I've realized my problem with AoS...

[Path Walker]

And, if you like 8th edition WFB (or any other edition), you can still play that, you can still play out the adventures of Josef 'Giant Balls' Hef as well now as you could last month

[Erik Setzer]

Who said that you have to play Stormcast? Why can't your army still be who they are, Free People fighting to save their/another city/Realm from Chaos/Destruction? There are plenty of Humans across at least half of the Realms that fight in puff and slash and one is bound to have some "big balls".

Oh? Can you give examples of these cities? Or any particular named region that has some background to it that a person might build the background of their force upon? Or does someone have to make up a city in order to have one to fight for, because no such cities exist in the fluff?

[Path Walker]

Townlandia is on the Metropolitan Peninsula in the Realm of Cities.

[Muninwing]

i'm a bit wordy... perhaps that should have been 2-3 posts.

that being said, i think this quote sums up one of the issues:

"Your commentary about how many minis you have bought in the last 5 years, for me, proves something - that you are not the target demographic.

AoS is about bringing in new blood and countering several criticisms about the problems of entr to WFB - cost and complexity. AoS has completely wiped those arguments away."

i personally don't think that the argument was ever valid.

barrier to entry became a smaller problem because GW pushed for the supremacy of large-block infantry. that wasn't a necessity in earlier editions. but even then, pushing for (a) a competent skirmish system instead of killing off Mordheim, and (b) a fun way of playing small-scale games could have saved that.

the average new player does not need a 3000 point army.

the average new player -- and i mean really new, starting the whole game from scratch, not just starting a new army -- will buy some core choices, a hero, and maybe something special or rare. and they will assemble and paint them. and they will play against their friends or locals. around here, they cannot go to the GW store, because all of them northeast of NYC have been closed (even the Boston battle bunker).

the average new player will be ok with a PS2's cost worth of models, for quite a while.

it's the army-expanders, the ADD-hobbyist, the pokemon player who has to have one of everything that they want to court, the loyal fan who would totally start a mechanicus army despite having 5000 points of IG, the Ork player who has always wanted to try out tyranids, the fan who lovingly crafted 4000 points of state troops, and wants to try out his or her hand at painting bretonnian heraldry.

look what GW has done, despite their "we're a models company, not a game company" line, to actively lessen that end of the hobby:

- the old White Dwarf had Golden Daemon pics, armies on parade, beginner and expert painting and crafting tutorials, and all sorts of hobbyist resources. i actually took my old copies and cut out the useful pages to punch and put in a binder, and it's amazing how the content dropped off. now instead of buying a WD for a neat painting scheme, i'll look it up for free on the internet. personally, i'd still rather have the hard copy in case that webpage were to disappear.

- the old business model had a crew of redshirts to rely on. if one was bad, there were three more who were hopefully better. they also could teach each other. they also could specialize -- one loremaster, one rulesmaster, one brushmaster, one parent-contact, and one well-seasoned oldtimer could handle pretty much all the needs of their customers. now, one-person stores and unreliable access, and stores closing, and fewer specialists.

- the old GW supported their product on all levels, from the beginner (with starter sets and clinics) to intermediate (with open tables and question ability), to competitive (with their own tournaments as well as prize support).then they just stopped.

- the old GW provided a wide array of bits to customize armies with, and supported those customizations with "counts as" rules and with public displays (in store as well as in WD) of the more interesting conversions. this has always been a decided advantage over WM/H and other games, since the converter/kitbasher has the ability to craft and personalize. but then this too just stopped.

we don't need to go into the whys and wherefores as to their stopping and changing. some of it was necessary, some if it was failed gambles, some of it was just lack of cohesiveness and leadership and forethought. but comparing a decade ago to now means looking at how GW has systematically pulled out of all the support roles that have kept them in the #1 position, while wondering why their numbers have slipped.

if the rules were fun and interesting, but the game not so radically different that it may as well be something else, and they still offered the same level of creative allure, we'd see more people starting new armies. if there were not such widely disparate levels of power for points in different books, or arbitrary changes, we'd have seen fewer people shelf their armies -- but as of 8th i have no reason to finish my Dragon Ogres, my Nurgle Minotaurs, or my wolf-centigors given different army changes... and my friend with the all-tzeentch army just put it in a case when his lat army book came out. they lost fans and players a lot through lack of support on the game end too.

when 40k 6th came out, i started playing again. i had fun with a new army project, and i began to enjoy myself again. when WHF 8th came out, i'd been trying to wrap my head around a new subpar army book, and had to do the same with the rule changes. it caused me to just give up, and play something else. i was hoping 9th would give me a new fresher look at things, and i'd start playing again, but that's clearly not on the table. so my armies go back into their cases, and maybe i can take them out in a few years if AoS fails and they backpedal.

[Muninwing]

And, if you like 8th edition WFB (or any other edition), you can still play that, you can still play out the adventures of Josef 'Giant Balls' Hef as well now as you could last month

... if you can find someone willing to play
... if you can find a store selling the old models you might want to expand with
... if the local store lets you (some are oddly firm on the "no old games" rules, if they are concerned about their role as supplier)
... if you never want to see any change or expansion of the rules and the fluff and the plot and the opponents and your on army

it's like saying that you can totally still use an old analog rotary phone instead of updating to touchtone or cell. you can. it's just a lot of pain in the butt and frustration and the inability to do certain things over the phone. at that point, you have to assess whether it's worth it.

[ColeVVatkins]

In the 8th I would just run doomwheel and abom's until you converted to Age of Sigmar!

[Muninwing]

So we have these ill-defined "realms" which are really just pockets of reality themed after some abstract concept. No civilizations or nations, nothing to actually define how the peoples of the setting interact or anything, other than "They're always fighting." Well, that doesn't actually work, because you'd run out of people.

Hmm. Ill-defined concepts of people, ill-defined "realms" that are vague themes, all of the main people Sigmar fought with/against are back, Sigmar is the savior of the realms and fights with a holy necromantic army, and it's the Age of Sigmar...

i love your PTSD Timmy Westphall theory, but the only reason it can exist is because they have done such a terrible job creating what exactly the new realm is like.

lower on that way-too-long original post, i had mentioned that fairly early on (and perhaps before the box set and rules release) they should have done an Atlas of the new Planes, a sourcebook with the fluff and the story as a follow-up to the End Times. in addition to clarifying the new world, and proving that they have a long-term plan (which i am seriously doubting -- their release botch and the rumors/changes show they have not necessarily thought this all through), it would also start to enrich this new world and get players who love lore to buy in.

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In the 8th I would just run doomwheel and abom's until you converted to Age of Sigmar!

.... and that's why i stopped playing. as riddled with errors as the skaven book was, it was dramatically overpowered as compared to my beasts. but we were using the same points scale to set up battles, meaning that someone did their job wrong and i had to pay the price for it.

[Muninwing]

Holy ****! That's a lot of words used to describe an incredibly bad idea.

This whole process might be what you WANT and it's the last thing you, and the players both old and new, NEEDS!.

A game, and its players, NEEDS rules that works, which AoS does, that creates awesome imagery in the mindscape, which AoS does. The last thing they need is to know the deep seated motivation for each and every model on the table, their fears, their anguish and miles and miles of existential angst.

A game exists to be played. Fluff can never add gravity to the rules, which is the important part. However rules can add gravity to the fluff.

while exaggerating my point of view is interesting, it's not in any way relevant to this argument.

what players need are good rules. this we agree on. in 7th, and into 8th, (and through the second half of 5th in 40k) GW stopped makign those in favor of exaggerating certain armies' capabilities. there are many perspectives on this, but mostly i just blame Mat Ward and no cohesive leadership from above, and i'm done with it. but it drove away a ton of players.

the game went for what -- six editions? before named special characters were allowed in regular play. why? because SCs and the rules needed to make them as epic as they need to be to match their fluff end up adding more opportunities to break the game, or to overpower one army. in contrast, you could paint up your Blood Dragon general to look like the Lord of Mousillon, and use ghostly bretonnians as Black Knights with thematic livery, but still use the brettonian paladin" or "blood dragon vampire" rules. suddenly being able to field a horde of Von Carsteins with special rules and special weapons and the like just cheaply borrows from others rather than adding anything personal, like rand paul's speeches or like fanfiction.

WM/H force a pensive player to imagine what those two generals from Khador feel like, as veterans of the million border skirmishes that never erupted into all-out war and sometimes are against each other or themselves. having "Rank II Warcaster" as an option with some minor customization rules would make their game far less "look at how awesome my D&D character is" and more like an actual fleshed-out world.

to respond to the part of your argument that is relevant, i'd like to point out that if gamers want good rules, it would make sense to give them good rules. if WHF was always the advanced model from 40k, with more tactics and a greater spectrum of learning in order to become good at the game, arbitrarily making it immensely simplistic is an outright break with what their fans have looked to them for.

instead of creating a whole new game that pretty much has nothing to do with the old one, why not create a new edition of the same game with fixes to all the problems, adapted rules for larger and smaller play, and a fully-realized world that makes sense?

or why not just reboot the game, a la ultimate marvel, or new 52? keep some of the themes and ideas, but approach it differently. same with the game itself -- and embed a real reason to want to play the game on both a larger and a smaller scale.

the weakly defined "realms," the increased importance of all these named characters, the lack of background and fluff and raison d'etre and purpose, the wealth of rumors that they allowed to circulate about WHF9 -- it's all stacked against the new game for veterans before we even open the rules. the old stuff created "awesome imagery in the mindscape" far better than the trite, hollow dumbing-down that they have offered up to us. the new stuff is like they hired middle schoolers to write their fluff.

[ColeVVatkins]

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.... and that's why i stopped playing. as riddled with errors as the skaven book was, it was dramatically overpowered as compared to my beasts. but we were using the same points scale to set up battles, meaning that someone did their job wrong and i had to pay the price for it.

It wasn't much fun for my opponents... So I didn't abuse them. Not gonna lie... That lightning was amazing. Don't know if anyone has read doomwheel now... It's unplayable. :-(

[nsc]

I'm a little curious as to why people are saying there's no threat, no weight to the AoS storyline, when there's more than ever before!

The boxed set for AoS is set an unknown number of years (vaguely referenced as hundreds) after chaos has conquered 7 of the 8 realms, and has spent all this time wallowing in well chaos, those who aren't pawns of the dark gods are hunted and hassled endlessly in this time, before the Chaos gods turned their eyes to the realms there was an unknown number of years (again vaguely referenced as hundreds) where seven realms (the 8th realm is chaos, I think it's safe to assume nobody was in there lol) were populated by all the races familiar to the WHFB setting and empires and nations were built and raised up.

Now, I know I ambled on about the context of the setting but it's part of my point about the threat. Sigmar is striking out from the 1st (or 8th depending on your perspective) realm and seeks to destroy Chaos. The threat of Chaos is even more terrifying than before, the 'good' guys are striking out against Chaos at its most powerful, with alliances that have been broken and betrayed. This is it, if these celestial warriors are halted, if those who would live in order do not crush Chaos in this long bloody campaign then all will be lost! The dark gods know that Sigmar did not cower in his realm, that he built up heroes taken from the history of the realms and equipped them with his finest weapons. This is sigmar playing his ace in the hole and if it doesn't work, or if they are fought to a stalemate, then things will be quite grim indeed!