Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I'm an opponent of the current 40k release model because it means that the majority of units in 40k will be underpowered most of the time. If a unit gets a new strong option in Psychic Awakening then it will either be underpowered before or overpowered after. What my theoretical solution to this problem has been so far is to connect rules and pts updates such that when rules are released pts will reflect what is and not what has been or what will be in the future. In the Chapter Tactics Podcast the host argued that the books sell because of the new rules and those new rules are needed to sell them, the host has knowledge of GW sales that I don't so I cannot argue with books that make the rules of a faction stronger have sold better and that makes perfect sense, I still believe it to be bad for the game. Would you ever get a campaign book if it did not give you any new competitive options in 40k?

I am bringing this up after reading that someone was going to return their limited edition Psychic Awakening Pariah book because their anticipated power creep did not come for Necrons, to me it seems like he was just screaming for GW to continue screwing him over by holding balance hostage with powerful campaign rules. What I was thinking was that GW could bring value through other means, but after looking through the book I failed to find enough value for me to purchase the book, despite loving that GW is not holding my balance hostage with a second book, I will only need the upcoming new codex for the foreseeable future and I don't need Psychic Awakening Pariah. My gut feeling that Psychic Awakening will not be worth it for me boils down to a few things:

*I read that the story wasn't very good, the characters apparently didn't make sense.
*Pariah had a single two-page spread with Necrons on a Tomb World and then some more Necrons standing around in random ruined imperial cities. I was hoping for more pretty pictures with Necrons fighting their enemies on Tomb Worlds, SoB/Inquisition is also not an interesting match-up for Necrons IMO.
*No hobby guides for building, converting and painting minis or terrain. Am I going to start suddenly getting my hobby on to the max? Maybe not, but I like to watch Youtube videos related to it and it'd be nice to have some inspiration to get working on my grey horde that needs to be rebased.
*There was almost no new Necron art. The amount of re-used assets was pretty shameful IMO, it makes the product feel a lot less premium.
*The missions seemed for the first time among all the GW warzone missions I've read to actually be playable and not murderously unbalanced, but they still didn't seem any more inspired than what I found in the 3rd ed codex and they featured half a dozen warzones and didn't have a focus on Necron warzones. Maybe all those warzones are part of the story in the book, but I guess I'll never know because the Pariah lead-up fluff that was released didn't catch my attention and now I've been told the story inside the book isn't great either.
*Last part is financial, the book seems really expensive based on its length. Ideally, I was thinking GW could make campaign books worth it for everyone to buy because the missions, warzone rules and everything in them were so great, but when even one focussed on my faction and with little focus on empowering factions can't make me buy it, can GW sell campaign books without selling rules? I think I'd need the price to go down to less than half for me to buy the books digitally even if they had slightly more real content in favour of imbalance-pushing BS.

Do any of the Psychic Awakening or Vigilus books have stories worth reading, new fantastic art, great dioramas or great mission design? I have access to them right now, but I'm not even interested in reading them so I am having a hard time justifying buying Pariah just because it has moved away from a toxic business strategy.

The narrative in Pariah is indeed steaming garbage.

And the tomb world rules are arguably inferior to those in the 3rd ed. Codex terrain generator.

The Inquisition rules are just copy-paste from White Dwarf; and the only Inquisitor who features in the story is Lady Dragon, so why are they even there to begin with?

I really liked the High Altitude warzone from Phoenix rising, and the mission that used it wasn't bad either. I'm a narrative player, so missions aren't really something I study in a lot of details; I confess, when I got my PA books, I went straight for the rules rules.

I should go back and explore those books for the finer things.

But here's the thing about PA: if you're going to release new models, you need a place for those rules to go. I mean, sure, they come in the box, or they go into an app, or they can go in White Dwarf. But people will tell you, they want it in a book; who often have we heard people complain about "too many sources"?

So when you've got a lot of models for one faction, you release a dex update. But what do you do when you have one model for each of 8-10 ranges? Well, you make PA.

Many of the rules we got in PA were not OP rules- often, they were fluffy things, or catching one faction up to the others. I won't deny there's codex creep, but I'm not sure PA is really that much of a contributor.

Sheild of Baal was great - but it was two books - big lore book and much smaller rules book. Loved it

I don't want OP rules, but I do want rules that increase viable options, and buff underperforming/underused units.

Points should be distributed electronically, regularly, and for free. With this model, GW can fiddle with points to their hearts content, as needed for new releases, the desire to sell new kits, clear out inventory of old kits, etc. They want an app - put points in the app. Harvest everyone's user data, welcome to the 21st century.

Printed material really should exist to sell models to the hobbyist and collector, both of which GW claims to target. Last I heard, their official stance was that they view themselves as a collectible miniatures company, and the game is simply a side effect. Whether you believe that or not (I don't, I believe their sales would fall off the face of the Earth if they decided there would be no more 40k/AoS game rules), GW at least claims to.

The books are also the primary source of new lore, art, game rules, and alternative modes of play (Crusade, Kill Team, etc). However, point values should really exist outside of any purchased material. Those arguing lost sales... Really? If a person only wants the book for the points, they're not buying it. Be honest with yourself. And why would they, there are multiple FAQ/errata per year that regularly change the point values printed in their books, which then become outdated.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
... and the only Inquisitor who features in the story is Lady Dragon, so why are they even there to begin with?

So that they exist in print somewhere other than White Dwarf. Ditto for Assassins in the previous book.

I really enjoyed the Vigilus books, even though I've barely used any of the actual rules in them. It was a cool setting, I liked the campaign system they outlined, and it was a nice way of fleshing out more things in the setting beyond worlds we already knew more about.

Can't say too much about the Shield of Baal/Pariah kind of books, but if I had the option of more Vigilus style books? Hell yeah.

 harlokin wrote:
I don't want OP rules, but I do want rules that increase viable options, and buff underperforming/underused units.

You prefer this happening in campaign books?

PenitentJake wrote:
But here's the thing about PA: if you're going to release new models, you need a place for those rules to go. I mean, sure, they come in the box, or they go into an app, or they can go in White Dwarf. But people will tell you, they want it in a book; who often have we heard people complain about "too many sources"?

Many of the rules we got in PA were not OP rules- often, they were fluffy things, or catching one faction up to the others. I won't deny there's codex creep, but I'm not sure PA is really that much of a contributor.

Good point and what I maybe failed to say in my original post was that I really liked that Pariah did what it needed to do, it updated rules for Illuminor Szeras, gave Inquisition a home and that was pretty much it rules wise, nothing in that book was going to massively change balance, it was pretty much an Inquisition Codex with a couple different new Datasheets thrown in.

On the other hand some of the PA and Vigilus books definitely powered some factions up, Astra Militarum needed both its PA and one of the Vigilus books to fire on all cylinders, Orks as well. Maybe the things in these books were not meant to be OP, but I get the feeling they are because GW tried to make some bad units better as harlokin said he'd like GW to. Small Ork walkers and Craftworld Dire Avengers seem like they were deliberately bad as to not make them OP once they new relatively powerful options in PA, if there was room for an upgrade to their rules within their current pts cost then the points cost leading up to these PA releases were too high. It's also going to be impossible to playtest the game when GW are the only ones who know how the game is going to look 6 months down the road like with what we saw with the Space Marines Codex, it wasn't in line with the power level of the rest of the game. Playtesters have said that the Munitorum Field Manual pts might be out of wack, but the codexes are for sure going to be amazingly balanced, well colour me brown because I think they're full of manure given that GW is making the job impossible for them. Unless Pariah is the new normal and GW has set some kind of standard for things to be balanced against, balance will continue to be a dizzying theme park ride that never lands on balance for longer than a few months because things cannot be tested against each other.

Phenatix I think you might have misunderstood me, I don't mean to say people only buy PA books for points updates, but for new powerful rules to use on the tabletop, so Stratagems that are unlocked for free and alternate Chapter Tactics rules, super-Chaplain/Apothecary rules and stuff of that sort. I am conflicted because now that it's my turn to get PA and I would have probably purchased it if it contained decently written rules that were inspiring or fluffy, but Pariah did what I advocate for and I don't find myself interested in buying it.

I think there should be some realism in setting expectations: GW isn't going to do a better job of balancing the campaign books than they do balancing the codex books. Each of the campaign books was certainly marketed by GW as providing new stratagems, rules, and other things to each faction, so it would seem to me to be reasonable to assume they were trying to be reasonably balanced.

On the other hand, one of the ways a game company keeps sales going is introducing new content to "shake things up". Faction X gets a new unit that does this new thing. So players of Faction X want to go out and buy the unit, and everyone else has to buy stuff to counter the new thing.

Just because something is new and it makes people make changes doesn't make it over powered.

Beyond that, I think there's a lot of people making conclusions about people's behavior with incomplete data.

Disclaimer: The situation where Faction X gets a new unit that does exactly what their existing unit Y does, but better, is a different problem, for a different topic.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
... and the only Inquisitor who features in the story is Lady Dragon, so why are they even there to begin with?

So that they exist in print somewhere other than White Dwarf. Ditto for Assassins in the previous book.

If that's the case, then GW should have bundled all of the PA rules together in a single rules update book, rather than spreading the content so thinly across the series.

I can say with phoenix rising and how they treaded DE i stayed away from all the remaining psychic awakening books, turns out i didnt miss much, ill just wait for codex chaos demons and not even bother with that book and sob got nothing at all.

I think the more interesting question is if a good campaign book can sell without matched play rules. By all accounts Pariah wasn't a good campaign book - everyone has something to complain about with the narrative and even fans of the specific factions involved came away from it unhappy. If the story sucks and there's no army rules, it's obvious that no one is going to want it; it appeals to no one.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I think the more interesting question is if a good campaign book can sell without matched play rules. By all accounts Pariah wasn't a good campaign book - everyone has something to complain about with the narrative and even fans of the specific factions involved came away from it unhappy. If the story sucks and there's no army rules, it's obvious that no one is going to want it; it appeals to no one.

Alot of times i think gw is held back by being a publicly traded company. after all just look at dev videos of them trolling the playerbase, they know what we want but they cant do it since they cant convince the $$ moneybag overlords to do it, how long were they teasing people with their white boards of plastic sisters, squats, hell dark eldar before 5th edition, doomsday clocks of plastic sisters and other things... im sure there are plenty of devs and writers who want to do something but the overlords say no, churn out more space marine stuff. Writing a campaign book about xenos? make sure space marines are prominent and doing everything even though they have no reason to be in the story!

i dont know the feasibility of doing something like making 2 versions of a book, the normal overpriced edition where you pay 30-40$ for 4 pages of rules and artwork and fluff... and one thats just the 4 pages of rules by itself. Fluff is nice dont get me wrong but sometimes it would be nice to have a rules only codex or book where you only have to flip through 6 pages of rules and not 30-40 pages of fluff and artwork and paint guides to find the point values or weapon lists that are never placed in the same place between codexs.

I think if they marketed like this is a narritive book so if your a narritive player check it out!, and if your a match played player heres a bunch of scenarios in this book! etc etc. instead of putting a little bit of everything in each book, but i guess its better financially to do it that way so everyone has to buy every book instead at its overinflated price.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
I really enjoyed the Vigilus books, even though I've barely used any of the actual rules in them. It was a cool setting, I liked the campaign system they outlined, and it was a nice way of fleshing out more things in the setting beyond worlds we already knew more about.

Can't say too much about the Shield of Baal/Pariah kind of books, but if I had the option of more Vigilus style books? Hell yeah.

The Vigilus campaign system is very underrated in my opinion. I'm using that campaign system as the backbone for a crusade league that is launching in early august at my place. I'm excited.

They have Crusade now, so we could see future "campaign" releases lean heavily on that rule system.

 vict0988 wrote:

 harlokin wrote:
I don't want OP rules, but I do want rules that increase viable options, and buff underperforming/underused units.

You prefer this happening in campaign books?

I don't mind if it's campaign books or issues of White Dwarf.

 warmaster21 wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I think the more interesting question is if a good campaign book can sell without matched play rules. By all accounts Pariah wasn't a good campaign book - everyone has something to complain about with the narrative and even fans of the specific factions involved came away from it unhappy. If the story sucks and there's no army rules, it's obvious that no one is going to want it; it appeals to no one.

Alot of times i think gw is held back by being a publicly traded company. after all just look at dev videos of them trolling the playerbase, they know what we want but they cant do it since they cant convince the $$ moneybag overlords to do it, how long were they teasing people with their white boards of plastic sisters, squats, hell dark eldar before 5th edition, doomsday clocks of plastic sisters and other things... im sure there are plenty of devs and writers who want to do something but the overlords say no, churn out more space marine stuff. Writing a campaign book about xenos? make sure space marines are prominent and doing everything even though they have no reason to be in the story!

i dont know the feasibility of doing something like making 2 versions of a book, the normal overpriced edition where you pay 30-40$ for 4 pages of rules and artwork and fluff... and one thats just the 4 pages of rules by itself. Fluff is nice dont get me wrong but sometimes it would be nice to have a rules only codex or book where you only have to flip through 6 pages of rules and not 30-40 pages of fluff and artwork and paint guides to find the point values or weapon lists that are never placed in the same place between codexs.

I think if they marketed like this is a narritive book so if your a narritive player check it out!, and if your a match played player heres a bunch of scenarios in this book! etc etc. instead of putting a little bit of everything in each book, but i guess its better financially to do it that way so everyone has to buy every book instead at its overinflated price.

Urban Conquest was a purely narrative book with nothing in there for Matched play I think. We don't know how well that sold but I can say as a mainly narrative player I still didn't buy it because the price was too high, the system didn't impress me and the rules were mostly already in the CA (cities of Death).

Not really. Most pickup games will not those campaign rules and any garage group most likely won't exceed more than 5-6 people, which is pitiful for a campaign. It's basically just an exercise in futility.

As a narrative gamer, I'm way more interested in awesome lore, narrative missions and campaign rules, than individual unit rules, so you can imagine my tremendous disappointment at Ritual of the Damned. It really just drove me off the idea of buying rules from Games Workshop anymore. I'll still use their rules of course, I just won't pay for them, and what money I do save on rules, I'll probably just continue to hand over in fistfuls for that sweet sweet plastic, so Games Workshop aren't really going to make any less money from me anyway.

They should just go back to releasing units exclusivly with a codex. This whole thing they're doing with releasing models whenever then having a campaign book later is dumb and puts people off buying the campaign books IMO because it takes resources away from things that could be used for other, more interesting stuff. At least I've never thought "I need the rules for this unit in a book, better buy the related hardback". More often its "I'll just wait for the codex".

It also means releases feel a bit more even between the factions. I think at this point even space marine players are sick of space marine releases.

The writing in these new books is....not stellar. Without op rules what do they have to justify the price? I find the number of books already beyond my capability to keep up with. I guess if you’re at your game store every other night it might be worthwhile. I’m curious what proportion of players get more than two games in per month.

A fair argument could be made that Pariah at least did not push the codex creep of the game in the same way as others, but ultimately if GW are going to creep the books they have to do it across the board.

Beyond that the content of Pariah was particularly lazy and poorly timed in almost every aspect - exactly how many times is GW going to feel the need to reprint the index-book rules for the Inquisition?

Campaign books often sell without OP rules, and even with rules that you can't use outside of the campaign in that book!

Part of the problem with PA is that they were billed as "Campaign Supplements", but used as "codex updates" and typically failed at both. I've played many wargames over the years that released campaign books that led you through really fun campaigns that told a story, were fun to play, and that also had no effect on your army once you were done with the campaign, and those books still sold.

I'm hoping GW looks at PA as an experiment and just goes back to the old approach of "Codex updates are exactly that", and campaigns are a different thing entirely for 9th. Fingers crossed because while I didn't hate all of the PA books, they were definitely too expensive (that may be the first time I've complained about GW and cost in a while), contributed way too much to "book bloat", and often failed to serve the intended purposes. Either that, or, release codexes as binders instead of books, and just give us updates in CA that can be cleanly ripped out and added to the Binder ... IDK, that sounds weird too, but going all digital isn't a clean solution yet either, and it would still be better than "Here's my codex, the two PAs I need, both Vigilus books and the WD article required to run my mono-faction army ..."

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
... and the only Inquisitor who features in the story is Lady Dragon, so why are they even there to begin with?

So that they exist in print somewhere other than White Dwarf. Ditto for Assassins in the previous book.

If that's the case, then GW should have bundled all of the PA rules together in a single rules update book, rather than spreading the content so thinly across the series.

At which point people would have complained that they had to buy rules for all factions when they only wanted rules for one faction. Count the number of people who only bought the PA relevant to their army; they far outnumber the folks who bought them all.

I don't have insider information about the GW business structure, but i guess to justify specific peoples whose role within the company is to write rules, errata, and points values, those people have to justify their economic existence by selling their own items (aka books).

Gw is definiftely not ready to "pay" those people just for potential raise in sales for specific overpowered miniatures for rules they would write, and prefers that the book pay for maintaining those people within the company.

Short story : powercreep is here to stay, because the job of some people depends on it, and thus, only OP stuff will be produced to guarantee the highest level of sales.

Campaign books by themselves have largely been tough sells period. They just don't move very well. I suspect thats because most of the gw gamingverse aren't really into campaigns.

By putting in rules that can be used for matched play in campaign books, they open up who will buy the book though. And that has worked in spades.

I liked the Vigilus books. 2 Books, each had plenty of narrative missions and campaign rules for outside the Vigilus setting that my group used and the detachments were a nice touch of fluff without being needed to play the game.

The PA books? Nearly drove me out of the game. they were putting out like 2 books a month, and FAQs every other week. They acted as codex expansions/supplements and provided more rules than narrative missions or stories. The only reason I have PA is because a friend bought me one and then I got another one so that all my armies would be "updated." But they lack so much content I would rather just get a new codex honestly at this point. I haven't seen every single PA book but it seemed you got 1-3 missions, some rehashed lore, and then a codex update. These books were made for the codex update. Sure enough I wouldn't be surprised to see 9th ed codexes coming in the next 3 months, more or less invalidating the PA books.

Personally I don't see why a campaign book needs any rules in it whatsoever! I'd love it if campaign books were like the Sabbat Worlds Crusade background book.

Give me uniforms, maps, camouflage , campaign mods to vehicles, beachheads, abuscades etc. basically all the military minutia that wargamers love to obsess over.

You get to sell to more people if you include material to appeal to both kinds of Warhammer players.