Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining me as always is my co-host who's on the road. It's Tom. What's up, buddy? How you doing? Hello friends? Tom what's it like to have to do the show sometimes? Occasionally from the road for you now that you live my life where I had to do this show for years Often being on the road very consistently It's fine. Sure. Okay. Yeah, it is easier when you're just joining in as opposed to like trying to actually do the show No, I mean, I'm doing the show and it's great. Mm-hmm. Sure. Steve's a great host He is yes also joining us on the show back on the show One of my favorite people in all of Warhammer it's Steve Herner. What's up, buddy? How you doing? Hi, thanks for having me back. Appreciate it. Hello everyone I have a pretty great hobby space. I won't lie. I'm very proud of it But my hobby space is like garbo compared to Steve's hobby space That's the that is the number one thing I think every time I look at Steve's like whenever he's on the show I look at this his like office and I'm like That's so much better than what I've got going on You you think that's right. You should see the rest of the basement. I sure I'm sure Right down that door. Yeah there And then on behind that wall right here is all of the holy words and holy heaven tables I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Uh, well, I'll have to make a pilgrimage out sometime Uh, okay So tonight we're going to talk about what makes a battle plan good and what makes a battle plan bad We're going to take a walk through history We're going to talk about how battle plans should be designed why we're missing a trick how battle plans are letting us down We're going to talk about all that stuff. But of course first to the news So news how about that rumor engine? How about it? it's It's uh, the new it's going to be the the thing in magigie. What are they called? It's the incarnate That's what it is. Well the one that's not coming Yeah, they'll still do the incarnate somewhere just because there's no season war book doesn't mean we're not going to get another incarnate We're going to get another one. Absolutely um, I can't I mean, I want to say it's a Some type of reptilian things But I don't I think we probably saw all of our seraphon stuff, but sure Well, it looks a little dinosaur to me So what realm is that then? I don't know man. It's still ger. It's just a spidery thing.  No, it goes with the giant spider face. That's the problem here. Sure it can it can always be ger Tom, that's what it has to be a different incarnate It's you can still be gerger's the plane. It's just a different part of ger Steve is is vince freezing on you. He's freezing on me. Yeah, he's Nope. Well, there he goes. You just know it was it's it's you guys by the way That's just as a as a warning, but that's okay. You you both froze a minute ago, but we'll get through it. It's all good Uh, yeah, it's a big incarnate thing. That's what it is There you go. He keeps freezing He's gonna say it's us. It is you Yes I'm sure it's you because I can I can see my own upload speed on my side. So I know it's not me Well, we are on the same connection. So that could be the problem See how see how when both of you have a problem simultaneously and you're both in the same house It's kind of easy for me to work out what's going on Well, well the hilarious thing though is that him and I can interact And so whatever it is like him and I on discord are still interacting. You're just not here anymore Sure.  That's fine That's fine. You're good.  That isn't that that's the key Quick quick close everything else. It's fine. All right That was it. What's next Um, yeah, let's talk about the f.a.q Let's talk about it. Boom Let's bring it up f.a.q. We got four We've got some corn we've got some slanesh. We've got some ko We've got some ghb All right Let's roll these in order corn Can karnak set up his dogs within three inches of enemy units? Yes, he can Of course karnak. It's karnak the leader continues to be the best boy. Yeah, he is the good boy.  No No, they did not They did not I am a hundred percent sure of it. They did not and they did not Uh, and then some the allies table was updated accordingly. Okay fine neat Yep Steve anything anything you care about with corn corn was pretty like yeah, okay cool to me No, not my army Sure, exactly audio better some people on this stream said that the audio was a little soft So I just pumped up the volume a little bit here a little bit.  You can you can you can crank that gain on that mic Is it any better? There you go. Uh, you got a little bit better better better better better. There you go. Yeah, sure. Yeah, there you go Still pretty quiet. Steve. I don't know. I'll speak up. No, you're good man. There you go You hit it right there. You're good. Yep. Okay. All right Then we got slanesh Is the retreat moved caused by the phantasmagoria spell simultaneous with piling in and attacking? Yes What does this mean? This is not helpful Ridiculous and I was like, yes Right And Here's how it works. Here's the designer commentary on this wackadoo ability There you're at where you're doing two things at once What it would effectively mean right now Is that it would happen Like it's going to it's going to change When it happens based on whose turn it is Correct because player priority will take effect, right? It gets sequenced. So the active player is going to resolve first Correct. Correct. Yes. Yeah. And so what that means is that if it's the enemy attacking they still get to attack before you pile away for retreat or You if it's your turn you get to retreat before they pile in effect. Yes. Now I get that But that is a real in the weeds sort of like rules interpretation and How did anyone think this was acceptable? So I I literally expect to see this updated in the future This is this is a nonsense. Thank you. Stop that. Don't don't please stop that I've said a hundred times. Could you please stop writing the word? Yes and no unless the answer Literally behooves a yes or no question Can I do this thing? No acceptable answer Is this how a thing works because of this rule? No, unacceptable answer explain yourself Okay I think they misunderstand the purpose of FAQs. I really do. I really do Uh, as someone who's you know writes FAQs. This is not how you write them. It's ridiculous It's supposed to explain question. Right Okay Can you just figure out to the dark prince more than once in each of your phase? No, that was already answered before so whatever Uh, blade bringer thing fine The all these things are fine. But some of these were answered before they just stayed magenta the how did the things work? I love this one. If I offer a temptation dice to my opponent and they reject the offer is that temptation dice still lost Yes Nice try the devil Who's like who's like no, you just got d3 mortal wounds on tap just forever Forever forever These people I'll tell you what Uh, yes, that's exactly how they intended the army to be built to just be able to be like every time someone activates You do a d3 mortal wounds. That's it Uh, okay Uh, the invaders battle tray got reread got rewritten for clarity and to limit Non-sensory that's fine. And so okay, whatever Um, I didn't think it was that good before I didn't it's not chainable and so on anymore and whatever It's fine. Yeah, and uh, you can't uh Like The clarification again on on everything with the lord of hubris. I love how How much problem the lord of hubris causes because of this silly rule he decided to have Like This is every slanesh book because they they have to write some wacky do ability to try to get at slanesh We can't just like write an army that's just like fast and has rent Which would be a perfectly valid Expression of the army like it could just be that What does this army do it's a fast glass cannon army with ultra high rent But it has to tempt people right Every time we've got to play around with dumb mechanics every time This is what you get. What do you get with this? This is did you want ants lana because this is how you get ants. Okay Um At any rate. All right, full cool fine. Yay a plus Corrader and overlords, uh, this is all sort of the A lot of stuff here. Tom was there anything in this that caught your attention. I mean It's fine Okay, like I think it's I think it's all still playable You know like for being at the top of the meta. It's fine sure like it's all playable. It none of it is egregious um Yes, you know yeah You can still retreat up into boats right or not retreat, but sorry read to play up into boats, right? Yep Nice, that's I mean, that's my read of it. Yeah, sure Okay All right They clarified the tusk helm thing, which is good. I always thought that was a silly combination I know there was some argument about it on our original show I'm happy to see the tusk helm thing resolved like no that person didn't actually charge chance. They didn't make a charge role So that's fine Yeah, okay I mean a lot of it was just for me just matter like the the types of interpretations you would expect yep Uh, yeah, I mean exactly most of these were pretty in line with how I think the the standard interpretation was So I didn't really I didn't really see anything in here that that blew my mind I was also happy to see like the timed charges cleaned up just so it's like a functional Common sense rule now. So yep all works It's all fine Okay, good stuff All right, and then lastly Generals handbook, let's talk about it. Here we go. We've all gotten opinion on this one There's only there's only like You know really one thing we're going to pay attention to here. Okay Sure It's down here page 46 Pitch battle publications 20 22 23 season two other publications Remove compendium monster sarcanum excluding warhammer legends monster sarcanum from the list All right We finally did it. We ripped off the band-aid and an FAQ on mark the date May 10th 2023 The forge world models are gone rip Press f to pay respects okay so Uh, let's start up here steve.  We're gonna start with you. What do you think about this? Oh, well Um It was going to happen someday. Sure. Um, that was obvious. Um, but um I don't support the decision so abruptly. Um, and so I am allowing The monsters sarcanums to show up at holy havoc We're going to roar and we're going to roar fun and then all of those four Monsters that I might may or may not have in the collection We'll make an appearance and have special rules on holywars tables. So They're not going away in my realm in my world. So that's a great use for them. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely Here we go. See your rack and rock might need a little friend or maybe You know the island of sorrow table. Could you see him ice skating? Oh, yeah, it'd be great. It'd be great.  Oh, yeah, we'll take them. Oh, yeah, and they'll find a home forever. Yeah on his table Yeah, for sure that gets used. Yeah, sure. Yeah So if you have a dread sorean out there, you can send it. Yeah, and it'll make its way onto the uh The pair bond table Do you hear that Anthony? Is he watching? It's the entertainer. I'm I haven't seen him in the chat Yeah, but he'll he'll watch at some point. Absolutely. By the way, everybody who pressed f also press like to pay your respects That's really easy. See you clicked a button already. Well, just click that button too We're gonna we're gonna have a couple of these maybe rolling around the speed is processing table. So Yeah, yeah, yeah so Yeah, that's my opinion Sad to see it happen, but I knew you knew it was coming. So I think probably what I'm more sad about than anything else was just um, I I had planned to bring that many many years ago to an event pre COVID so it never happened. So he just sat over here just sitting there Um, and uh, yeah, so but yeah, it was it was inevitable Yeah Tom Yeah, I mean Yes, everybody saw it coming, right? Like we knew we knew that this was going to happen like a couple years like a about two years back I saw the writing was on the wall And so I went out and bought the models that I wanted right like I knew that I was going to want these Because they were going to disappear off the market and now they're going to um and I mean just because they're being removed doesn't mean you can't do something with them Like uh, for me, I have my colossal squig and he'll probably find a home in my loomspite army as squig knows, right? So like you can do conversions with them and they're still they still have a wonderful home in your Sure, sure.  They never had a place in this world and uh Sure, they could have published something like three months ago that said hey in three months We're going to knock them out. It would be the same thing Like it would be the same thing because at that moment everybody would know that they're going away And so it doesn't matter if they picked a date, you know Three days in the future three months in the future. Like they should have cut these things back at the changeover into third like I'm sorry, but they just they're they're ugly old models that were hard to get a hold of that were egregiously Expensive for bad casts.   I love my scurvy keel Like come on the the land ship converted into a screaming ball Come on as soon as that as soon as the scatting get that special rule where it can just move Like the daughters feel like like the cauldron and you know Once sure that thing's coming back on the table, buddy And that is the probably the most expensive conversion I've ever done. Oh, so I mean There's I don't know I hear you you're right. You're absolutely right with regards to well in all your points. Um It's Don't say that. He's right.  The the cast are not the greatest. That's for sure.  Maybe no, there's there's a bunch of these concepts that could become really cool Fakes that should be reintegrated into the army like conceptually There's a lot of ideas there in those forged road models That are cool and that I would love to see reimagined as a new sculpt in the army And if brought back in that way, I would have absolutely no problem with and celebrate Right, like if they if they reimagined the troll hag into a new type of troll in the army and gets I would be all for it I would think that would be the coolest thing since sliced bread, especially if it was in plastic and Uh an actual good model that didn't cost twice as much for poor quality resin casting Like I just That's it.  I love my uh Like I love my colossal squig.   It's like I agree with hey Well, I think that was in the like you must be joking tier when he rated the models Like the whatever the lowest joke tier was Okay, and and it belongs down there Uh, shut your mouth You compare that to something like the mangler squig the current loon boss on mangler squig One of the most beautiful sculpts that they've ever wrought the movement the life the detail Like it's incredible the the loon boss on mangler squig is like Is is one of the pinnacles of model making it's incredible I I don't like the mangler squig sculpt That's fine. I'm not talking about liking it or not liking it. Okay. We're not talking about that tom We're talking about respecting the craft Of what a model is The quality of the cast The way that the lines are and are organized the movement in the figure These aren't like or dislike you can like or dislike whatever the heck you want in life. Okay This is this is I am evaluating a thing according to criteria here You can not like value. They are poor quality They are poor quality. I mean the the landscape I had to bend back because I'm so poorly cast Right, I mean and when you're paying almost 300 dollars for a for a modeling expect perfection. Thank you This is all I'm saying This is all I'm saying. Okay. Anyway, so they're well I think what sucks is that people can't use them on it. You know, if they want to stop producing them It's fine without producing it. But I don't I don't like it when they sell models like that Especially models that are at that price point events. So sure I do I mean everything eventually has a lifespan, but I do think that the right answer is is what tom said now Like tom does have the right answer here to jump back to tom's defense Which is there's no reason you can't use these models anymore. Most of them are fully Like your troll hag should easily suddenly become your your dank Uh, your dank trod boss or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly So, okay Very funny. All right at any rate, so That's that's the FAQ The third news item you want me to take the third one. I got the third one if you want That's fine. Okay third news item Hey, everybody tmx is happening about a month from now june 3rd and 4th in oshkosh, wisconsin It's it's uncle adams convention. Uh, you can check it out It's there the link is down in the description and guess what myself Sam lens and then john are all going to be teaching there this year. We're gonna we're gonna we're doing our best We're gonna we're gonna To have some fun classes. We're gonna play some fun games We're gonna be hanging out painting and you can sit around and paint with us even if you're not taking one of the classes It's gonna be a grand old time uh and So check it out links in the description. You can buy tickets to classes. You can buy tickets to tmx and we hope to see a bunch of you up there An oshkosh on june 3rd and 4th should be should be a beautiful time Uh, okay, so Uh, yeah, there you go link link below. All right good stuff Uh, let's talk about some pick of the week That's what we're on to now Uh, tommy, what do you want to share with everybody? I'll let you go first this week Wow, I feel so honored and it's not because vince is trying to catch me out Without an actual recommendation because he knows I have one and that's gonna be Yeah, I do it is uh aos No, no not aos shorts um I You teed it high and you just shanked it buddy. Yeah, I was like I got this one Way off the fairway Yes aos coach, um I Loved his video with basil. Um talking about colas serif on so if you Are a fan of the um the new army that they just created with all these beautiful sculpts you can check out The uh that video and uh, yeah Good stuff very nice sieve What would you like to share with everybody? I'd like to share a very important video from a A beacon of A beacon of intelligence in this game from halo And um, it's his video that he did On mastering the double or how to play Age of sigmar and uh, it's a brilliant video. Uh, it's an it's really really great for all you people who hate the priority role Uh, you need to watch that video. It's absolutely amazing and it's the best 20 minutes I think it's around 20 minutes best 20 minutes you'll ever spend watching a video brilliant stuff In typical halo fashion The man is a master He is a master An absolute pillar a chat of the community The artistic stuff I I I fully fully fully second this recommendation Yeah, many athletes watch Send it to him, send it to him Well, no, what's funny is he's embraced that uh, he has embraced that that thing since the show He talked about in a video. He talked about embracing what tom told him Okay Oh, which is uh, always Always give it away Assume like follow the what we call the red hot chili pepper strategy Uh, right, uh, which is you you always play as though you're going to give it away And then you give it away unless you're going to literally win the game that turn Right And you know, I watched him play against nergal with his sole blight a list He had formerly had some trouble with now partially. He's playing a ramped up new sole blight book and that book is pretty strong And secondly, he had the guy who cuts through ward saves at the head of the the list But also he followed that advice and just I mean demolished the nergal player on stream. I felt I feel pretty good watching it because I like watching nergal get the living, you know, snot being out of them Uh, it's always a good time um, okay So, uh, my pick will be for our buddies over at call to paint great people over there friends of the show All around and uh stellar human beings. Um, they have a cool video on the, uh, the coolest stuff from golden demon that didn't win Basically, you know, other things that they liked highlighting some other minis this I cannot support enthusiastically enough They're they are all men of excellent taste and they highlight some really cool cool cool models in there And at the same time I want to shout out to gw because this week gw put up The part one of the commended entries article so Was this myself and travarian and ninjon complaining about this loudly the fact that they take pictures of all of this stuff And then don't use them even though it's the most obvious article that would get that like obviously would garner tons of clicks And they're just like wasting Value like free marketing of some of the best painters in the world Painting their models to an incredibly high quality and then deciding not to use those incredible photographs for free advertisements In one of these stupidest marketing decisions that they've made Historically, did they finally realize how dumb that was? I don't know I don't know if we had an effect But either way they did it. They shared it out and it was awesome I love seeing all those commended entries, man. And what it made me look at was go My god, there were so many good entries at that uk golden demon I was just blown away by everybody's stuff and that's like it was such a great read Because I wasn't just looking at the top three, but I got to see so much more Please continue that and I want to say I can't wait for like part two and three of the article or whatever so absolute proper Celebration of the artist who put so much effort in sharing it out a plus good work gw Better late than ever. Okay so With that, let's uh, let's talk. Let's move on. Let's talk about some hobby time gentlemen Uh, steve, what are you working on there? Well, I'm working on one of your favorite model ranges malifaux um I'm working on my um, my never-born crew. I got a game this weekend. Um, with a good friend joe peck Who's been training me up in the ways of malifaux and I've been enjoying the game. So I figured Time to dive back into painting. I'm finally getting settled into my new job Uh, I was on a painting break for about six weeks, which is pretty unusual for me But I just didn't have the energy or the mustard to do anything And so that's what I'm doing now is a palette cleanser before I jump right back into all this stuff That's over my shoulder. Nice. No, I I'm quite like malifaux figures. I just quite do I I quite don't like assembling malifaux figures Oh, there's a No, yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a nightmare.  No, it's painful. Yeah, it's painful being in 28 millimeter with the way they slice those those sprues up as uh Painful. Yeah, and then I'm seeing all types of seams and I don't care That's my you know, that's the new saying here. I just I'm not gonna care Because totally fair It's malifaux Tom You worked on anything recently. I mean, obviously you're traveling this week So I imagine your hobby time has been somewhat limited, but I know you're also at Steve So you could have brought something and just worked with his stuff I did ask I did ask if he was bringing an army. Would you play or do some hobby? I hung drywall this week Okay, okay So I hobbied on my house This excuse is just only gonna go so far Tom. I'm just saying It is it is and I uh, and I I have a friend in the lesson area that's getting ready to head out He is moving and so I'm gonna be joining them for some games and events in the coming week So gotcha. Okay. Um, so it's it's the plan. It's on the calendar. It's just one among many many things So Glad to hear it For my hobby time I have been rocking and rolling on this uh, this bust right here. So this is northern wind From big child creatives One of my favorite busts of all time There's big skulls there Yes, they are like the skulls that hang around her belt are ridiculously Oversized like just she is chopping off some big heads. Um, so yeah, that's she's obviously still mid-prime progress But I'm super happy with how some things have turned out so far I am just loving everything about the the journey With with models like this. So if everybody can see the skin tone and stuff that's on her a little booty shot there uh, but So that skin tone Okay Was made Using Uh These colors right here, which is a purple Uh, a deep yellow a bright yellow A pink and a pale green and that got me to all of those colors I'm just enjoying playing around with skin tones in a lot of different ways Playing with different color palettes to get to skin Uh, and and to mix new and interesting tones and shades and stuff like that just having a lot of fun and Like I've I've been focusing a lot recently on models that have Like a lot more skin and I have a lot more queued up because I just I love painting skin and uh I really really like using Unusual colors like starting from purple yellow together like specifically this is a pure violet and a Well, what yellow pigment is this? py1 70 Is the yellow that's being used there as the pigment? Uh, and it's just that it produces such an interesting rich sort of base Uh Warm brown tone You put those two together that you can then push around With the pinks and the greens and get into like interesting places So anyways, it's been tremendous fun and uh, yeah, just keep working on that So that's what I'm what I'm doing now on that that bust It's a little bit like doing oil painting and doing your underpainting and brown tones You get all the shading and building up from there. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're not wrong It's it's a lot of it's a lot of exploring that similar stuff, right? Yeah Yeah, once you get that technique down it opens up the gateway of exploration Yeah, it's just it's so much fun and then like working with the leather and I was like, okay Well, what do I want to do for the leather and you know, let's mix Let's let's get to some natural brown tones in a different way, right? There's lots lots of ways obviously through different paints you can get to an interesting brown tone And so on and so forth and you know playing with textures and all that kind of stuff So, um, yeah, it's just been like a lot of fun Uh, and yeah, so that's that's what I've been doing Um, okay But that's not what we're here to talk about what we're here to talk about today Is we are here to talk about battle plans What makes them good? What makes them bad? Good and bad elements, okay so I have gone through the history books As it were the the the sacred tomes the historical artifacts pulled a selection Of different battle plans to talk through as well as some other things We've also I've also borrowed one of steves. He uses for his holy events to talk about it And what we're really going to get to here So I want to talk about the different audiences for these things and why I do feel we're missing a trick With battle tomes right now Our battle plans. I'm sorry not battle tomes Uh, all right so Overview, let's let's lay down some fundamentals So first They're an essential element of the game the battle plan I they are how you experience the game period Right, I don't think aos is a game that should be played without a battle plant like it is a fundamental part of it I don't there's no Sort of core loop outside of that right it is meant to be experienced through the scenario Right Now what that thing could consist of as we'll see it could be A million different things right it could be just kill your enemy That's it Like it doesn't have to have objectives doesn't have to have anything else It could be anything but that's that is the lens through which you're going to see it and what's going to flavor and and color your experience of the game And historically over the like eight years of aos battle plans have had wildly different elements That aren't well aligned for the specific purpose of that battle plan And what I mean by that is in my mind battle plans largely fall into four categories You've got your competitive event based battle plans Which all need to be relatively we'll talk about the various elements of them But they should be relatively straightforward minimize randomness Right and and sort of like other sort of negative elements They should rotate largely on a particular axis That is that you can fight over that skill tests, you know And they should have relatively constrained scoring So that people can't just like oh, it's bottom of two. I'm up by 30. You can't catch me even if you play for the rest of the game And that hasn't always been the case. Sometimes we've seen those get broken Then we've got what I call general use battle plans Okay, so this is stuff that does need to be on tight rails That can be that could use other other things general use Is what I'm falling into like Triumph of treachery multiplayer stuff siege battles Generic you want to play a game with your friends. It's not a competitive event You just want to do something different or have fun, right? Like this wide swath of just all of the things all the ways we could explore a battle plan right in that regard But there's still a basic battle plan Then you've got narrative battle plans, which in my mind are a different thing Because narrative battle plans are almost by their very nature heavier You have to introduce like a lot more crap Like you just do Yeah, you know Narrative is heavier than match play. It just is Right just stuff. There's stuff in those just gotta be stuff because you're trying to tell a story Like you're there's some kind of rails you're trying to keep everybody on that is that story And so you got to put down those extra elements And then the final category in my mind is like starter beginner battle plans This is the kind of stuff that should feel like a beginner battle pack They should look a little like event battle plans But be like potentially simpler, but those are those have the tightest alignment Okay, what do you think of my four categories there? Steve, what do you think you think I'm I'm in a I'm in a general area here I think it's perfect. I think it's great. Nothing to add Okay, okay spot on cool Tom Yeah, no, I think that it's probably accurate cool, well good uh and the uh The the key here is Certain elements work better in certain categories of these battle plans and work better for certain intended audiences Right. Yep, and we're gonna see examples where they've where this has been like tragically misaligned in the past and at a deeper level There was misalignment in the past, but there was also more experimentation and we've lost some of that in the past couple years I don't have the same breadth of battle plans available to me now Like current edition battle plans to me now. I mean I can still reuse the old ones and sometimes do A lot of them still work and that's fine But some in a particular year I got like six of this certain type and it's like well, we've played this six 30 times How many more times should I play them?  Where's where's mine? If I if I don't want to if I'm not willing to be limited to that event, right? Uh, and don't really feel like writing my own although you could go the steve route and write your own That is true Okay Uh Cygnus had a good point there as well. Yeah, I really think we need low points battle plans That could fall under beginner, but it'd be great to have solid competitive battle plans for lower points games Yeah, no, that's totally fair like something with the with it being designed With the concept that this is a thousand point or a 750 point battle plan So it's built to the smaller table the number of objectives is adjusted and like so on and so forth, right? Yeah Yeah Jonathan straw said I'd like to hear your take on the open play battle plan generator I quite like the chaos that can be made by rolling dice some generate feel bad. Don't get me wrong But no one ever talks about it. Yeah. I mean, I think the problem is because they labeled it open play Stop then then and people stopped reading Yeah, yeah, that's the issue. I don't disagree with you. There's some fun stuff in there. Go ahead Tom I love the open play card like the deck Yeah, like as a concept like it's something that we Like my family has used a ton in household games Like it is like I don't run like when I would when we would play We only would use that deck Because it generates the right complexity and the right kind of like Engagement that I was looking for That's not overly complex. That's not overly difficult Now they haven't printed one of those decks in two editions, right? That was first edition that they did that for And so I think that there could be Some interesting opportunities Like I can imagine a world where they create like a core scenario deck Sure, and then have like a narrative expansion pack and have like a you know, like where they could where They could they could lean into this element of Like random like but they would need to think deeply about design Particularly around how those things interface. Um, and I Yeah, and I just don't know if that's a priority Yeah, well, whatever they do don't I'm sorry, Steve is gonna say this real quick Please don't call it open play because you've poisoned that that term in everybody's mind. That's the issue. I'm sorry I was disappointed that they didn't expand upon this deck when it first came out I mean, what was it first edition second edition when that came out first? I still I Yeah, I have it I have it on the bookshelf by the gaming table and and we still will use it to this day from time to time Just to throw things out there and we even use it as a as a way to experiment for our table We'll we'll even throw it out there once in a while just to see I really don't know if they're passionate enough about it as much as they Say they they like the narrative aspect or the the open play aspect or however they define events I just I don't I was surprised. They just they just kind of dropped the ball on it I thought it would it's even something that I was really stoked about. I mean related to that. I think there's probably a really interesting opportunity to do a modular scenario design for narrative and that actually dovetails in with map play Um, and I and I don't think that they've like I don't think that they've put kind of the design energy towards that But it's surprising to me that they've never explored that like for narrative play to really build out um scenarios that are both modular and yet can are conducive to like like narrative structures Sure Okay, and yeah the die is cast at 40k's new edition has some elements of the deck system for a battle plan I could see a resurgence. I I agree actually with that. Yeah 100% okay So let's talk about the potential elements of a battle plan because I think even this is understated Most battle plans that we currently play with are derivative of the ghp now. That's basically what we get Right now theoretically we're going to get some new battle plans In these yeah in these books coming over the summer the harbingers whatever the the four book series that that Is that the transition out of a os 3 and a os 4 next year? right And and my answer Sean would be yes Absolutely, that would still be a thing you'd still buy the ghp even if you had a wide variety of experiences with the cards because Events have a very different set of requirements Correct than what these things generate like events need predictability practiceability stability Right like things need to exist within a fairly tight design space a confined space to be a good event battle plan Okay, like a tournament battle plan. I should say Whereas these can go way wider Right, okay When you look at the things we've gotten recently it's mostly like objectives That's it and just like and something interesting will happen with the objectives Right, like you'll score some extra points with one of the objectives in some way an extra point or two Which by the way is fine for an for a tournament battle plan. I'm not at all lambasting that like that's fine okay But that is hardly the whole world of what could be in these battle plans There could be interaction with terrain You don't need to know what the terrain is to say interaction with terrain Like the battle plan itself could have terrain rules written to interact with it on it, right? It's just like Randomly jet like I'll give you a sample there could be a rule in the battle plan That says randomly generate some piece of like randomly choose one piece of terrain on your table That is not wholly within any deployment zone right That thing if claimed Uh, after it is claimed acts like an objective and it scores one additional point if you blah blah blah or something like that Okay, whatever that can be a good or bad rule you dislike or like I don't care My point is that's a perfectly valid extrapolation of a way you could write a battle plan right Yeah, their battle plans are that's a more immersive Right a strategy there, right? So it brings you into the tabletop Your the terrain is not just it comes interactive And that is very More much more appealing to me than the static plans what we have right now where it's this random point on the battlefield And you're fighting over some random point. Yeah, I mean it's just like It's shocking to me that they that each battle plan seems to treat the terrain as though it's completely flat empty space When we know there will be terrain there like the battle pack tells you to set up terrain right now Now, you don't know what kind of terrain or or size or quality or anything like that Individual people have and it will vary wildly But who cares if my terrain is like two soda pop cans Tap to tape together standing upright and I'm saying those are grain silos Yeah, that's still a piece of terrain, right if I'm just referencing like choose a piece of terrain it does this thing Right Like people aren't playing on flat boards with nothing on them, right? Like that's just not the experience So I don't know why we're not even using like this button is perfectly valid and just waiting over there to be pressed and we aren't pressing right Schemes goals battle tactics grand strategies now I understand you might say but yes, Vince, but there's already battle tactics grand strategies and I said to you I say you are correct But they're not part of the battle plan But they could be and they've done this before season war thondia has inbuilt battle tactics that you can only achieve in a particular Uh battle plan Yep, right. Yeah, like it actually lists new tactics for you That could be a thing Right. Yeah, it could be a new grand strategy I wrote schemes and goals to make them also more generic schemes as a thing We created goals that just mean it like generically There's all sorts of things that could be in here We'll see a couple examples of this because they have used this sort of thing in the past To a really good effect. We're going to look at some of my favorite battle plans from from the best ghb ever published, which was ghb 2017 If you don't own that we find it in your secondhand store. It's the all-time. It's the all-time. It's the goat So there we go Uh random events This is it there it is absolutely the old softback Yeah Uh random events is another thing that could happen This easily drifts into real feel bad territory when executed poorly And so I think a lot of people are sort of predisposed to not like this by that What I mean is like here's here's an easy example um A storm rolls in and visibility is now limited to nine inches and no ranged weapons work beyond nine inches Right or something like that.  Thanks for shutting off my entire army Right Warp Fog Warp Fog Warp Fog Warp Fog. Yeah, exactly Like steve you use plenty of random events in in your in your yeah plans, right? Yeah, they don't they don't all have to be punishing like that Sure, right. No, they don't they don't all have you Yeah, that's true. Very true like a random event And by the way, this gets used a little bit but now but often only with objectives Like you randomly figure out one of the objectives and it's now worth a bonus point in this round That's a random event. Yep, right. Yes. Yeah, but it's being tightly tied to the objectives. It doesn't necessarily need to be No, right. No No, it could be like damage on quadrants of the table Like right like there was like there was an earthquake occurrence or like lava is suddenly bubbling up from underground damage in a quadrant bonuses to to do something in a quadrant like the spirit of Of rage raises up and everybody in that quadrant gets plus one to hit for for in melee combat That battle round, right or something like that. Like there's friend info like there's again, there's Quite literally almost infinite permutations of this, right? Yeah That would have been something that would have been really great that kind of playing in that design space would have been fabulous for um for like Battle lines drawn Sure, right. I mean that it's such a That's like on the low end of my list of battle plans and i'm not trying to hear us into Especially on that, but it's a boring battle plan for me And I don't I don't find that one in compelling in any way But if in the quadrants, you know, I think we'll probably do that when Ethan and I roll up next We'll probably do something like that where the random things might happen some kind of environmental Yeah, exactly would add a lot of flavor to that battle plan for me Yep There's and then this can add so much to it because it's another element of like surprise and suspense Right, right where you know, it's coming. It might happen any time, but you don't know exactly when it's going to happen Right, so on and so forth. Okay Goals for specific models Do a thing with a monster do a thing with a hero do a thing with a battle line unit like these could be written in and worth points or whatever Right, again, they have done this on occasion in very certain types of battle plans And these most of these types of things might not like the random events thing should never show up in attorney or event battle black It just shouldn't I'm turning back specifically here like traditional competitive tournament pack It's not appropriate for that most likely and that's fine Again, I'm not saying all of these need to be used in everything. I'm saying there's a lot of design space here we are just Let it where there's letting these fields lie fallow Right, we're not plowing these fields at all And I don't know why When with war scrolls, we're getting into like the nitty and the gritty of every every nook and cranny and corner of design space We can explore in the game and then we got battle plans over here and we're just Tightening the aperture Well, the reason why I think is exactly what you said is because it has to do with the permutations Of played and what they're actually like when they're printing new Battle plans, they're doing it with a purpose and that audience that in mind generally is the competitive Like the competitive audience with the ghp. And so they there's no incentive To explore design outside of delivering repeatable competitive You know like from a design standpoint like they have a very very specific target in mind Right with those sure, but that assumes that that's your largest cohort that is going to buy this and I just don't think that's true No, no, no It's about products like what products are you putting these in right the only product that they're selling That they're putting regular like that that is a regular part of their core Distribution are our ghps At the moment that is true the past ghps had more battle plans for different types of events And they were clearly labeled categories those different types There's no reason the generals handbook the general's handbook should have a clear concise delivery method for the competitive events Competitive event battle plans the year agreed. That is one of its primary purposes. It's not the only thing it's there for I'm sorry. I agree with that. Yeah What's missing what's missing is what the beauty of what 2017 gave us In that general's handbook. We had triumph and section. We had open play. We had the battle plans from match play Everything we get now from the ghp. I think that's part of the problem We we look at this As if it was this for us for the people who've been around the longest and it's not This is essentially just the match play section of what we had back in 2017 and they haven't invested the time or the energy to deliver Those themed battle plans those battle plans that exist outside the competitive scene That doesn't that that's not there or if it's there you have to go looking for it in other publications right and I I agree tournament players buy rules. I I agree which is great But I think lots of players will buy books if you give them a good quality book Okay, like this could be in that ghp and then a bunch of people would like I'd pick it up and I'd use all this other stuff too It could also be a battle plan book That they do I guess they're always looking for more books to sell How about a fun battle plan book with like well, I buy it I would buy it at heartbeat for different types and different types of games that really fully explores this You know what I mean like There are options here Isn't it true though the majority the majority of the players are not tournament players Isn't that a vast majority of people never go to a tournament? Yes, right? but yet this is what We are given right as a community and so when we sit down and we teach somebody the game Neighbor whoever this is what we use this is what we'll reference from and we'll we'll use this and It's a missed opportunity, right? They have an opportunity to make more Publications they have an opportunity to sell more things and to a greater audience Agreed and it could go Totally agreed. I want to I want to hit on what martin just said here Which is I hope we get stuff like boarding actions and combat patrol both are not matched play and are taking off in 40k Right when you look at that kind of audience Right, that's that's them creating new audience with their product offerings. That's what I'm saying Part of what you can do with product Is create new audience right Like that's a classic element of product management, right? Um, it's the if you build it they will come thing. That's that's literally what it is, right? and so the Like there's just there's just room here deliver it an existing Thing or make a new thing. I don't care But there's got to be ways to deliver more and serve a wider audience of people who want a more varied experience That's it Right. It has like it cannot be the 12 battle plans a year Is it like that's it? We've reached the end and this keeps everybody in the community happy. Is that really true? I just I just can't believe that Well, I mean It it is true. That's what we've got. Well, yeah, it's what we've got. I'm just saying I don't think it's that I don't think they're capitalizing on their market What I'm saying is I think they're leaving money on the table and underserving their audience I would agree with that. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I agree and and so Uh, okay, I mean, I think it boils down to audiences, right? Sure. Sure. Yes. That's what I'm saying ultimately, right? That's why that's why my my sort of Uh, my categories were user focused, right? What's the persona that's going to use it as much as it was anything else? Right, right Uh, because I do think that's the that's the axis it revolves around right like who is extracting the value. What's the persona? right, yep So and then oh, there's one more thing here that that only got used a couple of times But steve uses all the time this is this is that we just literally talked about it at the beginning of the show So thank you steve for teeing this one up, which is additional models on the table the classic published example of this is, uh, the Uh, chained colossus, which we will be looking at today But if you've ever gone to a holy event, I mean there are multiple tables with models on them that you use and that have rules and stuff, so so Uh, so yeah, I mean like I loved chained colossus. I thought it was like the coolest battle plan because Neat. It's a free purple sun. It's fun Right Okay, uh All right So that's exactly it the alignment of elements and audience is important Right lots of random elements in a combative competitive battle plan will be bad for a competitive event And that's where I have here looking at you Relocation orb, right like tom Classically hates this this battle plan so much. He hates it. He cannot stand it Okay, I mean I liked it. I liked it may have lost I mean, I'm not only gonna blame it to this but it was the final scenario in around five of adepticon on table two And it bounced the wrong way Sure, sure And that's just it. There are some battle plans like whether you agree relocation or it was one or not It's fine. I don't care there are there are Things that sometimes show up in some of these battle plans that are what I call oops you lose Yeah Yeah, right And like there is a there's a cohort of players who don't mind those who like those kind of random elements and that's fine I don't mind. I do not begrudge battle plans existing with oops you lose in them Correct, correct, but they should not but they are not appropriate for competitive events Right let alone round five Yeah, sure. Sure That's okay. Oh feel bad Uh, there you go So, all right, I want to discuss the elements of battle plans and where they line so from this point forward We're going to jump into specific battle plans. We're going to talk about what they do right What they do wrong the audience they're intended to serve. Okay, and we're going to extrapolate Strapily Okay, enhance Enhance. All right, here we go And before I do that anything else we want to say here on this Steve any other any other thoughts? I did I did I any other any other things you want to you want to drop here? Um, no one more thing you mentioned earlier. You talk about the personal I don't want to go too long into this, but it feels like they don't have those Clearly defined in their plan, right? Do you feel that way? Maybe. Yeah, I don't know like I have so like obviously I am a product manager by trade, right? That's why I do like professionally And in our group, we have a persona bible Right, sure like customer persona, right? Who's your persona? You have a yeah marketing persona. Yeah, exactly Yep, these are the buyers and this is what they want and this is their daily tasks And this is where they extract value and this is the things that frustrate them and so on and so forth, right? Like it's a pretty standard sort of product management and marketing activity across the industry to do this kind of thing It's not like it's something special, right? It's not Like if you sell a product you should have an idea of who your buyers are, right? Yeah, it's like it's like an SLP right standing operator seat, right? And so That coming from a background of legal that means something different to me, but I understand what you mean It's more a thing you don't want to show up, um, but the Uh But like the the nature of The way that they have made products either tells me they don't or they've decided that like one of those personas is the most important Or like right enough people act like that persona that they're just going to use that as a standee for their audience Squeaking wheel persona, sure Who complains the most that's the most yeah, yeah, sure Yeah, okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to do brawl my apologies. That's all good. It's a great point Okay Let's jump into some specifics here. Let's talk about the prize of galley or gallant or Gali galley galley talk about that pros and galley so Uh, so it's funny too because beforehand when I shared this out on twitter somebody I don't know if you're watching the show right now If you are a person watching the show right now, you should hit like and subscribe and do all those things It's fun. We're talking about battle plans. It's fun. Uh, that's your objective right now You can earn a victory point by pressing the like button. Oh, don't worry. I'll know I'll keep track of your victory points at the end of the show. We'll score them up. Um So I think the price of galley is like one of the 10 out of 10 battle plans of all time Like I love it. I think it's truly fun I do think it's not like absolutely perfect. Of course, there are still challenges to it Um, and it's funny because one of the tweets was like hot take Uh Was like price of galley is actually an okay battle plan at best because of these rule these reasons and like I get it I don't disagree with any of the person's reasons But I just they just I don't think they're they're that strong I think they're just every battle plan has some downsides. This is like a downside, right? I love this one because the way it encourages the interaction the way it screws with your turn selection The victory points remain quite tight Um, it becomes very interesting to control. Yes, it does have an alpha bunkering challenge. Of course that is there Um, but nonetheless, I I just I really think this plan is great. Good deployment Good spread Like five objectives that eventually become active obviously starting at one I love everything about this one to me. This is like the perfect event tournament Competitive tournament battle plan Right Yep. Yep now Because when I look at this, it's like it's going to keep the scores relatively tight It's very skill testing in how you're making decisions about which turn you're picking And then that's allowing you to activate certain ones and so on and so forth, right? And how you spread your forces to then guard and defend those things Yeah, move. Yeah. Yep. Yep Critical in this one. Absolutely. I mean it's it's critical in the game But there are some battle plans where it doesn't really impact but this one movement is is big Mm-hmm Yeah, strong incentive To not take the double turn into two because it can often screw you really hard And make it to your opponent just kind of picks up an easy win If you can't literally shatter their whole army, then they can pick up an easy win Um, like it's just it's really interesting to me how this one plays out what What I like about this one too with the scoring you mentioned the scoring events I like it because It's it's easy to keep track of right. It's not it's not bookkeeping dependent It allows you to focus more on strategy on what your model is doing what that's you're going to go after You're not really focusing on. Okay. I got I got a score X amount of points here to get it just I love that. I'd like to see more of that type of scoring actually. Yep Yep, I agree not a lot of fiddly tracking You know where it's like, oh wait, hold on bonus point here and here and here and that's sort of two things one There's a bad there's a downside to those because of bad bookkeeping and people forget Tom even in a serious tournament. Let's let's be honest here for a moment. Okay, you and I played plenty of tournaments Yeah, okay How many times at a serious tournament where you're like where we're rolling up? Let's call it in the top 10 of tables. Okay Sure. Does somebody say Wait a minute. Hold on. Did I score that? Right or or like, you know, I mean like forgets to mark a victory point or is unsure if they scored something correctly Because some of the battle plans have been have had fiddly scorekeeping Yep, yep, or did you remember to did you remember to yep? Yep Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so it's not like and if that's happening amongst what is theoretically I suppose The better players that are at the event or at least people are at the top table. That's it's happening everywhere Hey, it's happening. I'm a submarineer. It's happening at those lower tables, right? Well, well the key is At the higher tables, it's happening amongst players who are trying to have clean play And remind one another where it's not going to influence the game because yeah, assuming that everybody's like playing with intent You know to be clear and concise Well, I think I think the other tables that may not be happening Well, I think that it's the pressure of time too. Sure. Okay. Yeah, yeah The pressure of slow play The pressure of getting your five turns in in your three hours Making sure you're doing all that and that's why a scoring setup like this is so desired when you're in tournament play because it it allows it you're not it's not that additional burden of The bookkeeping and compare and when you're looking up at that clock you're thinking, okay And then you're rushing to get your stuff done. Yep. Yep. Yep Completely agreed like that's another thought that I haven't mentioned yet But it's really important to a competitive battle plan, right? The more fiddly the thing is the more complex the more anything Then the more likely you are not to be able to finish the game within the allotted two and a half two hours 45 three hours, whatever it happens to be And and like when you got five games in a weekend Gotta get them games done like the to is gonna call dice down and that's it folks like and you know Yep Yeah, coming from a coming from a being a narrative event and to and then when I go to play in a competitive event It's really hard for me to get my mind my mind in that space because it's a completely different You're not you're not always going to get your five turns in right in a narrative event And so like when I'm when I come up and I'm And It's this style of battle plan. It just kind of like helps me orient back into the competitive scene Because my whole life is the narrative strong So to me this is like a and yeah to answer I saw you tom. You already answered um poxas in the comment Yeah, absolutely.  Why not do this ourselves as well is one we have and two I why not both? I want gw to to put out some of the best stuff and like I'm like obviously are We've we've been more than happy to produce content for that for for people in the past, right? So I think we can do both Um, I'd love to see the mothership Also joining in is basically the answer. It's just it's easier. They have a wider reach than I do um So like when I look at this what I see is everything that a tournament competitive battle plan should be Concise skill testing controlled scoring You know, nothing fiddly easily happening within time, right? Uh solid deployment that works well on tournament tables another thing you don't want to Overwrite like it's different when you're playing at home on your table and it's just you and you know one person Versus when you're in a tournament and you're all butt to butt down a You know 30 foot row of tables Right, all right, you know um War coda we did a show on it a while back We actually dug into those so you go back in the playlist You'll find the war code episode And the four battle plans you made and play tested and all that um So like This to me is the template for how you want to run this All right, and this is what tournament battle plan should look like, but I also think this is the least interesting Uh, because it's that's not its job Right, like I don't mean that in any negative way. It sounds like it's I really need to reword that because that what I said has like a lot of negative connotations What I meant by that is there's nothing that is you're gonna That the playability of this is going to be like wildly different time to time That's not what you wanted to have happen. You wanted to give a consistent experience. That's the whole point right So again aligned to the audience the audience that wants a competitive tournament event Turn it, you know competitive battle plan Once this this is it Right So, okay cool easy. We got that one down. All right, let's talk about season of war I don't know if we'll ever get another season of war book. I guess maybe in 4.0 at this point Maybe that was Well, I mean realistically maybe the season of wars because everything is in a certain realm You know, like all of season three is in ger So then your season of war is fond of you because it's a again It's all tied to ger And so if that's the case then you're gonna get one of these ones every three years with each edition That's fine. I'm okay with that Which would mean statistically, you know where we're going next, right? Uh, like on the numbers where we're probably gonna end up I we'll go Yeah, oh goo. Yeah, uh because skaven have to be launch box. That's gonna happen. We know that already We've by we know that I mean we're willing it into reality. Yes, correct. Yeah, exactly. We're manifesting it. Yes, and so Uh, we know that it's going to be that because we're going to have skaven Uh, the new clan ashen in that launch box like that's good. And so ninjas are in darkness So it's going to be all good. Yeah, right And we're going to get malaria So like that's like which is all all goo like that's why that has to be the next edition Yeah, my whole wall just off screen is just a vision board full of pictures of skaven And then I've like photoshopped onto launch boxes and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah So you all here heard it here first We manifested this so when it happens, you'll know the power of Of our will Sure. Sure. All right Now here's why I want to talk about the season of war battle plan. I don't know how many people actually played through these I did I thought they were pretty fun. Um, like me and a buddy played through these over a course of a couple weeks And um That had a pretty fun time Uh You know, one of the interesting things is how attacker and defender works You don't have necessarily have to use those those rules if you're if you're using them as a chain experience Then like who loses and who wins becomes the attacker defenders. That's kind of an interesting little little rub there, right? um but To me the actual interesting thing about this one is a couple of things one tom you notice the complete lack of Objectives on that map. It's great. It's great. I'm out there They're not there Uh, so no objectives. That's number one, right instead. You got other goals And here there are battle tactics that are again just built in part of the battle plan right Uh occupy and repel Uh, where you're like it's this push and pull obviously that you're trying to accomplish All right now there's also season of war specific battle tactics here Um, but these two are specific to this battle plan Right Now there's also another little thing where like the faction terrain the defender You're allowed to do use your faction terrain and the attacker gets a free command point again These are just a little more interesting things that could happen right That that could be elements of this right And uh You know your your victory is achieved not through some the scoring mechanism. It's done through controlling quadrants Yep right And then the the battle tactics presents you with uh your your tiebreaker But these could still have points you could hold quadrants and score you could use non objective things He will talk. Well, you'll see some other ways. We could do this later But what I liked about this one is this is like narrative light Battle plan Okay Where it's got some additional structures on it, but it still fits on a page. It's not too much extra weight here No, it's good right To me This is a good example of like you could use a lot of these kinds of things in In outside of narrative battle plans and I would welcome them Mission specific battle plan specific battle tactics that'd be great An interesting bonus or benny for quote-unquote the attacker or the defender right player a player b Right again a minor should be minor stuff not huge stuff just interesting things Right But I thought there was lessons here that were applicable Beyond yeah, this is exactly this is like diet narrative. Yes, exactly. This is narrative zero or something right Yeah Okay What do you guys think about this either there is this the kind of elements you think could be picked up and used in other stuff Yeah, absolutely. I think so. I like the faction terrain component of this. It's it's great If you don't have faction terrain You get to you get to choose a piece. I mean on my tables. That's fantastic You know choosing the oak of the ages because it doesn't have a shirt and it's always there. It's always available And you're popping that that that bad boy down on the table. It's just pretty awesome Um, I like the push pull component of it in the battle tactics. I think that's it's it's it's nice It feels like something that every army could achieve in some to some to some degree It It doesn't have that kind of feel that moment. Um I like it. I think it it worked it works well and it worked well because you have the It works better than that other scenario we talked about earlier where it's We have the four quadrants You could actually use this battle plan where we talked about earlier in the show about adding in some Some environmental impact in the quadrants. Absolutely, you know, and it doesn't that doesn't necessarily affect the core tactics of the battle plan um and It's a it's a canvas that has the you have the ability to Paint your own picture on it and still not affect the core rule of the battle plan the rules of the battle plan Which is what I like about it. I agree tom Yeah, I mean what I would say is I like the asymmetrical element that is the um the dominant warlord um that like the ability for One of the players to be rewarded in this great really subtle way But meaningful, right? Yeah, because they also had to take the first turn in this Right, right, right. Yeah Yeah, and so I think that small trade-offs like that could be from a design standpoint something that could be like utilized to To create interesting asymmetrical play experiences. Yep. They don't like super heavy It doesn't all have to be and we talk about asymmetrical play experiences and the thing that always comes up is like siege Battles right? It's like, oh you get a thousand points. You get two thousand points It's like man, not everything needs to be that extreme. No, right, right? Yeah, you know You can you can play around in this space without just like completely putting the game on tilt Right, right and and still get the feeling of that happening Uh, so yeah to me this one This there was a lot of really good ideas in season of war thondia that I felt like Just didn't get their day in the sun because enough because I think a lot of people thought oh, this is just a narrative thing It's not for me. It's you know, super narrative and I'm just kind of ignored it One of the things I kind of mentioned this before the show But man, there's so many great battle plans that have just never been played Right because they're they're sitting in publications and require very specific things which will lead us on to the next one Let's talk about but let's go full-on narrative now, but I want to talk about where something went wrong Okay So this is my first example of something going horribly wrong to me So this is out of broken realms specifically. This is out of bellicor in case you're curious And this is the battle plan stampede of scales okay and You'll notice right off the rip that it has very unusual deployment zones Right like it's again. You don't have objectives other than the eater of tomes. This is this one thing that's on there That is a that is relevant to the battle plan But very different sort of zones and how you're setting up Very very much not a not a again. This is truly asymmetrical in the in the setup um But this I have to go down a page to see the rest of this because this battle plan is seriously two pages long Okay, and this is the first place where this goes wrong It's fully possible for them to write good narrative battle plans I think thandia was a pretty good Exploration of like how to do it in a light way, but they could do deeper narrative stuff Steve you do this all the time Without requiring an entire army This is one of the things that drove me absolutely crazy About all of the narrative battle plans that are in we're in all those broken realm books And boy, do I really hope we do not See this repeated in The upcoming Harbingers slash whatever that book series is called, right? 3.0 n times. Yeah Because this is wild This each army is a gaunt summoner This particular thing uh 14 other 14 Other zinch demon units, right? And then the seraphon army is the celestial stampede which is a a War scroll battalion like a narrative battalion and then 12 other seraphon units What Right, and then there's rules about what all of those things have to be and they're all like this Right, this one's actually I picked this one because this was like the most open Some of them are like one of these one of these one of these one of these one of these and i'm like Come on man I'm racking my brain here. Since you said when you sent this to us earlier today I was racking my brain and I have all the broken realm books and i'm trying to think Did I embrace it? Did I and I I have no I I didn't because I think I think it was this type of design I just was like Forget it. I mean the really what I was buying those books for the new scrolls for the new war scrolls for the new rules And the battle plans it was a real mess by then it was a real real mess With this type of design Yeah narrative players want to play okay Like let me see if I can really make this real for people because like this is such a fantastic fundamental misunderstanding of Of like narrative and narrative gaming it blows my my mind Okay When people write fan fiction Okay They don't write their fanfic insert character into The exact Story that was in the book They do not rewrite the book word for word and replace the words harry potter With whatever their insert fanfic character name is Okay Yeah, that's not what that is. That's not narrative And that's what this is asking you to do. It's assuming that like, oh, don't you want to experience this moment from the narrative? Yeah, sure. That's cool. Like no like I would like to experience I would like to experience the narrative you laid out Which is like zine fighting seraphon But like having this war like the broken realm story of bellicor sounds pretty cool I'd like to experience that narrative or even some moments from it But I don't want to experience it with the exact forces that were literally written and portrayed in the story at that exact moment No, so here's my pushback to you What I want to experience is this I don't want to experience the story As they articulated it. Yes, there may be a war going on between these factions I want you To dictate what that looks like The specifics But then also in the setup for this battle plan say at the same time on the western front Exactly Yeah, exactly. That's where I was going exactly That's exactly what this should be is to say Yes, this is simultaneous with those other things are going on But you get to write the narrative Creating the appendices. It's the appendices of the broken realms like Lord of the Rings It is additional stories that take place that you're crafting that narrative for Yes, I agree. Natalie said it is a specific scenario not narrative and that stinks. I agree. This isn't narrative Right, they think it is but it's not like narrative would be exactly what you're talking about tom where I mentioned that narrative things often have a heaviness to them And that's because it should be like playing in the broken realms bellicor time period. Okay So during this war the big cloud is overhead and that's doing these things and it causes this effect right bellicor is like dark cloud that he spread and You know the giants have come up from the The sea To to go fight on behalf so like these random things happen because of that or or so like you can hire a mercenary mega gargantor You know, whatever right? You can picture like the 50 things that you could that would be like an emergent properties of the narrative happening during bellicor The story right right and now it's like, okay. Here's the toolbox of elements of that time period Right now tell your story I don't know. Neither of you ever played this game. I don't think but there was an like there was an mmo for lord of the rings Lord of the rings online. Okay I played a lot of that game like way too much like a lot a lot. All right and that Game did such an amazing job Of telling its own story in the time period of the ring bearer Right.  But it's pretty rarefied most of the time you're off doing like exactly what you said and also on the western front Here's what was going on in angmar at that moment Yeah, and that's your career job Yep, uh d and d picked up on this really well with their recent War of the Lance Like the dry lands expansion because that narrative is like it is the war of the lance But it's not it's the same space that everybody else is right And so it allows you to have an entire story that you can engage in and still be part of the main thrust of the big kind of narrative Yeah. Yep. Yeah, and that's honestly that's what all of these scenarios The narrative scenarios need to be is you're in this known war this named conflict But you're but and and maybe you're The story is alluded to in the narrative Like bellicorps sends forces, you know gives commands to send forces out to the western front, right? And then so it's alluded to in the actual narrative, but then the scenario is what lays out what that thing ends up looking Exactly two comments one bed Staffordson vince playing lotro instead of ddo tisk tisk Ben I mean we played video played the heck out of ddo You acted like I don't have max level characters in ddo as well and didn't run every single Dungeon in that game. Okay. Get out of here. All right I I have I have been on all that stuff. We will my god the number of south runner runs homie We used to do south of that when that was the thing we were south runner running in under under a minute like out of sprint uh at any rate um, and then uh Blue said example in 40k the badab war or badab badab. I don't know how you say that doesn't matter Yeah, I don't know 40k narrative stuff Uh, there were loads of space marine chapters and non-startage groups participating the battle plans contained there and didn't specify Who exactly thought who exactly was just like this is the war that's going on. It's this large spreading conflict Here's the rules of this time period Everybody's basically caught up in it Tell your story, right? No, it always puzzles me that that they don't embrace that part of 40k Like they really don't they really don't explore this concept of the the narrative that there were battles going on that It just blows my mind it blows my mind that they don't they don't embrace it great This feels like just such an overweighty thing, right? Um And uh Like there's all these there's like these extra rules that happen with like your uh That that happened with your various units and all this up and in the end You're just like this is so much work and and who could play through all of these You can't you can't but I like I'm sitting here looking at it earlier today when you sent it to I was looking at it I like all right. I resolved myself to say, okay Can I swap out z charming for army x and can I and you you you can't it's too much work Right, you can't you can't you gotta perform like major major surgery, right? Yeah Yeah, you go to each two There's more Yeah, uh Okay, so Let's uh, let's This to me is an example of like how not to serve the narrative audience Right Like and and the examples of like and again, it's not hard You take those various elements we talked about earlier and you make them available Inserted into the battle plans in generic ways as the rules Manifesting of the time period the battle the the region the thing that is going on right now and say, okay You bring your forces and tell your story in this particular time in this particular place Yeah Okay All right cool cool Uh Triumphant treachery now This is straight out of general's handbook 2017 2017 was a as I said at the beginning an all-time banger of ghbs would recommend Uh Like pick this thing up. It's worth it even now um So Here's what I want. Here's why I brought this one up I have played all the triumphant treachery in coalition of death missions like 30 times each I'm so many times Because we often play at my tables we often play three and four player games Right same. Okay And so and again, I don't know if I'm the only person in the world's like that obviously I'm not the only Steve and I I don't know Steve and I are the only people in the world like that um But man is it a lot of fun and it's totally a different experience the best. It's the best I love I love two on two. I love three player chaos games Now I will say when we played this we often didn't use like the secret objectives out of triumphant treachery And I would love yeah, I just want to see more multiplayer support Multiplayer is such a good way to get new people into the hobby Um, whether it is like, uh doubles, you know two on two words to three player thing Because it's not just straight one on one. It's not new player versus experienced player Right the two experienced players can sort of be like, hey new player you come join us and we're gonna do this three player thing You know, we'll focus on each other Right Yeah, and you go there. This is like this is the the commander experience in magic exactly Right, you could have like three experienced players. You got one person who's fairly new They don't really know what they're doing the other three players table.  I just think that there should be way more multiplayer support in in these books Um, this is basically the one ghp where we got support for it and man was it fun um The others bribery all of that stuff was sure sure added so much to it Yeah, and again Even if you don't want all of that stuff, which by the way, I'm not saying it's bad I'm just saying like I would like I would love to see it just here's a scenario for three people Right, right or a scenario with up to five people or something like that. Whatever. I don't know. You know what I mean This this map here has a six deployment zones. That's what those little red circles are Yep right Yep and So like again The games I've written With adam we usually write them so that they can handle, you know, like one to four people or something like that, right? So they can be multiplayer experiences Um with space station zero and with rain and hell and you know with our new game There's also the ability to co-op Um, coming soon. In fact, that new game will be launching at tmx link down below Come join us for tmx june 3rd and 4th. Um, that's where the that's where the new game will be played in person and debuted um but The other thing I wanted to point out here is check out the victory points. Did you catch this? So first of all, there's this like secret objective Which is like the triumphant treachery secret objectives to generate. Okay, so that's fine And that's where some kind of points you can use those or not One victory point is scored in each phase for every five wounds you inflicted in that phase Okay, so straight kill bonus victory point thing Okay, this actually may or may not have influenced holy wars Just so much fun, right? It's sure yeah Yeah, especially when you're turning on your buddy. He's got a weaker arm, right? Sure Like uh, you got a lot of wounds over there. They're the low save. I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna have to call into that unit. Yeah What's your save there your saves of six? Yeah, okay. You're my enemy at this turn Yep That's the best Uh And then at the end of the battle the player who's general is carrying the artifact scores 10 victory points If nobody has the artifact the player with a model closest to it scores five if several players have equal Just didn't you score two this happens to be one where there's like a single artifact in the center of the table That you scrum toward but there's a bunch of different ones in this in this setups. They're all like this They all have multiple different ways That you score victory points and that's really what I wanted to talk about Because one of the things we really haven't explored and again, they're not appropriate for most competitive tournaments Battle plans and that's fine. But man for general use battle plans for narrative battle plans for multiplayer battle plans I really wish we would explore more ways to score points right Uh, like things like this now, that's a very kill focused objective And that's fine sometimes they shouldn't all be like that. That's a good example There's a pick up a thing and live That's if that's a good example. There's like throughout this whole book. There's a bunch of different ones Like this go to a place do a thing move somewhere get off a table edge yada yada yada, right? Yeah, right um, and and They're effectively They they can perform a lot of the same function that either something like a battle tactic or a Grand strat is doing in the normal game without presenting you with the choice paralysis Uh that would normally be incurred because it's not choose one from x every round at a certain time It's just these are your three options to score points in this particular battle plan And you build the battle plan around those three options like you smartly design it to take into account those three options Right Yeah, agreed Yep, wouldn't that be the light pole it would be it just feels like it's the lowest hanging fruit Right, that's what's so mind-boggling about it's right there. It's just Yeah, we've written it before like I didn't make this folks No, right. No kidding Like they thought of this. I'm just saying why did we stop? I I don't understand It it it blows my mind I will also say Another fun element to this one that I don't know if y'all remember but this is a fun one Most of the the a lot of the triumphant treasury wins and coalition ones use this they have a varying end point Right. Yeah, it's right. It's yeah, right the random event is the end of the game Yeah Right No, um, it can end as early as the fourth round or then go. I think I'm yeah, whatever when it becomes automatic Oh boy next next club day. We're breaking this out again. I'm telling you man. These were great battle plans. I really love it This was like this was it.  Just so much fun and wow. Yeah, I can't wait to go back to it And like I said Yep, there you go Exactly. And like this same book also had the coalition of death ones in them, which occupied Which played with a lot of the same stuff just in a different way Obviously didn't have the triumphant treasury secret objectives, but it had a lot of the same like different ways to score It's assuming you're playing teams, you know, like all these different different deployment functions and stuff like that You have a warlord function. So like killing the enemy warlord was worth more points Right. Uh, just you even had you had realm rules too Yeah, the work that worked when worked well In the battle plans Yeah, I agree with a os coach really wish we had more triumphant treachery. We played at a lot of club on a friday night. Yes Yes, exactly. So like this just and here's what's so funny about this um So like I'll get to it in a minute, but they they included Little samples of this in the 3.0 core book. Do you remember this in the very back of the core book? There's like one siege battle plan one triumphant treachery battle plan Yeah, right and one like coalition battle plan or whatever and I'm like, what is this Is this are these plans for ants? What what kind of a what's the What is one battle plan worth to me?  This was the last one We never went anywhere with it. Come on. I sickle this time into it. Please put it in. Please. Please Yeah, they just like snuck it in. It's like the last four pages of the book, right? I'm just like, what use is this to anyone who's like, let's play triumphant treachery again on our one battle plan Why I feel good about man, even the siege stuff in 2017 was great. It was. Yeah, they had the whole siege build in there, too Yeah, oh awesome, which by the way is what they lifted almost directly for that one stage siege In the back of 3.0, which is what's so funny to me. They were like, hey, we had a good idea there Let's just shove it in here. But oh, but never do anything with it right Yeah, uh It's like if I asked somebody to grow some tomatoes for food and they went out and planted one tomato plant like, okay That's good. I guess We'll get some tomatoes But I was really looking for more right, okay All right, let's talk about ghb 2018. Let's go forward one year in time from 2017 to 2018 where we get everybody's favorite The thing the battle plan that clearly no one ever hated Everyone was completely on board for this and it in no way broke everyone's brain the moment they looked at this map What the hell is that? The relocation orb Okay Remember any conversations you had about okay, wait it moves over here. No, it moves over here. Wait. Wait.  I hate it so much so Relocation orb obviously the way it bounces and it can repeat bounce and all of that Let us not forget though that with determining control of an objective each hero with an artifact of power and each wizard That is within three inches of the objective counts as 20 models instead of one. That's right.  Yeah, they did. It was supposed to be a typo Yeah Yeah Nobody cares. We don't need to get you that one. Let's just leave it at 20 yeah Okay I think this one fails and like clearly they're not making battle plans like this anymore and they've learned their lesson But I thought it was still instructive to talk about why this is a failure in every possible way of a competitive battle plan And why it's probably even a failure as a general battle plan like why battle plans like this are just Like Bad not a good idea. Yeah, right. Yeah, they can just be not a good idea Yes Yeah And to me this breaks so many cardinals one taking a very specific particular subset of models That are going to very wildly army to army Right. Yeah, like your corn guy has one your corn army But potentially has like one army there one guy that could count as 20 probably in many held outs Whereas your your lumeneth armies or whatever. It's just like everybody's 20. Just they're all 20 All 20 all 20 Right. Yeah, okay. I said we made it bad as a job Do you remember how you would like You'd have to try to figure out a way to get a wizard Like you'd you'd be banging your head against the wall like how can I get a wizard into in this army? Even if you didn't want to bring a week, even if you didn't want to bring a wizard. Yep Yeah, so you've got wildly inequitous sort of scoring Right and and model count like objective capture potential You have one objective almost always a terrible idea Like yeah, this is if you're going to use objectives And by the way, I have to we already talked about in the show how like it's perfectly possible to write battle plans with no objectives right um That artifact the artifact that the thing we just looked at When you look at this you think well, ostensibly, there's only one objective here vince. Why is this different? Because it's not the only objective. I've got these other two methodologies up here to score victory points So actually every enemy unit becomes an objective because I can go punch them and and And get victory points out of them, right? I can pull out my secret objectives and get victory points out of them There are many objectives in this even though only one of them takes physical form on the table Yeah, right here. There's one objective. It's one thing Almost anything in this game that has been written with one or two objectives is almost by necessity A failure of a battle plan almost no matter what audience is trying to serve Because it just cuts against the grain of what makes the game interesting everybody goes Like a magnet directly to that objective you play five rounds scrumming in that place Yeah, right. Yep It's it's and so like and this one's even worse because it'll just this also has the oops you lose problem You know a one way one way to write that by the way I was just thinking about this like let's say that you wanted to do that. Okay One way to write it would be to say and this would be horrible tracking So it'd be super hard to do would be something like Units that have contested this objective in a prior turn no longer can contest the objective I mean if you want to talk about the good way to write this battle plan tom It's just realmstone cash Out of the current ghp That's constraining it properly because there you do have one objective for three rounds of the game And then it explodes into two objectives now. I think realmstone cash is like a Above average but not great battle plan Yeah, okay, like I certainly don't think it's one of the all-time best. It's no prize of gillet Right, it's fine. It's fine. I don't I don't hate it but there it like The there are four places the objectives can end up They are well known the moment. They will end up there is well known This is all known information Right.  There's it's a it's a bimodal state Right, yeah And it's the nice thing about that too is for the first returns you have to You're you're playing for that explosion You're deploying in a manner that you say, okay I have to keep stuff that it's going to be fast enough to get to where it needs to be So it takes into account your movement it takes into account Extracting how much you want to invest in those first three rounds Like what are you going to go in there? And are you going to and then don't jack yourself up? Because you you know, what's going to it's going to move and you like you said then so you know where it is And then you can get there and you can plan for it And that's where the whole concept of taking first turn or not taking the priority or not taking the priority It feeds really well into into that into that battle plan. Absolutely. Absolutely So to me This one's like a failure like it's an all-time Failure, right And I don't like I'm not interested. They're never going to reprint relocation orb They've they they got smacked on the wrist hard enough for that one, right? But I think the lessons we extract here Extremely inequitous scoring Extreme high randomness, right? Yeah, very low number of objectives These are all lessons we should take and go In almost any battle plan that's going to be a fail because no basically no persona likes this Right There's no narrative players. What is this doing for narrative players?  I win We see you We know Yeah, then this is admittedly probably you're the you're the one persona That that this battle plan probably works for And they they like this right but that is I think I suspect I don't have any like empirical data to back this up But I but my read of it is that's a small subset Like most narratives most general use people most beginners and certainly competitive players would would hate this experience Yeah I think you can have some random elements included that that that tripped the trigger for that player Profile without going this far Is this scenario salvageable if it was just moving if it was if it If it only moves once Yeah, like or if it's moving twice, it goes, you know, it starts in the center. It could go to the to the center of that The top, you know, so like If it couldn't multiple Because I was just saying because like right now it can multi-ball, right? It can be like, right, right? Go here here. Yeah, right. Exactly. It can like keep going. Yeah. Yeah Is it salvageable then? I don't think so Maybe it's not even worth talking about Yeah, no, I mean my short answer is no because of all those other things working against it Yeah, right. I think you'd have to like strip this to the studs There like I said, there is probably a core concept here. That's good And and that's just realmstone cash or some other extrapolation like that I was just seeing how long we could talk about it in Illinois time I just Whatever What's that panda? Yeah, I agree with blue who says imagine this being the first game you play as you try to get into aos Would you yeah, would you ever want to play again? No? Oh boy That would break you. Okay Let's talk about malign importance So this is another one I went and dug into I remember there was battle plans in this thing Just the the number of battle plans that lie in the ash bit of history, right? Okay Why is this one cool to me? well This one is cool to me Be for a couple of reasons first off four objectives spread relatively Far ish apart um On the current tables, this would be like the four corners like the nightest paths Four objective setup, which is one of my favorite objective setups that does that has a nice That does a nice job of pulling armies apart So it's good objective setup if you're gonna use again if objectives are to be used Then let's use them in the right ways make sure they're spread. There's a good number of them read Uh four or five is the correct number usually like that's just what it boils down to You can push to six in one you can push to three in one But you know four or five is just by most of the time the correct number They should be spread relatively apart where they're encouraging movement so on and so forth But so that's all fine um Dude Malix or the named purple sun in the middle of the battlefield that you can take control of Oh Now we're talking Okay, as a competitive battle plan. No trash As a general use or fun battle plan Fantastic, this is the kind of stuff I want to see continue to be explored Steve this is where you live Doing this kind of stuff, right? We we we messed around with the idea of putting purple sun on one of the tables We did we we've thought about bringing that element into play Um and just throwing it down and having some fun with it. Yeah, this is where we live. Absolutely You know the only problem with this scenario Okay Yep, was it was actually really hard to get control of malix or because you had to control Uh Like three of the objectives, right? Uh, yeah, you have to get to control more So you had to control three out of the four objectives, right? And I always thought that was such a whiff Because of the nature of this being, uh, a four objective plan It was just really hard to take control of him It might have been I I thought it was malign importance, but maybe it was malign sorcery I might have written down the wrong book. I went through both of them. Hey os coach So I'm sorry if I have it in malign sorcery then malign sorcery. I'm looking at it anymore Sorry, you're good. Those two things were published back to back I went and took the picture and did all this stuff and then was like, wait, which one was it? I took a guess and I guessed wrong. There you go. Sorcery. Thank you. Thank you, coach Okay all right, so whereas Tom reimagine this as a five objective battle plan Right where now it's very likely that it trades back and forth Every round and like you've got a stretch to hold your three, but the other person has two You know classic five objective you're fighting over the one a lot of trading going on which is what aos is It's a trading game Right and every round then people are getting control of the purple sun and it's doing something Oh man, this scenario flips on a dime buddy and becomes like way more cool Yeah So like Steve you do this correctly. Um, I think of like the ice table your your ice flow table So for those who've never been to a holy event Steve as these incredibly gorgeous incredible tables each one is its own sort of narrative experience in and of itself Yeah, but one of them is this huge ice lake with like a big castle on one side and a skull altar and all this other cool stuff and At one side of the battlefield you have two Uh, basically shaggoth models, right? And but they're like bronze Dollums effectively, right? And each player Yep, each player gets control of one of these models You just have control of it from the beginning and they can't attack each other They're barred from attacking each other, but otherwise they can go move around and do things and fight the enemy army right yeah, and so like What what you cotton to ride away with it is like no no Taking control of the toy should be the near automatic part Playing with the toy is what makes it fun and interesting, right? Don't put the toy on the table and then make it near impossible to use Right. Well the the funny story there Vince that Bryce broke it Bryce and Walter broke it Game one the first day that the the year that table debuted We didn't have that the brotherly love rule which prevented the twins from attacking each other So they just had them snack off against each other and suddenly they were dad and i'm like what the hell happened And so I had it's that's the whole concept of designing on the fly and having the thing to rule So yeah, yeah, thank you. I think the first time you and I played on that table, steve That's the first thing I did too.  It'll be okay and sure enough. Nope That didn't I know so Vince is just a broken individual. That's one that is true But to know other people sadly think like me too steve. Um, yes, yes, yes Yeah, I coach said imagine this is a chained incarnate. I agree right like yeah, yeah You know just like there's so many cool ways we could be using other models on the table that people get controlled Yeah, I love the idea of putting the purple sun under the black pit of zeech on the zeech table. Sure. Sure.  Here we go. I was just talking to read about what we could do to that table There you go. There you go. We're putting the we're gonna put a purple sun chained underneath the black Seems pretty much an answer Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be great. And this is just a thing like you know, I mentioned how much I want to see multiplayer and and and uh You know team type battle plans, but I'd love to see battle plans that are also just like Maybe a little wacky and fun Isn't this supposed to be a fun game? Right. Well, I think that's it's we touched on at earlier events. That's the difference between 2017 and what we get now Like it was there. It was all there for us.  Right. So yeah, it's a total joy. It's a joyful experience It's what made the game. It's it's honestly 2017 is probably what made We really fall in love with with with H6 bar, right? I mean you think of think of that transition You know how hard that was coming out of warhammer fancy battle Going into and then when that dropped it was like it was it was game changer Literally game changing and it was just it was just such a wonderful experience Yeah, so I completely agree. I just think it was it was the it was the transition moment because the ggp 2016 Really didn't have form yet. Like it gave some points. It did the basic stuff It kind of like got the game into shape 2017 is the one where it was like, oh, no, this is a real game now. Here's this thing We're going to give you moments to play in this kind of stuff and You know things like this are such a cool idea for just sort of general Whacky fun like again In the ghp we could have I I hate that we've put it under the structure of open narrative matched because that sort of Suddenly they feel like I put all this other weight in it when like what I really want is a battle plan book And it's like, right? Here's the ghp It's got the competitive tournament experience. I want those things tight Right and and like the attorney experience. I want 12 out of 12 bangers where to's can pick any five And feel like they're going to have a great standard match play tournament And it will be a good time and people will have a unified controlled even Fun experience right where like scores don't get too high people complete their games on time. That is perfect That's what I want. I want that to exist Right. Yeah, but I also want like the battle plan book to come out once in addition I don't think one book every three years a big ask It's like the big book of battle plans, you know, and it's got some triumph and treachery ones in it It's got some coalition of death ones in it It's got some wacky fun like one-on-one matches in it where extra models are on the table where Other interesting stuff is happening random events, you know, like built-in battle tactics like Why why not Imagine how amazing Yeah, right. It just blows my mind that this product doesn't exist It just feels like the easiest slam dunk Uh And yet here we are I don't know By the way, see if we lost your camera. I don't know why Oh, there you're back. I I went to get my 3.0 book. Oh, you're good. Okay. Cool. No issue. I just want to make sure you knew Um, thank you. Absolutely. All right. So anyways, that's my pitch. So AOS 4.0 is coming next year. So let's Let's make it happen folks We you can we can do it GW if you want you can just outsource this to me. I'll start brainstorming I got a good year. We'll we'll get it. I'll get it turned over for you I'm willing to work for uh, completely unreasonable prices. So get your checkbook out It ain't gonna be cheap Okay, I didn't Core book 3.0 this I wanted to make reference to this just to show this battle plan convergence of fate they have like this nod to Uh, to try infantry in here where you've got the four territories Up to four players, right? And But we lost In this all of the fun stuff that we had in the 2017 tramp and treachery Right. Yeah, it's a set time for the battle rounds not random It doesn't have the multi Uh objective control thing like we cut everything that was good. We totally lost the threat I'd like to I will say though to to to say something positive about this For a four player game. This deployment is better Agreed. This is a great deployment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect deployment now You know, you could take that original charm of church. We put your objective there in the middle Spotting you do the same exact thing. You're just doing this and that's great because like So many times you felt unbalanced, especially in like a three player situation Where you had that long table like you're just in you're in that little 12 inch bubble Yeah, you can do lots of different objective maps with this terrain setup and actually have every reasonable You can do like three across the middle one two three everybody has relatively equal access to that You can do a four objective one one one one Right. Yeah, like there's actually yeah, like this is a I completely agree with you. This is a fantastic easy Set up map that makes me like, okay, cool. I know where my forces go.  Um, the rest of it the rest of the top garbage, but yeah, right. Yeah Well, like this is a great set of map. I I that you are right to pet to actually point that out Um Cygnus says we need a general's handbook and a wacky lieutenants notepad. That's all I'm asking.  I don't know. Did you see Tom Grant's? No. I think that was to the purple sun underneath me Uh, it should be fun. I see no issues. I say go for it like To me what this just shows is how like the reason I put this one in here It's what was two reasons one to make fun of the like these little Just nothing's at the end of the core book 3.0 that are completely worthless because they didn't bother to build them out to anything actually usable Yeah, but two To talk about how much to me The journey from the one I showed from the 2017 book to the one that came out in 3.0 2021 Uh four years later How much we lost The story of what we're even on about here Right. Yeah. This is not Triumph and treachery No, okay. This is just a four player map with a single objective That last four rounds. That's all this is right, right. Yeah You notice too like if you flip the page and I know it's not on here So you can't flip the page, but they have the tunnel fighting scenario right? Yeah. Yeah, right What what a mess, right?  Yeah, so anyway, yeah He said yes 100 it was to the purple sun by the way. There you go uh Yeah, so like, uh, I just think that We it's important often when when When the designers of dnd fifth edition sat down And wanted to make fifth edition The first thing they did was go back and read and play every other edition Right Right, right I will also say this is the same thing we did But when we wrote him a thing that was like pro fifth edition because we were on the same page Yeah And the reason you do that kind of thing is because in any kind of game like this Over time you're gonna have some good ideas. You're gonna have some bad ideas Right, whether it be additions or individual rule supplements or whatever Yeah, and it's very easy in the tumult of the constant move for new product and new books and new whatever To lose the thread of really good ideas you had Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true And so like I thought this would be important to go back and look and say where were those good things they where did they have it Where did they strike gold and then just stop mining that vein? Right, right Uh, and I think that's absolutely what happened here Okay Holy events here we go Uh So this is one of steve's items. I pulled this out of this is table one the challenge stone So this is this particular type steve's events have two different formats by the by In one of steve's events your each table has its own Uh sort of scenario that you're doing Uh and then in a different one you're following It is a standard like everybody's playing the same thing, but it's following a set narrative over the course of the five rounds But the reason I picked this one steve is because this so this is from the the the grail not the warpstone, right? And so the reason that I I thought this one was interesting is because so What steve does here is you utilize A couple of the elements many of the elements we've talked about Because one we already mentioned how on some of your tables you will have models to fight with you Right, we mentioned the bronze guardians in the ice table You have terrain being a focal point of this now in this case like this is the challenge stone One of everybody's favorite table everybody loves the challenge stone. It's a super fun table It's just myrthon ogre table. It's great Um, I I agree. I agree a plus will play again. No notes. I I completely agree So many fun games on this table Oh, yeah And but the terrain objective is the team that is tally the most wounds caused in in the combat phase Within the maximum radius of the challenge stone by the end of the battle has won the objective And so in this case you're referencing a very specific piece of terrain and that like there's a separate card That explains all the terrain rules on the table that you'd be looking at and this explaining like What the radius of the challenge stone means and stuff like that It's effectively just a three-inch expanding radius that gives you plus one attacks and But the important part is there that's exactly the kind of thing i'm talking about Where this that kind of a rule Could be written into any battle plan that they did now. It couldn't be that specific Right, they can't they because they don't know what the challenge stone is but but They could write a rule called like uh The The what is it like the proving ground sure something like that right or the or the Yeah, the challenge ground and they could say randomly choose a terrain feature not wholly within a Yep, uh a deployment zone right uh all units within blah of that terrain feature gain plus one attack and You know controlling it's worth this or whatever whatever, you know, you know cause the most wounds near it or do something with it Hold it for at least three rounds like whatever. There could be 10 different iterations if I score points off of it, right? yeah And and again, they don't need to know what your table is You could have anything if you just again, it could be two soda cans taped together fine. Great. You got it That works Right and yep Like I just think Steve you're a lot of your missions you use a lot of the stuff that i'm talking about here Just part. Yeah Yeah, it it stemmed from the early days in 2020-03 when the boys and I Started to play warhammer on a more consistent basis and it really the genesis of all that came from kind of quite honestly was 40k and then Um lord of the rings that we were playing at the time. We weren't playing for hammer fantasy battle at the time Yeah, but we were making up our own little Type of things I build out this really crazy terrain and we put on the table and we would create really immersive rules around that It's just been How we play here at the hq our headquarters Oh, yeah And it's just the way we play it and it's just it's a great time. It's just an absolute blast when you can play A game that's completely immersive That's what we talked about earlier in the show that that's what's kind of missing from some of these battle points You have these and the other thing a bit that's unique about I think with the holy event is like the grail token There's three, right? It's it's there's one that's Yeah, and then we don't put them on the map here because we'll Randomly it'll get replaced before the tournament during the event so that players They rock up to the table and they see and the objective are they're always in harm's way There's a price to be paid to claim the objective right from the terrain now in this particular table It's those bonfires that are dishing out those unsaveable holy rooms, right, right? It's not being gated So you have to you're not only There's a there's a there's the bonus you're getting from the challenge stone And then there's the penalty you're getting from the bonfires to try and claim the objective At the same time And and so it's it's this kind of dueling objectives within the battle plan That there's a positive and then there's negative right and It's what do you want to sacrifice? What do you want to you know, how do you strategically plan? What unit would be good? What unit can weather? The bonfire holy wound And can you can can you hold on to that right and it's pretty much the theme That we repeat on most of the tables not all the tables every table is slightly but In terms of the Like whether a grail token is going to be in super harm's way or right Sometimes it could be in a position where it's giving you a bough because what are the terrain sure sure in that area? Yeah, what I thought was fascinating about something like this is how many of the things i'm talking about you're using In this one game Okay, right. You've got the terrain interaction that I talked about you've got classic objectives That's the grail tokens. Yeah, they're not listed on the map But like for most intents and purposes they are classic objectives, right? They're a thing they sit on the table. You want to go stand near them now You have an extra rule in here that heroes and monsters can't claim them okay Which they do sometimes play around with right the certain types can or can't claim or don't count as much or count for a Little more or something like that. So that's fine. They you're both playing the same space there And I like those kind of slight modifications again as long as they're not too heavy As long as they're not the thing we saw earlier, right? Like but what was it duality of death only like hero wizard heroes or something Was your claim the the objective at all like whoa way too heavy way way way too heavy, right? You got to be careful with that. But again, there's good and bad ways to use most rules Then you have your secret mission where you've got to note this thing down And again, this is very like a scheme, which we'll talk about in just a second. Yeah But you have to over the course of the the So it's so in in in broader terms, it's more like a grand strat. But the trick is you use you use all five of them Uh, right over the course of the One use only tournament because they're each one use. Yeah So like okay, is this the game where I'm gonna do iron will and you're trying to achieve it over the course of the whole game Right. Yeah It's not just this one turn thing you make the decision at the beginning when you rock up You're not done. You're not there's no paralysis of choice in the middle of play You just set it and that's it.  It's clearly like out of position by the end of the game right Yeah, and so Uh, which how many times have you seen somebody pick traitor tom and then like just randomly about round three? They just start booking There's just They're just like racing baby like this I know what you're doing Turned and this is like full speed running six this direction. It's like, okay. I got you Exactly This is right, right Like they'll kind of wander a little bit and then all of a sudden just like Right, yeah, yeah, it was interesting when battle tactics and grand strats came into the game You know, we had secret missions for a long time And so it it it was a for us it It was like, oh, we're already doing that. So we're not even going to put that into the game And what's really kind of what's really great about what I really like about our Our event is that we don't use grand strat. You don't use it for this one, right? The grand strat will be used in holy habit. Um, but you don't use battle tactics in either You don't use battle tactics, right? Yeah, so Yep And uh, I love it. Tom and I are both big fans. This is one of our events. Like it's such a such a Yeah, I tell you what I don't miss it But yeah, then there's also a fourth thing here that at the end you get an extra bonus point If you have more of your deployed units alive again, right another interesting orthogonal goal to kind of uh, Or not orthogonal. Sorry aligned goal to to kind of score points It goes back to what we were talking about with the triumph of treachery mission We looked at right here, right? Here's another thing that isn't sitting on an objective But it's another way to score some kind of points, right multiple avenues Toward points Right. Yeah. Yeah. I like that as a thing and to me Competitive event good. Keep it on rails tight control. You know, that's fine. You've got like Here's your objectives. Here's your battle tactic fine. Again, we've talked about how battle tactics should be changed many times in the show but Good. Okay. Cool. Let that sit over there and be that thing Within the broader general use man, there's got to be more we can explore Okay. Yeah speaking of which let's end here on schemes I've talked about schemes many times on this show. This is a thing that we created for nash con back in the day um The way that schemes work. This is a sample card Uh that we had that we made for the event And so this is in pre pre battle tactics and grand strats none of that existed when we made these things But this was this was us realizing that a secondary objective was good And I still think this is a better implementation than grand strat by far Uh, and I think 10th edition 40k proves me right. So history wins Uh just saying gw you had my whole file Uh, I gave you open permission to use this and you still went your direction Because you thought you were more right than me I guess you weren't Uh at any rate, um The No, it's okay. I'm good. I know look I I don't sweat it because I always know history will prove me right. So it's fine in the long run I can wait um The the way schemes worked is like this. It's a five round tournament at the beginning of the tournament. You were dealt seven cards randomly Um, you flipped your seven cards and those were seven different schemes in each game much like much like steve's secret missions We just looked at you could use one of them once you use it you burn it And we specifically designed them to be truly like perpendicular goals to winning the mission You were always trying to do unusual stuff.  They weren't win more And so the one here is called murdering your protege Um, your lieutenant has been plotting to your serp your rule Uh declaring its only amount of time before they in charge little do they know that the day will never come Your troops though can never know lest they turn on you So before the start of the game after all units have been deployed Choose a single hero in your army that is not the general This model must be killed by the enemy before the end of the game for this scheme to be successful Uh, so um You know and then like these were kept secret So the key is you have seven you have to use five Because they're not repeatable, right?  Yeah. Yeah Um, and you know that and they're a limited resource across the event as well Yeah, so it's not like you're performing the same thing in every game. Yeah Yeah, I like it. That's good They were worth pretty hefty points in the event like they were worth the equivalent of a minor victory Um, so like you had your if you got your major victory and and this it was like a major plus a minor Is what you were effectively scoring at the time, right? So they made a big deal But they were using them right or no, no, we don't use them now. They just use standard tactics. Yeah Yeah, that's a shame Yeah, it's because like so what you would do is we had a pile of what 26. Is that right Ben? Yeah, 26. Yeah, we have we should look at those You would draw the file Steve Prince, right? We should look at those. Yeah, you'd have 26 You had 26 you would draw seven at the beginning of the event like Yeah, right and came with your path like we came up and collected your paddle pack during registration There's a big stack and you just like pick seven cards just drew seven random Well, obviously you didn't know what you were drawing. You randomly drawing seven Yeah, you would draw seven and then Um, each match you would decide to use one of your seven and for that entire scenario That's the only one that that is functionally your secondary objective, right? Yeah Or in in third edition equivalent. It was functionally your Um grand strat, right, right? Do you remember we had the warlord cards? Yeah, we had those the treasure in the yeah, absolutely Yeah It might be interesting to look at that. I had our meeting our holy abic meeting coming up. Yeah, I know it would warlord reborn Yeah, it would replace it's the equivalent of uh What was the thing you used to do? the world It's it was the equivalent of your uh secret mission. Yeah the secret mission, right? Yeah, so and for you it would fill that slot in in your scenario. Yeah, especially having a fixed list. Yeah Yeah, something we should look at so to me This is like it's battle plan adjacent because this is the kind of thing that can sit on top Of other battle plans as well and again provide another method towards scoring towards Things you're doing on the battle plan that aren't just like go to a place kill the people on that place Yeah, and you want it to be orthogonal like with this type of thing It's orthogonal to what you're trying to accomplish in the scenario And so you're you almost always are having to make a decision Do I do this or do I complete the scenario because it's not with those units because it's an eye It's got a a malifold field to it too, right? So you can you can get that win You can be losing the game, but you get this one condition You just like when in malifold when you lose all your models, but you can still complete a scheme Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's good design All right. So there we go folks. That's the breakdown. That's that's what's good and bad I hope the the things that they emerge. I I I know it's weird I'm usually complaining about the number of books and the number of things and bloke but to me Publishing one book per edition that would be like the big battle plan pack For for this edition. It's just a it's just a slam dunk of a win If you're looking for more money, it just feels like they've got this sitting on the table There's so much design space sitting in battle plans. That's unexplored And I just think there's both like it's it's one of those alignments Where like hey, you published the article for the commended entries. Let's see if we can manifest this one too, right? Um, like well, there's money to be made. There's fun to be had. It just feels like a win-win for everybody Well, let me can I push this one for other events? Yeah, go for um You know, I think there's a home for this You know what that's called No, like for gw in your current product line. There is a home for this. You know what that is. What's that? Season of war sure sure, right? Yeah, because season of war is dictating the season that the war is taking place in sure in a particular region and Uh, it would be easy to make half of that resource Yeah battle plans and the other half narrative, right and some of them can be Keyed towards pitch battle some of them can be keyed towards narrative Some, you know, like you can do this type of experimental thing in that and you could even have multiple You know, like packs, you know play packs or whatever in there like I just The product is already there Yep, right. Yeah, it is we could go that direction too. I'd be fine with that I'd be completely fine with that So, yeah, okay. Well, there we go everybody Uh, hey, tell you what Steve. Thank you so much, buddy. It's a pleasure to have you on man. Oh, hey, thanks Thanks for having me. Thanks for Triggering my brain to go back to 2017. I see you. I don't yeah I cannot wait. I just can't wait to break into those. It's gonna be a great time That was our that was the glory days for us here at the HQ. So I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks for having me I appreciate it. Absolutely for all of you out there. Thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it Don't forget hit buttons. Click like subscribe Basically click the things that make the dings. It's a lot of fun for you and your whole family.  Um, all your friends will definitely think you're cooler if you click those buttons just guaranteed Uh parentheses not guaranteed Uh, so but uh, yeah do that stuff if you want to support the channel There's lots of ways you can do that. Don't forget about tmx. I will be teaching there along with sam and john june 3rd and 4th Uh up in oshkosh, wisconsin. It's going to be a great time Uh at at uncle adam's convention. Obviously uncle adam will be there too. 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