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Avenging Dentist posted:Yeah, I know. (Although DoW was originally previewed with Ultramarines.) The Blood Angels have been around for ten thousand years. I'm not sure why you think the idea that they were almost completely wiped out a couple times over those ten thousand years ruins them
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Sep 26, 2016 20:50
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Ashcans posted:I do like the idea that the Blood Angels managed to pour their entire chapter into one Hulk mission though. They mobilized their entire chapter for this one thing, brought every scout and veteran from their homeworld, and stuffed them all into some crappy leaking wreck to die. When they were 800 bodies deep, no one paused to say 'Maybe we should reconsider this'. "Do you think that maybe this is a bad idea Brother Chaplain Escalades?" "DO YOU DOUBT OUR MISSION BROTHER? DO YOU DOUBT THE EMPERORS WILL?" "I er... well... no " Vitamin P posted:The Mantic skellies came with a surprise little skeleton rat and it's amazing. Truly, not giving Games Workshop money has paid off for me this day. The dwarves and not-chaos dwarves come with little bulldogs 
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Sep 26, 2016 20:57
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Guy Goodbody posted:The Blood Angels have been around for ten thousand years. I'm not sure why you think the idea that they were almost completely wiped out a couple times over those ten thousand years ruins them It's stupid because it's an utterly meaningless bit of fluff. A bad thing happened, and there are no actual consequences for it. I'm on the edge of my seat now!! Throwaway fluff is the absolute worst.
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Sep 26, 2016 20:59
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There's throwaway fluff and then there's an immense period of time for you to forge your own narrative and all that jazz. 10,000 years is a long time. I don't play GW games any more, but back when I did, I enjoyed the fact that I wasn't given a limited period of years to play my games in. There's only so many times you can repel a german attack on a french village, but what possibilities do a 10,000 year period; spannning an entire galaxy give you? A poo poo lot of possibilities.
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Sep 26, 2016 21:06
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Avenging Dentist posted:The main issue I'm trying to point out is that when you write fluff for one of the 4 most important Space Marine chapters (Blood Angels), you should probably temper your desire to write in historical disasters that befell them. These are the players' dudes, so you have to be careful not to gently caress them over; but that has the side effect that even major disasters, like losing 95% of your chapter in a suicide mission ultimately amounts to nothing. It ends up just underscoring how nothing ever happens in 40k. They probably just got better. At least this wasn't used as an excuse to turn them into real vampires. (Man, that'd be terrible. They'd probably end up like the Space Wolves, except instead of going Wolf Wolf with their Wolf Bolters and Wolf Swords, they go Blood Blood with their Blood Bolters and Blood Swords.) enri posted:There's throwaway fluff and then there's an immense period of time for you to forge your own narrative and all that jazz. 10,000 years is a long time. I don't play GW games any more, but back when I did, I enjoyed the fact that I wasn't given a limited period of years to play my games in. There's only so many times you can repel a german attack on a french village, but what possibilities do a 10,000 year period; spannning an entire galaxy give you? A poo poo lot of possibilities. Only in 10k years of endless possibilities can Grey Knights walk around in the blood of nuns with guns, while Blood Angels indulge in jolly co-operation with Terminator skeletons like they're playing this Last Stand game mode in DoW2. Doresh fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Sep 26, 2016 |
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Sep 26, 2016 22:01
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Interestingly, in 10,000 years the tyranids still never get a decent update.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:03
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Avenging Dentist posted:It's stupid because it's an utterly meaningless bit of fluff. A bad thing happened, and there are no actual consequences for it. I'm on the edge of my seat now!! I feel like you're saying 'Don't write any fluff that changes things because players love their factions' but at the same time you seem to be saying 'writing fluff that doesn't change anything is meaningless.' Either I'm misunderstanding you or you're trying to have it both ways.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:23
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Doresh posted:Only in 10k years of endless possibilities can Grey Knights walk around in the blood of nuns with guns, while Blood Angels indulge in jolly co-operation with Terminator skeletons like they're playing this Last Stand game mode in DoW2. I didn't say all of it was defensible 
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Sep 26, 2016 22:27
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Ashcans posted:Interestingly, in 10,000 years the tyranids still never get a decent update. That's what happens if you can't into bio-organic FTL travel. enri posted:I didn't say all of it was defensible Just spreading a bit of Chaos.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:28
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enri posted:The dwarves and not-chaos dwarves come with little bulldogs Holy moly. Is it just skellies and dwarves or do all Mantic sprues come with awesome little mascots?
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Sep 26, 2016 22:29
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fnordcircle posted:I feel like you're saying 'Don't write any fluff that changes things because players love their factions' but at the same time you seem to be saying 'writing fluff that doesn't change anything is meaningless.' Any changes to the fluff that impact any faction in any meaningful way will have a massive blowback from the fanbase. If however, there's fluff that doesn't change anything (Medusa, Eye of Terror) then it's chalked up as unimportant and rather meaningless and few people pay much attention to it. GW can't move past the midnight hour, basically. They've set themselves into a corner where the best they can do is shuffle the deck chairs around to make it look like something's going on and hope no one notices. If they DO change anything significant fluff-wise, there's a very high chance that it'll be the End Times all over again and everyone jumping ship because the new product and fluff suck balls.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:34
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First, just to clarify things, my initial comment in this ("Do not gently caress with the players' little dudes.") was under the assumption that something actually came out of the Blood Angels being nearly wiped out, but then I read about it a bit and it appears that it resulted in nothing of note, since they were back to doing major operations in a pretty short time (200 years, but it takes a long time to rebuild a chapter, especially when their gene-seed is as hosed as the Blood Angels').fnordcircle posted:I feel like you're saying 'Don't write any fluff that changes things because players love their factions' but at the same time you seem to be saying 'writing fluff that doesn't change anything is meaningless.' I'm just suggesting that GW create meaningful changes that don't directly affect your dudes. Having some tragedy befall the Blood Angels, only for nothing to come of it, is pretty boring, but it'd be even worse if they had actually hosed up the Blood Angels (in the sense that your dudes have all been killed off). A better way to handle this would be for it to have actual consequences in the background elements of the story; for instance, the Blood Angels being out of commission for a generation directly leads to some bad guys pushing deep into Imperial territory, killing a bunch of people and taking control of some key Forge World or something. If you want to tie it in to the miniature range (and for big things, you should), this could result in, say, Chaos Marines getting a new model kit to represent their victories. The key here is that instead of a) doing nothing, or b) taking things away from players, you're using the fluff as motivation to give players new stuff. Another way to handle this sort of thing is to kill off relatively unimportant groups that parallel the main playable factions. No one's going to be too sad if some random chapter that was mentioned maybe twice before gets the axe; certainly not compared to one of the big four. This isn't that interesting on its own, but you can use it to show how so-and-so is really powerful and tie it into a larger plot. You could also have background characters in the main factions get killed off. Maybe such-and-such Cadian general (that doesn't have a model and is just in the fluff) gets assassinated, and now there's a major internal conflict with some mutinous Guardsmen. Now you have an interesting story and more inspiration for some cool army concepts. The whole "GW can't move past the midnight hour" just isn't true. While they can't, like, kill the Emperor*, they can make significant changes to the balance of power in the galaxy and create stories, campaign books, etc that emphasize how whatever group has been taking lots of territory, or how such-and-such group had to retreat, or whatever. Like, if the Blood Angels' homeworld Baal blew up and they had to flee on their Battle Barges, that doesn't hurt anyone's ability to play Blood Angels fluffily, but provides some interesting story hooks (will they ever find another homeworld?) and maybe even some cool new minis (e.g. more Black Company dudes because now they're even more pissed off at everything). Overall, my point is that bits of fluff, especially ones about the central forces in the story, should be used to motivate cool things happening, and not just some throwaway gag. By focusing on the question, "What new possibilities does this fluff inspire?" you can come up with cool story hooks that push things forward, both by having notable in-universe effects and by inspiring new model kits or new armies (even if they're just a new paintjob and backstory for players). Throwaway fluff is boring because it's so isolated from everything else, made worse by the fact that the glut of it inevitably results in internal contradictions. * Ok, they can, but they'd have to be really careful about it.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:27
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^^^ If (emphasis on if) it is a good read but ultimately changes nothing I'm okay with it. See endless Tyranid v Ork war!Vitamin P posted:Holy moly. Is it just skellies and dwarves or do all Mantic sprues come with awesome little mascots? Most of them do, to some degree or another. Demons get little imps, elves get cats, salamanders get... flame drops? Niads get a toad and otter (and a Basilean in a net). The humans don't get anything cool like that yet.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:39
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Vitamin P posted:Holy moly. Is it just skellies and dwarves or do all Mantic sprues come with awesome little mascots? Now I think about it, the old high elves sprue I have knocking around has a weird cat thing on it from what I remember. edit: beaten 
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Sep 26, 2016 23:46
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LordAba posted:^^^ If (emphasis on if) it is a good read but ultimately changes nothing I'm okay with it. See endless Tyranid v Ork war! Even then, if it's a good read, it probably inspires some cool ideas (e.g. Orks with repurposed Tyranid carapaces for armor, Tyranids based on Ork DNA) and still has potential to get tied into the larger plot in some ways. Maybe the Imperium decides to step in and try to stop it because they fear what would happen if the Tyranids and Orks used each other to improve at making war.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:50
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Orks vs Tyranids is the best. Except for the GW parts
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Sep 26, 2016 23:52
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Avenging Dentist posted:
If you're writing fluff, please do not take this advice. It is terrible and cliche and boring to murder a recognizable side character solely to puff up the big bad/motivate the "real" heroes. Doing this is how Big Two comics continually manage to murder their gay and black and female characters, because they aren't important enough (in the company's eyes) to have agency, but they have fans, so clearly killing them will make the villain seem more important right? It mostly just makes the fans of those characters really, really angry. Like their little dudes just been messed with. Writers also do this when they can't characterize their villain any other way, or think of an interesting way to raise the stakes besides splattering some fake blood around and insisting they're evil and dangerous. If that's all the writers have for that villain, it falls completely flat.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:53
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occamsnailfile posted:Doing this is how Big Two comics continually manage to murder their gay and black and female characters, because they aren't important enough (in the company's eyes) to have agency Luckily, this is GW, so there are no gay, black, or female characters. However, my point is that events in the story should be used to motivate cool new possibilities, not to restrict people's options more. Killing off a character to produce a power vacuum and allow a new faction to spring up gives players a jumping off point to do something new, rather than making their already established little guys irrelevant. And even if you don't go that far, it's still better than nothing happening. Hell, you can invent characters on the spot to do this with, if you bother to use a small bit of subtlety to make it less obvious that they were created solely to die. Avenging Dentist fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 00:03
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GW is bad megachat - Luckily, this is GW, so there are no gay, black, or female characters.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:23
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LordAba posted:Most of them do, to some degree or another. Demons get little imps, elves get cats, salamanders get... flame drops? Niads get a toad and otter (and a Basilean in a net). Oh my god the Orc Greatax Troop comes with a pair of little orc toddlers.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:31
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I'm racking my brain and I honestly can't think of a single black character in any official 40k product. (No, Salamanders don't count; they're jet black because of a genetic disorder.)
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Sep 27, 2016 00:32
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Avenging Dentist posted:I'm racking my brain and I honestly can't think of a single black character in any official 40k product. (No, Salamanders don't count; they're jet black because of a genetic disorder.) There's a black Commissar in Cadian Blood. It gets commented on because all the Cadians are white so most of them have never seen a black guy. I think there was a black woman remembrance with the Thousand Sons before the Burning of Prospero.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:33
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Guy Goodbody posted:There's a black Commissar in Cadian Blood. It gets commented on because all the Cadians are white so most of them have never seen a black guy. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:39
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Avenging Dentist posted:I'm racking my brain and I honestly can't think of a single black character in any official 40k product. (No, Salamanders don't count; they're jet black because of a genetic disorder.) There's a lot of incidental black characters in the Gaunt's Ghosts novels, usually members/officers of other Imperial Guard regiments (the Ghosts themselves are mostly pasty-white Celtic types). In one of the later books they pick a couple of non-white officers, since at that stage their recruits are being sourced from a number of different places.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:44
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Avenging Dentist posted:I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. It's canon. 
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Sep 27, 2016 00:48
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Yeah, I was wondering if there were any in the Ghosts books, but I couldn't remember. I still can't find any actual visual depictions of a black character in any official product. In fact, the only non-white character I can think of at all is the lady on the cover of Dark Hershey 1e. e: I found her. The only black woman in the 41st millennium (from Only War: Hammer of the Emperor, so a supplement to the fourth spinoff from Dark Hershey):  She's so excited about soup that she brought two thermoses to the cafeteria today. Avenging Dentist fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 00:56
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Sep 27, 2016 01:14
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I am honestly shocked.
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Sep 27, 2016 01:17
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Avenging Dentist posted:Luckily, this is GW, so there are no gay, black, or female characters. I think this is the reason I like Historical more than Fantasy (In general), stuff happens(ed). Empires rise, Empires fall, Heros and Villians who's actions and deaths change the course of history. 40k is a static universe were nothing of importance actually changes. All those heroic last stands don't matter and don't have any impact, victory and defeat don't matter. Boring Boring Boring. Of course there is fantasy where this does matter, Battletech (though no major character ever seems to die until its impossible to justify a 150 year-old man piloting a war-machine) but stuff does change. LotR is also another. I could probably sell my historical playing friends on a LotR game (since its sort of like a historical, but in another universe), but the generic Warhammer, KoW, or whatever universes? nope.
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Sep 27, 2016 01:37
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From what I understand, Warmachine has an active metaplot too, but I don't know much about it since I don't play it. It's also, you know, not a trash game.
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Sep 27, 2016 01:47
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Avenging Dentist posted:From what I understand, Warmachine has an active metaplot too, but I don't know much about it since I don't play it. It's also, you know, not a trash game. Eh, so far they have shown that no warlock/warcaster will ever die ever. The whole "Coleman Stryker in Menoth land" thing was kind of a huge let down as well. Stryker is the "big
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Sep 27, 2016 02:03
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I thought the FF stuff was better and balked at there being no black dudes in Dark Heresy. Wasn't there even one in the cover? Looking at the book, nope it's a swarthy white dude with cornrows. All of the character class images are white. The first actual black dude is an Inquisitor from the Calixis sector fluff/sample setting. Page 321. There you go 1 black dude in 395 pages. Now I wanna go through the other core books.
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Sep 27, 2016 02:02
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Coolness Averted posted:The first actual black dude is an Inquisitor from the Calixis sector fluff/sample setting. Page 321. There you go 1 black dude in 395 pages. Now I wanna go through the other core books. Oh hey that is a black dude! Since it was a greyscale image, I flicked past it without it registering for me.
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Sep 27, 2016 02:05
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Actually, is there any game that has more than one black man in it? Warmachine just has Siege... Actually Malifaux has Marcus and Toni (technically Toni is a black female, but there you go). EDIT: Oh, one of the deadly sins is black as well!
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Sep 27, 2016 02:28
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LordAba posted:Actually, is there any game that has more than one black man in it? Warmachine just has Siege... Heroclix
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Sep 27, 2016 02:32
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Guy Goodbody posted:Heroclix Bonus for being prepaint!
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Sep 27, 2016 02:37
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Warmachine also has a Mercenary solo who's black, and some of the Devil Dog's are black I think? It also has not-Arabs. It's pretty good about the male/female thing for the most part but it's still pretty much just stereotypical 1800s europe from an American's perspective as far as skin color is concerned. Also it's not a trash game
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Sep 27, 2016 02:36
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Well, yah, Catachan regiments where basically copied wholesale from the film Predator so they kinda had to have some black dudes in the art. Besides, I see they've apparently managed to walk that back now to 100% white dudes only.
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Sep 27, 2016 02:42
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LordAba posted:Actually, is there any game that has more than one black man in it? Warmachine just has Siege... Dark Age only has one black named character that I know of (Saint John), but the studio paintjobs for the Weaponsmith and the Flenses are dark-skinned, although maybe the Flenses are meant to the Indians (the kind from the subcontinent)? They also have rad post-human Mayans. Still, it's pretty white overall. (And yes, Dark Age is fairly cheesecakey at times, but the minis still own.)
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Sep 27, 2016 02:49
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I tried reading some WarmaHordes fluff once. It was terrible. It's like something a 12 year old would write.
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Sep 27, 2016 07:17
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