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 JohnHwangDD wrote:
TMIR = "The Most Important Rule"

... it is important to remember that the rules are just a framework to create an enjoyable game.

The most important rule then is that the rules aren't all that important

The fact that it's a really big deal to Jervis & co, but not the players is kind of a strange disconnect that speaks pretty strongly to why certain WFB players are so bent out of sorts over AoS.

It also speaks strongly of a disconnect between a company being out of touch with its customer base

 Herohammernostalgia wrote:
A of course, The Most Important Rule: fun. Thanks!


Actually aside from warhammer skirmish I can think of few published scenario's after 3d edition where there were set forces rather than points limits.

GW did this even in 6E, with the Border Princes campaign in the rulebook, along with the Seven Samurai scenario.

7E was the beginning of the end, when they took the campaign and scenarios out of the rulebook, trying to sell them as a separate campaign system.

Which of course was a money grubbing move.

GW's decline started when they took to jacking kit prices up a lot, and accelerated when they got the idea of doubling the cost of rulebooks.

No argument that GW overreached on what the market was willing to pay.

For example, I'm still happily enjoying playing my Imperial Guard with their Lumbering Behemoth Leman Russ battletanks, while others have moved on to "Astra somethingorother" as an alternative army with worse tanks. No way I'm dropping $50+ on that stinker. I skipped the last Eldar Codex, too, because it didn't seem worth $50+, either. Eldar Craftworlds, OTOH, that was worth getting because it added something cool (i.e. the Wraithknight).

If every GW gamer decided that they only needed to buy every other Codex (like the iPhone 5 - 6 / 5s - 6s crowd), I wonder what that would do.

Anyhow, GW not charging money for AOS got me to play it. And GW not bothering with points made it so my Dogs of War could come back as such under homebrew rules.

indeed JohnHwangDD, homebrew units and characters can benefit from AoS. It's way easier now to invent a new unit, or invent new rules for out of production kits AND put them on the field without the bother of assigning them an "appropriate" points cost. And I think other players may be more tolerant of homebrew units as long as their abilities are not ridiculous, whereas before the more competitive players may doubt the "points balance" of your creations.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Which of course was a money grubbing move.

GW's decline started when they took to jacking kit prices up a lot, and accelerated when they got the idea of doubling the cost of rulebooks.

The new rulebooks are a *lot* nicer than the old ones, though. I mean, hardcover, full color rulebooks are just way slicker than softcover black-and-white (and it's not like those were cheap). It kinda goes with what I've said, that GW loves its collector types, because these books are beautiful to read and put on the shelf, and just horrid to transport if you need to lug around anywhere other than within your own home (they weigh a freakin ton if you have a stack of 'em).

I think the solution for GW is to make 3 versions - a softcover mini B&W that's around $25, a hardcover that's current price of $40-$60 (depending on size), and the collector's LE at $150+. The irony is that GW's ideal customers will buy *all three*. Like, look on the DCM thread, there's a fella who buys the iTunes, print, and LE versions; the LE version probably just sits on a shelf. They'd end up with softcover to take with, color print version to read through, and LE version to collect.

On the other hand, the iTunes versions are very good and extremely cheap if you split them with friends (because the purchaser can download the iBook onto 10 tablets).

I really am not a fan of the hardcover books. They may be nicer simply as books, however as actual game supplements, they're in many ways less usable, a lot heavier to lug around, and for long term players they're pretty much just $50 rules updates. They're also half the page count or less of many other companies $50 hardcover/full color rulebooks. The "full color" aspect doesn't do much for me either personally, a lot of the coloring is really mediocre, just some schmuck sitting in photoshop for a bit adding color to pictures intended to be viewed in B&W and created many years ago in many cases, and a lot of them frankly have more character in B&W than they do in color, particularly in the "grimdark" 40k universe. Even as a "collector", the added weight and space makes them much more of a pain to keep around.

I used to go play with a backpack full of codex books, I bought every book as it came out and could carry them around as reference, wasn't too bad when they were softcover and $25 each. At $50 each and hardcover, both the physical weight & cost makes this impractical and undesirable, and I no longer buy new codex books.

I'd buy B&W $25 books again, but I haven't bought a codex book in...over a year.

I don't care about hard cover and all the pics and fluff. I am primarily a gamer. What I want is the rules, laid out as clearly and as economically as possible, in a book that is easy to carry around. If I wanted to read fluff I would buy novels.

The point of a hardback is long life, which is irrelevant if editions are only going to also two or three years.

The solution of three versions is similar to what I proposed a couple of years ago, except that I wanted a cheap, rules only softback as an option. That is what I would buy, obviously.

GW of course have started to offer softback codexes at £25 (compared to £15 in 2012), without a release schedule, and without incorporating any of the formations and so on that they have made part of the 7th edition game (which I don't like anyway.)

@Kilkrazy - I think the mini-hardcovers (40k) would have been perfect if they were softcover instead, and black and white. And cheaper.

I like that the mini and regular rulebooks are identical page-wise, because then you can say "P.65" and all be talking about the same thing. But the hardcover, even on the mini, is an impediment rather than a benefit to gaming, because all it does is weigh more and take up more space. And, as you say, if you're primarily interested in gaming, who cares about full color pics.

I mean, seriously, who lugs around a full size hardcover version of the BRB anymore

Incidentally, whatever you do, don't buy the AoS 264 page book. It's a hardcover, very heavy, and has a higher picture to text ratio than almost any rulebook I've ever seen -- the sole exception being, the free AoS book in the box set, which takes maybe 30 minutes to read through 100 pages .

The hardcovers are pretty and all, but I am just tiring of the mechanical complexity of GW gaming. I'd like greater streamlining across the board.

A good example is how AOS gives bonuses. Re-roll 1s, re-roll failed, +1 to die roll - that's 3 partial bumps that really should be just standardized to re-roll failed.

To that extent, I'm somewhat on board with those who suggest GW should have gone further and made a completely new game. Folding to-hit with to-wound, etc. But at that point, it's really a different game altoghether.

Streamlining is only good to a certain extent, though. If you take away all the variation in different levels of buffs, you're left with the exact same thing across the board for every model. To me, at least, a large portion of the fun of a TT game is having those different factions and different models actually work differently.

Besides which, there is a massive gap between rerolling 1s with a 5+ to hit and rerolling failures with a 5+ to hit. If the only buff was rerolling failures, having a better starting stat would not matter nearly as much.

I do find that Age of Sigmar gives sooooo many buffs, from terrain to battlescroll formations to random buffs from heroes, it really can be difficult to keep track of.

 Bottle wrote:
I do find that Age of Sigmar gives sooooo many buffs, from terrain to battlescroll formations to random buffs from heroes, it really can be difficult to keep track of.

On the other hand, I see it as a very strong point of the game. Most armies in AoS have a lot of inherent synergies which really does an army well - it feels more like having one big army instead of having a certain amount of individual units. On the other hand, there most often is one strong combo for each unit you will pull off, but in general, I like the idea of an army buffing itself e.g. by having other units nearby. Good design choice in my eyes, but having equally good options would be awesome. Still: a good start.

Using "re-roll failed" consistently looks like this:

33% = 5+
39% = 5+ RR1
55% = 5+ RRF

50% = 4+
58% = 4+ RR1
75% = 4+ RRF

67% = 3+
78% = 3+ RR1
89% = 3+ RRF

83% = 2+

As progressions go, re-rolling 1s gives the smoothest half-steps. Oh, well.

It is an interesting area of discussion.

In Proposed Rules I proposed to get rid of the whole To Hit, To Wound, To Save (with Rending mod) mechanism and replace it with a simple To Hit on a 6. Statistically the results are fairly equivalent, and you can make units stronger or weaker by giving them more attacks, more hit points and different weapon ranges.

Not many people replied and those that did thought that the game needs the long sequence and modifiers to give variations between units, while the rolling of lots of dice is fun in itself.

However in the thread discussing the lack of tactics in AoS, people were criticising the idea of having modifiers for flank attacks and the like, saying that the game gives bonuses of itself just by manoeuvring your units, and games should not use dice modifier mechanisms.

These two views of course are contradictory, but are not necessarily held by the same people.

My view on AoS is that I compare it with the WRG Games Ancients 7th Edition and De Bellis Antiquitatis. WRG developed their Ancients rules over a period of more than 20 years. At the end of that time, the writers were a bit fed up and wanted to make a smaller, simpler, quicker playing ruleset that would still provide tactical complexity and allow players to use their old armies. De Bellis Antiquitatis was the result.

DBA throws out nearly every mechanism in Ancients. and provides a rich tactical game with new mechanisms and without points. It has been as successful for casual and tournament play as Ancients, and is still popular 25 years after first publication.

The change between Ancients and DBA is what I think GW failed to do with AoS. Instead, they preserved intact the core of WHFB, the tedious combat mechanism which really ought to have been streamlined to allow for more interesting rules elswhere.

The difference between AoS and DBA is that in AoS units behave differently because they have been given different stats. Dwarves are a bit slower moving, Lizard Men have higher Bravery, Nagash has lots of special rules, and so on. In DBA units behave differently because they have different battlefield functions. For example, Light Infantry move quickly, especially in rough going, but they are lightly armed and cannot stand up to heavy infantry. DBA also has bonuses for flank and rear attacks, and a command and control mechanism that is completely lacking from AoS. Interestingly, it dispenses with morale mechanisms completely, absorbing that aspect into the combat results.

The DBA rules are six pages of A4, compared to the four pages that AoS uses (not including its special rules.) DBA also has a set of army lists that are equivalent to the war scrolls, though there are no special rules in DBA. The fantasy game Hordes of the Things is a development of DBA and uses points.

DBA is a much better streamlined game compared to Ancients than AoS is compared to WHFB, and it preserves a lot of the flavour of ancient battles. In the core philosophy, DBA allows complexity to emerge from the interaction of simply described different troop types, while AoS allows complexity to emerge from enormous amounts of fine detail. AoS is philosophically a game of the 1970s, but it ignores major areas of battle such as command and morale.

However there it is, AoS isn't suddenly going to transform into a brilliantly thought out modern system. We are pretty much stuck with it.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
In Proposed Rules I proposed to get rid of the whole To Hit, To Wound, To Save (with Rending mod) mechanism and replace it with a simple To Hit on a 6. Statistically the results are fairly equivalent, and you can make units stronger or weaker by giving them more attacks, more hit points and different weapon ranges.

However there it is, AoS isn't suddenly going to transform into a brilliantly thought out modern system. We are pretty much stuck with it.

If I were designing a WFB-successor battles game from scratch:
- combined Hit&Wound roll
- basic on 6 (17%),
- Elites 5+ (33%),
- some re-rolling of 1s or 1&2 for bonuses.

But AoS is out, with all the chrome, so there we are.

Yes, it could be done that way and also vary the number of attacks and hits that models have to roughly replicate the power level of the war scrolls while making the combat a lot simpler.

The thought wasn't that we didn't want the bonuses, it's that they don't make sense in a game scaled like age of sigmar. My 20 high elves spearmen don't want to line up in a block all the time, and when they do, why wouldn't they be able to turn on the spot and receive a charge? That was the entirety of my point in the other thread.

I agree that AoS shouldn't be encouraging units of 40+ models. That's just silly.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
I agree that AoS shouldn't be encouraging units of 40+ models. That's just silly.

Funny you should say that.

In the new Ghal Maraz book, there is what is basically a 'Dryads get angry' table. Roll a dice and something turns up. If you roll a 4, it is a unit of 40 Dryads.

Does make me wonder what kind of games they are playing up at GW. I am beginning to wonder if they are treating it pretty much like 40k in that regard.

That is pretty funny, but I can see where GW's accounting team wants Welf players to purchase and paint 40 *extra* Dryads, "just in case"...

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
That is pretty funny, but I can see where GW's accounting team wants Welf players to purchase and paint 40 *extra* Dryads, "just in case"...

On the bright side, those are the cheapest models that I think GW sells

 Kilkrazy wrote:

In Proposed Rules I proposed to get rid of the whole To Hit, To Wound, To Save (with Rending mod) mechanism and replace it with a simple To Hit on a 6. Statistically the results are fairly equivalent, and you can make units stronger or weaker by giving them more attacks, more hit points and different weapon ranges.

I don't think it is necessarily about the final probability. You have basically one pool of dice that is rolled three times, getting smaller every time. This makes the values of To Hit, To Wound, and Save somewhat unequal. For instance, having a better To Hit value would mean more dice survive the first roll, creating a bigger pool for the second roll. Terrible To Hit but good To Wound means that the second roll will be smaller, but more of the dice will move through it.

It's been a decade (or two) since I took probability and statistics in college, so I could be WAY off, but I think that because the probability actually changes with each roll, you have to calculate the probability individually. So a 4+/4+/4+ would be 50% * 50% * 50%, which is 12.5% chance that die will survive through to do damage. A 3+/4+/5+ would be 66.7% * 50% * 33.3%, or 11.1%. A 1/6 chance is a flat 16.7%. Doesn't seem like much of a difference, but that difference is amplified by the volume of dice at work. Again, it's been a long time so I'm not sure I'm doing this right, but I don't think you can't declare a single dice roll with the dwindling dice pool as "fairly equivalent".

I think there is also other mitigating factors involved. First, I think there is a bit of a thrill in the gambling, watching the dice pool dwindle with each roll, raising the stakes and increasing the tension. And second, I think rolling more dice reduces the damage a single bad roll can do to you. Third, each player rolls for his own stats, so you don't have to cross reference stats for every roll (what's you defense again?), so it is streamlined in a non-obvious way.

KK was calculating a combined to-Hit & to-Wound of 6+ vs separate die rolls.

A 4+/4+ is 25%, which is (on average) the same as a 6+ Attack re-rolling 1s, 2s & 3s (9/36). Out of 36 dice rolled, 6 are set aside as success, 12 are removed as automatic failures, and 18 are re-rolled - same total rolls as 4+/4+.

If you look at 3+/4+ averaging 33%, that would be an elite unit on a flat 5+. The distribution would be tighter, but much faster.

Yes, exactly that.

I am aware that to do the calculation properly you should calculate the chances of failure and deduct from unity, but I wanted to get a rough idea.

Basically though you can calculate the whole sequence of To Hit, To Wound, To Save as a single equation of pTH * pTW * pTS.

To go back to the 40+ member units, the war scrolls do indeed encourage them by awarding bonuses for large units. For example Skinks get a bonus attack at 20+ members, and another one at 30+ members. A unit of 40 Skinks gets 120 attacks per round, which is a frightening amount, with a decent cushion to take some casualties and not lose the bonus.

Empire State Troops are the same way. 40 Halbardiers normally hit on a 4+, but 30+ of them are +3 to-hit (1+ auto-hit), so that's 40 automatic hits, causing 20 wounds at -1 Rend. That's a bit silly that they literally double in effectiveness.

Well, it's intentionnal. After all, old players of WFB usually have a huge collection that can easily have quite a lot of "basic troops".

And new players would be interested to gain these bonuses by having a huge unit - since everything is about using your models/collection, that means buying more.

More freedom can be tricky; since you "play what you want", it's natural to "go unbound" and quickly adding more and more models to your collection. So many new models, so much money to spend...


About playing big games...it was always a trouble in GW games. They always write stories of huge battles involving thousand of warriors, yet a game featuring that would be asking for so much time it's more of a special event than the norm. Big battles in Warhammer (40k or AoS) show the disadvantages of their game system and can quickly become tiring.

But I don't think they really play that way in the Studio. I think they just make their own rules and don't really care about what they write here for their customers...Jervis already said in an old article that he still uses the first edition of WFB when playing casually with his gaming group. I suspect he's not the only one by far.

There are advantages and disadvantages to large units, for instance they are more resistant to battle shock but harder to hide in cover. It is also to some extent harder to move them around enemy units.

Players need to figure out whether the special rules benefit to a large unit outweighs the difficulties.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Empire State Troops are the same way. 40 Halbardiers normally hit on a 4+, but 30+ of them are +3 to-hit (1+ auto-hit), so that's 40 automatic hits, causing 20 wounds at -1 Rend. That's a bit silly that they literally double in effectiveness.

No, the models that can attack double in effectiveness. You will struggle to get more than 20 guys into range if you're playing pile-in properly.

Actually I misread the Skinks entery. They get plusses to To Hit roll rather than extra attacks, for having larger units. This makes them more similar to the Halbardiers but they are using a missile weapon so there is usually not going to be a range problem.