Ish

This is slightly off topic, but also feels relevant somehow: Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village.

I actually had a set of dice like this. They were sold in a three pack labeled “Character Creation Dice” as a sort of “gag gift” for nerds (at least, I hope that was the intent and no one used them for real). One was a normal D6, one had a 5 on every face, and one had only 1’s and 6’s… So, you couldn’t roll a less than a 7, but were basically guaranteed a lot of 14+ scores.

Hestia, goddess of the hearth, and Demeter, goddess of the harvest, have had an argument over which is more important: the skill of the cook or the quality of the ingredients. They decided to settle it once and for all. Hestia has secretly put her support behind one entrant in the pie contest, Demeter his secretly supporting another. The Hestia-sponsored baker’s pies look absolutely stunning, with incredibly intricate lattice crust design, the fruit inside is laid out in a beautiful mosaic, and all were baked to the perfect golden-brown. But each tastes average, at best. Perhaps even a bit bland. Demeter’s champion’s pie is a fairly average looking one, one is even a bit burnt in one corner. But each is filled with fresh fruits at the peak of their ripeness, many from distant and exotic lands, the crusts are made of the finest flours, creamiest butters, and richest sugars. They taste heavenly. The town’s judges are deadlocked, fifty-fifty. One of the PC’s will have to cast the deciding vote. Anyone familiar with Greek myths know that this will result in one of the goddesses feeling snubbed and choosing to make that PC’s life “interesting” for a while.

Granny Goodguy’s cottage was broken into and her recipe book was stolen, but she didn’t notice until after everyone had submitted their pies. Patty Patsy and Auntie Social both entered pies into the contest that look and taste just like Granny’s! Both claim that they came up with the recipe on their own, but one of them must be lying!

Pretty much exactly this. Despite multiple editions and rewrites over the decades, both WH40k and AOS are still using the same foundational system designed for WHFB way back when. In that system, dice rolls were based on attributes that ranged from one to six and you usually wanted to roll above or below the value, with a stat of three being considered the baseline “average human,” because it yielded 50/50 odds (you had equal chances of rolling 1,2,3 or 4,5,6). Orcs and Dwarves were more durable than Humans, so they got Toughness 4; Elves were quicker, so they got Initiative 4; and so forth… Over in the sci-fi spin-off game, Space Marines were superhuman so they had BS, WS, S, T, and I all at the incredibly high 4 and a 3+ Armor Save! The problems started to creep into this system when the gameplay began to shift away from the baseline being an “average human” and instead the baseline became “basic space marine.” Instead of 3 being the “middle” value, it was now 4… which began to make the “design space” really cramped if you wanted to have things in the game that were better than Space Marines. But you only had 5 and 6 left on the die. So you need to start jumping through complicated hoops to (essentially) be able to get the equivalent of a 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 result on the dice.

I’m familiar with only a handful wargames that don’t have random elements, Diplomacy, Go, Shogi, and Chess. Even then, they are usually played with randomized starting positions… And it’s rather a stretch to call Go or Diplomacy wargames. I don’t have a problem with the game being decided by the dice or even with special rules that let you manipulate/mitigate the outcomes of those dice. I just don’t like the (for lack of a better word) logistics of how WH40k and WHAOS handle their dice rolls. Games like Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and Oathmark have really opened my eyes to the notion that the “tables and tables of bonuses and penalties” and “buckets of dice” game design systems that I had always just assumed were the way tabletop games had to work is just… not.

Slightly off-topic, but have you ever seen the Shieldwolf shield maiden / rangers kit in person?

I could probably do something similar using Cobblestone’s orcs and goblins, for a similar cost, to make a “double-duty” army of Isengard.

So Copplestone Castings’ Horse Tribe are basically just Tolkien’s Rohirim… and I love the Rohirim. In Warmaster, I’m thinking they’d work pretty well as stand ins for the Kislev rules: Horse Tribe Cavalry and Horse Tribe Royal Cavalry (the only real difference is that one has feathers attached to their helmets) as Winged Lancers and Cossacks; use the Horse Tribe Horse Archers as Horse Archers. Horse Tribe Foot Archers as Bowmen and Horse Tribe Infantry as Axemen (yeah, I know the models have spears but that shouldn’t be a big problem, right?) So here’s my rough draft of a Kislev, 1000 points list, for Warmaster Revolution -------------------------------- 400 - 4 x Winged Lancers 150 - 2 x Horse Archers 110 - 2 x Bowmen 90 - 2 x Axemen 125 - 1 x General 80 - 1 x Hero 45 - 1 x Shaman -------------------------------- 1000 Points Oathmark cavalry models are meant to be single 28 mm scale models on 25 x 50 mm bases; Warmaster cavalry are on 20 x 40 mm bases… which is close enough to use them on a one to one basis, I just need to kitbash some movement trays to hold them with the proper spacing. Easy. Oathmark infantry models are meant to be single 28 mm scale models on 25 x 25 mm bases; Warmaster infantry are on 40 x 20 mm bases. I’ve already got movement trays meant to hold 20 x 20 mm based miniatures for Oathmark, so I’ll just use two 20 x 20 mm bases for each Warmaster stand like I said earlier. Very, very, very roughly I’m looking at the following for Oathmark using the above models. This actually leaves me with a couple of “redundant” stands: -------------------------------- 450 - 10 x Human Cavalry 120 - 5 x Human Mounted Rangers 120 - 10 x Human Archers 130 - 10 x Human Spearmen 155 - 1 x Human Captain on Horse -------------------------------- 975 Points I’m looking at roughly $80 USD, plus shipping for this. Not bad.

Right, what I’m saying is that each of my 20 x 40 mm stands would be made up of two 20 x 20 mm bases. So when I’d normally have to remove one stand I’d just remove two bases. They’d have the exact same footprint.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in Warmaster all infantry are mounted on 40 x 20 Wmm bases whereas all cavalry are on 20 x 40 mm bases, right? Would it be super obnoxiously disruptive to gameplay to mount my models on 20 x 20 mm bases but use two bases per base (if you follow)? This would make it a lot easier to have the models do “double duty” in Saga and Oathmark.

Re-rolls, per se, aren’t inherently a bad thing. What drives me nuts about the way WH40k currently handles re-rolls is that there are a lot of different sources of re-rolls (e.g., stratagems, unit abilities, army-wide abilities, hero auras, magic items, etc.) and that not all the re-rolls are consistent in what they have you re-roll (e.g., re-roll all misses, re-roll all “1’s” to hit, re-roll “1’s” to wound, etc.). This is, frankly, a real pain in the astartes.

Sorry; Starting a new job and my orientation was today. Plus general back to school chaos with the kids all week. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it next week!

$100 for the upgrade kit!?

Each box makes one Nob, one special weapon, three shootas, and five slugga+choppas. So, if you want a unit with uniformity of load out – which 99.9999% of players will – then you are going to need multiples of this kit and will wind up with a pile of spare Nobs. Two get a legal squad of one Nob, one special, and eight slugga boyz requires two kits. You have a leftover Nob, a leftover special, and six shoota boyz… not quite enough for a unit. If you want thirty-strong squad? Oi vey.

Okay. This confirms it… The Space Ork army I had been thinking of building (and gathering bitz to do so with) for the past couple of years is now officially a dead project. I had started gathering stuff in late 2019, but held off because of the announcement that new a rank and file Ork Boyz kit was due in the next couple of years. Now it’s here. But you cannot build a complete unit with the box!?

(Not to mention that by third level or so, the average PC has more money in their pocket than the average kingdom’s GDP… But they still gotta haggle over the price of an ale.)

Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist take place in opposite hemispheres of the same planet.