sean.blog

Warning: Filled with senseless rambling. : )

Tabletop Gaming News ran an editorial last week about Games Workshop and the positive effect that they have had on the miniatures gaming industry as a whole. The article itself was well written, and I think I agree with the general premise of the article. The premise being that it is GW that has, and continues to drive new players into the hobby. I agree with this, and I agree that it is a good thing.

What really shines about the editorial is the comments. For starters, it is an entire comment thread about this topic with no flames, trolls, negative comments. It is very civilized, and a great discussion from top to bottom, something that is rare in threads on this topic. I didn’t comment on the editorial at the time (too busy), and decided this morning to add my comments here.

My background with GW is as follows. I started playing Warhammer about 8 years ago (I bought the starter set on the day I quit smoking - spent the money I was saving on something fun), and built up a fantasy Lizardmen army of about 10,000 points. I also had a Brettonian, Vampire Counts, Tomb Kings, and Beastmen army over the years that I played. I started playing 40K about 2 years after fantasy, and had a couple Space Marine armies as well as a Necron Army. I played Mordhiem, Battlefleet Gothic, Warmaster as well in my course as a GW fan. About 3 years ago I decided that the most recent price gouge at the time was the final straw, and I stopped playing and started selling stuff off. I was not as interested in WFB or 40K as I had been in the past anyway, Warmachine had just come out, and felt it was time to unload some of my stuff on Ebay.

So whats my comment? People who are interested in some of the alternative games need to buy miniatures, buy rules, learn them and get out to the FLGS’s and start playing. If you want to teach a game, play a game regularly, get in touch with the games publisher and find out if they have some sort of demo program. If they do, find out if your area has a rep and get them into your FLGS. If they don’t buy models, paint them up, and apply to be the demo person yourself. Even if you only service a small area. Talk to your FLGS owner, and find out if he can special order stuff for the game you want to encourage. See if the store will set aside time/space for a regular game night for your game.

I think the success of Privateer Press and the relative lack of success for everyone else comes from one thing. Marketing. Warmachine was well hyped, the rule were available for free, it only cost 40.00 at full retail to start playing, the models were very nice, and, most importantly, the game released basically on time. At-43 was well marketed, had the relatively inexpensive starter, with terrain, but the release delays after Operation Damocles came out have hurt the game. Battlefield Evolution was not terribly well marketed, and they had some major quality issues just before release which has pretty much killed the product. Game companies cannot screw up the marketing if they want to compete.

A bunch of long winded thoughts are in the rest of the article below, but it is not more than a brain dump.

A couple of things standout to me when you talk about GW and what place they hold in the miniatures gaming market place. The players, the rules, the games, the company, and the rest of the industry (especially in the fantasy and science fiction realms) stand out to me as key components that define GW and the GW experience.

1. The Players: Maybe this should be “the people” in general, but I think it is mostly the players. When I started playing I found a few people to play against at a local store. The games were fine, we were all novices at the time, so we were not terribly serious. I then found a couple other guys, through the Rice University game club FastWarp, and we started playing regularly. None of us were rules lawyers, we all played to have fun, games were fast and very bloody. This was 5th edition at the time. By the time that 6th edition was out, we had started a Yahoo Group for Houston area players and started hosting tournaments at local game stores. The same group, but not me, has gone on to put together 3 exceedingly popular Indie GT tournaments in Houston. The important part of this is that the games we played, back in 5th edition and early 6th were amazing fun. We didn’t argue, we just played. My experience with the game was that as we added more and more people to our tournaments not all, maybe not even most, players were as laid back as we used to be. I believe your experience with GW games is impacted in a major way by your opponents. I am sure this is the same in all games, but with the complexities and number of special rules in WFB or 40K, I think that rules lawyering can really quickly drag the experience down.
2. The Rules: I want to start by saying that I don’t think that the GW rules “suck”. I actually have copies of both 4th edition 40K and 7th edition WFB. I have not played, but I have read the rules. I think they continue to get better. The problem with the GW rule sets though is that they truly cannot say the rulebook has everything you need to play. I think there are enough game altering special rules in the army books that in order to be effective you need to purchase not only the rule book but the army book for every army that is released. It’s like an advance recon party for your army. If you don’t send one out, you won’t know what you are facing and you will do something that causes major wounds. Pikes were a great example of this. Charging a unit of spearmen with a unit of knights was not a great idea, but the knights could often hold their own. Spears are in the main rulebook. Charging one of those unit of pikeman from the Dogs of War line with cavalry was suicide. The pikes were in the army book, not the main rule book. I know, you can ask your opponent. Still, I think that Privateer press and other companies are doing a much better job at this. Buy a single new book with all of the rules, all of the army lists, everything you need to play the game in one place.
3. The Games: I really like skirmish games. A number of the comments in the editorial discussed how well WFB handles large scale battles. I think that might be one of the things that dragged me away from WFB. We have already talked a lot about 40K and WFB though. What about the other games? To me this is where GW has made it’s biggest mistakes. Anyone out there watch Jericho on CBS? Or should I say you watched it before they canceled the series without ever ending the story line. This is exactly how I feel about the Specialist Games. In my mind the best game I have ever played with miniatures is Warmaster. I liked every game I ever played of it. I think it is a game that just works. Mordheim is a fast skirmish game, can easily be played with any number of different models, and is a nice subset of the WFB rules. Battlefleet Gothic gets a bit more complex, but I think it still works. You don’t need terrain or a large number of models for BFG which makes it a good entry game. Why do these games get abandoned? This is where I want to talk about something that themailedfist mentioned in the comments of the editorial. The commenter mentions the drive of rpg players back to D&D when the d20 system and version 3.0 of the game were launched, and asks what something like this could mean for the GW. The Specialist Games division of GW has it’s living rule books online, you can download the rules for free. I don’t see GW ever opening up WFB or 40K, but what if they took the time to strip the setting from Warmaster, Mordheim, and BFG (and Necromunda and Epic as well - which I have never played)? Would a company like Mongoose publishing have done their own rule set for Might Empires or might they have just used an open license to Warmaster with a few twists and a new setting? Might we have seen a couple of games and maybe miniatures lines to run with a Mordheim type game? Perhaps Reaper would have considered something like that for Warlord. Perhaps Mongoose again would consider a version of their game using an open BFG ruleset. They expanded Call to Arms into a historical game, Victory at Sea, and i don’t see any reason that a stripped down BFG could not do the same. I think this would be a very interesting direction for GW to go with these “unsupported” games. I believe that their are a number of existing miniatures manufacturers who would consider capitalizing on the open rule sets, and I think it would drive people back to GW. One of those Win-Win things.
4. The Company: I have not really looked at the company at a high level. I can say one thing here though. When I first started playing the WFB GW was just opening the first Houston area store in the Katy Mills Mall. I went out to check things out, and was told that in order to play in the store I have to have a painted army. I didn’t. So I furiously painted for 3 or 4 months. I didn’t play the game at all in that time because I thought I needed to be painted to play….pretty much anywhere. I think that this painting thing has been getting less strict as of late. Still I wonder how many people are like me and didn’t play much while we worked to make some sort of arbitrary rule like this? Obviously the GW pricing structure is a debate that has been had time and again, so I won’t go there. GW’s decision to prevent internet sales of its products has also been heavily debated.
5. The Industry: Privateer Press, Rackham, Reaper, Dark Age, Your Move Games, Corvis Belli, and Urban Mammoth all make current miniatures game rules and miniatures. These are all modern rule sets, with well supported miniatures lines. Looking at the science fiction games (AT-43, CAV, Dark Age, Infinity, Urban War) you see basically skirmish level games. These games usually use interesting tactics to define the turn order, have some sort of snap fire (response fire) rules to them. The games are designed to be fast, and are often designed to make use of a lot of terrain. Urban Mammoth just came out with Metropolis which is a more mass combat system based on the Urban War skirmish rules. The real question with these games is, how do you get them on the table at the game store, and how do you convince the store owners to stock the game? The game stores stock GW because it generates sales. Have a Warmachine night and it will sell as well, often to the same WFB/40K players looking to play something different. However, once you have a WFB army, a Warmahine and/or Hordes faction purchased you may not be terribly inclined to jump into another game. The world of pre-painted games is interesting. There is certainly a lot of interest in Heroclix and Mechwarrior. AT-43 and Battlefield Evolution are out, with AT-43 being the more popular. D&D Miniatures, Star Wars Miniatures, and Axis & Allies are available as is the naval A&A variant. Mongoose will be releasing the Starship Troopers game in plastic pre-paints later this year. My FLGS stocks Wizkids and Hasbro games, but I don’t know that we will be seeing any of the other games on the shelves. I have to think that the investment, and the sales success of GW miniatures hinders the ability/desire of game store owners to stock these new and alternative games. I mentioned more about theindustry in my short comment above.