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If GW fills its game tables at Adepticon, then they're demonstrating the reality that a big chunk of Adepticon attendees want to play at those tables. If Adepticon finds it hasn't got room for all the tables of different games that it could fill, it should seek a larger venue. It's not GW's fault or problem if Adepticon's space is too limited. Basically the problem here isn't Adepticon bending over for GW, it's Adepticon lacking sufficient space. That said, GW definitely should revive Games Day, not to mention featuring game play at the Golden Daemon Awards. There's a large and eager fan base that used to love going to those things, back when they weren't just charging exorbitant fees for the privilege of getting to stand in line and buy things at 100% retail prices. I attended the GDAs in 1990 and 1991 as a teenager and doing so firmly cemented my lifelong interest in their products. I got to watch and participate in games, try a speed painting contest (for free), bid at an auction for bags of random minis and loot (very generously stuffed with good stuff, I paid like ten pounds and got probably 40 pounds worth of stuff), goggle at the GDA finalist minis in display cases, and meet famous GW people face to face to ask questions and chat. It was epic. ...literally, they were playing Epic! They had a huge game of Epic going and you could go up and take a turn or two, with the guidance of a staffer who knew the rules, and then hand off to the next kid in line. There was a time when GW was amazing at capturing and retaining customers, and having their own conventions was a big part of that. But also showcasing their games at other gaming conventions is a very good idea. From a corporate standpoint, it's good to get the attention of gamers who aren't already walking in to your stores. From a game development perspective, it's an opportunity to get independent playtesting and feedback from seasoned gamers, float trial balloons to gauge interest in various product possibilities, preview stuff before it comes out to build interest and excitement, and get your staff to take in the status quo in the wider gaming universe so you can understand your market competition better, identify and adopt advancements in game design theory, and so on. It's definitely a good move by GW and it seems absurd to me to complain about them taking steps towards doing it. Age of Sigmar is still a bad game. So another possible side effect is exposing Age of Sigmar players showing up to Adepticon to other better games being played next door.
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Mar 3, 2017 18:55
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Black_Nexus posted:rotbringers Hi guys, thanks for inviting me, hey look I brought some rot got some rot here I brought for you
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Mar 12, 2017 20:00
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I love it. GW incentivizes buying their insanely priced gold paint by giving units bonuses for being painted with more gold
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Mar 17, 2017 21:21
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Yeah the 8th edition building rules are hilarious. A single building can hold a single unit of any size. The actual models have to be normal sized, they can't hold like cavalry or monsters etc. but a 100-rat skaven unit is juuuust fine. Of course the rules also explicitly say that players can agree that very small buildings are impassible terrain instead, or break big ones up into multiple pieces (like a castle might have two towers and a wall, each of which is a "building" for rules purposes). What they don't say (and therefore presumably you can't do, even though of course you can, you idiots, it's a game, you can make up house rules) is that you can define an upper limit to how many models can be in a garrisoning unit. So I think probably most players didn't. The funniest part is the magic and template weapons rules. While buildings offer "no additional protection" against magic, they actually do: templates only hit D6 models. Period. You can put an entire large template vortex or something onto a building and you hit only D6 models with it, no matter what. So even if your dragon trots up and puts his lips to an arrow slit and fills the building with an inferno, he can only cook one to six duders. Hah. Deino posted:Ah, I'm mixing up special rules in my old age. Braces of Pistols had Quick to fire, which would allow them to Stand and Shoot at any range. The dwarf rule to ignore the penalty for doing so is just gravy. Buildings did limit shooting from within them to no more than five models per floor of the building, unless you agreed otherwise beforehand. (And that's where the 20 story tower advantage thing comes from, of course). Why no, it doesn't take extra turns for those dwarven pistoliers to climb up all those floors, that'd be silly! Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 16:53
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Don't play a horde army in a game where you have to move each individual model with a tape measure.
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Apr 3, 2017 17:04
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Only if they feel like not following the rules.  I mean of course they do, the rules are impossible to follow. But even so, I'm just helpfully pointing out to someone, before they get too invested, that Age of Sigmar is a game where you move individual models and so having 200 models on the table is gonna suck. mango sentinel posted:I think I talked about this in the 40k thread once but I've got a bad thing about liking horde armies for the fluff, not because it's what I want to play. A solution is getting some laser cut MDF movement trays for deployment and movement until pile-ins. You can probably manage this, but if I understand correctly, you'll take a significant penalty for not being able to do stuff like surround a smaller unit, straddle a fence, string out into a long line near a piece of terrain, etc. while your opponent is able to do so. Unless your opponent is also using movement trays! I bet if you did some very simple mods to the rules, you could avoid the whole pile-in mess, too. Just let the whole unit fight if the front rank is in contact, maybe make up some simple rules for maneuvering units via wheeling etc.
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Apr 3, 2017 17:57
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Atlas Hugged posted:Well, what if you divided your units into fives and every five guys was on a tray? You'd have a much easier time moving since now you're moving between 1 and 4 trays instead of 5-20 models, but you'd still have the flexibility to take advantage of the terrain or to surround a unit or to position yourself into a line. Yeah, hmm, it just occurred to me, this could work really well for a sci-fi miniatures game, too!
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Apr 4, 2017 01:20
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Yeah. I did a similar color scheme on my tomb kings but I did aquamarine/red/gold for the shields too, and I think your white scheme looks better.
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Apr 24, 2017 01:43
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Horace-Noah posted:Man, I'd love to see some pictures of those. I've got some photos from old Oath threads, but I've been meaning to put the whole (painted portion of the) army together for a group photoshoot.
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Apr 24, 2017 03:09
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Horace-Noah posted:That would rule and, you should do it. Here's a collection of Tomb King photos taken for Oath threads, 2011-2015. https://www.flickr.com/gp/slyhatjones/V6925z Please don't doxx me.
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Apr 24, 2017 21:49
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My ushabti are all metal, although I think I have a box of the guys with bows in finecast. Got them all as part of a full-army purhcase from an embittered 7th edition Tomb Kings player, not long after 8th edition came out. I paid $70 for an entire army. The last floating guy is a Reaper Bones model: http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/egypt/latest/77147 Search reapermini.com for "egypt" or "nefsokar" to see all their Not-Tomb-Kings models. A lot of them are really good, and if you don't like Bones, they're most all available in metal too. The swarms are also mostly Reaper I think. e. Oh yeah, the dude at the altar, I lost one of his arms and had to kind of sculpt drapes onto a replacement arm. I found the real arm later so eventually I might fix him since his replacement arm drapes are kind of crap. The giant is my most heavy conversion I've done, because the bone giant is so goofy by default. I think it came out OK. I have a unit of tomb guard I finished painting last year, I've finished a lot of the incomplete bases you see in the photos, I've got four chariots painted up, and I probably have one or two other things that I didn't paint for an oath. The necrosphinx is magnetized. You can take off the wings and stick the howdah on, and replace the torso and head with the head with cowl. I never painted the howdah or the head with cowl, though. The tomb king has a peg on his foot and comes off his base, so he can ride in the howdah, or you can put the four normal dudes in the howdah, also with pegs. The pegs don't work too well, so I intended to switch to magnets. Also the wings' magnet never quite lined up right, so there's a small gap when you stick them to the body that always bugs me. These guys all have magnetized bases so they can stick nicely to metal movement trays (I get them from Shogun, here in California). All my movement trays are the wrong size for Kings of War, so my next project is new movement trays that will let me play KoW. I also still have tons and tons of tomb kings stuff to paint. A dozen more chariots, probably 40 guys on horseback, probably another 50 assembled skeletons (some badly painted by the former owner) and probably another 100+ unassembled skeletons, another two boxes of plastic tomb guard, another 20 or so metal tomb guard, two more liche priests, another bone giant, two scorpions, three giant snake dudes that I finished magnetising so they could be either model type but never got around to basing or painting, it goes on and on and on. AoS totally killed my enthusiasm for the army but KoW has made me want to get them out again. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 01:50
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I was at a swap meet, he was piecing them out so I bought like three chariots or something for what he was asking. Maybe $15. Then after the meet, I see him loading stuff in his car so I go over and say "look I know this is massively lowballing, I don't think it's a fair price, but it's what I can afford: how about $70 for everything?" and he didn't hesitate. Dude was just horribly demoralized and wanted out. So I think honestly I paid more like $100 for everything? But if you discount 3 chariots it was $70. Maybe someone else at the meet bought one or two items, I don't know. He probably got a lot of his stuff second-hand too. Almost none was painted, but he'd assembled a lot of cavalry - obviously had been playing 7th edition with a cav-heavy list, which was exactly crap in 8th. I figure at the time I got probably $500+ retail worth of minis, and today it'd be worth three or more times that if I sold it all off piecemeal.
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Apr 25, 2017 02:01
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MonsterEnvy posted:I don't mind there being multiple rolls to kill somthing. If there was only a hit and save roll everything would die too easily. uhhhh no, that's not what that means at all. If you have to roll a 3+ and then 4+ to wound and then they get a 5+ save, that's not statistically different from you just having to make a single 5+ roll to wound and then they get a 5+ to save. The probabilities are identical. (.66 x .5 = .33) Of course it's not as granular, you can't replicate all of the combinations of one d6 roll followed by a second d6 roll if the first one succeeded, with just one d6. But this is easily solved by rolling a die with more sides. If you wanted to you could go through all of your units in age of sigmar, find the probability of their wounding as a percentage, and then just roll d%. And an even better option is to roll two or more dice and add them together because that gives you a probability curve, and you can do all kinds of interesting game design things with probability curves. GW even makes a game that takes advantage of that fact: blood bowl. But the thing that most people complain about here is not just the completely unnecessary "roll against one target and then roll successes again against another target" - it's the fact both of those target numbers are determined by the attacker. In other words, whatever the likelihood a given unit has of causing wounds, is the same regardless of who they're attacking. The only thing the target affects is the save roll (plus any special abilities tacked on). This is different from how it was in warhammer fantasy, where attacker and defender compared stats to find the target numbers needed. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:18 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 06:16
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I hope we don't have to belabor the point. It's a clear flaw in the game, but it's not a huge deal in play. To me, it's more interesting as a point of evidence on the heap that age of sigmar was designed by someone who didn't really understand game design, or at least, wasn't familiar with non-gw game designs. More novel, and to me more ugly, are all the weird measurement and piling in rules.
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May 1, 2017 16:32
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mango sentinel posted:I dunno what WHFB rolls looked like but the Hit/Wound/Save thing seems core to the idea of Warhammer as a game these days and even though they blew up the setting people loved, they found that mechanic too precious to replace. Yes. I loved 4th edition D&D as the best edition ever made, but it had exactly the same problem. The designers understood they were jettisoning a lot of the garbage that had been carried along in previous editions entirely through tradition, but they failed to fully commit to that purpose and kept some things that they should have left out. For example, ability scores. All D&D 4E characters have piles of things that depend on the ability score modifier, but the base scores themselves are almost entirely for flavor - and they actually reduce rather than expand roleplaying opportunity whenever a player gets fixated on the flavorful meaning of an ability score. The game would have been better if you just had a list of modifiers. All those modifiers had to scale with character level anyway. Pawl posted:You're also not accounting for the massive amount of modifiers in the game like +bonuses and rerolls A massive amount of modifiers in the game is actually another problem. Even with the warscrolls, having to count up a bunch of different modifiers and remember all the sources of them is quite error-prone. It's too easy to forget a bonus, or forget that a particular bonus doesn't apply in this specific situation, and the more bonuses your opponent is applying to his own rolls, the harder it is for you to conveniently audit what he's doing. Not even because you think he's cheating, necessarily, just to keep track of why he's getting those bonuses so you can potentially interfere with your own units' capabilities.
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May 1, 2017 17:09
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Well, was, anyway. There are fantasy sword & sorcery RPGs with nothing relating to D&D available now. They're not super popular of course, but it's quite similar to the GW situation.
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May 1, 2017 17:43
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MonsterEnvy posted:Then what is. facts vs. opinions. Fact: all of the statistical probabilities of rolling a d6 and then on success rolling another d6 can be reasonably approximated with a single roll of some other die or set of dice. So rolling a d6 and then another d6 is an unnecessary inefficiency that adds no mechanical advantage to the game. Opinion: rolling loads of dice is fun If we disagree on a matter of fact, one or the other of us can present evidence to support our positions, but we are not having a subjective disagreement. If we disagree on a matter of opinion, one or the other of us can present persuasive arguments to support our positions, but ultimately the judgement is subjective.
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May 1, 2017 18:28
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MasterSlowPoke posted:And at the same time, a single person posting isn't irrefutable. I love Leperflesh, and I see how he thinks the 20ish possible combinations of To-Hit/To-Wound with auto pass/fail on 6's/1's doesn't have enough granularity. There's also problems with his solutions. 8+ sided dice have issues with being cocked, they're too large to roll more than 10 of them at a time, they don't pack neatly storage, numerals take longer to parse than pips, determining at a glance what side is ontop on multiple d10+'s takes longer, etc. Yeah I mean I also don't think it's great to approach a game with so many models on the board with mechanics where you roll for every model's interaction with every other model, e.g. the piles-o-dice solution. I don't think rolling piles of d8s or d20s or whatever would be that much harder to figure out, though: I know there's other games that do it. I think Age of Sigmar would benefit from that "complete structural change" you mention. But if you still wanted to use models-as-hitpoints for your units and still move every model individually and still have combats where not every model is attacking or defending etc., you could for example roll a single D20 or a couple of D6es or whatever, and add a modifier depending on how many models are still in the unit. Ex: your Bloodblood GoreGorers come in a unit of 12 or more guys. At full strength, roll 4d6, and add +1 for every two models beyond 12 in the unit. When the unit is at half its original strength, drop a D6. Now they only roll 2d6, +1 for each two models beyond 6 in the unit. When the unit is down to 1/4 strength, they only roll 1D6, no bonuses. So now you have a unit that starts with a very well defined bell curve, and you can buy extra models to both give it more resiliency and boost the numbers of that curve. You still lose some strength from the unit as it drops models, simulating the attrition that games like Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40k prefer, while avoiding the need to match up every single model with enemies, measure tons of fiddly 1" distances, or worry about getting every model in the unit into pile-in range in order to maximize their attacks. You can apply some general rule for units caught in combat with multiple other units (maybe drop a die for every unit beyond the first being fought, but roll against each enemy unit? Or maybe you can opt to apply however many of their total dice to a roll against each enemy unit... something like that?) and you can make a similar rule for their defense and how they take wounds/lose models. There's design room in between where skirmish games sit, where every figure on the table is making individual attacks, defenses, etc., and mass-battle games like Epic where the smallest unit is a squad and entire formations fight as one with mechanics aimed at whole-formation combats. I think Age of Sigmar is trying to sit in that design space, but the two different d6es for each model for each attack is an unnecessary anchor that is doing the game no favors. It's not a massive deal. As I said before, there are other places where I think Age of Sigmar has larger problems. It's just a noticeable one.
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May 1, 2017 18:52
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Also, subjectivity is not an end to debate. If it were, art reviews would not exist.
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May 1, 2017 19:02
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I made this because I was bored and I like spreadsheets and I wanted to actually look at the odds and see how well the Age of Sigmar attack rolls can be represented by single dice: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lvh9J89Oqv6atCfMuWwhXecSw1LRPfWAFnUulAIzBNk/edit?usp=sharing I only simulated a d8, d10, d12, and d20. Obviously D% would be even better, but as MasterSlowPoke pointed out, rolling 2d10 for each man in a unit would be awkward. There are also d14, d16, d18, and d24 available on the market, but they're much less common and sometimes more expensive than they should be, so I stuck to the very commonly found polyhedral dice.
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May 1, 2017 20:52
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Texmo posted:but it's way funnier when say, 5 dice all come up 1's and you can yell 'you useless bastards what are you doing' at your pile of dipshits, whereas you can't exactly represent that 0.01% chance on even a D100 Actually this reminds me of another weird issue Age of Sigmar's "roll a d6, and then roll another d6 for successes on the first" which only became clear to me when I made that table yesterday. The easiest roll is of course the 1+ 1+ sequence, which wounds 100% of the time. But the next easiest roll is 1+ 2+ or 2+ 1+, which wounds about 83.3% of the time. And the next easiest after that is 2+ 2+, which wounds about 69.4% of the time. This is some surprisingly huge gaps. By comparison, Age of Sigmar provides very tightly arranged options for really difficult attacks at the opposite end of the scale. The hardest roll is 6+ 6+, which wounds about 2.8% of the time. The next hardest is 6+ 5+ or 5+ 6+, which wounds about 5.6% of the time, and then the 5+ 5+ roll, which wounds about 11.1% of the time. Notice how much more closely packed these unlikely probability options are, compared to the "good" ones? Age of Sigmar's attack roll sequence gave the game designers no basic ability to provide for several increasingly good options at the top of the scale. It's either a certain hit, or you're down to the 83 and 70 percent options. There's no combo of two dice that lets them give a model anything close to a 90% chance to hit, or a 75% chance. I wouldn't have guessed it before doing the math and it strikes me as weird. Of course you can give models higher but non-certain ability to deal wounds by giving them multiple attacks, but that also increases the maximum number of wounds they can cause: so even if you give them (say) three attacks of 3+ 4+, which works out to averaging 1 wound per combat round, they now have the potential to cause 2 or 3 wounds that combat round. So you can't really give any model in Age of Sigmar like a 90% chance of causing 1 wound but no chance of causing 2. ...well, you can. But you'd have to make it a special rule, like "when this model attacks, roll for all three of its attacks, but it can never cause more than one wound." which trumps the dice but is kind of an ugly hack. I don't know if that's really a requirement for a game to do, I just found it an odd gap in the design space. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:05 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 19:01
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I remembered it, and then remembered that "reroll 1s" on a 1+ 2+ or 2+ 2+ roll would be pretty crazy poo poo. (Also I couldn't immediately remember how to add that to a probability formula. I think you first find the odds of success, and then add to it the odds of failure times the odds of success on the reroll. So, on a 2+ 2+ where you can reroll 1s on the first roll but not the second roll, you'd have: ((5/6)*(5/6))+((1/6)*(5/6)) = .6944 + .1389 = .8333 Which hey, is exactly the same as a 1+ 2+ roll. So did I do this right?) e.2 no I didn't do this right, because you have to find the odds of success of the first roll that gets the reroll before you move on to the second roll. So, to simulate getting to reroll 1s on the first roll but not the second: (5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6))*(5/6) = .810. So it's nearly but not quite identical to a 1+ 2+ roll. By a difference of about 2.3 percent less likely. How about if you do a 2+ 2+ roll where you get to reroll 1s on the second roll only? That's 5/6 * (5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6)) uhhh that has to be exactly the same, because A*B = B*A and here A=(5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6)) and B=(5/6) and all we did was reverse them. How about if you get to reroll ones on either roll? (5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6))*(5/6 + (1/6 * 5/6)) = .945 so there's your ~95% chance, which you could also have simulated with a single 2+ roll on a 1d20.
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:14 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 00:03
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dexefiend posted:It is a trademarked spelling of Orc. Except that it isn't. According to https://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmtext/ a trademark search for the exact word "orruk" returns zero results. E.g., Games Workshop has not bothered to trademark it. Which makes sense, because trademarks are not free, and they made up a shitload of dumb "unique" words. They could trademark them, but until they do, anyone can use them.
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May 6, 2017 20:57
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dexefiend posted:Huh. I stand corrected. I figured it was all a big play to control brand identity. Chill la Chill posted:It still is. GW can bully the small producers who would do it but who would do that in the first place? Much easier to just call your guys generic Orcs so they can be found and used for any system. Yeah. It's basically GW learning lessons from the Chapterhouse lawsuit. -They could already trademark any of their lines by putting their brand first. E.g., "Citadel Elves" or "Warhammer Elves" or "Games Workshop Elves" are all totally fine to trademark. -They could trademark a more generic word, provided they use a distinctive graphic and trademark that graphic. E.g., "Elves" drawn in a unique way. -They don't need a trademark to reserve the distinctive characteristics of their products to themselves, protected by copyright law. E.g., make their elves distinctive and unique in some consistent and novel way, and nobody else can copy that. -They don't need a trademark anyway. It has always been the case and will continue to be the case that any other company can make little plastic elf toys and can even explicitly market them as "compatible with" GW's products. The key restriction is that no other company can "trade on" GW's trade. This is the effect that the IP laws (not including patents) are designed to produce: other companies may not create confusion in the market as to who produced or owns the products being marketed. So you can't package anything in such a way that a reasonable customer might think it was a Games Workshop product. Deliberately using someone else's trademark is de-facto proof that you intentionally tried to do that, so it's a pretty cut & dry protection, which is why companies use trademarks. But even if there is no trademark, or copyright infringement, you can run afoul of the law simply by creating the impression that your products are GW brand products. A judge is going to lean on the intent of the law very heavily in any litigation, as Chapterhouse proved. So if you as a company decide to you can totally sell some warhammer-compatible elves. But if you call them Aelves, while you're not infringing on a registered trademark, in theory it gives GW a little bit of evidence to claim in a courtroom that you were attempting to trade on their brand. But since you are a good company selling good products and don't want to lose a lawsuit, you could just make your own brand quite distinctive, clearly mark it with your own trademarked logo, call your elves aelves, and put a disclaimer on your packaging and website etc. to make it absolutely clear you are not selling a games workshop product. At that point, GW would not likely have enough of a case. e.g., calling them aelves and orruks and ogors only helps GW to solidify a case if you're already massively infringing, and in the meantime, makes their products sound really loving stupid. But that actually probably gets them the effect they wanted anyway. Nobody else would put "aelves" on their products because why would you want to? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:52 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 19:49
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