Why is it called Warhammer For Adults?

Right. Warhammer For Adults. Lets get the obvious out of the way first, shall we:


“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
- C.S. Lewis

As a quote, I guess it stands opposed to what it is I'm trying to assert, but given that I've already guessed this is your first go-to place in your argument, I thought I'd just table the thing now. I'll get back to the quote in a bit.

I called the site Warhammer For Adults because I am asserting that the nature of the games of Warhammer being played by most of the people today are limited. Stunted in their scope and ability. Unable to flourish into the well-formed fun activities they were always envisaged to be.

Underdeveloped, if you will.

Immature.

Which is where the whole adults thing comes into it. It is positioned against the term 'children'.

So, I am asserting that most of the games of Warhammer played today are immature. Unrealised in their potential. Fit for consumption by children, but hardly satisfying for adults.

"Hang on," you protest. "Who's 'most people'? Bit generalised, don't you think?"

Sure, okay. It is a bit. So I'll refine - in my experience of playing Warhammer 6, 7 & 8 over the past few years at various clubs ranging all the way from Croydon to Salisbury (and various places between), I have only played immature, unsatisfying games of Warhammer. I've tried not to - I've tried to convince my various opponents that it could be different, but lack of time, lack of interest and a genuine lack of understanding appears to have confounded me at every step.

So what's my problem, then?

Perhaps you've heard these statements before:
  • Don't worry about a scenario, we'll just do Pitched Battle.
  • That's too much scenery. Let's take that stuff out of the middle so we can finish quickly.
  • Let's not use the special scenery rules, they're just going to slow us down.
  • I don't know if I'll be much of a challenge - I'm trying out a new list for the <XYZ> tournament next month.
  • Oh no, don't worry - I'll take some points out of my list - I'd rather the armies were equal.
  • I'm just warning you - there are some pretty rough combo's in this army!
  • I hope you don't mind, but I'm using two special characters
  • Normally, I'd have two of these, but I've only got one tonight because we're only allowed one for <XYZ> tournament.

That's before you get to the various discussions about rules interpretations, FAQ's, the precedents that FAQ's set for other 'similar' unit types which aren't actually discussed, the probable error that allows one or other combination to 'break' an already powerful character or unit to be all but unstoppable. The fact that your army can't cope with <XYZ> situation because your army book hasn't been written for the new rules yet.

Ringing any bells? If you're getting this on a regular basis (as I was - weekly), then, in fact, you're suffering from some underdeveloped Warhammer. The games you are playing are probably not nutritious enough to sustain you, even though you pretend they are, because you just don't know what else to do.

Besides - you've spent a lot of money on this hobby, right? For this much money, surely I can't be unhappy with the game, right? Maybe if I just stick at it, I'll eventually have fun? Or get a different army? Yeah - that's it. I'll get a different army!

So game after game after game eventually becomes the same thing - 2400 points, pitched battle, comps as per the nearest tournament on the calendar. Your list is always designed for all-comers, so your list is always generic - no extremes, just in case you can't deal with something. Okay, you flex it a little. Sometimes its 3000 points. Eventually, out of sheer desperation, someone proposes a Storm of Magic game, so out come all the monsters. But it wasn't prepared properly, so it actually ended in five turns with most people thinking "it had potential, but actually, let's just do a pitched battle next week. I mean, how realistic is it to have nine manticores on the table anyway? That'd never happen in a tournament..."

Again, this is my experience, but I'm using the words you and yours because I'd bet that its your experience too.

So back to my problems with this. It feels like there are two overriding things here:


  1. Every game is just a practice session for some tournament
  2. Your opponent is expressly delegating his responsibility for you having fun away from himself and on to the ruleset. In the same way that you delegate your responsibility for your opponent having fun down to the ruleset. That's right. I'm talking about you! 


Let's talk about that second point for a bit. When the players absolve themselves of each other's responsibilities to each other, the only thing that can carry that responsibility is the ruleset.

This leads to the situation where players meditate day and night over the rules, scouring them like lawyers, hunting down precedents and common understandings that allow them to flex the rules to facilitate whatever surprise it is they have for their opponents. This happens because you can't trust the other player to help you have fun. He's not responsible for that, remember? Forums are started, where players can compare their understanding of the rules and complain about people whose understanding doesn't quite match their own.

Discussions form around specific magical items and combinations and how these might be countered. Threads are created to lament the clearly erroneous omission of some vital word or rule which renders some brilliant 'thing' useless.

Suddenly, the game designers end up carrying the ultimate responsibility for you and your opponent to have fun. They can't cover ever eventuality, and they have another directive anyway: they have to drive sales. They're not really here to carry the responsibility you have to your opponent, but they gamely accept the challenge and start 'tightening up' the rules. Warhammer 6 was well written. Warhammer 7 was very well written. Warhammer 8 employs object oriented design techniques (from software engineering) in order to create clever inheritance mechanisms in the rules, creating a near flawless set of rules.

But still, they can't get it right. They can't cover the relational and social aspects of the game for you. So no matter how hard they try (and boy do they try!), they can never actually create a system that can carry the responsibility you have for your opponents fun, because that's a relational thing. It's a social thing.

It's something you have to do with your opponent.

You contract with each other. You know - like adults.

Right, so I'll leave that hanging there and I'll start talking about the alternative.When I eventually reached the end of my tether, it came in the shape of one of the least most satisfying game of Warhammer I'd ever played. I'd tried really, really hard to inject as much character and narrative into the thing as possible, but it was completely overshadowed by the tournament preparation approach of my opponent. Try as a might to contract with him, I was unable to get him to agree to not approach the game this way. So, we practiced for his upcoming tournament (again). I went home and turned my back on Warhammer 8 and the various club practitioners of its unusual tenets.

Not because its Warhammer 8 (although I don't think much of the ruleset specifically), but rather, because it is the current version of Warhammer being used to perpetrate this immature, unsatisfying and empty style of play. The same was true of Warhammer 7 and will probably be true for Warhammer 9.

I returned to the place where my fantasy fascination was born - where the fertile mind of a young boy was opened to the endless possibilities of fantasy stories. Original fantasy stories not expressly told in order to sell products. A place where Dwarves could have spears and bows, and elves could have axes and crossbows. A place where characters were not a viable tactical delivery of pain and death, but actual representatives of the player on the field. Where the fantasy was personal and I cared. I cared about the outcome of my fights and the fate of my units and heroes.

For me, that was the 3rd edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

Let's be clear here: it's not a 'tight' ruleset. You will struggle to find more poorly worded commercial product produced in an english speaking country. Entire paragraphs are sometimes just... missing.

That's right.

Missing.

It's clunky, it's slow, it has rules that contradict each other. There are no checks and balances to see if you're taking a fair army. T7 vampire with 7 wounds, a sword that auto-hits, auto-wounds, kills if it hits once and offers no armour save, and has the ability to cast a spell that causes a S3 hit on every living thing on the table?  Check.

Monsters where every single stat is a 10? Every single one? Check.

In fact, its bloody hard to imagine that anyone managed to get any games out of the system at all.

Thing is, the way the ruleset is written, there is absolutely no way one can delegate their responsibility down to the ruleset. Just not possible.

So impossible, actually, that the only way to make it work was to...

...take responsibility for your opponent's fun.  You had to work with your opponent to get through a game. You had to negotiate. You had to think about the implications on the game if you did something too 'wild'.

I remember a very interesting scenario once. I remember knowing that my opponent had the means to summon a greater daemon. He knew that I had the ability to do the same. But we never actually summoned them. We ended up conducting these bizarre 'cold wars', where we always made sure we had enough mana to cast the summon - just in case, and made sure the other one knew that. That way, we kept each other's 'nuclear' threat at bay. A strange meta gaming concept, but one rich with narrative and a realistic behaviour of the characters involved. Eventually, we spoke about it. What would happen if we did summon the daemons? Perhaps we should give it a go?

And so, by consensus, we derived a scene where both wizards summoned their greater daemons and whilst the armies fought, there was a clash of the titans like no other happening right in their midst - two daemons going head to head. Epic fantasy stuff.

It happened because we contracted. We took responsibility for each other. Together, we created an environment where we both had fun. The rules were just a vehicle for interpreting the events.

I want to play games against people who are interested in both themselves and myself having fun. I want to play games where the rules are just a vehicle giving us an idea of how to roll the dice to determine a specific outcome. I want to enable other players to have their fantasy stories played out in miniature - where their heroes can wax and wane in glory. Where they can be more than just 'batteries' for other characters, or scroll caddies, or whatever demeaning term applies to most modern Warhammer characters.

In wanting this, I consider my tastes to be mature. I consider other gamers who want this same thing to be mature. And it's this maturity that I want in my games. You don't have to be over thirty to have this maturity, and you don't have to play Warhammer 3rd Edition either.

But, in my experience, it is those who have seen 3rd Edition that are the most likely to yearn for that maturity,which is why I focussed on that ruleset. Indeed, one can achieve everything I described using Warhammer 8. But good luck in finding those who want to do that with you.

So I'm hoping by now that you'll see that C.S. Lewis' quote up top doesn't actually apply to my employment of the notions of childishness and adulthood. Rather, I refer to these things as levels of maturity in the gaming experience.

Are you able to contract with your opponent and help them have fun?
Are you willing to contract with your opponent and help them have fun?
I call that a sign of maturity.

Welcome to Warhammer For Adults.









22 comments:

  1. Here, here!

    Although I like a good rant too ;)

    Love the Cold Demon War concept - you've got to work some kind of Dr Strangelove scenario into it -

    "Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"

    ReplyDelete
  2. Right On, Gaj!! Well said.

    And Greater Daemon Brinksmenship Rules! I love stuff like that too, and the wonderful edge that it brings to the whole gaming experience.

    We still must play sometime if/when you have the time. (I'll even let you use your Two Special Characters!)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great Post- perhaps you are the Howard Beale of Fantasy War-gaming!
    I suspect that the game did change over the years. I suspect it is the game morphing into what the players wanted: a shallow caricature of Anglo-American-culture.

    Here in the United States we have the same issues: excessive tournament play & groups of men still playing the game like whiny 12 year-old boys; where every game played is a chance to be "seen" as a "winner".

    ReplyDelete
  4. Fantastic sentiment. We share it here in Chicago. Keep up the good work! Check out Song of Blades & Heroes for a similar interpretation of this philosophy. It's more skirmish-oriented, but the game stresses fun, narrative games without any allegiance to particular miniature manufacturers.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well said sir, I play wargames to have fun, I lose (some what epidemically) and much to the humour of my gaming buddies, but I always enjoy the game.

    ReplyDelete
  6. We're talking about this article over here!:

    http://old-hammer.blogspot.com/2013/04/hitting-nail-what-is-oldhammer-view-two.html

    ReplyDelete
  7. The sentiments you express here - and indeed the quote at the top - summarise to a terrifyingly precise degree why I decided, almost out of the blue, to rekindle my toy soldier addiction after fully two decades away (well, that and the fact that having two small children means I don't get out much any more). That said, while the gaming culture may have changed for the worse, I firmly believe that this is a golden age from a miniatures point of view - there are so many companies making amazing figures, widely available as a result of the web. No we just collectively ned to re-engage our imaginations, and accept that gaming is not just for children, or, more accurately, for the immature, or to be played to win rather than just to enjoy for its own sake...

    ReplyDelete
  8. 3rd ed was where I remember having fun... haven't played the game now in years....

    ReplyDelete
  9. Inspirational.... this is how I`ve done things for years (but then again, in desperation for all the above you have mentioned, I turned to solo wargaming long, LONG ago).

    I just discovered this blog, and boy have I enjoyed reading it. Keep up the amazing work.

    Actually, its inspired me to undertake a project I`ve been putting of for ages.... my own website for similar endeavours :-))

    Steve.

    PS, reached 50 this year, and I embrace my childishness to the full... Warhammer for adults hehe, PERFECT title.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Steve - thanks for the nice comments - they are much appreciated! I look forward to seeing your website.

      Welcome aboard.

      Regards
      Gaj

      Delete
  10. Fascinating: This is actually the way most people in the "Old School Renaissance"-movement reason about older editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry for the late reply - busy organising myself for the Oldhammer weekend!

      To be honest, I think all gamers from the late 80's/early 90's have felt the 'sting' of business formality in their games, which is bitter. Its a little harder to see with RPG's, I think, but the taint is definitely there.

      Delete
  11. Thank you for your inspiring text.

    I've been playing and collecting GW minis (and now some other companies for other games) since 1990. So for me, 3rd Ed is a very, very old thing, and I don't remember it very well as I was only 13 in 1990 and played mainly Epic and Advanced Space Crusade at this time (my first real WFB games started at the end of 4th Ed)

    But what you describe is exactly what I've seen along the years around the gaming tables (and especially now in my new gaming club) : people who only see the game as a manner to be a "winner" and testing lists for another tournament, but forgetting that it is a game before all (and for me that means that all the opponents should have fun playing the battle), and that we all are playing with toy soldiers.

    Due to this and the slow evolution of the " it's only business" feeling about GW, I've nearly given up WFB (even if I still add and paint new units for my empire and bretonnian armies), but this summer, I started a new escalation campaign (using 8th ed, easier to find for new players) with some friends of mine, we had lot of fun, with narrative scenarios, campaign rules (especially for heroes and vets units gaining experience and special abilities, but also weakness) and special scenery on each table.

    As said, this way I had a lot of fun, as I haven't had playing standard games for years...

    So I'm not sure playing 3rd Ed due to lack of players in my gaming area (I'm in Bordeaux, France), but now I will certainly only play the game the way you describe (and I think I can easily take one or two members of my gaming club to this point of view).

    Best regards,

    Eric

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hi Etic

    Im glad you found the text inspiring. Its nice to find other players who have 'seen the light'. Its also good to see you applying these things to 8th edition. I think this works for any edition, although I think I would remove the turn limit on the later editions to allow more time for manoeuvre and some 'role playing' movement. I think this would remove the desperate charges that tend to happen on the 6th turn from the losing side.

    Regards
    Gaj

    ReplyDelete
  13. Bravo! I left my WFB gaming group because it was all mathhammer and prepping for the next tournament. Escalation games, skirmishes, campaigns, etc. were non-discussable. They are fun to dring with and to game with (when we have board game gatherings at conventions before or after tournament day) but with WFB, they are monomaniacal.

    You go!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cheers, Mr Gamer - you know exactly what I'm talking abouy by the sounds of things. What do you do these days for Warhammer, though? Have you managed to find a like minded crows to play with?

      Delete
  14. Well said, when you say that WHFB 8 is written with object oriented design, what exactly do you mean? I am not a computer programmer so am a bit unfamiliar with that jargon. Thanks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey there - sorry for the late reply - I had changed my email address, but not for blogger comments (don't know why they're different), so I didn't see it!

      Anway, thanks for the kind comments. I meant that the rules (like, say, fear) were small and modular and could be used to extend other rules (like terror, I think?).Some of the rules include others as a base to start from, which allows each rule to be small, self contained and re-usable. This allows us to build complex rules very quickly by stringing together very simple rules.

      I think, anyway :)

      Delete
  15. If that is how you feel, then you would probably love Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. It is exactly what you describe. I must say that I'm enamored with it and started a blog to track my journey. Check it out: http://squigsnest.blogspot.ca/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Squig Hunter

      6th September! I can't believe I missed this - sorry for that - not very polite at all!

      So, apologies. May Santa bring you a little extra karma for having to put up with a git like me...

      Regarding AoS, the bold step the designers have taken there is indeed a very compelling thing. In the brief research I've done into it, I think my main issue really is that it's a whole new game. Without anything discernably Warhammerish about it (in ruleset or background), AoS forces us to ask ourselves to consider if we would even start with a GW ruleset in order to fight a battle, so I don't see it so much as warhammer vs. AoS, but probably

      1. a comparison between AoS and a mass combat system (say, Kings of War, for example)
      2. a comparison between AoS and skirmish games (say, Skulldred, for instance)

      I've been poked about writing something about AoS elsewhere, to I'm guessing now is as good a time as any to take a swing...

      Delete
  16. proper statement. not long time ago I got back to playing Warhammer FB and I discovered too many opponents are too serious about the games. army lists tweaked to maximum - not even one point spent without necessity - the need of competition was huge. only ETC, only tournaments, only wins - only that matters. but thankfully there are many folks who just want to have fun. Campaigns, homemade rules, and pure joy:)

    ReplyDelete
  17. Hi Sebastian

    Thanks for writing - its great to find other gamers who aren't all about competition and winning and rules-lawyering and the like - great to have you on board! And apologies for the lack of updates on this blog. Y'know - real life. And kids. Which don't necessarily fit into real life, but boy do they take up time...

    ReplyDelete