A friend asked me a question the other day:
"Why are you so against playing Pathfinder?"
He asked assuming that I'm a hipster who avoids popular media (Kind of true). My answer was thus:
"I'm not against Pathfinder (or D&D etc etc) if there's a game running and I can make it I'm in. The thing is, is that I Know that Pathfinder is good. I want to experience other systems and find out if they are as good, or if I'm being hopeful, better."
This is true for most of the media preferences I consume (As in RPGs, Anime, Fantasy novels and some games, depending on price naturally), I will find myself walking into a shop and literally judging a book by it's cover.
...and by that I mean reading over the synopsis.
As shallow as it is (and it is) if you want to get me to buy your product you need to hit 3 criteria:
1./ A reasonable price
2./ Some well-done artwork
3./ An excellently worded synopsis without going all 'buy this buzz-words'
Some of my favorite books and anime I've found by this process, where they hit those 3 points and I've picked them up. If I had looked up reviews of "Speed Grapher" or Scott Lynch's "The Lies of Locke Lamora" beforehand, I might have not gave them a second glance. This is because I enjoy the risk of trying something out without the hands of preview chapters, PDFs or Netflix tainting my view of it. If I've put down £20-£30 on something, I'm at the very least going to complete the experience rather than the Netflix problem of having no reason to continue if the first 10 minutes didn't capture me.
For example: Paranoia Agent, an anime I had no knowledge of before buying has THE SLOWEST START to an anime I've ever witnessed, the opening is weird and if not for putting down £30-ish quid I would have left it early on. I continued to watch though, through the box set and suddenly the anime opened up and the preceding story made a lot more sense and foreshadowed following events and I was struck with the euphoric moment of "I'm so glad I kept watching!".
Had I stuck to watching the well-known and popular titles, I would watch them saying that yeah, they're okay; I wouldn't have that fist bump moment because the hype surrounding it has peaked to the point of hating it or loving it because of it's over-exposure before even viewing it.
Undertale I've never played nor wish to at this point. I KNOW it's an amazing game and the internet has done a fine job of making sure everybody knows about the last boss or the opening scene or the scenes in-between ("Don't you dare kill Goat Mum"). With so much attention, it's now impossible to go into Undertale blind unless you simply do not have internet access.
This of course extends to tabletop miniatures as well, with the caveat that people in my area need to be playing the game for me to invest a lot of time into into it. With 40k I could have gone Space Marines and won more games but again, I knew they were good, I wanted to see if the other factions were any good as well. Try being a modern 40k player without consulting MEQ stats (Marine equivalent) for every single model choice you make and understand that I didn't foresee it being fun to play the faction that everyone assumes the opposing player is playing. In my whole time playing 40k I only faced Eldar and Orcs once, every other time it was Marines, it's boring.
With Malifaux it's less apparent now because unless one is strictly keeping to one faction, players are likely to gather any crew they enjoy the mechanics of so a power fence isn't brought up to face that one faction that everybody plays. Luckily Malifaux doesn't have 'The one Awesome faction'; one could argue Guild, but then someone will pipe up and say Neverborn then behind that person, another player will say Outcast, then in the back an old veteran tells everyone in the room the tales of that time he faced Gremlins etc etc
But I still went in relatively blind and chose the Ice Mage because I have a fondness for Ice Magics.
D&D, Pathfinder and the RPGs everybody "knows" is at a point where anybody interested in playing a tabletop RPG knows it's good and likely wants to play it first because "I don't want to waste my time on something bad" but here's the thing: With the right GM who
knows the rules and manages them seamlessly into a story, it doesn't matter if you're throwing D6s, D20s, D100s or playing Jenga. What it well and truly boils down to with many RPGs is what you character creation options are and the mood of game you're playing. For me, I'm looking for a good time, not to narrow my options down to the global opinion that X, Y & Z RPGs are the only ones worth playing.
To go back to my friend's original question, I don't shy away from the cool kid's games and media because I hate them or have a disliking towards them necessarily. I have a un-healthy amount of love for Bleach, Fight Club is my most favorite and most watched film of all time and I really enjoy the current Marvel Cinematic universe. My point was to my friend was that I don't want to simply find the mass majority thing that the world has agreed on is the best ever awesomesauce and add to the pile, I want to find the stuff that people haven't necessarily found or maybe have skimmed over due to the other brands hype. Hell, I'm not even doing that really, what I like doing is taking a risk on the unknown and finding out for myself if it's worth my time and something I enjoy. Again, some of my favorite books and anime were found by me skimming a synopsis and dropping some pocket money on them, I wouldn't be playing AMP right now if not for randomly picking it up next to Feng Shui 2. It's the simple joy of Discovery.
Make sure life is exciting and have fun out there.
So far my stable of Arcanist masters are performing admirably well although a distinctive podium has occurred where Rasputina is tippidy top, Toni is taking silver and Mei is hanging onto third place by default. This is most likely due to the Ice Witch being my favorite master in Malifaux to play and her weaknesses not being so blatant as the other two. Having a master who straight up kills fools as well is pretty handy as a strength and one I have missed, playing a lot of Yan Lo and Mei Feng; Yes, Feng's total damage is up equal or dare I say higher than Rasputina's but December's Chosen is a lot more consistent with it.
Bad habits have formed mind you, the inclusion of Wyrd actually releasing Wave 2 tech in plastic for all our consumer needs, particularly in the advent of the Effigys, has not helped me in terms of good decisions in list making. Brutal Effigy is almost in every Guild list I face now and my own use of Arcane Effigy is absurd. Shadow Effigy being in "Mei Feng" place for most useful out of the seven. My game has suffered and not due to age old rantings of "this master is fun but struggles against Blank". No, my Win/Loss total in January sitting at an eerie 1-6 loss with 'Tina has shown me that despite the AWESOME POWER of a Winter Goddess at my disposal, I need to step back and rethink my strategy. Let me explain:
Lately, I've been running Rasputina as the core of my crew, to a degree it works and why Vp gets awarded to me but the problem now is I narrowed the focus too much and use more than half of my crew to simply buff up the Lady of the Tundra. Essence of Power gets pushed alongside Raspy by The Captain in order to use it's Amplify buff, then an Ice Garmin wanders up and with Bite of Winter buffing her damage followed next activation by the Arcane Effigy giving out Arcane Radiance.
Theoryfaux smiles greatly at this as now Avalanche Alice is Ca8, getting double duty out of her soulstones, a 3/5/6 damage track and has discard-or-burn attached to her already fairly aggressive attack options without relying on fragile ice mirrors being pushed so far up the board.
Theoryfaux can taking a running leap!
If you read back to my Mei Feng rundown here, you might notice why your humble writer putting all his hopes and dreams into a single model is a bad idea no matter how magic or kung-fu that model is. Cassie Cold spending 4ss on upgrades, 4ss on cache and then another 24ss just to spend a turn buffing her up is sheer lunacy in retrospective, especially considering that the opponent can see it coming 3 activations beforehand!
I try to be good at this game guys...
All these buffs are all well and good but thinking back, does Rasputina really need them? More damage is great. More out of my soulstones, neat. Sacrificing half my list to do it is insanity though and being an Icy death incarnate anyway, being death incarnate +1 seems overkill if it wasn't telegraphing every activation being so. Surely I have better things to spend points on than a dude who does nothing, a dude who does nothing and can explode, a dude who has nothing to do if no one has a condition and an old feller who helps all the useless dudes out before taking to midfield and effecting the actual game.
One game had Levi destroy Winter Wanda after I threw caution to the wind and nuked two Waifs that were in range. I felt at the time it was a good play, it put Levi on the backburner and stopped him from bamfing around the board wherever he wanted, then I sat back looking at Essence of Power posting C.Vs looking for a new job, Arcane Effigy lost in the woods with nothing to do and The Captain, bless his heart, pushing them both to tar-pit enemies. It was shameful to say the least and didn't give a great reason for Snowy Sandra (I'm running out of nicknames...) to stick her neck out. Even if it did hurt Levi's effectiveness in the long run, without that support to back up her noble sacrifice, all it did was rend an already tentative synergy with her models asunder. Without casters nearby, EoP literally does nothing, without a leader, the effigy is left as a defenseless medic all the while the shambles of the rest of my list were left with toothpicks to fight sharks with.
So, I put a new plan into action, no more "Team Mega Buff", no more un-cooked omelette sloshing around a basket, I set aside what December Diana could potentially do and started asking what she could do alongside her crew.
What is Rasputina good at? Blast damage, paralyzation and board control in the form of her Ice Pillars. Against crews that struggle against armor, she can boost the longevity of the models around her. So a good all-rounder. Who helps alongside that?
My totem of choice for so long: Essence of Power has been my go-to because of it's Ca and soulstone boosting. It has made recent games of "Malifaux Bowling" a treat, yet even with it's toted ability to increase Rasputina's soulstone use, most of the time it's hoping that Icy Alison doesn't move so it can give out it's Ca boost. My Rasputina moves basically the whole game, getting into range, getting around corners, moving in and out of cover, getting out of melee. A 3" push is a snails pace I agree but it's all Snow Mountain Maggie needs to be where she's required.
Sadly this puts E-O-Pow in the position of doing little else but double Tundra Tina's soulstone use, which is fine if not for her other totem: Wendigo doing a lot more for her as a whole.
Wendigo I never really got on with at first, he's frozen heart, a fast significant bugger yes but he's also Def4 with 6Wds. Very easy to kill and just the right amount of Wk6 non-peon that trigger fingers everywhere start getting itchy because of. The Essence is a insignificant peon, apart from adding to activations (something it doesn't even really use) it's pretty much a non-scoring, non-threat to all non-blast players.
So what does 'Digo give me? Is it even worth taking? Well lets take for example, Essence moves towards the Rasmus then she does her thing. Now lets do the same with Wendigo, instead, Frosty Florence (I guess I wasn't running out of nicknames) does her thing then passes the torch to Wendigo as a chain who then moves to a better location and copies a spell at Ca4. Ca4 doesn't set galaxies on fire but it's still extra pressure on the opponent or an additional buff, plus in a pitch he can at least charge and throw some fists on a near-dead dude. Devour is a powerful threat in a crew that can so easily paralyze.
Next on the agenda was greatly lowering the amount of buffs unless they effected more than just Rasimir Putina (the nicknames just keep on rollin') Ice Garmin has a very good 12" diameter buff that effects Frozen hearts so it's an option for more Frozen heart heavy lists but if Garmina del Ice isn't out buffing at least 2 models a turn, it's not worth using outside of thematic lists, or explosion spam which I enjoy sometimes.
When these lists aren't so chock full of Slush Puppy Valentines, or I'm potentially facing a lot of conditions, the Arcane Effigy is grand. More focus on it's (1) action is required as the Discard-or-Burn is nice but leaves the Effigy twiddling it's thumbs otherwise. The slow condition being used against DJ Ra-Ra-T's already plodding team is a nightmare and something the effigy is great at removing.
After that, it's really just a case of playing more to Sub-Zero Sally's strengths rather than avoiding her weaknesses. For a while now, I've been playing general Arcanist crews and placing Raspy (or Feng) in the center without any clear synergy or thought. Joss is great, Mole Men are great, Coryphee are glass cannon all-rounders yeah but when it came down to master activation, it could have been anyone. So I decided to populate lists with more frozen heart choices dedicating pieces not to Ice Mirror fonts of power but rather making every model be aware that 16" paralyze ray is a thing. Allowing in-crew synergies that didn't rely on Rasputina to use a (1) action to create as well was a boon. Snowstorm can push or can fire freely into F-H melees, Silent Ones heal F-Hs as well as using Ice Mirror herself and Ice Garmin being able to buff more than a single model making December Acolytes even more annoying and giving Snowstorms damage track some actual bite. Nice little things that I had left behind because of this narrowed down focus on making Rasputina the greatest thing ever.
The closer you look, the less you see.
With these old tricks re-implemented Freeze Over becomes a real pain for my opponents, engaging Frozen Hearts to stop the Ice Mirror is a well-known tactic but when that same frozen heart steps into base to base, slaps your model in the face and watches Gloria Glaicia paralyze you without even a chance to defend against it it's a work of art. With help from Snowstorms base size, even if she's engaged, she can pull other friendlies base to base just outside of melee engagement and have Ice Stalactite Stacy use Ice Mirror no problem. Wendigo being on protection duty by setting up really annoying walls messes with opponents movement plans and Ice Golem spreads slow as well as being a primary target, allowing the weaker parts of my crew to get where they needed to be.
as for non-Frozen Hearts, I've found great success in Hoarcat Pride, being another font for Devour allows Rar-Rar-Rasputina to do her paralyze thing and rely on more than Wendigo to finish the job.
And Joss, because Joss.
Every activation, Rasputina uses her "full" Ap, no more does she Push 3", make someone Frozen Heart and deal two damage. I still use Joss when Armor is prevalent but with more sense of synergy now, my games have gotten a lot more tighter and closer than if I were to rely on these general lists.
Never forget your master isn't the only model in your crew and have fun out there.
Human beings have this urge to remember things in their past much more fondly or worse than they actually were. Think back to your favorite christmas or your friends back in secondary school. Maybe your first heartbreak or your first car crash. How much of it was as bad or as good as you recall it being? How many of us miss our school days having a laugh with our mates and the stupid stuff we did in our youths? When really, at the time we were bored out of our minds in classrooms being taught things we haven't the foggiest recollection of or reason why it was imperative that we knew them before going into the "big wide world" by ourselves. Utter nonsense.
My generation, if you can even call it a generation, it's unclear, are absolutely sold on the idea that the 90's were the best ever awesomesauce where we all had the most fun. It was a colorful time full of original ideas and haircuts, lots of haircuts. Really though, our memories of it are the 1% highlights whilst we ignore the 99% shocking terrible-ness of it. Our minds are hardwired for survival despite the very real reality that the mass-majority of us are "basically" safe. We don't have to stand guard at our loved ones beds, we don't have to fear being killed by roaming gangs of aggressive gnomes, we are "basically" safe yet our minds are still hardwired to protect us. Thus our memories of things being gleaming bastions of the good ol' days or the worst thing to ever happen. That or we were bored. These are the three options with memories and science has even found out that every time we recall an event in the past, we start making stuff up and adding or subtracting things. It's all lies! They're not even square!
That amazing segment segways into the point of this post, how I came to love and enjoy my favorite tabletop game: Malifaux. It's a long road of highs and lows and a LOT of money. Or I was busy drawing with crayons and my mind is simply replacing pictures of clouds and farm animals with the Eldar Craftworlds of the 40k universe, it's hard to know for sure.
My earliest memories of gaming was Magic the Gathering. My mother for whatever reason tried to play it, failed spectacularly and handed me and my brother a selection of cards and said, very lovingly "you work it out". What I remember is a pure and honest butchering of the rules as myself and my younger brother attempted a game we had very little meta knowledge of. At some point we both got bored and returned to our mega drives and playstations.
Skip forward and I'm on holiday to America for the first time and, being a marvel fan I find Heroclix and buy a few. Again, no one else to play games with other than my brother so once again, a full on butchering of the rules and eventual boredom. Two for two so far.
Fast Forward to my late teens and I'm on holiday in Spain. I stumbled upon english Magic the Gathering, the Kamigawa block to be specific and fell in love with the world and the mechanics. This time I got my friends involved and even hit up local shops and entered a community. It was a good couple of years, games around the dining table and friday night Magic as well as the sunday casual tournaments my local shop.
Good times.... Good expensive times. My stint in Magic created as it does with all MTG players, drawers and drawers full of cardboard that inexplicitly cost money. Sorting out cards like an obsessive compulsive squirrel. Seven books sorted into colour, type, cost and every new booster box or theme deck I bought to grab those few rares I told myself I needed resulted in having to reset the whole system and reorder everything. I spent 5 hours at a time doing this just to keep on top of a mountain of pictured flash cards. I don't know when I broke but I said to myself, instead of storing these precious cards in boxes and books to be hidden in drawers, surely it would be better to have a game where I could display what I had and create dioramas when I wasn't playing the game. Enter Warhammer 40,000.
40K brought with it more reasons to hate money as I was starting from scratch in miniature wargaming. Paints, brushes, models, more models, no wait you can only have a small game with those models, buy more to get the full game experience and then buy more models to combat that one dude who is kicking your behind up and down the store. Dice, you need dice and circles and measuring tapes and a large carry case because you've outgrown that tupper-ware with foam in it.
Something tells me if I had saved all this money, I would be living in a flying doom fortress in the shape of my face swimming in my own currency like Scrooge McDuck and renamed the internet "Joden" by now. Hindsight 20/20...
I started out with Tyranids. The idea of swarming the board with a never-ending wave of H.R.Gigar ripoffs really sparked excitement in me and I built up a sizable collection. The problem now was finding players. Friends that were happy to play with MTG cards back in the day balked at the idea of spending a metric crap tonne of money on a product they had to paint and construct themselves, it didn't appeal to them. So I was left with a local club that met every weekend. The problem being that this club had myself, two guys in their late 30's and about 10 pre-teens with their bored parents in the background. The trouble with children that age in wargaming is they have no gaming etiquette. If it wasn't their turn, they would walk off to another table or get bored and start playing a whole other game whilst getting constantly called back to roll dice or move troops again. That kind of thing grates on me as a player, I can't stand facing someone who doesn't want to play, it wastes both of our times.
Sadly, had to drop the game and hobbying altogether at this point. When I was met with the realization that I spent all this money, spent all this time learning rules and checking forums and getting invested in a game only to find no one plays it; it was disheartening and puts you down in the dumps on even bothering. Every game that looked awesome or had an interesting spin to it I had to ask the question "Who will actually play this game with me?" If I couldn't name 4 people who were as invested as I was, I didn't bother. Bad times.
One day much later on, after moving house across London, I was coming back from work and I spotted a local Games Workshop that I kept on passing. An idea lit in my head and a long forgotten passion reignited in me. I had the money now, I already had all the supplies making start-up a whole lot easier and it was on the way back from work so I wasn't even wasting time and finding a player base is hella easier when you're going to the store players are routinely meeting up for games in. I restarted 40K with Eldar and started enjoying games with players around my age bracket who more importantly, wanted to play the game. It was all going great, but then 7th Edition happened.
Rules change, I get this and a business like GW is going to change things up in order to obtain a fresh customer base and influence more sales from current players. It's a business, I get it but man, 7th killed all excitement I had for the game. Having a "Magic phase" meant that instead of tactical application of spells in movement then in combat, the player with the "Magic army" spent a turn rolling dice when 95% of the time, you could just simply declare that this spell was in effect with the sheer ease of casting. Then there was the army codex changes that fundamentally changed troop rules and how they were played, on top of options being taken away being replaced with sub-par ones. It sounds juvenile to say but I liked it back in my day when the rules were good.
Yet my joy of wargaming continued, alas it was no longer being sated by Warhammer 40K. I briefly attempted Warhammer Fantasy but every game I had turned into two armies running into each other and then both players throwing dice for an hour. I came to the conclusion that I needed more from a game than the goal of a table wipe every time.
I stumbled upon Infinity and loved the idea of both players being involved in each turn and the game being set up with missions and objectives rather than a slobberknocker of "kill the dudes dood" and the fact that a starter box and maybe one blister was all you needed to play a typical game helped out as well. I played a few games and got hooked.
...Then the honeymoon ended, the fog machine breathed it's last and the mixtape got chewed up and my eyes were open.
The thing is about Infinity, it's very easy to play a game where you either stay bolt in place in order not to get one-shotted or spend the whole game navigating alleyways in order to press the use button on a console or objective. Fire fights weren't these dramatic what ifs, they were more like coin flips and if you were in a range bracket that benefited you, but not your opponent.
Having every piece in the game die to 2 or less hits kills all the fun I tried to have with it and whilst customability exists, you picked the same this-or-that loadout and every model felt the same. This guy shoots. This guy shoots but with a template. This guy is a marker (that can shoot). I can't recall a single model from infinity other than the snipers and I couldn't tell you what their names were.
I was on the right track though, smaller skirmish games were better for me than large 60 model count games and I wanted the objective game play with models I actually gave a damn about who were different from each other. This is when I found Malifaux.
Now I noticed Malifaux when I first got into Infinity but due to the lack of youtube support for it (I was following an episodic Infinity batrep at the time) I brushed it off as a steam-punk try hard. How wrong I was.
After Infinity, I managed to get in contact with an organizer for Malifaux and got a demo game with him. I hit the books as I do with all games. I learned as much of the rules as possible and went about researching what crew box I should take. My love of Ice mages lead me to Rasputina so I checked out her guide and luckily, the fellow giving me the demo had the models and set me up with the starter box to demo with. Somehow I managed to win that game (The henchman not being a player who lets newbies win just because) and got hooked. The rest is history as they say. The community is the best I've known and having an organizer who puts his own time down to make sure players new and old have games every week is amazing and I've never looked back.
Will history repeat itself where a massive rules change comes into effect and "ruins" the game, I don't know but I'm riding this wave whilst it's here and damn is it a lot of fun. Being a wargamer nowadays is much more gratifying than it ever has been and it's all thanks to a great community and a solid game. Malifaux having such a diverse range of characterful models is a testament to how it should be done in this sort of game. This blog wouldn't even be here if I felt this game wasn't worth talking about. It revived my passion and is something I feel giddy planning and getting a game with every week.
But enough talking about the past, we loom ever closer to the future and what mysteries it might bring. Get the mode of transport of your choice up to 88mph and have fun out there!
As shallow as it is (and it is) if you want to get me to buy your product you need to hit 3 criteria:
Undertale I've never played nor wish to at this point. I KNOW it's an amazing game and the internet has done a fine job of making sure everybody knows about the last boss or the opening scene or the scenes in-between ("Don't you dare kill Goat Mum"). With so much attention, it's now impossible to go into Undertale blind unless you simply do not have internet access.
