"Has a reboot ever won you back?" Topic

Why is it when your group sours on a game it's like a bad break up?

Since I've been told that Warmachine is actually about warjacks again it got me interested in playing. The only problem, of course, is that the game has been dead to me ever since it moved from 3-5 warjacks to 40K steampunk.

I also have a tough time playing 40K. As soon as I start a game I remember why I hate it and room usually is bitching about prices, how the new codex screwed this army, blah blah blah. Why bother?

We see that D&D is trying a "reboot" with the 4E fiasco (not that I play) so I wonder: Are there any reboots that work? Is it worth trying Warmachine again or is it doomed to be "the ex?" I need a zen master to help me move past the hatred.

Why not just play the old rules and have fun?

I will say that Heroclix reboot has pulled us back in, but then lately I've been going back to all my old games and having a blast. It feels like the first time all over again! (Being able to buy figures for .05 to $1 USD is also nice!)

I agree with CPBelt.
To take D&D as an example, my favorite edition is and always has been AD&D 2nd and given the choice I'll use those rules. Some people prefer 1st, and a lot of new material has been written for it by third party publishers in the past few years. Most people I know prefer 3rd or 3.5. The reality is that vast majority of players didn't like 4th and rejected it.

I don't see why wargamers can't follow the same principle.

Why not just play the old rules and have fun?

Because they weren't fun. Read his post – Warmachine Mk1 was designed to favor infantry from day 1, but most people were distracted by the "shiny" factor of the warjacks and didn't catch onto it until the expansions (with even better infantry) started coming out. MrElmo wants the game to be about jacks and casters foremost (understandably, IMO) and isn't going to get that in Mk1. It's debatable if Mk2 fully fixes the problem – the jack vs infantry balance is better, but pure jacks is still a hard force to play for many casters, and pure infantry can still work for many. Moreover, Mk2 warbeasts are still miles better than jacks IME – if you want to play a leader and his battlegroup, it's much easier to do in Hordes than in Warmachine.

Presumably, he prefers clanks to fuzzies or he'd already have gone the Hordes route.

With most games, the move was from complex and slow to simpler and faster; from BT to Mekatac-GRSE, SFB to Sunder the Stars, etc. Became a fan of Iron Ivan's rules for WW2, Pulp and Zombies after playing different rules for each genre. There are a few games that I've followed through each new edition with mixed results; Mekton got better and Gamma World became worse. I still prefer D&D 1E to anything that came out afterwards in that line.

So, no, a reboot has yet to lure me back.

Al | ravenfeastsmeadhall.blogspot.com

only reboot that brought me back was gamma world 4th…
edit: and by 4th I mean the version that came out right before d&d 3.0, NOT the gamma world based on d&d 4.0. .eeewwwww

Fire & Fury Regimental came very close to getting me to game that rules set again. Not sure if that counts.

I was never quite lost. Didn't fancy BloodBowl 3rd edition, so I kept playing 2nd. Jumped back into the mainstream somewhere in the midst of the 5th edition LRB updates, those and up through the current 6th were all great improvements.

ASL is the only "reboot" that ever got me, first I recoiled in horror, then I played it a few times and liked it, then I got sick of it and quit, then I tried it again, then I dropped it in horror again…

Fed Commander got me back into SFB

Pathfinder got me back into D&D

BattleTech has my game group wanting to re-start a old campaign.

If I like a game enough to look at the new edition then it will almost certainly be a disapointment as to be new it has to change something about the old game that I already liked.

Does that make sense ?

Having not really played Star Wars since the old WEG days, Saga Edition really got me back into it.
Along with their minis games…

40k? Missed 3 & 4, got back into it on 5. Might miss 6 though…

And they are working on 5th ed D&D now.

I would say yes to the original question, there have been many instances of game system reboots that worked, though admittedly "working" is in the eye of the beholder.

I can't speak for WarMachine personally as I don't play it, but reading what's posted above it sounds like the designers intended the game to be about mixed forces of warjacks and other troops -- if not why did they release those troop types? It sounds like they were confounded by players focusing on skewed troop mixes, and tried to adjust the rules accordingly.

For D&D I can say definitely that every succeeding edition was an attempt to address limitations of the prior. In pre-3.x editions, each was about clarifying and collecting rules, creatures and abilities. 3.x was about redrafting the mechanics into a consistent framework. 4.x has been about simplifying the complexity and focusing on playability. (Some players don't agree but I find 4E gameplay far superior to 3.x and it's not because the game mechanics are different, it's because I don't have to juggle as much to figure out what I want to do.) I'm not clear what will come in 5E but it's still a complicated game so there are doubtless improvements that can be made.

For Warhammer Fantasy Battle, 5th edition was hero heavy and not really about troops. 6th edition was about troops but in gameplay was skewed in favor of cavalry. 7th was er, a rewrite of 6th edition to make it easier to play, but still favored cavalry too much and the game mechanics carried over the flaw that favored players who were good at visual estimation. 8th edition has been about simplifying troop movements, collecting all the randomness under a consistent stastical foundation, extending the game system to support larger units, expanding the armies to include bigger models, and prettier army books.

To cite other examples, in all of the games above you will find people who liked the prior edition and hate the new, or at least tried it and couldn't recapture the same magic.

To cite a couple examples of failed reboots, the D20 reboots of Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer seem to have not caught on from what I can tell.

EDIT: I guess I've missed the forest for the trees. In most of my examples above, it presumes the player keeps playing into the new edition. The question is really about players skipping an edition, i.e., when old becomes new dropping the game, then when new becomes newer picking it back up. I suspect that has more to do with the social situation -- i.e., players get older, groups move apart, and that causes interest in a game to die out. When enough new interested players come along to form another group, they typically play the current version of the game, which due to the realities of game publishing, is doubtless a newer edition than that favored by the prior group that lost interest.

4th edition won me back into 40k for a while. I had missed much of 3rd, and 2nd was pretty clunky. By comparison, while they had their faunts to be sure, 4th and 5th edition were fairly fast-moving, fun games.

In general though, reboots don't interest me much. If I've slowed play, I may find my self playing more often, but if the original was bad enough that I quit entirely -or found another ruleset that does what I want more effectively- I probably won't be back.

It's far more likely that an entirely new ruleset will bring me back to figures I haven't used in a while than a new version will tempt me to return to an given game.

D&D 4e brought me back to D&D, though frankly it may very well have been the campaign my friend was running that happened to use 4e that really brought me back.

D&D 3e didn't feel right to me, though oddly Pathfinder seems just about perfect, so I guess Pathfinder's "reboot" (really more of a hot patch) of D20 worked for me too.

I've played Warzone for a while and have played 1st, 2nd then Ultimate loved the game but just fell out of favor/bad luck. Was a great game compared to 40K.

My mates finding the same with CAV at the moment was looking forward to the newer rules.

Ok, he likes the new rules better. Got it now! I read it but it did not click. There is a reason I teach literature but not reading! ;-)

No, they mostly always push me away.