Re: Deals with the devil

At 12:34 AM 4/30/97 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Considering all the flak that GW takes from you lot, how many of you
>actually own or
>play GW games or use their figures?

I used to work in a comic shop while I was in college. I ended up buying
a
lot of GW stuff. 

I bought Talisman and Dungeonquest, both of which were fairly simple
games
that my wife liked to play. Her favourite, though, is Chaos Marauders
which
is almost totally mindless but still fun. 

I got into WH40K fairly heavily when it first came out. Same reasons as
everyone else: it was popular and was the only thing anyone else played.
I
lived in a small city outside of Toronto (Oshawa) so there was precious
little else to play. I liked WH40K but found some immediate problems and
stupidities (a moving shooter wasn't penalized but you were penalized
for
shooting a moving target?). I fixed some of these with house rules,
introduced opportunity fire, adjusted the army lists based on errors in
the
point system, and used a slightly modified Squad Leader turn sequence.
Funny
enough, this created a fairly reasonable game.

I bought Warhammer Fantasy Battles (2nd edition, and later 3rd edition)
and
two armies. I still haven't played it or painted the figs...  I bought
Space
Hulk and enjoyed it a few times until I realized that there was no play
balance and a lot depended on luck. I bought first edition Space Marine
and
played that a fair bit. A friend bought 2nd edition; we played one game
of
it and disliked its simplicity. I bought Advanced Heroquest, which is
actually a fun little dungeon crawl, and Advanced Space Crusade, which
was
much less fun than Heroquest. I played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with
our
regular RPG group. Everyone had fun while we played it, though we were
as
often laughing at the system as with it.

I got out of WH40K when it became obvious that it was becoming a serious
money grab. I still contend that WH40K Rogue Trader is a fun skirmish
game
if you keep the games down to squads of average troops. Once you start
adding things like psychic aspect warrior librarian chaos daemons and
some
such, real tactics go bye-bye. My last game was at a con with over 100
figures per side. The battle was won by our side when one squad of
Aspect
Warriors attacked our Ork psychics and died; we could have had the two
squads attack each other on turn one and saved our selves four hours of
con
time. 

Then GW did their cute little attempt at a Canadian monopoly by
announcing
that they would no longer sell to distributors, so stores had to buy
directly from GW's stores. Oh, and the prices went up. Again. We stopped
getting GW stuff into the store and I stopped buying any of their games. 

I've seen their recent versions of WH40K and WFB, and I wasn't impressed
with the dumbing down and munchkining up of the games. I hear
interesting
things about the latest Space Marine, but I'm not paying that kind of
money
for their games. Besides, I have enough fun using their figures with
DS2. 

Allan Goodall:	agoodall@sympatico.ca 
"You'll want to hear about my new obsession.
 I'm riding high upon a deep depression. 
 I'm only happy when it rains."    - Garbage