me into all of those models was a system that represented a battle you'd read about or watch in a movie.

What we have now is not anything you'd see like that. I have a huge investment into a system that totally transformed itself into something that would never have attracted me in the first place.

I have a feeling we'll see an ancient dead come out with the tomb kings models returning. The sphinx, for example, was a relatively new model for them to just take away forever.

However it does burn a lot of us that factions have been ignored (like the dwarves above) for almost three years now. That kills the product too. And I agree the massive fapping over stormcast in our face 24/7 is also a big contention point, because they are quite obviously trying to recapture their space marine lightning in a bottle selliing point.

It's because not only at the same time they ignore previous large factions that also push others so much that they became hated for it, SCE.

Enjoy the game if you can and if you can't, let it go. I know there will be a point when I'll put AoS on hold or let it go. I did it with Infinity, I don't think AoS is going to be any different at some point in the future.

Personally, we are at the point of no return here, they should have kept the models on squares, and offered 2 game modes, skermish plays as AoS now, and a battle mode with more ridged and defined movement and bonus to attacking in spicific ways. Similar to old fantays. But also simplifed some of the rules that was the rediculousness of 8th.

But that's just my pipe dream

Parra Bellum Conquest is mine lol.

 auticus wrote:
Parra Bellum Conquest is mine lol.

Enlighten?

http://www.beastsofwar.com/para-bellum-conquest/
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/740261.page

Company called Para Bellum. Game is Conquest. Written by Alessio (he who did whfb 6th and kings of war). Demo'd at Adepticon.

You can youtube a bunch of stuff on it.

Comes out early summer. It is very close to what I want a fantasy game to resemble.

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.

 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.