I first started gaming in 1994; the year that D:Ream had topped the UK charts with the song "Things Can only Get Better". As always with the UK, it was an optimistic symbol of hope, that ended up standing for the exact opposite. It ended its short, but increasingly festering career as the theme song for Tony Blair's New Labour election campaign; with a unique performance of the song during their election victory party. So that went well, didn't it? One day I would like to meet the members of D:Ream so I can shout at them for getting my sodding hopes up. I suppose I could clip Howard Jones around the lug at the same time.
The point is, not all change is good. Change is the reserve of the optimist. Now, those who follow this blog regularly will know a particular fact about me. I'm not an optimist.
Change to me invokes several emotions, and one of them is always deep concern. It is something I learnt in part from playing Games Workshop games (whose rules change more often than a schizophrenic leopard in an abattoir), but also because any gamer has emotional and financial concerns with any gaming system.
For the computer gamer, change is annoying, and expensive if you want to change immediately. But the expense generally encountered by a wargamer is significantly larger than this, and can be something of a constant for some gamers.
Especially with GW games, such as 40k and WHFB, where there is an edition change about every 5 years, bringing out a new rulebook (of increasingly significant expense), and at some point during the run of a new edition, every single faction will be treat to a new Army Book or Codex, throughout the run, with a significant amount of new shiny models that most likely you'll want to buy, and in many cases, usually have to.
Change is realistic for any game. You need to keep people buying if you want to further support, but each change runs the risk of undermining your fanbase, their interests, and the whole ethos of the game you wish to promote.
The main problem is, that if you are releasing a new rulebook, it needs to be noticeably different to justify the gamer's expense. If you just change the artwork in it, gamers are going to feel cheated. Every single change you make will impact on the nature of the game that your fans have been buying.
As we have seen in my previous article in this series, this often lends itself to gimmicks. If you are going to change the ruleset, you need to attract attention to some particular mechanic or aspect that you are inevitably going to deem as "ground breaking" or "innovative".
This runs a number of risks, most prominently, breaking the game away from what it originally was, and risking a fan-revolt. Rackham managed to achieve this quite spectacularly on several levels with Confrontation: Age of Ragnarok, which rebooted the old Confrontation Skirmish system into a regiment based wargame with pre-painted miniatures mounted on different bases. This forced gamers to challenge a lot of their ideas and perceptions they had about the game they loved, and it made most of them noticeably furious.
This is something that generally gets rather understated when it comes to gaming. The integrity of games is always put in question when a change looms along the horizon. Whilst most will put up and shut up, or immediately drop the game and seek other entertainment, an increasing number of gamers and hobbyists are getting increasingly insecure about their gaming environment.
This situation is so pronounced, that with GW games, generally more discussion is dedicated to speculation and debate about change (no matter how far off it is) than the existing merits of the product as it stands. It seems the gamer's coping mechanism (and can you blame them) is to have as fluid a concept of the game so that they never find themselves in such an existential crisis as some gamers who get attached to a particular way of playing end up facing.
Games Workshop's change is virtually constant, bringing out a new faction every 3 months, and with two cores where this occurs regularly, it can seem like every other month, there is something else to buy. The worst of it is that despite this constant change, the product support to keep the game more or less intact is positively non-existant.
There is no way to directly contact the writers, and despite some customer support existing to address some rules and gaming issues, only this week I encountered one email from a customer service representative of Games Workshop that simply had to be wrong. The "answer" provided was with reference to whether Zzap Guns (an Ork Big Gun) hits automatically. The Ork Codex says nothing of the sort, but a summary in the 40k rulebook says it does. The responding email to this question confirmed it did, because the rulebook said so. But it said so in a summary, clearly labelled with a disclaimer that any discrepancies in the summary are overwritten by the Codex.
It doesn't help that GW's writing is poor and inconsistent (but more on that in another article), but it is a prime example of the fact that too much change can constrict a gaming system. Warmachine has changed recently, and this has provoked a lot of controversy (as I said earlier, gamers, quite rightly, hate change). But the difference, to my eyes at least, is consistency.
If you are changing a system, you need to keep it fairly consistent. The game may need improvement, you may also want to encourage sales, but you also have to spare a thought for the gamers who already support you, because they already like what you have produced, or else they wouldn't front you any money.
You need to consider the integrity of the game, what it stands for. If you change that completely, you are going to undermine your own fanbase considerably. It is of even more importance if you have several inter-playable systems. Rackham had 4 it managed to undermine. Privateer Press has technically 3 (although Iron Kingdoms merely shares models, not a ruleset with Warmachine and Hordes). Games Workshop has a number, but the most notable is LOTR and WOTR. The important point to bear in mind that if you are going to change a system, it impacts on the others it is connected to. So, Hordes players will react to change in Warmachine (and vice versa), so had better make sure that you don't undermine the ethos or style of either game.
Change is often necessary, but it is not without risk. The other companies should take note to notice what happens when change starts occurring to a ruleset merely for the sake of it...
