Empire of the Dead upcoming West Wind game!

[abdul666lw]

Also, by using non official figures it fails to support the company which produced the game you are attempting to support.

Not that simple.
Even forgetting the irritating 'We offer an entire hobby, don't give a cent to our competitors' marketing trick to 'enslave' consumers, to *encourage* the use of proxy minis (and the use of the rules in other settings / time periods) can only booster the 'taking off' of a new game (think Carnevale, for instance). Actually if gamers are not brainwashed with the 'use only official minis' doctrine, they will be more prone to buy figurines from a manufacturer to play with the rules of another, Westwind minis for Malifaux and Mansions of Madness for instance, and all companies producing good rules or good (and 'mainstream' size) and not outrageously expensive minis would benefit.

Besides, I'm not convinced by the 'wysiwyg' argument: even an 'official' figurine *never* perfectly reflects what the character is currently doing, his state (despite the 'clix' bases), what he is carrying... That's why to use minis is one of the two experiences (the other being to use 'Rolemaster' rules   ) most role players never repeat...


Then, remember that in our games figurines fulfill two functions:
- to show where the persona is (for this only the base matters) and to act as a quick reminder of its main characteristics: a cardboard chip bearing a few symbols would be perfectly equivalent;
- to provide eye-candy.
Thus the possibilities for a miniature to 'count as' are limited only by personal taste and mutual agreement.
More decades ago than I care to compute I fought many Ancient battles with my Minifigs 'javelin & shield' Aureola Rococo Amazons 'counting as' Egyptian or Assyrian spearmen, Greek hoplites, Carthaginian veterans, Roman legionaries (from the Republic to the Late Empires), Byzantine scutatoi... Given they were mostly topless my (male, young and testosterone-filled) opponents willingly accepted the 'count as' conventions  
Don't forget the potential *reciprocity* between different figurines manufacturers.
All of them (if selling 'good' minis) would benefit from a wider market if players buys were not 'clouded' with the 'official mini' paradigm.

I'm not sure it's wise for small and middle-sized companies to ape the marketing practice so successful for the *gigantic* GW.

[RepublicsFury]

I disagree. And so at the tables I host they'll be official or not on the tables.

I will think on this though, and once I get the rules I'll see what the company says.

Thanks for the thoughts.

RF

[Deathjester]

Westwind have absolutely no probs with people using other manufacturers miniatures for their games.

I have played in their official tournaments for Secrets of the Third Reich and used official minis, Dust minis and even Artizan WW2 minis as well as Warlord vehicles.

[n815e]

Without trying to be combative, here, it seems to me you are hung up on this "official" thing a bit too much.  It's a mentality perpetuated by certain game companies that is meant to railroad players and shop owners into buying their products, not the competitions'.  To these guys it is a matter of maximizing profit by convincing you that playing with your toys how you want is unacceptable and even morally wrong -- there'd be no "[Company] Hobby" with the Company.  It's marketing bunk.

Carry the West Wind lines, carry the Blue Moon line, carry the Foundry line.  They compliment each other, they work together, you will be benefitting multiple companies and they will all come out winners.  Your players will be happy, your bank account will be happy.

[RepublicsFury]

@n815e

I see the validity in allowing any mini on the table. I really do.  It affords the player the option to use what he thinks it a great sculpt.  See... in the old days you designed your units using the rule book.  BattleTech, Alternative Armies are good examples of companies where you can still do that.  Thr gamers of today seem to want stat cards and are reticent to play games which require time and effort to design units.  Empire (I belive, but don't hold me to it as I don't hsve the rules yet), Wyrd Games' Malifaux, Hordes & War Machine are good examples of games where you can not design your own units because there is no formula to design them with. 

Because I know Malifaux the best we'll use that as an example.

So in Malifaux I want to use Reapers' Zombie Dancing Girls instead of the Rotten Belles.   To do that I have to either buy the Rotten Belle and the Reaper Dancer or just the dancer and then irder the stat card from Wyrd.  The later being more codt effective.

To be able to go outside of their models a company has to be willing to provide the player with the mechanism to design the units.  Unless you only game with the same group of guys and they are fine with your designs even though you had no official design tools.  And so you end up with units that may/or may not be broken.  But there is no way to check.  If a company provides the formula to design units it is by default their desire for you to use any figure you want to use.  Malifaux, Hordes, War Machine are examples where you can not design uour own units.  Westwind may be an exception, however, I find that stat card games do not offer you the ability to design your own units.

Now if it's simply a question of proxy and you want to use the provided stat card then you've a) already bought the figure, b) or have purchsed the stat card and so the figure doesnt really mean anything as you are simply proxying it for the unit on the stat card.  So it means the figure is acceptable simply because the card is correct.

Now, if Westwid provides the formula great, use what ever you want as long as it was designed correctly.  If you proxy in Malifaux but are using the company produced Stat Card, great! 

What I need to be able to offer is open play where someone comes in, and I've never met them, and he can setup and play "right out of the box" (as it were).  I can't offer a situation where I have to tell that newcommer "well... Here's how we do it, and this figure is ok because we agreed that it was ok."  do you see the difference? It is NOT about the figure (which everyone seems to be hung up on) it IS about offering an environment where someone can come in, setup, and play.  Maybe they come back, maybe they din't.  But they were able to play because we didn't have a lot of rules exceptions and we were't house ruling and didnt make up units because we thought they would be cool or neat.

IF Westwind has the formula THEN I don't care what fig someone uses.

See what I mean?

RF

P.S. I try not to take offense, it's why we have a forums.  But I don't want to be offensive either.  Which is why I just ended the conversation.  But I am glad we talked.  Thanks for chatting.

[Brummie Thug]

If you where going to Demo this game in a store. Then you would just use balanced forces that where pre determined before hand. Because you have so much choice in this game theres no way you could you just turn up with a box of minis and play you'd need to work out wargear etc before hand. You could have loads of lightly armed members or a few well tooled up ones its all swings and round abouts

[RepublicsFury]

Does anyone have the rules book, and can tell me if the formula for creating units is part of the rules?

[Skrapwelder]

It is not.

[Major_Gilbear]

@ RepublicsFury:

It is not, but do remember that units have gain bonuses to stats and skills, etc as they advance over several games.

Also, usually players fill in a roster (or similar) with details of their gang so that they can keep track of it from game to game.

[RepublicsFury]

I called all the "Big Boys" (game stores) in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas and none of them are stocking it.  Which is either because it's new, the distribution channel is not conducive to game stores, or it's not popular yet.

We discussed starting up the game, I think we're going to order the rules.  @Major_Gilbear I didn't know any of that as I don't own the game.

The one thing this thread has made me realize is that if the manufacturer produces the game and includes the formula for creating units they support using what ever you'd like.  They believe that they make great stat cards (applicable to stat card games only) and if you buy our great looking minis you'll get those which makes the game easy to play.  But are fine with you using what ever.

And companies that don't make the formula available fall under the "Only Buy From Us" category.  I think there has been a lot of validity to what's been said for using what ever the heck you want.

I do still think that if you're hosting a game at a store, and are the quasi official spokesman for the game being run that it's best if you use the official minis.  But I do think that companies that offer the rules for unit creation are more gamer friendly.  And that companies like Privateer Press, Wyrd Games, GW are too wrapped up in making money they may have lost sight of what's important.  And that is: Good friends, great games.

RF

[abdul666lw]

It's unlikely that the composition of 'factions' is random and unbalanced -players would soon discover it and drop the game. Hence, even if no justification for them is given, if no individual 'point value' is provided, an analysis of the various ready-made 'gangs' would allow to compute fairly good approximations. A few friendly / solo games would refine the approximations. An interesting intellectual challenge by itself, anyway.
For such assessments it would probably be wise to use the original publications: companies selling minis with their (unjustified) stats in order to 'imprison' their consumers tend to work like CCG ones, issuing  permanently new 'sets'. And the temptation is strong to 'improve' the characteristics of the latest products (or, at an upper scale, to print new editions of 'army books' or 'codices'), so that consumers / players *have* to buy them if they want to keep winning now and then.


Then, there is always the 'counts as' possibility: I understand that Laughing Ferret's excellent and very original Boneswords 'count as' Zendarians?

I do still think that if you're hosting a game at a store, and are the quasi official spokesman for the game being run that it's best if you use the official minis.

The apparently 'safe' approach (it worked, and works, so well for GW), but probably not always the wisest one. When a new, small, company tries to launch a new, original game, with at first very few minis in production (I'm thinking of Carnevale, for instance), allowing, even encouraging the use of proxies could only booster the 'taking of' of the game. Remember, by Rogue Trader times, Citadel urged the players to build their own deodorant hovertank!
Modern players being mostly of the 'passive' kind, seemingly, an 'official' range of minis for an already well known set of rules will sell well. And 'Strange Aeons' ("open") appears to be far more popular than 'Mansions of madness' ("closed" system). The '18th C. gothic horror' boardgame' with minis 'A touch of evil' ("closed" system) is barely struggling along for years, and is far less known than 'Witchfinder' / 'Witch hunter' / 'Pike & shot & zombies' (or 'Chaos in Carpathia', perfectly playable in the 18th C. -as, I'm sure, is 'Empire of the Dead', btw) sets of rules ("open systems", which could be partly turned to "closed" by an official range of minis *once* known and popular enough).

Below a 'critical mass' of secured consumers, the 'exclusive' GW strategy can be counter-productive.  I suspect that the best way to support a small company producing a new game is to first 'hook' a number of players to the rules and setting, completing the initially limited range with proxy minis.

Now, it's true that the situation of WestWwind, already well known and with an established commercial basis for their minis, is not the same as, say, Vesper-on Games; yet to see them taking the "Only Buy From Us" road which suppresses the creativity, imagination, capacity of initiative and independent thinking of young players, while understandable, is... unpleasant.

[RepublicsFury]

So your thought is that it creates a greater interest for the person walking up that has never played to be able to use what ever he has, and that he uses our designed formula during when he returns the next time to have units he's created. And during the first go use our stuff.

Hummm...

I'll tell ya what, I'll do it. As an experiment we'll do it. We'll get the rules, one set of minis abd develope a formula. I'll give it say three months and come back with a report on if it killed the interest in the game completely or if it drove the game forward.  I'll post the formula up at the store so people can potentially use it during the week.

When I report I'll start a new thread. 

This will be interesting.

[Major_Gilbear]

@ RepublicsFury:

Hmm, well, I'm not sure I'm quite following you with your last post. 

In EotD, players choose a force according to that force's recruitment rules, and those force members all come with a fixed statline. You can equip them as you see fit from the permitted equipment list. All this is taken from a "budget" of points ("Shillings" in the game) that all players start with.

Depending on the outcome of each game, players can earn more Shillings. In addition, some of the forces' participants may have been wounded (or worse) and will need to determine what the outcome of those injuries is.

Shillings earned by each player can be spent to replace losses suffered by their force or to add more members, having members gain new skills or stat increases, buying new equipment, visiting the Doc to try and heal any outstanding injuries, and so on.

Each game that force plays in carries over all the previous games' worth of experience and outcomes with it. In this way it is a bit like each player roleplaying a whole gang rather than a single character (as would be the case in a traditional RPG).

If players were allowed to make up anything they liked at all according to a "game formula", the game would very quickly break and stop being any fun for anyone. So, the fixed starting statlines and recruitment constraints are important.

However, just because something like the Nosferatu gang is based around a Vampire and its immediate entourage for example, does not mean that all payers must play that gang as a Vampire gang. A player might want to play a Mummy-themed force, and as there isn't such a list in the game (currently, at least), decides to use the rules of the Nosferatu gang as a template instead. So his Mummy counts as the Vampire Graf, the Mummy's bride as the Consort, his palace guard as the Thralls. No rules are different; just the models are effectively swapped out.

This means that players can field pretty much whatever they want, it still fits the rules, and the game gets played (which promotes said game in your area).

Some players will buy the official models and play a gang "out of the box" as it were. Other players might want to do the same, but use models from their existing collection (for example, Malifaux Guild Guard make good Zendarian Officer Club gangers), but it is still very obvious what's what. Still other players might want to run a gang, but with totally different models (perhaps from the manufacturer, perhaps not) and use one of the existing gangs as a template - like my Mummy example above.

In all cases however, the players are using the official rules, following the actual gang types, and promoting the game. So in the end, the only issue is whose models get used, and I think you'll be surprised to find that players will enjoy being allowed to use whatever they please, and that many will choose to use at least some West Wind figures.

I strongly recommend reading Anatoli's blog about EotD here, and also Laughing Ferret's blog here; this will hopefully give you a good idea about what the game is like and how it works. In both cases, some official West Wind figures are used, and in both cases a lot of imagination and other manufacturer's models are used as well.

What's interesting to me, and might be to you as well (I take it you run a store then?), is that although players might use Malifaux figures for EotD for example, they can similarly use West Wind figures for Malifaux too. So in a sense, you can support both West Wind and Wyrd without having to feel tied to either manufacturer's products exclusively when playing each of their games. This obviously applies to more than just West Wind / Wyrd models, but I'm just trying to illustrate my point quickly with pertinent examples here!

For many smaller games companies, allowing and encouraging this freedom of what models to use is what helps promote them and keep them alive. Bigger games companies (especially GW) want players to stick only to what's "officially" allowed because they want to protect their profit - if their players realised that other companies can make exquisite models in a variety of materials to a high standard and at a lower cost too, they would struggle to sell anything at all with their existing business model. In essence, by locking players in, they keep them blinkered and keep them spending much more than they need to.

So if you want to promote the smaller guys in the industry, sell a wide variety of models, and have a variety of games within your player group, I would encourage you to allow them to use the models they want to, to think for themselves and search out cool figures they want you to stock, and to play for fun and love of the hobby (and not because there is a tournament or league for a specific game or whatever).

[RepublicsFury]

  I really need to buy the rules!  This may/may not work. 

Thanks

RF

[Brummie Thug]

You can pick the more esoteric gear and have perhaps pitched battles. But I don't really see that is the way its intended to be IMO.

Don't forget there all the Gothic Horror and Vampire war figures to choose from to use for Zendarians, Wulfen Jaegars etc