MerlinCross said:
I'll admit, I've only played;
-Chaos of the Old World
-Bloodbowl; Team Manager
-Talisman
-Dark Hersey(With Errata)
And of those I only felt like Talisman was a miss. While we're on Talisman, is it the WH40K one or Talisman in general?
I'm not sure I understand the "Workmanlike" systems. Where you build your own character? Don't you do that in like, every tabletop? You probably mean something else and I'm not getting good google results so I'm not actually going to hold it for/against. I also don't recall the board games being that fiddly but I've only played a small selection as you can see.
The point I'm trying to make is with the license thrown around now like it seems to be, we'll get a rush of probably crap games. Sure there might be some good ones, even great, but hope you like doing research and combing over the ones that are actually good. And if there's too many bad/flop games, again, I feel it could hurt GW's actual main lines since this realm is closer to home.
For 'workmanlike' I mean 'not a bad system, but also nothing special.' If you like Warhammer Fantasy, I strongly encourage you to read Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, 2nd Edition, by Black Industries and Green Ronin. That book oozed flavour, from skills like Consume Alcohol and Talents like Flee!, to careers like Roadwarden and the ever-popular Rat Catcher, to the rules for magic use and consequence, to the general text wrapping it all and giving it that dark British humour that is WH at it's best.
FFG aped the style of WFRP for their 40k line (after trying and failing to make WFRP 3e good with their own system), but it lost a lot of the charm. WFRP 1e and 2e are systems designed for Warhammer, and trust me when I say trying to take the system out of the Old World is a disaster. The FFG 40k line (which to be fair started with Black Industries making Dark Heresy, even if the studio was shut literally as soon as the core book went out) can easily have the numbers filed off and used for a non-Warhammer sci-fi game, because the core system was genericized so they could pump out 5 different lines without needing to think too hard.
As for the general point about crap games, definitely a possibility. Personally I think that there's enough hungry talent out there, and that GW has gotten better and understanding how to license properly, that the bad games will be a minority rather than a majority. As for hurting their main lines, they've already cut off one leg by axing WFB and replacing it with Age of Sigmar, which is underselling, and the 40k miniatures game itself has not been the most profitable use of the 40k license in several years now. All the lousy 40k books aren't killing them, some bad RPGs won't either, especially as part of a larger mix of good RPGs and board games, more video games (which despite their quality are bringing in money for GW up to this point), and other merchandising like toys and clothes.
