Poll: Choose your favourite Dwarf army. There can be only one!

Aww... I kind of dig the art style. It's definitely retro and a little more cartoony. GW was much less "grimdark" back in the day.

 

Of course it doesn't look compatible with the darker and more realistic art of later editions, but at the time it fitted what Warhammer was, particularly given that it was a lot less prestigious than it is now. I can imagine the illustrators wanted to make it look more vibrant, exciting and perhaps a bit less serious than its main rival at the time, D&D, to draw in players with a different attitude and outlook on life.

What's more, it still made its own contribution to Warhammer's long and industrious path toward toppling D&D off its perch as being the biggest fantasy world and game around, so it deserves to be remembered fondly by those who were first drawn in by it.

 

Nicely said. I am not fond of the style either, but like the historical aspect hobby-wise.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

Poetic. If it had a mention of Lizardmen, I'd have nominated for the next LO poetry contest!

 

Well said. Do you think it has actually toppled D&D? In fairness, I don't think so, but I guess I only see my little slice of the gaming pie.

Most of my friends who play Warhammer play D&D as well. They like Warhammer, but would drop it to play D&D. I'm pretty sure all of them came into gaming through D&D, so maybe that's a factor.

I'm bad about sidetracking threads, so I hope it don't drag this out.

 

Personally I think it has.

Games Workshop has become a titan that Wizards of the Coast and Ral Partha could only ever dream of being. It is arguably the most successful gaming company of all time, and its steadily-increasing influence is turning Warhammer into a more and more mainstream phenomenon. Celebrity endorsers like Henry Cavil only add to its level of fame.

Modern audiences easily prefer stories of mass battles deciding the fate of entire nations (as seen in such highly-popular franchises as Middle Earth and Game of Thrones) over small bands of heroes dungeon-crawling (which nowadays only seem to appear sporadically in films like remakes of Conan the Barbarian).

Warhammer is more accessible as a game - anyone from 9-10 year-old children to wargaming veterans aged 50+ can grasp the rules and have fun playing the game, whereas D&D always was, and will likely always be, mainly appealing to the intellectual minority who have the patience and intelligence to grasp its complicated rules, hence its notoriety as the ultimate symbol of 'geekdom'.

Total War Warhammer alone has shaken the PC gaming world a lot more than any D&D computer game has.

Warhammer caters to more different types of player - the lore-loving narrative gamer, the competitive powergamer and anybody in between can get all the fun out of it they want. D&D I would say caters near-exclusively toward the former.

Additionally Warhammer puts the heroes and villains on a level playing-field, whereas in D&D, while anyone who knows the rules can get into playing a hero if they wish, it is a lot more difficult to play as the monsters (make the monsters too strong and the hero players lose and get upset, make them too weak and the hero players may find the game too easy, not to mention that you yourself won't have nearly as much fun), meaning Warhammer is a lot more attractive to those who like playing the bad guy.

Warhammer requires more miniatures and scenery to be built and painted (which aren't even compulsory in D&D), which requires more money to be given to GW (particularly these days) and more time and effort to be put into the hobby side of things, which often leads to greater rewards, a greater feeling of satisfaction when a particularly big project has been completed and a greater devotion on the part of its fans.

All these reasons show Warhammer has always had a bigger target audience available (and a greater amount of spending and enthusiasm to come out of that target audience), which is without a doubt the main cause of its rise to greatness, and that's before I even mention 40K (given we're talking specifically about fantasy here, it would be unfair to bring that into play, I'm referring to Fantasy and Age of Sigmar).

Certainly folk who got into RPGs in the 80s, when D&D and other RPGs were at their peak and Warhammer was in its infancy, are more likely to want to keep their RPG groups alive rather than ditch it for something new and perhaps less intellectual, which I can certainly understand and respect. @Scalenex is our biggest example - he dabbles in playing Warhammer (though he theoryhammers a lot more) but delves extensively into RPGs (if his world Scarterra is anything to go by).

In those days, of course, culture in general was a lot different - the lack of CGI meant that making films of mass battles like the ones we see regularly now would have been financially impossible to achieve, whereas small stories with characters you could engage with, fighting a 'big bad' with hordes of sword-fodder represented by the same blokes in different suits or stop-motion animated models charging round corners again and again would have been highly achievable to make. TV shows like Knightmare and He-Man, books like the Fighting Fantasy series and other RPGs made in D&D's image like Tunnels and Trolls and HeroQuest to a lesser extent became highly popular. In addition wargaming was almost entirely associated with history back then - it was about recreating battles of ages past in the real world with real-world physics, and those who got into something as comparatively 'out-there' as Warhammer would probably have been seen as a little eccentric even by other wargamers.

It'll be interesting, though, to see if Warhammer can continue to reign supreme, or if some new style of fantasy gaming will take over from it as the leading game, just as it has superseded D&D. Card games like Magic are becoming a threat (certainly at my university there were signficantly more Magic players than Warhammer players), probably because it would require much less time, effort and money to get into it than Warhammer, as well as the obsession with trading that has taken young generations in the late 90s onwards.

Spoiler: My personal opinion

Warhammer >>>> D&D >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Magic. Magic just looks so boring and nerdy as a game and unimaginative as a fantasy world, I couldn't understand why my University's Games Society was so smitten with Magic compared to the greatness that is Warhammer.

 

Those are interesting opinions and you make your case passionately, but I just don't totally agree. I do agree that GW has grown to become a much more singularly cohesive and successful company than TSR or WotC. But D&D is bigger than either of those companies; probably the same for Warhammer.

I thought about offering counter-points, but it's moot. Rarely do people of differing opinions see eye to eye. In the end, you may be right. I can't take a poll of everybody who's ever heard of, and played, D&D or Warhammer. We each gravitate to those hobbies that interest us, and they are our worlds. Most of my friends and many of the gamers in my circles are role-players. For them, D&D reigns supreme. I'm certain there are gamers who love Warhammer and would never play a role-playing game.

Both D&D and Warhammer are iconic game systems, and pillars of the gaming world, which satisfy the various needs of the gaming community.

EDIT: By the way, I do agree that both D&D and Warhammer are superior to Magic. I played it back in the day for a while and it just wasn't for me. But, I recently found out that it's still crazy popular here in the US. I don't get it...

 

If you'd said this ten years ago I would have agreed with you, those days were when games consoles had reached their prime, but since then I wonder if they're starting to decline.

The Wii died a long while back, I haven't heard nearly as much raving about the Switch compared to the DS, and I certainly haven't heard as much of a fanfare for the PS5 or whatever equivalent rival for it there is or will be planned for XBOX compared to the PS4 and XBOX One. Of course I would think this is due to mobile games increasing in quality and getting cheaper more than the return of wargaming/RPGs/CCGs, but a house divided against itself cannot stand.

 

Back to Dwarfs:


Would this beauty, painted by craftworld studios, classify as Dispossessed or Chaos?

Grrr, Imrahil

 

Definitely Chaos. Look at the horns.

 

It isn't even close. Let me simply compare it to miniature tabletop wargaming since you placed Warhammer above D&D and Magic.

First some simple tidbits on the subject:

• I always have to explain what warhammer is to people, but never have to explain what a video game is. More people have heard of Xbox than Warhammer. More people can identify Mario & Luigi than Sigmar or Horus.
• top twitch video game streamers make millions of dollars a year, there is no wargaming equivalent (at best they get some free product to review)
• top table tournament winners might win a couple of hundred (maybe a thousand) dollars worth of product or gift cards. A couple of years ago the winner of the world Fornite championship won a cool $3,000,000.
• Esports are huge and only getting larger. In places like South Korea you can make a very lucrative career off of being a professional gamer. They have leagues, teams, mascots and sell out stadiums. Check out these prize pools
• Video games are completely mainstream, with a significant percentage of the population playing them, wargaming is niche.

Now the main event. Let's sort this debate out with some simple numbers:

The entire tabletop games sector (of which GW is by far the biggest player) was worth about $7.2 billion dollars in 2017 and is estimated to potentially rise to $12 billion by 2023 (source). So let's assume that current value lies somewhere in between those two figures... for the ENTIRE tabletop industry.

Now let's contrast this to video games. It was recently announced that Microsoft (who own Xbox) are set to acquire the gaming studio Activision Blizzard (think World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, etc.) for $68.7 billion!!! Keep in mind that this doesn't represent anywhere close to the value of the entire video games industry. It's just the acquisition of one studio (albeit a very large studio) by Xbox, who themselves are just one of the big four (PC, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo). Ergo, that one studio is worth more (and many times over) than the entire tabletop wargaming industry.

The numbers don't lie. It isn't even up for debate.


The video game industry is easily larger than the tabletop wargaming, role-playing and collectable card game industries combined.

Over a year out and I can't get my hands on a PS5. Completely sold out everywhere here in Toronto, Canada. @Mrs. NIGHTBRINGER searched everywhere in an attempt to get me one for Christmas with no success. The only place you can reliably get them is from people selling them at twice the retail price. Sure there is a pandemic-induced shortage, but they are selling like hotcakes. The systems are doing just fine!

Mobile games are still video games. That's just a different platform... console vs. PC vs. mobile.

Personally, the more the merrier. Competition in the industry breeds innovation and is always beneficial for the consumer.



Lastly, if you consider the long term, things are only becoming increasingly digital. We increasingly live and entertain ourselves in a digital world. Sky's the limit when it comes to video games. They will only get better and better as technology develops. The platforms may shift, but video games are here not only to stay but to grow exponentially.

 

Looks like a Samurai/Japanese inspired Dwarf to me. The footwear, mask, armour and sword are all Samurai themed.

As it being Dispossessed or Chaos, it could go either way. The helm and horns lean the way of Chaos, but the beard is much more reminiscent of a conventional Dwarf.