Is Age Of Sigmar Off Topic For Oldhammer?

The Oldhammer Facebook groups are fine places for talk about gaming of yesteryear and for trading or selling off old lead. Just don't mention what Games Workshop are up to today, as it makes people utterly displeased.

The Age Of Sigmar has arrived and I for one and very glad to welcome it. I've played older rulesets and 8th edition WFB, as well as other systems, like Songs of Blades and Heroes. I really hoped that Age Of Sigmar would be something different and all the rumours and signs running up to the big reveal indicated that it would be.

Then the rules dropped - all four pages of them - for free, and the gaming world stayed up late trying to figure out what it all means for them, scrolling through... well, Warscrolls. Tourney types were outraged by the lack of points and immediately started working out how to achieve 'balance' through wound counts or some other metric. Casual gamers rejoiced at the potential for swift and satisfying games. Narrative gamers began dreaming of the possibilities for scenarios and campaigns.

Oldhammerers... well.

Although the Oldhammer Facebook community is clearly aimed at sharing people's enjoyment of a certain set of games circa the late '80s and early '90s (and fills this niche very well), I've always been troubled by how all newness is broadly treated as anathema. While this may not be a majority view in 'real life,' it certainly comes through in plenty of anti-plastic, anti-contemporary rhetoric in posts and comments.

Today, all talk of Age Of Sigmar was deemed off limits, with the threat of removal from the group. This astonished me.

Perhaps I missed a batch of particularly nasty and idiotic comments somewhere. Maybe someone was having a bad day. It could even be that this is a backbreaking straw for the camel, the final point in a trend of 'off topic' commentaries that is bending the remit of the group. Whatever the reality of it all, the response seemed pretty extreme.

I simply commented (and I strongly believe this) that the Oldhammer group should be a place to have some sort of discussion about how this new rule set - so radically different from what went before (i.e. 8th, 7th...) - compares to the games of our youth. I would like to share in this discussion with fellow 'veterans'. To me, that is eminently 'on topic.'

I am not alone in noticing that in trying to invigorate their fantasy line, GW have given the world a system that looks to hit all the sweet spots for Oldhammer-types. It genuinely is a play-it-your-way game, built around cooperation between players. You don't have to like the high-fantasy models to appreciate this is a good thing.

I'm going to embrace it and I'm going to do this for several reasons:

1. It's a new game that seems to capture all the ethos of gaming that I enjoy. In sum, it's a game that's storied.

2. Round bases offer better modelling opportunities and as I spend 98% of my time modelling and painting, that suits me.

3. Crucially, this is a system that will scale very well for different solo gaming opportunities - I want something to occupy me at the dining room table while my wife looks over occasionally and sighs...

4. I can easily teach my children how to play as they grow up, and it'll be the same game at each level.

5. It's an excuse to buy new models and I like the current line.

These aspects then made it a done deal for me. Points 1-3 will be a new focus for this blog (along with all the 40k stuff I've been up to... more to follow on that).

It's time to discover and explore the nine realms.