Editing Warhammer: Age of Sigmar (section)

==Mechanics==
Age of Sigmar's selling point was that it "emphasizes the narrative aspect of the wargaming experience, encouraging the play of story-driven scenarios, recreation of battles from lore, and player-created stories", which lasted a whole half edition and fully vanished by the time 2nd edition hit (with exception to the recreation battles). This is due to the above mentioned lack of any sort of balancing mechanics, anything you had you could field without any kind of restriction so any sort of fight that happened would always come down to who spammed out the most OP units or who had the largest army.

Being a skirmish game Age of Sigmar uses round bases and no longer has unit blocks like Warhammer Fantasy. On initial release GW said that using your square-based models was okay because [[Derp|all measurements should be made from the model itself]]; 2nd edition replaced this blatant retardation with "measure from where the edge of a round base would be when measuring from base to base." Movement trays can still be used.

===Rules (aka "What book is it anyway?")===
GW like to trumpet that the core rules and "Warscrolls" (all the rules to use one unit in one document) for Age of Sigmar are free by way of the Age of Sigmar smartphone app. This is technically true, but in practice you're going to buy the physical core rulebook anyway because all the rules beyond the bare minimum to play a basic game are "extras" not included in the app. [[Codex|Battletomes]] include fluff, all Warscrolls for the faction, and "Allegiance Abilities" that give you buffs for fielding a force composed solely of that faction, so you're going to buy that too or be at a competitive disadvantage. On top of this you've got supplements for terrain, extra magic items, and so on and so forth. It's kinda like one of those shitty smartphone games you hear [[/v/]] bitch about constantly, but made of dead trees and costing ten times as much.

As opposed to WHFB where players would have to wait years to get FAQs for rules issues and entire editions for balance updates, Age of Sigmar gets FAQs and errata published online every few months and updated rules and points totals published once a year in the "General's Handbook" (GHB) series. [[Games Workshop|Naturally, in order to have the up-to-date rules and therefore be able to play in any remotely competitive venue, you need to buy the newest GHB every year.]]

====Three Ways to Play====
One of the marquee features for Age of Sigmar, so central in GW's eyes that it was ported to 40k for its 8th edition, is the Three Ways to Play system. By providing three separate "frameworks" that modify the same set of basic rules, the theory is that GW can support different levels of play with a single rulebook, from kids playing on a kitchen table to national tournaments. The practice is somewhat different.
*'''Matched Play:''' Build your army using a points system like in any sane wargame. This is what everyone plays.
*'''Narrative Play:''' Build your army based on a scenario from an Official Campaign Handbook™. The scenario usually includes extra special rules that reflect the state of the campaign. This allows more flexibility in representing varied forces than Matched Play's points system would normally allow.
*'''Open Play:''' Do whatever the fuck you want. When Age of Sigmar was first revealed a big part of the "simplicity" pitch was that this ruleset was the ''only'' ruleset. This led to much rage and derision, which caused GW to quickly pivot to the Three Ways to Play scheme in the first General's Handbook.

[[File:Death of Warhammer Fantasy.jpg|thumb|right|300px|[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpGDk39mtZE| Millions of Voices Cried Out In Terror...] ]]
When Age of Sigmar first released, GW published free Warscrolls on their website for nearly all the models available in the 8th edition of WHFB and advertised that you could start playing right away. Likely because this was the bare minimum needed to keep WHFB players from storming Nottingham with catapults and axes. While these warscrolls are ''technically'' still valid, good fucking luck trying to run an army with them as they have never been updated and good old fashioned Codex Creep means that any attempt to field a "Warscroll Compendium" army will be like fielding [[Sisters of Battle|Witch Hunters]] against 7th edition Taudar. [[Squats|If you play Tomb Kings or Brettonia, you may not even be able to buy new models.]] The tagline in fluff states [[Canon|"Not all perished in the destruction of the world. Hidden in shadow realms, alternate dimensions or protected by fell magic, they endured the darkness of the void and emerged once more. Warhammer Age of Sigmar reintroduces these legendary heroes and notorious villains, though not all will come back as you remember them."]] While some old characters like [[Morathi]] have new models and rules, as part of 2nd edition's kick GW spit out some updated rules for named but out-of-print characters under the '''Warhammer Legends''' subline...But not for matched play.
The name of every classic Warhammer race was changed, factions were split up and some have been expanded.

The game has four factions known as the Grand Alliances - [[Grand Alliance: Order|Order]], [[Grand Alliance: Chaos|Chaos]], [[Grand Alliance: Destruction|Destruction]] and [[Grand Alliance: Death|Death]]. Factions within these Grand Alliances may combine forces, such as Elves, Dwarfs and Humans coming together in one army, or you may elect to focus on a specific faction and gain faction specific abilities.

AoS's second edition was released in June 2018. Ghosts were involved. Nerfs and buffs abound, new magic, new location-specific rules, actual fluff this time, the whole shebang.