AoS as an RPG

[Voltigeur]

Hey Guys & Gals,

I was considering the nature of the beast that is AoS and while I've yet to get a chance to try it out and judge it's suitability as a wargame, It's emphasis on narrative battles and lack of balancing mechanisms got me thinking. How do you think it would do as an D&D like RPG?

The main idea I had was to use the AoS rules for any combat during the game (as I find most RPG combat mechanics painfully slow) and for non-combat situations used a stripped down character sheet with a list of skills and out of combat abilities. This means each character would have a war scroll and a character sheet. Characters would advance over time by being able to up stats on both sheets.

I'm sure I can't be the only one on the forum who dabbles in both RPGs and Miniatures, so for those of you who've gotten a few games in with AoS do you feel like it would be suitable for an RPG and how fast do you find it plays?

Thanks in advance!

[Lord Manton]

I was thinking along very similar lines! Although I think I would use Pathfinder or DnD 3.5 for most things and then throw in a few big battles with AoS rules. It seems from the scuttlebutt that GW is planning on releasing and really pushing AoS in this style.
Apparently they want to release the rules in campaigns that push the narrative forward, introducing characters and environments with each new campaign. This seems like a really cool way of doing it and has definitely piqued my interest more than the lacklustre starter set. I just hope that each campaign has scope for each faction to "have a go", as it were. If you're trying to push a rule set, the last thing you want to do is limit who can play by only having two factions in the story

[Erik Setzer]

It could work, but I'm not sure how easily you could translate D&D characters to an appropriate AoS statline, especially as the characters level.

It's worth considering for larger skirmishes in an RPG, possibly even larger battles, like if the players hire some mercenaries to fight someone, or two armies clash and the outcome isn't just pre-determined by the DM's story needs.

If you mean AoS itself as the core of an RPG system... that's probably doable. You'd want to balance experience and gaining abilities that could be used in combat, and any weapons they use as well. At 1st level they'd likely start with, say, 5+ to hit and 5+ to wound, one attack, gaining pluses to hit and wound (and then additional attacks) as they scale up, with better weapons giving them bonuses on Rend and Damage, or perhaps wound. Gain a wound per level, should keep them feeling about the power level you'd expect in an RPG. And then set up non-combat abilities to also be based on D6 rolls (perhaps with some inspiration from the WEG version of Star Wars, or even Shadowrun), so all players need is a simple sheet, some D6's, and a miniature. So, yeah, wouldn't really take that much work. Heck, now I want to throw something together just for fun.

[Anthrax ion pusscabe]

i'm working on ideas for AOS as a army scaled rpg (ATM I'm focusing on heroes models) and I've come up with stuff based on all flesh must be eaten from unisystem (a zombie apocalypse game that's so easy to modify that my group have used it for everything from fantasy to sci fi) and I'm planing on using the following system for leveling up stats, to increase a state cost in XP units (with 2-4 being awarded per session) what it is at the time + one, for instance upgrading a character from 5 to 6 wounds would cost 6 XP, but from 5 to 7 wounds would have a cumulated cost so it'd cost 6 XP to reach 6 wounds and a further 7 XP to reach seven wounds for a total cost of 13 XP, im still working on how to upgrade abilities and command powers and magic, but I've only been thinking on it for about a day