I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
Hellebore wrote: I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
It comes from those who can't accept losing/missing/failing.
They can't deal with whatever the rule is during play so they try and convince everyone else to simply not use it.
Hellebore wrote: I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
I think the "feelsbads" came from situations that were derived from withheld information combined with a total lack of interactivity - if you don't let me know you have a unit that when your character has relic X in 6" and you use these 2 strats on it, you auto-delete my mvp unit and force me into a position I can't have a fair game - that's a feelsbad moment, it's not necessarily your opponent being an ass either, it might simply be that there's such complexity and unclear interactions that it makes it a one-sided game.
It's almost synonymous with gotcha moments, situations where it feels your opponent is doing something so out of kilter that you didn't know could happen, that it feels somewhere between unfair and somewhat like cheating.
I agree it's become overused however to the point it means "I don't like it", when initially it was used in the context of situations that describe negative play experiences.
Hellebore wrote: I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
Every other Master/Cpt in the game has a 0CP per stratagem rule per turn. For some reason it is once per game for my dude. All other armies kept their powerfists, chains fists, thunder hammers etc. My army lost its thunder hammers. For some reason when all other Masters/Cpts etc hit stuff on +2, my dudes somehow hit on +4. Every rules, weapon, datach sheet has the psychic trait. It has no internal synergies or bonuses, only handicaps from counter psychic rules from other armies. At the same time, there exists the eldar rule set. So it is not like GW doesn't know how to write powerful rules.
I think this is a very interesting topic and speaks to the heart of why people play wargames and the different expectations they have.
Firstly, I don't think there is much dissent around the idea that a mixed-capability list should have a reasonable chance of achieving mission objectives against any other mixed-capability list of equivalent power. This can be extended to asymmetric power if the objectives are crafted well. Generally, I think players want a good chance to be able to achieve something that feels worthwhile to them. The aforementioned "gotcha" scenarios violate this by being too complicated for casual players to parse, and therefore counter. They "feel bad" because they exploit a lack of ability to commit to learning complex rules interactions across all armies, and most casual players do not have that ability because of time constraints etc. Most are counterable if you know about them, but therein lies the problem.
Secondly, what an individual players wants from and assumes about wargaming varies. An example which springs to mind is target priority rules in 4th edition 40k- a unit had to pass a leadership test to target an enemy unit that was not the closest enemy (there is a little more nuance, but this is the gist). I really like this rule nowadays, but I recall someone on this forum stating that rules that prevent your units doing what you intend are bad. I acknowledge this viewpoint, but personally I like the idea of battles simulating an engagement, where units do not always do what you say. I didn't see it as any different to units ignoring commands to move into cover (rolling short on a difficult terrain test) or ignoring commands to hold position by failing a morale test. For me, these add flavour that needs to be mitigated. I think my Imperial Guard should be less coordinated if their officers are killed. For someone else, these interrupted their ability to execute their battleplan. They wanted to do things with their soldiers how they chose. For them, target priority was a feel bad rule. To use a chess example, few people fall for the Scholar's Mate twice!
I think the two ends of this spectrum are chess, where every unit behaves predictably to a defined set of rules, and military simulation wargames that try to add fog of war. An example of the latter being the naval wargames played by the Youtuber Drachinifel and their peers, in which the Battle of Jutland was refought. They went to the extent of not allowing the supreme commanders to directly see the battlefield with decisions made purely on information delivered by subordinates to facilitate fog of war effects. Now obviously this is quite an extreme example, but clearly some people enjoy simulation wargames to the point they are willing to not even watch the game directly!
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
Hellebore wrote: I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
It comes from this being a game more than a wargame. Feels bad = not fun, and if a game isn't fun, what's the point of playing?
The other side of it is, of course, that the internet doesn't lend itself to extensive and reasoned discourse. Shorthand happens, and being overly literal about interpreting it is a path to madness.
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
Do you have an example of such a feelbad mechanic? Because i 100% have had people say some things were feelbad yet they still had agency
VladimirHerzog wrote: Do you have an example of such a feelbad mechanic? Because i 100% have had people say some things were feelbad yet they still had agency
Interceptor in Heresy comes to mind. Basically nobody fields Flyers because it's trivially easy to get a free shot at incoming Reserves with every heavy weapon in your army.
VladimirHerzog wrote: Do you have an example of such a feelbad mechanic? Because i 100% have had people say some things were feelbad yet they still had agency
Interceptor in Heresy comes to mind. Basically nobody fields Flyers because it's trivially easy to get a free shot at incoming Reserves with every heavy weapon in your army.
That however is less of an issue with the interception reaction and has more to do with the fact that it basically is always nightfighting making an augury scanner which grants free unlimited " reaction of interception an must take to ignore the 24 " limit.
I probably play a little fast and loose with the term "feelsbad." Generally, I use it to mean something like...
"This mechanic creates results that reduce my ability to engage with the rules in a satisfying way; especially in cases where it feels like the rule is doing more to reduce my enjoyment than add to it."
* Flubbing a to-hit roll can be frustrating, but mechanics to randomize how effective a unit's attacks are add uncertainty to the game in a way that is well-worth those minor frustrations. Not a feels-bad.
* I used a djinn blade/daemon weapon/oldschool drukhari drugs to kick butt harder, and then I took damage as a result. That was a willing tactical choice. Not a feels-bad.
* Pre-nerf craftworlders using a bunch of fate dice to automatically hit/wound and thus inflict mortal wounds that bypass all your army's defenses and invalidating any defensive decisions you might have made? Feels bad. Because there's not much you can do to meaningfully engage with the situation.
* 7th edition tau having wargear to ignore LoS and cover, intercept deepstrikers, and overwatch your front lines to death so that your charge is harder? Feels bad because it shuts down the tactics that *should* be the interesting counterplay when facing a shooting army.
* An enemy beatstick unit being kind of overpowered for its points cost? Not fun, but not something I'd describe as "feels bad."
Edit: I'd maybe add on to that that rules that prevent you from using other rules you invested in are kind of feels bad. Imperial Fists ignoring cover in 8th edition was NOT a particularly strong chapter tactic, but it was still kind of a feels bad rule because it took away the interesting decision of using cover to make your units more durable, plus it negated any wargear/chapter tactic/etc. you may have taken that provided cover. Like, way to turn my venomthropes from an interesting support unit into merely an overpriced melee unit.
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
Do you have an example of such a feelbad mechanic? Because i 100% have had people say some things were feelbad yet they still had agency
Howabout unit you can't kill? Necron warriors is unit most units in game can't kill. Tyranids have pretty much no way short of insane dice rolls(sure you can hope opponent fail 20/20 4+ rolls...but whats the odds?) To actually kill it.
Of course reverse can sort of be true as well. So you have game where at the end armies were almost literally as they started...
Was it unwinnabie for either? No. But not much of interest. There was actually very little reason for us to put out models as secondary draws mattered more...
And don't consider game where only way 1 side avoids death is hide behind los blocking(the moment you move out you die without accomplishing anything) particularly interesting.
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
Do you have an example of such a feelbad mechanic? Because i 100% have had people say some things were feelbad yet they still had agency
Howabout unit you can't kill? Necron warriors is unit most units in game can't kill. Tyranids have pretty much no way short of insane dice rolls(sure you can hope opponent fail 20/20 4+ rolls...but whats the odds?) To actually kill it.
Of course reverse can sort of be true as well. So you have game where at the end armies were almost literally as they started...
Was it unwinnabie for either? No. But not much of interest. There was actually very little reason for us to put out models as secondary draws mattered more...
And don't consider game where only way 1 side avoids death is hide behind los blocking(the moment you move out you die without accomplishing anything) particularly interesting.
Necron units can be killed if you bring a decently choppy hero and use Epic challenge. What unit can't be killed in nids? (Genuinely don't know, havnt played against the, yet)
And even then, i'd argue that units being unkillable isnt a problem as long as they arent also able to project a ton of damage easily (which lychguards at least don't)
A lot of people in 5th ed. didn't want to use the wound allocation mechanics, or put more thought into close combat that forming a massive dogpile, because it might not be beneficial for them.
On the other end of the spectrum, having your Leman Russ pop out of existence because a nearby sergeant in the same melee accepted a challenge because 6th ed's challenge mechanics were jank, is pretty understandable.
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
Do you have an example of such a feelbad mechanic? Because i 100% have had people say some things were feelbad yet they still had agency
Howabout unit you can't kill? Necron warriors is unit most units in game can't kill. Tyranids have pretty much no way short of insane dice rolls(sure you can hope opponent fail 20/20 4+ rolls...but whats the odds?) To actually kill it.
Of course reverse can sort of be true as well. So you have game where at the end armies were almost literally as they started...
Was it unwinnabie for either? No. But not much of interest. There was actually very little reason for us to put out models as secondary draws mattered more...
And don't consider game where only way 1 side avoids death is hide behind los blocking(the moment you move out you die without accomplishing anything) particularly interesting.
Necron units can be killed if you bring a decently choppy hero and use Epic challenge. What unit can't be killed in nids? (Genuinely don't know, havnt played against the, yet)
And even then, i'd argue that units being unkillable isnt a problem as long as they arent also able to project a ton of damage easily (which lychguards at least don't)
Unit doesn't need hero to survive i couldn't kill them even without characters.
Nids he could kill...but they came back often benefitting ME that unit dies.
So we were in i can't kill him, he can't kill me fast enough i don't just come back. I didn't even bother rolling attacks anymore where i didn't have to.
Hellebore wrote: I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
Where is this conventional wisdom being expressed?
I am not aware of a wargaming dictionary that defines "feels bad", but to me a test of whether a moment is "feels bad" or not is whether or not both players who were acting in good faith feel that way. If someone feels bad after losing a game then, barring other information, its not a "feels bad" moment that we need to worry about. But there may be lots of other situations that are "feels bad" moments. A
A lop-sided victory could be a genuine "feels bad." Lets say the TO decided that he should ignore the Leviathan tourney pack and set up the board without any LOS blockers. The winner would likely be the one who won the dice roll to go first. The result would likely be a "feels bad" for both players, even the victor.
If one player is acting without information that they should have then the result can be a "feels bad." This can be the result of inexperience, but its a thing nonetheless. Just having things go wrong is not a "feels bad" to me. Let's say that my opponent moves his Hellblasters up and kills my centrepiece model with some hot rolls while supercharging. I might be unhappy with the result, but that wouldn't be a feels bad. He took a risk and was rewarded - its a dice game! I took a risk positioning my centrepiece model where it could be shot like that.
Let's say he fails to kill his target and then rolls all 1s for his Hazardous checks. He knew the risk and took it so its more likely to be a memorable and epic moment than a feels-bad. But let's say he Supercharges when shooting at my Deathwing Knights and then proceeds to lose over half his models to unlucky Hazardous checks. If he didn't know about my unit's innate damage reduction ability on its datacard when he made his decision then that could be a feels-bad moment. He would feel bad that he took a risk that could not give a reward, and I would feel bad about not asking him if he was sure when he declared that he was Supercharging.
I think that "feels bad" is related to somewhat but different from Negative Play Experience (NPE). Feels-bad moments tend to occur inadvertently through player interactions where perhaps there is incomplete information, while NPE is baked into the rules. Feels bad is experienced by both players (or maybe even just the winner) while NPE might only apply to one (the player on the receiving end).
A ten-man Desolator Squad firing indirect with old Oath of Moment full re-rolls was NPE. A Wraithknight leaf-blowing opposing armies off the board on Turn 1 through windows in the terrain was NPE for the receiving player. I suppose it could also be a "feels bad" for the Aeldari player but they likely went into the game hoping that would happen. Getting "Vected" is entry-level NPE. Having a melee unit fail a charge due to a Vanguard detachment unit moving out of range could also be NPE.
So NPE might be something we just have to "get over" and account for in our tactics while "feels bad" is something that we should work to avoid.
Unit doesn't need hero to survive i couldn't kill them even without characters.
Nids he could kill...but they came back often benefitting ME that unit dies.
So we were in i can't kill him, he can't kill me fast enough i don't just come back. I didn't even bother rolling attacks anymore where i didn't have to.
so you struggle with killing terminators then? Because thats pretty much what solo lychguards are, with 1-2 coming back per turn
To me feel bad is when it seemingly fails at creating either a good simulation or bring an interesting/enjoyable mechanic to life. Unfortunately often subjective to at least some extent.
Underpriced/OP units are most often the source, not by themselves, but because their rules or inclusion either makes the game flat out one sided to the point where gameplay becomes tiresome, or because they make no sense lore/simulation wise and therefore are harder to enjoy.
An example of this outside of 40k because list would be too long, in 1rst edition BA.
Rallying would not allow you to ignore pin markers and thus meant it could never fulfill the role it was supposed to have. Rule that fails to enrich gameplay, this felt bad.
Reconnaissance vehicules could make 2 moves thanks to strange escaped moves that were always possible, making them unfair and game breaking as you could more often than not never shoot at them. Feels bad because you could get your army steamrolled by a min maxed two armoured cars (though hellcats were the absolut worst at that game) with tactic passing away in the process. Plus the idea of sonic-ing their way at FTL speed across a WW2 bmnattlefield felt inconvenient.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: So NPE might be something we just have to "get over" and account for in our tactics while "feels bad" is something that we should work to avoid.
I agree with this sentiment though I don't know how commonly accepted these definitions are. The 8th/9th stratagem experience was conducive to 'feels bad' moments because it was impractical to memorize every stratagem, so getting blindsided was inevitable. The way the game was written (no secret information, assumed perfect game knowledge) didn't sync with how it was actually played, and the result was bad moments where you got screwed by that disconnect between the implicit expectation of the rules and the reality of the game.
However, I think the more common uses of 'feels bad' I see have more to do with randomness and what mechanisms are left up to chance. There is a tension between two extremes of game design- one extreme where you have full, precise, deterministic control over your army and dice are only used to resolve interactions with the opponent, and the opposite extreme where almost everything is affected by random chance and your job as a general is to manage the chaos as best you can.
Most modern wargames lean towards the former, but 40K leans especially hard in that direction, so mechanics where your units or abilities don't always work as intended may be dissatisfying for players who prefer games without that sort of unpredictability. They want games where if they lose it's because they feel like the opponent directly outplayed them, not because they rolled a 1 to cast a psychic power that needed a 3+. It's a matter of degrees, because we all accept that failing rolls is part of the game and something you have to plan around, but many players have strong personal expectations about what things they should have to roll for and what things they shouldn't, and failing a roll for something that they feel should be automatic is frequently expressed as 'feels bad'.
I only think it's fallacious if 'feels bad' is being expressed in this way as an objective criticism rather than a subjective dislike. Personally I enjoy games like AK-47 Republic- a game where you don't know which of your troops will even show up to the fight, let alone what they'll do when they get there- but most 40K players wouldn't, and that's completely fine.
I agree - there are no set definitions for these things.
I can understand people "feeling bad" when their dice abandon them, but I don't really worry about that too much. Failing a charge with an amazing melee unit which then gets shot off the board could be a "feels bad", but that's part of the game for me. Complete randomness is not something that I want, but I am OK with things not always going the way that I wanted. Counting on rolling a 3+ to activate an ability (common in AoS for instance) often leads to disappointment, but that door swings both ways. The player on the other end of the ability has a chance.
We should, as players, account for probabilities in our plans and have some levels of redundancy.
I can understand people "feeling bad" when their dice abandon them, but I don't really worry about that too much. Failing a charge with an amazing melee unit which then gets shot off the board could be a "feels bad", but that's part of the game for me. Complete randomness is not something that I want, but I am OK with things not always going the way that I wanted. Counting on rolling a 3+ to activate an ability (common in AoS for instance) often leads to disappointment, but that door swings both ways. The player on the other end of the ability has a chance.
We should, as players, account for probabilities in our plans and have some levels of redundancy.
I do tend to think of random charge distances as being a slightly "feels bad" rule. It's less of an issue in 9th and 10th as your opponent is generally meeting you in no man's land, but it can still stink. Like, you moved your melee unit forward, thus putting it at risk of enemy fire, then you charged, and instead of being rewarded for taking a melee unit and following the steps needed to deliver the unit, you roll snake eyes and thus accomplish nothing before having your unit blown away. And on the flip side, getting wrecked by a deepstriking unit that made a lucky charge roll without really having a chance to retaliate doesn't feel great either. (Although that's less of an issue thanks to screens, overwatch, etc.)
Basically, the random charge distance isn't there because that's the best way to decide whether a unit gets into melee. It's there because GW wanted to get rid of scatter dice (good call) -> which meant they changed how deepstriking worked -> which meant they needed a new way to determine how close you could get/whether you could charge that turn -> which lead to them deciding that *sometimes* you'll successfully charge out of deepstrike, but not always. Thus the 2d6 roll. The 2d6 roll is there to make it possible for units to pull off long-distance charges without giving everyone an absurdly long guaranteed charge range. I don't think the designers thought that sometimes failing a 4" charge would be good for the game.
I'm pretty sure random charge distance appeared before scatter dice were removed. I think random charges came in 6th and definitely by 7th, but scatter dice were removed in 8th.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: So NPE might be something we just have to "get over" and account for in our tactics while "feels bad" is something that we should work to avoid.
I agree with this sentiment though I don't know how commonly accepted these definitions are. The 8th/9th stratagem experience was conducive to 'feels bad' moments because it was impractical to memorize every stratagem, so getting blindsided was inevitable. The way the game was written (no secret information, assumed perfect game knowledge) didn't sync with how it was actually played, and the result was bad moments where you got screwed by that disconnect between the implicit expectation of the rules and the reality of the game.
However, I think the more common uses of 'feels bad' I see have more to do with randomness and what mechanisms are left up to chance. There is a tension between two extremes of game design- one extreme where you have full, precise, deterministic control over your army and dice are only used to resolve interactions with the opponent, and the opposite extreme where almost everything is affected by random chance and your job as a general is to manage the chaos as best you can.
Most modern wargames lean towards the former, but 40K leans especially hard in that direction, so mechanics where your units or abilities don't always work as intended may be dissatisfying for players who prefer games without that sort of unpredictability. They want games where if they lose it's because they feel like the opponent directly outplayed them, not because they rolled a 1 to cast a psychic power that needed a 3+. It's a matter of degrees, because we all accept that failing rolls is part of the game and something you have to plan around, but many players have strong personal expectations about what things they should have to roll for and what things they shouldn't, and failing a roll for something that they feel should be automatic is frequently expressed as 'feels bad'.
I only think it's fallacious if 'feels bad' is being expressed in this way as an objective criticism rather than a subjective dislike. Personally I enjoy games like AK-47 Republic- a game where you don't know which of your troops will even show up to the fight, let alone what they'll do when they get there- but most 40K players wouldn't, and that's completely fine.
You have more eloquently expressed much of what I was trying to say above. I agree with everything you have written here.
I can understand people "feeling bad" when their dice abandon them, but I don't really worry about that too much. Failing a charge with an amazing melee unit which then gets shot off the board could be a "feels bad", but that's part of the game for me. Complete randomness is not something that I want, but I am OK with things not always going the way that I wanted. Counting on rolling a 3+ to activate an ability (common in AoS for instance) often leads to disappointment, but that door swings both ways. The player on the other end of the ability has a chance.
We should, as players, account for probabilities in our plans and have some levels of redundancy.
I do tend to think of random charge distances as being a slightly "feels bad" rule. It's less of an issue in 9th and 10th as your opponent is generally meeting you in no man's land, but it can still stink. Like, you moved your melee unit forward, thus putting it at risk of enemy fire, then you charged, and instead of being rewarded for taking a melee unit and following the steps needed to deliver the unit, you roll snake eyes and thus accomplish nothing before having your unit blown away. And on the flip side, getting wrecked by a deepstriking unit that made a lucky charge roll without really having a chance to retaliate doesn't feel great either. (Although that's less of an issue thanks to screens, overwatch, etc.)
Basically, the random charge distance isn't there because that's the best way to decide whether a unit gets into melee. It's there because GW wanted to get rid of scatter dice (good call) -> which meant they changed how deepstriking worked -> which meant they needed a new way to determine how close you could get/whether you could charge that turn -> which lead to them deciding that *sometimes* you'll successfully charge out of deepstrike, but not always. Thus the 2d6 roll. The 2d6 roll is there to make it possible for units to pull off long-distance charges without giving everyone an absurdly long guaranteed charge range. I don't think the designers thought that sometimes failing a 4" charge would be good for the game.
An interesting theory, but they got rid of scatter dice 2 editions after the 2d6 charge roll was introduced.
I'm going the be honest, I think the only objective measure of a feels bad (as objective as something like this can be anyway) is when both the person preforming the action and the one on the other side feels bad about it.
For a personal example, stratagems. I hate stratagems, no loath them. I hate being on the receiving end of them, and I hate using them. I hate how they cannibalize wargear, I hate how you cannot deal with them besides lay there and take it, I hate all of it. I don't like heresy's reactions much either, but those at least you can plan around and mitigate. Stratagems are almost entirely uninteractable besides a handful of "make it 1CP more" abilities scattered across the games. I think stratagems are a feels bad for both parties, and I think at least a few people agree.
Hellebore wrote: I see this as an argument quite a lot - this or that rule or version of a rule is a 'feels bad' moment and shouldn't be used.
It's becoming almost synonymous with 'i personally don't like it'.
But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions. That you won't always have the best, most fun or effective unit/position/choices available?
Where did this conventional wisdom that a rule that 'feels bad' to use is unworthy of existence come from?
You're discussing wargames on the Internet, which means you're in a room full of people who operate from the assumption that the only possible way wargames can be fun is for them to be exact, perfect replicas of their personal idea of fun. To you, the thing that's wrong is the people complaining that the game isn't fun, because you think it is and therefore the other player's attitude is the only possible problem; to the people complaining about the rules feeling bad, however, the game isn't fun and therefore the problem is the game.
An interesting theory, but they got rid of scatter dice 2 editions after the 2d6 charge roll was introduced.
Did they? I could have sworn 6th and 7th edition were still using 6" charges. As I remember it, difficult terrain required you roll 2d6 take the highest to determine your charge range through dt, but that's not really the same thing. There was also fleet which generally let you run/advance 1d6" functionally giving you a d6+6" charge range.
An interesting theory, but they got rid of scatter dice 2 editions after the 2d6 charge roll was introduced.
Did they? I could have sworn 6th and 7th edition were still using 6" charges. As I remember it, difficult terrain required you roll 2d6 take the highest to determine your charge range through dt, but that's not really the same thing. There was also fleet which generally let you run/advance 1d6" functionally giving you a d6+6" charge range.
I'd add underpowered/overcosted/"not functioning as the lore describes" units as feelsbad too, though these feelsbad occur during listbuilding as you take a sad look at the profile and then don't include them in the list. It's why I never fielded howling banshees over multiple past editions, despite really wanting to*.
Or you go "how bad can it be?", field the UP unit anyway and get your "this unit sucks" expectations confirmed. Which is what I did with striking scorpions and lictors, for example :p
* they were supposed to be elite glass cannon-type power armor shredders, but they hit like a wet blanket.
You're discussing wargames on the Internet, which means you're in a room full of people who operate from the assumption that the only possible way wargames can be fun is for them to be exact, perfect replicas of their personal idea of fun. To you, the thing that's wrong is the people complaining that the game isn't fun, because you think it is and therefore the other player's attitude is the only possible problem; to the people complaining about the rules feeling bad, however, the game isn't fun and therefore the problem is the game.
I'm interested in what it means and why it's being used so much. There are without a doubt rules that work poorly, but 'feels bad ' is an appeal to emotion that seems to be conflated with poor rule design.
If I were to play the feels bad game, I'd say the entirety of 10th ed because it has had every rule that doesn't directly benefit space marines removed, until it's just tough smash save grrr. Without any real nuance.
I feel the "problem" with 40k and "feels bad moments/gotchas" is that its such a long game. Playing 2k points (including set up etc) in 2-2.5 hours requires both players to be focused on what they are doing. With two players who are enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon, it can easily take 4.
Losing a game - or being in a position where it feels the game is decided but you still need another hour to make sure - because you didn't know a stratagem, or that such and such a unit ignored regular rules, or just because you failed 3 charge rolls in a row, "feels bad".
But I think there's a doubling down effect here on why "gotchas" are an issue in 40k and not so much in other games despite being there. As the game takes so long, a lot of people just don't play very many. This in turn means it takes a long time to "learn" by playing alone.
When I look at almost any other game (miniatures, cards, RTS, Mobas etc etc) - odds are new players are going to "get got" over and over again. This can serve as a barrier to entry - as who likes losing their first 10 games? But if those games are relatively quick (especially because you are getting caught and defeated) you can just shake hands and go again. Not so much with 40k unless you can earmark entire weekends.
Its the gap we saw with 9th. I felt if you were constantly playing/watching/reading 40k then stratagems were not that complicated - and you learned the "go-to" combos of the various in form factions. By contrast, if you played once a month (which I'd argue is relatively frequent) you had little chance. I mean there's 20+ factions (and over 100 subfactions). If that was your only way of learning, odds are you were "getting got" every game for the entire edition.
Tyel wrote: I feel the "problem" with 40k and "feels bad moments/gotchas" is that its such a long game. Playing 2k points (including set up etc) in 2-2.5 hours requires both players to be focused on what they are doing. With two players who are enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon, it can easily take 4.
Losing a game - or being in a position where it feels the game is decided but you still need another hour to make sure - because you didn't know a stratagem, or that such and such a unit ignored regular rules, or just because you failed 3 charge rolls in a row, "feels bad".
But I think there's a doubling down effect here on why "gotchas" are an issue in 40k and not so much in other games despite being there. As the game takes so long, a lot of people just don't play very many. This in turn means it takes a long time to "learn" by playing alone.
When I look at almost any other game (miniatures, cards, RTS, Mobas etc etc) - odds are new players are going to "get got" over and over again. This can serve as a barrier to entry - as who likes losing their first 10 games? But if those games are relatively quick (especially because you are getting caught and defeated) you can just shake hands and go again. Not so much with 40k unless you can earmark entire weekends.
Its the gap we saw with 9th. I felt if you were constantly playing/watching/reading 40k then stratagems were not that complicated - and you learned the "go-to" combos of the various in form factions. By contrast, if you played once a month (which I'd argue is relatively frequent) you had little chance. I mean there's 20+ factions (and over 100 subfactions). If that was your only way of learning, odds are you were "getting got" every game for the entire edition.
As an example of the former, I was playing a game a couple of days ago, it was neck-and-neck, slightly in my favor as I had more OC on the board. And I was close to pulling it off too. Additionally, my opponent reminded my my sole surviving heavy weapons, a land raider, could spend a CP to swap to tactical doctrine, fall back, shoot, then charge the skorpekhs it had been engaged in, tying them up. He then overwatched me, destroyed my land raider, and he had complete control of half the board, boxing me into the left half of the board and taking away my chance to pull off the win. It was then i decided, once and for all, I'm done with 10th.
On the other hand, SW legion has a Gatcha mechanic as a core one, the order cards. Besides Standing orders, which is required, you have no idea what's in your opponents command card hand until it's played. However, because it's 1) a faster game, a 800pt gane still only takes about an hour and a half, 2) it's balance by more wide-spread or beneficial cards being lower priority, meaning your opponent gets the first move.
As opposed to stratagems which are almost purely beneficial, are almost impossible to stop or interact with, and have few ways for your opponent to counteract them
Or you go "how bad can it be?", field the UP unit anyway and get your "this unit sucks" expectations confirmed. Which is what I did with striking scorpions and lictors, for example :p
* they were supposed to be elite glass cannon-type power armor shredders, but they hit like a wet blanket.
You're not talking about them in 10th ed, right? Because both those units are pretty good right now
On the other hand, SW legion has a Gatcha mechanic as a core one, the order cards. Besides Standing orders, which is required, you have no idea what's in your opponents command card hand until it's played. However, because it's 1) a faster game, a 800pt gane still only takes about an hour and a half, 2) it's balance by more wide-spread or beneficial cards being lower priority, meaning your opponent gets the first move.
I mean, you both have the same amount of cards of every pip value, and you learn pretty quickly what will realisitically be brought by your opponent depending on which leaders/operatives they have in their list. (Like if you see Maul in the list, you can fully expect "At last" to be in your opponent's hand)
Or you go "how bad can it be?", field the UP unit anyway and get your "this unit sucks" expectations confirmed. Which is what I did with striking scorpions and lictors, for example :p
* they were supposed to be elite glass cannon-type power armor shredders, but they hit like a wet blanket.
You're not talking about them in 10th ed, right? Because both those units are pretty good right now
On the other hand, SW legion has a Gatcha mechanic as a core one, the order cards. Besides Standing orders, which is required, you have no idea what's in your opponents command card hand until it's played. However, because it's 1) a faster game, a 800pt gane still only takes about an hour and a half, 2) it's balance by more wide-spread or beneficial cards being lower priority, meaning your opponent gets the first move.
I mean, you both have the same amount of cards of every pip value, and you learn pretty quickly what will realisitically be brought by your opponent depending on which leaders/operatives they have in their list. (Like if you see Maul in the list, you can fully expect "At last" to be in your opponent's hand)
True, it's just the best example I can give with the games I play. Though I guess it can also be compared to strats in that, at least with 10th all stratagems your opponent can use are known. It's nearly 15+, but they are available.
True, it's just the best example I can give with the games I play. Though I guess it can also be compared to strats in that, at least with 10th all stratagems your opponent can use are known. It's nearly 15+, but they are available.
You only need to know 5-7 new strat per opponent right now, much better than 8th/9th (although i agree the game would be better without them)
There is a subtle but very important difference between a secret hand of order cards versus a sprawling set of stratagems that the game assumes you know.
Getting caught out by the former is being surprised by hidden information and is an intended part of the game. It might throw a wrench in your plans, it might deny you a close victory, but that element of surprise and uncertainty is deliberate on the part of the designer.
Getting caught out by the latter is being surprised by information that is not supposed to be hidden, and is an unintended result of the difficulty of learning and remembering all the potential stratagems in play. Losing because you forgot about a stratagem your opponent had all along is not fun, is not how the designer intended the game to be played, and is often described as a 'feels bad' situation.
At least it's better in 10th than it was in 8th/9th.
shortymcnostrill wrote: I'd add underpowered/overcosted/"not functioning as the lore describes" units as feelsbad too, though these feelsbad occur during listbuilding as you take a sad look at the profile and then don't include them in the list. It's why I never fielded howling banshees over multiple past editions, despite really wanting to*.
Or you go "how bad can it be?", field the UP unit anyway and get your "this unit sucks" expectations confirmed. Which is what I did with striking scorpions and lictors, for example :p
* they were supposed to be elite glass cannon-type power armor shredders, but they hit like a wet blanket.
That only works for over achiving armies like eldar. An 2000pts eldar list can take 500pts of banshees or scorpions, because the rest of the army is that good. It is much worse, when GW designes your rules to be bad, so you end up playing with what is more or less a tournament build. And you still often lose by virtue of match up alone. GW doesn't just do this unit is 5% weaker then it should be. They do stuff like Imperial Knights can not hold objectives realisticaly, have LoS blocked by everything, but everyone else can see them. Or in "tank" editions having armies that can't deal with tank, or score secondaries or hold objectives. It wouldn't be that if at least GW treated all armies the same, but it ain't the case.
Tyran wrote: 6" fixed charge also had its own issues, it basically requires pre-measuring to be banned and that introduced further issues.
What is the reasoning for this? I think not being allowed to pre-measure is a problem for new players, mostly. I remember in late 3rd or 4th that I was able to estimate the range for my Basilisk or Leman Russ within 1-2" of the actual target (which was usually the center of the enemy unit). I'm confident I could estimate 6" no problemo after some time getting used to.
Tyran wrote: 6" fixed charge also had its own issues, it basically requires pre-measuring to be banned and that introduced further issues.
What is the reasoning for this? I think not being allowed to pre-measure is a problem for new players, mostly. I remember in late 3rd or 4th that I was able to estimate the range for my Basilisk or Leman Russ within 1-2" of the actual target (which was usually the center of the enemy unit). I'm confident I could estimate 6" no problemo after some time getting used to.
yeah, no premeasuring is an artificial balancing point that in reality only means newer players (or people that don't work with measurement in real life) are at an unnecessary disadvantage.
Tyran wrote: 6" fixed charge also had its own issues, it basically requires pre-measuring to be banned and that introduced further issues.
What is the reasoning for this? I think not being allowed to pre-measure is a problem for new players, mostly. I remember in late 3rd or 4th that I was able to estimate the range for my Basilisk or Leman Russ within 1-2" of the actual target (which was usually the center of the enemy unit). I'm confident I could estimate 6" no problemo after some time getting used to.
The problem with 6" fixed charges is that it is very easy to avoid charges by simply placing your models Move+6.1+" away. Obviously it is even easier with pre-measuring but as you noted veteran players can usually do it just by eyeballing.
2D6, while unreliable, does mean you need to be Move+12.1+" away to be fully safe.
Add the generally increased movement of 8th+ editions and assault is usually more threatening (outside of cavalry and jump units that could already move 12").
Tyran wrote: 6" fixed charge also had its own issues, it basically requires pre-measuring to be banned and that introduced further issues.
What is the reasoning for this? I think not being allowed to pre-measure is a problem for new players, mostly. I remember in late 3rd or 4th that I was able to estimate the range for my Basilisk or Leman Russ within 1-2" of the actual target (which was usually the center of the enemy unit). I'm confident I could estimate 6" no problemo after some time getting used to.
The problem with 6" fixed charges is that it is very easy to avoid charges by simply placing your models Move+6.1+" away. Obviously it is even easier with pre-measuring but as you noted veteran players can usually do it just by eyeballing.
2D6, while unreliable, does mean you need to be Move+12.1+" away to be fully safe.
Add the generally increased movement of 8th+ editions and assault is usually more threatening (outside of cavalry and jump units that could already move 12").
I feel like this isn't much of an issue if reasons exist for holding ground (such as objectives) or sufficient penalties exist for most units if they move away. A unit being 12.1" away in 3rd lost rapid fire and couldn't shoot the enemy with rapid fire or heavy weapons if it moved. Armies were smaller so a unit losing firepower could be a big deal. You would also run out of board or move off objectives if you kept conceding ground.
Yeah, I suspect I'm mistaken because I didn't get enough games in at the time or something, but being able to reliably predict whether an enemy would be able to charge you never seemed all that game breaking to me. And it seems like it would be even less so now that backing up means giving up objectives.
Plus, Fleet always added a little unpredictability into the mix; it just also gave you a chance to change your plans if you rolled low rather than just making you fail a 3" charge because reasons.
I think the best example of a feels bad mechanic is armor saves and and improved squad leader armor you see in Horus heresy. Rolling one die at a time is not only painstaking but also can completely negate any shooting that isn’t overwhelming. Even more egregious though is the image of the squad leader dancing in front of shots like some sort of secret service member only to slink back in the moment any weapons can punch through his armor.
The other feels bad mechanics generally come from outcomes where one party wasn’t even aware of the possibility. With hundreds of strategems and now hundreds of unit specific rules and faction abilities it’s impossible for all but the most dedicated players to track everything. 40k doesn’t encourage a rule zero discussion like some games so it can leave to moments that wrong foot a player because it was an unknown unknown. It’s why generally it’s best to discuss what your army does and verify some actions with your opponent if they seem to be stumbling into an obvious bad play. Of course in a tournament all bets are off but in casual play there is a level of responsibility to explain your army to your opponent.
As an example of the former, I was playing a game a couple of days ago, it was neck-and-neck, slightly in my favor as I had more OC on the board. And I was close to pulling it off too. Additionally, my opponent reminded my my sole surviving heavy weapons, a land raider, could spend a CP to swap to tactical doctrine, fall back, shoot, then charge the skorpekhs it had been engaged in, tying them up. He then overwatched me, destroyed my land raider, and he had complete control of half the board, boxing me into the left half of the board and taking away my chance to pull off the win. It was then i decided, once and for all, I'm done with 10th.
On the other hand, SW legion has a Gatcha mechanic as a core one, the order cards. Besides Standing orders, which is required, you have no idea what's in your opponents command card hand until it's played. However, because it's 1) a faster game, a 800pt gane still only takes about an hour and a half, 2) it's balance by more wide-spread or beneficial cards being lower priority, meaning your opponent gets the first move.
As opposed to stratagems which are almost purely beneficial, are almost impossible to stop or interact with, and have few ways for your opponent to counteract them
I hope that you are aware that your Land Raider could have remained in Engagement Range of those Skorpekhs and still fired at them with its weapons? Vehicles (and monsters) have Big Guns Never Tire. You fire at -1, but you can target units in Engagement range of your vehicle (except with Blast). Its not a Stratagem, its just a rule that all vehicles and monsters have.
What weapons was your opponent using that were able to destroy a Land Raider with Overwatch? That is some hot rolling. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I wonder if your opponent was trying to lure you into fall/back/shoot/charge to allow him to use Overwatch when you didn't have to? That would be more than a "feels bad!"
As an example of the former, I was playing a game a couple of days ago, it was neck-and-neck, slightly in my favor as I had more OC on the board. And I was close to pulling it off too. Additionally, my opponent reminded my my sole surviving heavy weapons, a land raider, could spend a CP to swap to tactical doctrine, fall back, shoot, then charge the skorpekhs it had been engaged in, tying them up. He then overwatched me, destroyed my land raider, and he had complete control of half the board, boxing me into the left half of the board and taking away my chance to pull off the win. It was then i decided, once and for all, I'm done with 10th.
On the other hand, SW legion has a Gatcha mechanic as a core one, the order cards. Besides Standing orders, which is required, you have no idea what's in your opponents command card hand until it's played. However, because it's 1) a faster game, a 800pt gane still only takes about an hour and a half, 2) it's balance by more wide-spread or beneficial cards being lower priority, meaning your opponent gets the first move.
As opposed to stratagems which are almost purely beneficial, are almost impossible to stop or interact with, and have few ways for your opponent to counteract them
I hope that you are aware that your Land Raider could have remained in Engagement Range of those Skorpekhs and still fired at them with its weapons? Vehicles (and monsters) have Big Guns Never Tire. You fire at -1, but you can target units in Engagement range of your vehicle (except with Blast). Its not a Stratagem, its just a rule that all vehicles and monsters have.
What weapons was your opponent using that were able to destroy a Land Raider with Overwatch? That is some hot rolling. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I wonder if your opponent was trying to lure you into fall/back/shoot/charge to allow him to use Overwatch when you didn't have to? That would be more than a "feels bad!"
I'm aware, I wasn't trying to shoot the skorpekh, I was trying to soften up lychguard enough for my hammer termies to finish off the unit so they can't get up, then dominate the middle objective. As for what shot at me, it was a Doomstalker, and because the LR was already damaged, it only took 2 successful shots to kill it, and the thing is d6+1, hitting on 5s in OW.
I mean, he may have been, but I don't like to assume malice on a whim. It's not like this was a tourney, where there's an element of psychological warfare, this was a crusade game.
evil_kiwi_60 wrote: I think the best example of a feels bad mechanic is armor saves and and improved squad leader armor you see in Horus heresy. Rolling one die at a time is not only painstaking but also can completely negate any shooting that isn’t overwhelming. Even more egregious though is the image of the squad leader dancing in front of shots like some sort of secret service member only to slink back in the moment any weapons can punch through his armor.
The other feels bad mechanics generally come from outcomes where one party wasn’t even aware of the possibility. With hundreds of strategems and now hundreds of unit specific rules and faction abilities it’s impossible for all but the most dedicated players to track everything. 40k doesn’t encourage a rule zero discussion like some games so it can leave to moments that wrong foot a player because it was an unknown unknown. It’s why generally it’s best to discuss what your army does and verify some actions with your opponent if they seem to be stumbling into an obvious bad play. Of course in a tournament all bets are off but in casual play there is a level of responsibility to explain your army to your opponent.
this armour and hit allocation stuff breaks the immersion in the situation. would be a lot better to have all hits allocated prior to even rolling to wound, best AP goes against best armour then gradually down. no model gets a second hit until all have one
easier to have hits only on visible models etc. and then role individually, takes a bit longer, avoids a lot of issues though
Not sure I love the idea of plasma guns being able to reliably snipe out characters and squad leaders because they automatically home-in on the best save in the squad. Sort of turns good armor into a death trap, doesn't it? Also means potentially more wound tracking for multi-wound units.
That is one thing 10th did right. You shouldn't be allowed to allocate hits to characters until everyone else is dead (outside of precision hits of course).
The first example of 'feels bad' that comes to my mind isn't 40K, or even another tabletop wargame, but the boardgame Eldritch Horror. Hopefully I can use that as an example here without dragging things off-topic. I'll put it in spoiler tags so you can skip over it if you prefer.
Spoiler:
In Eldritch Horror (a Cthulhu Mythos game) each player has a character with various skills, e.g. Strength 3, Will 2, Observation 4.
During the game you can upgrade your character with 'improvement tokens' that add +1 or +2 to your skills. For instance, by going to Sydney and doing a week's hard manual labour, you might get a +1 improvement token to your Strength.
There are also a lot of effects that can downgrade your character, like falling and breaking your leg while exploring ancient ruins. Often for these downgrades you take a card like "Leg Injury" that tells you what the penalty is. "Cursed" for instance means you have to roll 6s rather than 5s or 6s to succeed at dice tests, making it twice as hard to achieve anything in the game until you find a way to lift the curse.
So far so good. All appropriately pulpy and flavourful.
Then an expansion to the game added impairment tokens, which are the opposite of improvement tokens: -1 to Strength, -2 to Will, and so on. For instance, if you get hit by a spell that magically ages you ten years, you might have to take a -1 Strength token to represent your enfeebled state. (Or cancel out a +1 Strength you already had.)
Mechanically this is simply the reverse of improvement tokens. It lets the game represent a larger variety of possible effects. The designer thought it made perfect sense to add them to the game.
But in practice, many players disliked or outright hated impairment tokens.
For some reason or other, it rubbed them the wrong way to reduce the stats of their characters. They weren't all that bothered by getting a card that says "you're cursed and now your dice rolls are harder" - it was frustrating but enjoyably thematic. But they did object to taking a token that gave them -1 Strength and pretty much did the same thing. It made them feel useless, like they couldn't do anything no matter how hard they tried.
It may also have been because players tended to grow attached to their characters and play them like RPG characters - slowly getting stronger and more experienced, collecting more and more items, and so on. That's not really how the game is 'meant' to be played. EH is actually easier to win if you treat your characters as expendable in humanity's fight against the eldritch horrors--if you're willing to sacrifice characters who are nearly dead or insane, in order to bring fresh, healthy investigators into the game.
But if you think of your character as a long-term improvement project over several hours of game time, getting impairment tokens feels like an unfair setback - like being sent back to square one.
The issue was exacerbated by several event cards that hit you with multiple impairments at once, instantly turning useful characters into borderline useless ones.
The game designer was taken aback by the 'feels bad' response of many players to what seemed like just another logical way to achieve the same gameplay effect.
Wyldhunt wrote: Not sure I love the idea of plasma guns being able to reliably snipe out characters and squad leaders because they automatically home-in on the best save in the squad. Sort of turns good armor into a death trap, doesn't it? Also means potentially more wound tracking for multi-wound units.
well that only happens if the one who is different also has a better save
Flames has a "mistaken target" rule as well, once all the hits are allocated (by the attacking player) the player controlling the victims can pick two models and on a 3+ swap the hits allocated, and can do that for as many model pairs as they like. this shuts down at 8" or less when it can no longer be done.
the wound tracking for multi wound units isn't that hard to deal with given they tend to be smaller units, plus being honest no "normal" infantry figure should be multi wound anyway as damage is always going to either be trivial and they can carry on or enough they cannot carry on
You're discussing wargames on the Internet, which means you're in a room full of people who operate from the assumption that the only possible way wargames can be fun is for them to be exact, perfect replicas of their personal idea of fun. To you, the thing that's wrong is the people complaining that the game isn't fun, because you think it is and therefore the other player's attitude is the only possible problem; to the people complaining about the rules feeling bad, however, the game isn't fun and therefore the problem is the game.
I'm interested in what it means and why it's being used so much. There are without a doubt rules that work poorly, but 'feels bad ' is an appeal to emotion that seems to be conflated with poor rule design.
If I were to play the feels bad game, I'd say the entirety of 10th ed because it has had every rule that doesn't directly benefit space marines removed, until it's just tough smash save grrr. Without any real nuance.
...I mean, it's a fuzzy term that means different things to different people, but in general I think it means "the things that happen on the table contradict what my intuition suggests should happen," e.g. "oh no I moved my airplane too close to enemy lines and it was brought down by...flamethrowers?", "...why are my Chaos Warriors losing melee to a unit of goblin archers?", "what's the point of running Knights at all if Space Marines with knives are a cost-effective way to kill them?", that kind of thing (examples from various editions).
If 10th feels bad to you because the Warhammer in your head isn't bad SM fanfic and 10th feels like bad SM fanfic, then "feels bad" is an accurate way to describe it, but you could definitely be more precise in your description if you wanted.
Wyldhunt wrote: Not sure I love the idea of plasma guns being able to reliably snipe out characters and squad leaders because they automatically home-in on the best save in the squad. Sort of turns good armor into a death trap, doesn't it? Also means potentially more wound tracking for multi-wound units.
well that only happens if the one who is different also has a better save
I feel like that's not very uncommon in 40k though. Off the top of my head, autarchs have better saves than the squads they can join. So do phoenix lords. I think DW can still mix termies into their squads. Pretty sure warbosses have better saves than boyz.Probably more, especially if you count invulns as better saves than armor saves. And the end result is still that the highest quality incomign shots automatically snipe out the models with the best saves (thus the models that are most likely to be expensive and that you're probably least happy about losing.) Like I said, in the event that your armor is better than that of your squad, your armor functionally makes you die faster. Which is counterintuitive and enough of a problem that I wouldn't be excited about switching to that system.
Flames has a "mistaken target" rule as well, once all the hits are allocated (by the attacking player) the player controlling the victims can pick two models and on a 3+ swap the hits allocated, and can do that for as many model pairs as they like. this shuts down at 8" or less when it can no longer be done.
In addition to being more complicated, it sounds like this is basically a rule to undo your heat-seeking plasma proposal above. So if we're adding extra rules to negate the proposed rules, I feel like there's probably a stronger alternative out there.
the wound tracking for multi wound units isn't that hard to deal with given they tend to be smaller units, plus being honest no "normal" infantry figure should be multi wound anyway as damage is always going to either be trivial and they can carry on or enough they cannot carry on
I mean, we've had enough threads about W2 marines to safely say that that opinion isn't universally supported. Switching back to a wound system where multiple models can be injured simultaneously wouldn't be the end of the world, but I do think the extra tracking it requires is still worth keeping in mind.
Hope none of that came off as overly harsh. Not trying to attack you over toy soldier rules.
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
pretty much this - I think one of the best examples is how scattering worked in earlier editions:
You target something with a template, and units covered were able to jink / take cover (?) before you roll to hit. If you miss the shot, it scatters in a randomized direction. Units that are now under the template were NOT allowed to try to evade that shell. You werent even allowed to just evade "in case the shell scatters onto my other dudes"
Considering that this was a) removing agency from the now-hit units and b) made absolutely no sense as this was mostly relevant for indirect fire - no "look at the barrel direction then take cover" at all - this was just a feels bad moment. they fixed this towards the end of 7th edition, but up until that everyone i know played it like that and complained about the awful rule.
Wyldhunt wrote: Not sure I love the idea of plasma guns being able to reliably snipe out characters and squad leaders because they automatically home-in on the best save in the squad. Sort of turns good armor into a death trap, doesn't it? Also means potentially more wound tracking for multi-wound units.
well that only happens if the one who is different also has a better save
I feel like that's not very uncommon in 40k though. Off the top of my head, autarchs have better saves than the squads they can join. So do phoenix lords. I think DW can still mix termies into their squads. Pretty sure warbosses have better saves than boyz.Probably more, especially if you count invulns as better saves than armor saves. And the end result is still that the highest quality incomign shots automatically snipe out the models with the best saves (thus the models that are most likely to be expensive and that you're probably least happy about losing.) Like I said, in the event that your armor is better than that of your squad, your armor functionally makes you die faster. Which is counterintuitive and enough of a problem that I wouldn't be excited about switching to that system.
Flames has a "mistaken target" rule as well, once all the hits are allocated (by the attacking player) the player controlling the victims can pick two models and on a 3+ swap the hits allocated, and can do that for as many model pairs as they like. this shuts down at 8" or less when it can no longer be done.
In addition to being more complicated, it sounds like this is basically a rule to undo your heat-seeking plasma proposal above. So if we're adding extra rules to negate the proposed rules, I feel like there's probably a stronger alternative out there.
the wound tracking for multi wound units isn't that hard to deal with given they tend to be smaller units, plus being honest no "normal" infantry figure should be multi wound anyway as damage is always going to either be trivial and they can carry on or enough they cannot carry on
I mean, we've had enough threads about W2 marines to safely say that that opinion isn't universally supported. Switching back to a wound system where multiple models can be injured simultaneously wouldn't be the end of the world, but I do think the extra tracking it requires is still worth keeping in mind.
Hope none of that came off as overly harsh. Not trying to attack you over toy soldier rules.
none of that is harsh, never mind overly harsh, just different ways to approach the same issue.
Flames v3 had the target unit player allocate hits, with IIRC four pages of illustrated rules on how to do it, priority etc, then various units that had special rules that mucked about with it.
in V4 they flipped it to the attacker allocates hits, largely however they want with just a few rules (can't allocate to stuff you can't see, and has to be below 16" before over it), then added the "mistaken target" swapping so unit leaders etc are harder to snipe out
has the advantage that done that way you more or less only bother when it matters, see also middle earth where technically each model fires at an individual, but its not uncommon for it to be "mix six archers shoot at your block of infantry" and let the target player work out who dies when it doesn't matter much
many ways to skin the cat then argue over whose fault it is you now have a cold, and angry, cat
Hellebore wrote: But surely a central theme of wargames is adapting tactics to deal with suboptimal conditions.
Which is why most feel bad rules are labelled that way because they deny agency to one or both players, no matter what the "LeArN 2 pLaY" drones want you to think.
pretty much this - I think one of the best examples is how scattering worked in earlier editions:
You target something with a template, and units covered were able to jink / take cover (?) before you roll to hit. If you miss the shot, it scatters in a randomized direction. Units that are now under the template were NOT allowed to try to evade that shell. You werent even allowed to just evade "in case the shell scatters onto my other dudes"
Considering that this was a) removing agency from the now-hit units and b) made absolutely no sense as this was mostly relevant for indirect fire - no "look at the barrel direction then take cover" at all - this was just a feels bad moment. they fixed this towards the end of 7th edition, but up until that everyone i know played it like that and complained about the awful rule.
worst bit with templates is how so few would roll the flipping scatter die close to the template and all the resulting arguments over the angle
especially given there is a seriously easy solution, print a clock face on the template, the "12" position goes directly at the firing unit, now roll a D12...
leopard wrote: worst bit with templates is how so few would roll the flipping scatter die close to the template and all the resulting arguments over the angle
especially given there is a seriously easy solution, print a clock face on the template, the "12" position goes directly at the firing unit, now roll a D12...
but that wouldn't use the holy d6STC, so it's clearly not a viable solution!
leopard wrote: worst bit with templates is how so few would roll the flipping scatter die close to the template and all the resulting arguments over the angle
especially given there is a seriously easy solution, print a clock face on the template, the "12" position goes directly at the firing unit, now roll a D12...
but that wouldn't use the holy d6STC, so it's clearly not a viable solution!
IIRC the 1st Edition of Space Marine had printed card templates that did the same with a D6
of course these days it would have to be a custom D13 or D5 with a chance to have a "FUN" misfire or similar
Games almost always have just 2 test conditions, pass and fail. Regardless what dice you are using, you're only looking for a pass or fail.
IMO larger dice are used to make people feel like there's greater depth than there actually is.
larger dice offer more granularity. Having a D12 as the hit roll would allow profiles to be more diverse as BS could range from 2 to 12, and would reduce the impact of modifiers, also allowing them to be more diverse - e.g. dense woods give +2, light woods +1. Not having that range is the primary negative of sticking to D6. And Rihgu pointed out another consequence - you have more space for degrees of success, and while it doesn't make sense for every system and every kind of roll, it is added design space that could be used.
Games almost always have just 2 test conditions, pass and fail. Regardless what dice you are using, you're only looking for a pass or fail.
IMO larger dice are used to make people feel like there's greater depth than there actually is.
larger dice offer more granularity. Having a D12 as the hit roll would allow profiles to be more diverse as BS could range from 2 to 12, and would reduce the impact of modifiers, also allowing them to be more diverse - e.g. dense woods give +2, light woods +1. Not having that range is the primary negative of sticking to D6. And Rihgu pointed out another consequence - you have more space for degrees of success, and while it doesn't make sense for every system and every kind of roll, it is added design space that could be used.
In practice it doesn't work. An 8% chance to succeed is so small that in a wargame it becomes a waste of time.
Just because you technically have more granularity doesn't mean it provides a practical use.
Games almost always have just 2 test conditions, pass and fail. Regardless what dice you are using, you're only looking for a pass or fail.
IMO larger dice are used to make people feel like there's greater depth than there actually is.
larger dice offer more granularity. Having a D12 as the hit roll would allow profiles to be more diverse as BS could range from 2 to 12, and would reduce the impact of modifiers, also allowing them to be more diverse - e.g. dense woods give +2, light woods +1. Not having that range is the primary negative of sticking to D6. And Rihgu pointed out another consequence - you have more space for degrees of success, and while it doesn't make sense for every system and every kind of roll, it is added design space that could be used.
In practice it doesn't work. An 8% chance to succeed is so small that in a wargame it becomes a waste of time.
Just because you technically have more granularity doesn't mean it provides a practical use.
It does make a meaningful difference but more importantly it allows for things like dice rolls modifiers without everything becoming completely out of wack. See the stacking minus go hit modifiers in 8th where Eldar became impossible to hit for Orks or how cover adding to armor saves ends up with MEQs having double the effective durability due to going from 3+ to 2+ armor compared to (again Orks) going from a 6+ to a 5+ save being a vastly smaller increase in durability.
Modern 40k has to have all these limits cludged onto the modifiers (can only result in a +1, can't have a save go above 3+ from cover, stuff like that) because of how only having 6 faces on a die makes it difficult to have modifiers not become highly problematic.
One way to add more granularity is with stacking rolls such as if you have your armor save and then you got another roll afterwards for cover (like with Feel No Pain). A Marine getting a 3+ save and a sort of 5+ cover save on top would decrease casualties by 33% instead of going from a 3+ to a 2+ which results in 50% casualty reduction while the same thing for an Ork boy with a 6+ save and 5+ cover still gets a 33% casualty reduction from a 5+ cover save even if the armor save is still just a lousy 6+ armor save. Thing is that GW is scared to having more dice rolls and would rather throw out it's cake and eat it neither.
BTW stuff like the old "all or nothing" AP system was better suited for a d6 system 40k uses instead trying to make +/- modifiers work.
Games almost always have just 2 test conditions, pass and fail. Regardless what dice you are using, you're only looking for a pass or fail.
IMO larger dice are used to make people feel like there's greater depth than there actually is.
larger dice offer more granularity. Having a D12 as the hit roll would allow profiles to be more diverse as BS could range from 2 to 12, and would reduce the impact of modifiers, also allowing them to be more diverse - e.g. dense woods give +2, light woods +1. Not having that range is the primary negative of sticking to D6. And Rihgu pointed out another consequence - you have more space for degrees of success, and while it doesn't make sense for every system and every kind of roll, it is added design space that could be used.
In practice it doesn't work. An 8% chance to succeed is so small that in a wargame it becomes a waste of time.
Just because you technically have more granularity doesn't mean it provides a practical use.
Pretty much, units not hitting on a 4+ on a d12 would likely be considered "bad" and that's what people would be wanting all the time.
nekooni wrote: larger dice offer more granularity. Having a D12 as the hit roll would allow profiles to be more diverse as BS could range from 2 to 12, and would reduce the impact of modifiers, also allowing them to be more diverse - e.g. dense woods give +2, light woods +1. Not having that range is the primary negative of sticking to D6. And Rihgu pointed out another consequence - you have more space for degrees of success, and while it doesn't make sense for every system and every kind of roll, it is added design space that could be used.
I will never accept that the thing 40K needs is more granularity when it A. doesn't have mechanics or modifiers for really obvious things like target size, evasion, or range, and B. already involves rolling way more dice than comparable systems with multiple redundant checks that provide individual levers for adjustment. Switching to bigger dice would be a kludge for bad mechanics.
The whole reason Eldar stacking negative to-hit penalties broke the game was because there was absolutely nothing you could do about it, no way to accrue bonuses in your favor to offset the penalties, and the to-hit mechanic the game uses is a coarse system not designed to elegantly handle modifiers. They could make to-hit an opposed check like Strength vs Toughness currently is and then they'd have plenty of scope for adjusting BS, representing size/evasion as a new stat, and stacking bonuses and penalties without immediately veering into auto-success and auto-fail. There are other ways to handle it, that's just one example of a system that already exists within 40K.
Hitting 8% more often than the other guy is not a particularly impactful, relevant, meaningful level of granularity for this scale of wargame. The issue isn't insufficient granularity, it's inability to handle modifiers. Switching to larger dice while keeping the mechanics intact would just reduce the impact of modifiers to conceal the underlying problems. Rolling a D6 like five times to resolve a basic attack already affords plenty of design space, they just need to use it better.
Handling modifiers can be an issue - but I feel the core problem is that "stats" is a quasi-RP effect that doesn't actually matter to the game. (The fact people get upset that Meltas wound on 4s and 5s versus 3s and 4s indicates this - but doesn't matter that much.)
Because these stats just produce formulas. Stripped of the RP, 100 points of stuff has to roughly equal 100 points of other stuff for the game to be balanced.
So you can have a unit which hits on 2s and wounds on 2s. And you can have a unit which hits on 5s and wounds on 5s. But if they are the same points, they need to do roughly the same amount of damage. With some allowance for units being faster, tougher or having other benefits etc etc.
So we end up with 5/6*5/6*Sv*X Attacks=K wounds vs 1/3*1/3*Sv*Y Attacks=K wounds. The second unit can't "be worse" - it just ends up having to roll KFC buckets of dice to make up the difference. If it is just worse, then you have imbalance and no one should take said unit.
A D12 system where Marines are BS3+, Eldar are 4+, Necrons are 5+ etc wouldn't change anything as you then have to reverse engineer it backwards so the shooting units are respectively useful. In the system its just noise.
You could completely re-write 40k - which I think is where the suggestions of various active threads get you to. But 40k being a 5 turn IGOUGO system where damage output isn't hugely impacted by board-state circumstances like terrain, psychology or pin markers etc (as against special rules, stratagems etc) makes far more difference than it being D6 rather than D12 or D100.
going to a D12 is the same in effect as a D6 with "+/- 0.5" modifiers allowed
also its a circular arguement that its not needed as the level of granularity isn't there in the rules, when its not there because a D6 doesn't allow it, a D12 wouldn't be perfect but it would be good.
However GW won't move from a d6 so it hardly matters that there are a whole slew of alternative ways to do the same thing, all with pros & cons
The biggest issue (in this context) GW and any game has, is when you use the X+ value of the dice directly as a stat. THAT more than anything else is what limits your range. Of course a D6 looks crap when your BS options are 2+, 3+, 4+,. 5+ and maybe 6+. 4 options is not a lot.
But when those 4 values are measures of success rather than literal stats, the issue disappears. People might consider a comparison chart old fashioned, but it created an endless spread by using relative differences to generate a % chance of success, rather than a static, 'you are always 66% good'.
I will always prefer a relative value over a static one for this reason. And because it scales between better units.
leopard wrote:going to a D12 is the same in effect as a D6 with "+/- 0.5" modifiers allowed
also its a circular arguement that its not needed as the level of granularity isn't there in the rules, when its not there because a D6 doesn't allow it, a D12 wouldn't be perfect but it would be good.
However GW won't move from a d6 so it hardly matters that there are a whole slew of alternative ways to do the same thing, all with pros & cons
There's a hypothetical version of 40k that uses d12s, lots of modifiers, and works well. But you would really have to pack in lots of easy, intuitive access to to-hit modifiers for it to matter. I'm picturing bringing in things like +1 to hit when you hold still, -1 to hit a target that advanced, -1 to hit targets beyond X" away unless your weapon has a 'long-ranged" rule, +1 to hit when cross-firing, etc. I think that game could be fun, but I also think you'd be looking at a very large rework to make all those sources of modifiers play well and not just feel like too much to remember.
Hellebore wrote:The biggest issue (in this context) GW and any game has, is when you use the X+ value of the dice directly as a stat. THAT more than anything else is what limits your range. Of course a D6 looks crap when your BS options are 2+, 3+, 4+,. 5+ and maybe 6+. 4 options is not a lot.
But when those 4 values are measures of success rather than literal stats, the issue disappears. People might consider a comparison chart old fashioned, but it created an endless spread by using relative differences to generate a % chance of success, rather than a static, 'you are always 66% good'.
I will always prefer a relative value over a static one for this reason. And because it scales between better units.
Stat comparisons have a lot of merit, but things like the S-vs-T chart we currently have and the WS-vs-WS chart of yester-year did have a couple weird quirks of their own. Mainly that, in those charts, you can increase a stat without it mattering. For instance, going from Strength 4 to 5 in10th edition is great when you're playing against marines or orks, but if you're facing guardsmen, almost nothing in their codex cares about the extra pip of strength. So if you invested in +1 strength as a subfaction choice or have it baked in as an army rule or whatever, you've functionally wasted your subfaction choice or wasted however many points they upcharged your unit for having that ability baked in.
GW's stat comparisons are problematic because they want big numbers.
Their comparison rules are based on 1-10 scale rules and changed the comparison to require doubling to work then tacked on 10+ stats, thereby expanding the required numbers to make it valuable and also undervaluing numbers at the same time.
If you're designing the game to have +1S as an option, then you should also be scaling its cost based on its relative value, which is less now the game requires a logarithmic relationship to change pips.
IMO they should have just shifted all stats down 1 and stayed in a 1-10.
Grots and ratlings S/T`1, humans S/T2, marines 3 etc.
have s vs t go
= 4+
< by1 5+
< by2 6+
< by3 6+ +1 save
< by4+ 6+ +2 save
< by5+ impossible
or
= 4+
> by1 3+
> by2 2+
> by3 auto
> by4+ auto +1 damage
or something like that.
No infantry should be higher than T5 and anything T6 or more is a vehicle.
T1 - grot
T2 - human
T3 - marine
T4 - warboss
T5 - ? special uber things
They stupidly went up instead of going back to the bottom of the stat profile, and IMO they did that because they were coming off the back of Instant Death, so T1 and 2 were terrible because of the logarithm.
remove that, use T1, go back to 1 damage, only increase damage if its from high strength weapons or special rules and keep everything under 10.
people need to get doubling out of their heads, it added more problems than it solved. ID looked like someone's clever idea they couldn't let go of.
just having a special rule applied to attacks that did 2 damage instead of ID would have avoided a lot of mechanics issues.
The current game has set itself up to forever chase the logarithm...
Yeah. I think I pretty much agree with all that, Hellebore.
I know there were a lot of people pushing in 8th/9th to use stats above 10 more often, but the end goal there was basically just to let some weapons wound rhinos on 2s and land raiders on 3s.
Condensing the stats probably gets you the same result without creating the weird "gaps" where an extra pip of strength or whatever doesn't matter.
Removing always fails on 1s and always succeed on 6s would increase the available results based on stats from 4x4 =16 to 6x6 = 36. That is more than doubling it without having to change the type of dice we use or completely changing every stat and modifier in the game.
H.B.M.C. wrote: I don't think it would be as big a problem if it were possible to be in a situation where your attacks were simply incapable of wounding something.
^^^^ this
there is no way an infantry side arm, laspistol or similar should be able to harm a knight, or even a decent tank. if it could there basically would be no tanks/knights as they wouldn't last long enough to be worthwhile.
I wondered some years back on a D12 based system, numbers 0-9 to use as if it were a D10 thats nicer to roll, but then with a "Critical Success" and "Critical Failure" side - the intention was to roll them in pairs as a D100 to reflect an entire unit - one "fail" side and you missed, two being an actual critical failure, same with success
then some weapons on a success yes they hit, but short of a critical did nothing (aka sidearms v a tank), others would get a critical on one success depending on the target, or other task
a way to have that rare fluke happening something other than one time in six
Hellebore wrote: GW's stat comparisons are problematic because they want big numbers.
Their comparison rules are based on 1-10 scale rules and changed the comparison to require doubling to work then tacked on 10+ stats, thereby expanding the required numbers to make it valuable and also undervaluing numbers at the same time.
If you're designing the game to have +1S as an option, then you should also be scaling its cost based on its relative value, which is less now the game requires a logarithmic relationship to change pips.
IMO they should have just shifted all stats down 1 and stayed in a 1-10.
Grots and ratlings S/T`1, humans S/T2, marines 3 etc.
have s vs t go
= 4+
< by1 5+
< by2 6+
< by3 6+ +1 save
< by4+ 6+ +2 save
< by5+ impossible
or
= 4+
> by1 3+
> by2 2+
> by3 auto
> by4+ auto +1 damage
or something like that.
No infantry should be higher than T5 and anything T6 or more is a vehicle.
T1 - grot
T2 - human
T3 - marine
T4 - warboss
T5 - ? special uber things
They stupidly went up instead of going back to the bottom of the stat profile, and IMO they did that because they were coming off the back of Instant Death, so T1 and 2 were terrible because of the logarithm.
remove that, use T1, go back to 1 damage, only increase damage if its from high strength weapons or special rules and keep everything under 10.
people need to get doubling out of their heads, it added more problems than it solved. ID looked like someone's clever idea they couldn't let go of.
just having a special rule applied to attacks that did 2 damage instead of ID would have avoided a lot of mechanics issues.
The current game has set itself up to forever chase the logarithm...
Actually I think they didnt go far enough. Vehicles/Tanks should have gone up even higher, the weapons designed to attack them as well - which would then get a negative to hit anything smaller than a vehicle/monster. So Land Raiders are T20, Lascannon are S20 and only hit Infantry/Mounted etc on "Overwatch" level accuracy.
Actually I think they didnt go far enough. Vehicles/Tanks should have gone up even higher, the weapons designed to attack them as well - which would then get a negative to hit anything smaller than a vehicle/monster. So Land Raiders are T20, Lascannon are S20 and only hit Infantry/Mounted etc on "Overwatch" level accuracy.
Wouldn't that just make land raiders really non-interactive for most of your opponent's army? Plus, making it so that anti-tank weapons can't really interact with anything except tanks. So you go from having weapons that are various levels of efficient against a variety to basically making them all but unusable if you face, say, a horde army. Not to mention it seems a little unfluffy for something like a meltagun to be so inaccurate against a living target. (Assuming meltaguns are still anti-tank in this scenario.)
Also, would everything still wound on 6s in this scenario? If so, you end up weirdly incentivizing people to deal with land raiders with lasguns rather than, say, battle cannons. If not, then you're really doubling down on the non-interactivity by making most of the weapons in the game literally unable to damage the land raider.
nekooni wrote: larger dice offer more granularity. Having a D12 as the hit roll would allow profiles to be more diverse as BS could range from 2 to 12, and would reduce the impact of modifiers, also allowing them to be more diverse - e.g. dense woods give +2, light woods +1. Not having that range is the primary negative of sticking to D6. And Rihgu pointed out another consequence - you have more space for degrees of success, and while it doesn't make sense for every system and every kind of roll, it is added design space that could be used.
I will never accept that the thing 40K needs is more granularity when it A. doesn't have mechanics or modifiers for really obvious things like target size, evasion, or range, and B. already involves rolling way more dice than comparable systems with multiple redundant checks that provide individual levers for adjustment. Switching to bigger dice would be a kludge for bad mechanics.
In 40k we dont have these "obvious" modifiers because the design space on a D6 is so small, so we don't want to go to a D12 where it would be possible, because we don't have these modifiers right now? Is that what you're trying to say? I'm a bit confused to be honest.
Hitting 8% more often than the other guy is not a particularly impactful, relevant, meaningful level of granularity for this scale of wargame. The issue isn't insufficient granularity, it's inability to handle modifiers. Switching to larger dice while keeping the mechanics intact would just reduce the impact of modifiers to conceal the underlying problems. Rolling a D6 like five times to resolve a basic attack already affords plenty of design space, they just need to use it better.
Yeah, hitting 8% more often is exactly half as impactful as hitting 16% more, that's true. And again - having a D12 would allow for more diverse modifiers without immediately running out of "space" and having to rely on caps like "cannot be modified by more than +1/-1". The 'impactful' steps are still possible by simply giving a +2 modifier.
Actually I think they didnt go far enough. Vehicles/Tanks should have gone up even higher, the weapons designed to attack them as well - which would then get a negative to hit anything smaller than a vehicle/monster. So Land Raiders are T20, Lascannon are S20 and only hit Infantry/Mounted etc on "Overwatch" level accuracy.
Wouldn't that just make land raiders really non-interactive for most of your opponent's army? Plus, making it so that anti-tank weapons can't really interact with anything except tanks. So you go from having weapons that are various levels of efficient against a variety to basically making them all but unusable if you face, say, a horde army. Not to mention it seems a little unfluffy for something like a meltagun to be so inaccurate against a living target. (Assuming meltaguns are still anti-tank in this scenario.)
Also, would everything still wound on 6s in this scenario? If so, you end up weirdly incentivizing people to deal with land raiders with lasguns rather than, say, battle cannons. If not, then you're really doubling down on the non-interactivity by making most of the weapons in the game literally unable to damage the land raider.
I feel like I'm missing something here?
Looking at your questions I'd guess the main thing you're missing is that not only am I OK with Land Raiders "Non-interactive" if my opponent doesn't take anti-tank, I'm in favor of it. That said I think most infantry - especially "Battle Line" level stuff (Not necessarily down the line, but its a start for the ballpark) should have some sort of close range high danger option for anti-tank. Likewise I want anti-tank weapons to be fairly "non-interactive" with non-tanks. I don't want people rhino sniping - or whatever the gimmick of the week is - characters with a lascannon. There should be some weapons that are distinctly anti-infantry, some that are distinctly anti-tank, and some hybrid that will cover heavy infantry and/or light vehicles well and can be stretched to tanks in a pinch. I'm not a fan of all-purpose super-guns that can be used on almost everything.
For not interactivity to work we need more strick army restrictions, you cannot have an entire army be entirely non-interactive with most common weapons and units.
That also means that the issue isn't really Land Raiders, but transports. A Land Raider being non-interactive to most weapons make sense, a Rhino doesn't.
Also lore wise, a dedicated Tank should be in an entirely different weight class from an APC in terms of resilience.
Tyran wrote: For not interactivity to work we need more strick army restrictions, you cannot have an entire army be entirely non-interactive with most common weapons and units.
That also means that the issue isn't really Land Raiders, but transports. A Land Raider being non-interactive to most weapons make sense, a Rhino doesn't.
Also lore wise, a dedicated Tank should be in an entirely different weight class from an APC in terms of resilience.
I liked vehicles being immune to weaker weapons in old editions too, and you definitely need to restrict how many of those you can take. In fact, I think I'd like it if the rules dissuade skew armies in general. Having your army trampled by an all-infantry horde is just as fun as having your army's attacks bounce off of a tank column's armour. Those rock/paper/scissors matches that are won or lost in the listbuilding phase are definite feelsbad experiences.
But I don't think you can meaningfully restrict skew/spam without essentially deleting knights as a faction, and I don't see gw doing that.
I've once tried AoS. The most feels bad rule was some high elf character, that could force your hero to attack him. But he would often be put outside of reach. So you have to fight him - you can't fight him, because you can't reach - you can't fight anything else. THAT was feelsbad.
Tyran wrote: For not interactivity to work we need more strick army restrictions, you cannot have an entire army be entirely non-interactive with most common weapons and units.
That also means that the issue isn't really Land Raiders, but transports. A Land Raider being non-interactive to most weapons make sense, a Rhino doesn't.
Also lore wise, a dedicated Tank should be in an entirely different weight class from an APC in terms of resilience.
This did used to be the case. Most APCs could be damaged or even destroyed by the majority of small arms or anti-personnel weapons with sufficient weight-of-fire, although the attacking troops might have to manoeuvre to hit side or rear armour. Even full tanks were generally vulnerable to the same on rear armour. The Land Raider and Monolith were unusual in having no weak sides, but they were also very expensive.
On the other hand, most tanks ignored the majority of anti-personnel weaponry to their front and side facings. Weaponry suited to targeting light vehicles might be able to damage with difficulty. A Land Raider ignored all weapons of S7 and below, but for the aformentioned high cost.
Personally I think this worked, especially when it was fairly easy to have a smattering of grenades around that would give a tank a bad day if it had to hold ground close to enemies.
Tyran wrote: For not interactivity to work we need more strick army restrictions, you cannot have an entire army be entirely non-interactive with most common weapons and units.
That also means that the issue isn't really Land Raiders, but transports. A Land Raider being non-interactive to most weapons make sense, a Rhino doesn't.
Also lore wise, a dedicated Tank should be in an entirely different weight class from an APC in terms of resilience.
That's why it was about Land Raiders not Rhinos. Rhinos should be a tier above Speeders, and a tier below Predators, which should be a tier below Land Raiders, which themselves should (probably/maybe) be a tier below Knights/etc due to shields - though I'm not opposed to Land Raiders/Monoliths/Super Heavies (the biggest baddest monsters/vehicles in each faction) being on par with knights.
Personally I think this worked, especially when it was fairly easy to have a smattering of grenades around that would give a tank a bad day if it had to hold ground close to enemies.
That's why I pointed out the "Battle Line" type troops that may or may not actually be Battle Line should have a short range high danger option for tanks.
This did used to be the case. Most APCs could be damaged or even destroyed by the majority of small arms or anti-personnel weapons with sufficient weight-of-fire, although the attacking troops might have to manoeuvre to hit side or rear armour.
Depended on the edition. It was borderline impossible to destroy an APC in 5th with small arms because of the nerfs to glancing hits. Other editions were better in that respect but I have seen people complain it was too easy.
I would move Land Raiders to T9 and put Predators as T8.
Moreover I would also move Titans to above T10. They are so ridiculusly out of 40k's standard scope that considering them into the rules basically means reducing your design space.
So T10 would be for everyone's biggest non-Titan stuff (Dominus Knights, Baneblades, Tesseract Vaults, Hierodules).
This did used to be the case. Most APCs could be damaged or even destroyed by the majority of small arms or anti-personnel weapons with sufficient weight-of-fire, although the attacking troops might have to manoeuvre to hit side or rear armour.
Depended on the edition. It was borderline impossible to destroy an APC in 5th with small arms because of the nerfs to glancing hits. Other editions were better in that respect but I have seen people complain it was too easy.
So YMMV.
Part of the problem was that it was kind of both. I started playing in 5th. The game seemed to understand that making a rhino or chimera immune to most of the weapons in the game was a bad idea, so they gave most vehicles rear armor 10. But the thing is, you weren't generally "maneuvering" to get at rear armor 10. Any vehicle that wanted to hang back and shoot would just stick its butt against the table edge or some BLOS terrain so you couldn't actually shoot its rear. The only times you were likely to be shooting at rear armor were if you had landed a good deepstrike or if an enemy vehicle or if the enemy vehicle was disposable enough to park itself right in front of your front lines.
I largely agree with Tyran. Before you can propose making vehicles immune to huge parts of the enemy army, you have to propose a way to prevent skew lists from being a thing.
In practice, rear armor was less of a vulnerability to be exploited by shooting and more of a way to hurt vehicles in melee. So the counterplay was basically, "Okay, strength 4 and better can hurt vehicles if they charge." So vehicles were "immune" to small arms fire, but in the shooting phase, basically. But this still sort of sucked for S3 armies. Marines had their choice of stunning a vehicle by punching it or whipping out the strength 6 krak grenades, so every unit in the marine codex functionally had a way of hurting vehicles. But S3 armies didn't.
There should be some weapons that are distinctly anti-infantry, some that are distinctly anti-tank, and some hybrid that will cover heavy infantry and/or light vehicles well and can be stretched to tanks in a pinch. I'm not a fan of all-purpose super-guns that can be used on almost everything.
Can we agree that this is already the state of things, though? A scatter laser (lots of strength 5, AP-, D1 attacks) is pretty efficient at killing guardsmen but would take forever to kill a chimera. A lascannon won't kill off a squad of guardsmen even if it shoots at them all game, but it's pretty good at killing that chimera. Plasma guns are less good at killing guardsmen than scatter lasers and less good at killing chimeras than lascannons, but they're not terrible at either.
Is the issue that you don't think weapons are already capable of being specialized, or is it that you just don't like lasguns hurting chimeras for (valid) fluff reasons? Because those are different conversations.
Also, I don't love the argument of, "Oh, just take anti-tank in all your units so that the tanks are interactive after all." That approach invalidates the other options in the slots those anti-tank weapons occupy. That is, you'll never field a flamer because you're too worried you might need the meltagun to deal with tanks. After all, your bolters can already deal with infantry.
I like how 'muh relizm' always proposes wildly unrealistic and kludge mechanics because they don't like (or know) how it really works in practice
AV system was just comically bad because you magically teleported anime-style to the rear of the tank while punching it in the front, because you were forced to target arbitrary strong facing because tank was turned 1 degree to the left instead of plainly visible weak one (and it got even more comically stupid when the front was obscured and side was not but you still couldn't touch it), because half of big models in the game just ignored facings of armor and guns mechanics based on arbitrary unit types, and finally, BECAUSE TANK ARMOR DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
No, seriously, to give a simple example - British Challenger tank has equivalent of 1000 mm of steel on upper hull plate, but only 400 on bottom one - it's like having AV 13 on top of front 'wedge' of your hull, while only AV 7 on the bottom. Moreover, if you were to shoot left side of that weak bottom front armor, tank catastrophically explodes, because that's where the big ammo storage is. AV system just says frak you, it's all AV 13, and it will explode if you hit top right 1/6 of a time even though nothing that could do so is there.
And in 40K, the system is if anything even DUMBER, because all the massive hatches, front sponsons, gun ports, and spots perforated with rivets should have their AV values fluctuate even wilder than real tanks but nope, it's one value, and exposed engine/turret slot/sponson holes/hatches on Land Raider are made from stronger armor than front plate of other tanks, even superheavy ones. Or most knights/titans, too. ReALiSm!
And yes, you can argue it's all abstract and averaged over, but you know what system is actually abstract and realistic without having special tables on tables, Str working completely differently than the whole rest of the game, etc, etc, complicated nonsense that adds nothing besides artificially nerfing vehicles making them rare sight in multiple editions? Why yes, T introduced in 8th. Maybe it could use some fine tuning (say, modifiers to T if you manage to sneak close or engage tank in melee, or bonus at long range, etc), but it's vastly better than AV junk in virtually every way. Period.
leopard wrote: there is no way an infantry side arm, laspistol or similar should be able to harm a knight, or even a decent tank. if it could there basically would be no tanks/knights as they wouldn't last long enough to be worthwhile
Erm, no, this is just wrong. Small arms can destroy tracks, engine, targeting systems, etc, etc, there is tons of exposed elements on every vehicle that you can't armor for multiple reasons that are easy targets. Hell, NATO doctrine calls for tank commanders riding forward sticking their head (or even whole torso) out so they can see where they are going and what they should target (it's the Soviets who advocated being always 'buttoned down' with hatches closed, incidentally) - if you were to headshot tank commander the 'damage' to tank would be pretty huge despite being done by lucky small arm shot. That's why you're supposed to support your tanks with infantry, so opposing infantry can't get close and use their 'useless' small arms to take out your big expensive vehicle. If anything, if you wanted realism, the infantry in really close range should 'wound' tanks not just on 6s, but on 5s.
Just ask germans how their 80 ton Elefants with gazillion armor all around (that led Nazis to declare they don't need defensive machine guns at all, after all it's immune to everything, right?) worked against humble Soviet squads with 'useless' rifles - oops, after a few dozen burned they were recalled from front lines with haste and machine guns installed in every free spot
Breton wrote: Likewise I want anti-tank weapons to be fairly "non-interactive" with non-tanks
And this is just comical if you took a look at the two big conflicts going on currently (you know which ones). Enemy sees squad advancing? Vast majority of the time, first thing pointed on it will be tank gun, anti-tank missile, an RPG, salvo from grenade launcher, smaller cannons, or really any anti-tank weapon they have on hand - not just because these tend to have larger range, but modern infantry clad in protective gear is very hard to put down with small arms fire and if you need to kill or suppress them quickly, AT weapons are the only way to go. Hell, US grunts in their colonial wars in last 25 years used stuff like Javelins to hunt down single enemy soldiers to not come into range of small arms fire - why do you think this war cost two trillion dollars?
Just look at modern ads of NATO arms companies, you will notice virtually every new anti-tank rocket comes with shrapnel enhancers precisely to make it more deadly when it explodes used in anti-infantry role, such as HEDP warheads - this should give you a hint how common such use is. In game terms, if anything, AT weapons should be more, not less interactive with infantry, not just for realism reasons, but also to give them edge over stuff like plasma guns that was often used over them precisely because it was more interactive even if it was overall worse weapon...
They simplify armour profiles and gamify mechanics because accurately representing reality in a turn based combat game where everything is visible to the commander and the average range of an assault rifle equivalent is about 60ft (at a push), who would have thunk it?
But seriously, I’d prefer treating tanks if they were a crewed machines rather than a swollen infantry profile, give them the ability to be stunned or suppressed by non-lethal hits, but don’t make them vulnerable to infantry focusing them with standard weaponry.
I largely agree with Tyran. Before you can propose making vehicles immune to huge parts of the enemy army, you have to propose a way to prevent skew lists from being a thing.
In practice, rear armor was less of a vulnerability to be exploited by shooting and more of a way to hurt vehicles in melee. So the counterplay was basically, "Okay, strength 4 and better can hurt vehicles if they charge." So vehicles were "immune" to small arms fire, but in the shooting phase, basically. But this still sort of sucked for S3 armies. Marines had their choice of stunning a vehicle by punching it or whipping out the strength 6 krak grenades, so every unit in the marine codex functionally had a way of hurting vehicles. But S3 armies didn't.
Limit the amount of vehicles any given army can bring.
-> Force Organisation Charts that only allow 3 Heavy Support choices, where most armies would have their heavily armored units. (..as well as 3 Fast Attack, 3 Elite, ...)
-> Demand a basic amount of points being spent on infantry (again, FOC with at least 1 HQ and 2 Troop selections)
-> Price them properly so you can't just spam 3 Dreadnoughts with all the bling for 400 points. Adjust strength if needed.
-> Adjust inherently skewed armies like Tank companies and Knights with mandatory infantry selections.
S3 armies don't suck inherently against vehicles, as they have different methods to engage them.
-> Suicide melta drops, heavy weapon teams for IG (or their own tanks)
-> Eldar have lances and Fire Dragons (or their own tanks)
-> Tyranids have Monstrous Creatures that roll "Strength + 2W6 to overcome AV" in melee.
-> Sisters have melta spam, Paragons, Penitent engines and now their own tank.
That Marines could engage vehicles with their grenade is factually true, but that was never your first or only sort of AT. You would take Sternguard with melta in Drop Pods to take out priority targets.S6 grenades in melee are a "the SM player is in a bad situation with that unit" moment.
I largely agree with Tyran. Before you can propose making vehicles immune to huge parts of the enemy army, you have to propose a way to prevent skew lists from being a thing.
In practice, rear armor was less of a vulnerability to be exploited by shooting and more of a way to hurt vehicles in melee. So the counterplay was basically, "Okay, strength 4 and better can hurt vehicles if they charge." So vehicles were "immune" to small arms fire, but in the shooting phase, basically. But this still sort of sucked for S3 armies. Marines had their choice of stunning a vehicle by punching it or whipping out the strength 6 krak grenades, so every unit in the marine codex functionally had a way of hurting vehicles. But S3 armies didn't.
Limit the amount of vehicles any given army can bring.
-> Force Organisation Charts that only allow 3 Heavy Support choices, where most armies would have their heavily armored units. (..as well as 3 Fast Attack, 3 Elite, ...)
-> Demand a basic amount of points being spent on infantry (again, FOC with at least 1 HQ and 2 Troop selections)
-> Price them properly so you can't just spam 3 Dreadnoughts with all the bling for 400 points. Adjust strength if needed.
-> Adjust inherently skewed armies like Tank companies and Knights with mandatory infantry selections.
S3 armies don't suck inherently against vehicles, as they have different methods to engage them.
-> Suicide melta drops, heavy weapon teams for IG (or their own tanks)
-> Eldar have lances and Fire Dragons (or their own tanks)
-> Tyranids have Monstrous Creatures that roll "Strength + 2W6 to overcome AV" in melee.
-> Sisters have melta spam, Paragons, Penitent engines and now their own tank.
That Marines could engage vehicles with their grenade is factually true, but that was never your first or only sort of AT. You would take Sternguard with melta in Drop Pods to take out priority targets.S6 grenades in melee are a "the SM player is in a bad situation with that unit" moment.
I mean knights don't have infantry, and if you force them into tank companies.... it's not a tank company. Suggesting MC's can punch vehicles ignores the fact the comment was about having mass access to handle volumes of tanks in melee with standard infantry, which in turn also defeats the point imo.
You've utterly divorced the problem from the solution and asked for the old FOC which solves nothing here.
Doesn't this discussion about skew lists just speak to a problem in 40k where it focuses on destruction of opposing forces over suppression and objective control? Skew lists typically gain advantages in some areas at the expense of others, so a game with multiple options for dealing with the opponent and winning can encorporate them. You should be able to handle a tank company by suppressing enemy vehicles or preventing them from holding ground instead of relying on outright destruction.
I do think GW's poor morale and suppression mechanics are a big factor here.
Haighus wrote: Doesn't this discussion about skew lists just speak to a problem in 40k where it focuses on destruction of opposing forces over suppression and objective control? Skew lists typically gain advantages in some areas at the expense of others, so a game with multiple options for dealing with the opponent and winning can encorporate them. You should be able to handle a tank company by suppressing enemy vehicles or preventing them from holding ground instead of relying on outright destruction.
I do think GW's poor morale and suppression mechanics are a big factor here.
So Tyranids at present are good at board control, objective play and generally taking up space. What they're not great at is killing. This is a design choice and is often deemed "boring" and I've seen a few players online move away from the faction for that reason, I believe Necrons were the same last/this edition. Ultimately killing stuff is what people want.
Haighus wrote: Doesn't this discussion about skew lists just speak to a problem in 40k where it focuses on destruction of opposing forces over suppression and objective control? Skew lists typically gain advantages in some areas at the expense of others, so a game with multiple options for dealing with the opponent and winning can encorporate them. You should be able to handle a tank company by suppressing enemy vehicles or preventing them from holding ground instead of relying on outright destruction.
I do think GW's poor morale and suppression mechanics are a big factor here.
So Tyranids at present are good at board control, objective play and generally taking up space. What they're not great at is killing. This is a design choice and is often deemed "boring" and I've seen a few players online move away from the faction for that reason, I believe Necrons were the same last/this edition. Ultimately killing stuff is what people want.
Sadly, this does fit with a trend since 3rd edition to make the game increasingly lethal. I may be in a minority when it comes to favouring reduced lethality and increased tactical options in 40k
Haighus wrote: Doesn't this discussion about skew lists just speak to a problem in 40k where it focuses on destruction of opposing forces over suppression and objective control? Skew lists typically gain advantages in some areas at the expense of others, so a game with multiple options for dealing with the opponent and winning can encorporate them. You should be able to handle a tank company by suppressing enemy vehicles or preventing them from holding ground instead of relying on outright destruction.
I do think GW's poor morale and suppression mechanics are a big factor here.
So Tyranids at present are good at board control, objective play and generally taking up space. What they're not great at is killing. This is a design choice and is often deemed "boring" and I've seen a few players online move away from the faction for that reason, I believe Necrons were the same last/this edition. Ultimately killing stuff is what people want.
Sadly, this does fit with a trend since 3rd edition to make the game increasingly lethal. I may be in a minority when it comes to favouring reduced lethality and increased tactical options in 40k
I'd be for smaller armies with more relevance on movement and lower lethality, sign me up! I also don't have a problem with an army being a pain to handle but pillow fisted, if that's what's fun to the owner then crack on. My issue is you hit armies like DG where durability is the thing they're known for and people want, but then can't accept that the killing power is either going to have to be lower, or they're going to have to cost more. GW have tried to stretch them in too many directions imo and now they're not filling any of those niches.
Haighus wrote: Doesn't this discussion about skew lists just speak to a problem in 40k where it focuses on destruction of opposing forces over suppression and objective control? Skew lists typically gain advantages in some areas at the expense of others, so a game with multiple options for dealing with the opponent and winning can encorporate them. You should be able to handle a tank company by suppressing enemy vehicles or preventing them from holding ground instead of relying on outright destruction.
I do think GW's poor morale and suppression mechanics are a big factor here.
So Tyranids at present are good at board control, objective play and generally taking up space. What they're not great at is killing. This is a design choice and is often deemed "boring" and I've seen a few players online move away from the faction for that reason, I believe Necrons were the same last/this edition. Ultimately killing stuff is what people want.
Sadly, this does fit with a trend since 3rd edition to make the game increasingly lethal. I may be in a minority when it comes to favouring reduced lethality and increased tactical options in 40k
I'd be for smaller armies with more relevance on movement and lower lethality, sign me up! I also don't have a problem with an army being a pain to handle but pillow fisted, if that's what's fun to the owner then crack on. My issue is you hit armies like DG where durability is the thing they're known for and people want, but then can't accept that the killing power is either going to have to be lower, or they're going to have to cost more. GW have tried to stretch them in too many directions imo and now they're not filling any of those niches.
In fairness I was also thinking about this in relation to skew lists. So players should be able to build balanced and skew lists for each major faction. Death Guard suffer from being essentially a skew list parcelled out of a balanced major faction (Chaos Space Marines). In the past you could choose to play an all-Nurgle list, but recognised that doing so was restricting options and reducing mobility and lethality in exchange for durability. Now it is harder to feature some plague Marines as part of a larger CSM whole.
Dudeface wrote: I mean knights don't have infantry, and if you force them into tank companies.... it's not a tank company. Suggesting MC's can punch vehicles ignores the fact the comment was about having mass access to handle volumes of tanks in melee with standard infantry, which in turn also defeats the point imo.
You've utterly divorced the problem from the solution and asked for the old FOC which solves nothing here.
Knights don't have infantry yet. Introduce something akin to "Household militia", limit the availability for big Knights in regular armies and work more with Armigers.
A Tank company can be accompanied by infantry in transport vehicles without taking much away from the fantasy. It may steer more towards a "mechanised brigade" maybe, but that is the suggestion to make a skew list workable. There used to be a time where a list like that needed confirmation from player 2 and I would like to make it usuable for general use without resorting to limitations like that. Though there is an argument to be made wether or not such a specific "Leman Russ and variants only" list got a place in the scope of a typical 40k game at all.
The base argument that your "100 pts for 10 S3 models" type of units need to be able to combat tank skew effectively is flawed to begin with and that is why I don't entertain it. The aforementioned S6 grenades were upgrades in 3rd and 4th edition, before they became mandatory and baked into the base equipment for Marines in 5th. Without them and with S4 only they are only a little bit less useless against the lowest armor value. You should take specialised weapons against specialised targets. A lascannon for a tank and a flamer for a horde of gaunts.
That a model with strength 3,1 attack and 4+ weapon skill needs to be effective against tanks before we can allow skew is something that needs to be proven first and is not supported by how 3rd, 4th and 5th edition was actually played.
I think Imperial Guard armoured companies are fine given there are 11 functionally distinct 40k Leman Russ variants (LRBT, demolisher, exterminator, vanquisher, conqueror, executioner, annihilator, eradicator, punisher, thunderer, destroyer) and as many supporting vehicles (chimera, salamander, both sentinels, hellhound, devil dog, bane wolf, basilisk, medusa, griffon, atlas, trojan, centaur). They are a common feature in 40k lore.
That is a bigger unit line up than a lot of factions today
Technically, there's at least 4 Sentinel variants known for Armoured Companies!
The biggest fix that they need for that setup is Tank Commanders ceasing to be an actual unit, and instead being a thing that gets to be assigned to any tank from your list.
Dudeface wrote: I mean knights don't have infantry, and if you force them into tank companies.... it's not a tank company. Suggesting MC's can punch vehicles ignores the fact the comment was about having mass access to handle volumes of tanks in melee with standard infantry, which in turn also defeats the point imo.
You've utterly divorced the problem from the solution and asked for the old FOC which solves nothing here.
Knights don't have infantry yet. Introduce something akin to "Household militia", limit the availability for big Knights in regular armies and work more with Armigers.
A Tank company can be accompanied by infantry in transport vehicles without taking much away from the fantasy. It may steer more towards a "mechanised brigade" maybe, but that is the suggestion to make a skew list workable. There used to be a time where a list like that needed confirmation from player 2 and I would like to make it usuable for general use without resorting to limitations like that. Though there is an argument to be made wether or not such a specific "Leman Russ and variants only" list got a place in the scope of a typical 40k game at all.
The base argument that your "100 pts for 10 S3 models" type of units need to be able to combat tank skew effectively is flawed to begin with and that is why I don't entertain it. The aforementioned S6 grenades were upgrades in 3rd and 4th edition, before they became mandatory and baked into the base equipment for Marines in 5th. Without them and with S4 only they are only a little bit less useless against the lowest armor value. You should take specialised weapons against specialised targets. A lascannon for a tank and a flamer for a horde of gaunts.
That a model with strength 3,1 attack and 4+ weapon skill needs to be effective against tanks before we can allow skew is something that needs to be proven first and is not supported by how 3rd, 4th and 5th edition was actually played.
That's really not what was said at all. The point was rear armour 10 was intended to be a high risk low reward method for common mooks with nothing else to do vs vehicles to slap them down a bit in melee as it was generally easier than getting guardians etc into rear armour via range. In fact the grenades costing points wasn't addressed because it was pointed out it didn't need to be - a marine can punch a rhino hard enough to kill it. Krak grenades just made that easier.
So to that end, we'd be back to every unit having to have access to some form of anti-armour capacity, even if weak. All those s3 units would need a way to contribute other than existing to be shot, so grenades for all? Make sure they always have access to an anti-vehicle weapon, but better make it cheap? Who knows.
Never the less, as I did also say, if you then gear the game up to be able to always handle a hard counter, it's not a hard counter, so what is the point.
Templarted wrote: But seriously, I’d prefer treating tanks if they were a crewed machines rather than a swollen infantry profile, give them the ability to be stunned or suppressed by non-lethal hits, but don’t make them vulnerable to infantry focusing them with standard weaponry.
Addendum, I would also prefer if monsters were treated as tank equivalents rather than swollen infantry profiles, because they are tank equivalents as far as Tyranids are concerned. That would also include giving them their own damage table because it is kinda ridiculus that a 1w left Carnifex was functionally the same as a full wounds one while beffing up their vulnerability to small arms.
A lasgun is as treatening to a Tyrannofex as it is to a Land Raider.
Dudeface wrote: That's really not what was said at all. The point was rear armour 10 was intended to be a high risk low reward method for common mooks with nothing else to do vs vehicles to slap them down a bit in melee as it was generally easier than getting guardians etc into rear armour via range. In fact the grenades costing points wasn't addressed because it was pointed out it didn't need to be - a marine can punch a rhino hard enough to kill it. Krak grenades just made that easier.
So to that end, we'd be back to every unit having to have access to some form of anti-armour capacity, even if weak. All those s3 units would need a way to contribute other than existing to be shot, so grenades for all? Make sure they always have access to an anti-vehicle weapon, but better make it cheap? Who knows.
Never the less, as I did also say, if you then gear the game up to be able to always handle a hard counter, it's not a hard counter, so what is the point.
Why does every unit need to be able to engage every kind of unit meaningfully or at all? If the army itself is able to, then it is your decision wether you gear up to face a variety of targets, including horde, elite and vehicle spam.
Getting into the rear of a vehicle in melee when your unit is not equipped for it is so ineffective, that you would not use it as a regular strategy. How would you get there easier than with ranged weapons anyway? The Predator Annihilator isn't coming to you. The Rhino will drop off its cargo most likey before you make it into combat with your S3 Guardsmen where they will spend the rest of the game trying to damage it (read: it is likely irrelevant and you would have been better off shooting the passengers with said Guardsmen).
At the very least every army needs the tools, preferably in a variety of options, to engage every kind of unit meaningfully.
E.g. Tyranids MC may be able to punch tanks to death, they still need ranged options to deal with that Predator Annihilator at the other side of the table. Moreover not all of said options have to be on a MC platform otherwise MC spam becomes the only real way to play if your oponnent likes Predator Annihilators.
Haighus wrote: I think Imperial Guard armoured companies are fine given there are 11 functionally distinct 40k Leman Russ variants (LRBT, demolisher, exterminator, vanquisher, conqueror, executioner, annihilator, eradicator, punisher, thunderer, destroyer) and as many supporting vehicles (chimera, salamander, both sentinels, hellhound, devil dog, bane wolf, basilisk, medusa, griffon, atlas, trojan, centaur). They are a common feature in 40k lore.
That is a bigger unit line up than a lot of factions today
To be fair, most of the difference between Russes is the turret weapon (back when AV was a thing, some of the Russes were "siege" variants with +1 rear armor). They only got their own datasheets because GW is...well, GW. Same deal with the Hellhounds (HH, Devil Dog, Bane Wolf) and Chimera-chassis artillery (Bassie, Medusa, Griffon, Wyvern; given that the Medusa and Griffon were FW and the Wyvern only showed up with the plastic Hydra kit (presumably as an add-on to say it was really two kits in one box for whatever reason), it makes more sense that those weren't a single "SPG" choice with weapon swaps the way the Russ was). That said, there's even more non-Russ vehicle options in FW than you've listed (Salamander Command, Tauros/Tauros Venator, Colossus, Macharius et al, Malcador et al...), and I'd agree that armored companies should be allowed for Guard in general (especially since Knights are allowed to be their own thing).
Although Russes being squadrons was such a weird thing, specially as the BRB squadron rules were clearly written with very light and cheap vehicles in mind, not heavy tanks that could easilly get in the 200+ ppm range.
a_typical_hero 812145 11613781 wrote:
Why does every unit need to be able to engage every kind of unit meaningfully or at all? If the army itself is able to, then it is your decision wether you gear up to face a variety of targets, including horde, elite and vehicle spam.
Getting into the rear of a vehicle in melee when your unit is not equipped for it is so ineffective, that you would not use it as a regular strategy. How would you get there easier than with ranged weapons anyway? The Predator Annihilator isn't coming to you. The Rhino will drop off its cargo most likey before you make it into combat with your S3 Guardsmen where they will spend the rest of the game trying to damage it (read: it is likely irrelevant and you would have been better off shooting the passengers with said Guardsmen).
Because unless someone plays horde or a hyper over efficient army, specialisation is always bad. Especialy for elite armies. Having 2 units that do anti tank, 2 units that do anti infantry and 2 units do anti heavy infantry, and they better be really good at it means the units are easy to focus fire and make the army stop working, if they are destroyed early game. In good armies the units counter almost everything in the game. There is very little things in the game that 3 nurgle rhinos full of 3 lords, 3 chosen units and 3 csm units, can easily deal with. Night spinners are good vs everything that is not a tank. Same with the avatar.
Meanwhile, if you take an army where there is one anti tank, supposed, the game becomes very problematic when the meta shifts in a such a way that this only anti tank unit gets easily hard countered by the entire games meta. It is even worse then stat check armies, that have an easy to pass stat check.
Because unless someone plays horde or a hyper over efficient army, specialisation is always bad. Especialy for elite armies. Having 2 units that do anti tank, 2 units that do anti infantry and 2 units do anti heavy infantry, and they better be really good at it means the units are easy to focus fire and make the army stop working, if they are destroyed early game. In good armies the units counter almost everything in the game. There is very little things in the game that 3 nurgle rhinos full of 3 lords, 3 chosen units and 3 csm units, can easily deal with. Night spinners are good vs everything that is not a tank. Same with the avatar.
Meanwhile, if you take an army where there is one anti tank, supposed, the game becomes very problematic when the meta shifts in a such a way that this only anti tank unit gets easily hard countered by the entire games meta. It is even worse then stat check armies, that have an easy to pass stat check.
I don't agree. I get what you mean, but I don't agree. "Not every units needs to be able to" does not mean that only a specialised unit will be able to.
Looking back at Marines in 4th and 5th edition, you had your 5 men Tactical squads hanging back with a lascannon on objective and your suicide melta squads of 5 Sternguards.
Imperial Guard in 5th used tanks for anti-armor duty as well as the newly introduced 4 lascannon Vendetta. Infantry was mostly Veterans with triple plasma or melta.
Tau never had a proper anti tank option on their troops and had to concentrate it into either Hammerheads, Broadsides or Crisis.
Eldar had the best anti-tank unit in the form of Fire Dragons for a long time. It wasn't very fluffy for them to be used as suicide melta, but they got the job done.
In your example, the weapon profiles of your 6 specialised units will most likely overlap to some degree as well.
Not every vehicle on the other side is a Land Raider or Monolith with AV14. And not every horde is a 30 model Ork blob. Autocannons or plasma work alright-ish against a variety of targets.
I can't say much about the pre 8th ed meta, as I know it only from stories. But from what you say the IG army looks exactly what I say a good army looks like. The plasma/melta/lascanon counters everything or most of the field. It kills monsters, it kills tanks, it kills marines and it kills heavy infantry like terminators. Eldar I think are a bad example for everything, as the norm with them is that they are hyper efficient, to a point where an eldar army can be considered to have a 500 or more pts extra. On top fo that their specialists are REALLY good. A night spinners counters everything that is not a vehicle or in a transport. That is a huge.
The "suicide melta" only worked for eldar, because they had unkillable transports and the units, both the transports and the cargo, were undercosted for what they did.
Tau "anti tank" wasn't just anti tank. It massed killed monsters, marines etc Yes their troops were a tax. But that is a case for many cases. Aside for small moments at the end of 8th ed, the core of marine armies wasn't tacticals or intercessors. It is minimal troops and then skewing hard in to the good stuff. Chaos marines right now have it really good with how their uber cultists units are both super powerful, have good rules and low point costs for what they can do. With no point adjustment for the army core rule. But in the past csm were the codex, where troops were minimal to a point where taking csm in a csm army was considered stupid.
In my 6 units example, only for good armies with good rules, the things may over lap. In mid tier or bad armies they will not. And then you end up with armies that have no anti tank in a vehicle heavy edition. Or Knights being unable to deal with stuff like flyers or hordes of infantry. Specialisation, and I am saying this again, is only good for armies with big pools of units and a good rule set. For other armies, especialy elite ones like custodes, knights or GK, not being able to counter everything has really bad results on the table. Because if you have 2 NDKs, which are your only source of "anti tank";and a bad one too. Then all it takes to be unable to play in a vehicle heavy meta is to lose those two models. And in a stat check, hyper damage setting those two NDK evaporate.
Karol wrote: I can't say much about the pre 8th ed meta, as I know it only from stories. But from what you say the IG army looks exactly what I say a good army looks like. The plasma/melta/lascanon counters everything or most of the field. It kills monsters, it kills tanks, it kills marines and it kills heavy infantry like terminators. Eldar I think are a bad example for everything, as the norm with them is that they are hyper efficient, to a point where an eldar army can be considered to have a 500 or more pts extra. On top fo that their specialists are REALLY good. A night spinners counters everything that is not a vehicle or in a transport. That is a huge.
The "suicide melta" only worked for eldar, because they had unkillable transports and the units, both the transports and the cargo, were undercosted for what they did.
Tau "anti tank" wasn't just anti tank. It massed killed monsters, marines etc Yes their troops were a tax. But that is a case for many cases. Aside for small moments at the end of 8th ed, the core of marine armies wasn't tacticals or intercessors. It is minimal troops and then skewing hard in to the good stuff. Chaos marines right now have it really good with how their uber cultists units are both super powerful, have good rules and low point costs for what they can do. With no point adjustment for the army core rule. But in the past csm were the codex, where troops were minimal to a point where taking csm in a csm army was considered stupid.
In my 6 units example, only for good armies with good rules, the things may over lap. In mid tier or bad armies they will not. And then you end up with armies that have no anti tank in a vehicle heavy edition. Or Knights being unable to deal with stuff like flyers or hordes of infantry. Specialisation, and I am saying this again, is only good for armies with big pools of units and a good rule set. For other armies, especialy elite ones like custodes, knights or GK, not being able to counter everything has really bad results on the table. Because if you have 2 NDKs, which are your only source of "anti tank";and a bad one too. Then all it takes to be unable to play in a vehicle heavy meta is to lose those two models. And in a stat check, hyper damage setting those two NDK evaporate.
My memory of 5th ed GK is hazy, but you still had the S8 rifleman dreads, the rending psycannons and hammerhand was a power to double strength iirc and hammers still existed everywhere. They did not struggle at all and were OP at release. The rifleman dreads in particular were a bit of a scourge as there wasn't a bad target for them generally.
Eldar, as you note, didn't have many problems accessing the stuff they needed either. Good specialists in tough vehicles that carry a pair of lance weapons made them well rounded.
What people are commenting on, and I fully understand, is when you're playing against a tank company, or knights, or any heavy mech force, that unit of flamer guys might as well not exist, everyone in the infantry squads that isn't a special weapon is just a wound counter, nothing more. Your tactical choices for the vehicle player is "kill the big gun" and the other player has "protect the big gun" and whoever does that best wins the game.
Such is the nature of hard counters or skew lists.
I think a mid ground can exist without forcing people to field stuff they don't want or need (just because: wooo the knight player has 20 basic humans for me to bolter before I become wound counters again!) and allow most units have the ability to interact, without making rate of fire on crap guns kill everything. Maybe all units should have access to some form of melta bomb equivalent baked in where they can trade melee attacks from the unit to land 1 good hit on a vehicle, or maybe make wounds re-roll against a vehicle unless it's ap-2 or more but any weapon can wound on a 6? There can't be many spammable S3-4 weapons with ap-2 or greater.
Templarted wrote: They simplify armour profiles and gamify mechanics because accurately representing reality in a turn based combat game where everything is visible to the commander and the average range of an assault rifle equivalent is about 60ft (at a push), who would have thunk it?
But seriously, I’d prefer treating tanks if they were a crewed machines rather than a swollen infantry profile, give them the ability to be stunned or suppressed by non-lethal hits, but don’t make them vulnerable to infantry focusing them with standard weaponry.
Almost everything Irbis said is bs anyways so not worth engaging with. You don't engage armor with small arms except to force the crew to button up. I wonder if he's getting his knowledge from a videogame or something.
But also, the AV system was a pretty decent abstraction of varying armor levels- generally a given weapon against a given thickness of armor is either going to reliably penetrate or reliably bounce, but the S+D6 system added some 'wiggle room' in which the AV represents the average level of armor protection, and then your D6 roll determines whether you hit a weaker spot or solid plate.
It's still fine with SvT, or using the armor save as the mechanism for resolution, but like you said the modern system does omit the ability to mission kill or temporarily incapacitate a vehicle. It's either hard kill or nothing, except with maybe a degrading profile for the last few wounds.
I’m pretty sure you engage tanks with infantry from multiple directions so that they hopefully don’t notice the anti-tank weapons lining up to get mission kill hits on them.
You don’t need to blow up a tank to defeat it. Blowing out a track with an RPG is a win for the infantry.
The weird thing about the AV system is that armor penetration didn't actually help you penetrate armor.
I vastly prefer the SvT and APvSV system everything else uses. It is only missing a damage table but that shouldn't be hard to implement and monsters should also have a damage table anyway.
alextroy wrote: I’m pretty sure you engage tanks with infantry from multiple directions so that they hopefully don’t notice the anti-tank weapons lining up to get mission kill hits on them.
You don’t need to blow up a tank to defeat it. Blowing out a track with an RPG is a win for the infantry.
That was a nice part about the old system. You could immobilize vehicles and play to avoid primary firing arcs, keep out of LOS, and engage them on your own terms. And the Shaken/Stunned results worked as a good stand-in for the crew being unable to engage effectively because of incoming fire.
Tyran wrote: The weird thing about the AV system is that armor penetration didn't actually help you penetrate armor.
I vastly prefer the SvT and APvSV system everything else uses. It is only missing a damage table but that shouldn't be hard to implement and monsters should also have a damage table anyway.
Vehicles using AV but also having armor saves (3+ as the default, 4+ for skimmers and flyers, -1 the save on rear armor hits, maybe the tank USR adds +1 to the front armor save) would of fixed a fair amount of issues that plagued 6 and 7 edition balance between MCs and Vehicles and would of added more impact from AP than just adjusting the vehicle penetration table results. Would of kept the high rate of fire, relatively high strength but AP crap weapons from shredding vehicles while still preserving the true AT weapons like melta, lascannons, railguns, missile launchers, etc.
Tyran wrote: The weird thing about the AV system is that armor penetration didn't actually help you penetrate armor.
I vastly prefer the SvT and APvSV system everything else uses. It is only missing a damage table but that shouldn't be hard to implement and monsters should also have a damage table anyway.
Vehicles using AV but also having armor saves (3+ as the default, 4+ for skimmers and flyers, -1 the save on rear armor hits, maybe the tank USR adds +1 to the front armor save) would of fixed a fair amount of issues that plagued 6 and 7 edition balance between MCs and Vehicles and would of added more impact from AP than just adjusting the vehicle penetration table results. Would of kept the high rate of fire, relatively high strength but AP crap weapons from shredding vehicles while still preserving the true AT weapons like melta, lascannons, railguns, missile launchers, etc.
In that scenario AV is just T with extra steps.
AV10=T6
AV11=T7
AV12=T8
etc
S4 wounds a T6 model on a 6 - the amount needed to glance an AV10 model.
The mechanics are the same, the facade is different. IMO the facade isn't worth creating extra pointless rules that are basically the same as existing ones.
For the current rules T and Sv for vehicles and monsters, you can apply old damage tables like so:
For each point on the die you roll over the needed value to wound, add 1 to the table (ie you need 4+ to wound and roll 6, add +2 to the table)
1 - glance
2 - shake
3 - weapon damage (-1 BS/WS to weapons)
4 - locomotion damaged (halve M)
5 - penetrating hit (+1d3 damage)
6+ - massive hit (+1D6 damage)
Tyran wrote: The weird thing about the AV system is that armor penetration didn't actually help you penetrate armor.
I vastly prefer the SvT and APvSV system everything else uses. It is only missing a damage table but that shouldn't be hard to implement and monsters should also have a damage table anyway.
Vehicles using AV but also having armor saves (3+ as the default, 4+ for skimmers and flyers, -1 the save on rear armor hits, maybe the tank USR adds +1 to the front armor save) would of fixed a fair amount of issues that plagued 6 and 7 edition balance between MCs and Vehicles and would of added more impact from AP than just adjusting the vehicle penetration table results. Would of kept the high rate of fire, relatively high strength but AP crap weapons from shredding vehicles while still preserving the true AT weapons like melta, lascannons, railguns, missile launchers, etc.
In that scenario AV is just T with extra steps.
AV10=T6 AV11=T7 AV12=T8
etc
S4 wounds a T6 model on a 6 - the amount needed to glance an AV10 model.
The mechanics are the same, the facade is different. IMO the facade isn't worth creating extra pointless rules that are basically the same as existing ones.
Not quite. T6 is wounded by S4 on a 6, but so is T7. AV11 is immune to S4.
Edit: At least, in the wounding chart of 3rd-7th edition.
If you wanted AP to be more relevant to penetrating tank armor, you could always do something like S + D6 - AP, treating AP- as '7'.
Obviously this would require shifting armor values downwards, and it would also exacerbate differences between weapons. An autocannon at 3+D6 would be a lot less capable than a lascannon at 7+D6. Whether that's a feature or a bug is up to you; personally I felt like the old AV system did a perfectly fine job working off of S alone (with special rules for AP- and AP1), until the hull point system was introduced and glancing vehicles to death became a viable strategy.
Without hull points, the system works, it just feels unintuitive that the AP stat is irrelevant, which creates bizarre edge cases where a Rupture Cannon eats Land Raiders for breakfast but sucks against anyone in power armor.
Hellebore wrote: For the current rules T and Sv for vehicles and monsters, you can apply old damage tables like so:
For each point on the die you roll over the needed value to wound, add 1 to the table (ie you need 4+ to wound and roll 6, add +2 to the table)
1 - glance
2 - shake
3 - weapon damage (-1 BS/WS to weapons)
4 - locomotion damaged (halve M)
5 - penetrating hit (+1d3 damage)
6+ - massive hit (+1D6 damage)
Roll to wound, roll to save, roll on damage table
I must point out that this sort of contingent roll is pretty alien to 40K. Normally your wound roll is wholly separate from the save roll is wholly separate from the damage result. It's a non-negligible paradigm shift to not only adopt contingent rolls, but also have a contingent sequence interrupted by the opponent taking a save in the middle. At bare minimum, it's a system you can't fast roll.
Fast rolling is only necessary for the ridiculous number of dice that 40k uses. Against vehicles you see far less successful wounds so it's not like you're having to keep track of a dozen dice to save against.
The game already uses contingent rolls in the form of critical hits, so it's not that hard.
But if it's too much for people, then you adopt that mechanism.
Monster/vehicle
If you score a critical wound on a model with this keyword, roll on the following table:
The easy fix to "Feels Bad" moments is just to be transparent I always tell my opponent up front what wraithguard's ability is because the ability is the gatcha to end all gatchas letting me shoot back when its shot once a battle round including command overwatch is really good. But this is a game where nothing is supposed to be secret if i ask my opponent they need to give me every detail on their datasheet and if i ask i should be told every strategem they have access to but what that also means is that if you dove in not considering information of which you can just ask and get you are the dumbass and im not going to just give up a win because you made a bad choice you have to have a back bone
not_a_newtsee wrote: The easy fix to "Feels Bad" moments is just to be transparent I always tell my opponent up front what wraithguard's ability is because the ability is the gatcha to end all gatchas letting me shoot back when its shot once a battle round including command overwatch is really good. But this is a game where nothing is supposed to be secret if i ask my opponent they need to give me every detail on their datasheet and if i ask i should be told every strategem they have access to but what that also means is that if you dove in not considering information of which you can just ask and get you are the dumbass and im not going to just give up a win because you made a bad choice you have to have a back bone
Transparency is a good solution for "gotcha" feels bad moments. Unfortunately, there are feels bad moments/mechanics out there that are still unpleasant even if you know they're coming. For instance, pre-nerf strands of fate letting us literally automatically do a bunch of mortal wounds with wraith weapons and d-cannons felt pretty rotten even if you were perfectly aware that it was possible. Or failing a 3" charge because your dice came up snake eyes. It's not a surprise that you can roll snake eyes on 2d6, but it still feels bad because to have your melee randomly not get to make attacks and subsequently get wiped out on your opponent's turn.
i couldn't kill them even without characters.
