This is just a general question to /tg about tabletop wargames in general. What if the rules for our favorite games weren't written and maintained by the same people who have a vested interest in selling us armies?
Something I've been mulling over quite a bit lately is that there's a fundamental conflict with miniature games rules being written by the people who make the miniatures. Even if they set out with the best of intentions (and they usually do), sooner or later there comes a point where they've got to choose between making the game better or making more sales. In order to ever really be balanced and healthy, a game's rules need to be stable, and stability - at a fundamental level - is just bad for business. In a stable tabletop game, people can build up their armies slowly, and once they have a "complete" army, they can just happily go on playing it with little incentive to buy more.
To call out GW specifically for this with the pic is beating a dead horse, I recognize, but I think theirs is a story most of tg is very familiar with and serves as a good example. The trials and tribulations of Privateer Press the last couple years look very similar to a lot of us. I'm sympathetic - I think companies hit a critical point in their growth (and some others like Wyrd are probably coming to it as well), where most of their customer base already has an army or armies, and all they're selling is the new releases. That, in turn, means you need a constant stream of new releases, which inevitably leads to bloat in the game. Then, at some point, you have to either outright cull your rules and/or community down to a size you can deal with, or at the very least hit the reset button with a new edition and hope to get back to a manageable place.
Cooper Barnes
I'm not sure what the alternative is. Obviously, there's a ton of rulesets out there that have been written over the years, either fan-made or abandonware from small companies. There's also community maintained systems like what Epic has become, or the various WHFB bastard children.
The problem, as I see it, is that with NO money behind them, projects like those tend to stay fairly low profile. The community also has little faith in them (sometimes justified, sometimes not), and many players are unwilling to "commit" - building an army for any tabletop system is a pretty big investment, after all.
But I think that "neutral" rules have some pretty big benefits for us, as gamers and hobbyists. The first and most obvious is just satisfaction with what we're doing - in a system that's actually stable, you CAN lovingly build up armies over years and continue to put them on the table for many more. It also unfetters us from an "official" line of minis, and with everything that's out there today, that's pretty big.
Anyway, just a discussion starter, really. What do people think?
Brayden Gonzalez
Better question: What if the rules were actually written by high school graduates who understood game theory, rules, and literature, instead of washouts from the marketing department?
Charles Lopez
Nearly all wargame rules aren't written by manufacturers.
Asher Russell
I play Kings of War entirely with GW minis, and fan made versions of GW's rulesets such as Heralds of Ruin. Net Epic, Wyrd Wars, and 1 Page 40K all exist. It isn't unheard of, but it is much harder to promote a decent ruleset without official figures. A store owner won't promote anything they can't sell you after all, so said rulesets rarely get big.
You are right that the drive to push their new releases really ate up Rackham, GW, and others. Some I would claim haven't reached that point, but it is definitely something that can happen.
Sebastian Morgan
This is why as I'm getting older, historicals interest me.
There's a divide generally between miniature suppliers and rules writers, and even if a company does both, they can't gear up to make it a closed circle where you have to buy the new plastic kit, because of all the alternatives available. And it's not like they can pull new units out of their arse.
Though it does seem Warlord are attempting to make Bolt Action work more like 40k or Warmahordes than just another WW2 ruleset.
Logan Thompson
What's probably the vast majority of systems are written without an attached figure line.
Why they don't get nearly as much traction as the ones that do have an attached line is largely down to gamers not really wanting to have to put any effort in to finding appropriate figures. It's a convenience thing. Sometimes you get miniatures manufacturers selling one or more systems produced by entirely different, separate companies alongside their ranges, and sometimes you even get the larger companies who produce both figures and rules still effectively advertising other miniatures manufacturers in their games because it's not financially viable/reasonable for them to produce complete ranges by themselves when ranges already exist.
This is seen mostly with historical wargames for fairly obvious reasons though, but also applies to a bunch of fantasy and sci-fi games.
Benjamin Fisher
I think I'm a year or two ahead of you >Ditched 40K, WHF, X-Wing >Started Flames of war (15mm) and Bolt Action >Suddenly notice that there's all these "rules" around that work with the same models, some of them are really different >Start trying to find people to play against, most of my friends are not as into the historical and are going down the Infinity line >Start hanging aroud the hoistorical games thread >Find obscure historical wargamng clubs >Am the youngest there by about 10 years, they're fun and the games are better >They're suggesting that I should pick up some Civil War minatures >They all look like my dad >I look like my dad
OH GODS I'VE GOTTEN OLD!
Ryder Evans
>historic / RL-based games OP here - yeah, I can understand that. This is one area where the manufacturers are not dominant, but I think that's in large part because the motivations of the players are different. Most historic wargamers are much more interested in the "fluff" aspect - that is, the actual history - than in a game that is competitively robust or interesting on its own merits. The rules are a tool that serve a larger purpose, in a word.
That may be true of the whole set of all the wargames rules ever written, but if you look at just those that have a global presence, or that most people in the community have had direct contact with, the list is dominated by manufacturers' flagship products. At the very least, most of us were introduced to the hobby by 40K or similar.
What are you playing to have that point of view? I'll agree there are some stinkers out there, but most of the games I've played in recent years were, at their core, very well thought out rulesets. I think it's hubris to assume you or I could put together better rules than what Warmachine or Malifaux are running on right now.
That's not really the point - I don't think either of those are bad games. My experience is just that, when you talk about the future development and growth of games on that path, that the manufacturers' interests stop aligning with those of their customers after a point.
Hudson Harris
>PP >Not money grabbing jews
Let's nerf popular armies into the dust only to give them new options later purely on mini sales.
