by Patrick Nevan

Verisimilitude – The appearance of being true or real

Oxford English Dictionary

“I tell you brother, shit just works like it should. It’s a beautiful thing”

The Author, about six beers in, enthusing about Zombie spam

The concept has been weighing on my mind since the release of the latest Khorne book left me with a degree of emotional devastation I haven’t felt since hearing that Chris got pointlessly killed trying to break up a fight in the what-became-of-them-afterwards narration at the end of Stand By Me. Damn they knew how to make kids’ movies in the 80’s.¹

Nope

My Khorne review was the first thing I ever turned in for the Craichouse and even if I was way off about how successful it would be, I stand by my conclusion that it sucked balls and everyone involved in writing it should consider finding something else to do with their working lives.² Long story short I ditched Khorne, had a read of SBGL and fell head over heels for them. Not for their power level or cheap points, none of that shit lasts, especially for Death armies. The SBGL Battletome is written with a high level of plays-the-way-you-think-it-should. Be it Zombie spam, Mortarch legions or hordes of freaky monsters, the Vamps play the way they should, managing to keep it remarkably close to JROC levels of real.

Obviously not as real, know what I’m sayin?

I think the always-excellent Vince Venturella was the first person I heard use the word Verisimilitude to describe the extent to which the design and playstyle of an army matches its narrative, so I’m using it for this article. It’s a hefty-ass remind-people-that-I-went-to-University type of word to describe something we all tend to discuss in terms of how “it just plays like it should”. The quality of realness or trueness to the source material: Verisimilitude³, pronounced Very-Similar-to-it-Dude or just good old V for the purposes of my lazy-ass writing.

It’s been weighing on my mind and I’m not really sharing the Destro-erotic enthusiasm of my fellow Craichouse scribes for Armies of Renown or stupid looking over-designed trolls⁴, so I’m planning a couple of think-pieces on the topic alongside a bit of game design advice based on my zero years of experience. For the two or three people who follow my work and wonder when I’ll get back to churning out snarky hackery about the Three Worst Whatever’s in Age of Sigmar I’ll be resuming regular service once I’ve got the pretentious think-piece bug out of my system for a while. Hell, even Adam Sandler has to make the occasional Punch Drunk Love.

What is Verisimilitude?

I’m using the term in AOS to assess the quality of trueness to people’s expectations of the tabletop performance of an army based on its narrative. You can apply it in a broader sense to the whole experience of the game, but for my purposes it’s the extent to which a Battletome hews to its source material in practice. Tabletop wargamers aren’t just moving tokens around; the game is a mental exercise to create an imaginary narrative of armies duking it out on the battlefield. The degree of Verisimilitude is the extent to which the unfolding narrative matches our expectations.

A generation of tabletop wargamers were birthed here. On top of all the other awesomeness, Helm’s Deep has a fantastic level of the Verisimilitude I’m banging on about. The movie takes pains to establish and meet our expectations of the three factions involved in this showdown.

Well Duh! and thanks Patrick for mansplaining a simple concept four or five times but V goes to the core of our hobby and why we spend so much time and effort painting our little men. You take the ruleset, the physical properties of the models, the artwork, the narrative. the box and the dice. Verisimilitude is the final test of how well it all works when it comes together.

It’s a quality distinct from a faction’s power level. Oddly enough actual performance can be the enemy of V as plenty of armies feel like they should be winning more or less than the ideal 50% of their games for the sake of balance. Granted everyone is poised to take over the world in the fluff from their own Battletome, but Stormcast Eternals, an army with a terrible level of V, have never produced anything like the success you would expect from Sigmarines outside of goofy niche builds.⁵ Conversely the Gloomspite Gitz had a higher level of Verisimilitude back when they were garbage because they’re not meant to be world beaters. Goofy ass random rules and wildly varying abilities make sense for the comic relief, reliable mega output doesn’t. If you think that’s me hating on the Gitz well spotted, I can’t stand ’em. But there are plenty of long-term Gitz players who have jumped off the faction because they are too good.

Gloomspite Hipsters or Giptsters, still better than people wanking on about Brisket

Clearly Verisimilitude is always going to be one those highly subjective type of deals that are meat and drink to content creators and other opinionated loudmouths with too much time on their hands, but it is the Holy Grail of quality design. The cherry on top, the spoon that stirs the drink and here’s why.

Why does Verisimilitude Matter?

This is actually a tougher question than I first thought. My initial answers had a lot to do with aesthetics, elegance of design and quality of the product, but that’s a bit too self-indulgent and babbly even by my generous standards of rambling. There was a lengthy metaphor about chess players not needing immersion but for the sake of brevity⁶ I decided to try and zero in on what Verisimilitude actually does for the hobby.

The first thing that became apparent was that V wasn’t that big a deal to the average competitive tournament gamer. It’s nice, its a cherry on top but if you are looking to stay on top of the meta you aren’t losing too much sleep over it. That’s not to say other factors don’t matter: I had a recent conversation with Sam Morgan about SBGL were he rhapsodized over Askurgan Trueblades finally representing Neophyte Vampires on the tabletop. Joel Graham, who is as competitive a player who ever drew breath, wouldn’t touch Stormcast if they came with Five guaranteed wins and a handjob.⁷ Don’t ever think comp players don’t have daydreams about their toy soliders.

Still committed AOS hobbyists, like most Craichouse Patreons, tend to have a fair few armies on the go and just jump off them when they turn sour for whatever reason. In my own case I like armies with a high level of V and when the Khorne book was obviously a steaming turd I went out and found a better one.

The best way I can explain the Khorne Battletome to the non-faithful is Theoden making this speech and instead of charging they all get of their horses and start digging trenches. It’s that weird.

Plenty of the guys seem quite happy with Out-of-phase Movement for the Out-of-phase Movement God, it’s just the new guys who are a bit baffled that Khorne aren’t really in the top ten armies for combat output.

So it’s with the casuals, narrative players and dilettante system flitterers that Verisimilitude becomes important. Tabletop wargaming as a hobby is difficult, expensive, time-consuming and generally all around inconvenient as fuck compared to just about anything else in the fantasy sphere. Actually going to tournaments to play with a bunch of strangers is a whole extra degree of difficulty. Everyone knows this, so the tournament experience is geared towards keeping casuals happy with sports scores, painting prizes, swiss pairings and what have you. 

They could also, you know, not be so fucking casual

There are a lot of things that go into keeping the game engaging for casuals such as simple rules, fun missions, easy list building and, oh I dunno, not having a new GHB every six months, but Verisimilitude is important to the guy who throws together a Slaves to Darkness army for a couple of local events a year because he played ’em in back in Fantasy when he was a kid and he thinks Black and Gold armor is cool.⁸

When Johnny Casual rolls out his STD he may not be interested in the latest competitive build, he might lose most of his games but he wants the satisfaction of seeing his army do something on the table the way he pictures it in his head. Be it a crushing Varanguard charge, a screaming horde of cultists over-running something or one of his heroes hitting the demon prince lotto and ascending to godhood. He wants the real experience, Verisimilitude. 

So what happens if he doesn’t get it? If his Bloodthirsters hit like wet noodles? His Gutbusters can’t stand up to combat? If he can’t run hordes of Plague Monks with Skaven? If the only High Elf build that won’t be shredded has to have Teclis and 50 Sentinels, or a Dark Elf build that has to have 30 Snakes and Morathi for that matter? Imagine if you got into AOS for the new Cities stuff with visions of a glorious old-style Empire combined arms machine, and spamming Fusiliers is the only thing that actually doesn’t suck.⁹ What Johnny will do is something else: another game system or forget tabletop altogether.

 

I’ve heard it might still be a thing

It’s fair to say AOS is in in a bit of a slump in Australia and not just because people don’t want to play against me. The competitive guys are still slaves to the grind but I know a lot of more casual players are out of tournaments and playing way less locally too. I’m not saying poor Verisimilitude is responsible for this. 3^rd ed will go down as the “String of Bad Choices” edition and this is reflected in player engagement.

Listen to other players’ stories, if you can bear it. A lot of it is freaky dice rolls and general back and forth drama but there is plenty of people loving what the little dudes and dudettes they spent all that time and money on get up to on the table. Good Verisimilitude, the ability play what is in your mind’s eye builds that love and that is what keeps people coming back. 

Sons of Behemat are a relevant example. The initial book was met with a shrug by some and a Fuck Yes by people who love the idea of running an army of huge morons. The actual narrative stuff in the first Battletome was really solid, the warscrolls were good, the rules were ok but the gameplay had a low to middling level of Verisimilitude. They did gianty stuff, hurling bodies, kicking objectives but they kinda just stood on objectives and won if they didn’t get killed. Not really what people were looking for. 

Fast forward to the new book: new special character, pretty much the same sort of gameplay but they cranked up the V levels with the set of WWE moves for monstrous actions, the Beast Grapple and the Colossal Slam. Sons of Behemat players love that shit and will not shut up about it. They really do picture their Gargants doing Batista bombs on enemy dragons. I’m guessing they will also go crazy for throwing terrain at people in Brodd’s thing and why not?  Anyways there are people who will keep playing AOS as long as there is a single enemy monster to hip toss.

Never miss a chance to roll out a picture of my boy

And that (grown-ass adults sniggering to each other and telling tales of body slamming Archaon) is why Verisimilitude matters. We aren’t playing chess, we are playing with our toys and it’s cool as shit when they do what they are supposed to do. 

Anyways I’ll be back with part two of this one if there’s any interest and I can tear myself away from writing Avengori Terrorgheist lists while making shrieking noises.

1. Classic film, a mainstay for dudes of my vintage that seems to have slipped off the nostalgia wheel. Still a great movie for boys. ↩︎
2. Obviously not, its called Hyperbole. Except for whoever wrote the warscrolls for the Aspiring and Exalted Deathbringers, fuck them. ↩︎
3. I’d steal his painting tips except they are way too advanced for my paint by numbers style. Love your work Vicne. ↩︎
4. Yeah, I said – it even for the comedy faction in a high fantasy game, Trugg looks fucking stupid. ↩︎
5. I’ll discuss in further in a future article but the Golden Boys suffer from low V because there was never a clear idea of how they work as an army. ↩︎
6. Yes I am familiar with the concept, thanks for asking. ↩︎
7. Sam and Joel are mainstays of Australian competitive AOS for them as don’t know. ↩︎
8. He’s right ↩︎
9. I really hope there is a viable combined arms build for Cities. It is what AOS is missing. ↩︎

If you’d like to help us continue our work, we’d love to have your support. All Patreon Tiers include Discord access, exclusive articles and regular contests. Our Tiers are priced to be within everyone’s reach, so please click here to join us today!