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Rather than hijacking someone else’s thread, I figured it best to start a new one. 

 

This was my third year at Adepticon.  Still the best tourney in the land.  The job that Jeff Chua (in particular) and associates do every year still amazes me. 

 

Took another class from Chris Borer (this year, it was sculpting, last year it was army conversion).  I highly recommend any of the seminars, but especially Chris’s, to anyone.

 

Played in the LotR and 40k TT.  I know most people put down LotR, but I think with the Legions book out, it’s one of the best games on the market now and certainly better than 40k or WFB.  I will admit that part of the reason is they got to start new with it and learn from their lessons on the other two games.  It’s relatively inexpensive (around $100) to get an army, plays fast and furious, and relies on in-game tactics not the uber-army list to win games.

 

The 40k TT reinforced why I don’t play 40k much (in fact, only a handful of games since last Adepticon, which may explain some of our mistakes).  I was on the drop-podding Space Wolf team (and I was the guilty party for not getting my vehicles highlighted).  In the second round, got wiped off the board by the 40k Wrecking Crew 3 and their Emperor’s Children list.  They out-shot us and made up for it by being better in hand-to-hand as well.  In the third round, Russ’s heirs took out their frustrations on an over-matched IG/Sisters army that was razed to the ground.  I can’t characterize either game as ‘fun’ because I felt they both owed more to army vs. army match-up and the scenarios (and I think the adepticon scenarios are better than anything GW had done) rather than game-level tactics. 

 

I sat in on Jervis Johnson’s round-table on Sunday morning.  Here’s some highlights of what I can remember:

 

·        Jervis says his job is to get more people playing with toy soldiers and have fun doing it.

·        LotR sales have dropped off, but leveled out around 10-15% of total sales.  Sales of Legions and Arnor where higher than they expected.  A friend in Saturday’s session reports Jervis said it was between 1/4 and 1/6 of sales which is 25-16%.

·        Overall, it sounds like they have adopted a more professional and business-like attitude towards their games development team.  He said that in the past, they relied too much on inspiration.  And the results are multiple 40k Chaos codices between 40k Ork codices.  They need to regularly revisit and support armies.  He said this doesn’t mean they may follow the same release order each time they’re revisited, but that they won’t go 10 years without revisiting an army either. 

·        GW has decided that they have 10-15 armies in both WFB and 40k that need to be regularly supported.  There will be no more variant lists.  They’re going to incorporate them into the parent army list as much as possible.  This is partly to avoid the Storm of Chaos fiasco (army lists disallowed for tourneys) and partly to address balance. 

·        The extreme ends of armies need to be addressed, including min/maxing of lists. 

·        They need to avoid not just raising the ceiling of an army, but also, they need to not raise the floor.  He said they often reduce the weakness of an army in future incarnations, and that’s the same as raising the power level. 

·        People need to be able to buy what they want, and make an effective army out of it, if they can figure out the tactics.  (I take this to mean, no more junk units like ork stikkbombaz). 

·        Jervis pretty much admitted 40k isn’t balanced and they’re working to address that.

·        It’s undecided if the next marine codex will be Codex: Space Marines of Codex: Ultramarines (aka Codex: Codex Marines).  Not all marines are codex chapters, and they need to decide if the codex will cover all marine chapters, or just codex ones.  If its codex chapters, expect the DA build (1 termie hvy weapon, combat squads, etc.). 

·        The studio needs to reduce the number of special rules or “half rules” as Jervis called them.  For example, he took Stubborn out of DA and replaced it with Fearless.  He said that Stubborn was meant to be real similar to Fearless, so why have a special rule to cover it, when there is an existing rule that is nearly the same thing.

·        There are the core game mechanics, and the army books can’t change them.  And, yes, he’s aware that transports aren’t working well. 

·        He commented that 40k is on V4, and it’s really only two versions into a radical rules change.  WFB is on its seventh edition, so it’s had more time to work out the bugs.

·        He commented that the game is a contract between two players to have fun.  He is pushing to include a section similar to the first D&D rules.  ‘This is not a game like any other.  Leave your preconceived notions at the door.  This is about having fun.’

·        Cities of Death was very popular.  They want to do similar books because it’s a chance to alter the play of the game, without it working back into the core game mechanics and breaking things.  These may not necessarily be ‘environmental’ settings but just a chance to play the game a little different (with strategems, etc.).

·        He’s learned they need to stop tinkering with things and get the points cost correct.  As an example, people complained a shooty army wasn’t shooty enough because they were BS 3.  He said the temptation is to make the army BS4, but then that’s broken too.  He said that he’s learned the answer is to leave them BS3 and get the points cost right. 

·        There was a discussion on ork choppas (40k).  He said that was an example of a “half rule”.  It was meant to only help orks vs. marines, and yes, it doesn’t make sense that IG don’t care if they have choppas.  However, since there is a rule for heavy close combat weapons, I don’t see this going away either.

·        FAQ are there to address ‘grey’ areas in the game with different interpretations possible.  Example, DA cannot assault out of drop-pods.  Yes, nowhere does it say the troops inside the pod count as arriving by Deep Strike, but they do.  Errata are there to fix mistakes.  He said there is a magic item in the Ogre Kingdoms book that gives a bonus to casting spells.  As printed, it makes it harder to cast because it’s a +1 not a -1 (or the other way around, I don’t play WFB).  That’s a mistake in the book and they’ll fix it in later printings and by errata.

·        FAQ and Errata are not a chance to fix ‘mistakes’ the game developers made (like Wolf Guard in termie armor with Wolf Scouts). 

·        The game needs to appeal to both the veteran gamer and someone who just bought <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Battle</st1:place></st1:city> for Macragge. 

·        They assume too much knowledge of the gamer.  His son put together a tactical squad.  He said about every five minutes there was a question.  “Is this a power weapon?”  “No, it’s a combat knife.”  “Is this a jump pack?”  “No, it’s a backpack.”  Etc. 

·        Special Characters are going right into the list entry because some tourneys didn’t allow them.  He said these are the arch-types of their army, and great figs, and he wants people to play them.

·        40k is meant to be balanced for pick-up games of 1500-2000 points and that is their goal with future releases.

·        Someone brought up Ghazkull, and how the problem is if he charges with a squad, everyone in his kill zone is gone before he attacks with his power claws.  Jervis said that is not a problem with the model, it’s a game mechanic problem.  He didn’t say it’ll be fixed anytime soon.

·        GW publishs in six languages, and there are sometimes translation problems.  It also means that when they do a FAQ, it needs to be up on multiple websites (in six languages) at the same time. 

·        Jervis wrote the DA codex as an example to the team of what he wants their work to be.  Also, there will be less variation from book to book based on the writer.

·        GW did not let go their external playtesters as was rumored.  Previously, they were putting the work in progress of a book on their website for their “techpriests and geeks” to download and review.  These people tended to offer lots of feedback on the army list and play.  They didn’t see the final page layout, just a word document.  Now, they get ‘as near to final as we can manage’ layouts and are just told to comment on errors and problems, and they are not to comment on the army list.

·        He took bionics and purity seals out of the DA codex because people weren’t taking the wargear (or using some models) because they didn’t want to pay the points for the item.  He sees them as modeling aesthetics and so took them out of the wargear.

 

And he had lots of praise for the Adepticon Team.  He brought over some people from Warhammer World to observe and get ideas to take back to the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region>. 

 

After the TT, it gave me hope that 40k will be a better game over the next couple years and one that I’ll get more enjoyment from.  No game is perfect, but 40k can certainly be better.  Armies will be more balanced, and that may mean taking away choices.

 

I also walked away with the feeling that Jervis has forced the development team to take a more professional approach to their work, which I also see as a good thing.

Thanks for the info, dietrich!

Thanks for the write-up. Most of it sounds good, balance, blah blah blah, FAQs, etc. It just bothers me that while they're combining all of the chaos legions into one book, they're still treating the Space Marines as several different armies, therefore several different rulesets.

First we have:Followed by:/facepalm

Knowledge!
The more I hear about JJ's remarks, the better I like the sound of them. IMO, this bodes well for 40K.

Thats makreting doubletalk. If they are only allowed to comment on errors and not the army list, they are no longer playtesting, they are proofreading.

Excellent write-up. Many thanks for providing.

Posted By Breotan on 04/06/2007 9:24 AM
First we have:

...Errata are there to fix mistakes... That’s a mistake in the book and they’ll fix it in later printings and by errata.

Followed by:

· FAQ and Errata are not a chance to fix ‘mistakes’ the game developers made...

/facepalm

I think he is trying to say that they will have errata for things that are unclear or that break the game mechanics but they won't change the rules arbitrarily like the old FAQs used to. 

How about instead:

Errata is a chance to fix typographic errors in the book.
FAQ and Errata are not a chance for the Developers to correct mistakes in the book by adding new rules and/or changing rules within the book (unless it's a typo like the OK example).

I find this very worrisome. How much more do they plan to dumb things down?

Posted By Asmodai on 04/06/2007 7:49 PM

I find this very worrisome. How much more do they plan to dumb things down?

 

You find that worrisome? I think perhaps you want to take a step back and realize what you're saying.

GW has gotten in the habit over the years of simply assuming that players know what a power weapon looks like, what a bolter looks like, etc. While the rulebook contains a few diagrams on the whole there are quite a few pieces of equipment which aren't described in the codices/rulebook yet players are expected to know what they look like in order to make their models WYSIWYG.

Even veterans (like myself) can even fall into this trap. When the first Tau codex came out they only included pictures of some of the weapons in the codex (and they labeled them in Tau writing). For quite a while I had some trouble recognizing which Tau weapon was which.

With the Dark Angels codex moving forward, all codices will now have a visual represenation of the wargear described in the codex. The point is that players new to the game (or new to the army) will easily be able to tell what wargear is what for the minis they purchase.

This sort of information should have always been provided to the consumer but it is actually understandable (to me at least) that it could have gotten lost as the newer versions of the game have rolled out.

So I really don't understand how correcting this major mistake and making sure the proper information is available to new players is "worrisome" or somehow dumbing down the game.

 

I have to agree with yak.

I remember getting back into 40K in the beginning of 3rd ed with dark eldar. if it wasnt for the sparse visual reps of the weapons, absolutely no one would have been able to tell what a shreddder or blaster was.

Being the cheapo guy I was at the time, it also helped me just cutdown a splinter rifle and use a couple blades mounted on the gun, a Viola! A perfect rep of a shredder.

Heh, even in rogue trader where they did sort of show you what a jump pack was, I thought that those backpacks on the marines were jumppacks initially.

Its kind of odd how Jervis' son is changing the face of the 40k as we know it.... In some ways we have Jervis' sperm finding its way through the uterus to thank for the better rumoured changes to 40K.

2nd Edition had a beautiful wargear book that came with the main boxed set that explained rules, showed a picture and explained how the items worked.

5th edition will be 40k Clicks!, can't wait to buy 1000 boxes to do a grey knight army!

Posted By Hellfury on 04/06/2007 9:36 PM
Its kind of odd how Jervis' son is changing the face of the 40k as we know it.... In some ways we have Jervis' sperm finding its way through the uterus to thank for the better rumoured changes to 40K.

I wish I had the nuts to sig this.

Thanks for the info I was unable to attend Jervis round table talks at Adepticon this year, Whisky and Friends got in the way. I have high hopes for the direction that 40K is going.

I have to agree with Yak. I think Jervis is focused on trying to expand the game to new players (and introduce new armies to veteran players), and I don't see that as anything but a good thing as it grows the hobby.

Like I said, after Saturday, it really reinforced why I stopped playing 40k for the most part (and if it wasn't for Adepticon, I would probably just sell all my 40k stuff and play LotR, WM, Hordes, and FoW). I think that to balance the game Jervis needs to reign the system in - hence, no more variant lists. I'd rather see the game have 6-8 well balanced armies that are fun to play than 30 armies that are all over the spectrum.

It depends. If it's labelling things on the sprues and providing diagrams in the Codexes it's one thing.

If it's eliminating the distinction and saying "Every model has one 'weapon'. A weapon in 40K is 24" S4 AP5 and grants one attack in close combat.", then that's something quite different - and it seems the direction things are headed. (Read the related quote on bionics to put things in context.)

I don't think it would be a good thing to eliminate the difference between a Plasma Gun and a Meltagun because some players aren't capable of telling them apart.

Posted By Asmodai on 04/07/2007 9:21 AM
I don't think it would be a good thing to eliminate the difference between a Plasma Gun and a Meltagun because some players aren't capable of telling them apart.

And I really don't think that's the kind of thing JJ was proposing GW planned to do.

It's a shame they dont listen to their outside play testers. Now they want them for finding typo's. Good ol stubborn idiotic British smarts.

They could keep the myriad of options for each and every squad if they would put together some professional non fanboy play testers. Play testers dedicated to balancing and finding abuses. How hard is it to come out with a set of rules, eat some humble pie and hand it over to play testers and ask them to break it? I'ts like designing a car and never testing the breaks. Except gw gets away with it cause no one dies.

Most gaming companies want outside playtesters because 100 nerds will find every flaw, loophole, and abusive thing that can be done in it within 48 hours or less. Why GW doesn't want to take advantage of this is odd.

Yep, free labor. The best tourney players would get asked by Decipher (Star Wars CCG) to playtest their new cards or sets after every major tournament. I don't know if Wizards does it with Magic, but wouldn't be surprised if they did. Also, proof of this is simple: go to blizzard's WOW forums and you'll see 50 pages of mathematical breakdowns of skills and why certain skillsets are broken. Or Yak's document for 40k.

About the items/weapons: I think they'll just release a version 2 of the Wargear book. Simple picture with each item and updated rules, all copy+pasted and maybe tweaked. If tweaked, required for tourney play. Instant $20 from every gamer.

Well I belive WotC at one point was having their World Tournament winners DESIGNING a new card for the next set. SO I would assume they do the same thing, but now we're getting off topic, so I'll return us to our regularly scheduled topic, already in progress.

Maybe I'm just a bit biased (and bitter!) but Jervis did a great job at "balancing" and "streamlining" Space Marine/Titan Legions right out of existence (for all intents and purposes).

Of course GW itself is pertly to blame too, for no longer fully supporting the system.

Its a shame too, because EPIC has some great things in it, but, as an example, when all of your weapon systems are reduced to "Guns" and "Big Guns", well, the game loses something.

Along with all of the players too.

I don't blame JJ for that at all. The Specialist games were very playable (for the most part). GW would not support these games. As a result, you would not see many of them (if any) being played. Whoever made the decision to not support these various games are the main culprits of their non existant nature, rather than the game mechanics.

It's good to know GW is aware of these problems. I just hope they'll be able to address them in an intelligent and timely manner.

On the downside, we discover Jervis Johnson is secretly running a GW testing center in his house!

Many thanks for the detailed info.

I welcome the changes that Jervis is planning.

I think in this case, any change is good. I'm not playing 40k much more than once a year (at Adepticon.) It's just too much of a bother.

And games are starting to appear that fill the nitch where Games Workshop was once king. (If you loved Necromunda, you'll -love- Infinity.)

If Jervis can make my armies enjoyable, again, then I will shake his hand and say "Thank you, sir."

As it stands, every game of 40k I play is exactly the same. I wait for the drop-pods and terminators to fall and then I hope I destroy enough Assault Cannons to mitigate the losses I recieve in the following round. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but in the end its always the same exact game.

Posted By Sarigar on 04/08/2007 5:40 AM
I don't blame JJ for that at all. The Specialist games were very playable (for the most part). GW would not support these games. As a result, you would not see many of them (if any) being played. Whoever made the decision to not support these various games are the main culprits of their non existant nature, rather than the game mechanics.

According to JJ in the seminars, the specialist range of games cost more money to support than it brought in.

That meant the model they had set up to support specialist games was a failure and had to end.

While they may set up subsidiary companies to run/re-launch their minor games in the future, if they do so it will be with a different approach.

 

Posted By Breotan on 04/06/2007 9:24 AM
First we have:

...Errata are there to fix mistakes... That’s a mistake in the book and they’ll fix it in later printings and by errata.

Followed by:

· FAQ and Errata are not a chance to fix ‘mistakes’ the game developers made...

/facepalm

Don't take that out of context. What Jervis was saying is that a FAQ isn't the place to change the core mechanics of the game. It's a place to fix errors in ARMYBOOKS that interrupt the flow of said mechanics.

EG: Changing the definition of a special rule like True Grit (old Daemonhunters FAQ) that suddenly means all models with Storm Bolters and True Grit get a bonus attack across the whole game. The intention is to give the Daemonhunters a unique rule, but for a while it meant that EVERYONE with True Grit and a Stormbolter got a bonus attack.

Don't confuse GAME development with the development of supplements. Jervis is talking about two different things here. You can alter armybook rules until the cows come home and it effects one unit/force. Alter the main rules of the game and it effects EVERYTHING.

Posted By dietrich on 04/06/2007 8:29 AM 

·        GW has decided that they have 10-15 armies in both WFB and 40k that need to be regularly supported.  There will be no more variant lists.  They’re going to incorporate them into the parent army list as much as possible.  This is partly to avoid the Storm of Chaos fiasco (army lists disallowed for tourneys) and partly to address balance.

So out of the 10-15 armies for 40K, 5 are loyalist space marines, so that leaves 5-10 armies to cover the rest of the 40K universe?  Ok, throw in Chaos, Tyranids, Eldar, Orks, Tau, Imperial Guard, and Necrons and you're already at 12.  If I played Dark Eldar, Witchhunters, or Daemonhunters I'd be feeling a bit anxious about now.  Who's gonna be left without a chair when the music stops?

This also means over a 1/3rd of the armies in the game will basically be slight "variations" (we won't call them "variants" since we don't have "variant lists" any more) of the space marine list.  That's slowed.

Posted By dietrich on 04/06/2007 8:29 AM  

·        It’s undecided if the next marine codex will be Codex: Space Marines of Codex: Ultramarines (aka Codex: Codex Marines).  Not all marines are codex chapters, and they need to decide if the codex will cover all marine chapters, or just codex ones.  If its codex chapters, expect the DA build (1 termie hvy weapon, combat squads, etc.).

So if they decide to have the codex cover only codex chapters where does that leave divergent ones?  Sadly I think I know the answer.  If they do indeed scrap all non-codex chapter rules (excepting BA, DA, SW, and BT of course) does this mean that these chapters will still exist as divergent chapters in the fluff but without rules (a la hrud, exodites, genestealer cult, etc) or will they be retconned to make them into codex chapters?  "The White Scars adhere strictly to the Codex Astartes.  They like bikes, but they like 10 man tactical squads even more.  Have fun!"

Posted By dietrich on 04/06/2007 8:29 AM  

·        He’s learned they need to stop tinkering with things and get the points cost correct.

They're just figuring that out now?  Better late than never.  Yes, when you make point costs correspond to effectiveness it can result in better game balance!  Oh, so that's what they're for.  What a concept!

Posted By dietrich on 04/06/2007 8:29 AM  

·        He took bionics and purity seals out of the DA codex because people weren’t taking the wargear (or using some models) because they didn’t want to pay the points for the item.  He sees them as modeling aesthetics and so took them out of the wargear.

Well, this I is something I can certainly get behind.  Not every little doo-dad has to have an in-game effect.  In fact, I'd take this even further.  Do chapter banners really make marines flip out so much harder than normal that we need a rule to represent it?  Get rid of all the unneccessarily fiddly little rules and then you would have room rules for more important stuff that actually improves gameplay.  Like maybe suppressive fire or morale that actually does something?

Poor Jervis.  It seems like he wants to make a genuinely good game but his hands are tied due to all sorts of other considerations (eg, backwards compatibility, space marine chapter codices).

 

Posted By Hellfury on 04/06/2007 9:36 PM
In some ways we have Jervis' sperm finding its way through the uterus to thank for the better rumoured changes to 40K.

Tell Jervis to keep his stinky sperm off of my chaos space marines!!!