WFB 9th Edition Rumor Roundup

[Auticus]

Throughout the history of the game as long as I have been involved, every edition change has had a line of people claiming to be "in the know" with a series of rumors that range from minor to lolWUT. Usually most of the rumors pan out to be false or badly stretched versions of reality.

Some of these rumors I feel are spread to simply incite rage and recruit people to other games.

We will see in a few months.

[Cutter]

Some of these rumors I feel are spread to simply incite rage and recruit people to other games.

I haven't checked lately but I think that's what the internet is for.

(The rage inciting I mean, not so much the recruitment.)

[Erik Setzer]

Yup. Having it scale better from skirmish up to regiments makes sense, hell even having an integrated form of Mordheim included would make more sense than scrapping the Battles in Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

I don't get what happened there... Fine, ditch Mordheim as part of killing Specialist Games, even though you could still have people playing it buying WFB models and support it with new rules for new WFB models. But they also at one point had Warhammer Skirmish rules (and Warbands rules for 200-500 point games), and ditched both. They were designed during 6th edition, maybe 7th? So they were generally compatible with the current rules. Just tweak a little, and boom, good to go.

It seems that, like with 40K, they decided to leave out the low-level rules so they could encourage people to buy large armies (with 40K seeing Kill Team at least come back as a nearly $20 digital download, meh), and that backfired because it meant they'd stripped out the entry-level versions of the game that also served to encourage existing players to try out new armies in bite-size chunks.

- - - Updated - - -

On the topic of round bases: I don't care. I will keep basing my guys as they are. I use Daemons with square bases in 40K because I based them that way to use in both games. I still have some older walkers and stuff for 40K that have square bases because that's what came with them back in the day. No one cares. If the game changes to round bases, no one will care if you keep using square bases. If they do, smack 'em with a heavy book.

[grimmas]

I don't see the round base thing being particularly implausible or indeed something that will matter too much. If they follow the LoTR/WoTR model, in the skirmish game it doesn't really matter what base shape one uses and is this likely to be a gateway game ( more on this later) so people with existing armies won't be playing too much or if they do it won't really matter as it will be a fairly relaxed beginners affair. For the battle game again it doesn't matter as it will designed to be played with movement trays, much like WFB and WoTR does, so again it doesn't matter what bases the individual models are on. The movement trays for round bases already exist for WoTR. It also means GW only has to make one shape of base which is better logistically

It makes good sense to have a gateway skirmish game like LoTR as this provides a good entry point to the hobby. This was certainly the case during with the original LoTR game as people were playing that and then moving on WFB for something more. So much so it pushed WFB sales to equal with 40K, something that hadn't happened before or since. ( I know this because I worked for them at the time and they did tell store managers that sort of thing then)

And anything that gets more people playing WFB is a good thing.

Of course they didn't need the End Time to do any of this however. But let's face it the background was such that most of the Races would have not even met each other let along fought battles against each other. So it need to be shaken up to added a more plausible narrative and whatever the "competitive" crowd say it is pretty crucial in a fantasy game setting. e

[Path Walker]

The trouble with Mordheim/Necromunda was that their rule systems, while fantastic, were diverse from the core games, this is not ideal, people don't want to learn new sets of rules to play a game, Necromunda launched when 2nd edition was strong and the rules were the same with a few additions, it did well and launched 2 other similar games, Mordheim didn't do well at the time, its rules were very very different from WFB, more like 2nd edition 40/Necromunda, which had been replaced the year earlier with the streamlined 3rd edition, and people didn't want the skirmish level fantasy game that GW were offering.

Always odd to see people shouting at GW about ditching games/ranges when at the time the sales were stagnant. Same with Squats, to paraphrase Jervis "Where the hell were all these people when no one was buying Squats?"

[Mr Mystery]

"Where the hell were all these people when no one was buying Squats?"

That's easy - not playing 40k on account of quite possibly still being little more than a twinkle in the Milkman's eye.

Srsly. Squats went the way of the Dodo officially back in 1998 when 3rd Ed came out, and received little more than a handful of models for their Epic range in....ooooooh.....1993ish, with Titan Legions?

I've been doing this hobby for yonks, and have never met a Squat player anywhere near my age - and I started young in 1989.

Ergo, many Squat Enthusiasts are just Hobby Hipsters, all dewey eyed for something from the past. Not because it was necessarily any good, but because it's from the past, and thus Hipster.

[Erik Setzer]

Of course they didn't need the End Time to do any of this however. But let's face it the background was such that most of the Races would have not even met each other let along fought battles against each other. So it need to be shaken up to added a more plausible narrative and whatever the "competitive" crowd say it is pretty crucial in a fantasy game setting. e

This is no more true than suggesting the same of 40K. There were many reasons the various forces could run into each other. Just because a lot of people were too lazy to actually figure it out doesn't mean it wasn't there. Okay, so maybe Kislevites and Lizardmen might seem odd... except what if some Kislevites were going to Lustria to search for some kind of treasure, or the Lizardmen found a Chaos relic in Kislev and were coming to cleanse it but failed to mention it to the Kislevites to warn them? See, right there, easy ways to explain a fight between the two.

People can't say they care about the fluff and then say they have to be spoon-fed reasons to fight, when the fluff gave so many reasons.

The real problem is that a lot of their looks weren't unique enough to copyright (leading to some companies releasing very similar models for a lot less), and the world map was basically a very slightly altered Earth, with a lot of groups being based on their real world locales (i.e. Lizardmen being Aztec/Mayan, Kislev being Russia, Norscans being Norsemen, Albion is England/Ireland, Nippon and Cathay just straight up use real names for Japan and China, Hobgoblins were Mongols, Chaos Dwarfs were Russians, Khemri was Egypt, Tilea and Estalia were Italy and Spain, etc.). But heck, they could have reshaped the globe without completely exploding it. Might have taken a bit more work to explain, but given the level of catastrophe happening, probably not.

Eh, we'll see what they did with the fluff. But I'm sure those models that fit as Warhammer units but cost 50% or less were a determining factor in the shakeup.

[Mr Mystery]

I'm not sure it was a geographic problem with the background, so much as...well....it was all terribly generic.

Good, but generic.

End Times got my attention, and looking at how fast that stuff sold out, I'm far from alone. Mayhap the entire thing was a colossal publicity stunt, spread over five volumes of win with some nice models to remind us what the game is about. Herald of the New Times - new edition released with heightened interest from lapsed gamers.

[grimmas]

That's just the point though Erik one really does need to come up with quite a bit of story to justify battle between the various races, it seems to rely on various armies wondering around thousands of miles from home after having travelled through other hostile lands just to get there. Take your Lizardmen example it's not just Kislev that's implausible the same would go for them fighting, WoC, the Empire, bretonnian or Ogre Kingdoms. The same goes for Khemri. It just takes (or rather took) too much justicification to make it seem plausible. You may say people are lazy but games with better settings do seem to sell better

Edit

Of course everyone you could just go with "their ship gets blown off course, with a whole army on it" but that gets old pretty quick.

[Erik Setzer]

Again, the same could be said for 40K. Or any world unless you throw everyone onto the same square mile of land, so they can't help but run into each other all the time. Or come up with some lame claim that everyone is on a cosmic island that keeps bumping into other cosmic islands and people fight "just because" (which is one of the rumors that had come out about the new background).

In ALL scenarios, you have to use imagination to come up with a reason X army is fighting Y army. How did Cadians end up running into Chaos Marines? Why are Blood Angels fighting Dark Angels? I could list example after example. And how can Warmachine pull it off, or other fantasy settings?

So, basically, people need all of the races to be dumped into a blender, so they can fight for eternity, with no reason as to why, just so people don't have to think about why X might be fighting Y.

Yeah, that's not a problem with the setting, that's a problem with people.

Let me show you the bigger problem:

[url]http://www.avatars-of-war.com/eng/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=129&I temid=143&armycode=Warthrone+new+releases[/url]

Skim through that selection. I see Chaos Marauders, Dwarf Ironbreakers, Dwarf Slayers, Witch Elves, a War Priest, a Witch Hunter, Orcs of various kinds, Goblins, Necromancer, female Vampire, human captains, Chaos Warriors, Chaos champions, Dark Elves, Saurus characters, Dwarf Rangers, Dwarf handgunners, a Beastman lord, a Skaven chieftain, a Khorne Herald, and a Nurgle Herald, along with some other stuff. All of it fits perfectly into Warhammer's aesthetic, and they can't stop it with Warhammer the way it is now. And since that stuff looks pretty good and the regiments are much cheaper than GW's, that creates a problem. Heck, if I didn't play primarily at a GW store, I'd have some of those characters at least, because some of those characters are, IMO at least, better than GW's (especially the Dark Elves, the humans, and the Chaos Warriors). And they fit perfectly! So, yeah, blow up the Warhammer world and redo the races to be easier to copyright so there's less competition for people's money (rather than do a better job with pricing and all).