Well despite all my promises I still find myself only being able to dip into the WAB list every now and then. Catching up on the last week or so's mail I see that the two hot topics are basically 'what bases sizes should I use' and 'what errata and rules changes are there'. Unfortunately its not all that easy to answer either question simply, so you'll have to put up with one of my famous (well, famous to my friends : )) long-winded explanations.
Base Sizes In WAB
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The Warhammer Ancient Battle rules includes notes and guidelines on basing your troops, but no firm 'rules'. This was deliberate, as we didn't want to 'force' players to have to base up their miniatures in one way. As the debate on the WAB list has shown, there are quite lot of different points of view bout what is the best method about basing miniatures, as well as the added twist that miniature designers have a distressing tendancy to design models without ever thinking about how they 'rack up' when forming a unit. The bottom line is that we feel that how you base your figures should be an aesthetic consideration rather than a rules one, so we didn't write 'hard rules' for it.
Clearly in certain circumstances this approach can cause problems, most notably at tournaments where players that don't normally play games together can meet up. However, as long as players apply a certain amount of common sense (always a dangerous concept I know), then there really shouldn't be too many problems.All you have to do when two armies are based differently is decide at the start of the battle what base sizes the models are *assumed* to have, and then use this to work out how many models can fight if there is ever a dispute. For example, if you decide that infantry are on 20mm bases and cavalry on 25mm, then four cavalry can fight 'toe to toe' with five infantry, etc. etc.
I know that this isn't a perfect solution in pure game play terms, but to be honest miniature tabletop wargaming isn't the best situation to take part in 'pure gaming', and I think we need to learn to accept this as one of the prices that we pay for such a visually appealing hobby.
Errata Sheets
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Quite a few players have asked where they can get hold of an 'official' set of errata and rules changes. I must admit that I've been sitting on an errata sheet for a while now. The reason for not releasing it is not, as some might think, that I can't bear to admit my mistakes, but because so many players have asked me _not_ to bring out endless sets of errata, clarification and changes for WAB. I've therefore been bidding my time to try and make sure that I just need to do one sheet that deals with all the *real* mistakes in WAB and AoA. By 'real' mistakes I mean genuine errors and goofs, not just things that in hindsight I might do differently now. The good news is that I think that I'm probably at the stage of covering all these goofs now, so I'm going to take another day or two to have one last 'go over' the errata sheet, and then I'll make it freely available to WAB players.
The *really* important thing to note from the above is that one thing that the errata sheet will _not_ contain are any rules changes or modifications. The experimental elephant rules, for example, will not be there. This is not to say that they should dissapear from web sites, or that players that want to should stop using them, just that they are not official changes to the rules, and therefore should be viewed in the same manner as all of the other 'non-official' WAB material that is available. As a games designer I tinker with rules all the time, that's part of the joy of this hobby for me, but the majority of my 'good ideas' and experimantal rules fall by the wayside based on my own experience and feedback I receive from players. Therefore anything that isn't in a _published_ WHW book or errata sheet should be viewed as non-official, no matter who was the author.
This isn't to say that WAB won't change and evolve in time. We were able to add some rules in AoA, for example, while other supplements offer a great opportunity to modfy rules for specific army lists. However for the core game rules my plan is to follow something like the GW four-five year cycle, where 'core games' like Warhammer and 40K receive a new edition every 4-5 years. For WAB this means that we'll be looking to do a new edition in about 2002 or 2003. When the time comes to do a new edition, we'll review all of the experimental rules, look back over the feedback we've received, and make any changes we think will improve the game, but we'll do this all in one go, rather than piecemeal.
I think the benefits of such an approach are obvious, as they give players confidence in the rules and army lists, while at the same time allowing space for the game to grow and evolve over time. I know that for some this pace of change may seem a bit slow for some, but at the end of the day the WAB rules and lists *do* broadly work and don't *need* to be changed. Or to put it another way "if it ain't broke don't fix it".
That's all for now, apart from to congratulate Don on what was clearly a fun WAB tournament, and to say that I'll get the 'official' errata sheet as described above off to the list asap.
Jervis