Nerd Rage of Sigmar

It's been an interesting week hobby-wise, I wrote a post for Corehammer that got a lot of attention, most of it positive at first, but then the dickhead, sexist, gamergate arseholes on Reddit got hold of it and took offence that they might be asked not to make quite so many rape jokes and consider being a considerate human being. 

Being all about ethics as they are, they flooded the comments with their barely coherent rage.

That was a fun little distraction.  

More rage was generated by the replacement for Warhammer: Fantasy Battles, Warhammer Age of Sigmar.

First off, I've played quite a few games so far and all have been great, nice and quick, loads of fun and everyone has had a good time. I've played more Age of Sigmar in the last two weeks than I've played Fantasy in the last 2 years. 

The hardcore nerds hated it.

The rule book is just 4 pages long. This sounds like a huge deal but it really isn't, with the Army Building mechanics shorn out of the rules and the fact that every unit has its own War Scroll with their rules on, meaning anything that was previously a Universal Special Rule is now on the War Scroll, it's plenty of space to fit the core mechanics on to. 

This seems simplified but in practice it allows them to expand unit by unit and easily add in as much extra stuff as they want in the future.

It works really well but still generated fury from people calling it childish (you know, as opposed to the super serious world of Squig Hoppers and Giant Hamster Wheels).

It's not in the least bit suited for traditional competitive play. It doesn't have points values or any sort of restrictions on what you can use, asking you to agree with your opponent if the game is going to be fair. Turns out, most “competitive” players can’t comprehend why you'd want to play fair when you're playing a game against another person when you can just overpower them and then you win. We've seen this happen with Unbound in 40K but they've doubled down here, use as much or as little as you like.

Then there were the “silly” rules, lots of the rules for the game give you benefits for little roleplaying things in the game, having a moustache, growling like a beast, etc. Being a rational and relatively mature human being I was able to see the funny side of this, but there have been more complaints, conspiracy theories about this trying to embarrass players into buying new stuff and throwing away the old and everything.

What you essentially have is the players no one actually liked to play, the ones who hadn’t bought any new models since 2006 and generally fucking stink raging at Games Workshop for ruining the game that they’d already ruined for most normal people. There was much flipping of tables (actually happened) and setting fire to their models in a pathetic and homophobic rant (again, actually happened) but the rest of us rejoiced, we can balance the games between us and not have to care about points and OP units any more. And so we actually tried the game. Because its free so why not?

Oh yeah, I didn't mention that, the game is free, the rules – free, rules for the existing models – free, the rules for new models – come with the models and probably free on the free app that’s on the way.

And yet still they complain.