FAQ Reaction

Thursday saw the release of the latest version of the FAQs and Erratas for Me:SBG and while I am happy with most of the changes that have been made there is one big change that overshadows all the rest and that I am really unhappy about. Of course I'm talking about the change to allied armies and the new requirement to have a Hero of Valour in each allied contingent. The argument for this change is that it will discourage unthematic alliances being used in games (primarily Cirdan in many Good armies and the Shade in Evil armies, among other offenders), a goal that I am totally in favour of. However, this change doesn't achieve this goal and in fact, in my opinion, actually works against building themed armies. 

Take this example of a historical King of Gondor themed army:

King of Man - Horse, Heavy Armour, Lance and Shield
9 Warriors of Minas Tirith - Spear and Shield
1 Warrior of Minas Tirith - Spear, Shield and Banner
5 Rangers of Gondor - Spear

Captain of Dol Amroth - Armoured Horse and Lance
5 Knights of Dol Amroth - Armoured Horse and Lance
7 Men at Arms

This is a perfectly themed 500 point army that is now completely banned because the Captain isn't a Hero of Valour. So let's look at what we could replace the Captain and his warband with. We can't just swap out the Captain for a different hero because of the King's rule preventing the use of named Gondor heroes. So we have to use another faction(s):

King of Man - Horse, Heavy Armour, Lance and Shield
9 Warriors of Minas Tirith - Spear and Shield
1 Warrior of Minas Tirith - Spear, Shield and Banner
5 Rangers of Gondor - Spear

Merry
10 Battling Brandybucks
5 Hobbit Archers

Galadriel

This army is still perfectly legal, forms a yellow alliance but it is clearly not at all themed. Here we have Merry and his mates time traveling back to a time before the line of Kings failed, and walking to Gondor via Lothlorien to pick up Galadriel.

This change has banned several of the armies that I have contemplated recently, including:
The Gondorian King's of Old style above
The Horrors of Karna
Thorin's Exile
The Lord of the Glittering Caves
The Legions of Angmar (this weekend's post was due to be detailing this idea)

It seems to me that this change doesn't address the fundamental issue it was trying to fix, while hampering creativity and choice for players. If the issue was a small number of profiles being used a lot as allies then why not just fix those particular profiles (as they did with the Shade), instead of ruining alliances for all the other profiles?

One of the central themes running right through the Lord of the Rings is that it doesn't matter how small you are, you can still have a big effect on the world and that you don't need to be a big hero to have an influence on the future. Unfortunately, Games Workshop seems to have forgotten this point.