FAQ Time: Reviewing the August 2024 FAQs

Good morning gamers,

Well, a lot has happened in the MESBG community since Aradcon a few weeks ago - and it's got us here at the TMAT blog excited on a number of levels. February and August have been the FAQ drop months, which have been good for shaking up the meta a bit (sometimes more drastically than other times) and as usual, as July turned to August, I was anxious to see what was new for the game (especially with a new edition coming out and a new sourcebook to boot)!

Photo Credit: Reddit 
I didn't submit anything this time . . . they have my previous correspondence if they wish to know my thoughts on certain Legendary Legion fixes and scenario quandaries for the new edition . . .

Then the GW team threw us a curve ball - in their August 15th Warhammer Community post talking about the new edition, they wrapped up a smashing article with the following:

With the next edition so close, we have made the decision not to release our usual FAQ and Designer’s Commentary document in August. Don’t worry, we will be back on schedule in February with our usual updates – the first of the new edition!

So . . . that makes summarizing the FAQ for August easy, right? Not exactly . . .

What Didn't Have Changes

On its face . . . nothing changed. I mean, they said that - nothing changed, no FAQs, no Designer Commentaries, no nothing. So everything didn't have changes.

But they did announce a new version of the game - and with it, the things that would be axed from the rules and what would be added to the rules. So as a result, we're going to focus on those things today and see what's in store for us as we approach the new year.

First off, the core rules are more or less going to be the same - which is on-par with previous SBG revamps. It's always good to hear when you get back into a game or a sport that "yeah, it's got a few new things and that's it" - and this has been the case with SBG for ages.

We were also told that other things would be the same . . . for the most part, so let's look for the things that are going to change a little, but more or less as we expected.

Rules that Worked Like We Thought

One of the things that was highlighted as getting a change that I'm personally happy about is that all in-the-way rolls are back to a 4+ instead of negotiating a 3+ or 5+ situation (which, I admit, was cool in this edition of the game, but really has to be sorted out before any models get placed on the board). All tabletop games have to abstract realism in order to work, so it's good that the game designers agreed on going back to "everything is a 4+" like it was before the MESBG redo. Maybe this will make some people sad, but not me.

Another thing that was highlighted is that the terminology is going to be consistent and clear, which I think is a good goal and time will tell how successful this is. To that end, I think the team has the right idea in mind, as rules lawyering is good to a point, but we don't need to get spun up on endless debates because "it's genuinely unclear." 

Finally, Legendary Legions were praised as a community-supported way to get interesting, thematic lists on the board. These are gonna stay, but it would appear that they're going to rise in prominence a bit as the default way to get armies on the table. This will probably drive some players mad, but we're promised that "for players that like to find the most potent combinations, fear not! Many of these Army Lists will still provide ample opportunity for you to try out your combinations and see what you can come up with." My expectation is that means not all factions we currently have will have "factions" anymore - and as we'll see later, this might mean some interesting things regarding the alliance matrix, but I expect much of list building will remain the same, but we might get some interesting new Legion ideas for free with this revamp to support thematic play (like a Thorin's Company Legion and a Moria-based Fellowship Legion . . . just spit-balling here).

Rules That Got Changed

We were also told in the article that special strikes are out - which means we're going back to the way things worked in LOTR SBG, which was what I got started with. Special strikes were first introduced in the Hobbit SBG system and got refined in the MESBG system. If I don't have access to special strikes (and as a result, paying for weapon swaps), some things change for me, but not much (that is, unless your warrior choices are incredibly limited and you were weapon-swapping on your Mirkwood Rangers or Warriors of Druadan just to meet the points limit). Also, my Balrog and Troll Chieftain are a lot more worried about rolling 1s To Wound.

We've also been told that the unit profiles are going under the knife for rebalancing - but like we saw with the MESBG release, I expect some of the lesser-loved characters to get heavy treatment and the more popular "they just work" profiles to remain more or less as they are. We were told that "the profiles will still function in the same way, however, they will have updated wording for their rules to fit in with the new edition to make them clearer for players to understand." This probably ties into the clearer/tidied up wording stuff from earlier, but I'm expecting to take a good month or two updating my home-made spreadsheet army builder with all the changes.

It would also appear that some profiles are going to be removed from the official release of the game and rolled into a downloadable PDF called "Legacies of Middle-Earth", which will give you edition-consistent rules for these older profiles (I expect Tom and Goldberry to fall into this category) so you can still use them, but so they won't take up space amongst all the other profiles. In this discussion (near the end of the article), GW made a statement that I really, really liked:

This PDF will contain updated rules for all the profiles to fit with the new edition, and will also have a selection of Army Lists for you to use those profiles in. While profiles and Army Lists in the Legacies of Middle-earth™ PDF will not be legal for official Games Workshop-run Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game events, tournament organisers are still absolutely welcome to allow them in their own independent tournaments and gaming weekends. And, of course, you can use them at home or at your gaming clubs.

In the past, we've seen on occasion very strong language from GW about what tournament organizers need to do (and what they can allow). Every time this has happened, it has been met with strong resistance - and I think rightly so (TOs should have freedom to run their own tournaments the way they want). This statement makes it clear that GW-hosted events are not going to use these profiles (so people can plan accordingly) - but they haven't given up on the profiles themselves, nor have they left them as relics of a previous system. Instead, TOs are allowed to celebrate the profiles and allow them if they wish, but are also able to say, "Nope, we're not gonna use those profiles." This was ace, GW, absolutely ace. Also, it's downloadable for free, which brings me to . . .

. . . I know it might be a fool's hope, but I've been playing a lot of Star Wars Legion for the past year and I LOVE that the rules, character stats, and everything is accessible online for download and/or printing. GW did this when the battle host boxes dropped, giving new players a simplified version of the rules and simplified character profiles so you didn't have to buy a big rulebook and one or two big army supplements to get started playing. Nope, you could buy one box, print a few pieces of paper, and get started. I would love to see more of this model going forward - printable, evolving documents that anyone can download/use and have the sourcebooks/main rulebook made to order periodically throughout the year so they don't waste money on printing, but people who like having thick books can buy them if they want. Just sayin', there's a market for both and it would be good if we had it. But I'm just spit-balling again . . .

We're also get a more distributed Fight Value system - which will still cap out at F10, but we here at TMAT have long argued that too many profiles live in the F3-6 space with very little dropping below F3 and even fewer getting above F6. If they're going to get most of the models between F2 and F8, I think the game is in a great spot - time will tell if we finally have a F6 Eomer (even if it's conditional on being on the charge) and more than six models that have F8, 9, or 10.

Finally, we're getting a new Intelligence characteristic, which will be used for a number of things (probably integrated into the profile rework/cleaner rules set), to include being able to spot Ringbearers. I have LONG thought that the Shoot Value stat would have been far better for seeing Ringbearers, but having a new characteristic entirely is probably the right call (as shooting things better doesn't necessarily mean you can "read the signs" and be able to spot an invisible model). I don't mind adding one more stat - especially if it's used in unique situations. Also, I'm kinda hoping most models have a "standard Intelligence" stat that you can memorize (like F3, S3, D5, and C3).

Scenarios and Terrain

There was a note about scenarios in a previous Warhammer Community article, but I liked that in this release, they said that the older sourcebooks (which will collide with the new edition - and includes the upcoming Rise of Angmar supplement) will be useful mostly for scenario play. If you haven't seen our Fantasy Fellowship or Scouring of the Shire content on the blog during the past two years, you should know that we here at TMAT like scenario play as a way to shake up the MESBG experience - so I'm glad that they're still encouraging the use of the scenarios from the soon-to-be-outdated sourcebooks because . . . for the most part, they're really good. Since the core mechanics of the game aren't changing that much, the scenarios should play pretty well with the new profiles.

But what this also tells us is that the narrative play scenarios section of the Armies of the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit might not be in the new supplements - frankly, with additional pages being needed for profiles that were released after the Armies of the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit and all the Legendary Legions they're going to roll into those books (even if they take profiles that only appeared in the books out), they probably need the space for profiles and such. For those who don't like scenario play (or those who have the older sourcebooks for scenario reference), I don't think this would be a bad change.

A Tease About List Building

I mentioned above that Legendary Legions were sticking around and that their prominence may be rising - but I'll go one step further and note the following: there's clearly going to be some kind of alliance option, but I think the game is going to lean heavily on Legions. While some players may react to this negatively, I'm actually getting a nostalgic feeling back to the Legions of Middle-Earth sourcebook that used to govern army building back in the LOTR SBG days. 

Back then, there were 3-4 timeline-established variants for each faction (Minas Tirith had a generic Minas Tirith list with Kings of Men and no named heroes, The Tower of Ecthelion list with all the guys from the War of the Ring, an Ithilien list - I forget the exact name - that had Faramir in ranger-garb only, and quite possibly another Minas Tirith list . . . it was a long time ago and I can't remember). Each sub-faction army list had an alliance chart and it was . . . honestly, quite painful to navigate sometimes. However, I think what they're going to try to do with Legions is build one thing that incorporates these ideas (such as a Fields of Celebrandt list for Rohan/Minas Tirith, which you can make right now based on the text in Eorl's profile, but an Eorl list can also include Theoden and Gamling if you're okay with losing your army bonus).

Moving to a system like this would also help with some really weird pairings that you can do now - for example, taking Gil-Galad in your Rivendell list has some (not that steep) penalties for including timeline-breaking characters like Elladan and Elrohir, but you can totally take the Twins with Elendil if you also bring Elrond or Glorfindel along. Theoretically, this is the kind of thing that can be fixed with a "Legion-themed" approach to list building.

My fear - and I assume many other people will share this thought - is that some niche factions might only exist in Legions (like the Wildmen of Druadan and Dunharrow) and other factions might disappear entirely (like Far Harad and the Wanderers in the Wild - who, to be fair, aren't really a faction anyway). My hope is that there's still ways to do both historical and convenient alliances that make sense and give creative territory for gamers (like Rythbyrt - and more recently, myself . . . because golly, if I'm not able to get more Will on Floi without killing stuff with Moria heroes, I'm gonna be sad). Time will tell, but I'm cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine.

Conclusion

So yeah, that was our not-FAQ-update for August 2024 - if you have thoughts and hopes for the new edition, let us know in the comments below! As we approach the release of the new edition, I have some articles talking about profile-touch-up wishlisting (the first of which kicks off on Monday!), so be on the lookout for those! Until next time, happy hobbying!