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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Are you in NA/is their distribution that hosed from winter? We got both starters already in Central Asia by way of the UAE Lostconfused posted:North America got the starter boxes, but games-workshop apparently decided not to give us any rule books. The US, and not my LGS, apparently. They have nothing. I wonder if the LGS hosed up.
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Feb 7, 2024 15:43
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apparently GW had a bunch of shipments en route destroyed by water damage, which would explain irregular shortages
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Feb 7, 2024 16:10
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Cease to Hope posted:Some of this depended on the army books you had, I suppose. Even the earliest undead books emphasized that Nagash and the von Carlsteins are coming back and there'll be hell to pay. Archaon was 5th edition. The High/Dark Elf struggle was basically fully formed in 5th. Those gave it a millenarian vibe to me, even before Storm of Chaos, Mordheim, Belakor, Grimgor, etc. Those are some of the retconned-to-be-last-week things I was talking about. I don't know how much of that "but lurking behind the corner..." stuff is Marvel Cinematic Universe style "Here-Comes-The-Threatiest-Threat-Yet" or "ok, so every bit of 'history' your faction has swiftly ends with 'but then they got their poo poo kicked in by The Empire/Bretonnia/Lizardmen/etc', but Your Guys don't suck! We promise! Your time is coming, don't worry about that!" I don't know how millenarian Grimgor was, or Snarsnik - who I think was still around at the time. Certainly less so than Ghazghkull in 40k. Grimgor's problems were more the first time Storm of Chaos came around when GW wrote him as suddenly not wanting to fight when he met Archaon.
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Feb 7, 2024 16:31
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3 Action Economist posted:The US, and not my LGS, apparently. They have nothing. Entirely possible given the weirdo saga of my 2 LGSs and their wildly different releases. ANYWAY I've finally gotten my entire Bretonnia box built up. Good lord I forgot how time consuming building up a complete army at once is.
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Feb 7, 2024 16:54
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It's a problem that what makes GW's worlds work as setting is the same thing that's a weakness as a story. The background is full of "[character] attacked the Empire and conquered a bunch of it but it's was so long ago that it's recovered." Off the top of my head just for Orcs, Gorbad took a bunch of cities, Grom did too and Azhag rampaged around before he was killed. It works well for your guys-ing armies and campaigns - it gives a player room to say that their army totally burned down Nuln one time 500 years ago but it's recovered since then. It's bigger extremes both ways in 40K - there's a lot more history and space to play with for your own stuff. As an example a few years ago our gaming group ran a 40K narrative campaign fighting over some planet we made up that ended up with it being destroyed and that fits neatly into canon because a massive planetary war is just a drop in the bucket - it doesn't affect the monolithic status quo so it can have "really" happened. This runs into problems now that GW's trying to do an ongoing story since we've had the massive, galaxy changing* events of Cadia falling, the plague wars, the psychic awakening, the pariah nexus, the 4th tyrannic war, multiple primarchs returning, the arks of omen, other stuff I'm sure I've forgotten and the setting hasn't - can't - change becase of any of it. It feels even more static than eternal 999.M41 did to be pretending all these events are taking place and they have zero effect, not even culling some excessive named characters.
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Feb 7, 2024 17:05
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Yeah one thing I liked when I picked up O&G in 4th ed is that a lot of the Big Events were in the past. Like Grom's rampage across the Empire. But the vibe was very much that the main draw of O&G was to come up with your own scrappy little warband and give it your own history and theme. You could use the special characters, and by God we did because we were 13 and Morglum Necksnapper was just so cool, but it was obvious that the White Dwarf staff and their mates were more into coming up with small, contained stories in the setting. Hell, even Grom's story was "and then he sailed away to the Elves and fought and lost but who knows how that really happened and if he's still not out there, biding his time?". That's how you write a setting where your players are allowed to pick up the reins and make their own stories if they want to. Like, I have zero interest in paiting up Rouboute Guilliman and have him lead 20 dudes and some tanks against Angron once a month. So a do-over where you are free from the big poster boy Main Characters is pretty refreshing to me. Nagash being a bogey-man is great for a setting. Nagash being a centerpiece in every army is not. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 17:17
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Some of this has to be a gameplay design thing, 40K has a bunch of named characters that fill a specific gameplay role because you can't simply kit out a generic unit to do that job. A bunch of people in youtube videos say "I hate points, it's so much hassle" but being able to take a a Chaos Lord and give him a dragon or a horse or nothing at all and make him fit whatever role in your army that you want is better than finding some narrative character to do that for you. Edit: For example of this look at Lord Solar Leontus for imperial guard in 40K. He has a unique role in the army that nobody else can fill and that's why he gets picked, since his model looks so bad. But you have to have this epic hero character, that a lot of people don't like, because of gameplay reasons. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 17:29
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I also don't think GW wants to put in the game design work to make it so you can build the characters out how you want in a granular way, so the named people are kind of a compromise- a few pre-built things they don't think will break anything, otherwise yeah it's just "what mount, if any, do you want on this character".
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Feb 7, 2024 17:35
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Lostconfused posted:Some of this has to be a gameplay design thing, 40K has a bunch of named characters that fill a specific gameplay role because you can't simply kit out a generic unit to do that job. Definitely. And as a hobbyist, I love putting together some combination on a generic hero, having it do something amazing on the table, and then converting up that specific hero in all its glory as a proper mini. That's how my bloodthirsty murder-hobbits started in our Frostgrave campaign.
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Feb 7, 2024 17:37
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ro5s posted:It feels even more static than eternal 999.M41 did to be pretending all these events are taking place and they have zero effect, not even culling some excessive named characters. even the ones that died are still kicking around. captain tycho died in the same story that introduced goth captain tycho. which was in 2001. LashLightning posted:I don't know how millenarian Grimgor was, or Snarsnik - who I think was still around at the time. Certainly less so than Ghazghkull in 40k. Grimgor's problems were more the first time Storm of Chaos came around when GW wrote him as suddenly not wanting to fight when he met Archaon. Grimgor was just Ghazghkull, the orc chosen one who's here lead the final waagh, according to his witch doctor Merlin. (That is Wurrzag's whole deal btw.) And Archaon did just appear to be Fantasy Abaddon, although he did benefit from an outstanding sculpt that I hope does come back. (It got demoted to Chaos Lord on Nightmare when Archaon went all supermonstery.) Archaon's original book was really forgettable, a collection of named characters that got bumped from the overstuffed 5e Chaos book, but he got his it's-time-to-end-the-world sidekick in Belakor sometime around 6e. Nagash was always Sauron and was always working to come back, as far back as 4e. But part of this story was in the O&G book, which establishes that the Crown of Sorcery is just Nagash's One Ring. He ended up downplayed in 5-6, pushing him way back in the storyline to focus on the (IMO extremely boring and bad) deep backstory.
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Feb 7, 2024 17:44
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I'm reading the Archaon book and I think it's ok. And I do think Chaos needs a character like that or Abaddon. It works very well thematically, since one of the big reasons chaos doesn't win is because it can't organize itself to accomplish any specific goal. So Chaos needs a central figure similar to the human Emperor God King whatever, who brings order to chaos to achieve whatever their goal is. Yeah it's not mind blowing stuff, but these are simple narrative themes that you can tell a good story with.
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Feb 7, 2024 17:52
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Cease to Hope posted:even the ones that died are still kicking around. captain tycho died in the same story that introduced goth captain tycho. which was in 2001. That's the bit I find baffling - 40K's allergic to historic characters to the point I think Tycho's the only dead one, even Eldrad got better and came back to life. Grom, Gorbad, Azhag, Vlad von Carstein and I'm sure a bunch of other warhammer characters were explicitly not from the current era, dead or missing. There were few enough of them around that each was the main character of their own little story in the wider world, now there are so many around that they're all bumping into each other, fighting and surviving, retreating screaming "I'll get you next time
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Feb 7, 2024 17:52
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ro5s posted:That's the bit I find baffling - 40K's allergic to historic characters to the point I think Tycho's the only dead one, even Eldrad got better and came back to life. Grom, Gorbad, Azhag, Vlad von Carstein and I'm sure a bunch of other warhammer characters were explicitly not from the current era, dead or missing. There were few enough of them around that each was the main character of their own little story in the wider world, now there are so many around that they're all bumping into each other, fighting and surviving, retreating screaming "I'll get you next time Yeah I find that stuff really eye-rollable. Reading the little fluff sidebars, you always know that if a modelled, named character is up against some incorporeal fictional antagonist, the latter is going to lose. If two characters with models are mentioned clashing, one might come off worse, but both will definitely survive.
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Feb 7, 2024 18:33
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Hard to sell a $50 model of a guy you just killed off in the fiction, and the models are more important like this is just how it is when a company wants to sell you something, pretty basic corporate math "don't kill the thing" imagine if DC had stuck to superman being dead, back in 1993 but it's a game about fighting, and there's always been the incongruity of the fragility of the units on the table vs. their endurance in the lore like the whole "there's only 1000 marines in each chapter and they fight for a century or more each" vs. "my gnoblars just took out ten space marines in this skirmish" it just doesn't match in historicals maybe you'd buy a model of temujin or patton or hannibal, but you probably wouldn't because they didn't get into a tank or hop on an elephant and go visit the fighting front of battle to hit them with their sword, for the most part! Having them die in a random battle would be a major twist of history, like it's possible, but unusual? When you look up a list of history's greatest generals, few of them died in combat. Civil war one and two star generals died in battles sometimes but the top level generals generally weren't within firing distance of the enemy, ever. That's really it I think in fantasy or space-fantasy if you want to have these epic characters who are also supercombatants, but you want a game where units actually die quickly so you can finish the game in six turns, and you want those characters to be defeatable, you wind up with this situation where roboute guilliman fights 400 (minor skirmish really, because of tabletop size constraint) battles and dies in 200+ of them To turn that around then, it makes a lot more "sense" to have your own made-up characters (and space marine chapters, orders of knights, skaven clan, etc.) to put on the table because it feels less of a jolt from the established game lore when they get wiped out, and you want the battles to be over poo poo Hill instead of Literally The World, so you're not as frequently rewriting the setting with each garage match up you have with your pal Lee. And your made up character doesn't have to be the leader of an entire geopolitically-significant nation or faction, they can just be a one-star general of some level of fame. I can give a tomb prince or even a tomb king a name and it fits with the lore because there's supposed to be hundreds of them, dynasties of lineages piled up as they all obstinately refuse to die or give up their individual domains. I guess where I got with this is it's better to sell and fight with minor heroes and characters of renown rather than the top guys like nagash or the founders of space marine chapters or w/e. Only some of the factions seem to have this issue, there's not like a named leader of the tyranids who shows up to every battle as far as I know, or like whoever is the leader of the eldar Iyanden craftworld isn't teaming up with two dozen striking scorpions and three squads of guardians to go fight some necrons somewhere. I dunno. It's a tabletop wargame and at some point you have to suspend disbelief at the absurdities of the thing so you can get on with having a scrap, and I guess it's hard to write stories with these big important hero characters and then not make a fancy model to sell and give it rules for the wargame.
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Feb 7, 2024 19:29
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Well the Eldar do have the Avatar of their dead got Khaine that requires the sacrifice of their nominal craftworld leader to bring to life for a few minutes. But that falls under the faceless monstrosities umbrella like major chaos demons and don't count as characters.
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Feb 7, 2024 19:46
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I mean my Saga armies absolutely do have models for Charlemagne, Aethelflaed, William the Bastard, etc just cause it's cool. (There's even rules for them but the rules are dumb so I just use them as generics)
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Feb 7, 2024 19:49
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ro5s posted:That's the bit I find baffling - 40K's allergic to historic characters to the point I think Tycho's the only dead one, even Eldrad got better and came back to life. a lot of the 40K characters were historical and they just forgot or didn't look at the dates, lol. once the warp became time travel they just stopped worrying about who was historical or not (except for tycho, who is very dead.) there have been a lot of named characters, with rules and everything, that fell by the wayside over the years. some of them were just names for generic figures (what, you don't remember seraphicus?), some of them were ridiculous (fear the might of arbaal, the champion of chaos who rides a flesh hound!), some were boring (gorthor rides a chariot and has inordinately large horns, even for a beastman). they can't all be winners. as for the sunk cost, most of them were intentionally designed to be basically interchangeable with a generic figure from the same army. the exceptions were few and far between until around about end times, and even then i don't think 40K had any until giant Ghaz.
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Feb 7, 2024 19:57
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StashAugustine posted:I mean my Saga armies absolutely do have models for Charlemagne, Aethelflaed, William the Bastard, etc just cause it's cool. (There's even rules for them but the rules are dumb so I just use them as generics) do they die in battle? Like at all, or frequently? IMO the best historical battle simulations would be ones where losing 10% of your force to dead or mortal injuries would be a devastating defeat, usually, at least until you get to the us civil war era I really like heavy-handed morale mechanics, basically
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Feb 7, 2024 20:03
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Leperflesh posted:do they die in battle? Like at all, or frequently? Well Saga is gleefully Hollywood history (and usually like 50 dudes a side), but even the more grounded games like Art de la Guerre or Field of Glory let you field generically upgraded leaders to represent famous generals. Leaders tend to be less vulnerable in that kind of large scale game but you still absolutely can have your general bite it randomly (ask Gustavus Adolphus)
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Feb 7, 2024 20:08
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Guildencrantz posted:AoS lore has zero interest in daily life at all and you just have no idea what it's like to live there as a non-soldier. Sorry this isn’t true. I don’t want to start a whole thing, but lots of stories and game books have taken a look at the daily life.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:11
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One of the reasons I like Epic Armageddon is the scale, I feel like with hundreds of tiny minis on the table it actually starts getting into the scale of real military skirmish. Like just a small battle though. IRL hannibal and scipio brought like 40k+ men into battle. When you have a battlefield scaled in kilometers, it's easier to tuck your very important general and his van somewhere completely out of range of all missile weapons and retreat when the battle is lost, rather than like lol some cavalry got slightly ahead of where you expected and suddenly ten dudes on horseback are killing your country's general. But we gotta concede to the size of the board and that means literally the king of your country is there on an eagle and needs like all kinds of magic ward saves and poo poo and still might bite it when some skaven with a jezzail snipes him, welp, that's the end of the dynasty, I guess our empire collapses now
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Feb 7, 2024 20:13
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Flames of War famously had a Warriors entry, which included named characters of WW2. I never actually got to try FoW, but I remember one of the forces I tried to build was inexplicably locked behind a particular Soviet officer and his attache. I never, ever cared for using unique characters. It's fine for something like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, but these are my guys. It's pretty great that they're distancing from that in ToW. And yes I'm prepared to be disappointed when it all comes flooding back in the first General's Handbook. If they've still got molds for Teclis and the Von Carsteins, we're going to get those characters.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:17
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It doesn't appear to be mentioned as much any more, but early on the defence for Big-Boss-(Wo)Man Showing Up With, Like, Fifty Guys was that a bigger battle was happening just off screen, and the fight you were playing was a vital, central part of the greater battle (Starring many Sirs Not Appearing In This Film) and the outcome of the game actually happening on the table would have an affect on the greater imaginary battle. Well, more imaginary battle.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:25
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Leperflesh posted:One of the reasons I like Epic Armageddon is the scale, I feel like with hundreds of tiny minis on the table it actually starts getting into the scale of real military skirmish. Like just a small battle though. IRL hannibal and scipio brought like 40k+ men into battle. When you have a battlefield scaled in kilometers, it's easier to tuck your very important general and his van somewhere completely out of range of all missile weapons and retreat when the battle is lost, rather than like lol some cavalry got slightly ahead of where you expected and suddenly ten dudes on horseback are killing your country's general. Yeah ADLG/FOG are more on the Warmaster scale- albeit deliberately ambiguous so you can have the same system model the vast armies of ancient empires and also tiny feudal retinues, but still at least thousands a side.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:34
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LashLightning posted:It doesn't appear to be mentioned as much any more, but early on the defence for Big-Boss-(Wo)Man Showing Up With, Like, Fifty Guys was that a bigger battle was happening just off screen, and the fight you were playing was a vital, central part of the greater battle (Starring many Sirs Not Appearing In This Film) and the outcome of the game actually happening on the table would have an affect on the greater imaginary battle. Well, more imaginary battle. I appreciated that as a veil of plausibility but it breaks down with a lot of scenarios, like battle for the pass, defend the hill, etc. and especially when the terrain does not seem to include some vitally important objective... or any objective system whatsoever, for that matter. One thing I would really like, and maybe it's there already (I still don't have the rules) are more objective-based scenarios. "Just kill everyone on the other side or at least get all their flags" is 100% fine for learning the game or having a quick skirmish, but the default play mode for Epic is a game with six objective markers on the table where you need to claim more before the end of the game, casualties be damned, and I love that as it forces you to do things like advance and maneuver, in this game about maneuvering and advancing, and it gives more weight to e.g. decisions about retreating in order or just camping a unit on a hill all game or spending your resources hunting down the enemy's caster and general.
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Feb 7, 2024 20:42
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Leperflesh posted:I appreciated that as a veil of plausibility but it breaks down with a lot of scenarios, like battle for the pass, defend the hill, etc. and especially when the terrain does not seem to include some vitally important objective... or any objective system whatsoever, for that matter. Tbf at least some of this is the time period (that they're ripping off). At the Warmaster scale, an army is gonna be an independent unit- possibly the only one fielded by its side- and its goals are either "get to a point off the map" or "prevent the army from getting to that point", and the decision to engage has already been made pregame or else there'd be no battle. Meanwhile an Epic army is like brigade scale- that's not even the size of Omaha Beach! In that type of battle, it makes sense that you'd be trying to seize operationally useful objectives for the rest of the army
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Feb 7, 2024 20:52
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Yeah and I'm talking about at the Old World 32mm scale, if this is a pivotal subsection of a much larger battle, why is it here and is it really just two generals decided to try and kill each other, with their attached retinues and whatever is lying around nearby? Or is there maybe something of key importance at this specific spot that brings them together. But more importantly from a game design perspective I think a battle is more interesting and engaging if it's not just "mash these two lines together and roll the dice. " That's the real reason I'm more interested in this game than Age of Sigmar, really. Not just bouncing off the lore, but the maneuver/countermaneuver aspect of formation battle.
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Feb 7, 2024 21:02
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Square base I assume each block of 15 dudes is actually 150 or 1500 or 15k, given the movement rules.
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Feb 8, 2024 00:36
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Square base I assume each block of 15 dudes is actually 150 or 1500 or 15k, given the movement rules. Its 15K if you're playing skaven, 1500 if you're playing orcs, 150 if you're playing Empire and actually just 15 dudes if you're playing Chaos
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Feb 8, 2024 16:31
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Some disagreement in my local group about how per 1000 pts units work when playing at point values <1000. If you're playing e.g. Tomb Kings Grand Army, can you not take any High Priests or Tomb Kings at 800 pts?
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Feb 10, 2024 06:29
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I'd read it as one per full 1000. Having one at 800 is probably ok but two at 1200 would be strange? Admittedly, it's not clear.
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Feb 10, 2024 11:06
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I think RAW it doesn’t kick in till the full 1k. So you have the same limits from 0-999,1k-1999, etc
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Feb 10, 2024 11:39
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Yeah I'd definitely read it as per full 1K. It's still far more generous than previous editions. I foresee a rise in 1999 point games for this reason, as a "2K points but only one lord-tier character" mode of play.
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Feb 10, 2024 11:54
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It's worth noting that you can't bring those things in Allied detachments unless you've got a thousand points of allies.
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Feb 10, 2024 14:33
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moths posted:It's worth noting that you can't bring those things in Allied detachments unless you've got a thousand points of allies. I'd say you're likely wrong. Nothing in the ally rules explicitly says that.
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Feb 10, 2024 15:29
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p280 posted:An allied contingent is effectively a miniature army in its own right. Accordingly, an allied contingent must abide by the army composition rules and the percentages given for the army composition list used to create it They could have been more explicit IMO but "0-1 per thousand points" is a composition rule for the list used to create the allied contingent.
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Feb 10, 2024 15:54
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I think RAW it doesn’t kick in till the full 1k. So you have the same limits from 0-999,1k-1999, etc I feel like it's obviously supposed to be 0-1 for each 1k but I don't think it's explicit because saying you can't take 2 in a 2000pt game if your list is 1997 pts feels a little too bullshit.
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Feb 10, 2024 16:01
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moths posted:"An allied contingent is effectively a miniature army in its own right" That reads more like a fluff segment, not a rules segment. Actual composition rules: 1 general, 1 non-character unit. Must follow the percentages and composition rules. page 278 "In some rare cases, you might encounter the term 'up to X per 1000 points', with X being a number. For example, up to 3 per 1000 points, indicating that an army may contain no more than three units made up of that type of model for every full 1000 points of army size (as described on page 276)" page 276 talks about army size in terms similar to game size. Too long to quote. But if allies are fully separate armies, it would lead to lot of funny effects. For example the Bretonnian Errantry crusade list of infamy: You don't have to take any Knight Errants, because it is 1+ unit per 1000 You can take 0-1 Dukes, but no Barons as they are 0-1 per 1000 points. (This is on regular Bretonnian list too) Similar things with other armies like chaos warriors. Can take 0-1 Chaos Lord or Daemon prince, but not the Exalted champion as they are 0-1 per 1000.
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Feb 10, 2024 16:23
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More funny business: 2000 point game: Bretonnian army (^1500 points) is allied with Bretonnian errantry knights (up to 500 points): It can have 2 dukes (1 per each list) This is undisputed. But how many Barons it can have? 2 (0-1 per 1000, so your main list can have 2, but errantry list is under 1000 points, so they can't have any) 4 (Both list can get 2, because it is a 2000 point game) 1 (Main list is under 2000 points, so only gets one, Errantry list is under 1000, so doesn't get any)
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Feb 10, 2024 16:31
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I'm not sure about the brets- I don't have the book with their other armies. But it looks like you're overthinking it. Issaries posted:Must follow the percentages and composition rules. Exactly. The 0-1 per 1,000 restriction appears in the list for the allied contingent. Ie: You'd need a thousand points of that army to include them. It's a composition rule, and that army has less than a thousand points - all the "extra" points are external to that army and its rules. This restriction doesn't prohibit the parent list, because allies are an entry (and part of) the parent army list.
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Feb 10, 2024 16:55
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