"AoS - The game of shouting and banter?" Topic

After looking at the new AOS rules I am sure some of you have seen the new warscrolls and therefore may have picked up on some of the more crazy rules.

The warscrolls are full of rules such as these…

link

My friend is slowly compiling these rules as he finds them.

Example:

Ancient Dignity: Dragons are ancient and prideful creatures, and the Elves that
ride them are no less haughty, but from such nobility and dignity stems an inner
strength. If, during your entire hero phase, you can maintain a dignified (even
arrogant) composure and not smile, smirk or laugh regardless of your opponent's
antics, you may re-roll all hit rolls of 1 made for models in a Dragon Host until
your next hero phase.

Is this for real?

(…And a party game?)

This is the new GW ruleset for Fantasy yes. It contains a lot of these rules and worse.

They are free on their website.

Geeze

"The Mad Count: Marius Leitdorf is an
exceptional swordsman, even if he is totally
insane. If, during your hero phase, you
pretend to ride an imaginary horse, you
can re-roll failed hit rolls for the Averland
Runefang until your next hero phase. If
you actually talk to your imaginary horse
you can re-roll failed wound rolls as well."

"Braying Warcry: Red-hot rage festers in
the savage minds of Wargors, their only
desire to rend and destroy. You can add 1
to all hit rolls made for a Wargor if, before
rolling the dice, you let loose a primal
warcry. Your warcry must use no actual
words, but angry grunts and raging snorts
are encouraged."

Interesting, the Dark Elves are listed under the alliances of Chaos and Order.

I heard the elves are now one race or something because of the end times.

They are also called Aelf now.

This actually sounds like it could make WHFB into a great con game.

I was intrigued before, if this is true I'm buying it for sure.

Also, contrary to all of the rumors out there it looks like everyone is still on square bases.

If you enjoy rules that give you bonuses for facial hair, winning your last game and so on then yea it can be fun for a casual game here and there. But I don't think the rules are very good and personally not worth spending money on.

Since the rules are free I suggest using the models you already have for this.

I strongly suggest you download and read the rues before buying this game anyway.

Bases mean nothing in this, ALL measuring is done from any part of a model.

This is crazy.

In the old days, the game was pretty light-hearted. Heck, most of the fluff, confined to minis ads and the back of minis boxes, was humorous.

The snotling pump-wagon one REALLY cracked me up. Plus, it was a snotling pump-wagon.

So, I could *maybe* see this stuff 3rd edition and earlier.

But the stuff that's leaked form the latest White Dwarf is Grimdark to Hell and Back. REALLY. How the hell does THIS jibe with THAT?

Where on the GW website are the warscrolls, I couldn't find em' anywhere? Shouldn't be too hard, as there's all of 4 pages or so on the site (FB, 40k, LotR, and Paint)

I'm sorry, but that's beyond beer n' pretzels, heck, that's beyond reasonably childish. I'll give the game a go without the silly special rules, because I was actually cautiously optimistic about the rules until I saw these special ones. If I wanted to play a silly fantasy game, I'd pull out the Munchkin cards. GW should know better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon.

If you want the 4 page rules you have to look at the leaks for a few more hours I think.

But for the faction rules you simply click on any faction you want and look at one model. Bottom of the screen there is a pdf link to that rules of the faction that model belongs to.

Some cool ideas but in GW manner, poorly executed.

Sorry core rules and more here

link

Nice, thanks for the linky. I'm actually kinda excited to read the rules.

No problem man, let me know what you think!

Those rules are certainly silly, but I'm more surprised that there seems to be no points system!

No points system. The only limit is you cannot have more models that can fit on the board. You simply deploy whatever you want and you can decide what you deploy as you deploy it.

Do you want to use 1 model? Or 700,000 models? It is up to you. Does the other player want to deploy 1 model or 40? it is up to him. No limits (except space).

Kurt Helborg
Pride of the Reiksguard: Helborg's
skill is as legendary as his moustache is
magnificent. You can re-roll any failed hit
rolls when attacking with the Runefang
so long as you have a bigger and more
impressive moustache than your opponent

I cannot wait for the Slaaneshi army special rules.

There is a unit that wins the game on a roll of 13. I don't think these special rules can get any worse.

SAGA has something similar about the player with the most impressive facial hair getting initiative, or something like that.

Does SAGA have a rule where if you talk to a model… and it talks back you get a bonus? :P

See fun rules like this are ok, like in black powder having to state your orders before acting them or the SAGA example you mention.

But when there are heaps and heaps of these rules all throughout the rules then a problem starts to arise.

They seem to be mostly (but not exclusively) restricted to the Empire list. I looked through the orcs list and even Grom the Paunch doesn't have such rules.

I would expect that Bugman would have some rule where if you show up at the game drunk you get re-rolls or re-rolls for chugging a beer but no such thing.

Did somebody hack them? Did Annomynus figure it would be cool as hell to mess with GW? That would be awesome….

unfortunately these rules are in a lot of places. Vampires, orcs have rules for yelling waaagh before dice rolls for example.

These are the rules, like 100% the rules. No hacking.

I wonder if we will see ripples of this in 40k rules of the future? Or maybe they are truly desperate to shift some fantasy product.

The core rules actually ain't that bad, if a bit vanilla. Magic feels the way it should, though. I'm sure some of the sillier special rules can be modded with percentile dice or coin tosses. Not a perfect fix, but it keeps em' in without WAAAGH echoing from the basement at 12:30.

@Swastakowey: Just so you know, I credited you for providing that link in my blog post on AoS.

There should have been some rule for jumping a shark.

That blog is actually my friends blog! (although I did show him the rules for this :P) but cheers mate.

Blog link?

Linky: link

I think the rules for jumping the shark go with the old Saharduin sculpt from Rogue Trader. "Have a good go at reenacting the climax of Jaws with a few casualties or reinforcements, really get into it, like film it and send your games to Tom Kirby's office for our personal enjoyment. We'll get to you in a while, absolutely not after we're done laughing at you folks for playing with these silly special rules. If we like it, your Mecha-Saharduin skullz king can jump over a terrain feature in this move phase"

I will link you to my blog roll mate :)

Words cannot express how lame this is.

I don't really like all the silly stuff, but I suspect this will be limited to the rules for the old stuff. After all GW do really want you to buy the new range of figures…

Nope, no more square bases, all the new stuff will come on round bases but base size and shape no longer matters apparently. And there are no rules for number of ranks or anything. You just have to keep all models in a unit within 1" of each other.

There is a strong 40K flavour to the rules but hugely streamlined and stripped down. Like someone has been through and asked " … do we really need this detail … "

And yes, there are no points at all. Not sure how thats going to work but hey this whole Age of Sigmar thing really comes across as a massive Hail Mary play by GW to stimulate Warhammer FB sales. Having said that, yes, all the existing armies have lists (now called "Warscrolls") to cover the existing ranges of figures that you can still use. So its not like all your old stuff is so obsolete you just have to buy new GW models. About the only thing that seems to really have gone is all the fluff about the Old World. Fluff wise GW are starting afresh. They refer to the fluff up until now as "the-world-that-was".

My 11 year old is all excited about the simpler, less-than-4-pages of rules and wants to drag out his Lizardmen (now called "Seraphon") again and fight my Skaven (now part of the Chaos Alliance). If he's part of the target audience maybe this'll work for GW?!

You do realize that the silly rules are tongue in cheek and that you don't really need to do those things for the model to get the bonus, right? If you play with someone who insists otherwise you've got bigger problems then a set of wargames rules.

The humor is not my cup of tea, but where's the harm?

Does anyone else find that measuring from neither from (a) the base edge, nor (b) the center of the base, to be a really bad idea?

Who measures from the miniatures themselves anymore? Especially the guys with the most ridiculously/dynamically-posed minis out there?

This seems messy and naive. And much more argument-prone. Does that really justify their "whatever bases" policy? Measuring square or round wouldn't make THAT much of a difference, anyway.

Sounds like they just made the game fun to play again. What's wrong with a bit of role play when commanding your armies? Remember we play with toy soldiers, in this case of imaginary creatures. Its not something you should really be taking too seriously.

I just got back from Lowes. I picked up a truck-load of 4'x8' sheets of MDF. I am going to rebase all of my Warhammer minis, one per sheet. It will be a hoot!

Maybe GW are being cunningly considerate towards the usual boring crowd of detractors.

After all GW must have disappointed a lot of the moaners and their premature predictions by not making everyone rebase their minis, Ancients-style; not make them buy a rules set but offer it for free; not make 1000s of minis redundant, but instead provide free warscroll stats; etc.

So I guess the silly elements of the rules are merely a public service to those who'd far rather moan about somebody else's hobby than get on with enjoying their own.

Alternatively, we could all just be a bit mature about this by following Kenneth Portner's suggestion, above.

My 11 year old is all excited about the simpler, less-than-4-pages of rules and wants to drag out his Lizardmen (now called "Seraphon") again and fight my Skaven (now part of the Chaos Alliance). If he's part of the target audience maybe this'll work for GW?!

This might well be the only valid comment posted on AoS on any forum so far…

As far as I can work out GW don't operate a business model that requires hundreds of high street retail premises in towns and cities around the world, with even more retail staff because they think that is what's needed to sell their products to middle aged steeped-in-gaming web-savvy TMP readers.

If the 11 year old likes it, and is tempted to buy more models, it's probably going to be a winner for GW..

An 11-year-old with a good income, I hope. Otherwise, somebody has to foot the bill.

So it'd be a good idea to maintain, I don't know, SOME of their old fan base? But they DO love throwing that ol' baby out with that bath water.

They have long failed to appreciate that the "old timers" (interpret that one as you wish), who may or may not be buying as much new product as they used to, promote the product to new players. Otherwise, they have to hope junior wanders into a GW store (if they can still find one, and if so, hope the one guy there isn't busy) or happen to pick up a WD at the local bookstore (oops, they don't sell them there anymore).

If GW says WHFB isn't profitable anymore, I suppose I'll take their word for it. Though, as a publicly traded company, their notion of a "profitable line" doesn't seem to be the same as anyone else's in the industry. Fine, then. And entry-level for a mass-combat game is high, especially at such prices as they charge. So, I can see the system changeover. Few people are addressing what this is likely the biggest motivator, and that is fabricating a fantasy IP that competitors can't horn in on.

But this take on it is INSANE. I've played many rulesets that came in at four pages, or less, but these look like they WISH they were beta. And the whole points/no points thing is responsible for a good 75% of the hulabaloo, and WHY? Do they really think this freeform mess will make ANYONE happy in the long run?

Someone here joked that this was GW's "New Coke", and that made me wonder: Is AoS just the detonation charges to sweep WH away for good, allowing them to say, "well, we tried, you didn't play ball, so we axed the whole thing."?
That sounds crazy, but I don't see another answer.

Wrecking their decades-old IP is suicide. They've now leveled the playing field for many established competitors. That's not sour grapes, it's just how I see it.

Good luck to the 11yo, but children and teens are simply not the target-market that TMPers seem to think. The idea that GW's entire business is built on parents buying fantasy games for teenagers to keep them occupied with anything that will stop them nicking dad's porn collection and mum's kleenex is a myth and nothing more.

GW shops may operate as a de facto weekend teen-creche whilst ma&pa do a bit of shopping, but the dozen or so 'yoofs' you see in there on a Saturday will barely fund the staff's biscuit kitty.

I take my 8yo grandson to Warhammer World where I have to say he is treated very well (unlike my experience of taking children to wargames shows/clubs where we've being treated far less kindly.) But the majority of visiors/customers are well into their 20's and above.

What you do get in the WH World shop is large numbers of full-grown adults who've travelled miles and from overseas, loading up with big multiple purchases. My conversations with them reveal there is a high proportion of modellers/collectors whose interest in gaming is at best minimal.

I think the Age of Stigma may well indicate GW have recognised that. Their business statement puts the "World's best producers of fantasy models" line well before making games for people to play. Hence the rather well-crafted but equally wacky models.

Sounds like this can be house-ruled into a good drinking game.