Oh yes, Gamesworkship is the devil. We're talking about a company that in order to sell their product requires you to enter into a contract giving them certain percentages of your retail space which must be greater then any other product. If they find you in violation they will pull all the merchandise you have paid for and take it away. This has caused more then one shop to fold so I hear.

I remember playing Space Marines in 40k and skeletons in Fantasy because I was a pre-teen with no money, and those box sets gave a really good bang for the buck. The few times I've stopped by a FLGS recently, I'm amazed at how prices have risen, rather than fallen.

</get off my lawn>

Which is why I feel not a twinge of guilt when it comes to scouring the used market for their miniatures. Ebay and Craigslist ftw.

honest question - why would you or anyone feel guilt about buying things used? A "not-supporting-the-artist" kind of thing?

I think tabletop gaming from Games Workshop peaked at Necromunda.

This isn't including the practice of monitoring which franchise shops in their retail area that are selling well, and if they are selling enough volume of GW stuff, rather than trying to work with that local shop to increase sales further, they open up a GW store nearby to suck the sales away from the local shop.



-k

Umm, wouldn't that be illegal to take the stock back (unless the clause requires GW to pay for it). I suprised game store owners would put up with this.

Well, since I work in the gaming industry, I'm kind of a supporter of that "supporting-the-industry" thing, yeah. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

For pretty much any company but GW (because they're ruthless enough about pursuing their profit margins, and their profit margins are there regardless of my actions), I do everything I can to not only buy the product directly from a legit distributor, but to do so from a local gaming shop (so that I'm not only putting money in the pocket of the RPG company I like, but in the pocket of a local small business owner, often one whose shop I lounge around in and play wargames at).

GW are such total dicks when it comes to how they treat other businesses (and their fans, for that matter) that I don't feel bad in the slightest when I hit up eBay and they don't get a dime of my money (and I get a ton of miniatures for pennies on the dollar compared to their retail price)...but for most game companies, that's (a) not necessary because prices are pretty reasonable, (b) lost business that they might really need, and © not something I'd do because I'm a sucker for the little guy.

Which isn't me being preachy and saying other people need to do the same, or whatever. It's just what I try to do.

This is pure, unadulterated truth.

It's also a very convenient truth, because all the rules and books for Necromunda are available for free pdf download.

Really? Excellent, but I don't need em as my hardcopies are holding together. Honestly all I need em for are the advancements and wounds. Sucking Chest Wound FTL

I should make a SR Juvie with a pistol and grenade fixation.

It's all here. $50 for the dead tree core rulebook, or download the pdf for free (and they also offer a little tactics guide, stats for running Arbites/Enforcers, Ratskins, Spyre Gangs, some reasonably well laid-out gang sheets)...cool stuff, and a pretty un-GW move on their part.

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/...jsp?aId=5300010

I would have thought so as well but as it was explained to me all GW retailers are actually selling on consignment meaning GW retains property rights until it actually goes to the customer. Stupid I know but from accounts I've heard from people I trust it works. There must be more to it and IANAL but that's my understanding.

I think most book sales are like this as well. You don't buy the book as a retailer and resell it, they publisher sends you stock and if it sells you as the retailer get a cut of the profit. The retailer never actually owns the product at any time, they are just providing shelf space to display it.

I know that unsold stock at many booksellers has to be returned, or rather they rip the covers off and send back the covers to the publisher. You'll see inside some books a notation that if you received the book without a cover, it's probably "stolen", meaning it was reported as "unsold and destroyed" and if you bought a copy the publisher didn't see any of the profit from that sale.




-k

Yeah, but I've never seen old stuff bought or taken back by GW.....it would seem to me that would be one way to prvent some one from selling older less expensive packs of troops than the new stuff. Could also be store dependent, and stores that get stock through distributors don't have such agreements.

I'm actually coming back to Shadowrun (and Earthdawn) after some serious burn-out on the 40k universe. Ultimately I'm a child of the 1st edition of the 40k setting and, well, the imagery and concepts kind of stuck with me. Subsequent editions tended to get increasingly gonzo with the fantasy and lost some of the "sci-fi" feel (or at least began to ignore it), so over the years it has been increasingly rubbing me the wrong way. With the FFG publications this just got to magma-heat levels of friction so I... just bowed out of it.

It's still a great setting but no longer does anything for me that I want it to do. I've got a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to bring appropriate elements of it to my Shadowrun and Earthdawn concepts but, well, that's just me. Trite, cliche, or whatever--just name it me, but I find it fun and, well, it's the same with 40k. Roll with the punches and all that.

On the other hand I'm not really surprised by some of the pratices that are being reported vis-a-vis GW.

As to whether the 40k RPG has gone down the "boardgame" route, then at least for Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch I can confirm that is not the case. While the 3rd edition of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game has a lot of cardboard bits that makes it appear as a boardgame, the fans of the system say that this is not the case. Furthermore, the books are available without all the bits, a feature that would also seemingly argue against the idea of "RPG as wargame."

YMMV, though.

Whoa, talk about opening the flood gates. It looks like I'll be holding off on playing the two WH games, at least for now.

I've also had my eye on that Reapers miniatures games, Warlord. Anyone have experience with that one?

No experience with that one---just like Confrontation most people I know bought the miniatures but don't play the game. My advice is to go to your FLGS to see what others are playing. Local areas differ in what is and isn't popular. While

Beyond Games Workshop (which I see fewer and fewer people playing) things that are regularly played at my FLGS:
1.Warmachine/hordes (alot of refugees from GW recent edition change)
2.Malifaux
3.Flames of war (A WWII miniatures game)

As a 40K player myself (Tau), I love the game, but I agree that GW has jacked their prices all to hell and gone. Also the quality of the recent Army Books, to put it very kindly, sucks big fat donkey balls. I mean the Gray Knights have a character who has a "I win!" button enabled against most of my fragging army. It's not right that I have to play against someone who can go "Oh, all your weapons... they don't work against me."

Thank you Stahlseele & Tanegar for telling me about MegaMek. This looks really cool.

*EDIT* sorry for the double post.

The plasma siphon working on Tau pulse weapons was just a dick kicking that the anemic fishmen just didn't need.

Sadly... "The rifle works by electromagnetically accelerating a plasma shell down its barrel; in effect, it is a coilgun. On firing, a ferromagnetic, solid slug is chambered from the magazine and turned into a plasma"

So it's like plasma... but it isn't... smells fishy to me.

Lolwut. Converting a solid slug into a plasma would A) require a huge amount of energy, B) reduce the weapon's range and damage (because a puff of vapor, even superheated ionized vapor, just doesn't hit as hard as a solid object), C) require bulky, energy-hungry cooling systems to keep the weapon from melting... I'm sure there are other problems, but those are the three that immediately occur to me. I know, I know, stop applying real-world physics to a game, but it still bugs me.

It's just 40k. Don't think too hard about it.

No problem ^^