Everyone is different. Thankfully, tabletop wargames offer a great case study of the various player psychographics that help designers categorize different types of players and what makes them tick. Timmy, Jimmy, Spike, and Vorthos are all equally valid and developers should be cognisant of their wants, needs, and turn-offs.
The Tau Empire is well known for its devastating ranged firepower and not much else. This polarizing design offers players who are drawn to that play style a comfortable and familiar place to get into Warhammer while leaving a sour taste in other players’ mouths who prefer meeting their opponents in face-to-face combat. It is often more effective to create a game that some people love and some people dislike than a game that everyone thinks is so-so. Focusing on the various types of players your game will attract will help you create unique experiences that will resonate with different types of people.
Orkz are as simple as it gets: march forward, charge, and clobber your opponent. Timmy prefers showing up to the game table with a few beers and a bowl of peanuts and appreciates the lack of complexity, while Johnny would be bored before the game even started.
Johnny wants to express something about themselves, and thankfully, tabletop gaming offers plenty of opportunities. Not only does the act of hobbying create a sense of ownership, but the Johnny will also be happy as a clam with a list building app or a codex with all of the options and combos they have at their disposal laid bare.
Spike isn’t looking for a specific aesthetic or style as much as they enjoy the experience of learning and perfecting their gameplay to be the best that they can be. Skill expression isn’t as much of a concern, as long as they have the best chance at winning. This player will be more focused on the minutae of gameplay rather than anything else and pushing specific values in certain areas will give them plenty of clues to discover.
Vorthos are often more difficult to design for, given they are specifically drawn to the storylines, characters, and background lore. Tabletop wargaming offers a unique look into potential gameplay hooks for these types of players; fundamentally tabletop gaming is about shared storytelling and these players will be most drawn to that aspect of the game. Artwork, stories, and the miniatures themselves will do wonders towards catching a Vorthos’ eye.
These basic player psychographics extend far past tabletop wargaming, but they can be especially useful when designing a multifaceted miniatures strategy game. No player will love every aspect of your project, but when each feature is designed to be loved by someone, you’re bound to have left a memorable expression.
For today’s battle report, my sparring partner and I decided to test a new Slaanesh list against my new Ogors with Kragnos in toe. Check out the lists below:
Hedonites of Slaanesh
Subfaction: Pretenders
1x Glutos
1x Lord of Pain
1x Contorted Epitome
22x blissbarb archers
5x blissbarb seekers
10x twinsouls
10x pain bringers
Terrain feature
Ogor Mawtribes
Subfaction: +1 to spells for butchers
2x butcher
1x icebrow hunter
1x Kragnos
4x mourn fang
2x frost sabres
6x gluttons
4 leadblechers
We usually come up with the flavor for our match as we set up terrain, so today’s battle involved an Ogor Mawtribe on the warpath coming across Kragnos, the living earthquake, and following him into conflict with a marauding band of Slaanesh’s finest. Half the board being covered in snow helped sell the illusion that the Overwinter had followed Kragnos along with his Ogor companions to their encampment before the battle.
Round 1: Hedonites
I was able to win the roll off, deploy first, and gave the turn to my opponent. My goal was to aim for the double turn, and otherwise react to their movement with counter charges. As is typical for the followers of Slaanesh in 3.0, the round started with a pelting of ranged attacks and ended with the pack of seekers killing my leadblechers in one combat. My boys were able to land some nasty unleash hell damage, but otherwise the first turn was relatively uneventful, just as planned.
Round 1: Ogors
My turn ended up being much more eventful. Despite my subfaction giving me 2 extra casts, both of my butchers whiffed on all of their spells except for Voracious Maw, dealing a surprise amount of mortal wounds. Not having a terrain feature bit me in the butt for this match, given my list, but I think my models did okay on their own without buffs. A YouTuber once told me to never rely on my spells as an Ogors player and it felt self evident in this match. Thankfully, the remains of my ogors were able to smash into the enemy line and deal a bunch of mortal wounds. Kragnos did his thing, killing the seekers, and my general popped up out of deep strike to send his sabres in to absorb the unleash hell.
Round 2: Ogors
Giving up the first turn paid off! I got a double turn and was able to send Kragnos across half the board (10″ move plus a 15″ charge), tackling the Epitome and engaging most of the backline heroes in combat. My hunter was able to breath ice on the archers, charge in, and take a few down before dying himself.
Round 2: Hedonites
To his credit, my opponent played out the rest of the round. They finest hour’d their Epitome and went in for the attack, but a finest hour and All Out Defense from Kragnos helped keep him on a +2 despite the rend, nullifying the combat phase for the most part and keeping his army out of range of their mortal wounds on 6 ability. With the Kragnos clapback imminent and him just barely avoiding being bracketed, my opponent conceded and we had a relaxing break afterwards. Sometimes its more fun to talk about Sigmar than to play, but them’s the dice.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read more about Age of Sigmar, game design, or similar topics, check out the rest of the my blog.
Games Workshop’s flagship tabletop wargames are just as distinct as they are similar. Both games have developed in parallel over the past few years and still have lessons to learn from one another. With Warhammer 40,000’s 10th edition just around the corner, now’s the time to theorize what the new rules set might look like.
5. Remove the Psychic Phase
This lesson could just as easily be learned from the success of Horus Heresy’s 2nd edition, but Age of Sigmar similarly benefits from the removal of a dedicated magic phase. Whether you prefer being able to move before or after casting spells, cleaning up unnecessary complexity will go a long way toward making Warhammer a more approachable game for everyone.
4. Improve Overwatch
Neither 40k’s Overwatch nor Age of Sigmar’s Unleash Hell are perfect by any means, but the disparity between which models/factions can actually take advantage of their respective anti-charge mechanics shows a clear favor towards the fantasy approach. Unleash Hell allows the defending player to shoot their opponent at a -1 to hit deficit after a successful charge move is made. These two changes in conjunction make for a much more impactful mechanic, but one or the other alone might make Overwatch more than a niche universal strategem.
3. Adjust Secondary Objectives to be More Reactive
No plan survives first contact with the enemy, although the current rules for Warhammer 40k wouldn’t show it. Locking each player into three secondary choices from the onset of a match does little to encourage flexibility and quick thinking from players. Age of Sigmar’s Battle Tactics may not be lauded for their design, but they at least allow players to react to what has already happened on the battlefield and change their plans accordingly.
2. Simplify Morale
Why Morale involves two separate dice rolls is beyond me. Everyone complains that morale doesn’t matter enough, so having something more similar to Sigmar’s battle shock might help kill two birds with one stone; that or it could just give folks more things to complain about.
1. Free Warlord Traits and Relics
Warhammer is always in flux, so this may simply be a symptom of a specific meta-game that we will soon forget. However, 9th edition’s recent change to force players to pay Command Points pre-game to select warlord traits and relics is something I would immediately reverse. Building a list is an engaging part of the process for many different players and forcing them to sacrifice a vital resource to access flavorful aspects of their army is antithetical to allowing players to differentiate themselves and their lists.
What do you want to see most of Warhammer 40,000’s 9th edition? Let me know in the comments below.
An inexperienced wargamer might be surprised to find that Warhammer 40,000 is both Games Workshop’s most popular game anda complete mess. With decades of success and a devoted fan base, 40k has surpassed every other game in the industry by a large margin. This success has come at a dire cost; legacy rules and mechanics add to the overwhelming sense that Warhammer in space is as bloated and hard to grok as it is compelling to new players. 9th edition introduced a nearly unimpeachable foundation for gameplay and then added more rules and stratagems than any reasonable person has the patience to wade through. With a new edition on the horizon, here are a few suggested changes to make Warhammer 40k more fun for everyone.
Stratagems
Similar to Command Abilities in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, Stratagems offer players abilities outside of their unit’s datasheets. Both games offer a set of universal abilities that all players have access to, but Warhammer 40k leans much more heavily into each player’s individual stratagems. An average codex has two pages devoted to these abilities and it can be difficult for even experienced players to track which stratagems relate to which units or specific gamestates.
Solution: Simply expanding the set of universal stratagems, cutting down the overall number, and moving them to specific data sheets will help remove some of the bloat that 9th edition introduced while also making the interesting abilities easier to remember and therefore use effectively.
Rules Bloat
Solution: Get rid of 10-20% of superfluous rules and relegate them to a specific game mode, preferably not Matched Play.
The main difference between Age of Sigmar and 40k is the degree to which each mechanic helps support the overall flavor of the game and story that the players are trying to tell. Age of Sigmar has fewer rules and better flavor expression, while 40k is extremely bloated and still fails to execute on replicating the lore that makes players start playing in the first place.
Number Crunch
Having to track primary and secondary objective points, command points, experience points, and other various numbers at any given time while primarily using 6-sided dice makes my smooth brain wince. Counting to 100 is an incredibly inefficient use of a player’s time and mental stack.
Solution: Move the decimal point over one and make numbers smaller and easier to grok. Instead of having 100 point games, make 10 points the maximum instead. This will require the scoring system to be adjusted accordingly, but it will also make the game easier to play without sacrificing anything of value.
Flavor Expression
As mentioned previously, Warhammer 40,000 suffers from having incredibly interesting lore and gameplay that fails to live up to the storytelling that precedes it. Factions like the Adeptus Mechanicus and Necron share very similar space mechanically but have drastically different flavor, while the Adeptus Astartes are carbon copies of one another with the exceptions of Space Wolves and Blood Angels. Another ~33% of the model range is devoted to Space Marines but angry, without many shades of nuance in between. Some of the scariest alien menaces known to mankind end up being as weak as wet tissue paper on the tabletop.
Solution: Of the fewer rules that remain post-debloating, ensure that those rules do a better job expressing the individual faction’s background lore. Differentiate between factions that have similar themes and ensure that everyone has something interesting to do. Reinforcing how the remaining rules express how cool the world of Warhammer 40,000 is would do wonders toward making a better game.
Skill Expression
Despite Games Workshop’s best intentions, Warhammer 40,000 is a competitive game with a growing community of professional players. That being said, there are a few mechanics that cause repetitive game states and leave opponents in a situation where they can predict their opponent’s strategy without much agency to do anything about it. Some data sheets provide a jack-of-all-trades profile priced in such a way that makes other similar options inefficient in Matched Play. 40k even offers a few factions stratagems to help players subvert skill testing abilities and just “do the thing!” Letting players do cool stuff is essential, but making them actually do something of note to achieve it will both make their opponents feel better for losing and make the active player feel more clever for having overcome the hurdle.
Solution: Leaving players with fewer catch-all tools and forcing them to overcome unexpected obstacles will increase player skill expression while reducing the amount of feel bads felt from losing in the same way each match.
As Age of Sigmar’s development has successfully trended towards simpler, more expressive gameplay, Warhammer 40,000 has several opportunities to learn similar lessons while remaining a distinct game with its own quirks. Warhammer does not need a universal ruleset. Instead, Games Workshop should let the left hand know what the right hand is doing and learn lessons from the development of its other products and other tabletop wargames in general.
Magic: the Gathering’s most prized treasure, Mark Rosewater, presented a panel at CDC called “20 Lessons from 20 Years of Magic.” His speech focused on various aspects of game design lessons that he had learned over his tenure at Wizards of the Coast, but many can apply to fighting games as well. Please excuse me as I loosely paraphrase Mr. Rosewater and cherrypick his lessons that I find specifically valuable. There’s a chance I may have also heard of these on his podcast, Drive to Work.
Player Psychographics
Take the player psychographics that Rosewater so often references when discussing the audience for Magic: the Gathering for example. The spectrum of Timmy, Johnny, Spike, and Vorthos is a lens through which you can view anyone, not just card game players. To paraphrase Mr. Rosewater, a Timmy plays to experience something spectacular, a Johnny plays to prove something about themselves, a Spike plays to win, and a Vorthos plays to experience the story.
The fighting game community includes more specific player archetypes, but I would argue that we all have a little bit of Timmy, Johnny, Vorthos, and Spike in each of us. Keeping these hypothetical players in mind when designing your fighter will ensure that you’ve done your due diligence to include a wide variety of player perspectives into your work (or not, if that’s more your style!)
Don’t Fight Human Nature
At the end of the day, game design is all about conveying and in many ways teaching players complex concepts without ever being able to sit down with them individually. Part of that journey is doing one’s best to pack as much information up-front as possible by utilizing ideas and concepts that the player is already familiar with to ease them into learning about whatever it is that makes your game unique.
The first step on that path is to acknowledge that you cannot and should not try to fight human nature unless that is the expressed purpose of what you are trying to pull off. Otherwise, it’s best to stick to the familiar when necessary and use that to expect certain responses in return.
Players have a finite amount of time and a near-infinite inventory of great fighting games to enjoy. Don’t expect a player to want to learn how to ride a pogo stick when they already know how to ride a bicycle, for lack of a suitable metaphor. Only spend those precious mental resources on teaching your players about what makes your game cool!
Look at this selection of vampire colors!
Discovery & Self Expression Are Vital
Although it differs among players, a key component to analyzing the player psychographics mentioned above is that each player is, in some part, in it for themselves. That isn’t to say that they don’t care about the other players, but they do ultimately want to express or discover something about themselves.
Providing that player agency can be as simple as a variety of color palette choices at character select or as complex as an in-depth combo system that requires years to truly master. Whatever avenue for self expression your game eventually utilizes, being cognizant of what you are providing your audience to discover will make for a more compelling player experience.
If Your Theme Isn’t At Common, It’s Not Your Theme
I’ve left this for last simply because it deserves more explanation than the others. Magic: the Gathering separates its cards into a variety of rarities: common, uncommon, rare, and mythic rare. These have differing rates of occurrence in a booster pack, meaning that most players who purchase products from Wizards of the Coast will run into commons way more often than rare or mythic rares.
These categories offer designers a chance to throttle the player experience and leave more complex concepts or mechanics for rare or mythic rare cards. If a new player runs into a complex mythic rare, that’s okay because it is only one of potentially hundreds of other cards they own, most of which are simple enough to grok without years of experience playing the game at a high level.
Fighting games are similar, except instead of gating mechanics behind card rarities, fighters have normals, command normals, target combos, specials, ex specials, super arts, super desperation moves, and too many more to list here. Most of a character’s moves are going to be normals—their punches, kicks, and basic martial art attacks. Street Fighter’s Ryu, for example, has plenty of normal moves (Street Fighter is traditionally a six-button fighter), but only three or four special moves, and one to three super arts in his arsenal. Throwing a fireball requires a unique joystick notation as well, leaving some new players left mashing buttons rather than trying to do a 623 motion.
“Grok?”
Mr. Rosewater emphasizes in his lessons on card game design that whatever one’s theme is, it should be readily apparent to a new player after confronting their first booster pack of cards. Given that only 3/15 of the cards in any normal pack will be uncommon and 1/15 of them will be rare or mythic rare (although they’ve changed the specific numbers and types of booster packs since I quit playing), that means that 11 of the 15 cards that a new player purchases will be common and, therefore, limited to being relatively simple compared to others.
In the same way that a Magic set’s theme should be apparent at common, so too should a fighting game’s theme be apparent to players who simply mash buttons and don’t wait long enough to learn how to do a hadouken. If you don’t want players to have to worry about links or precise timing between normals, make your basic attacks chain into one another. If you want to focus on aerial combat, give some fighters grounded normals that leave them airborne. Conversely, if you want a fighter to focus on grounded combat, provide them opportunities to keep their opponent where they are most effective and limit their options to jump.
This applies to both universal mechanics and character-specific themes; if your most inexperienced players can’t “get it” after hitting a few buttons, it needs to be better baked into the foundation of the player experience.
tommgoldrick.com 