Assorted AoS Observances

[Auticus]

Erik - exactly. There are a multitude ways of playing, but all are "unofficial" and thus "bad".

[Mr Mystery]

That's just people being silly.

The official books are just the baseline experience. If you want to tweak, such as your own Sainted efforts with Azyr Comp, go for it. It's not my bag, but for gods sake (your choice of deity/deities too!) don't let my opinion or preference stop you, or anyone else for that matter.

And go for the middle ground. If an opponent would prefer to face me under your points system, then fair enough. If it's been sprung on me, I'm happy to point up my intended force, so long as my opponent understands I won't necessarily be able to stick to any further list restriction (like a cap on big monsters etc). But even then, that's not an excuse for me to be a Richard about it.

Now, let's consider formal, organised play. All it takes is for the organiser to publish their own FAQ and nominate a comp system beforehand. Don't like those? Sit it out. Their house/gig/venue, their rules. Which is exactly what happened with the previous editions of Warhammer....house rules, arbitrary comp, tournaments specific FAQS. It's part of the hobby. Always has been, and with any luck it always will be

(Not having a pop at individuals on this thread.)

[grimmas]

Thing is all tournaments/organised have some sort of comp people don't just turn up and start playing without any extra guidance. Warmachine the paragon of tournament play has at last count a 16pg document for their major tournaments

[Auticus]

I've always been of the opinion that having multiple ways of playing is desirable (for me) but the base of the disgruntlement that I hear and read all comes down to no universal ruleset. The reason why its a big deal is that AOS has shown in the states anyway that pick up gamers and tourney gamers make up the majority of the player base in most communities.

You are right - the big events pretty much universally had their own comp system. I know the ETC was big over in Europe but a lot of people in the states expressed solid disdain for it for having such heavy handed comp (where they wanted universal rules with as little modification to the raw as possible)

Unsurprisingly it appears AOS is also more popular in Europe based on the tournament attendances over there than compared to over here, where most of our communities languish with few players.

We're up to 8 now but most of them also don't want comp and want to play RAW. The problems of course being that there are about a dozen common rules arguments you read about when trying to play raw (can i summon things not on my list, can i move models in base contact to make way for others during combat phase, should 1s count as fails or are they auto pass, etc) so really they are all playing differently anyway (which further aggravates a lot of people)

Me personally I will never play AOS raw but yes I agree - play what makes you happy! I've always been of that mindset (i've never liked any verison of whfb or 40k raw since the mid 90s and have always tweaked)

[Erik Setzer]

I'm in the middle ground... I think the company could have put forth more effort in creating better guidelines to work with. Yeah, having more than four pages would mean you can't slap those four pages into everything and have the rules everywhere, but you don't really need to. A 20-page set of standard rules, army building guidelines*, and standard scenarios would be nice. Actually, 24 pages. Not an arbitrary number, really. That's a good printing number, and you can offer up a PDF download, and sell it in stores in print form using the same printing as WD and charge $5 for it. People would likely slap down $5 for it (I certainly would), and you have a core document to work with.

*By army building guidelines, I mean something more than model count. Doesn't even have to be points. Just something to help people along. Even if it's, say, adding more keywords to units, like Elite, Regular, Horde, etc., to help people better recognize how good something is compared to something else. And never, ever have a victory condition based on who has more models left on the table.

There are some issues with the core rules, mainly in that victory condition and the rules about outnumbered armies getting bonuses even though an army of Skaven Clanrats would need to vastly outnumber an army of Ogres for a fair fight.

But from an optimistic standpoint, the game can be "patched" at any time with new PDF releases and even slapping the new rules into a WD. So where there are issues, they can be cleared up at any time.

[Mr Mystery]

It's even in the GW staff training (or at least it was circa 2010 when it was all massively overhauled, and for the better in my opinion).

See, when you come into my store, as a salesperson I need to establish a rapport with you. And the best way to do that? Talk to you about your hobby first and foremost. Not 'the' hobby. Not my hobby. YOUR hobby. Now don't get me wrong, it will always ultimately remain 'my house, my rules' for gaming purposes, but you need to get on the same level as your customer when chatting about the games.

Done right, I can feed your enthusiasm. An enthusiastic customer will always spend more - even if it's just an additional pot of paint, I'm that much closer to my target (and I used to break it down at the end of the month based on average transaction value. You would not believe the difference simply flogging WD, paint or a brush in addition makes to your store's performance - and I wasn't even particularly brilliant. Competent enough, but by no means a master salesperson).

Best example? Kid and Mum came in at the beginning of the summer hols. Kid was in shtook because he'd got bad test results, and that affected his holiday spending budget. Started off with the cheapy Chaos Warriors set. By the time I'd pitched in, that turned into the Batallion Box. Can't remember exactly what clinched it, but I explained (via porky pies) that I'd been in the same place as a nipper, and my Mum had bought a similar set. Every time I completed homework, and my grades improved, another kit from the box was mine to build...and the Batallion is a cost effective way... Devious? Liberal with the truth? Well, I was a sales person.....

So in the modern day, I'd be looking to familiarise myself with he various points systems, so I can engage on some level. I'd stop short of learning them inside out - because nothing enthuses a nerd like the excuse and opportunity to wax lyrical. Walls broken down. Rapport established. Sales in the offing. Easy. Peasy.

But those days are behind me now. But I've been able to adapt certain skills garnered there to my current career as professional financial disputes mediator. All about making the aggrieved feel listened to, but more importantly, heard. Which is why I have a pretty superb resolution rate, and don't need to go bothering Ombudsman for final decisions - and when that's proven unavoidable, I've never had an Ombudsman depart from my findings, rationale and outcome

[grimmas]

To be totally honest when I made the initial comment I was referring to the size of the armies. Being able to play small is very important for new people and being able to go big is important for the vets. I like the way the discussion has gone though and I'm very happy to see Erik being cautiously optimistic, the AoS is gonna get you.

I was under the impression that WFB was very much a minor system in the US for a number of years before AoS came along though. Well it was claimed to be dead by quite a few on the front page anyway.

I find the idea that non official rule are bad a little alien. I ran a GW a bit before Mystery (selling the 6th ED WFB box was the ticket) and we'd house rule loads of stuff. In fact every GW l've been to and thats a few had it's own meta as you'd say. They'd also have their own ideas on what was overpower and not and it varied quite widely between stores.

[Auticus]

It really depends on your community to be honest. My community is for the most part mostly competitive style players. Many dont play in tournaments, but are still competitively bent, and don't like many house rules at all.

Our group uses a fair bit of comp, and we have a decent turnout but it is said by others in my community that doing this "drives a division in the community and is bad".

Now if the community is more casual and less competitive, I have a feeling it wouldn't matter as much, but thats just a guess on my part.

[Erik Setzer]

I'm all for unofficial rules. Heck, I've got a website (and two from my dad) that was built off of the idea of coming up with new units and rules and all kinds of stuff. A lot of the old GW fan sites were like that. Somewhere, though, the community at large changed. Look at the more popular GW sites, you might see some painting discussion but it mostly seems to be news, rumors, and/or "tactics" (which is less tactics and more "how to build a stomp-'em list"). It's hard to pinpoint when that happened or how it happened. I won't blame "the tournament scene" because prior to the disaster that was 'Ard Boyz, tourneys were focused on multiple aspects of the hobby.

I'd love to see more "house rules" but I'm not sure how you'd get a community to embrace them again, especially an entire community embracing one set of ideas.

I feel like a game company should produce a good core that covers all the basics, but they don't need to really go beyond that (unless they feel like it). But that's an "ideal."

In the meantime... it'd be interesting to do "house rules" for things like converting T&T to AoS, adding building rules for AoS, other types of realms, new scenarios, stuff like that. Maybe some "rules guidelines" for various questions like splitting fire or anything else. A "Community FAQ" of sorts. The house rules writing loon in me wants to start jotting down concepts and throwing them together, but maybe more experience would be better before hand. Then again, you could just release ideas into the wild, let people test them, and tweak them based on community feedback.

Might get around to doing that. Also, finally getting off my bum and doing some other stuff I'd meant to do in terms of converting old units and such to AoS (because they might be gone, but never forgotten!). Why would some obscure army from a corner of the Warhammer world show up in the Mortal Realms? Because MAGIC. (Come on, it's a bunch of floating magical realms in the middle of the Warp, who's to say you couldn't have a bunch of guys get picked up from the past and dropped into one of the realms like a magical version of the Cardiff Rift?)

- - - Updated - - -

On a side note, sort of related to the last bit... Has anyone tried a wild concept army yet? It seems you can mix units to your heart's content, so if you feel like getting particularly crazy (and don't mind explaining it to your opponent), you could convert an army of, say, magical automatons (golems, I suppose you could call them, but mechanical looking), and then use appropriate rules from a unit who has rules that you feel match the units you're modeling. Everyone's all about mixing TK and VC, or Orcs and Ogres (admittedly, I'm all about that one, it's the whole reason I bought an Ogre army), or various types of Chaos and Skaven... but why not use all that freedom to just build your own army and borrow rules from existing units?

[Auticus]

Thats funny you mention that "somewhere along the line things changed". I have said that for a long time. My speculation is that when tournaments stopped scoring for appearance and sportsmanship, that the hobby side of the game started taking more and more of a backseat.

Then coupled with the emergence of other games like warmachine and then infinity and malifaux and xwing never caring about that aspect of the game enough, it caused a new generation of players to really not care about it either. Thats not to say they don't care about the hobby at all, but the hobby part of the game became very much secondary and probably since around 2005 or 2006 or so the alternate rules started to be treated more with disdain than anything. Pretty much weekly now I hear people in my own community wish that GW would release pre-painted models so that they could just buy their army and play out of the box like other games. I'd say a good 50% of my community never picks up a paintbrush and has no desire to do so and wants pre painted models. (this is not to say thats bad or good this is just giving my perception of what my community is composed of in general)

I still remember the General's Compendium being released in 2002 and how many awesome ideas it had in it and it was a struggle even then to get people to deviate from the (6th edition) rulebook to use some of those ideas.

Today the community overall no matter what game you are playing is very dead set against house rules overall and I think it would take moving tournaments back to scoring for painting and composition and sportsmanship to shift that focus, but I also feel trying to do that would enrage the community overall as that moves away the concept of a tournament being 100% about the game (it was argued even back in the 90s that those scoring facets should never exist in a tournament)