The primary way I interact with Warhammer these days is through fiction and videogames - which I'm sure works just fine for them. New versions of the flagship game, Warhammer 40,000, come out fairly frequently I would say - and with them comes a host of rule changes, changes for how armies are constructed, and changes to what your models do - up to and including exile. 11th Edition just came out, and I've looked at it and looked at it; you can look at it too. I wonder who outgrew who; the conservative rule shifts and terror of their own fanbase makes the game feel inert. And it's gotten so expensive that I'm considering going elsewhere for rules and printing my own models out of poison.
Roughly a billion years ago, Blizzard was screwing around with class abilities in Word of Warcraft because things that worked fine in PvE didn't work in their PvP Battlegrounds, which I almost never played. It recalls Positive K's 1992 banger, I Got A Man. What's your man got to do with me? "Your Man" in this scenario is PvP. I guess? I'm starting to wonder what this paragraph is about. Oh, now I remember. Lots of games tune themselves for the most misshapen, irradiated mutants in their Tournament Caste. I think the vast majority of players don't touch that at all. I certainly don't touch it, and I have like ten thousand points of models painted. So do my friends. The most fun I've had with their stuff lately has all been sidequests off the main lines - their delightful, board-gamey skirmish product Spearhead, and the incredibly weird but also smart and fun Blood Bowl. Then again, I loved their mech combat game Adeptus Titanicus and their grimdark aerial dogfighting game Aeronautica Imperialis. They're rule sets where their journeyman designers can smooth things out or just be weird. I like to picture that weirdo scribbling away when I play these games.
When Gabe's youngest plays the game with his friends, they use basic stuff like rolling to hit and save plus weapon effects and things like that, but there's a lot that they don't use because from their perspective it doesn't add anything. As we have said many times: the game is about throwing a handful of models at your friend's face. Anything that obscures the throwing or the face isn't what I want. I wonder what the game would look like if it was made with ninety-five percent of its players in mind.
I've considered checking out some of the One Page Rules stuff - streamlined systems you can use any models you want with, for fantasy or sci-fi. We've also been getting a jumpstart on our Coot Era over at GMT Games, playing masterworks where everything is made out of cardboard and you have everything you'll ever need, forever, in one box. It's so funny. Games Workshop has me on the fiction and the crafting - just dead to rights. And I have thousands of points worth of models that might never see a table.
(CW)TB out.
