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 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Hellebore wrote:
So long as GW are honest in how they sell you the game I dont really care which one is true. But they have to choose because at the moment it's being developed as a narrative and sold as a setting.

I don't think GW know what they want to sell the game as, genuinely. They go from pushing the setting to the narrative back to the setting again so quickly it's hard to keep up. It's like they want to be masters of both without realising that in mastering one they forgo the other.

I would be very interested to see some actual customer behaviour data on purchasing habits around this.

There's a lot of conventional wisdom about imperial being more popular, and arguments that support makes them popular.

What I'd be interested in is longevity of popularity, especially when it came to xenos armies. I think that the enthusiasm for an army will be affected by it being ignored and sidelined by GW while all their marketing materials promote imperial armies and marines.

I can see people originally choosing an army entirely on the perceived cool factor only to give up on it due to support apathy.

Whereas marine armies get continual material to consume, keeping their collectors happy for years and maintaining faction. Loyalty.

Basically to be faction/brand loyal in Warhammer for xenos armies is to be something of a hobby masochist, like a sports player refusing to change their gear brand despite no updated or replacement hear being offered for years at a time and they doggedly stick to worn out shoes. It is of course also a gradient amongst xenos armies over which is ignored more, but it's less noticeable than the quantity 9f stuff marines have chucked at them.




GW have actually already designed game around a one sided factionalism. Space Hulk made it clear that you were the marines and you tested your skill by seeing who could win with the marines the most. GW could easily do that with 40k. Everyone chooses a marine chapter as their avatar in the game. And people can buy every other army as a bargain bin bulk order of NPC mooks you use to fight each other...


Or you know, they could sell their factions as equal and actually supper them that way...

Didn't Creed get "lost" on Cadia? He was a named character, but I don't see him on BattleScribe anymore. Is there another datasheet that he can represent?

 Ginjitzu wrote:
Didn't Creed get "lost" on Cadia? He was a named character, but I don't see him on BattleScribe anymore. Is there another datasheet that he can represent?

last I heard he's like Tycho "dead but his rules are still in the codex"

BrianDavion wrote:
that or they're just doing incremental changes in the setting with story elements and don't want to massivly change everything. which is the proper way to do it.

Why is this the 'proper way to do it'? There were some pretty big setting changes with End Times to AOS launch and that has swelled in popularity incredibly.

Perhaps now is the time to do things differently and with more innovation.

Hellebore wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Hellebore wrote:
So long as GW are honest in how they sell you the game I dont really care which one is true. But they have to choose because at the moment it's being developed as a narrative and sold as a setting.

I don't think GW know what they want to sell the game as, genuinely. They go from pushing the setting to the narrative back to the setting again so quickly it's hard to keep up. It's like they want to be masters of both without realising that in mastering one they forgo the other.

I would be very interested to see some actual customer behaviour data on purchasing habits around this.

Spoiler:

There's a lot of conventional wisdom about imperial being more popular, and arguments that support makes them popular.

What I'd be interested in is longevity of popularity, especially when it came to xenos armies. I think that the enthusiasm for an army will be affected by it being ignored and sidelined by GW while all their marketing materials promote imperial armies and marines.

I can see people originally choosing an army entirely on the perceived cool factor only to give up on it due to support apathy.

Whereas marine armies get continual material to consume, keeping their collectors happy for years and maintaining faction. Loyalty.

Basically to be faction/brand loyal in Warhammer for xenos armies is to be something of a hobby masochist, like a sports player refusing to change their gear brand despite no updated or replacement hear being offered for years at a time and they doggedly stick to worn out shoes. It is of course also a gradient amongst xenos armies over which is ignored more, but it's less noticeable than the quantity 9f stuff marines have chucked at them.

GW have actually already designed game around a one sided factionalism. Space Hulk made it clear that you were the marines and you tested your skill by seeing who could win with the marines the most. GW could easily do that with 40k. Everyone chooses a marine chapter as their avatar in the game. And people can buy every other army as a bargain bin bulk order of NPC mooks you use to fight each other...


Or you know, they could sell their factions as equal and actually supper them that way...

I completely agree with your expectations around purchasing habits but I think it's a bit off topic and you've kinda misunderstood me.

I don't think GW know if they want 40k to be this cool setting where anything can happen and we make up our own stories with our armies in this sandbox universe or whether they want it to be a story driven narrative such as the Horus Heresy. I don't think they can master both. If they want to be story driven, we need to see actual progression and change. By changes - I don't mean a big tear across the galaxy that changes the galactic map but otherwise nothing else, nor do I mean new units that just so happen to have been kept on ice for ten thousand years. I want to see the characters in the story develop or die and be replaced by others. I want to see the consequences of changes to the setting. Real things like the death of a known character, an Imperial civil war, the destruction or change of an entire faction, anything that breaks the status quo really.

This is what piqued my interest in 8th most. It seemed that there would, for the first time ever, be actual changes to the lore and/or the setting. I'm still waiting.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Ginjitzu wrote:
Didn't Creed get "lost" on Cadia? He was a named character, but I don't see him on BattleScribe anymore. Is there another datasheet that he can represent?

last I heard he's like Tycho "dead but his rules are still in the codex"

I thought I'd heard Trazyn had "tee lo carbonited" his ass, but in terms of rules, I can't find him anywhere on BattleScribe.

 Ginjitzu wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

 Ginjitzu wrote:
Didn't Creed get "lost" on Cadia? He was a named character, but I don't see him on BattleScribe anymore. Is there another datasheet that he can represent?

last I heard he's like Tycho "dead but his rules are still in the codex"

I can't find him anywhere on BattleScribe.

Creed got kidnapped by Trazyn, it was Colour Sergeant Kell who got killed.

About the character dying thing: If I remember the WM/H facts correctly, they evolved / changed / killed their main characters - witch was represented with different minis and profiles, but you could use all incarnations of a character legally, in terms of listbuilding and playing (ofc just one character with that name, not multiple incarnations at a time).

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
that or they're just doing incremental changes in the setting with story elements and don't want to massivly change everything. which is the proper way to do it.

Why is this the 'proper way to do it'? There were some pretty big setting changes with End Times to AOS launch and that has swelled in popularity incredibly.

Perhaps now is the time to do things differently and with more innovation.
.

yeah but there's a big risk of taking something people lvoed and destroying it by doing massive setting changes. for example, what if they did a massive change, had the Orks launch their greatWaagh. had Ghaz destroy a buncha worlds, and then get killed in a counter offense, Orks are then destroyed as a faction etc and GW's only response if you write them an email asking about the future of your army is "guess you should choose a new faction"?

Nibbler wrote:
About the character dying thing: If I remember the WM/H facts correctly, they evolved / changed / killed their main characters - witch was represented with different minis and profiles, but you could use all incarnations of a character legally, in terms of listbuilding and playing (ofc just one character with that name, not multiple incarnations at a time).

The reason for suggesting they are all posthumous is it disentangles them from the current setting and means people aren't invested in their actions affecting the world As they already have.

The model can be enjoyed as a character and a unit but wirhout that dragging narrative weight that has IMO adversely affected the current setting.

BrianDavion wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
that or they're just doing incremental changes in the setting with story elements and don't want to massivly change everything. which is the proper way to do it.

Why is this the 'proper way to do it'? There were some pretty big setting changes with End Times to AOS launch and that has swelled in popularity incredibly.

Perhaps now is the time to do things differently and with more innovation.
.

yeah but there's a big risk of taking something people lvoed and destroying it by doing massive setting changes. for example, what if they did a massive change, had the Orks launch their greatWaagh. had Ghaz destroy a buncha worlds, and then get killed in a counter offense, Orks are then destroyed as a faction etc and GW's only response if you write them an email asking about the future of your army is "guess you should choose a new faction"?

What? They don't need to squat a faction to be innovative or to do setting changes.

Couldn't they just replace all of the named datasheets with generic names? Like, instead of Azrael, just have a datasheet for a Chapter Master, with all of Azrael's rules. And every Dark Angels successor chapter can now have their own Azreal, while naming him whatever they please?

Instead of Commissar Yarrick, just allow Lord Commissars to buy Hero of Hades Hive, Iron Will, Power Field, storm bolter and power klaw for 65pts.

If they go that route they might as well scrap special characters all together and just allow you to build generic characters however you'd like. Sort of like in earlier editions, really.

That kind of a goes against the whole, no new model, no new rules. And no new rules for models we no longer make. If people could make their own characters, GW would either have to give options for the characters, or worse we end up like AoS where characters are stuck in big boxs of units, and if you take them you end up with 2-9 wasted models, just to get a characters.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
that or they're just doing incremental changes in the setting with story elements and don't want to massivly change everything. which is the proper way to do it.

Why is this the 'proper way to do it'? There were some pretty big setting changes with End Times to AOS launch and that has swelled in popularity incredibly.

Perhaps now is the time to do things differently and with more innovation.
.

yeah but there's a big risk of taking something people lvoed and destroying it by doing massive setting changes. for example, what if they did a massive change, had the Orks launch their greatWaagh. had Ghaz destroy a buncha worlds, and then get killed in a counter offense, Orks are then destroyed as a faction etc and GW's only response if you write them an email asking about the future of your army is "guess you should choose a new faction"?

What? They don't need to squat a faction to be innovative or to do setting changes.

they don't need to but I've seen it happen in other games. what happens is that if they get into the pattern of "big exciting events" they need to keep making every event more exciting. and eventually that means factions dissapper. now 40k due to all the factions having their own mini's it's less likely, but still it's all too easy to destroy someone's fav part of the setting

 Ginjitzu wrote:
Didn't Creed get "lost" on Cadia? He was a named character, but I don't see him on BattleScribe anymore. Is there another datasheet that he can represent?

Creed is limited to Cadia. Select that regiment and he'll appear.

Creed isn't dead, and in fact they don't quite specify it was the necron who took him. I've read some wild speculation and who knows ? He may one day be back and we were played for fools all along.

No, but perhaps he should be. I mean if Black Library were to kill him off and the rules writers were to just rename the Lord Castellan Creed datasheet as a Lord Castellan, would the game be any worse off? Would Lazarus's model have sold any less if his datasheet had been named Inner Circle Primaris Master instead?

I mean, I suppose one could also argue that the rules are fine, and that it's me who should just say that my Inner Circle Primaris Master is called Ted, but for rules purposes, he's using the Lazarus datasheet.

Either way, nothing about the rules should hold back the fiction from letting characters die, but it does, and the fiction is suffering from it.

I mean, would the game be any worse off if they just got rid of all named characters ? If they had a robust build a leader, probably not.

The model has been sold for a long time, some people like their named characters and have used them in lots of games, Creeds one of them. Could you use him as a standard commander ? Sure you could but some people like their named characters why should guard be the ones that sacrifice their characters where other factions just live forever seemingly ?

They either need to make it like game of thrones and give most named characters a real problem staying alive or keep them around past death for those who love them still.

The issue is GW are consistently inconsistent with how they handle these things but I always am against people losing their characters or tools in their respective tool boxes. Just for the sake of narrative, which really has been really meh for awhile now. Especially when it was always about the setting before and less flowing stories that constantly evolved and had to keep moving forward.

Frankly nothing is worse than them moving it all forward and writing themselves into a corner because they don't have one unified vision. Which for GW I'm worried for because they can't even keep parity with army rules in communication let alone have a set goal for story aims.

AngryAngel80 wrote:
why should guard be the ones that sacrifice their characters where other factions just live forever seemingly ?

I was just using Creed and Lazarus as examples. I think they should get rid of all named characters; from the datasheets I mean, the lore is something entirely different.

I don't think renaming the Tor Garadon datasheet would take anything away from Tor Garadon the character, after all, one could still name their Brother Captain, Tor Garadon and lose nothing. All of which is small beans of course, because the logic works both ways, but still...

killing characters is, honestly cheap, it has some inital shock value but eventually people just kinda shrug. GOT taught us that

Yeah killing characters just to kill them is cheap but sometimes they can have a huge impact used a bit more than it currently is in 40k.

I mean if they are going to kill off named characters that's fine but do it across the spectrum and not just to non space marines, which I feel like would happen more. As well I'd not care if they got rid of them in model form so long as they give you ability to make the same abilities in character form so the interesting game mechanics are still there even if its not creed creed for instance.

BrianDavion wrote:
killing characters is, honestly cheap, it has some inital shock value but eventually people just kinda shrug. GOT taught us that

In some settings and stories that's undoubtedly true.

But 40k is a Grimdark setting that emphasises the enormity of the galaxy and the threats to humanity. Few other works - even galaxy-spanning ones like Star Wars - have anything on 40k's sheer scale, where billions of lives are fed into the meat-grinder just to keep humanity alive for a little longer. You have hive fleets that devour entire worlds, you have Necron invaders that can appear from nowhere and gradually reduce the surface of a planet to dust, you have weapons that can destroy entire worlds outright, you have chaos daemons that can corrupt people and turn them into twisted abominations, you have immense titans doing battle with one another on the surface of contested worlds.

This is a setting where life is supposed to be incredibly cheap and where you could die a gruesome death at any time from any of a thousand different (but equally horrifying) means.

However, this is completely undermined by the myriad of heroes all running about with impervious plot-armour.

40k is a setting where heroes should not only die - they should regularly die meaningless and inglorious deaths.

AngryAngel80 wrote:
Yeah killing characters just to kill them is cheap but sometimes they can have a huge impact used a bit more than it currently is in 40k.

I mean if they are going to kill off named characters that's fine but do it across the spectrum and not just to non space marines, which I feel like would happen more. As well I'd not care if they got rid of them in model form so long as they give you ability to make the same abilities in character form so the interesting game mechanics are still there even if its not creed creed for instance.

They do kill non-Sm characters. All the time. As I pointed out in another thread - every non-"Good guy" faction in the game has some kind of resurrection mechanic, and GW does make use of it to kill them off. Daemons and chaos characters are just "banished" when killed. Drukhari can be resurrected. Tyranids can be rebirthed. Etc.

 vipoid wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
killing characters is, honestly cheap, it has some inital shock value but eventually people just kinda shrug. GOT taught us that

In some settings and stories that's undoubtedly true.

But 40k is a Grimdark setting that emphasises the enormity of the galaxy and the threats to humanity. Few other works - even galaxy-spanning ones like Star Wars - have anything on 40k's sheer scale, where billions of lives are fed into the meat-grinder just to keep humanity alive for a little longer. You have hive fleets that devour entire worlds, you have Necron invaders that can appear from nowhere and gradually reduce the surface of a planet to dust, you have weapons that can destroy entire worlds outright, you have chaos daemons that can corrupt people and turn them into twisted abominations, you have immense titans doing battle with one another on the surface of contested worlds.

This is a setting where life is supposed to be incredibly cheap and where you could die a gruesome death at any time from any of a thousand different (but equally horrifying) means.

However, this is completely undermined by the myriad of heroes all running about with impervious plot-armour.

40k is a setting where heroes should not only die - they should regularly die meaningless and inglorious deaths.

and how long can they keep that up before people stop giving a gak? if you over do the "LOL GRIM DARK NO HOPE LOL" you go to grimderp where no one cares and it becomes a cliche parody. (see all the jokes about GOT's killing characters off)

It's not just characters not dying - some like Eldrad just cease to be dead with no explanation!

BrianDavion wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
killing characters is, honestly cheap, it has some inital shock value but eventually people just kinda shrug. GOT taught us that

In some settings and stories that's undoubtedly true.

But 40k is a Grimdark setting that emphasises the enormity of the galaxy and the threats to humanity. Few other works - even galaxy-spanning ones like Star Wars - have anything on 40k's sheer scale, where billions of lives are fed into the meat-grinder just to keep humanity alive for a little longer. You have hive fleets that devour entire worlds, you have Necron invaders that can appear from nowhere and gradually reduce the surface of a planet to dust, you have weapons that can destroy entire worlds outright, you have chaos daemons that can corrupt people and turn them into twisted abominations, you have immense titans doing battle with one another on the surface of contested worlds.

This is a setting where life is supposed to be incredibly cheap and where you could die a gruesome death at any time from any of a thousand different (but equally horrifying) means.

However, this is completely undermined by the myriad of heroes all running about with impervious plot-armour.

40k is a setting where heroes should not only die - they should regularly die meaningless and inglorious deaths.

and how long can they keep that up before people stop giving a gak? if you over do the "LOL GRIM DARK NO HOPE LOL" you go to grimderp where no one cares and it becomes a cliche parody. (see all the jokes about GOT's killing characters off)

Too far in either direction is bad. If everyone is constantly dieing then people never have a chance to become attached to characters. If no one ever dies then there's no tension and everything is meaningless.

My favorite bl series is ADB's Night Lords trilogy. If Talos and the boys had lived in the end it would have taken away that feeling of csm fighting for a bitter, hopeless cause. It wouldn't have been as satisfying. There needs to be a balance.

I've heard the opposite complaint about GOT way more often - that the story in the later season became driven by the characters rather than the characters being driven by the setting.

An ideal example of that would be Princess Natalie Dormer, who over the course of the show went from "hot seducey lady trying to get with various kings" to a kind of virginal saint type character when the fires of religious fanaticism were being whipped up in the capital.

Geopolitical forces being bigger than individual heroes was 100% of the initial appeal of GOT and people only tired of it when it went back to the safe fantasy territory of Great Man Theory.

That absolutely also applies to 40k. Part of the appeal of the setting is that the greatest bad-assest heroes of the settings are all fundamentally caught up in this vast system. The age of great heroes has come and gone and all that's left of the greatest hero of mankind is a molding corpse in a chair kept technically alive by continuously escalating sacrifice. The biggest baddest daemon heroes are ultimately puppets of the chaos gods.

At the risk of getting sidetracked, the GoT writers have admitted that they started to write the characters around the actors, in order to show them off.

My main complaint (out of many mind you) was that characters started to have ludicrous levels of plot armour in that show. I would have loved it if in the big battle with loads of characters, half of them would have died in the first five seconds because they were at the front. That sort of mass death can be very impactful.

Imagine if you could mirror a pre-battle planning scene with a post-battle recovery scene, but with so many places unfilled because of all the dead characters. I don't know if you could pull something like that off in 40k though, it seems better suited to the screen.

 Trickstick wrote:
At the risk of getting sidetracked, the GoT writers have admitted that they started to write the characters around the actors, in order to show them off.

This happens in everything, because people like characters more than a setting, and typically can't disassociate "characters" from the actors playing them on TV.
Not really sure I'd say GoT's claim to fame was geopolitics>characters - certain characters had "plot armour" from the start. The issue is that it was vaguely well written, rather than "uh... we want this scene, not sure how to get there, just film it anyway, no one watches for the dialogue or plot or anything but CGI fighting CGI."

Which is why I'm not sure how killing people off helps anything.
I can understand people thinking its ridiculous that Cato Sicarius single handedly kills three C'Tan while surf-boarding an Avatar of Khaine.... but if he - and everyone else - had a 50/50 chance to die every story, the results just going to you don't care about anyone, because everyone will be toast in two years at most.

I mean lets say in GoT they properly cleaned house of all the main characters at some point in seasons 5/6. No Dany, Jon, Tyrion, Sansa, Arya etc. They are all dead, and we are now following the adventures of... random new person from the North, and the South, and the East and whatever for a few years. It might be good, it might be bad, but most likely you are just alienating your fan base to no gain.

It was like when they killed off Eldrad. The collective (such as it was) cry of Eldar players was "wot?" Eldrad was essentially... our guy. The only Eldar character to have had any significant writing, popping up in White Dwarfs etc. Yes there was the Phoenix Lords but they were never really given much beyond being Exarch+1s.

It didn't take the wider 40k story or Eldar story/faction or other characters forward. You were not left thinking "wow, 40k is Grimdark, anything can happen." It just made Eldar into a faceless NPC faction. And as a result very unsurprisingly it got almost immediately retconned.

I mean everyone has their views though. I hate Vect for instance - although I know other DE fans love him. I think he's a tedious narrative black hole that prevents anything interesting storywise happening to the Dark Eldar. The result has been no special characters, no data entries, and a slow devolution of the story to "what's Vect doing? Nothing, but, uh, just as planned?" I can see much more fun with a grab bag of dukes and ladies and marquises jostling for power. (This might change if Vect got a super cool model, but its been decades, its not happening.)

BrianDavion 785394 10721379 wrote:
and how long can they keep that up before people stop giving a gak? if you over do the "LOL GRIM DARK NO HOPE LOL" you go to grimderp where no one cares and it becomes a cliche parody. (see all the jokes about GOT's killing characters off)

I don't get why people think that got had too many character kills, durning the Xth-XIth century in middle europe worse stuff happened. siblings killing each other, mothers druging children from other wifes, sons castrating fathers. Kings invited to peace meetings, running nude from assassins from a sauna being caught by peasents and getting nailed to the gate door. Women that were ex wifes of dukes drawn nude through the streets of capital while being whipped durning winter. And then their fathers and family starting a litteral civial war that even the king and his army couldn't stop. And later on the monogls came and burned city after city, killed Henry the Second, and mounted his head on a spike. started the siege of his capital in legnica, with defenders being led by his wife. And it only stoped because the mongolian leader died and they had to go back for new leader election. and this is just 150 years, before that people were less civilised and there were purges of entire populations.