New Edition Dramatis Personae

Games Workshop, in my opinion, often gets shit for stuff it doesn’t deserve. One prime example is the rules releases.

I hear all the time about how GW draws out the rules releases so they can time them to earn the maximum amount of money off them. And, if I thought that was true, I’d still answer with a great big shrug. It would be like accusing Milton Bradley of trying to make the maximum amount of profit on a rerelease of Candyland. They’re a fucking games company, what do you expect them to do? Would anyone say, “I want to like Krispy Kreme so much but every time they sell me donuts, I think they’re trying to make as much as they can off me…” Of course not.

But I don’t think they’re doing that. For instance, Games Workshop announced that they’d be releasing a PDF with updated rules for all the ForgeWorld miniatures some of us have dumped thousands of Euros into buying. It’s a new edition. I guess they could have made me shell out for a book. But, no, they put together a 67-page PDF for us to download and play games with that won’t profit them in the short term in the least.

Now, that’s service.

But how do they play? Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten a game together. And, since the rules came out yesterday as I write this, I definitely haven’t played a game with any dramatis personae. And, if I’m being totally honest, I don’t play with dramatis personae (in the future to be called “characters”) much anyway.

Quick side story… Back when I was learning Blood Bowl in the 90’s, when the music was hot and the chicks were hotter, they had a bunch of Star Players, of course. But my friends and I always played D&D off-book, inventing our own campaigns and campaign settings. So, to us, the Star Players looked dumb. Instead, as we played seasons, at the end of a season, we retired the best players and they became our Star Players. That was much more fun…

Anyway, I have played with a few, mostly in demo games and, mostly, to bring them to an end quickly. So, rather than combing through the entire document, I thought I’d highlight a few special ones just to compare and contrast. It’s of a piece with my new Escher list, so forgive me for delaying the Orlock list by a couple of days to sneak this in.

Lady Haera

First up, my favorite monster in a fancy dress and then a sickening leg chopping battlesuit, Lady Haera, the 13th Daughter. She already had rules for the battlesuit in Gangs of the Outlands, so let’s stick with this PDF and compare fancy dress Haera, new and old.

Off the bat, she looks basically similar. Her stats (ignoring Initiative) are the same all the way down to the number of Attacks. Her head stats are the same or improved. Since the new way for checking for a head stat is to roll 2d6 and be at or under the stat number, a 5+ is essentially an 8 and a 6+ is the same as a 9. This means Leadership and Willpower have stayed the same but her Cool and Intelligence have each increased by one.

The stats for her weapons are also broadly similar.

The question any player has to ask, now that Close Combat has a primary and a secondary weapon selection, is which to use as the primary weapon? The Phase sword will essentially negate anyone’s armor (unless they have a refractor field, I guess) but the Strength 4 means a wound is more likely and, if her opponent does fail an armor save, a Lethality of 2 means an Out of Action is even more likely.

Still… the spear with Breaching (6+) means any wound roll of a 6 negates any armor at all. And with an AP -2, this might be the preferred weapon for non-Refractor field equipped opponents. Then again, the Phase Sword still has an AP -4 so… I think I’m talking myself into all-phase-sword-all-the-time here.

Interestingly, the armor situation for her is exactly like it used to be. She used to wear Light Carapace for a save of 4+ but had a refractor field that, like today, still granted an unmodifiable 5+. So it’s still the player’s choice, depending on the weapon that’s brought to bear.

Lady Credo

When the PDF was released, I was on the coast, trying to hide from life and modernity and all that, so I only was able to skim the stats and, at first, I thought they’d nerfed Lady Credo by one point on Weapon Skill but… they did not! In fact, like Lady Haera, she’s largely unchanged. Again, ignoring the new Initiative, her stats are what they were before.

Something to note here is the comparison of Initiative translations between the last edition and this one. Lady Credo had a 2+ Initiative which became a 5. Lady Haera had a 3+ and that became a 4. This seems to track as Credo was maybe just a little more agile or quick. And when you compare their dresses, you can begin to guess why. But in a toe-to-toe brawl, Lady Credo would get a hit in first!

Interesting to note that she has the new Iron Will and Dodge skills, which are similar to what they had been, but lost the Parry skill because it’s no longer necessary. In the old rules, it granted her a second “parry” re-roll against a successful attack. But, because she’s carrying a Power Sabre with the Parry trait, she always gets to add +1 to any melee saves. In this respect, it gives Lady Haera an advantage in combat since she didn’t have this skill before but, with her Phase Sword having the trait, she now does.

I think it would be a lot of fun to do a mini-game of Lady Haera versus Lady Credo, both the old rules and the new, just to see who comes out on top.

Last thing for Credo, her Master Crafted Power Sabre has been turned into a Power Sabre with a Breaching (5+) trait, so she’s pretty dangerous even to field armor wearing fighters. You definitely don’t want to let her get too close…

Estus Jet

This is probably going to strike everyone as a weird one to highlight but… I’ve always liked her rockabilly vibe, it reminds me of a girl I had a crush on in high school. That, plus the knives and the bionic eye… nope, she reminds me exactly of the girl I had a crush on in high school!

Anyway, I’ve always liked the model, even if she was… underpowered for a character.

If we’re seeing a theme here it’s that they did a really good job of keeping these characters mostly the same to what they had been. Obviously, you can’t have Parry on a character any more since (a) it’s not a skill and (b) Parry is just a weapon trait and it probably always belonged there. But that’s okay.

Estus Jet is also fundamentally the same character as before. All her stats (excluding Initiative) are the same and, in this case, her head stats are also a pretty good translation of what they had been. But, since she was classed as Hive Scum, formerly, her old 4+ Initiative turned into a current stat of 3 actually makes perfect sense. 4+ is always what your basic scummer has and it makes sense they’d be slower when engaged in close combat. This is slower than both Lady Haera and Lady Credo.

There are really just a couple of things to note about her versus her old profile: first, she had a 5+ save which is better than her old flak armor save of 6+. So that’s a nice little boost. Doubly so since her price has come down by 30cr. That, and her Parry skill has been replaced by Cut-throat, a skill that allows her to re-roll a Coup de Grace roll. This is a good character skill because it makes her just that much more deadly with a second bite at the “I’m going to murder you now” apple. And Estus Jet definitely looks like a murdery kind of character.

Just like that girl in high school…

Claim Jumper

This one I just wanted to hit because this one had one major thing that was more of a fix than a change. Which is great because, if you’re going to sculpt and sell a model one way, don’t then say that build is no longer legal. Especially not a resin model that costs 2-3x what a plastic model would. But, when GW put out the Ironhead Squat weapons sprue, it looked like, for a hot minute, they were favoring a more generic build you could make with that.

In Halls of the Ancients, for some reason and probably as a typo, they replaced his Power Pick with a Power Maul. It made zero sense, especially because they’d been selling the Claim Jumper model on ForgeWorld for years by then only to invalidate it with a book.

Well… those days are over now. The Power Pick is back. Sorry for upsetting everyone!

Oops, but your Power Fist is now gone. Seriously.

Unlike every other character we’ve looked at here, the Claim Jumper is the one that’s gotten noticeably worse. The Weapon Skill was nerfed from a 3+ to 4+ and his Attacks were dropped from 2 to 1. It’s interesting, in light of Estus Jet, to see that his old 3+ Initiative was turned into an Initiative of 3 instead of a 4, which would have been more in keeping with the stat changes above. But this is probably justified by the fact that he’s a dwarf and GW are known bigots against the little people. (Kidding… or am I…) His Leadership, Willpower, and Intelligence stats are also one tick worse than they used to be.

Lastly, and this was probably the best thing they could have done to balance him rather than nerfing his stats, they substantially increased his cost from 60cr to 160cr. Normally, I would say that, given all his weapons and the free Techmite that comes with him, this is totally reasonable, even though he lost both Frag and Smoke grenades. But removing his Power Fist is like another kick in the balls with this guy. Like, what did he do, look at your wife wrong at the company party?

Since these rules are in a PDF, hopefully they just update this without telling us, as they’re sometimes wont to do.

Wrap Up!

I’ve spent almost 2,000 words writing about just these four characters and could probably put out a book if I were to go in-depth with all of them and the little rules tweaks each one received to make them edition-compliant. But it is interesting to see how one set of stats makes the transition to another very similar but different system.

So far, I haven’t found any hard-and-fast rules except that Movement, Weapon, Ballistic, and Attacks can more or less transfer seamlessly if not attempting to modify for “balance” reasons. What’s trickier and what I couldn’t write a program to translate, for instance, is how the old Initiative would transfer into the new and what each head stat might be. I could probably get pretty close but old Initiative to new isn’t a science, it’s definitely more of an art, based on feel rather than pure math.

I don’t know how often people use characters in their games as the characters GW has created but hopefully people get a lot of use out of this. And, given how much money we pour into this hobby, every once in a while, it is nice to get something back for “free.”