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I don't think it is too complicated. That said, it could certainly do with rules being consolidated, and I would love to apply STC (Society for Technical Communication) standards to the rulebook.

 Vaktathi wrote:
The problem is the level of detail, differentiation, and scale/special rules 40k has tried to pack in on the D6. D6's don't work so fine there, and is part of the reason why there's so much bloat in those respects, because a D6 just doesn't cut it when trying to portray that, particularly when 90% of things use just 2 or 3 values and 16% of results are auto-fails. Either the detail, scale, and differentiation need to be toned down, or greater granularity of results is required, or both.

That said, D20's are probably a bit much either way, D10's would probably be the ideal solution.

I hear ya, for sure. But I'd rather simplify the types of differentiation by cutting down on the special rules and sticking with the D6s than go with the D10s. I'll use the example of 4th Ed. which worked beautifully IMO, and still had everything on the D6, and way fewer special rules.

 agnosto wrote:

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 TheSilo wrote:
I think that's the biggest indictment against the current state. The game is so complicated that it's almost impossible to imagine two players agreeing on all the rules interpretations.

And that really takes the fun out of it altogether.

I have one fear though; simplifying the game might dilute the differences between all the different factions. But I think this can be avoided. Hell, if done correctly it could help diversify the game. It did so for AoS.

Exactly. One thing, basic troops don't necessarily need a whole raft of USRs to make them different, the stats and gear should do that for them. USRs should be applied to things outside of the troops section of the army.

The big question then becomes - Why bother taking them? - the same question we struggle with now, good formations put troops on the field but a lot of people don't like them.

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 TheSilo wrote:
I think that's the biggest indictment against the current state. The game is so complicated that it's almost impossible to imagine two players agreeing on all the rules interpretations.

And that really takes the fun out of it altogether.

I have one fear though; simplifying the game might dilute the differences between all the different factions. But I think this can be avoided. Hell, if done correctly it could help diversify the game. It did so for AoS.

Exactly. One thing, basic troops don't necessarily need a whole raft of USRs to make them different, the stats and gear should do that for them. USRs should be applied to things outside of the troops section of the army.

The big question then becomes - Why bother taking them? - the same question we struggle with now, good formations put troops on the field but a lot of people don't like them.

Go back to only Troops score.

Martel732 wrote:
D10's are exactly 10% on each increment. This gives us more dynamic range and easier math. I think D20s are overkill.

Whilst I agree, I can tell you from experience of playing lots of Void 1.1 that rolling handfuls of D10s is a major ballache.

Ruin wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
D10's are exactly 10% on each increment. This gives us more dynamic range and easier math. I think D20s are overkill.

Whilst I agree, I can tell you from experience of playing lots of Void 1.1 that rolling handfuls of D10s is a major ballache.

"Cocked Dice"

Outside of D6 the cocked dice rule becomes a major pain in the butt.
I use a biscuit tin with felt glued to the bottom, nothing to cock on but other dice and doesn't bounce far.

Never had those troubles with Bab5 Wars, but maybe.

pm713 wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 TheSilo wrote:
I think that's the biggest indictment against the current state. The game is so complicated that it's almost impossible to imagine two players agreeing on all the rules interpretations.

And that really takes the fun out of it altogether.

I have one fear though; simplifying the game might dilute the differences between all the different factions. But I think this can be avoided. Hell, if done correctly it could help diversify the game. It did so for AoS.

Exactly. One thing, basic troops don't necessarily need a whole raft of USRs to make them different, the stats and gear should do that for them. USRs should be applied to things outside of the troops section of the army.

The big question then becomes - Why bother taking them? - the same question we struggle with now, good formations put troops on the field but a lot of people don't like them.

Go back to only Troops score.

Just objectives or score at all?

I prefer troops being in good formations, myself. I think the current obj sec mechanic is fine.

Martel732 wrote:
D10's are exactly 10% on each increment. This gives us more dynamic range and easier math. I think D20s are overkill.

I would agree - Frostgrave uses D20's and we found it too random and too high a range of results, we switched to 2D10 but even then it can be a bit overpowering.

I like D6s best too, for all their limitations.

Here's a random thought; what if objective secured used the number of models to determine who controls an objective rather than just the unit as a whole? Like, it's whoever has the most models within x" inches of the objective controls it. The way I see it, hoard armies might become viable again because they can now win by using their sheer size to literally take the board. Meanwhile single or small number death star units become almost useless at it.

Would this be too complicated? I think it isn't simply because instead of needing to know the objective secured rule and any other rules like it in their formations etc, you could simply look at the board and say "well, I clearly have more models around the objective, therefore I currently control it".

I like some of the other ideas put forward here too. Like the pre measuring thing. It does slow things down. Also, contrary to what I just suggested with exact model numbers, I think a game like 40k does require a certain degree of abstraction.

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 TheSilo wrote:
I think that's the biggest indictment against the current state. The game is so complicated that it's almost impossible to imagine two players agreeing on all the rules interpretations.

And that really takes the fun out of it altogether.

I have one fear though; simplifying the game might dilute the differences between all the different factions. But I think this can be avoided. Hell, if done correctly it could help diversify the game. It did so for AoS.

I think this is an important point, balance is key. I would like to see a game design that focuses more on faction-specific mechanics (positive and negative), and less on the current "here are twelve faction-specific bits of wargear".

I think any effort to refine the game would also need to further develop the less utilized game mechanics like positioning and morale, to add new dimensions and tactical depth. Firing from an elevated position or at an enemy's flank should confer bonuses. 80% of units should not be immune to morale in the way that they currently are. Seeing a nearby squad wiped out should be unnerving and give players opportunities to destabilize the enemy line.

 Talizvar wrote:
I liked how a unit was more "the model" which makes for speed (5th edition).
Add a sergeant, special weapon, heavy weapon and away you go.
The Joe-troops act as hit-points and we do not get concerned with closest to closest or any of those other rules.
Individual model targeting rules work for skirmish, 40k kinda evolved out of that due to unit size and quantity.

How I would love for them to remove all that stupid IC tanking for unit insipid boring 2 rolls by 2 rolls (including one extra roll for LoS of course) bs...

That mechanic is pointless, utterly slow and against the fluff.
Why would an important character step in front of measly soldiers until he's on the verge of death?

I would like it to go the following way: normal troops die, special weapons die, sergeants die, ICs die.

And that's it. bucket of dice all the normal troops, special weapon and sergeant (because they have the same save usually), then bucket of dice the IC and feth those one-by-one rolls.
Let the game move on.

Plus, it prevents quite a few deathstars, which is an excellent thing.

Its not a fantastic game for people who don't get regular games like me, find myself reading a lot despite reading codexes and painting mostly since 2007

 Nubgan wrote:
Its not a fantastic game for people who don't get regular games like me, find myself reading a lot despite reading codexes and painting mostly since 2007

Yeah, due to family and work commitments, I'm only able to get a game in every once in a great while...maybe 3-4 times per year, lately it's gotten so convoluted with all the supplements that I don't know where to start in building an army list so I wind up just meeting some friends at a bar for board games and beer instead. Beer and pretzels this game is not.

@ agnosto

Yes, they've completely forgotten about the beer and pretzels. This isn't a jokey statement by the way. It's actually a very valid point. Nobody will play your game if it's a chore that you have to dedicate yourself to. It's supposed to be fun after all.

According to my magician buddy, d6s are also easier to trick throw with.

Martel732 wrote:
According to my magician buddy, d6s are also easier to trick throw with.

Aren't trick throws usually with 1 or 2 D6? I have never heard of someone trick throwing with 5 or 10!

There are a lot of individual D6 rolls in 40K, though. That's his concern

And that's why some deathstar tankers roll the dice one by one, getting staggering amounts of non-1 rolls.

Obviously this is heresy... but I've seen it enough times.

Actually they have to, so they can make informed LoS decisions. It just so happens that they can control the die throw as well.

morgoth wrote:

 Talizvar wrote:
I liked how a unit was more "the model" which makes for speed (5th edition).
Add a sergeant, special weapon, heavy weapon and away you go.
The Joe-troops act as hit-points and we do not get concerned with closest to closest or any of those other rules.
Individual model targeting rules work for skirmish, 40k kinda evolved out of that due to unit size and quantity.

How I would love for them to remove all that stupid IC tanking for unit insipid boring 2 rolls by 2 rolls (including one extra roll for LoS of course) bs...

That mechanic is pointless, utterly slow and against the fluff.
Why would an important character step in front of measly soldiers until he's on the verge of death?

I would like it to go the following way: normal troops die, special weapons die, sergeants die, ICs die.

And that's it. bucket of dice all the normal troops, special weapon and sergeant (because they have the same save usually), then bucket of dice the IC and feth those one-by-one rolls.
Let the game move on.

Plus, it prevents quite a few deathstars, which is an excellent thing.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. The 4th Ed. casualty removal (majority unit for toughness and armor, owner chooses casualties) was so much smoother.

It makes squad moving and placement easier (you don't have to worry about individual model placement as much), it makes shooting faster (fewer split-rolls for wound allocation), it stops the use of barrage weapons for sniping (owner chooses casualties) and makes assaulting easier (casualties can be taken from the back of the unit).

 Insectum7 wrote:

morgoth wrote:

 Talizvar wrote:
I liked how a unit was more "the model" which makes for speed (5th edition).
Add a sergeant, special weapon, heavy weapon and away you go.
The Joe-troops act as hit-points and we do not get concerned with closest to closest or any of those other rules.
Individual model targeting rules work for skirmish, 40k kinda evolved out of that due to unit size and quantity.

How I would love for them to remove all that stupid IC tanking for unit insipid boring 2 rolls by 2 rolls (including one extra roll for LoS of course) bs...

That mechanic is pointless, utterly slow and against the fluff.
Why would an important character step in front of measly soldiers until he's on the verge of death?

I would like it to go the following way: normal troops die, special weapons die, sergeants die, ICs die.

And that's it. bucket of dice all the normal troops, special weapon and sergeant (because they have the same save usually), then bucket of dice the IC and feth those one-by-one rolls.
Let the game move on.

Plus, it prevents quite a few deathstars, which is an excellent thing.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. The 4th Ed. casualty removal (majority unit for toughness and armor, owner chooses casualties) was so much smoother.

It makes squad moving and placement easier (you don't have to worry about individual model placement as much), it makes shooting faster (fewer split-rolls for wound allocation), it stops the use of barrage weapons for sniping (owner chooses casualties) and makes assaulting easier (casualties can be taken from the back of the unit).

This is exactly the point where my group started to split from GW. The 5th Ed. rules wedged in its stupid wound allocation nonsense, and even if one agreed with it in principle GW had the gall to say it was faster than 4th Ed. Now whether or not their 5th Ed system was better or not is debatable, but for them to say it was faster than just having the defender pick his casualties was a flagrant lie they repeated in their White Dwarf issues. So right then they were either flagrantly lying or just amazingly stupid (probably a combination of both) so we realized it was time to make rules for ourselves and get off the carnival ride.

Yes, my friend wanted for us to play 5th with some updates in case we wanted to play some new codexs, I cringed a bit but said OK.

I did a direct comparison of 7th edition and 5th with matching rules or ones that existed the other did not (excel spreadsheet with page number references).

7th I found had some GREAT rules that made a few things more fun (look out sir, snap-fire, precision shots) that little bit of detail 5th did not have BUT it is too much detail that hurts 7th.
I can honestly say I can appreciate a few really good rules in this BRB.

5th seemed more elegant for wound allocation, even using the vehicle rules seemed better, the less fussy 5th edition core mechanics allowed the more "characterful" rules of 7th to shine a bit. 5th also had some really smart rules put in it that I feel is a shame to have lost for change sake.

As a last touch to this "Frankenstein" we added Bolt Action activation.
The command dice are awesome to see what each unit did and what one activated, it is rather nice to not have the "I-go, you-go" first turn alpha-strike that 40k is known for.

Why say all this?

By using mainly GW rules that they made, I can mix and match a pretty good game (so it appears at this point) and be rather excited about it.
Why re-create the wheel?
They tried so hard to have some backwards compatibility so why not just make 8th edition a "greatest hits" of what came before?
Being neck-deep into this I can say it looks possible to make a smooth competitive game out of this.
All it would take is a smart game designer who is a master of copy/paste editing with some heavy emphasis on deleting things.

A greatest hits sounds great. It sounds like I need to go dig up my copies of 4th and 5th.

Just one question; would you guys be ok with sniper type weapons allowing the player to pick their own casualties rather than their opponent doing it? Would that slow things down too much?

 Future War Cultist wrote:
It sounds like I need to go dig up my copy of 4th ed.
Just one question; would you guys be ok with sniper type weapons allowing the player to pick their own casualties rather than their opponent doing it? Would that slow things down too much?

Ha! I believe the "precision shots" rule is the very reason for doing this.
It still is quite useful in 4th or 5th edition.
I would suggest you allow the "look out sir!" rule as well.
Since you do not want to make it too easy to take out characters.

There has to be some way for the defender to lose a special weapon or sergeant before the other dudes though. If that literally never happens, why give them a Leadership stat at all?

It seems silly to me that every battle in the 41st millennium is won by a group of sergeants milling about after literally everyone else has been killed.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
There has to be some way for the defender to lose a special weapon or sergeant before the other dudes though. If that literally never happens, why give them a Leadership stat at all?
It seems silly to me that every battle in the 41st millennium is won by a group of sergeants milling about after literally everyone else has been killed.

This is where I think someone mentioned 5th started down the road of complexity.
5th made it so you had to apply a wound to each model in the unit (for complex units) and then apply a second set... etc.
So then the saves were made in a pool for the generic guys and the Sgt and other special guys would have a save or two they had to make.
Say Orks manage to wound 20 times on some 10 Marines, you would apply to wounds for each model so the Sgt would have to make 2 saves.
I think 4th did not go that far.

 Talizvar wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
There has to be some way for the defender to lose a special weapon or sergeant before the other dudes though. If that literally never happens, why give them a Leadership stat at all?
It seems silly to me that every battle in the 41st millennium is won by a group of sergeants milling about after literally everyone else has been killed.

This is where I think someone mentioned 5th started down the road of complexity.
5th made it so you had to apply a wound to each model in the unit (for complex units) and then apply a second set... etc.
So then the saves were made in a pool for the generic guys and the Sgt and other special guys would have a save or two they had to make.
Say Orks manage to wound 20 times on some 10 Marines, you would apply to wounds for each model so the Sgt would have to make 2 saves.
I think 4th did not go that far.

4th had torrent of fire (or blows for HTH) so of those wounds the Orks caused on the marines they could allocate one of them to say, the Sgt with the power fist as they scored more wounds than there were squad members. Range and LOS could also be used to snipe special weapons/Sgt. out of squads as you could only remove casualties that were within range and LOS.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Whitebeard wrote:
They need to ditch the D6 and go to the D20.

Oh god no. D6s are cheap, common, easy to see results on from across the table, and I don't want to roll an "ork number" of D20s. D6s are fine.

The problem is the level of detail, differentiation, and scale/special rules 40k has tried to pack in on the D6. D6's don't work so fine there, and is part of the reason why there's so much bloat in those respects, because a D6 just doesn't cut it when trying to portray that, particularly when 90% of things use just 2 or 3 values and 16% of results are auto-fails. Either the detail, scale, and differentiation need to be toned down, or greater granularity of results is required, or both.

That said, D20's are probably a bit much either way, D10's would probably be the ideal solution.

Thing is you go to a D20 and suddenly you don't need to roll a bucket of them. have a look up table, the dice result is across the top, the number of 'actions' is down the side, roll the dice, check, oh look you have 'x' successes, be that hits or whatever. Yes you have a table, you now roll one dice, or one dice for every 1-20 weapons say, 25 units acting, roll two dice, one for 20 and one for 5.

Seen this in several historical games, it works well, you can easily add dice modifiers so the top scale can be larger than 1-20.

Different skill levels are just a dice modifier to make it so you get more successes or otherwise.

Reducing the number of dice rolled, while making the ones you do roll matter more also helps avoid simply crushing by the law of averages, and by removing the need for re-rolls on some dice but not others etc you can probably make the game a lot faster.

Heck you could even take advantage of the 'no splitting of fire' rule to combine everything a unit fires at a single target into one dice, more weapons is a + shift, a better target defence a - shift, that you have a delta gun is a further + shift etc - point it you will know when you create your army what the +/- shift a unit has at full strength and how it drops.

can't see it coming in GW love the D6, and love people rolling them by the bucket for some reason, if a unit has to act as one, why not have it roll as one?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

morgoth wrote:

leopard wrote:
If they are going to keep with the exploding number of supplements I seriously wish they would go back to something they have done before, and do it properly.

Drill the books, have a binding like a pad of paper (i.e. peals off) and sell ring binders with dividers. (codex Titanic, the Space Marine rulebook etc)

Now have a logical way of identifying sections, and number the rules - you buy you 'whatever' codex, the fluff bit goes in this folder, on a shelf, where it stays, the paint pictures go here where they also stay.

the units description pages go into that units section of the big army book of lists, or the part of it you take with you to use, any actual new rules are integrated into the rulebook - even if largely on a blank sheet of paper they go in the right place.

Instant updatable rulebook, write so there is whitespace on each page and your errata could actually be a collection of pages to print and swap out.

Plus gets so everything to do with a model moving is under 'M' (for example)

Or, you know, just free electronic format with indexes, search and all that. It's been more than a decade since the first kindle.

Would be all for a free downloadable pdf, searchable, indexed, cross linked version of the rules.. with modern authoring tools the cross linking should be pretty much automatic via whatever is making your index once you set the index up.

Just can't quite see it somehow, pity a ruleset that updates when a new supplement is put out would work, have the rules as a freebie, the books are for the fluff and artwork, good ones will sell, dross won't, cut a naff book won't hurt sales of decent models when the rules are free