Well my ex-GW manager friend always maintained that LoTR held its own on the sales front. With the release of WoTR I think GW will see increased sales of this range.

LotR outsold 40k & fantasy during the 'movie time'. WotR will boost it again as it has a decent system to go with. LotR sales made GW bigger then ever.

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His comments were post films when I was using the line "Why can't Specialist Games take the LoTR space, if can't be selling much now the films are gone!"

And yet funnily enough I've never met anyone who wasn't a staffer who collects and paints them (note meet as in the flesh).

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WOTR / LOTR, moreso than any of the Core games, is targetted at kids.

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The only people I know who collect LotR are kids.

This may be simply because us oldies are too invested in the Warhammer and 40K worlds already.

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What?

LotR is aimed at collectors. Fans of the Tolkien world. Therefor they create xth Aragorn.

I'm such a collector.

Plus the LotR rules are better then 40k/whfb rules.

WotR I dunno.

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Ha! Well in some cases the fathers have bought it for their boys...

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Better written?
Yes. The rules of Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer are a mess, frankly. Especially Warhammer.

More tactically complex?
Of the Core games, I'd rank LOTR about mid-way in tactical complexity between Warhammer 40,000 (lowest) and Warhammer (Highest).

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I agree-. I am a sucker for wanting the xth pose of Fellowship characters despite the fact that I have 4-5 different poses of each character already. Sometimes the poses have different weapons or armour or cloaks etc. But sometimes they are equipped the same. I even bought Gandalf in cart even though it is virtually useless for most scenarios but liked it purely because it was staright out of one of the early scenes in FOTR.

I like the game mechanics of LOTR SBG although it does get a bit clunky in larger games. This is what WOTR should do well. I have so far only played an intro game as I cant afford to spend money on gaming at the moment. However WOTR does appear to be popular down my local gaming club.

Cheers

James

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Ah, in that case you need Frodo wearing the ring
in the desert

in the woods

in the ruins

And finally in Tolkiens little known cross over book, in the Aliens francise

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I think that's you've made a good point, but there is another "split" that occurs among wargamers, those that use minis and those that don't. Until Adeptus Titanicus came along, all of my wargames were of the Avalon Hill variety, using boards and cardboard warriors.

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Yep, if you play a miniatures based wargame, then you have to be a modeller to a certain extent. Otherwise why not just play Avalon Hill style games?

As usual, it's all a matter of degrees.

You can be a 100% modeller and 0% wargamer. Or you can be a %100 wargamer and %0 modeller.

Almost everybody will be somewhere in between the extremes of 100% and 0% though.

I would judge most epic folk to be on the higher end in the wargamers score, and lower in the modelling (not very low though!). There are folk who buck that trend. There was a chap who we havn't seen for a long time MageBoltRat? Who's painting/modelling work I though was incredible.

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And finally in Tolkiens little known cross over book, in the Aliens francise

Having played Ratty's epic army quite a few times way back when, I can agree that it was a gorgeous army. That said, he had a 28mm Mortifactors army that was even more gorgeous.

Since this thread has turned into a comparison with other GW games:

40K. I actually still have hopes for this game. I was pretty please with the state of affairs when 5th ed came out and despite some horrible blunders (like Kill Points and outflanking) I was really enjoying the fact that it had moved to a more Epic-like system of objectives, the rules were reasonably tight and Codexes like the Eldar and the Chaos were (despite some misgivings) quite tight codecies - balanced, with a minimum of special rules. Then they gave the Marine and Guard codecies to inexpierenced developers who put every idea they ever had into print, it seems, resulting with a rediculous collection of special rules and options. That said, 40K could actually be made into a decent (or at least fun) wargame. Just adding in an overwatch system (which is enormously required in a YOUGOIGO system) would add in a wealth of tactics to the game.

Fantasy. I cut my teeth on Fantasy way back when and it is a reasonable game. It's always felt like it's one edition away from being a really good game, if they can just find a system that resolves the horrible niggly details that crop up with every game. After, what?, seven editions, we really shouldn't be struggling with clipping and the terrain rules are just aweful (oddly, 40K deals much better with terrain) and challenges . I have a love-hate relationship with this game because it would be so easy to turn it into something really good.

LotR. Given that this was an opportunity to build a game from the ground up, it was expected to be a decent system, and by and large it was. The concentration on heroes along with the interesting turn system did work out well. The need to move and resolve each model seperately made it somewhat slow, I don't know if the new game resolved this well or not. Not too much experience with it, few people played it. Largly regarded as a kid's game, which was somewhat unfair as it had quite some subtlety to it, the reality seemed to be that LotR was played far more by new players (not necessarily kids) and away from gaming clubs.

Epic. I love this game or I wouldn't be here but lets not say its perfect. I can't stand the fact that characters can be sniped or the hit allocation systems in general. There's a number of other things that are frustrating, and the models are largely unimpressive unless you drop a warlord on the table and the rules sadly make this unattractive for the most part.