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Balance is not achieved by the system, but by the players. Any rules system is susceptible of being broken. It is only a matter of how hard powergamers try to break it. "Open" systems have, usually, smaller followings than "closed" systems —which have the support of dedicated miniatures and a company that cares to expand their system as much as they can. In "open" systems the critical mass of powergamers devoted to break the system is insufficient to achieve that goal, except if the system itself has such a glaring potholes that even a blind man can find them! And even if they do, it is locally —in a gaming club— and the word rarely spread (see exception above, though. To be more clear: few, if any, players that select Beneath the Lily Banners as their rules of choice would bother to read the rules so thoroughly as to find any hole in the rules that they can use in their benefit. On the other hand, for example, Warhammer 40.000 has a mass of followers that it is big enough to create the critical mass of powergamers that will squeeze the rules until they reveal their point of rupture, and then will proceed to diseminate the information in the Internet. It is about scale, not internal balance. In my opinion.
This is the bit I'm struggling to grasp. I mean, real Napoleon-era troops fought armies armed with primitive weapons, so having imaginary beings in pseudo-Napoleonic gear fighting monsters with primitive weapons seems fine to me. I think it would be easy to cook up an interesting scenario background for the game - and games that pit different technology levels against each other are lots of fun.
As for Middle Earth games, I was thinking a while back about creating some HotT armies for the Battle of the Five Armies. If you were to restrict yourself purely to the descriptions in The Hobbit, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't use AoS orcs for that - and keep it 100% accurate to the book. The only real descriptions of the orcs there are "big" and "ugly", so the AoS orcs could work out fine. I'd enjoy seeing it done.
I haven't ever played Infinity (though I have read through the rules), but surely the "telling apart" aspect is no different from any "open" system where you clarify what units are before the game: "These are spears and these are warband" or "these are heavy foot and these are bellicose foot with shiny armour" or "the ones with bolters count as auto-rifles and the shuriken catapults count as laser rifles". I don't think any real difficulty is likely to arise. I mean, I've played MDRG, Rogue Stars, Fubar, Kill Team and Galactic Heroes doing exactly that, with no problems. So I can't see it's a practical objection rather than an aesthetic one. And if it's purely aesthetic, it's not really any different from preferring nicely painted miniatures to indifferently painted ones.
I don't know how you'd quantify this, but is it really true? Certainly, my experience is that the best-balanced games are the ones where everyone has access to the same troop types. There are lots of those games: HotT, Dragon Rampant, Saga, Sword & Spear, Battlesworn, FUBAR and Frostgrave, to name a few. Saga and Frostgrave have some differentiation through the battleboards and magic schools, but 'special effects'/magic aside, everyone chooses from the same troop types.
I'd say the defining feature of those games, relative to the 'closed' ones, is that their rulesets are very stable. I don't think there are any plans for new editions of any of the Rampant series, and HotT has had just two editions (with almost no rule changes) in its lifespan of nearly 30 years. Saga has a second edition, and Frostgrave is getting one, but they're still considerably more stable than their 'closed' competitors. I think that's because the closed systems are driven by the commercial imperative and almost inevitably mutate and 'break' under the weight of (commercially driven) add-ons.
Now, I'd agree with you that certain build-your-own-profile skirmish games with lots of abilities can have balance issues. An entirely Savage warband in SoBH can be hard to deal with, for example, which is why that trait was limited to personalities in ASoBH. But I think that's less an 'open vs closed' thing than down to the difficulty of accurately accounting for possibilities in a 'build-your-own' system. The number of potential profiles in SoBH must run into the hundreds of thousands at least (certainly if you include the extensions), so it shouldn't be a surprise that some combinations can be more value for points than others.
But I'd make two points about that. First, SoBH and FoL and the like are designed for fun. They're not tournament games (in the way that HotT can be). So the fact that their points systems can be gamed is neither here nor there. When I play those games, I typically design all the warbands and let my opponent(s) choose which one they want to play. I think that's what Andrea Sfiligoi does too. It works really well. So the fact that they allow for an almost infinite range of unit types is a strength, not the weakness it could be in a competitive game.
Second, the real test of open vs closed is with games that are designed to be watertight rulesets suitable for tournament play. And here, I think, the open games (like HotT) tend to do better. I don't think I've ever seen people complain about combinations that 'break' HotT, and armies fielded in tournament tend to be highly heterogenous. If there's a winning combination, no one's worked it out in 28 years. But in the 'closed' games, there seems to be lots of complaining about 'game-breaking' combos or 'overpowered' troop types. And there do seem to be optimal choices from certain army lists. And I assume that's why those games seem to be in constant flux (as others have said above).
I don't agree. I think there are more variables at play than that. A lot about a game can depend upon who you play, what group you play with.
For example, my Necromunda group has several house rules we all discussed and agreed on. That said, where does Necrmunda fall within these two 'camps'? Is it closed or is it open? I would say it's bang in the middle. It's an RPG wargame so it is intended to be a starting point you can create stuff from.
Then there is SAGA. It's open. You can use any miniatures you like
I think the variable I think is missing more than anything else in this discussion is the intent of the game. 'Balancing' only really matters if you are wanting 'competitive' games rather than narrative driven games.
40k and AoS and a lot of games workshop games these days have moved away from that to an extent. And they do have a very heavy tournament scene.
That in itself is fine, but the players that are heavily into that, IMHO can be less open to playing more fluffy driven narrative games.
2nd Ed 40k was relatively open in force composition. Back then you have 'beardy' players who min-maxed the % requisites for army building. Typically working out the character points limit and maxing out on those first. The fact the term 'Beardy' was even used in this sense suggested that it wasn't liked by all.
Just musing on the terms used in this discussion: it occurs to me that in some senses, it's games like HotT and the Rampant games that are "closed" and "complete", in that you draw from a strictly defined set of troop types. Yet they're miniature-agnostic systems, even down to the number of figures used per unit (your HotT ogres might be single-figure warband elements whereas orcs might have three or four figures per element, just as Dragon Rampant might use three or four ogres to represent a 12-strength-point element of heavy infantry.
I think it's also true, as mcfonz pointed out earlier in the thread, that systems tied to a miniatures line aren't really "closed" as far as miniatures go - it's just that the manufacturers would prefer you to think that they are. In this regard, it's interesting to see how Warhammer went from an explicitly "open" (miniatures-wise) system to a "closed" one.
There's also a point about "completeness". Hordes of the Things is a complete game, in that all you need is the rulebook and some miniatures (you could play it with base-sized cardboard or wooden rectangles if you really wanted; I can imagine someone with some artistic flair creating an attractive travel set in this way).
As said, this is something I really do not like. I like when in games rules are more representative of the model and the equipment. In Frosgrave, no one stops me (and I'm also pretty sure Mr McCullough himself would encourage it) to create an orc warband. Or an undead one. But rule-wise they would be the same as if I'd created a human one. It's just a cosmetic choice.
To the other hand, some settings are very characteristic and it's difficult to find something matching their mood and aesthetics without feeling out of place. But it seems to me I'm repeating myself. Did you read the example about Star Wars jedis? That's not just FF trying to convince you its game is "closed". Star Wars has a very well defined aesthetic (so 40K, Warmachine or Malifaux) and (atm, in production) there aren't other source of models. Of course you can find the occasional 3rd party model that fits the setting, or source some older Starwars models from other manufacturers, but generally speaking, people are going to use "official" models.
Back to Warhammer, AoS it isn't actually as closed as GW would make you think it is, I agree with you. Besides maybe some specific model, people could still play it with 3rd party models. Fyreslayers are still dwarves, and Stormcast could be a mix of paladins and angels.Rules are nothing to write home about, but way better (imho) to many "open" rulesets people seem to appreciate a lot ...But again, it's GW, so it has to be a bad game (Again, not a fantastic one, for sure, but not the worst, either. I'm surprised it is not played very much here, where users have proven to be inventive and able to think "out of the box").
These things seem to be broadly true:1. 'Limited-profile' rulesets, in which all players choose from the same roster of troop types, tend to produce well-balanced games. This makes them the best choice for competitive or tournament play, as they're more chess-like. HotT, Saga, Frostrgrave, Battlesworn, DBA and the Rampant family all fall into this category. All of these rules make little differentiation between (say) orcish heavy infantry and human heavy infantry. Armies or warbands are defined and flavoured more by the combination of units than the individual profiles of those units.2. 'Unlimited-profile' rulesets, in which the choice of unit characteristics is very extensive, offer much greater scope for individualising units. So one unit of orcish heavy infantry (whether an individual or a group) might differ markedly from the next, let alone from a unit of human heavy infantry. But this individualisation often comes at the expense of game balance, because the combinations are so varied that even the best points system will sometimes fail to reflect their potency (or, conversely, overprice them). Mayhem, SoBH, Rogue Planet, Rogue Stars, Fistful of Lead and many other games fall into this category. They offer plenty of detail, but are less suited to competitive or tournament play, because someone will always find a 'killer' combination or a 'game-breaking' design.3. Most commercial games that are supported with continuous model releases are more like 2 than 1. The potential profiles are limitless; the only difference is that it's the company, rather than the players, that designs the new profiles. So, like the games in 2 above, they tend to be less suited for competitive play - either initially or in time, as new profiles and unit types start to unbalance them. Consequently, those games tend to require multiple editions and are generally less stable than 1 above. Warhammer/AoS and 40K certainly fall into this category.
That's not to say that big companies can't produce games in category 1. I'd argue that Space Hulk and Blood Bowl are exactly that
Now, your preference for detailed rules probably means that you prefer games in categories 2 and 3.
But then there's another factor: aesthetics.[...]
I don't have anything against GW games; I played Blood Bowl for the first time this year and really liked it. My son loves it. But with AoS, I don't really see what it offers that Dragon Rampant or Saga don't. I could play a game of it tomorrow, as I have dozens of Citadel orcs, goblins and chaos creatures. But I don't see what makes it better than many of the "open" rulesets.
Would you consider it a better designed game than Saga, for example?