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 auticus wrote:
Warhammer fantasy had the same problem. On every forum I ever visited. I remember when Portent (before warseer was warseer) moved fantasy to the top to try to generate more traffic since it was being smothered by 40k and this was back in the glory 6th and 7th edition days of whfb.

That was mostly due to WfB going stagnent because they never advanced it. It also suffered from fan back lash like AoS still has, not nearly as bad, when they did the ass pull that was storm of chaos.

That was one thing. WHFB had several issues that have plagued it over the last 20 years before it was pulled, especially compared to the exponentially more popular 40k (and I say that with whfb being my primary game, I'm not big into 40k)

 auticus wrote:
That was one thing. WHFB had several issues that have plagued it over the last 20 years before it was pulled, especially compared to the exponentially more popular 40k (and I say that with whfb being my primary game, I'm not big into 40k)

Oh yeah toward the end it suffered from a lot
Silly rules with magic getting crazy
The start up cost for an army was dumb, 800+ just for models
Stagnent setting because they never wanted to advance it
When they did advance it, it was a cluster

WHFB imo had a much better setting. Aos has it's own set of issues.

Honestly, as far as setting goes, I actually enjoy reading AOS more.

Oldhammer Fantasy felt like LORD OF THE RINGS but with name changes. You could replace "Naggaroth" with "Underdark" or "The Empire" with... well, any empire, and the storylines would be the same. Orcs are bad, humans are struggling, elves are divided into light and dark, pantheons of gods exist and religious wars are a thing...

it struck me as fairly bland fantasy, from an outsider looking in.

Now? The gods stride among the realms. Mortals, once merely striving over territory on a world, now strive to themselves ascend to godhood (Morathi) or otherwise survive in this radically changed environment. The creative freedom is massive, and the divergence from "that one other fantasy setting with humans, evil humans, dwarves, evil dwarves, wood elves, high elves, dark elves, and orcs" is pretty huge.

The only thing in the Old World that I think was truly rather unique were the Skaven, and they play a large role in AoS, if my outsider reading is true.

I just picked up AoS and must say I really like the game. However it is definitely 2nd fiddle to 40k here.

Well that's one of the biggest turn off for many people is the fact that AoS is a cosmic fantasy. Lots of people don't like that, it's a very niche setting, and the lack of AoS enthusiasm in stores shows that. WHFB was and still is, the best none tolkin setting, Warcraft is good, but it's not a fantasy like Warhammer or tolkin was.

If someone likes the AoS setting that's cool but it's a cosmic fantasy that's probably a niche setting that is not that popular.

As I have said several times the reason I can't get into AoS outside of playing the game is that nothing really matters. Because it's cosmic the story really revolves around the gods doing their thing so when massive events happening nothing matters. For example the most recent campaign introduced the most powerful items in the setting, a time Cannon capable of rewinding time, got swept under the rug the next week and I bet dollars to donuts it's never going to be touched. Vs fantays where if say kislev was taken by chaos, oh that's pretty damn tangable I understand where that is and what that effects, vs random town in a plane of existence that has no baring on a place in another relm gets nuked, why should I care.

Sorry mini rant.

Yeah AOS the setting is not going to appeal to someone that loves the gritty low "realistic" fantasy settings that whfb catered to, no doubt.

I like both setting-wise. I'm a giant heavy metal fan and the lore and the setting appeal to me. The AOS rules on the other hand leave a lot to be desired for someone like me that got into wargaming where maneuver and the like were a huge thing (which was the appeal of whfb for me) and its now... well... its a modern game designed using modern game design principals, and is a few steps removed from draws me into wargaming in the first place.

Thats my struggle.

The problem I had with WHFB is that if I wanted to read lore set in the Old World, I could go read an Elder Scrolls novel or play an Elder Scrolls game and get what roughly felt like the same experience. Only, the winds of magic come from the sun rather than portals on the poles of the planet...

I disagree that WHFB was the "best" non-Tolkien fantasy setting out there. It essentially was Tolkien fantasy, just like a whole host of fantasy universes. I found the Elder Scrolls far more compelling, not the least because it at least had "cosmic battle" underpinnings that WHFB seemed to lack until it became AOS (where now COSMIC BATTLES are the way ahead!).

at least with AOS there's nowhere else I can go for a similar overarching narrative. And I'm not sure "nothing matters" is a valid criticism - it obviously matters to your men and women, dying in the trenches or slaughtering for Khaine or doing whatever. It may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but since when has anything mattered in the grand scheme of things? I don't think I've ever played a game of 40k or AOS or Fantasy that was mentioned anywhere again, except perhaps in my tiny circle of friends.

But that's the thing, major events don't matter. In the start of AoS sigmar sunk aassive chaos fortress into molten metal to get the hammer back. In WHFB that would have been a massive event and allowed none chaos races to advance. In AoS nothing happened there was no negative draw back, chaos was not effected are all and it carried on.

I would also say the WhFB is nothing like LOTR lore. Lord of the rings lore is in a completely different level of crazy when it comes to their lore.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
But that's the thing, major events don't matter. In the start of AoS sigmar sunk aassive chaos fortress into molten metal to get the hammer back. In WHFB that would have been a massive event and allowed none chaos races to advance. In AoS nothing happened there was no negative draw back, chaos was not effected are all and it carried on.

I would also say the WhFB is nothing like LOTR lore. Lord of the rings lore is in a completely different level of crazy when it comes to their lore.

Major events do matter, though, you just have to upscale what is major. A massive chaos fortress is not major to a pantheon of gods. Trapping Slaanesh, however, and beginning to rip the consumed Aelf souls from him, is quite major indeed. It's the difference between "melting a fortress" and "incarcerating a god." The latter is the scale AOS cares about now.

And when I said LOTR lore, I didn't mean the nitty-gritty silmarillion or behind-the-book stuff (like the "tom bombadil is an eldritch horror" or whatever nonsense). I mean the generic idea of "here is a country, and here are the evil dudes, and good dudes, and yeah there are gods somewhere doing things, but the dudes do a fight."

AOS, in one sentence, is "nothing mortals do matters - they run and hide and try to survive while gods and the armies of gods clash like titans; being a mortal in AOS is akin to being an ant on the plains of Troy."

Much different.

Both settings have their charm. I've been enjoying where AoS is heading with its background. There are only a few constraints when writing a story and background for your army.

The AOS rules on the other hand leave a lot to be desired for someone like me that got into wargaming where maneuver and the like were a huge thing (which was the appeal of whfb for me) and its now...

I miss some of those rules. AoS feels simply lacking when it comes to moving or using terrain to restrain the opponent. I sometimes wonder what exactly promoted the design to turn this way.

 Knight wrote:
I miss some of those rules. AoS feels simply lacking when it comes to moving or using terrain to restrain the opponent. I sometimes wonder what exactly promoted the design to turn this way.

Same reason 8th went this way too: people. GW's demand signal was that wargaming was complex and hard, and therefore the best wargames were computer games. So they made it less complex and hard, and while that upsets people who liked the complexity and hardness, it's clearly been a success (at least as far as 40k goes).

 Knight wrote:
Both settings have their charm. I've been enjoying where AoS is heading with its background. There are only a few constraints when writing a story and background for your army.

The AOS rules on the other hand leave a lot to be desired for someone like me that got into wargaming where maneuver and the like were a huge thing (which was the appeal of whfb for me) and its now...

I miss some of those rules. AoS feels simply lacking when it comes to moving or using terrain to restrain the opponent. I sometimes wonder what exactly promoted the design to turn this way.

Context: I do game design and like to attend game design seminars and get togethers to keep up with how things are going these days though my expertise is on PC game development, the environment is very similar.

Modern game design has been moviing into the simpler direction for many years now. Warmachine was the first to really start emulating card games like Magic and Pokemon only using miniatures with the foundation being set more on combinations and deckbuiilding and traditional tropes of wargaming like maneuver being made secondary or even ancillary.

About 2010 - 2011 we hit a threshold where games that focused more on maneuver were deemed difficult and were not very friendly to your average gamer. The trend has been overwhelmlingly in favor of discrete mathematics based games where you play the puzzle of maximizing a power coefficient (list building) and then apply that in a context against another person's power coefficient and then roll some dice to determine a winner.

Since then, we have moved into the direction we have been moving into and AOS and 40k being the simpler game that it is today is not an accident. We have had two GW devs on these boards who were normal people first who both loved the modern simple CCG style rules and that is not anything leaving anytime soon because it sells to the masses a lot more than traditional wargaming does.

Things like being outflanked, getting out of position, losiing because you maneuvered poorly, etc... are largely seen as not fun and drive people away from these games. Making sure your game is very forgiving sells more than a game that has a higher learning curve.

Note that this has nothing to do with complexity of the rules, but rather on how forgiving the rules are and how many mastery points you have.

GW games are now first and foremost about maximizing power coeffiicient via probability mathematics coupled with target priority which is also a subset of probability mathematics being applied to create a ranking structure. Maneuver is not as much a factor considering things can deepstrike or cover the length of the table in a turn or two.

Its what sells by far the most units.

Thank you both for the explanation.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
But that's the thing, major events don't matter. In the start of AoS sigmar sunk aassive chaos fortress into molten metal to get the hammer back. In WHFB that would have been a massive event and allowed none chaos races to advance. In AoS nothing happened there was no negative draw back, chaos was not effected are all and it carried on.

I would also say the WhFB is nothing like LOTR lore. Lord of the rings lore is in a completely different level of crazy when it comes to their lore.

I loved the world of Fantasy but it was also entirely stagnant. AoS can at least do big campaigns that actually change things, whereas Fantasy was in the same category as 40K prior to the Gathering Storm: nothing really changed. Storm of Chaos was the biggest event prior to The End Times and what changed? Absolutely nothing.

I do like that in the 100 or so years since the Age of Sigmar began, there's been big changes occurring in the Mortal Realms. There's a hell of a lot of scope there for storytelling too. I'm reading through Spear of Shadows right now and really enjoying the worldbuilding that's going on in it.

[Deleted]

Nvm, forum took me to a old conversation. :p

Edit: oh wait, it was just last page. Whoops.
Well, yadda yadda, fantasy forums have always been slow. Yadda yadda, forums not as popular as Reddit, Discord and Facebook these days. Adda yadda, TGA forum is nicer to go to than a 40k forum.

But that's the thing, major events don't matter. In the start of AoS sigmar sunk aassive chaos fortress into molten metal to get the hammer back. InWHFB that would have been a massive event and allowed none chaos races to advance. In AoS nothing happened there was no negative draw back, chaos was not effected are all and it carried on. 

Yeah it was, it allowed Sigmar to bring forth the Celestant Prime(and it would bring many glorious victories for Sigmar), stopped the drawback that the reforgings were starting to drain him and it was one blow among many that was a chain of events to stop chaos' death grip on the realms.

It's more perspective. A massive Tzeentch fortress in AoS is the equivalent of a chaos sorceror's wizard tower in the Old World. You have to take in the accounts that the realms make the World That Was look like a pebble in comparison and expand/retract comparisons from there. Like the Seeds of Hope global campaign would've been a battle over the city of Kislev in the World that Was.

AOS, in one sentence, is "nothing mortals do matters - they run and hide and try to survive while gods and the armies of gods clash like titans; being a mortal in AOS is akin to being an ant on the plains of Troy."

They still have their parts to play of course, several times in the novels it was the interventions and sacrifices of such mortals that saw the gods plans succeed or fail.

 auticus wrote:

 Knight wrote:
Both settings have their charm. I've been enjoying where AoS is heading with its background. There are only a few constraints when writing a story and background for your army.

The AOS rules on the other hand leave a lot to be desired for someone like me that got into wargaming where maneuver and the like were a huge thing (which was the appeal of whfb for me) and its now...

I miss some of those rules. AoS feels simply lacking when it comes to moving or using terrain to restrain the opponent. I sometimes wonder what exactly promoted the design to turn this way.

Context: I do game design and like to attend game design seminars and get togethers to keep up with how things are going these days though my expertise is on PC game development, the environment is very similar.

Modern game design has been moviing into the simpler direction for many years now. Warmachine was the first to really start emulating card games like Magic and Pokemon only using miniatures with the foundation being set more on combinations and deckbuiilding and traditional tropes of wargaming like maneuver being made secondary or even ancillary.

About 2010 - 2011 we hit a threshold where games that focused more on maneuver were deemed difficult and were not very friendly to your average gamer. The trend has been overwhelmlingly in favor of discrete mathematics based games where you play the puzzle of maximizing a power coefficient (list building) and then apply that in a context against another person's power coefficient and then roll some dice to determine a winner.

Since then, we have moved into the direction we have been moving into and AOS and 40k being the simpler game that it is today is not an accident. We have had two GW devs on these boards who were normal people first who both loved the modern simple CCG style rules and that is not anything leaving anytime soon because it sells to the masses a lot more than traditional wargaming does.

Things like being outflanked, getting out of position, losiing because you maneuvered poorly, etc... are largely seen as not fun and drive people away from these games. Making sure your game is very forgiving sells more than a game that has a higher learning curve.

Note that this has nothing to do with complexity of the rules, but rather on how forgiving the rules are and how many mastery points you have.

GW games are now first and foremost about maximizing power coeffiicient via probability mathematics coupled with target priority which is also a subset of probability mathematics being applied to create a ranking structure. Maneuver is not as much a factor considering things can deepstrike or cover the length of the table in a turn or two.

Its what sells by far the most units.

Interesting read thanks for that. Ultimately the point you make about the modern style game not going away as it sells more units is probably the key thing: if maneuver does not sell, then it does not make it. I think the advantage for GW also at this point is that there is enough of a secondary rules production industry that they do not need to invest their resources into this - other companies do it, often quite well, and normally more or less suckling on their creative teat.

In my area (Central Coast Australia) AoS is going gangbusters. There is a monthly gaming group about an hour from me with quite a few players, there is a local store which has a number of regular Thursday players, 2 or 3 players in my own local group, and a really active tournament scene. So no complaints there.

Maneuver and positioning have always seemed crucial in Warmachine. Is that no longer the case in the new edition?

 Glane wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:
But that's the thing, major events don't matter. In the start of AoS sigmar sunk aassive chaos fortress into molten metal to get the hammer back. In WHFB that would have been a massive event and allowed none chaos races to advance. In AoS nothing happened there was no negative draw back, chaos was not effected are all and it carried on.

I would also say the WhFB is nothing like LOTR lore. Lord of the rings lore is in a completely different level of crazy when it comes to their lore.

I loved the world of Fantasy but it was also entirely stagnant. AoS can at least do big campaigns that actually change things, whereas Fantasy was in the same category as 40K prior to the Gathering Storm: nothing really changed. Storm of Chaos was the biggest event prior to The End Times and what changed? Absolutely nothing.

I do like that in the 100 or so years since the Age of Sigmar began, there's been big changes occurring in the Mortal Realms. There's a hell of a lot of scope there for storytelling too. I'm reading through Spear of Shadows right now and really enjoying the worldbuilding that's going on in it.

I preferred that. It was a setting. I could make lore for my armies and nicely slot them into the world. Now it needs constant rewriting and the advancement is just annoying. Nothing matters. Oooo a Chaos fortress fell. Let's look at all the changes. Oh there weren't any.

 Eldarain wrote:
Maneuver and positioning have always seemed crucial in Warmachine. Is that no longer the case in the new edition?

There have been many threads of many pages of arguments on this topic over the past many years of Warmachine's existence. Positioning is more important in Warmachine than it is in 40k and AOS, but less so than classic WHFB. I consider it a secondary thiing over there, behind building your power coefficient and popping your combos at the correct time.

Nothing matters. Oooh a Chaos fortress fell. Let's look at all the changes. Oh there weren't any.

Haha, the exact same thing happened in the Sword of Justice and Sword of Vengeance books!

Huge build-up of plots, massive chaos army assembled and chaos cathedral spawning daemons created in the heart of the Empire and tons of deaths with two legendary heroes nearly broken-

Nothing happens, everything goes back to exactly the same status quo with even the small political matter of Averheim needing a elector count was reset at the end. They were great reads but the end made me felt like I just ate ashes, it was all pointless.

The AoS chaos fortress? No, it was just a, rather massive, objective that did see definite change happen and plot advancement in spades.

Also, what constant rewriting? GW's been staying on a consistent plot path and lore.

No, I'm doing the rewriting. Nobody knows where Slaanesh is? Great I can make something up! Then they reveal where Slaanesh is and then I have to rewrite things.

pm713 wrote:
No, I'm doing the rewriting. Nobody knows where Slaanesh is? Great I can make something up! Then they reveal where Slaanesh is and then I have to rewrite things.

Which is rather the point, in my opinion.

I play the game as if my army was a character in a roleplay setting. My Exalted Greater Daemon of Slaanesh may in fact be a pretender to Her/His/Its throne, right up until she/he/it hears him calling from the shadow world and the trap the Elven deities have laid for him.

Pretender no longer, I should think.

Though where does said Keeper of Secrets go? Does she go scampering back with her hordes to the shadow plane to save Slaanesh? Does he pretend nothing is wrong? Or does it do something nefarious, like subtly warning the elves that their trap is failing, in an effort to keep Slaanesh out of the way? She's the rightful holder of the throne after all...

The information changing for you is the information changing for your army as well, no need for your army to some how be anchored to a fixed point in time. That's just going to get it left behind.

BTW I play Slaanesh Daemons

Oh, that seems rather trivial. I always found fun in stories where I used head-canon to blend things together despite the plot taking a change away from where I expected.

Slaanesh can be an easy one just off the merit of being a chaos god. They reveal where it's main body is but your reveal can be a fragment of it contained like it's heart or a significant power that took on it's form and will try to recombine with it's host.

I'd be much happier with my writing not being majorly affected by whatever GW puts out. I already had to stick it in whats basically a bubble universe.

So your main complaint is that the plot is advancing? The horror.

 EnTyme wrote:
So your main complaint is that the plot is advancing? The horror.

Exalted. That's what it sounds like to me. "Things are changing, and that means my story has to evolve, and I hate it."

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
So your main complaint is that the plot is advancing? The horror.

Exalted. That's what it sounds like to me. "Things are changing, and that means my story has to evolve, and I hate it."

To be fair though, a setting is a backdrop to a game, be it wargaming or rpg, so its not a salty complaint but a very valid mindset. I think there is too much focus on "pushing the story" but there does not really need to be a "story" thats for us to play out on our tabletops not have pushed by a company.

Well the global events let both happen.

In anycase I hardly see it as a problem, if you want it static then just pick a point in the timeline and stick to it there. If you want to still be involved with the current lore then either pick/head-canon an area away from all the changes and action or justify why your homeland is in stasis.

Example would be wanting a ruined kingdom in the fire realm during the Age of Chaos. You love the barbaric struggles and your knights and soldiers desperately battling raiders and monsters amongst the ruins and outposts while the countryside is overrun by daemons. The timeframe advancing to the Age of Hope threatens this so you justify this hellish struggle continuing as the dark gods either use the lands as prime recruiting ground for mighty warriors or there's priceless artifacts still unearthed in the land so they cast their power over the borders that turn away all but the bravest mortals and blind the gods that try to gaze into it. Thus now a stasis land that can keep with the timeline, have new daring armies introduced and stay the same all at once.

It all comes down to the player and his imagination in the end.

Baron Klatz wrote:
Well the global events let both happen.

In anycase I hardly see it as a problem, if you want it static then just pick a point in the timeline and stick to it there. If you want to still be involved with the current lore then either pick/head-canon an area away from all the changes and action or justify why your homeland is in stasis.

Example would be wanting a ruined kingdom in the fire realm during the Age of Chaos. You love the barbaric struggles and your knights and soldiers desperately battling raiders and monsters amongst the ruins and outposts while the countryside is overrun by daemons. The timeframe advancing to the Age of Hope threatens this so you justify this hellish struggle continuing as the dark gods either use the lands as prime recruiting ground for mighty warriors or there's priceless artifacts still unearthed in the land so they cast their power over the borders that turn away all but the bravest mortals and blind the gods that try to gaze into it. Thus now a stasis land that can keep with the timeline, have new daring armies introduced and stay the same all at once.

It all comes down to the player and his imagination in the end.

Problem is you cant just "Pick a point in time." because the point in time people want is the one that got completely axed from the game. I agree we can all pick a point say prior to the world ending and leave it there, but the setting is completetly invalidated because GW has said, its gone. It also does not help that the AoS community is one of the worst communities when it comes to old players. I have never once seen a community as bad as the AoS one when it comes to players that just say, "I dont like AoS i enjoyed Fantasy." Or god for bid, you tell them, "I play a legacy army or keep them on square bases." Is like a personal insult to AoS players. So my choices are to get wit hthe time with a setting that i really dont enjoy at all, or get gak posted on by AoS for not liking cosmic fantasy.

Ill take option three which is go with my small group of players that just ignore everything GW is doing in the setting, which, is why we see AoS struggling, because the power house market for it, old players with cash to burn, arnt coming back.