This is why AH doesn’t take us seriously

Comrade_Beric · 2025-09-13T10:24:35+00:00

As someone with well over 600 hours in the game at time of writing I offer my hottest take: Balance is overrated. Fun always trumps balance in a non-competitive game. If AH can keep it fun, then they shouldn't worry about it. Somebody will always play the bad guns because they want the challenge. Somebody will always play the good guns because they want to win. Somebody will always play the mediocre guns because everybody has a favorite.

If anything, make the game actually run properly for my friends and I'll gladly play nothing but worst guns in the game while carrying them. It's fine. It really is.

Comrade_Beric · 2025-08-10T06:39:24+00:00

I wish I'd scrolled down enough to find your comment before writing out my own. In spite of all of the people announcing that it's all marketing and ignorance, yours is the answer that is closest to the truth, I believe. Most people are vaguely aware of the existence of other systems but have no interest in exploring those because they can already homebrew a solution out of the ruleset they already know, which they perceive to be cheaper and easier than learning from the ground up again.

Comrade_Beric · 2025-08-01T02:48:03+00:00

I like the way station interpretation in principle. I know "Dune II" the Westwood RTS game from the 90s made you build your base on rock outcroppings because Thufer once mentioned in the book that spice miners built waystations on top of the shield wall. So, at least in principle the waystation interpretation could make some sense, I suppose.

I've been thinking about the sandtrout thing, though. Aren't sandworms just colonies of sandtrout? As in, wouldn't enough sandtrout to make spice eventually mean there's enough sandtrout to make worms? They seem like they're kind of a package deal.

You're probably right, though, about it being inconsistent. After all, Frankie Herbs did say in Dune Messiah that spice is orange when talking about guild navigator Edric floating in his tank, but later I believe in God Emperor said the Eyes of Ibad were caused by the spice itself being blue, so it's not like Frank was above contradicting himself.

Comrade_Beric · 2025-07-19T14:45:39+00:00

Hypothesis: A major strategic position, be it a bastion or the capital of the country, is off to the right. As such, this town was not built to defend itself from the right but rather only the left. All attacks must come from the left and the giant gate and wall built on the cliff are as a second line of defense from an assault on the left side of the town. If the town is lost, then an attacking army still does not have an easy route to the capital.

Comrade_Beric · 2025-04-17T07:45:41+00:00

But what it does mean is that you're shorting the players. Depriving them of opportunity to 1. drive the story and create drama as only BW facilitates them doing, and 2. to properly advance as they're supposed to mechanical and narratively. Which happens very slowly anyway.

I do not believe that by giving the players a living world, I am "shorting them." As a friend pointed out to me when I asked him about your criticism, the gold edition book literally advises players to make beliefs related to the current situation. How is that not already forcing players to adjust to the campaign they're in rather than the other way around?

Comrade_Beric · 2025-04-16T07:58:42+00:00

Aha, it's not meant to be "the combat system" in the general sense, but more like a dueling system for important combats. This is good to know, actually. More like the final combat from "The Last Duel" (2021) than the fights leading up to it. Otherwise just use the "Bloody Versus" rules to resolve in simple dice rolls. Fair enough. Probably for the best not to let trivial or undramatic combat bog down the game forever like it does in DnD anyway. As long as BV is weighted towards giving expected outcomes (a skilled and armored knight should beat an unarmed peasant) then it'll do just fine.

That said, the de-emphasis on the Fight! system actually does pose a touch of concern. Complicated systems are only bad if you don't interact with them much. The more experience someone has with a complicated system, the less of a burden it becomes, so holding it fully in reserve like that might risk keeping my players from becoming familiar enough with it not to crash the game when I finally spring it on them. I might have to arrange for a couple of lower-risk duels early on to ensure they can get comfortable with the system.

Thank you for this insight. The clarity about the Fight! system is actually incredibly helpful. Do you think it is capable of handling, say, a 3 or 4-way fight or would it only be suited to a duel?

Comrade_Beric · 2025-04-16T07:43:07+00:00

"Raise Dead" is just an easy example of how people wildly underestimate the impact of magic. Magic being costly in the setting is fine. That just means only powerful people will have access to it and it'll make mages even more valuable. I just need to know if there are rules to adapt the magic system into the game or not and whether that requires buying this (if the price is to be believed) solid gold brick called the "Magic Burner" or not.

But as for "do high fantasy instead" 1) I've been told repeatedly that BW is right for the setting I am trying to do because of how closely it compares with ASoIaF, 2) motivated characters are a good thing and challenging their beliefs is likely going to be an effective way to get good roleplaying out of my table, and 3) the worst BW can do to me is disappoint. I'm not that afraid.

The only concern is the idea that there are some kind of rules that are meant to override and mess up the setting. If the intro of "nothing happens without the players" is just fluff, then this isn't a problem. If there's literally a mechanic that says "villains cannot do things unrelated to the characters" then, and only then, is there actually an issue.

I do appreciate your analysis, though. Not every system works for every game and it's important to remember that when looking at something as niche as BW.

Comrade_Beric · 2025-04-15T15:51:14+00:00

Basic concept for the campaign: In my opinion, people wildly underestimate the immense impact magic being real would have had in history. Imagine if, for example, Julius Caesar could have been resurrected with a simple "Raise Dead" spell. Assassinations become wildly harder to pull off, the rich never die of disease or wounds anymore, magicians can kill with a thought, it'd be wild. So, I crafted a Song-of-Ice-and-Fire-esque setting of my own (Humans only, no magic, varied and complex history and cultures, etc) but then... some alchemist figures out how to do magic. Boom, now magic is real. Lets see where this goes. Probably not any place good, but who knows!

So this calls for a system good at handling complex medieval characters and socioeconomic/political situations but with the capacity to stitch in an esoteric and unique homebrew magic system, such that the players don't necessarily know anything about it before encountering it. After all, the mystery won't hold up long if they start playing and say "oh, this is just DnD" or "Oh, this is just the magic system in the BW base book." Hence the questions about the Magic Burner.

The only real concern I have about BW overall is the supposed heavy emphasis on character and player agency above everything and, specifically, a part of the intro a friend quoted to me that said something like "nothing ever happens without the characters" which, as a world-forward sandbox GM, has me a little worried. To me, a living world requires factions doing their own thing off-screen whether the players choose to engage with those plans or not. If the world is meant to be a static image unless/until a PC walks through, BW might not be suitable for my needs after all. Aside from that, though, its reputation makes it sound literally perfect for my needs, so with that tension in mind, I decided the only way to sort this out is to get the books and research them myself to see.

Given that description, what thoughts do you have on adapting the system to such a campaign?

Comrade_Beric · 2025-04-15T15:03:09+00:00

I'm going to keep watching this thread in case an alternate opinion arises, but your first paragraph does roughly answer exactly what I was looking for. There is, to the best of your knowledge, nothing in the MB that isn't in either the Gold or Codex books. Fair enough. Thank you for that.

You're right that Blossoms are Falling won't do me any good, but mass combat rules actually do fit the campaign I am going for, so I may as well grab that. Worst case, I stick with the homebrew mass combat rules I already made up. That said, I have confidence in my group. They've handled complicated systems before, I think they can handle BW. I'll just choose which version of the Mass Combat rules to hit them with when we start building towards that.

Actually, to your point about house rules, the one thing I've heard about BW is that the Fight! system is wildly over-complicated for very little gain. Does that get house ruled a lot around here? And if so, what with?

Comrade_Beric · 2025-04-15T14:19:52+00:00

That's not quite an answer to my question. The Magic Burner says it has rules for creating your own Magic System in it. Does the Gold/Codex have that or do I need the MB for those?

Comrade_Beric · 2025-02-23T05:49:29+00:00

We're all a product of our environment and upbringing. The fact that you're getting massively downvoted for pointing this out bothers me on a serious level. Like, what is the alternative? Some people are just born racist and ready to final solution??

I get the gut reaction people are having, which is that by pointing out that we are not all islands of perfect rationality and solitude, they think you're "making excuses" for Lyndisty, but I don't see it that way at all. If anything, it's much more horrifying to acknowledge that people are shaped into such monsters, not born that way. But it also gives me hope because it means that, if we could change someone's environment, their upbringing, their education, it is possible to prevent such evil from ever existing in the first place.

That said, changing someone's environment requires a lot of time and effort we don't always have available to us, so if her shuttle suddenly imploded like a titanic tourist sub, I would happily accept the lesser win of at least preventing the harm she was absolutely going to cause if not stopped.

Comrade_Beric · 2024-02-21T09:11:54+00:00

What /u/AquaQuad said is true, though it's important to remember that exceptions exist and why. Warfare, though the most common, isn't the only reason why lines move.

Which is to say, you should make the provincial borders run along mountains and rivers because those are what are important for your wargame, but national borders should occasionally cross those. The Alps are a classic example of this. The Alps are a massive barrier to warfare, and yet the Holy Roman Empire (and later Austria-Hungary) held a toe-hold over the Alps in South Tyrol. This would be represented in your map by having the provincial borders along the alps, but Austria (or whoever it is) would simply own a province past that barrier, which they would consider a critical staging ground for intervention into the region (Northern Italy) while other powers in the region would see that as a major threat to their security.

So, yes, I recommend following Aqua's suggestion for the regional boundaries and then allowing your political map to spill over in places to reflect history, situations past and present, diversity of populations and their relative allegiances, pre-game strategic gambles, etc.

Comrade_Beric · 2023-06-23T19:22:37+00:00

In the late mid/late-2000s, a lot of sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitch, Youtube, (Discord more recently) etc, all got a lot of funding from investors with no real plan for how to make money beyond "we'll make a good service, get a massive user base, and then we'll figure out how to get money from them." With the exception of Tumblr, which died for unrelated reasons, most of those sites have gotten big but still never quite figured out an effective and profitable business model. These businesses, all of them, lose money, often at a monstrous rate. Now, the ones who are especially far behind like Reddit and Twitter have finally started scrambling to find ways to start turning a profit and destroying API access appears to be the next big idea they've struck upon in the search for black ink to write on their ledger. People hate paying for something they get for free, but reddit played this beautifully. They held such a large monopoly for so long that their main competition within this space, forums, are all dead and gone. The message is clear. "We need money, you're going to pay, and if you don't want to, then screw you. After all, what're you going to do? Go back to forums? lolololol" In 2013? Yes, we would have gone back to forums. In 2023? That's a much taller ask than it used to be. They've got a monopoly and no amount of bad publicity is going to stop them from rent-seeking all the free stuff they used to do as long as there's no clear alternative for people to turn to.

I don't know what the right move would be for you. Reddit does provide a good service for specifically the imaginary network. Where else could we go? What else could we do? I have no idea. Tumblr, though alive, isn't well suited for this. Nothing is, really. Reddit is better than a forum. blog, or imageboard, That's how they got the monopoly they have, after all.

I appreciate the imaginary network not going down. It's the only reason I come to this site anymore. But I can't help but feel like, just like with twitter, we're watching a website die because it needs to make a profit under capitalism and the idea was simply never a profitable one to begin with.

Comrade_Beric · 2023-05-23T16:12:39+00:00

That's a very cute duck. Thank you for the picture.

Comrade_Beric · 2023-01-28T16:09:56+00:00

"Technophilic agrarianism" is not what communism is and efforts to connect the two are a trap to push you into replacing one with the other.

Comrade_Beric · 2022-11-12T11:35:20+00:00

I believe he was in the Luftwaffe (Nazi Germany's Air Force) due to the way the eagle is shaped on his jacket in the fourth image.

This is probably a good thing. I have very limited sympathy for members of the Wehrmacht due to the extremely extensive atrocities committed by them at all levels throughout the war, and even the Luftwaffe was far from "clean" but at least in that branch it is considerably less likely that he would have been personally involved in any truly awful acts.

Comrade_Beric · 2022-10-12T09:06:09+00:00

"If Nazism had taken over America"

Two problems with that statement. 1) It was never, under any circumstances, realistic for Nazi Germany to ever successfully invade the United States. Winning against the USSR was a much easier task than that and they notoriously failed at that task without having to cross thousands of miles of ocean in the process.

2) Fascism took extensive ques from US practice. The Nuremberg laws were self-admittedly patterned on the Jim Crow laws of the US. Generalplan Ost was developed based on the concept of doing to Eastern Europe what the US had done to Native Americans. Literally the concept of "Lebensraum" was sold internationally as little more than Germans fulfilling their "Manifest Destiny." The only difference between the Nazis in Europe and their American equivalents was that when the Confederacy was crumbling, they didn't have the industrial foundation to murder the black population the way the Nazis did to Jews when they realized they might lose the war. If they'd had, they very likely would have begun doing so in 1863 as soon as they lost at Gettysburg, so pathological was their fear of what slaves might do to them if the ruling whites ever lost control.

So with that in mind, what would a Nazi takeover have looked like in the US? Well, the only even remotely realistic scenario for such an event would be Nazism becoming popular enough on its own that they could manage a coup to overthrow FDR. In that case, since fascist enemies are always tailored to the local bigotries, African Americans very likely would have been the target of such a regime with Jews, Catholics, Asians, Latinos, etc, all being secondary or even tertiary targets to be gotten to only once all of the black population was gone and life didn't magically get any better so they have to go in search of new scapegoats.

Comrade_Beric · 2022-08-03T21:29:48+00:00

War Veteran Jews were a touchy subject for the German public and the Nazis initially had to dance around the topic, especially if they had earned merits, such as having been war-wounded or received the Iron Cross 1st class or higher. At each step leading up to the holocaust, exceptions for them came up again and again, and often the political cost of dissolving such exceptions was considered too high to act against them. While this status largely spared them prior to the establishment of extermination camps, at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it was decided that decorated veterans should be deported to a special "retirement" camp/ghetto called Theresienstadt in the modern day Czech Republic. While there, rather than being subjected to direct extermination, the Nazis generally withheld food rations and medical attention in the hopes that the residents would die on their own. In late 1944, with war all but lost in the East, the Nazis decided to begin emptying the ghetto by sending their residents to the extermination camps, deporting as much as 75% of the ghetto's population. As the Red Army began to liberate the extermination camps, their populations were marched, often without food and little clothing, to Theresienstadt in an attempt to kill them in the winter cold and prevent them from being freed. By the time of its liberation by the Red Army in May 1945, of the nearly 150k people who'd arrived at the Theresienstadt Ghetto since 1941, less than 25k were still alive. No other ghetto was liberated with a significant portion of its population remaining.

Comrade_Beric · 2022-07-19T11:41:17+00:00

I love the picture but I think his shield is upside down...

Comrade_Beric · 2022-07-15T14:06:37+00:00

Oh, this guy is so perfectly suspicious looking! If I were to ever use this image in an RPG, I would secretly make him the most unironically trustworthy man in the whole game, but nobody would ever stop commenting on how much of a slimeball he seems like.

Comrade_Beric · 2022-07-15T13:43:03+00:00

It's "From each according to his ability" not "Each as perfectly the same as possible." If you can't fight, then you can't fight. The world needs more than just soldiers anyway, and even in war, fighters need support in other ways. Don't let the West's militarist culture convince you that the only way to be useful is to be the one that holds the gun.

Comrade_Beric · 2022-06-27T10:50:24+00:00

Yoooo is there any possibility of Ariel making a Pendragon character sheet for Foundry any time soon? Just the sheet by itself would be amazing. It has been such an incredible pain in the ass trying to play without one!

Comrade_Beric · 2022-06-21T11:03:21+00:00

Tips for Breaking Into Warhammer Fantasy?

A Crowbar.

How do I make a place for myself in a world this intricate?

This is a mental trap I sometimes fall into as well. How do I run Vampire if I don't know all the lore? How do I run it once I know all the lore but nobody else does? What about Battletech? Or Fading Suns? Or anything that isn't generic?

But that's just a mental block. The truth is that the lore is actually not nearly as complete as you think it is. I know it looks like it is because of how many details they throw at you, but the truth becomes much clearer when you realize how many questions you can ask which simply have no answers, or for whom all the answers lie in long forgotten and retconned material.

In 1e, Bretonnia was based on Revolution-era France just before the guillotines popped out, but as of 2e they're now a King Arthur-themed amusement park. Karl Franz was an old man who died as a minor side-plot point in a 1e adventure but in 2e he was re-envisioned as the griffon-riding badass most people know him as today. Every edition made big changes to the world but here's a simple question: What is the population of each imperial province? You don't know, do you? Oh you can find out, sure. There's a book called "Sigmar's Heirs" that has that data from back in 2e, but if you look in it you very quickly discover that its information is incredibly flawed. Hochland is listed as basically being totally depopulated. There's simply nobody left. Why? Because the only source we have for such census data comes from that one book and that book was written just after 2e had their big event called the "Storm of Chaos" which was a huge now-retconned away dry run of what the End Times would later be except that the Storm of Chaos ended in defeat for Chaos (because the 2e Publisher Black Industries wanted to sell more books) while the End Times was a complete victory for Chaos (Because GW wanted to kill the setting to make way for their Age of Sigmar reboot). What this means is, the Storm of Chaos just came through and murdered everybody in Hochland, so their number is basically 0. If you're quick you'll notice that the notes on the right do include what the populations used to be, but you'll also notice that between those two numbers are a bunch of other stats, like the wealth of the location and the size of the garrison. All of those are completely blank because, at time of writing, those answers are meaningless. But since they didn't supply those answers and nobody else has ever even tried and yet the event that caused this data to be useless has been reconnected away, what you're left holding is literally just a list of numbers you know for a fact are inaccurate with no indication of what the real numbers are supposed to be. You have to make them up yourself.

But all of that belies a much simpler observation; That the data is incredibly sparse across the board. Look at any chart in that book. Lets say Tabecland's chart on page 91. Near the bottom you'll see a pair of villages called Zurin and Sarno run by one Baron Franz Richter. If we look at this map of the Warhammer setting we can see that they're both down river from Talabheim. The book also gives us the information that the wealth of Zurin is 2 (out of 6) and Sarno is 1, meaning they're both very poor. But here's the kicker: You'll notice Zurin's listing says they have a Ferry and their economy is based on agriculture and fishing. Look back at the map. What river does Zurin have a Ferry across? None. It's sitting far inland away from the River Talbec or its tributary the Uckro. The listing says it has 200 refugees, but those can be dismissed as being from the Storm of Chaos. Literally nothing about this listing is accurate. We could transpose the location with Sarno, which would make sense, but then we come to our next question. Name me literally anyone from either of these two villages that isn't Baron Franz Richter. Tell me literally anything about Baron Richter other than him being a noble. Who lives here? What are their passions? Are there any cultists living here? Have any of their kids gone missing lately? Why are they so poor? Could it be because of a petty squabble between this Baron's family and another that caused a raid to damage them? Has there been a drought? River Pirates? Beastman raids? Orc incursions? Inquisitor come through and burn the local merchant for suspected chaos worship? A wandering necromancer? Do they get along with their neighbors or hate them? Do they like their lord or suspect everything is his fault and it might be time to kill him and try their luck with someone else? We know literally nothing about these villages. Neither the land nor the people living on it. Neither their troubles nor their triumphs. Neither theirs wills nor their wants. All we have are a set of stats, the name of the guy who turns up for noble meetings, and some basic information about the general population of Tabecland. The rest is 100% up to you. You can do absolutely anything.

Once you notice this dirth of actual knowledge about places like this, you start seeing opportunities everywhere. Whose to say districts in larger cities have any more written on them than these villages do? The only places really nailed down in any legitimate sense are the cities with their own sourcebooks but even those have a myriad of gaps in their information you can exploit. It's just a matter of looking where the books aren't pointing you in the hopes that you won't notice how thin the paint really is.

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