Thinking about 8th edition WFB, 10+ years later...

The 8th ed is awesome. The problem is not any edition but is lack of teamwork between designers. Also in having "favourites". So, the main problem is devil-may-care attitude.
(Also there are some sell politic: "We want sell these "brilliant miniatures" - let's write cheesy rules for them." Let it be on their conscience.)

Perhaps the 8th ed needs in just some cosmetic changes (we've said about it in the many threads here yet )


Some about ArmyProject/9th Age/same stuff.
They are maybe ok, maybe not. I consider they are just kind of homebrew. They are not a parody, but also not a masterpiece. "Let's give them all skirmish and/or expendable unit (analogue to slaves/peasant levy/zombies). And stubborn dudes in Specials too." (WAP). So what? All armies are identical. Phhh.

I like the 9th age for (finally! Oh, eahh) the clearly stated rules, but...
I've been tracking some their changes for a while. There are upped monsters and nerfed artillery, that's ok. We see again these loved "Monster march" lists, and they are not "just for fun".
And then upped "that dusty stuff on the shelf" (footslogging Bretonnia dudes fighting now in damn-how-many-ranks for example) or "fovourites" ("Beastmen are weak, let's give them vanguarding chariots!") and renaming...and renaming of renaimed. And then of course "We've made a new game", damn. Come on. After that, I stopped tracking them.

Should they even be exist? Yes, of course. It's a hobby and everyone can bring something new and play as they wish.

Have fun!

Some more about 8th ed and "Cheesy/broken" stuff and balance. The 7th ed has even more "cheesy" stuff, hasn't it?

I wouldn't accept those 6" in front shenanigans, make them place a marker and ensure it's in LOS

I started right when 5th edition came out and played with “pick and choose” rules for some time. We didn’t know what leadership was or combat resolution. It was a real mess at the start but then we got better and saw it played a few times in a store to understand better. Played through 6th edition and added an ogre kingdom army to my orcs and goblins. Everything was going great… until we made the biggest mistake a warhammer player can make. Much like Icarus, our
hubris got the better of us. We decided to play a massive game where everyone uses everything we had. Hour long turns, per player, on our 4x16 board with a full day of set up before anything was done in the game, it looked impressive but it was the beginning of the end of both our playing days and one lifelong friendship for my brother in law. Everyone got through their first turn with the understanding of ‘if it’s your turn and you think it’s line of sight then it is’. Turn 2 it all went south. My BiL tries to cast/shoot/charge/whatever at his lifelong friend to which the friend said ‘no way, not even close’ (my memory said it was questionable but not egregious. And to my BiL’s credit, he did allow anything anyone said was good against him, even some that were more far fetched than this one).

Fuse=lit

2 hours of yelling later (well into the AM hours now from our 7 o’clock start), friend starts packing up his stuff and says to never call him again. Massive game ended before it really even started. It would have taken weeks to complete it and tons of down time while playing but it was our big dream. Fortunately, my bro in law and I managed to avoid an argument, I think because we just saw the devastation that occurred and decided it’s not worth it any more, let’s just recover whatever we can for this stuff. Such a waste of years of building up our armies. The amount of hours I needed to work at my pizza place for all that stuff would never be replaced.

Flash forward to pandemic, every weekend open, and a shiny new 3D printer. Turns out the fire inside me didn’t die but merely laid dormant for years waiting for the opportune moment. Sold the idea to 2 guys in my d&d group and the rest is history. What a journey it’s been.

Yeah, sorry about the argument. Sometimes going separate ways is best though.

I had a friend "teach me" how to play. We got along just fine, I simply didn't know just how competitive his ego was. I lost nearly every game with him, much to the chagrin of my wife, who'd get to listen to me vent after getting home. I got really tired of losing to him and started playing others at my LGS and started winning a lot of games (probably around 50%). By this point, I had really started to learn the rules pretty well (enough that I wasn't having to constantly look up rules in the book) and I started calling him out on things in-game, which infuriated him. Our last game ended before it began because I quickly totaled up his points that he had brought for the game we were to play and he was over nearly 300 points! (That's pretty significant when playing a 2000 point game!) I was nice about it and pointed out his error, saying, we'll, you can just leave out some stuff, but instead of doing that, he tried to argue with me that I was wrong and powergaming! (He had brought WoC, including a DP and Unkillable Lord, btw.) Things got more heated, and I finally just said, "Okay, there's not really any point in me playing you if you're just going to cheat and win. That's no fun for me."

I went on playing with others and even managed to grow our gaming community quite a bit, but he couldn't find anyone who wanted to play since he had developed quite a reputation for "bending the rules" at this point. (Not from me, I might add! I played in a tournament that has a group of guys who drove 6 hours to get there, and they brought up just how worried they were that he'd be at the tourney - which he wasn't.) He called me later basically begging me to play because he couldn't find anyone who wanted to play and his wife was "tired of playing". I told him that I wasn't interested in playing anymore since our history unfolded the way it did, and that was that.

Moral of the story, stick to the rules, and just play it out! Houseruling a couple of things you both agree upon is fine, but rewriting entire books is only asking for trouble. That opens the door for too much "Oh, I thought it was THIS way!" mistakes, which ALWAYS seem to work out in the favor of the individual making the mistake. This is one reason why I'm sticking with 8th, until TOW comes out. And even then, we'll have to see just how different the game will be.

I haven't played much Warhammer before 8th, but I am extremely frustrated with the way magic works, specifically the Pit of Shades/Dweller's Below style spells. There is only one guy in town who plays, and his usual strategy is to constantly six die those spells, thinking they are the best way to win the game. I find this to make the game pretty boring, since the result usually is either (1) its completely ineffective and his strategy falls apart or (2) its too effective and the game is over. He knows my opinion on this but won't change his playstyle.

I don't know if I am missing something which I should be doing against this (please tell me if so); its starting to sour me to the edition specifically because of the magic phase. A scroll caddy can delay it for a round, but I don't think that's enough unless I am playing something like dwarves which can effectively take multiple ones.

Just as an example, I got a new army I was trying out for the first time earlier today, and we ended up rolling Meeting Engagement where my wizard started off the table (had the Talisman of Preservation and the Book of Hoeth). He went first, and casted Dwellers on an elite infantry brick which ended up panicking off the table after half of them and my BSB were dead. Next turn he used it on my wizard's unit and killed them. His wizard has killed more than half of my army pointswise before my second turn.