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Chikout wrote:City of Secrets, (which is getting a follow-up trilogy starting in June),

I haven't been paying close enough attention, but that is such good news.

 Just Tony wrote:

auticus wrote:The thing that pissed people off about whfb advancing the story wasn't that the story was advancing, it was that GW would retcon it right away.

Storm of Chaos - as soon as it happened they said "nevermind, none of that really happened" and it felt like a huge waste.

End Times pissed everyone off because it went right to AOS and blew up the old world, not because the story advanced.

You know, one of my favorite parts of WFB was in 6th Ed. when they took Eltharion, possibly my favorite GW created character of all time, and had him blinded. He wound up becoming a better character for it, and set up some really cool work later. 7th Ed. army book? RESET BUTTON!!!!!!!!!! Oh, and garbage army wide special rules that started the 7th Ed. arms race. Mostly, though, just the annoyance factor of all the reset button hitting from 6th to 7th.

Albino Squirrel wrote:Old Warhammer Fantasy had a lot of narrative, even if it didn't move the timeline. That's where most of their iconic characters came from, right? They had those campaign packs with narrative scenarios to play thought specific stories. And they didn't have specific scenarios, but a lot of info about things like Vlad and Manfred's wars against he empire, even though they were in the past.

5th Ed. had these really cool campaign packs that had characters created specifically for them. One of my dream projects is transcribing those to 6th, since the paradigm shift was significant. There was constant change and motion going on in the setting and in the story line in WFB, but the main timeline stayed still. This basically left the "present" and "future" up to the individual gamer, and catered to narrative play. I don't need to have my hand held and to be walked through the results of the High Elves reclaiming a colony in Lustria, I can write that myself. What I DO need is a tight enough rule set that I can play out any sort of scenario, no matter how challenging, and know that the parts are going to interact correctly. AOS didn't have that at first, and judging from the way the releases and style of gaming in AOS has progressed, I'm not the only one who needed that.

This is one of the other things that really rustles my jimmies, are people who say "WHFB got stale because it never advanced." If thats the case how was it not a problem for like 25+ years, but then only recently became and issue? As you said the arms race really screwed over WHFB, and i pin the death and lack of interest on it directly at the feet of kirby.

People have complained that the story wasn't advancing on forums since portent.net was the big site. I was iinvolved in many discussions... particularly when they retconned storm of chaos, about how gw needs to do something with the story.

I wonder how many people regretted wanting that when End Times happened?

pm713 wrote:
I wonder how many people regretted wanting that when End Times happened?

I imagine a lot of them

The Blightwar seems to have been the interlude between the Realmgate Wars and the Malign Portents. And at least with the two recent Aelven factions, their introduction has been part of the narrative - Morathi has just recently revealed herself as a big snakey daemony thing and the Deepkin are only now rising above the waves. It's not like they're saying "these guys have been heare for years, you've just not noticed".

So, while I continue to burn offerings in the hope that "competitive play" withers away and everyone starts playing the way I want them to, I'll take what I can get.

With both of the Aelf factions, it is "these guys have been here for years...but".

Daughters of Khaine were just thought to be some crazy cult dwelling in the outer parts of the towns and things like that. It's now being revealed that "they rule over the Realm of Shadow"(so I guess we're not getting Malerion and his Shadowkin ). Morathi was just thought to be a High Priestess of a dead god, but now she's been revealed as something far more sinister/powerful.

Idoneth have always been there but they've taken great pains to either leave no survivors of their raids or to erase all memories of their having been seen. There's a great bit in the Idoneth book where a Freeguild guard is talking to someone about the things he witnessed during an Idoneth raid, but he talks about "dragons" and "great behemoths" and has to stop talking when he starts describing the Idoneth themselves because he's suffering debilitating headaches.

Well honestly there's nothing 'just now revealed' about DoK. The various gods and those 'in the know' have known Morathi is a big snake since the age of myth, along with the existence of mutants made from stolen elf souls. But the greater 99% has never known about Morathi's snake form, snake people, harpies, medusa, true extent of her temples, etc. And still don't. They still think of DoK as a crazy elf cult conposed of 'normal' elves and led by a 'normal' elf. Pretty sure she doesn't rule over the realm of shadow either, but rather has a strong influence. Note that Malerion is more powerful than her and has his own Shadowkin.

The bit about Idoneth is spot on.

Warhammer Community via Warhammer Legends wrote:In the Background
The Dark Elves ruled the cold lands of Naggaroth with arrogance and cruelty. If you got a kick out of collecting the most depraved army that the world-that-was had to offer, then you need look no further than the Daughters of Khaine, who now reign over the Realm of Shadow in the Age of Sigmar.

I mean, it might be that Malerion and his Shadowkin are going to be billed as the rulers of a kind of 'Shadowrealm' in the Realm of Shadow...but that might be too on the nose.

I'll give you that quote, but I still think the battletome takes precedence over a snippet in warhammer legends

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'll give you that quote, but I still think the battletome takes precedence over a snippet in warhammer legends

To be fair, we've also had things fleshed out a bit more with it seeming like Slaanesh is being held somewhere 'between realms'.

Maybe they're planning on that being Malerion's realm?

Ooo, that's a cool theory.

A quick note, balance is very important, from the meta where I come from people are very, very happy to finally have a balanced meta where they can bring more or less what they like to the table without being tabled turn 2 or 3. These people, myself included take much more pleasure in playing balanced games where we can create a story out of epic moments and games where something truly amazing happened.
Like a unit of 30 plauge bearers holding off: Elven cavalary, sword masters, elven spearmen and 10 paladin for 2 turns while the bloatflies made their way into the safe backfield with the relic under the desperate fire of the storm casts to bring the flies down.

In a competitive game it would be impossible due to the lacking diversity of units and the absurd dryiness of the whole situation.

While I do regret the removal of the story driven battleplans although I did enjoy them only through Mongoose's battle reports, they still bought a sort of joy and knowledge that Age of Sigmar would be story focused, but in my opinion a stroy focused game is immposible without a stable meta.

It's been said multiple times on this forum: it's MUCH better to play a narrative game with a tight balanced rules system than to try to take a narrative system that cares nothing for balance and try to tighten it. You start with a good foundation, not a pit of loose gravel and sand, when you build a house. A game is no different. From there it could be a free form jazz hall or it could be a rigidly held scientific study hall. As long as the foundation is sound, it could go either way.

To be fair to the notion that players aren’t interested in non-tournament gaming... GW does not generally do narrative gaming well. I know there are exceptions, but to GW narrative = casual. Some sort of quasi competitive one off games designed to do little more than pad out expensive books. They’re very low effort affairs. They hire some intern to write a one page blurb about it doesn’t make a scenario narrative.

I play Bolt Action as well and the difference is night and day. You can just immediately tell the difference when you open the latest BA campaign book.

Running a narrative game/campaign is actually a lot of work. If anything it’s less casual than your typical one off competitive pick up game.

As long as GW treats “narrative” gaming as nothing more than a stripped down version of matched play it’s always going to be less popular.

A great example is the most excellent cooperative, fan made expansion for X Wing called Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. It’s awesome, it’s cooperative, and is a lot of fun. But it also involved some serious work on the design, and a little investment from its players.

dosiere wrote:
To be fair to the notion that players aren’t interested in non-tournament gaming... GW does not generally do narrative gaming well. I know there are exceptions, but to GW narrative = casual. Some sort of quasi competitive one off games designed to do little more than pad out expensive books. They’re very low effort affairs. They hire some intern to write a one page blurb about it doesn’t make a scenario narrative.

I play Bolt Action as well and the difference is night and day. You can just immediately tell the difference when you open the latest BA campaign book.

Running a narrative game/campaign is actually a lot of work. If anything it’s less casual than your typical one off competitive pick up game.

As long as GW treats “narrative” gaming as nothing more than a stripped down version of matched play it’s always going to be less popular.

A great example is the most excellent cooperative, fan made expansion for X Wing called Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. It’s awesome, it’s cooperative, and is a lot of fun. But it also involved some serious work on the design, and a little investment from its players.

This is a good point, though in GWs defense I will give them Path to Glory.

Yeah, fair. They’ve done quality narrative stuff before. I remember a long time ago they had a series of articles in white dwarf detailing a campaign for WFB. It was good, interesting stuff that I know people at least tried, because it actually had fleshed out rules you could use straight out of the magazines rather than just a vague hand waiving of “you should try finishing designing this idea, it’d be a lot of fun if you did.”

I just wish they’d take narrative gaming seriously; as seriously as they are trying to take matched play. I’d play the hell out of it, especially in GWs case as I don’t like playing Warhammer competitively anymore.

Absolutely love your blog, Matt. I hope the new edition brings some narrative that inspires you.

I think you might have been one of the dozen people in the world who cared about the narrative battleplans GW was putting out at the start of AoS.

It's awesome they inspired you, and it made for the best AoS blog around, but I think they weren't doing anything for 99% of the demographic.

I just wish they’d take narrative gaming seriously; as seriously as they are trying to take matched play.

A wish I have been echoing since the long ago as well. The general's handbook in 2002 was really quality material in that realm and from there they just kind of went downhill. They attempted the Storm of Chaos narrative and then hand waived everything as not happening and that was the last time they really tried up until now.

Where they really give lip service to it but no one really knows what it is unless they've played other games that have it for real.

So in regard to several thoughts I have had these last couple of years, that seem to broadly fit into this topic, and out of laziness and ennui have not bothered to type down or start my own topic. I present some of my issues that I have with AoS that are, despite my best efforts, stopping me from enjoying the game. I am certain most of them are not of any general value, since I have never seen much discussion about them online.

Someone said, that one of the problems with WHFB and its masses of troops were that they felt that most of them were just glorified wound counters and had no effect on the battle. While this is a fair point of view, my issue with AoS is that the models are dead. What I mean by this is that there are no rules for psychology and the rules for morale are lackluster. Imagine this, you want your 30 goblins to charge a huge angry dragon. In my world that would take some serious coaxing and would not be a proposition easily enacted, since goblins as we all know are cowards. How did WHFB of yore handle this? Well, by giving the goblins poor leadership and forcing them to take a test to see if they were up to the task this day. (Remember, there were 8 editions of whfb, not just one) Most likely, without a brawny goblin big boss with a magical hat or some such, they would not. Or imagine that you want the trolls that you command, known to be dumb as bricks, to charge a group of decidedly average humans. Would they conform to your orders or would they be more interested in examining that toadstool they found just under their noses? Or lastly, would your frothing fearsome berserkers be able to enact your command or would they loose all sense of self and by extension you the battle?

Well, in AoS, all these questions are non-existent. Your models do what you want them to do, they are after all just dead gaming pieces, not living. Because of this, for me, warhammer (because AoS is warhammer) has lost all connection with its rpg roots and thus, suffers as a vessel for narrative gaming.

I find it fascinating that I can find pages upon pages discussing the (lack of) balance, but almost nothing concerning these issues, maybe I am out of touch with what is wanted since AoS is not alone in going into this direction. Most miniature games these days seem to find rules that concern characteristics like psychology or morale to be sacrificeable on the altar of "streamlining". Well, I for one think that miniature gaming is lessened by that direction.

Finally, I just want to comment upon issues concerning "the story" or "time-line progression"

Saying "the story" implies that there is one overarching story line. Which is preposterous of course, Whfb was a world that contained a massive amount of stories, the mortal realms are by all account vastly superior in size to the world that was and as such should be filled with different "narratives". And lets not even get into the ridiculousness that a Galaxy with between a 100-400 billion stars, and an untold amount of humans, has one storyline. The problem with having "a story" is that it makes the world, galaxy etc seem very small. Easily digested, sure, but what is the issue with having dramatic regional, localised events, that can be sufficiently interesting and flavourful. That said, it is not impossible to progress the timeline, and having major events have an effect on the world/realms/galaxy. The issue then becomes one of touch. Too heavy-handed and it will seem like your average unreadable fanfic, with everything larger than life. Too subtle and a lot of people will question "why bother".

I have actually started to like the visual direction and the general feel of AoS background, even though I dislike the centralisation of narrative. And I like much of the aesthetics from the newer releases. But the lack of life in the ruleset is too large of a barrier for me to overcome. I feel that in spite of AoS being launched without points, it has a much more competitive direction as of 2018 than whfb ever had.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'll give you that quote, but I still think the battletome takes precedence over a snippet in warhammer legends

To be fair, we've also had things fleshed out a bit more with it seeming like Slaanesh is being held somewhere 'between realms'.

Maybe they're planning on that being Malerion's realm?

Malerion and Morathi both rule in the Realm of Shadow. Morathi rules a small region called Umbral Veil (gifted by Malerion), while Malerion rules the rest of the Shadowlands.

I find it fascinating that I can find pages upon pages discussing the (lack of) balance, but almost nothing concerning these issues, maybe I am out of touch with what is wanted since AoS is not alone in going into this direction. Most miniature games these days seem to find rules that concern characteristics like psychology or morale to be sacrificeable on the altar of "streamlining". Well, I for one think that miniature gaming is lessened by that direction.

I have posted similar topics on various sites over the past three years and what I have learned is that narrative RPG elements in a tabletop wargame were popular in the 80s and 90s when I starttetd, but are not in the least bit something that the current gen really wants.

Tabletop wargames today are competitive affairs and you'll often be told if you want to have RPG elements, then go play an RPG.

I learned that in tthte past three years since AOS has been released that what I want out of a game (things like whatt you talk about) are largely dead today, and thats something that I had to adapt to a while back.

To me, WFB at its heart was all ABOUT psychology. It's the reason that there weren't very many wounds done in unit per unit exchanges. It's also why after a certain many wounds you ran the risk of your units freaking out and bailing. 7th started killing that with the wounds cause cranked up to eleventy TEN!!!! (Sorry, my 5 year old daughter came up with a number that means more than pretty much any number in existence, I felt the need to use it) and rather than dial that back, Psychology paid the price.

Yeah, you can't have a game based off of classical combat without having psychology, because classical combat was all about psychology.

The entire point was to keep your nerve for longer than the enemy. Whoever broke first gets slaughtered.

Trying to "simplify" it by stripping away those mechanics completely misses the point of having a game based on that style of warfare.

auticus wrote:

I find it fascinating that I can find pages upon pages discussing the (lack of) balance, but almost nothing concerning these issues, maybe I am out of touch with what is wanted since AoS is not alone in going into this direction. Most miniature games these days seem to find rules that concern characteristics like psychology or morale to be sacrificeable on the altar of "streamlining". Well, I for one think that miniature gaming is lessened by that direction.

I have posted similar topics on various sites over the past three years and what I have learned is that narrative RPG elements in a tabletop wargame were popular in the 80s and 90s when I starttetd, but are not in the least bit something that the current gen really wants.

Tabletop wargames today are competitive affairs and you'll often be told if you want to have RPG elements, then go play an RPG.

I learned that in tthte past three years since AOS has been released that what I want out of a game (things like whatt you talk about) are largely dead today, and thats something that I had to adapt to a while back.

There's nothing wrong with either approach, it just is what it is.

A few years ago, I was having a discussion about why we don't see many (any?) point and click adventure games anymore. The conclusion we came to is that, despite loving games like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, they are a hard sell these days because FAQs and walkthroughs are so readily available, and once you've won the game, there's very little need to keep it or replay it. To add insult to injury, narrative games require a bit more talent in a broader range of skillsets, such that in the game industry, there's very few people left who could make a game to the same level as Monkey Island (and I say this as a dialogue writer who worked with the creator of Monkey Island).

I think that in the early days of video game development, inspiration came from a wide variety of places, but as the industry matured over time and new blood came in, they were inspired only by the video games that came before. Monkey Island was based on a book. Tales of Monkey Island was based on Monkey Island. Baldur's Gate was based on DnD. Dragon's Age was based on Baldur's Gate. Everquest was based on MUDs, World of Warcraft was based on Everquest. And so on. There's a sort of flanderization that naturally happens as an industry moves past its roots of outside influence and becomes its own roots for the future. Miniature gaming is old enough that it isn't the grognards running it, but their children and grandchildren.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Always in motion, the future is. Still, it is hard not to miss things that you loved from the past.

At least with video games, amateur development took up the mantle for a lot of dead gaming. There are large communities based around interactive fiction, roguelikes, old school JRPGs, visual novels, point and click adventure games, pixel art, and all sorts of things the industry (as an industry) has left behind. There's no reason why you need GW to provide narrative gaming for you. I mean, you may live by their rules, but you play by yours.

I didn't mention anything being wrong with it, just that I had to adapt my own mindset because mechanics > everything else is something I never really liked, but for me to have continued playing I had to learn to get over that because thats how its been for many years now.

One thing to keep in mind is that trends come and go. Tabletop gaming is like any other industry. We're in the middle of a boardgaming renaissance, so it's only natural that some of those mechanics will bleed over into other similar industries. Even videogames are currently experiencing an influx of mechanics mostly seen in boardgames. In a few years, the industry will shift again. It may go back toward narrative gaming, it may go in a direction we've never seen before. With the rise in popularity of tabletop RPGs (I seriously saw the cheerleading squad from a local high school playing D&D unironically at my FLGS a few months back), I wouldn't be at all surprised to see AoS 4.0 implement a gamemaster mechanic. It would be equally unsurprising for it to require some form of app integration (the current trend in boardgames). An evolving hobby is a good sign. It means it is doing well.

https://ttgamingdiary.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/i-have-an-issue-with-age-of-sigmar/

Another poster has similar issues with where narrative went.

auticus wrote:
https://ttgamingdiary.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/i-have-an-issue-with-age-of-sigmar/

Another poster has similar issues with where narrative went.

That's MongooseMatt's blog. It is literally the same text as the OP.