"Rules have become too shiny" Topic

Perhaps getting too old BUT now bored of all these expensive glossy new rule sets. Seems like if it does not have loads of pictures and art work it cant be good.

We play WRG 6th for many years with lots of great games. they came cheap with multi army lists. Now every new rule set pushes us to dump old sets and buy suppliment after suppliment after long wait. this can go into £100.00 GBP-200 if you want to all opponents armies.

Then people say they cant afford many figures. No wonder.

Probably like most people, I'm with you to a certain extent. I welcome the new emphasis on aesthetics (although it isn't always paired with eye towards good and practical design), but I would dearly love for rules to remain in the 20-30e range. Once they crawl up to the 40-50e range they usually fall off my radar, as the price of entry simply isn't worth the probability that they won't get played. In that light, it is even more important for rules publishers to provide more information on their rules beforehand, to justify the increased cost of the purchase.

You are not obliged to buy new things though, that is a choice you have.

If you don't want to buy the latest shiny cool rule set then it is not a problem that it is expensive.

True angel but Some times it's hard to find opponents if you don't.

Maybe, I guess, I recall when I was at school and me and my pals wanted to play GW games, we could not afford all the shiny books so we shared them.
I bought the rule book and the others bought the army lists and stuff.

When the new editions came out we just kept using the old ones as did the other people we knew.

We also started using whatever figures we found too, not just GW ones.

Most of my wargames rules have been available on the internet for free for many years – and many still are.
I decided to publish a glossy full colour version of Comitatus due to demand. It is something many people had asked me for but I had put off due to the up front investment costs. Now I am very glad I have done it. There is something very satisfying about holding a well designed printed product that a downloaded print-out does not quite match.
Perhaps it is a bit like using nicely painted miniatures on excellent terrain. There is nothing stopping me from using cardboard cut outs on a plain table but the aesthetics are part of the charm
Simon

I'm very much with Colin on this one. I want a set of rules, not a picture book. I used to buy rule sets, often for periods I wasn't playing, to see if I liked them, and then I might consider getting the figures.
I haven't bought any new rules for many years because of the cost, it's just not worth spending that sort of money on rules that are just going to sit on the bookshelf after one read through.

WRG ancient is what put me off the whole idea of ancient gaming.
It just leached the character from everything and reduced it to a stat matching excercise.

Call them phalangites, or legionaries, or catatphracts, or whatever. rather than reducing everything down to its most generic descriptor.
Give me rulesets with character and a bit of fun anyday.
And I like the modern glossy approach, too many wargamers live in the 'typewriter ruleset at cost price' world, if producing glossy books are the only way the writers can sell rulebooks and make a little in the process then good luck to them, they bring new blood into a sometimes opaque hobby.
I wont cry at the decline of WRG and its dull pseudo-legalese pamphlets.

Its horses for courses boys.

Stephen

There are times when publishers should listen to their writers and one hardback would have been preferable to two softbacks. But at the same time, if potential customers were only looking for details on the Cossacks or information on Russian Militia, then separate volumes at a lower price would probably be far more attractive. I'm happy with them and would recommend them to anyone interested in the Russian Army.

Seems for all too many these days it form over function.

I'm more interested in how well the rules work than how pretty they are, infortunatly I seem to be in the minority.

Rules have become too shiny?

I, for one, don't reminisce about the good old days when everything was black and white and smelled of cabbage. The world has moved on since the war, along with production values, hallelujah! If you want to keep eating your WRG type spam sandwiches, go right ahead, no one's trying to stop you.

"I'm more interested in how well the rules work than how pretty they are, infortunatly I seem to be in the minority."

No not at all.

Nobody is saying its fluff over substance, they are saying that rules are better presented and therefore cost more.

Jaz
6sided.net

Well – wouldn't class myself as old, but am begining to find myself getting nostalgic for a rule set that is well written, thorough, not tied in to some grand marketing scheme for selling figure ranges and accessories like wonky dice – wrapping it all up with some nice photographs and a higher price tag is not, IMHO, benefitting anyone. I don't mind paying a few quid for a high quality set of rules – I am struggling to find any of sufficient playability and quality at present – despite a plethora of releases in the past year or so – for which I would part with my hard earned cash. (says he who invests heavily in a rule set translated with varying degrees of success from the original Italian)
I am really not a great fan of aesthetics over substance – after all, if we want to see something nice, all we have to do is check some of the fantastic online resources available – which are generally absolutely free, gratis, and at no charge to the observer.
Rules are (supposedly) just rules after all…..

Yeah the full LotOW rulebooks cost me over £60.00 GBP, Bolt Action is likely to stack up similarly…

Any old rule set that has +2 if Roman or Swiss is worth a look….

Rules too shiny these days? Simple solution – Testor's dullcote.

There are kids on my lawn !!

Grognard's gonna hate.

I like shiny rules and lots of pictures because it inspires my imagination, it gets me excited to actually read the book and by extension play the game.

I also like to buy my books on pdf, because I can get them cheaper, I can carry around a lot of rules at once, and I don't have to worry about finding a place to store it all.

Buy FFoT, no shine at all there – just great rules and complete data charts for WWII to Modern.

Or Fireball Forward. Not hardback, but the rules include most equipment for WWII and a boatload of scenarios.

Just about anything Lardy is good, although getting more polished/glossy over time they are not hardback and scale well with inflation. Getting the PDF only is a good way to save on them.

Finally, although hardback and including a number of glossy pics the Force on Force and Tomorrow's War rules sets are very reasonably priced through Amazon.

So the options for reasonably priced are certainly still there.

If you go back 10 years you will find lots of people grumbling about the fact that rules are in general poorly presented and not attractive to new players.

Now you get those who didn't complain before because they were happy with the boring old format and feel that paying £25.00 GBP+ for a rulebook is outrageous.

The only constant is that someone will always complain ;)

My most recent rulebook acquisition was for a hardback, photo-illustrated, not at all cheap game. So far I think it has been worth it.

The rules are well written and play well. The use of photos to illustrate game rules is nice (and may cut down on some of the sillier hypothetical questions). Best of all the supplementary army lists are available FREE online, although the book includes rules for writing your own if you prefer.

If it isn't corner stapled mimeograph sheets it isn't a playable set of rules.

(insert sarcasm icon here)

It is not just the rule sets its the cost of army lists in the form of suppliments and the years sometimes to wait for list to cover your desired army.

Exception to this is Basic Impetus. Free rules and lists. I loved WAB chariot wars but look at the wait and cost to get other lists. I do appreciat COE and WAC putting up lists to cover until official suppliments though.

…or not shiny enough?

I too like fluff.
As for expense, I only buy rule sets for periods I game & even then not that many.
They ARE dear. I buy what I can afford.
I bought the FoG & several army books. Dear. But I aim to be using them for the next 10 years or more.
Be selective by all means.

I am a practical guy. Lots of pretty pictures do not really add to the gaming experience or understanding of the rules. I want diagrams that help explain the rules. A nice cover maybe. Maybe even a picture or two as filler on those half pages at the end of a chapter. A fair price for that. That's all. Color is optional.

I think back in the day people grumbled because there was a relative dearth of photos on the internet. So examples and inspiration were hard to come by. Now, you can't throw a stick without hitting very nice photos of expertly painted armies of just about anything you could want. So even if the photos in the books were inspirational to many, they are made redundant by the internet…and the internet is "free".

#greybeardproblems

Colin,

I buy rule sets to compare to others. Even like to get the latest to compare to the old and see what changes are made and why. I don't buy all rule sets though, just ones with mechanics similar to WAB or FOW so far.

Btw, I like to see some fluff as well.

Allen Curtis is writing something!!! Well see if it sees the light of day!?!? I hope so as my money is waiting!!!!!

I'm with Colin.

The whole "I don't like shiny rules" opinion assumes that shiny rules = less quality content.

I don't know that there's a correlation.

I think there are no more crappy, poorly thought out, poorly written rules now then there were years ago when your rule sets were mimeographed.

The crappy rules just look better now.

We still play WRG 6th and have a lot of fun with them. I have FoG with some of the supplements, but I have read it a couple of times and will probably never play it – don't see it as an improvement over WRG – so will sell the rules and supplements when I have the chance.

> The crappy rules just look better now

And cost a lot more. Pretty pics to illustrate gameplay, more please, pretty pics just for the sake of pretty pics, no thanks – I've got google image search (and youtube for movies) for that.

I have almost a 'time traveler" perspective to all this. I gamed as a teen in the early/mid-70s, then stopped in favor of girls, beer and rock-n-roll until 2 years ago.
The internet is perhaps the most important difference between then and now, as the hobby is easier to get into and things are easily found. And 30+ years of development in the hobby has moved it forward. Yet, much as with music or film, flash now seems to dominate substance. But, due to the internet, its also easier to determine what is or is not good.
All I can say is- slow down, resist impulse purchases and buyer beware!

For me it's the number of pages, shiny and pretty is all well and good, a few diagrams illustrating what is meant in the text are always welcome but I lose interest after page 100. That's one of the reasons FoG bored me despite its good production values.

Actually the best wargames I have had in more than 30 years of wargaming have been with WRG 6th and Bayonet and Ideology by Peter Pig both of which are far from shiny. For me the only things memorable about the new glossy rules are wishing games of FoG would end and walking past games of Flames of War and wondering if tanks really deployed wheel to wheel and did tank crews get in and out of their tanks all the time? I'm not a WW2 player but I'm not sure that they did.

For me it's a hobby, it's supposed to be fun. If others enjoy learning the contents of a big thick, shiny book in order to play a game they enjoy then I'm not going to knock them for that, it's not for me though. We seem to have gone from one extreme to the other, from rules that were a few sides of paper between a cardboard cover to rules that resemble phone books and are about as much fun to read and play. I think most of us want something in the middle.

The shiny rules syndrome…

My guess would be that folks do not mind the pictures if there was a practical purpose to them for the most part.

Example: Photos that show the reader moving/facing units, arc of fire, LOS…etc.

What about photos or illustrations that contribute to the fluff? I think that this is part of stimulating/inspiring ideas for the rules reader.

Humans have always been visual creatures. Page of page of text while that was the past for rules etc. in today's world the typical reader is not absorbing that information the same way.

What does this mean? Page after page of same font text tends to lose today's reader (especially younger ones). What to do? Enter the pictures /fluff/ and summarizing text in a larger font. What is the point? Those items break up the text and make it easier for the reader to deal with all the information.

Don't believe me? Examine any magazine article today and you will see what I am talking about.

Well what about all the extra pictures that do not add to the rules and is merely fluff? Why should I pay for the extra material involved in making it? Well, the company is probably selling their line of miniatures and thus, a form of advertisement.

My fellow TMPers, times have changed and how people process information has also changed. Why would the rules writers remain at text only pages and expect volumes of sales?

I was involved in writing a set of rules some time ago. If I had to revisit the rulebook, I would alter its appearance. No sockpuppetry here.

Well I suppose it's horses for courses isn't it- as with everything in this hobby – you pays your money and takes your choice. Or in my case, don't. I'm too old to read any rules that are more than 4 pages long – takes up valuable painting time (and money).
I originally got into ancients after buying DBA (£2.75) and two boxes of plastic ancients (75p each) no gloss, low cost – don't play it much now but it was inexpensive and entertaining !

For me the only things memorable about the new glossy rules are wishing games of FoG would end and walking past games of Flames of War and wondering if tanks really deployed wheel to wheel and did tank crews get in and out of their tanks all the time? I'm not a WW2 player but I'm not sure that they did.

So, if FoG and FoW were mimeographed products would you have forgiven these issues? Or, as others have mentioned, not the prety books that are the issue and instead the rules you do not like? If the latter is the case, I submit that nicely presented well written rules are goung to attract more folks than the same rules corner stapled and mimeographed sitting dusty and forgotten in some rack in the local store.

Like most things it's a continuum, with suckage at either end.
The handwritten notes of some guy with no editor/spellcheck are not a blissful utopia… neither is some 500 page brick that is mostly thinly-veiled ad copy for a specific line of miniatures, wrapped around rules that were an afterthought.

Most rules are not a thrilling read. Interesting maybe but I don't usually plow straight through them. Having them look nice with a bit of, relevant, illustration helps to make the task of reading them more pleasant. Give little eye-breaks along the way.
Too much eye-candy becomes distracting though.

They ain't proper rules unless they are hand written illegibly on yellow paper with ink faded from age.

So, if FoG and FoW were mimeographed products would you have forgiven these issues? Or, as others have mentioned, not the prety books that are the issue and instead the rules you do not like? If the latter is the case, I submit that nicely presented well written rules are goung to attract more folks than the same rules corner stapled and mimeographed sitting dusty and forgotten in some rack in the local store.

No, I wouldn't have forgiven the issues but I'd have saved a fair bit of cash. I got caught up in the whole FoG hype and spent a lot of money that in hindsight I needn't have.

Personally I believe that glossy rules with pretty pictures are sometimes used to disguise some very inaccurate and ill thought out concepts; eg FoG, lose a unit of conscript spearmen and they are worth as much to your army as losing the Varangian Guard! Nobody set me up as the arbiter of wargames good taste, there's a lot of things worth hating in this world but wargames rules aren't one of them, folks should play what they like, but I know wrong when I see it in a rules set.

I don't want to turn the thread into a FoG bashing session, I merely give that as an example to illustrate my point. Maybe I'm a wargames dinosaur but I'm not so sure we have come as far forward as we think.

I do not mind shney rule if they are good. Many of the new slicker rules sets focus on glitz and fluff and the rules are left wanting . It is hard to find a good set cause you have to buy the rules to figure out if they are any good and a shiney set just isn't cheap. good strong reviews become a must

There are a lot of very good rules around….but there are a lot of turkeys too. Somehow, When people invest in an expensive set, they will not admit that they are not very good in a way they would have if it was a cheap little booklet. They will push on and bend them, defend them, promote them, even butcher them until they can say "told you these are good" when wholesale surgery has got a dog's breakfast of a ruleset producing a mediocre game not a patch on bespoke rules in a #3 booklet or a cheap monogram. Sometimes these people push the 'shiny' ruleset ad nausium as well.

A mate of mine buys loads of rules and I try to stop him as he buys anything with colour pictures. He would buy used kids colouring books for the pictures if they were military pictures. He gets more of a row about it from me than his missus!.

HI DAX!

Personally I believe that glossy rules with pretty pictures are sometimes used to disguise some very inaccurate and ill thought out concepts; eg FoG, lose a unit of conscript spearmen and they are worth as much to your army as losing the Varangian Guard! Nobody set me up as the arbiter of wargames good taste, there's a lot of things worth hating in this world but wargames rules aren't one of them, folks should play what they like, but I know wrong when I see it in a rules set.

Well, that is exactly the same as a lot of other rules to be fair. DBM for a start classes pretty much all losses the same.

DBMM tries to get round the 'problem' but introduces its own issues in the process. It is possible to create a command where 75%+ of the troops can die and nobody cares. Is that any better?

I am wary of buying new rules on spec but I have bought just as many sets of shiny rules that I dislike as I have of stapled in the corner mimeographed ones.

@ Allan Yorke: bash away by all means but don't tell me any warrior could possibly be aware of what's happening to whom a few hundred yards away.

And in the heat of battle, the sight of ANY of your compatriots legging it may have an unfortunate result.

I don't mandate anyone needs to "like" the rules I use as long as Im happy with them.

And back to the topic:hard covers, quality paper & illustrations showing manoeuvres & formations (e.g., FoG) are worth the extra cash. Quality costs.

@ ochoin deache: Certainly there would be a morale test for the Varangians seeing the levies run away, what I meant was that in terms of Attrition Points aka Victory Points at the end of the game a unit of levy spears is worth as much as the Varangian Guard. In fact naked skirmishers throwing rocks are worth the same as our Nordic chums!!! IMO that's plain silly and nothing more than a device to enable tournament games to end quickly. Nothing wrong with wanting a game to end in a reasonable time of course but this method doesn't seem sensible or historically accurate to me.

As an aside Impetus gives each unit a value from 1 to 3, all these values are added up to give a total for the army. Once your army loses half of its total value the game's over. Levy spears and naked skirmishers would be worth 1, Varangians would be worth 3. I know which system I think most closely approximates history.

@ Allan Yorke: bash away by all means but don't tell me any warrior could possibly be aware of what's happening to whom a few hundred yards away.

Really? So how do you account for events like the death of Mardonis effectively breaking the Persian army at Platea? Certainly the army seems to have become aware of it quite quickly and it had a profound effect.

DBMM tries to get round the 'problem' but introduces its own issues in the process. It is possible to create a command where 75%+ of the troops can die and nobody cares. Is that any better?

I would say so. You view may vary. But if the 75% are mere peasants and the rest of noble blood why not.

One thing about flashy rulebooks that gives me pause is that I have always had an appreciation of the DIY aspect of gaming. It's a hobby and hobbies usually center on doing a lot of stuff yourself (though 'scrapbooking' seems to be an excuse for hoarding plastic jewels).
It's a bigger issue than just gaming for me… because I think a lot of people have become convinced that if you aren't good enough to go 'pro' you shouldn't go at all.
It used to be fairly common for people to draw and play music and sing and put on plays and do all sorts of stuff that nowadays we prefer to watch someone else do on the screens of our little boxes. We'd rather hire a professional to play piano at our wedding than have uncle Bob do it.
Sure, the pro guy is better than uncle Bob… but there's more at stake than that.
So, when I see game books that look closer to something I could make they appeal to me… they remind me that the game is mine… that I can build it and play with it (and change it). They aren't like some holy writ handed down by gods.
People seem a lot less hostile about homeruling Full Thrust than they do 40K.
Also, there is potential there for an undiscovered country vs. the big glossy book that, due to its production costs, is way less likely to take a risk.
The best gaming products I've bought the past few years have been the decidedly self-published RPG books coming out of the Old School Renaissance 'movement'… still looking good, but full of vim and vigour and daring that no 'big' company like WOTC would allow.
The rules books from Ganesha, Two Hour Wargames, GZG and GRUNTZ all appeal to me on that level. They're not ugly at all… but they're not so 'professional' that I don't still feel that DIY impulse coming off of them. They aren't loaded with pictures of miniatures painting I couldn't hope to match.
If I were to go further into hyperbole I'd suggest that a desire for more and more glitz would lead to decreasing satisfaction for one's own gaming… that our miniatures and games tables don't look as nice as those in the books… that eventually we'll just settle for watching 'professionals' play games while we sit at home with a beer.

My only issue with"shiny" rules is that the cost stops me buying them on spec. I suspect others are the same, and unfortunately for the publishers this means there are photocopies (scans) of these rules floating about while mates try to convince other mates to try them.

I think Basic Impetus was a great idea. Free striped down version, so that you can buy the full rules if you like them.

And for Hammy, the DBMM method is better. But I would say that. ;-) but not the right thread to argue about it.

Cheers,
JohnG

Well I don't know if this is meant as a poke at Hail Caesar or is genuinely aimed more widely, I suppose there has been a slew of glossy hardback ancient rules recently..

My 2c – I have been wargaming pretty much all historical periods now for over 20 years but until Hail Caesar came along, never went anywhere near ancients – the argy bargy of the WRG Competition crowd put me right of – I wargame to relax and have a good time, not set up Scilian type vendettas.

However Hail Caesar has changed all that for me, so I guess I count as a new recruit to Ancients, yes, attracted by the gloss and hype, but now really enjoying it – and yes I've bought both supplements!

And I know they call groups 'Divisions' to the horror and scorn of the 'couda, wouda, shouda' brigade, but lets face it – for that crowd it was never as good as the rules they 'were about' to write but all their best ideas were pinched by the men in suits….

I don't mind shiny as long as it isn't being used to conceal substandard writing.