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| This week on "A Man And His Dog"... |
Okay, so one
thing before we start: this whole chain of logic is based on the idea
going round that a General's Handbook 2nd edition is
coming sometime this summer. The whole idea I'm about to lay out
pretty much relies on the idea that the Handbook is going to become
an annual-ish release.
That said,
let's talk about the single greatest gift to game balancing GW has
ever created.
Let's look
at the customer experience of buying a Codex. You buy your Codex,
which in itself is £25 or £30 on top of the cost of the main
rulebook, the miniatures, glues and paints and such. You can't really
cut down that list much except in terms of the books and the most
expendable of the two books is the Codex.
Add to that
the fact that every edition is basically honour bound at this point
to produce a new Codex for every major army with a few small timers
getting a book every other edition.
So every
edition you're in for an instant cost of the main rulebook/starter
set and sooner or later you're expected to fork over another £30
just to keep using your army in most settings. Yes, there are places
you could play older versions of the rules but most gaming clubs,
certainly the most accessible ones that GW runs on its own premises,
is going to insist on current rules so everyone is playing the same
meta.
So let's
talk about limiting that cost and doing a favour to game balance at
the same time.
In AoS,
buying a Battletome is an incentivised purchase. Yes, there's stuff
in any given Battletome that isn't available for free: Warscroll
Battlions, Allegiance rules and Battle Plans for the rules side,
background sections for the fluff side. Essentially, though, those
are all add ons as full rules of every unit and characters, aside
from points cost in Matched Play, is available for free download.
Because the
points costs are available in a seperate (and relatively cheap) book,
I don't think we'll see a second edition of most Battletomes any time
soon. Oh, Stormcast Eternals will definitely get their fourth book,
fat golden poster children that they are, and maybe some other
housekeeping exercises like smooshing Khorne Bloodbound and Khorne
Daemons together to match Disciples of Tzeentch's formatting.
However, I don't think a new Ironjawz or Flesh Eater Courts books is
on the horizon.
Because
there's very little reason to create it, let alone ask for the player
for fork over the cast. If GW has a sudden inspiration to add a unit
to, say, Clan Pestilens they can just release the free PDF and lay
out its background in White Dwarf. They give it a provisional points
cost on the Battlescroll and codify it when the next General's
Handbook comes out. This way new model releases don't have to be tied
to book releases.
And what's
more, as points costs are the main game balancing strategy of these
games, if they can be updated once a year that gives GW a lot more
chance to both shake up and rationalise their meta.
There was a
problem once where Space Marine tanks were massively over-pointed for
what they did and the rules designers committed to lowering the
points cost in new Codexes. However, for some Space Marine factions
this took years because they had to wait their turn and so you had
one army spending peanuts on their Razorbacks and Predators whilst
others were paying through the nose for them. Instant imbalance and a
years long wait to see it fixed.
With a
General's Handbook it could have been done in one release.
Honestly,
this is all motivated by the fact I've been playing this old game for
four editions now, soon to be five, and one version of Codex: Space
Marines doesn't read much different from any other. Maybe its time to
just release one version of the thing and let it sit, a background
resource supplemented by PDF downloads and whatever campaign book
system rises from the ashes of The Gathering Storm. I also think it
would be of benefit to GW to de-empahsise buying books over
miniatures, especially with how short these editions are getting.
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