Reply To: The IX Age – Why/Why Not and so on

[limburger 21708xp 0]

@switzhobbies I apologize if my post was a bit more blunt than it needed to be.
It is hard to get the tone across in text.

Of course the system isn’t ‘dead’ (no system ever is if there are people playing) and there definitely is no such thing as ‘wrong fun’.
Fact is that after 4 years it has gathered as big a community as it can possibly ever get.

If there was a market for this style of game then we ought to have seen more competition within this type from the industry itself. And that hasn’t happened.
Runewars is suspiciously quiet.
The Game of Thrones game may have a chance yet, but I suspect it may have run out of momentum too.

Part of this may have been its origin too. At least from what I’ve heard of the system has only ever been in the context of it meant to continue WFB that was ‘killed’ by GW. It was never in the context of “this is a cool system for mass fantasy combat”.

And then you’ve got the recent kickstarter for a few armies.
That campaign was not exactly aimed at new players and it also made a very big deal out of the competitive nature of the system.

This lack of public face is what is stopping the system from gaining the audience it could have had.
Yes, Mantic made fun of the ‘golden boy’ … as pretty much everyone did. I think that is why they got away with it.
Plus … the Sigmarines serve the same purpose as the blue smurfs in 40k. No denying that either.

It is next to impossible to get rid of that bad first impression that 9th Age has made.
And that does suck, because it would be cool to see a fantasy rank&file/ mass combat system gain enough traction to become the new standard with that type of game.

I don’t know how that could be done with a purely fan-driven game like 9th Age.
Unlike videogames there is no option for mere amateurs to start the next big thing.
A lucky Kickstarter and a boost from websites like OTT is all there is … and that requires someone to want to become the de-facto face of the system.