Crispy78 wrote:
Either way is a bad, unfair match-up.

More importantly, its not even fun for either player (assuming the advantaged player is looking for a game and not a win).

 Hellebore wrote:
The 'feels bad' argument for games mechanics has been thrown around the community for the last 5 years or so as a way to justify taking mechanics from some factions, or controlling how opposing forces get to interact with your force.

It really constrains the thinking of game design and it's why we have such reductive game mechanics now where it's just T, W and Sv that can be used for survival.

The idea that -1 to hit is more feels bad than only wounding on a 6 puts people's feelings above good game design and variety.

and even when you have two identical armies facing each other, marine players still want to be the one that's better at killing their opponent and tougher than them, but when their opponent is marines it will never satisfy them.


IMO people need to completely reset their game expectations if they don't want to be emotionally affected by their opponent being a challenge.

More people need to adopt the cultural attitude ork players have about the game, rather than being uptight about how their opponent is or is not giving them a 'good' game.

I agree to a point. However, I would argue that it definitely is an issue when an army (or substantial elements of it) can be countered at the list-building stage.

Are we seriously saying it's fun for one player to take a list with a decent number of anti-infantry guns, only to wind up playing against an Imperial Knight army? At which point a substantial chunk of his army is reduced to being nothing more than ablative wounds for the anti-tank guns.

 vipoid wrote:
I agree to a point. However, I would argue that it definitely is an issue when an army (or substantial elements of it) can be countered at the list-building stage.

Are we seriously saying it's fun for one player to take a list with a decent number of anti-infantry guns, only to wind up playing against an Imperial Knight army? At which point a substantial chunk of his army is reduced to being nothing more than ablative wounds for the anti-tank guns.

Depending on the player, it's fine.

My list has...

GUO with a S10 Strike melee weapon, a S7 Plague Flail, and S5 vomit
Two Princes with S8 Strike melee weapons and effectively a Heavy Bolter each
Poxbringer with a S5 Balesword
Plague Drones with S5 Mount attacks
Literally every other weapon is S4 or less.

Most all of them have Lethal hits, but when it's almost all AP-1 D1... I cannot effectively kill Knights.
But I still like playing them, because I like to focus on victory conditions over killing.

That said, I definitely understand that my feelings aren't universally shared in this aspect.

Yeah it's never entirely on one side or the other, but society tends to polarise things into false dichotomies for ease of telling things apart (either things are actually poorly designed, or people are useless at telling the difference and rely on how they feel).

It's going to be bit of both, but using how something 'feels' to determine its objective balance is a flawed methodology and I don't really like seeing it used as a conventional wisdom reason for objecting to how an army or mechanic works.

It's ok to have a super tough army, so long as those armies that aren't have means of beating them. It's ok to have a hard to hit army, so long as other armies can still beat them.

The idea of a challenge to your ability to do things in itself shouldn't be reason to remove a game mechanic.


I feel like if old Pinning rules reappeared in 40k now there would be an uproar about how unfun it is to not be able to do something with your unit because it failed a Ld test. When just killing the models does the same thing. Having more than just removing models to affect their actions is a great thing. Everytime I look at current 40k, it just looks like it was designed to be marines punching marines to get maximum enjoyment from the rules as they currently stand. Playing anything else just works against the biases in the game itself.

Your argument is highly flawed though. Just because people's feelings don't always match reality, doesn't mean they never do.

Game design is a craft and there is a science related to it. Especially mobile game designers employ psychologists to make their games more enjoyable to encourage people to spend more.

"Feel bad moments" and lack of interaction are established concepts and symptoms of objectively bad game design, not a problem of society.

 Jidmah wrote:
Your argument is highly flawed though. Just because people's feelings don't always match reality, doesn't mean they never do.

Game design is a craft and there is a science related to it. Especially mobile game designers employ psychologists to make their games more enjoyable to encourage people to spend more.

"Feel bad moments" and lack of interaction are established concepts and symptoms of objectively bad game design, not a problem of society.

Just change the wording from "enjoyable" to "addictive". There's a point where they are the same, and there is a point where design specifically leans into addictive in a negative way that become less about enjoyment and instead preys on poor behavior control looking to exploit "whales". . . Or children.

"Objectively bad game design" is highly cotextual beyond those aspects as well. Some games become more effective by breaking "good design rules", and that can be the point.

 Hellebore wrote:
I feel like if old Pinning rules reappeared in 40k now there would be an uproar about how unfun it is to not be able to do something with your unit because it failed a Ld test.

Well... yeah.
It was when pinning was a thing?
GW guys have consistently said that the biggest complaint they got about 40K rules was anything that took control away from a player's own models.

I feel this is the crux of the issue.
You have to make a game that works for both players. You shouldn't have a system where if one player has "a perfect game", the other player just... dies, with no capacity of their own to escape the doom loop they are in. That is not fun.

Now clearly I don't want a system where if you consistently make the wrong choices you don't lose. But that is not the same.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 aphyon wrote:
In my experience i have more concern about fun/unfun players than i do specific armies. in the last 25 years i have done games against just about every type of army you can think of. including tournament meta builds and stuff that was just off the wall silly (like the 5th ed barrel of monkey's list for grey knights).

A good fun game is where the game is back and forth and often to hard to call till the end. Nobody wants a one sided stomp no matter which side you are on.

Agreed, but there are times when fun players can’t salvage a bad matchup.

I had a game where the opponent’s gunline was so damn killy it felt like I never had a chance. He was a pleasant chap, but it still was a slog of a game.

Attitude 100% matters though! Be kind, be sporting, and be fun!

Was about to say, playing with an unkillable army is also not much fun. Not only do people refuse to play you, every game becomes the same drama all over again.

But it can be hard to resist the temptation towards them. The ones I ran that wore out their welcome:

- 5th ed Spawn Rush
- 8th ed Black Legion gunline
- 8th ed Deathwatch gunline
- 8th ed Bloodletter Bombs
- 8th ed dual Daemon Princes (+ TS sorcerers)

Just got a flashback why I drop game for 8 years. Because every time I meeting same builds again and again. But the worst, and it braking all fun and immersion is that armies are never painted. And very often half of army are proxies. That the army not fun to face. it's looks like guards fight against grey depression and boredom. That is reality of my local Warhammer at end of 7th.

Some armies are unfun b/c they are Tau armies.

 Hairesy wrote:
Some armies are unfun b/c they are Tau armies.

Unfun to play or unfun to play against? Why do you think so?

Having barely played my tau army yet, I'm finding it a little iffy at the moment because 10th tends to have a lot of BLOS terrain that makes it hard for me to leverage my mid-strength long-ranged guns. A skyray is great because it just needs to shoot a single salvo at a good target to do a bunch of damage, but my fire warriors don't really do big spikes of damage like that; they need multiple turns of steadily whittling the target down to have much offense. So my games so far have made my less killy units feel like they're just sort of marching onto magic circles to die while my more expensive units do the actual damage. Probably just my inexperience/skill issue showing.

Playing against tau feels fine at the moment in my experience. In editions where tau are powerful, they tend to be oppressive because they're usually just kind of a stat check army in those editions. Like, 7th edition tau basically just out-shot most armies while simultaneously having counters to most forms of counterplay. Try to advance up the table? They'll ignore cover and/or line of sight. Try to sucker punch them from reserves? Interceptor. Try to charge them? Mass overwatch and/or fallback & shoot.

Basically, tau are kind of a one-trick pony. So it's very easy to either make that one trick so good that it's oppressive, or weak enough that the army simply lacks the punch to win games. And if they're strong enough to win games, you either give them counters to the opponent's counterplay (which makes them non-interactive), or you don't (which then makes it all too easy to auto-win against them if simply reserve rushing them or blitzing their lines or whatever works.)

For me, if an army feels like it perfectly counters, negates, or avoids your own army, then those are the least fun to play against. Or armies that completely ignore some aspect of the game's rules with their own special rules.

 Jayden63 wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:
Some armies are unfun b/c they are Tau armies.

Unfun to play or unfun to play against? Why do you think so?

Both. Tau often reduced games to exercises in applying and removing marker lights while not moving any models. Even playing objective games was unfun because Tau could just sit and shoot. Good luck holding on to that midboard objective with triple rips facing you down. Not only do they ignore entire phases of the game they fit poorly into the setting, though I would grant that they fit a lot better into the new era of mindless lore (if I cared to engage with that). I think Tau is a great example of how GW can feth up a faction for eternity by writing crap rules that jaundice them early on. Ask any of the veterans here how they felt about Fish of Fury and getting shot at from under a skimmer while not being able to fire back.

Crying about Tau feels so 2006.

BanjoJohn wrote:
For me, if an army feels like it perfectly counters, negates, or avoids your own army, then those are the least fun to play against. Or armies that completely ignore some aspect of the game's rules with their own special rules.

This is the answer. If you're opponent's army simply shuts down your armies ability to function as designed, it is unfun to play against. It could be faction rules or army composition. Either way, no one wants to play a game for 2-4 hours while not getting to do their thing because the opponent's army makes it impossible.

This is one of the reason Knights are so hated. You bring a balanced list and suddenly half your army can just move around and die because the entire opposing army is tanks.

 Hairesy wrote:

 Jayden63 wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:
Some armies are unfun b/c they are Tau armies.

Unfun to play or unfun to play against? Why do you think so?

Both. Tau often reduced games to exercises in applying and removing marker lights while not moving any models. Even playing objective games was unfun because Tau could just sit and shoot. Good luck holding on to that midboard objective with triple rips facing you down. Not only do they ignore entire phases of the game they fit poorly into the setting, though I would grant that they fit a lot better into the new era of mindless lore (if I cared to engage with that). I think Tau is a great example of how GW can feth up a faction for eternity by writing crap rules that jaundice them early on. Ask any of the veterans here how they felt about Fish of Fury and getting shot at from under a skimmer while not being able to fire back.

Didn't bother me at all.
Whatever the edition, all armies have their gimmicks.
My solution to that particular trick? I blew up the Fish (it wasn't hard). Then I blew up the Tau hiding behind it.

Tyel wrote:
Crying about Tau feels so 2006.

Accurate, as that's probably close to when I stopped caring about GW.

 Hairesy wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Crying about Tau feels so 2006.

Accurate, as that's probably close to when I stopped caring about GW.

So, out of curiosity, why are you bothering to post about it here in 2025?

 Jidmah wrote:
Your argument is highly flawed though. Just because people's feelings don't always match reality, doesn't mean they never do.

Game design is a craft and there is a science related to it. Especially mobile game designers employ psychologists to make their games more enjoyable to encourage people to spend more.

"Feel bad moments" and lack of interaction are established concepts and symptoms of objectively bad game design, not a problem of society.

Just because your personal feelings happen to line up with an objective truth one time doesn't in any way make personal feelings an objective truth. That's called a correlation causation fallacy.


If you want to argue that a mechanic is bad, you have to use, rules based evidence. Personal feelings are not evidence for rules quality, they are evidence of how a rule makes you feel. You can find disagreement over whether a rule is feelsbad in this forum, you can find people hating on specific rules across the community. If you literally used personal feelings to determine rule quality, none of the rules would exist.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
I feel like if old Pinning rules reappeared in 40k now there would be an uproar about how unfun it is to not be able to do something with your unit because it failed a Ld test.

Well... yeah.
It was when pinning was a thing?
GW guys have consistently said that the biggest complaint they got about 40K rules was anything that took control away from a player's own models.

I feel this is the crux of the issue.
You have to make a game that works for both players. You shouldn't have a system where if one player has "a perfect game", the other player just... dies, with no capacity of their own to escape the doom loop they are in. That is not fun.

Now clearly I don't want a system where if you consistently make the wrong choices you don't lose. But that is not the same.

Gw refuse to remove IGOUGO, so there commitment to removing rules that prevent loss of control is already gone. The alpha strike does exactly that and has done since 40k existed.

You can't give both players a perfect experience if you want one side to win, because killing your opponent's models reduces their control of the game. Pinning is a BETTER option than killing, because it allows you use the unit later in the game, rather than losing it permanently. It's extremely short sighted to consider that bad.

Which is entirely besides the fact that a wargame represents war and in war generals lose control of their troops all the time, its a FEATURE of the kind of game you are playing. It's like complaining that you have to use a board when playing chess.

 Hellebore wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Your argument is highly flawed though. Just because people's feelings don't always match reality, doesn't mean they never do.

Game design is a craft and there is a science related to it. Especially mobile game designers employ psychologists to make their games more enjoyable to encourage people to spend more.

"Feel bad moments" and lack of interaction are established concepts and symptoms of objectively bad game design, not a problem of society.

Just because your personal feelings happen to line up with an objective truth one time doesn't in any way make personal feelings an objective truth. That's called a correlation causation fallacy.


If you want to argue that a mechanic is bad, you have to use, rules based evidence. Personal feelings are not evidence for rules quality, they are evidence of how a rule makes you feel. You can find disagreement over whether a rule is feelsbad in this forum, you can find people hating on specific rules across the community. If you literally used personal feelings to determine rule quality, none of the rules would exist.

I'm going to sit in the middle on this, you're largely right on a cold objective level.

However there is a point where if a rule or situation is regularly causing "feelbads" for a significant number, then it's clearly poorly designed, even without an objective explanation.

The game is designed to be accessible and importantly to drive sales and customer interaction. If GW design any scenarios that regularly push away someone from yhe game or product with negative emotions, thats not in line with their goals.

I'd argue anything in the game that stops people feeling like they want to go buy a kit and paint it to some degree, via positive interaction, is poorly designed from the viewpoint of the creator.

ccs wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Crying about Tau feels so 2006.

Accurate, as that's probably close to when I stopped caring about GW.

So, out of curiosity, why are you bothering to post about it here in 2025?

Because the point of forums is to discuss things. I suppose if you absolutely need a current hot take I hate Primaris and think that whole thing is boring af, nonsensical to the setting and breaks established lore in an unfixable way.

 Hairesy wrote:

ccs wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Crying about Tau feels so 2006.

Accurate, as that's probably close to when I stopped caring about GW.

So, out of curiosity, why are you bothering to post about it here in 2025?

Because the point of forums is to discuss things. I suppose if you absolutely need a current hot take I hate Primaris and think that whole thing is boring af, nonsensical to the setting and breaks established lore in an unfixable way.

9 year old take sadly at this point, not against the participation though!

Dudeface wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Your argument is highly flawed though. Just because people's feelings don't always match reality, doesn't mean they never do.

Game design is a craft and there is a science related to it. Especially mobile game designers employ psychologists to make their games more enjoyable to encourage people to spend more.

"Feel bad moments" and lack of interaction are established concepts and symptoms of objectively bad game design, not a problem of society.

Just because your personal feelings happen to line up with an objective truth one time doesn't in any way make personal feelings an objective truth. That's called a correlation causation fallacy.


If you want to argue that a mechanic is bad, you have to use, rules based evidence. Personal feelings are not evidence for rules quality, they are evidence of how a rule makes you feel. You can find disagreement over whether a rule is feelsbad in this forum, you can find people hating on specific rules across the community. If you literally used personal feelings to determine rule quality, none of the rules would exist.

I'm going to sit in the middle on this, you're largely right on a cold objective level.

However there is a point where if a rule or situation is regularly causing "feelbads" for a significant number, then it's clearly poorly designed, even without an objective explanation.

The game is designed to be accessible and importantly to drive sales and customer interaction. If GW design any scenarios that regularly push away someone from yhe game or product with negative emotions, thats not in line with their goals.

I'd argue anything in the game that stops people feeling like they want to go buy a kit and paint it to some degree, via positive interaction, is poorly designed from the viewpoint of the creator.

It is impossible to please everyone and you will cause more harm to other players by trying to placate some who want the game to cater to their feelings. Because ultimately, you cannot make a competitive game like that without one side of the game feeling like it was rigged against them. It's a have your cake situation. It's just not possible to do when both players feelings must be taken into account.

If GW wants to purely drive sales and maximise feelsgood, then they need to change the game fundamentally and make it PVE rather than PVP. Because PVE is the only type of game that avoids sour grapes because you only have to make the experience work for one person at a time. Feelsbad requires you to balance both sides of the game, and both sides of the game will have different feelings on what feelsbad actually is.

If a large part of the player base don't like a rule, then there is certainly going to be some underlying reasons. But those reasons could be 'players expect a wargame not to work like a wargame' in which case it's a failure of expectation setting on the part of the company and a failure on the part of players for not understanding that is a feature rather than a bug.

This also comes back to a common issue in the GW community where people conflate a game CONCEPT with a game rule, decrying the whole concept if the rule is poorly executed rather than recognising that the rule needs to change to better represent the concept. so many demands for x rule to be removed entirely because it's dumb, when the concept it represents is vital to a wargame and removing the rule removes core aspects of wargaming. Leadership and pinning being a prominent one currently.

The expectation setting for the game is part of the problem. If you sell the game as living out your space marine power fantasy then players will complain that their marines aren't power fantasy enough, especially when both players are using marines. If you set the expectations that as a wargame you are playing with imperfect troops performing imperfect actions with imperfect timeframes and you as the general have imperfect control and you must make decisions that don't always work, you are less likely for people to feel bad that their marines didn't wipe the table, or retreated, or failed to kill something, or died faster than you hoped for.

I see a lot of legitimate critiques of game mechanics in GW games, but a lot of the feelsbad arguments fall back on personal power fantasy expectations clashing with wargaming simulation and the need to balance two people's power fantasies against each other.

Your take on PvP is flawed. Just because someone will win doesn't mean the other player will feel the game was rigged against them. It is just a harder lift for the designers to ensure that there are close to as many advantages for taking Option A vs Option B.

For example, you can offset the first player advantage of IGOUGO by providing advantages to the second player.

But that comes down to game design at a high level. At a lower level, you can have a mechanic that works fine in some circumstances but falls apart in others. Dice modifiers is a great example. No one complains about them on Saves. They are a little more problematic one the Wound roll and really unpopular on the Hit roll. There are multiple ways this can be dealt with. GW has gone the route of capping both Wound and Hit roll modifiers and has seriously cut back on instances of Negative Hit Roll modifiers.

Negative Hit roll modifiers are avoided because too many models have a WS or BS of 5+. The modifier is much more significant there than for a model with a 2+. Given the uneven distribution of especially BS between armies, it is difficult to balance a negative Hit modifier. This makes it a Bad Mechanic in this circumstance.

 Hellebore wrote:

It's going to be bit of both, but using how something 'feels' to determine its objective balance is a flawed methodology and I don't really like seeing it used as a conventional wisdom reason for objecting to how an army or mechanic works.

I feel like you're touchign on two semi-separate things here. Subjective feelings aren't good for determining whether something is objectively balanced, we agree on that. BUT, ultimately the point of a game is to give the players an enjoyable experience. So even if the math on a given unit or mechanic or whatever checks out as being balanced, it's possible for it to still be a bad bit of game design if players aren't enjoying themselves.

Or in other words, just because something is balanced doesn't necessarily mean that it's fun. And fun is arguably the main goal.

It's ok to have a super tough army, so long as those armies that aren't have means of beating them. It's ok to have a hard to hit army, so long as other armies can still beat them.

Counter-example: I hate facing imperial knights to the point of sometimes just preferring to turn down games against them. I can definitely beat them. I can outscore them. But the process of winning a game against them tends to not be much fun for me because it feels like half my units don't get to do the things I wanted them to do.

Knights are tough. Knights are definitely beatable. But regardless of whether they're balanced, they're still not fun to play against. So in terms of balance, knights might be a success (current chaos knight boogeyman aside). But in terms of their impact on how much fun some of us are having, they actively detract from the game.

I feel like if old Pinning rules reappeared in 40k now there would be an uproar about how unfun it is to not be able to do something with your unit because it failed a Ld test. When just killing the models does the same thing. Having more than just removing models to affect their actions is a great thing. Everytime I look at current 40k, it just looks like it was designed to be marines punching marines to get maximum enjoyment from the rules as they currently stand. Playing anything else just works against the biases in the game itself.

I remember pinning getting complained about plenty back when it was a thing. While I like the high concept of reducing actions/effectiveness rather than needing to kill a unit outright, the implementation was kind of frustrating and non-interactive. The player with pinning got to make the somewhat interesting decision of splashing pinning weapons into their list in place of other choices that might have been more lethal, but the player on the receiving end just randomly lost control of their unit for a turn after failing a single leadership check, usually without any real counterplay.

It was basically an X% chance of having your unit stun locked for a turn. Which then meant there was a good chance that unit was either going to die outright because you'd been banking on its offense to remove a threat in the immediate area (ex: having a short-ranged shooty unit wipe out a melee unit before the unit could charge), or else a chance that your slow foot slogging unit would reach the enemy too late to make a difference in the flow of the game.

In theory, a better implementation of the concept would be one that presents the pinned player with new and interesting choices rather than just stun-locking a unit and taking away actions. Or perhaps a version of the mechanic that provides more opportunities to react to the possibility of being stunned rather than it being an all or nothing outcome based on a single unmodifiable leadership test. Like, if there was a mechanic for commanders' attention/focus that could be spent rallying squads/buffing their pinning tests. Or if we had an AA system where pinning was represented by stacking stress tokens so you'd have the option of moving the unit behind some cover when you saw that they were starting to rack up the stress tokens.

But generally, I think it's possible to give armies advantages that are both fun to have and fun to face off against. Challenging, sure, but ultimately a more rewarding form of design than making both armies annoying to their opponents and hoping that players are more entertained by their own advantages than they are annoyed by their opponent's.

 alextroy wrote:
Negative Hit roll modifiers are avoided because too many models have a WS or BS of 5+. The modifier is much more significant there than for a model with a 2+. Given the uneven distribution of especially BS between armies, it is difficult to balance a negative Hit modifier. This makes it a Bad Mechanic in this circumstance.

Death Guard + Skullsquirm Blight + Morty's Hammer + VS Orks = Lots of laughs - one friend

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

It's going to be bit of both, but using how something 'feels' to determine its objective balance is a flawed methodology and I don't really like seeing it used as a conventional wisdom reason for objecting to how an army or mechanic works.

I feel like you're touchign on two semi-separate things here. Subjective feelings aren't good for determining whether something is objectively balanced, we agree on that. BUT, ultimately the point of a game is to give the players an enjoyable experience. So even if the math on a given unit or mechanic or whatever checks out as being balanced, it's possible for it to still be a bad bit of game design if players aren't enjoying themselves.

Or in other words, just because something is balanced doesn't necessarily mean that it's fun. And fun is arguably the main goal.

[

True. There's this example that is often quoted to illustrate such cases - designers in an online game reworked a certain mechanic so that instead of giving a penalty it withheld a reward. The result mechanically was the same but, as it didn't trigger the loss aversion bias, it was received more favourably by players.

Or how designers introduce more randomness into a game for it to be less discouraging for weaker/newer players, with the example of a multiplayer online shooter increasing the chance of a critical hit, increasing how many times a newbie could come out victorious of a sudden encounter. Player retention increased as a result.

ccs 817088 11770314 wrote:

So, out of curiosity, why are you bothering to post about it here in 2025?

There are people who hate each other because of a stolen bucket in 1325. 20y ago is like yestarday. I don't think I will ever forget the enjoyment of playing vs aloitoc flyer wing.

Dudeface wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:

ccs wrote:

 Hairesy wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Crying about Tau feels so 2006.

Accurate, as that's probably close to when I stopped caring about GW.

So, out of curiosity, why are you bothering to post about it here in 2025?

Because the point of forums is to discuss things. I suppose if you absolutely need a current hot take I hate Primaris and think that whole thing is boring af, nonsensical to the setting and breaks established lore in an unfixable way.

9 year old take sadly at this point, not against the participation though!

I refuse to find something new to dislike and would rather wallow in elegiac collectors joy.

Cyel wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

It's going to be bit of both, but using how something 'feels' to determine its objective balance is a flawed methodology and I don't really like seeing it used as a conventional wisdom reason for objecting to how an army or mechanic works.

I feel like you're touchign on two semi-separate things here. Subjective feelings aren't good for determining whether something is objectively balanced, we agree on that. BUT, ultimately the point of a game is to give the players an enjoyable experience. So even if the math on a given unit or mechanic or whatever checks out as being balanced, it's possible for it to still be a bad bit of game design if players aren't enjoying themselves.

Or in other words, just because something is balanced doesn't necessarily mean that it's fun. And fun is arguably the main goal.

[

True. There's this exame that is often quoted to illustrate such cases - designers in an online game reworked a certain mechanic so that instead of giving a penalty it withheld a reward. The result mechanically was the same but, as it didn't trigger the loss aversion bias, it was rceived more favourably by players.

Or how designers introduce more randomness into a game for it to be less discouraging for weaker/newer players, woth the example of a multiplayer online shooter increasing the chance of a critical hit, increasing howany times a newbie could come out victorious of a sudden encounter. Player retention increased as a result.

My argument is that many of these feelsbad comments I see are due to self inflicted denial/delusion about what a wargame should be representing and how it should be played, than a game that's actually 'unfun'. Or that GW are doing a bad job at expectation managing their customers on exactly what the game they are selling them is and does.

It would be like starting to play tennis and then complaining that it's not a team sport played on a round field. Which, if the tennis association advertised it as a large field game you can play with friends, would be their fault. Otherwise it would be player's making demands of a game outside its design.

If GW just want to build a customer base as massively as possible, they'd simplify the game even more and stop concentrating on tournaments because that's not where the majority of their customers exist. But, if they are starting from the conceit that the game is even notionally a wargame and should be treated like one, then the game itself has a finite scope of change within which it would be designed to maintain that conceit.



I absolutely think games should be enjoyable, but the definition of fun is set by the parameters of the activity. The fun of hide and seek is set as either managing to hide, or managing to find people. It's not throwing balls at people, or boxing them, or scoring goals between goal posts. The fun is clearly defined. Other games hiding is right out, so you aren't supposed to derive your enjoyment from hiding from your tennis opponent.

In some (but not all) cases of 'feelsbad', the complaint is actually that a wargame has defined an aspect of gameplay, like not being able to 100% perfectly control your troops at all times, as a feature of the game that should be where the fun is derived. Their issue is with the definition of a wargame, not that the game has a rule they don't like. That is where I find the feelsbad argument really frustrating and very egocentric.

You can enjoy literally anything with the right context setting. the Room is watched because it's bad, Citizen Kane because it's good. You can create a game scenario where one side will definitely lose all their models by the end of the game, but the context is a last stand to do something really cool, so even when you've 'lost' in one way, you can still 'win' the scenario.


Feelsbad is only valid when it's working within the framework of what a wargame is. If you are arguing with the very concepts of what a wargame represents and is simulating, then it means you are either playing the wrong game, or have very warped expectations of what the game should be.

In some (but not all) cases of 'feelsbad', the complaint is actually that a wargame has defined an aspect of gameplay, like not being able to 100% perfectly control your troops at all times, as a feature of the game that should be where the fun is derived. Their issue is with the definition of a wargame, not that the game has a rule they don't like. That is where I find the feelsbad argument really frustrating and very egocentric.
...
Feelsbad is only valid when it's working within the framework of what a wargame is. If you are arguing with the very concepts of what a wargame represents and is simulating, then it means you are either playing the wrong game, or have very warped expectations of what the game should be.

I guess I'd need a specific example to meaningfully respond to that. With the pinning example you gave earlier, I absolutely understand why getting pinned with next to no ability to interact with that mechanic would be frustrating.

It kind of sounds like you're saying people were wrong to be frustrated because the fluff of the game is that it's about battle and units getting pinned is a thing that happens in battle. (Not to put words in your mouth.)

And as I said with the pinning example, I can picture different ways of representing pinning that would make it feel less arbitrary and create interesting choices for players rather than essentially being a % chance to get severely fethed over by an unlucky leadership test.

EDIT: Like, if someone just invented tennis and was trying to sell me on it and one of the rules was that players had to punch themselves in the balls every time they scored a point, I'd be like, "Hey, that punching myself in the balls part isn't really contributing positively to my sportsball experience."

And if the inventor of the sport said, "Well, punching yourself in the balls is a big part of the sport. I was very upfront about the ball punching," I wouldn't find that a compelling reason to keep the ball punching rule.

The concept of pinning is an example of what I'm talking about. The specific feels bad about not being able to control your troops effectively all the time was given by several people this thread and across many others as a 'poor' rule that should be removed like AoS removing Ld tests.

your comment about finding different ways to represent pinning is within the framework of pinning still existing as it should in a wargame, so that's not what I'm referring to. Someone saying it shouldnt exist at all because they don't like it is what l'm referring to.

Similarly, to hit modifiers being feelsbad - no one is always effective at hitting a target in war. Removing that factor is poor implementation. If everyone always hit their targets wars would be over immediately. These things are frustrating to deal with, but dealing with them is what commanders in war have to do, which the player is acting as. Sometimes the challenge you have to solve in war is to accomplish something with no favourable conditions or advantages. It used to be that was one of the biggest kudos events in a wargame experience, that you overcame unfavourable odds to pull victory where someone else might have been defeated. The first wargames were all historical reinactments for history nerds to see if they could have won when Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or the Alamo etc. Deliberately taking the poor conditions as the fun aspect they're trying to overcome. LIterally the feelsbad aspect of no hope was the recontextualised as the feelsgood of victory against all odds.

40k now is just chuck dice until you bash people to death, or manage to stack combo attacks to wipe enemy units in a single strike.


The ball punching example is a little sideways because tennis isn't trying to simulate something that has known factors in it. A wargame is simulating warfare between imperfect soldiers, on an imperfect battlefield with imperfect CNC. There are things that are not fun that you have to deal with in that scenario, or you're not trying to play a wargame.

If "ball-punching" is too literal, you can come up with other examples.

I.E.
Armies have logistics issues. To simulate this, any time you select a unit to shoot you have to roll a dice. If you roll a 1, bad luck, you've run out of bullets. That unit can't shoot now or for the rest of the game.

We can, GW style, even embrace this rule, adding a complicated array of modifiers and rerolls, which may or may not be governed by keywords. In 20 years time people will debate whether it was fluffy or not that in 11th edition Space Marines auto-passed because Space Marines etc etc etc.

I think something like this even was a rule in Necromunda, maybe Gorkamorka.

Its something perfectly reasonable to have in a war game.

But...... I'd also argue however its adding a massive luck element to the game, which some players may or may not like. Its certainly adding a major "feels bad" moments, that will inevitably happen regularly. No one is going to enjoy being told "no, soz, left the ammo at home" when their big shooty unit is about to open up.

I don't think it would be remotely surprising if the bulk of players went "this rule sucks, please get rid of it GW". To which you might say "aha! You're not trying to play a wargame." To which they'd respond "we don't care."

+1 on the above. Game needs to work as a game, it is always going to have abstractions. "It's realistic" (whateve that means) is never a good excusefor mechanics that are crappy, by for example taking away player agency or, piling up tedious admin or creating negative play experience.

In my oppinion all this so called "feelsbad" is always childish gak commes from "oH No, my uber <unit name> not so uber!!!!1one Change the game my <unit name> shall be da Best" and this stupid. Look at HH 3 where bunch of suppression mechanics and dat not make it non interactive. All this interactive/non-interactive talks are from PC actions games influence. Where you move unstopable all the time.

Cyel wrote:
+1 on the above. Game needs to work as a game, it is always going to have abstractions. "It's realistic" (whateve that means) is never a good excusefor mechanics that are crappy, by for example taking away player agency or, piling up tedious admin or creating negative play experience.

Seems everything is a negative play experience these days.

Can't have pinning. Takes away agency.

Can't have units break and run. Takes away agency.

Can't have models get killed. Takes away agency.

Can't have models not get killed. Makes units feel ineffective.

Yet, I am pretty sure you know what I meant anyway But nice hyperbole, kudos.

Tyel wrote:
If "ball-punching" is too literal, you can come up with other examples.

I.E.
Armies have logistics issues. To simulate this, any time you select a unit to shoot you have to roll a dice. If you roll a 1, bad luck, you've run out of bullets. That unit can't shoot now or for the rest of the game.

We can, GW style, even embrace this rule, adding a complicated array of modifiers and rerolls, which may or may not be governed by keywords. In 20 years time people will debate whether it was fluffy or not that in 11th edition Space Marines auto-passed because Space Marines etc etc etc.

I think something like this even was a rule in Necromunda, maybe Gorkamorka.

Its something perfectly reasonable to have in a war game.

But...... I'd also argue however its adding a massive luck element to the game, which some players may or may not like. Its certainly adding a major "feels bad" moments, that will inevitably happen regularly. No one is going to enjoy being told "no, soz, left the ammo at home" when their big shooty unit is about to open up.

I don't think it would be remotely surprising if the bulk of players went "this rule sucks, please get rid of it GW". To which you might say "aha! You're not trying to play a wargame." To which they'd respond "we don't care."

This is the exact example I was about to give to Hellebore. Well done.

@Hellebore, as Tyel pointed out, designers pick and choose what aspects of the thing being simulated actually make it into the game. At times 40k has attempted to include pinning but not necessarily poor logistics or trench foot or what have you. Generally, the deciding factor in whether or not something makes it into the game is whether or not it adds to the game experience. So while I'm not opposed to including pinning again, I think it's fair to say that we should only include pinning if it's implemented in a way that adds to the game. Including an unenjoyable version of pinning like we had in the past purely because pinning is a thing that happens in war doesn't hold up as an argument for me.

Also, I hope my internet tone isn't getting too aggressive. I always enjoy conversing with you.




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kabaakaba wrote:
In my oppinion all this so called "feelsbad" is always childish gak commes from "oH No, my uber <unit name> not so uber!!!!1one Change the game my <unit name> shall be da Best" and this stupid. Look at HH 3 where bunch of suppression mechanics and dat not make it non interactive. All this interactive/non-interactive talks are from PC actions games influence. Where you move unstopable all the time.

That hasn't been my experience reading comments that mention "feelsbad" moments, and I don't think it's how I tend to use the term myself. To me, "feelsbad" isn't a term for when things merely go imperfectly; it's a term for when the rules screw you over despite no fault of your own or leave you in a position where you feel like you don't have meaningful choices or otherwise just generally feel like your army isn't being allowed to behave as advertised.

Speaking as an eldar player, strands of fate was a feelsbad mechanic at the start of 10th because it made people feel like there was basically nothing they could do to stop a bunch of literally automatic devastating wounds coming off of d-cannons at the start of the game. That's not non-eldar players whining about their armies not being uber enough; that's a reasonable reaction to a mechanic that disregards the defensive stats you invested in and basically guaranteed you were playing at a points disadvantage after the first eldar turn.

Failing a 3" charge because you rolled snake eyes is feels bad because you made the effort to get your unit very close to your charge target and then failed anyway. With some pretty intense mental gymnastics required to explain why your berzerkers couldn't figure out how to jog a couple meters closer to the enemy to get within chain axe range. It feels like you're being put at a disadvantage by an arbitrary and abstract game mechanic that doesn't reflect your piloting choices and breaks some of the immersion with the fluff.

Playing against imperial knights when you brought a casual vanilla army can be feels bad because you signed up to have your dire avengers or intercessors trade shots with fellow infantry, and instead they're just going to spend the game fishing for 6s and waiting to be killed on objective markers.

For me, a key point I like to consider in the difference between "Feels bad" and "Git gud" is What could I have done differently?

If the answer is something like "I should've focused on another squad," or "I should've focused on scoring instead of killing," or "I should've deployed less aggressively," then that's okay. I goofed, I messed up, time to learn.
If the answer is "I did everything pretty much right and just got screwed anyway," that's less okay.

And yes, sometimes the dice will just say no and there's nothing you can do about it. But when any given game involves rolling thousands of dice over the course of it, the odds of truly being screwed by dice are pretty slim. (Barring some key rolls-Charge Rolls, for example, can be a small number of dice that can have outsize influence on the game.)

Agree with that sentiment, JNA. Flubbing my attacks for a turn isn't something I'd call "feelsbad." It might be frustrating in the moment, but randomized damage outputs are a big part of what keeps the game interesting.

Managing to fail your single shot with a hammerhead's big gun feels a little worse, but again, the potential to fail attacks are a good and accepted part of the core game experience.

Failing a 3" charge just feels like you're getting screwed over arbitrarily by an 8th edition game designer's bandaid fix for making charges out of deepstrike possible but not oppressive. Getting pinned similarly felt like you were getting screwed by a single roll that you probably didn't have much way to mitigate or interact with, though at least some pinning weapons felt like they were an intentional choice on the part of the player who opted to take them instead of a more lethal option.

Sometimes it's not the base game it's the stuff added later like unbalanced missions.

I remember some of the Psychic Awakening missions that had objectives that could only be completed by INFANTRY.

So a battle between Knights, Armoured Companies, or other Monstrous units turned into lame stalemates as neither side could win.

Things like that make you feel like you spent your money and time wrong, as you flip through books saying, "I can't play that mission... or that one."

Would say changing the charge rule to 2D6" but you can always get a minimum of 6" undermine "wargaminess"?

I kind of think flubbing all your attacks is "feels bad" - but not obvious there's a solution barring some bad luck protection which you could have in a computer game but not obviously in dice. I think you've got to accept that one. Part of 40k is the ability to roll lots of 6s.

Some newer games with randomised attacks move away from having "Miss" as an option.

For example I am now playing through a Tidal Blades 2 campaign and neither attack cards nor dice you use to determine damage on enemies have a "Miss". Depending on RNG you can do more, you can do less, you can do too much or (frustratingly!) not enough, but you never do "nothing".

I guess, these designers (quite reasonably) assumed that players do not sit to have a game and perform actions only to watch how "nothing happened". They designed an incredibly well thought out, state-of-the-art game by the way, so I am sure this decision also wasn't a coincidence.

Don't this give us(in our setting with it "lore" sm predominance) even more outrage cause some grot anyway do damage to terminator? Or knight?

kabaakaba wrote:
Don't this give us(in our setting with it "lore" sm predominance) even more outrage cause some grot anyway do damage to terminator? Or knight?

That is a scale issue.

To my knowledge, a lot of other wargames have a tighter scale. You wouldn’t see a single model half the size of a human fighting against a robot 60 meters tall.

Because I do agree that always doing something would be ridiculous when you have one grot versus a whole Knight. But if you have a horde of 100 grots represented as one base vs a Knight, it’s a lot more reasonable that they can (with grenades or whatever) do something.

Great posts from Wyldhunt and JNA. Said everything I wanted to say but better.

kabaakaba wrote:
Don't this give us(in our setting with it "lore" sm predominance) even more outrage cause some grot anyway do damage to terminator? Or knight?

No. As the way you would sensibly design this would be to make such an action not possible in the game to begin with (like old S5 or less never damages T8 or AV12). The action is simply never undertaken.

But when you allow players to choose such targets, make them go through some kind of a process (rolling, counting etc) just for the result to be "nothing happened, you all just wasted your time" ... that's the kind of situations that a designer may want to avoid with such a solution.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Tyel wrote:
If "ball-punching" is too literal, you can come up with other examples.

I.E.
Armies have logistics issues. To simulate this, any time you select a unit to shoot you have to roll a dice. If you roll a 1, bad luck, you've run out of bullets. That unit can't shoot now or for the rest of the game.

We can, GW style, even embrace this rule, adding a complicated array of modifiers and rerolls, which may or may not be governed by keywords. In 20 years time people will debate whether it was fluffy or not that in 11th edition Space Marines auto-passed because Space Marines etc etc etc.

I think something like this even was a rule in Necromunda, maybe Gorkamorka.

Its something perfectly reasonable to have in a war game.

But...... I'd also argue however its adding a massive luck element to the game, which some players may or may not like. Its certainly adding a major "feels bad" moments, that will inevitably happen regularly. No one is going to enjoy being told "no, soz, left the ammo at home" when their big shooty unit is about to open up.

I don't think it would be remotely surprising if the bulk of players went "this rule sucks, please get rid of it GW". To which you might say "aha! You're not trying to play a wargame." To which they'd respond "we don't care."

This is the exact example I was about to give to Hellebore. Well done.

@Hellebore, as Tyel pointed out, designers pick and choose what aspects of the thing being simulated actually make it into the game. At times 40k has attempted to include pinning but not necessarily poor logistics or trench foot or what have you. Generally, the deciding factor in whether or not something makes it into the game is whether or not it adds to the game experience. So while I'm not opposed to including pinning again, I think it's fair to say that we should only include pinning if it's implemented in a way that adds to the game. Including an unenjoyable version of pinning like we had in the past purely because pinning is a thing that happens in war doesn't hold up as an argument for me.

Also, I hope my internet tone isn't getting too aggressive. I always enjoy conversing with you.

And that's all within the wargame discussion. Feels bad saying things should just not be there is not.

You can absolutely discuss what parts of warfare you want to model and how to make the game 'fun' as a result. But there will be a pyramid hierarchy of warfare challenges going from biggest impact to least impact that will naturally show which ones are more likely to be relevant and deleting them because the players don't want that challenge undermines the cohesion of what you're trying to represent. You can keep stripping 'unfun' warfare challenges out, but you are left with nothing to play.

These arguments keep conflating concepts with execution..I never claimed bad pinning should exist. But people.keep saying it should go because the implementation was bad. It's beholden to the designer to create good rules around necessary concepts. I think th concept of pinning is necessary which necessitates good execution for an enjoyable game experience. Removing the concept entirely is not a good execution.

As to the feels bad argument, I am an example of a counter to it. Because I depsise what current 40k is. I find it a comptety bland, challengless.dice chucking snooze.fest that makes me feel bad to play. And I found older pining rules feels good because they were another challenge and tactic to manipulate the game with.

Hence why personal feelings are a poor measure because if I'm playing someone who likes current 40k I want it changed and they don't, and vice versa with older editions.

Thus expectation management and objective design are better than personal preference.


Current 40k plays like a computer game where you figured out your optimal attack pattern and just press the same 5 buttons over and over again. Feels bad is when people don't get the victory they were expecting from their 5 button action.

Stack strategies, alpha strike, chuck as many dice as possible the end. There's no nuance at all. It's very binary.

 Hellebore wrote:


Current 40k plays like a computer game where you figured out your optimal attack pattern and just press the same 5 buttons over and over again. Feels bad is when people don't get the victory they were expecting from their 5 button action.

Stack strategies, alpha strike, chuck as many dice as possible the end. There's no nuance at all. It's very binary.

I'm not exactly going to disagree, because the rules DO facilitate what you describe quite effectively. I understand what you and others dislike about modern 40k, and there are elements of 10th that I don't like much either.

But I do think that a great deal about "how the game plays" does depend on how you play it; I know that some people's control over the way they play is limited to some degree by external factors beyond their control, and I'm certainly not telling anyone they are playing wrong.

But when I play, the game doesn't feel like what you describe at all. I mean, I'm playing 500 point Crusade games using Boarding Actions rules with an overarching narrative that that is designed to escalate to 3k armies and incorporates Kill Team games into the campaign structure. It's a lot of work, but I take as much pride in the campaigns that grow my armies as much as I do about my armies.

500 point Crusade games combined with Kill Team side missions really does capture the warband feel of the Rogue Trader Era. It is the perfect format for exploring novel experiments like the WD Blanchitsu/ Pilgrim project. I think that was actually 7th or 8th ed, but man, systems like Crusade and Spec Ops really open the doors on campaign play; they're best when employed co-operatively by a small group of like minded players.

Now it's entirely possible that I may encounter some of the things you write about with more frequency once my armies grow to a more cumbersome size; I might also encounter these problems more often if I played a greater variety of opponents... I'm working on that, with another game scheduled in the last week of August once my vacation wraps up. I'm using the time until then to get the raiding party fully painted, and I might be able to snap off an Arena fight next week so that I can bring the proper Wych Cult models to the battle.

Granted, some people just don't like small games, and want all their games to be 2k, and that's a valid choice. Some people aren't going to want to invest as much time into protracted narratives, and that's a valid choice too. And some people have already tried every flavour of the game and still can't find one that feels the way they want it to feel. But if you haven't tried the small escalating warband style of campaigning, and you're disillusioned with stand-alone 2k games, it might be worth your while to try it before you invest in a whole other game. It might not work for you, but then again it might.

At the moment, it's doing a decent enough job to give me what I want from it. Good luck man.

This tough just hit my brain. Doesn't we already have all kind of suppression mechanics that's looks fine? I mean there is all that special rules on almost every IG units for example which give battle-shock, reduce movement and charge, reduce hit roll, strip BoC.

kabaakaba wrote:
This tough just hit my brain. Doesn't we already have all kind of suppression mechanics that's looks fine? I mean there is all that special rules on almost every IG units for example which give battle-shock, reduce movement and charge, reduce hit roll, strip BoC.

Which are both bespoke, not universal; and don’t remove agency entirely. They reduce effectiveness without denying you your choices.

Doesn't that what we wanted? I mean we reduce effectiveness but opponent still can play this unit. No one loosing control.

The thing is people aren't complaining that German machine guns can pin British infantry in their D-Day game.

These are the factions of Warhammer 40k:
Brainwashed fanatical super-soldiers in impenetrable armor
Fanatical super-soldiers in impenetrable armor who are insane and worship demons
Legions of the soulless robots from Terminator
Mindless alien insects who attack in an endless horde
Wacky green Mad Max gorillas who think war is fun
Insane torture-elves who are all high on drugs
50-foot tall killer robots piloted by brainwashed fanatics

And then you do have the Guard, Eldar, and Tau, who are the only ones that would be more-or-less subject to regular morale. But they're what, 20% of the armies played? And even a Cadian, Fire Warrior, or Aspect Warrior has spent a lifetime training for war and is, by modern standards, a hyper-indoctrinated kamikaze. If it's possible to convince a regular French conscript to try charging across No Man's Land into machine guns - and it is because that happened - then you can bet your ass that a Cadian raised to obey orders from childhood on a 10,000 year-old fortress-planet will do so every time.

So the morale rules cribbed from Napoleonic wargames never made sense for 40k. 10e's "battle-shock" is actually much more realistic for most armies: morale doesn't inhibit their ability to fight, it inhibits their ability to do anything else. They were trained and brainwashed and genetically or digitally programmed to fight normally under stress and do so, but they can't deploy teleport beacons or set demo charges or engage in coordinated maneuvers. In game terms, they can't score objectives or use stratagems.

Yeah maybe PDF, conscripts, and grots could have some special rule where they lose combat effectiveness while battle-shocked but they're hardly worthwhile fighters anyways. All of the serious fighting forces in 40k are willing to die for their objective points, and since every game is supposed to be a battle of annihilation I guess that's what you should expect.

Pined more about survive and do what your commander/Synapse creature/pharaon said you to do and not about morale. You lay in your cover and wait until mg gone for reload. And then you rush into fight with all your fanatism or insanity or honor or whatever. And also if you got shell-shock or shok-wave hit you, no matter hon zealous you are. You can't normally shoot run or do anything. Even if you super-human alien murderous cadian gorilla robot.

kabaakaba wrote:
Pined more about survive and do what your commander/Synapse creature/pharaon said you to do and not about morale. You lay in your cover and wait until mg gone for reload. And then you rush into fight with all your fanatism or insanity or honor or whatever. And also if you got shell-shock or shok-wave hit you, no matter hon zealous you are. You can't normally shoot run or do anything. Even if you super-human alien murderous cadian gorilla robot.

There's a bit of fluff from one of the Mechanicus, where a Tech-Priest simply orders his troops to walk into the guns of the enemy... and they walk without complaint to their death.

That's a case and krieg do so and some other too like some harmogaunts rushing on heavy bolters or some death company guys brainlessly running into cc, but it's degraded case and in most situation we as commanders wanna our troops alive and winning our battle so we ok with them take cover for some time.

 Hellebore wrote:
You can absolutely discuss what parts of warfare you want to model and how to make the game 'fun' as a result. But there will be a pyramid hierarchy of warfare challenges going from biggest impact to least impact that will naturally show which ones are more likely to be relevant and deleting them because the players don't want that challenge undermines the cohesion of what you're trying to represent. You can keep stripping 'unfun' warfare challenges out, but you are left with nothing to play.

These arguments keep conflating concepts with execution..I never claimed bad pinning should exist. But people.keep saying it should go because the implementation was bad. It's beholden to the designer to create good rules around necessary concepts. I think th concept of pinning is necessary which necessitates good execution for an enjoyable game experience. Removing the concept entirely is not a good execution.

+1 to this. The purpose of pinning is to allow certain weapons to provide temporary incapacitation of the enemy without permanently killing them. It's to allow you to have support elements that can contribute in ways other than just being another means to scoop models off the table. It's in the same design space as debuff auras, psychic abilities, and anything else that applies to your opponent but isn't a shooting attack or dice roll's worth of mortal wounds.

And yeah, more fundamentally, everything your opponent does to you in a competitive wargame is a means of reducing your ability to influence the board state. Be it pinning, wiping units off the board, or just blocking your movement and deep strike, they all chip away at your freedom to control objectives or go where you want or project force. Getting tabled is when the game ends early because your ability to influence the board has been reduced to zero.

The important thing with any mechanic is how it's implemented and whether it's any fun to be on the receiving end. The 'unfun' mechanics people complain about tend to be ones that offer no counterplay besides just hoping it doesn't happen. Indirect fires that need spotters to function have counterplay. Pinning/morale mechanisms that gradually build up friction but can be mitigated by rallying or breaking contact have counterplay. Getting shot causing you to randomly, sometimes, lose control of a unit doesn't have counterplay beyond 'don't get shot' or 'roll better' or 'don't play an army that suffers from morale'; that's why a lot of people didn't find it fun.


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 Orkeosaurus wrote:
All of the serious fighting forces in 40k are willing to die for their objective points, and since every game is supposed to be a battle of annihilation I guess that's what you should expect.

Well, if we're talking realism/verisimilitude: Morale in wargames is not a binary 'are you too scared to fight y/n', it's an abstract representation of unit cohesion and coordination that is impacted by the friction and chaos of combat.

Maybe that squad of Cadians is composed of ten brainwashed die-hards who will fight to the last man. But if five of them get hit at once, it's going to take some amount of time for the other five to assess casualties, determine who is still alive and therefore in command, re-establish communications with the next echelon up, assess whether they are still combat effective or can better serve the Emperor by breaking contact, and take proper cover against whatever just shwacked half the squad.

Marines shall know no fear but still make a point to safeguard the gene-seed of their fallen brothers, Eldar are a dying race who prioritize extracting their wounded, Orks always love a good scrap but if the boss gets krumped they might leg it or they might have a friendly disagreement over who's in charge now. You might not be afraid of bullets, but that won't make it any faster to pry the previous autocannon gunner's disembodied hands off his gun and get it back in the fight.

Many of the factions are ostensibly fearless but the ones that do not react at all to incoming fire represent a minority. Some kind of temporary degradation of combat capability is a better representation of friction, even for complete fanatics, than the Space Invaders model where every dude just stands there with the trigger held down until he gets picked off.

 catbarf wrote:
Many of the factions are ostensibly fearless but the ones that do not react at all to incoming fire represent a minority. Some kind of temporary degradation of combat capability is a better representation of friction, even for complete fanatics, than the Space Invaders model where every dude just stands there with the trigger held down until he gets picked off.

It's why I think Battleshock is actually pretty good as a general morale mechanic for 40k.

It's not crippling, it doesn't outright wipe models without other rules getting involved (Daemons!) but it represents an at least somewhat significant loss of cohesion. That's something I see happening to Orks and Marines and Necrons and all them.

8th and 9th morale, where models just went "Poof!" and vanished... That was bad.

 JNAProductions wrote:
8th and 9th morale, where models just went "Poof!" and vanished... That was bad.

Agreed, and like I always have to caveat in these discussions, I didn't really like the all-or-nothing implementation of 2nd-7th either. I know that was a feels-bad mechanic for many players and I think the lack of counterplay is key; you could boost Ld with characters or upgrades but once the game actually started it became more of a random debuff that couldn't reasonably be avoided. I liked the way it differentiated some factions- Guard hitting hard but being susceptible to crumbling from morale felt thematic- but the implementation was crude.

My issue with battleshock is how often it just... doesn't matter. It's great when it hits a unit that's on an objective, but otherwise if it's not a unit with a key stratagem then they just don't care; their combat ability isn't degraded at all. And the fact that it's rolled for at the start of your opponent's turn precludes any clever sequencing within your own turn to, say, battleshock an enemy with shooting and then charge it.

I like it more than what it replaced. But that's a low bar.

 catbarf wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
8th and 9th morale, where models just went "Poof!" and vanished... That was bad.

Agreed, and like I always have to caveat in these discussions, I didn't really like the all-or-nothing implementation of 2nd-7th either. I know that was a feels-bad mechanic for many players and I think the lack of counterplay is key; you could boost Ld with characters or upgrades but once the game actually started it became more of a random debuff that couldn't reasonably be avoided. I liked the way it differentiated some factions- Guard hitting hard but being susceptible to crumbling from morale felt thematic- but the implementation was crude.

My issue with battleshock is how often it just... doesn't matter. It's great when it hits a unit that's on an objective, but otherwise if it's not a unit with a key stratagem then they just don't care; their combat ability isn't degraded at all. And the fact that it's rolled for at the start of your opponent's turn precludes any clever sequencing within your own turn to, say, battleshock an enemy with shooting and then charge it.

I like it more than what it replaced. But that's a low bar.

Yeah, fair.

May I interest you in some Morale Rules?

My overall issue with this discussion is that 40k hasn't been a representative "wargame" of the setting since probably 2nd edition, maybe not even back then.

It has always been a game, during 3rd-7th it was a game masquerading as a wargame, but the inconsistent scope, inconsistent lore and the marine protagonism killed that possibility in the crib.

You can make 40k more tactical, more interactive, a better game. But I don't believe you can make a good wargame out of 40k when the lore itself is an inconsistent mess. Real wargames have the advantage they are working with real history and trying to simulate real warfare/engineering/physics issues (because warfare has always been about implementing physics into soft human bodies).

Meanwhile 40k is trying to make chainswords a viable weapon in the same setting as melta guns and planet wiping starships... so I see any attempt of making a wargame out of 40k as an inherently flawed and doomed, because the lore that would be the bedrock for such wargame is less solid than jelly.

EDIT: I mean the whole pinning discussion? there are good game-related reasons about why pinning should be a thing. It reduces lethality, it makes the game less binary, etc. But being a "wargame that simulates the setting"? I can think of at least one instance of Marines casually walking through an artillery barrage because the shells lacked the caliber to hurt them. And I'm sure that is one of dozens if not hundreds of different interpretations of how that situation should go. There is no consistent lore reason why pinning should be a thing.

 catbarf wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
All of the serious fighting forces in 40k are willing to die for their objective points, and since every game is supposed to be a battle of annihilation I guess that's what you should expect.

Well, if we're talking realism/verisimilitude: Morale in wargames is not a binary 'are you too scared to fight y/n', it's an abstract representation of unit cohesion and coordination that is impacted by the friction and chaos of combat.

Maybe that squad of Cadians is composed of ten brainwashed die-hards who will fight to the last man. But if five of them get hit at once, it's going to take some amount of time for the other five to assess casualties, determine who is still alive and therefore in command, re-establish communications with the next echelon up, assess whether they are still combat effective or can better serve the Emperor by breaking contact, and take proper cover against whatever just shwacked half the squad.

Marines shall know no fear but still make a point to safeguard the gene-seed of their fallen brothers, Eldar are a dying race who prioritize extracting their wounded, Orks always love a good scrap but if the boss gets krumped they might leg it or they might have a friendly disagreement over who's in charge now. You might not be afraid of bullets, but that won't make it any faster to pry the previous autocannon gunner's disembodied hands off his gun and get it back in the fight.

Many of the factions are ostensibly fearless but the ones that do not react at all to incoming fire represent a minority. Some kind of temporary degradation of combat capability is a better representation of friction, even for complete fanatics, than the Space Invaders model where every dude just stands there with the trigger held down until he gets picked off.

Well this actually touches on another issue with 40k, which is that the scale isn't consistent. If you go by the distances of the models compared to their height, and the terrain features, and the distance they move over the course of the game, your expectation should be that a game of 40k represents only several minutes of real-world fighting. But there are many other rules, like medics, orders, and random secondary missions, that imply the game takes place over the course of several hours, and that is a substantial difference.

So when I see a squad of guardsmen and they have some genestealers a mere 30 yards away from them, I tend to think of the chain of command and who's wounded as irrelevant; they'll consider that after the game, when they aren't seconds away from being ripped to shreds. But if you think of those genestealer models as representing a threat that's ten minutes away that does change things, and I don't think that question has a right answer because there just is no underlying logic keeping it consistent.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
An interesting idea could be that a unit which fails morale becomes "disordered" and all rolls to hit them are at +1, but then they can forgo shooting/assault to remove that condition before the enemy's turn. So the player has a choice as to whether the out-of-position unit reacts by falling back and regrouping or charging forward recklessly.

Then perhaps certain units (berzerkers, grots) would always do one or the other, if you wanted a bit more fluffiness.

JNAProductions wrote:8th and 9th morale, where models just went "Poof!" and vanished... That was bad.

It was bad but I always liked to imagine it represented one of my models taking a wounded member of the squad back to HQ for medical attention rather then just disappearing.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

So when I see a squad of guardsmen and they have some genestealers a mere 30 yards away from them, I tend to think of the chain of command and who's wounded as irrelevant; they'll consider that after the game, when they aren't seconds away from being ripped to shreds. But if you think of those genestealer models as representing a threat that's ten minutes away that does change things, and I don't think that question has a right answer because there just is no underlying logic keeping it consistent.

I think "how much time is a game of 40k meant to represent" is quite important for deciding "what should a Wargame have"?

Because there's quite a difference between a game representing a 3-5 minute action sequence (forget Movie Marines, its Movie Everything) - and a battle that takes place over an hour, a day, or a week.

 Hellebore wrote:

You can absolutely discuss what parts of warfare you want to model and how to make the game 'fun' as a result. But there will be a pyramid hierarchy of warfare challenges going from biggest impact to least impact that will naturally show which ones are more likely to be relevant and deleting them because the players don't want that challenge undermines the cohesion of what you're trying to represent. You can keep stripping 'unfun' warfare challenges out, but you are left with nothing to play.

I'm absolutely nitpicking here, so feel free to tell me to buzz off.

I'd argue that you might be misdiagnosing things slightly. We don't prioritize modeling things in a wargame based on the biggest impact; we prioritize them based on what's "cool"/"fun". Logistics is arguably one of the most important parts of warfare, but I'm not dying to make a bunch of pre-battle Spreadsheet Tests to see how many units of corpse starch my troops had for dinner the night before the battle. I'm being pedantic here, but I point out the distinction because pinning being "impactful" to irl warfare doesn't necessarily make it a priority for things to model on the tabletop, especially if the way it's modeled isn't necessarily entertaining.

These arguments keep conflating concepts with execution..I never claimed bad pinning should exist. But people.keep saying it should go because the implementation was bad. It's beholden to the designer to create good rules around necessary concepts. I think th concept of pinning is necessary which necessitates good execution for an enjoyable game experience. Removing the concept entirely is not a good execution.

I definitely get that you're not advocating for a bad implementation of pinning, and I should probably mention that I think a good implementation of it is a cool concept to include in the game. I just want to split hairs and point out that we don't necessarily *need* to include pinning to have a good game. Being a thing that's impactful during battle and being a thing that could hypothetically be implemented well don't necessarily mean that pinning deserves to be modeled on the tabletop. In the same way that we don't necessarily need Spreadsheet Tests even if you come up with an elegant mechanic to go along with them. Ultimately, the overall impact on the end gaming experience is what matters. But again, I'm just being annoyingly pedantic at this point.

Hence why personal feelings are a poor measure because if I'm playing someone who likes current 40k I want it changed and they don't, and vice versa with older editions.

Thus expectation management and objective design are better than personal preference.

I don't know. To torture an analogy... Anchovies are a thing that happens on pizza sometimes. Not everyone likes anchovies, and GW has a history of somehow cooking their anchovies poorly. Furthermore, GW has more recently switched to anchovie-less pizza that a lot of people seem to like.

It's fair for you to wish GW would provide a good anchovie pizza experience in the future, and it's fair to say that not all anchovie pizzas are bad just because GW has historically handled them poorly, but it's also fair enough if GW just decides to give up on anchovies so long as their pizzas are good in other, less fishy ways.

(But again, I think I agree with what you're saying on the whole. I, too, would like to see a bit more variety in strategy.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

So when I see a squad of guardsmen and they have some genestealers a mere 30 yards away from them, I tend to think of the chain of command and who's wounded as irrelevant; they'll consider that after the game, when they aren't seconds away from being ripped to shreds. But if you think of those genestealer models as representing a threat that's ten minutes away that does change things, and I don't think that question has a right answer because there just is no underlying logic keeping it consistent.

I think "how much time is a game of 40k meant to represent" is quite important for deciding "what should a Wargame have"?

Because there's quite a difference between a game representing a 3-5 minute action sequence (forget Movie Marines, its Movie Everything) - and a battle that takes place over an hour, a day, or a week.

The time a 40k battle is meant to take is kind of hard to figure out, too. Some things (like the flavor text on some secondaries) suggests that the actions you take on a given turn are taking you minutes if not hours. But it really drains any fast-paced action-packed feeling from the game to think that my fire prisms aren't engaged in a swooping, zooming firefight but are instead tossing out a handful of shots over the course of multiple hours.

I almost feel like time speeds up and the scale zooms-in the closer units are together. Guardsmen shooting at genestealers as they rush in are engaged in a panicked, close-quarters firefight. Artillery lobbing shells from the backfield are casually picking out targets over a leisurely fifteen minute time period per salvo. It's weird, and it does make it a bit more tricky to figure out what should and shouldn't be represented on the tabletop.

Personally, I've always felt "I need to stay behind this building this turn to avoid being shot" is a fine implementation of pinning.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:


Current 40k plays like a computer game where you figured out your optimal attack pattern and just press the same 5 buttons over and over again. Feels bad is when people don't get the victory they were expecting from their 5 button action.

Stack strategies, alpha strike, chuck as many dice as possible the end. There's no nuance at all. It's very binary.

I'm not exactly going to disagree, because the rules DO facilitate what you describe quite effectively. I understand what you and others dislike about modern 40k, and there are elements of 10th that I don't like much either.

But I do think that a great deal about "how the game plays" does depend on how you play it; I know that some people's control over the way they play is limited to some degree by external factors beyond their control, and I'm certainly not telling anyone they are playing wrong.

But when I play, the game doesn't feel like what you describe at all. I mean, I'm playing 500 point Crusade games using Boarding Actions rules with an overarching narrative that that is designed to escalate to 3k armies and incorporates Kill Team games into the campaign structure. It's a lot of work, but I take as much pride in the campaigns that grow my armies as much as I do about my armies.

500 point Crusade games combined with Kill Team side missions really does capture the warband feel of the Rogue Trader Era. It is the perfect format for exploring novel experiments like the WD Blanchitsu/ Pilgrim project. I think that was actually 7th or 8th ed, but man, systems like Crusade and Spec Ops really open the doors on campaign play; they're best when employed co-operatively by a small group of like minded players.

Now it's entirely possible that I may encounter some of the things you write about with more frequency once my armies grow to a more cumbersome size; I might also encounter these problems more often if I played a greater variety of opponents... I'm working on that, with another game scheduled in the last week of August once my vacation wraps up. I'm using the time until then to get the raiding party fully painted, and I might be able to snap off an Arena fight next week so that I can bring the proper Wych Cult models to the battle.

Granted, some people just don't like small games, and want all their games to be 2k, and that's a valid choice. Some people aren't going to want to invest as much time into protracted narratives, and that's a valid choice too. And some people have already tried every flavour of the game and still can't find one that feels the way they want it to feel. But if you haven't tried the small escalating warband style of campaigning, and you're disillusioned with stand-alone 2k games, it might be worth your while to try it before you invest in a whole other game. It might not work for you, but then again it might.

At the moment, it's doing a decent enough job to give me what I want from it. Good luck man.

I'm glad you're getting what you want from it, but the amount of work you're putting in makes it stone soup in my opinion.

Reminds me of DND where they kept pushing social interaction rules onto the players and only giving people punching rules. You could build a satisfying experience in non combat situations but you had to do it yourself. Many other games managed to do both.


Basically if the game can't offer you this itself, it's not well designed. GW relies on its loyal customers to do their work for them rather than put the effort in themselves.

Imperfect control in a wargame would be a fanatic way to design a game. The problem is that 40K is not designed with imperfect control as the standard.

Generally speaking, especially in later versions of 40K, you get to have your troops do exactly what you want them to do. They can move exactly this distance. They can choose to fire their weapons exactly the way you want them down to each weapon on each model. You always get to choose when you charge and who you charge. You lose exactly the models you want to out of an entire unit of models.

Then GW starts layering on small bits of imperfection, but mostly leaves you in charge of that also:

Want to Advance your unit? Roll the dice to determine your adjusted move and then move exactly where you want to go.

Charge distance is random, but you still get to move to exactly where you want to within that distance.

You can choose to Pile-In or Consolidate rather than them being compulsory, and then move exactly as you want to when doing so with some stipulations.

The reason for this is two-fold:

Not requiring you to do specific things means the rules are simpler. Fall Back and Regroup in 5th Edition took 2 pages of text. Battle-Shock in 11th is 1/4 a page (really half that since that quarter is half bullet points of the other half).

The game is short, so forcing you to do things feels bad. If you only get 5 turns to use your model, you don't want to lose a turn to a compulsory action. Compulsory moves (or non-moves) and loss of Shooting are a much bigger deal with it takes 20% of your choice with that unit away (1 of 5 turns) than it would be if the game was longer.

Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

I think more interesting would be a combination of less precision in actions along with graduated levels of Morale that can be mitigated by your choices.

For example, if you simplified movement overall, you could also have space for more randomized movement. I know some systems use a Squad Leader based movement where you move the SL and then move the other models to within a certain distance of them. If you did that, you could have lots of movement semi-randomized (talking 4" + 1d3" instead of always 6") to create the ability to underachieve your target if not being conservative. Could be a bit too gamey for some, but could also be interesting to fail on occasion.

On the Morale side, unit can be less effective as they lose Cohesion, with more and more effects as they lose more and more Cohesion. You can take time to Regroup up to higher levels, spending some of your actions to get back up. It would wouldn't be "I failed one roll and am screwed", instead being "I failed multiple rolls and made choices that left me in a really bad state".

Wyldhunt wrote:So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Epic: Armageddon does this- you need to pass a command check to issue any order you want to a formation. If you fail, you can still issue a basic order that lets the unit move or shoot, just no moving triple or assaulting into melee and so on.

The depth, and the element of control, comes from the fact that you can try to order multiple units in a row, but with a penalty to the check. You also take a penalty if the unit is under fire. So there's an element of gambling on whether it's worth risking failing that test, whether you should just hedge your bets and let your opponent activate, or whether you should prioritize a unit in combat (and more likely to fail) or bring in support instead before the enemy can disrupt it too.

Giving the player choices that influence the odds is how you make randomness fun, IMO. But everyone has different tolerance for different amounts of loss of control- I remember a lot of people didn't like the Synapse rules for Tyranids that required you to take a Ld check or go on autopilot, and that was a mechanic you absolutely had a lot of control over.

 catbarf wrote:

Giving the player choices that influence the odds is how you make randomness fun, IMO. But everyone has different tolerance for different amounts of loss of control- I remember a lot of people didn't like the Synapse rules for Tyranids that required you to take a Ld check or go on autopilot, and that was a mechanic you absolutely had a lot of control over.

Because it was different tables in which pretty much all the results except rolling 6s were awful.

So it wasn't just an issue of losing control, it was an issue that the unit in question could easily and likely be permanently out of the fight by either killing itself or running out of the table.

The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

 KingGarland wrote:
The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

The problem with DG wasn't just points. It was the way things like auras stacked. Where your guys are made tougher, and the enemy weaker at the same time.

While the points increase might drop a lone model or two from the list, lists wont really change and the real hammer and anvil problem hasn't been addressed.

 Jayden63 wrote:

 KingGarland wrote:
The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

The problem with DG wasn't just points. It was the way things like auras stacked. Where your guys are made tougher, and the enemy weaker at the same time.

While the points increase might drop a lone model or two from the list, lists wont really change and the real hammer and anvil problem hasn't been addressed.

Yeah, I looked at my list.
It went up about 30 points. That's, uh... Not much.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

You just described the old instinctive behavior rules for tyranids. In synapse range you could do whatever, but outside you needed to check or revert to base instincts, which were different per unit. I think it was a Ld check, might have been automatic. It’s been a few editions.

I remember the Black Templar wouldn't run away, but run closer to you when they failed morale checks.

I have some horrible memories of those bastards getting closer to my Guardsmen.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember the Black Templar wouldn't run away, but run closer to you when they failed morale checks.

I have some horrible memories of those bastards getting closer to my Guardsmen.

That's why it's important to kill them ALL.
If you shoot at something, make it go away.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Jayden63 wrote:

 KingGarland wrote:
The new points for the Deathguard, the army that started this conversation, are out and they seem OK...

I only had to remove a Helbrute and a single enhancement to keep mostly the same list. Time will tell if this is enough or if more is needed. Hopefully not.

The problem with DG wasn't just points. It was the way things like auras stacked. Where your guys are made tougher, and the enemy weaker at the same time.

While the points increase might drop a lone model or two from the list, lists wont really change and the real hammer and anvil problem hasn't been addressed.

Yeah, I looked at my list.
It went up about 30 points. That's, uh... Not much.

This says you are not using the “best” units in the Codex. Every unit in the Lone Star Open winning list has a points increase as does one of the 2 Enchantments taken.

Now that is theoretically a good thing since they are not punishing the entire army for the sins of the most efficient units.

ccs wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I remember the Black Templar wouldn't run away, but run closer to you when they failed morale checks.

I have some horrible memories of those bastards getting closer to my Guardsmen.

That's why it's important to kill them ALL.
If you shoot at something, make it go away.

Sometimes the lasgun brigade couldn't kill them all, especially when a Land Raider Crusader just Hurricane Boltered away your heavy weapon guys in the same turn it regurgitated a blob of Templars on your doorstep.

 Nevelon wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

You just described the old instinctive behavior rules for tyranids. In synapse range you could do whatever, but outside you needed to check or revert to base instincts, which were different per unit. I think it was a Ld check, might have been automatic. It’s been a few editions.

Yeah. I'm not ready to defend the idea, but I do wonder if that sort of thing might be better received if it were an army-wide thing for most/all armies. It would dramatically change up the game, making it much more of a "wind up your toys and watch them walk towards eachother" situation, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a terrible thing? Letting players automatically pass the test to have better control over a certain number of units each turn would mean you'd be guaranteed to pull off at least a few of the most critical maneuvers each turn, and I could see a lot of room for fun mechanics representing the various ways that different factions go about controlling their armies. Marine leadership meaning that they're more likely to pass the leadership check, guardsmen issuing orders via vox networks, tyranids auto passing while within range of synapse units, etc.

Players would have to be okay with the idea that big chunks of their army might opt to go on autopilot and behave suboptimally, but managing that could be a fun game in its own right and add to the feeling that you're in the role of the commander trying to get your orders through the fog of war to your troops. It might even give "psychology factions" like night lords a little more room to operate. Give them rules for making enemies more likely to go on autopilot (and thus easier to plan around) or else change up the behavior of enemy units when they do go on autopilot (ex: forcing them to run for cover instead of marching forward and shooting.)

Idk. Could be cool to see the idea fleshed out.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Hmm. I think I might be kind of okay with imperfect control/control loss if it was a more up-front and embraced part of the game and if "losing control" still left you with a certain amount of control/choices.

So like, you go to activate a unit and roll a leadership test to see if your commands are cutting through the fog of war. On a success, you have perfect control per the current rules. On a failure, you have to follow some guidelines on how the unit acts. Maybe your zealous Black Templars default to moving towards and attacking the enemy, but you get to control which enemy they shoot at or charge. Maybe cowardly grots have to end the movement phase in range of cover if at all possible, but you can choose which direction they move if there are multiple bits of cover available.

Basically, the idea would be that there are frequent chances for your units to go into "autopilot," but players would still have enough control over a unit to not feel like they're being totally screwed over. And presumably you'd put more emphasis on rules representing your leaders cutting through the fog of war to reassert more precise control. (Ex: spend 1CP to retain control of a unit that failed its Leadership test.)

So instead of orks standing around uselessly (old pinning) or even running in the wrong direction (old fall back), they still keep moving towards the enemy as orks are want to do. They just maybe end up moving towards the enemy when you want them holding an objective instead, or maybe they attack the closest enemy instead of the enemy you want them to go after.

But all the guidelines for imperfect control might get overly complicated unless you boiled them down to a few standard behaviors, and armies with poor leadership could end up being frustrating for people who don't necessarily want to plan around half their army being on autopilot each turn.

You just described the old instinctive behavior rules for tyranids. In synapse range you could do whatever, but outside you needed to check or revert to base instincts, which were different per unit. I think it was a Ld check, might have been automatic. It’s been a few editions.

Yeah. I'm not ready to defend the idea, but I do wonder if that sort of thing might be better received if it were an army-wide thing for most/all armies. It would dramatically change up the game, making it much more of a "wind up your toys and watch them walk towards eachother" situation, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a terrible thing? Letting players automatically pass the test to have better control over a certain number of units each turn would mean you'd be guaranteed to pull off at least a few of the most critical maneuvers each turn, and I could see a lot of room for fun mechanics representing the various ways that different factions go about controlling their armies. Marine leadership meaning that they're more likely to pass the leadership check, guardsmen issuing orders via vox networks, tyranids auto passing while within range of synapse units, etc.

Players would have to be okay with the idea that big chunks of their army might opt to go on autopilot and behave suboptimally, but managing that could be a fun game in its own right and add to the feeling that you're in the role of the commander trying to get your orders through the fog of war to your troops. It might even give "psychology factions" like night lords a little more room to operate. Give them rules for making enemies more likely to go on autopilot (and thus easier to plan around) or else change up the behavior of enemy units when they do go on autopilot (ex: forcing them to run for cover instead of marching forward and shooting.)

Idk. Could be cool to see the idea fleshed out.

That would be very cool and definitely is something I could see working in many games, just not in GW ones. There would probably be very many exceptions to this sort of rule that would quickly make it something for NPC factions to deal with while plenty of other armies get away scot free. Just like basically all leadership things in the history of 40k. I also fear that it might very easily lead to deathstars becoming an even bigger deal than they already are because they will also be guaranteed to be in control.

But generally, it would be really cool.

Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

CoreCommander wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

The target priority stuff wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be. It actually forced people to consider how to move across the field and not just ram everything up the center. It actually helped make the game feel tactical.

CoreCommander wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

I'm too lazy to go read my 4th edition rulebook. To clarify, does that mean you could shoot at any vehicle/monster you wanted to without an Ld test? Because that always struck me as the biggest problem with a lack of control over unit targeting.

It's one thing to have to shoot your bolters at some gaunts instead of the warriors behind them. It's another thing altogether to waste your devastators' lascannon shots on those gaunts instead of shooting the hive tyrant.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


I'm too lazy to go read my 4th edition rulebook. To clarify, does that mean you could shoot at any vehicle/monster you wanted to without an Ld test?

No. You could ignore the closest unit to shoot at the closest Large Target (vehicle, artillery, monster) without an LD test. If you wanted to shoot a Large Target that wasn't the closest Large Target, you still needed to test.

It was pretty intuitive - it was:

1: What's the closest threat? Shoot it
2: are there bigger threats in range than the closest one? See 1.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

CoreCommander wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Was it 4th that you needed to shoot the closest unit unless you made a Ld test? Baked into the core rules. IIRC there was a cutout for vehicles, which used different rules at the time. Also nids “shoot the big ones” I think.

That's correct, it was atleast in 4th and you could opt for not shooting at the closest target without taking a Ld test if the target was an enemy vehicle or monster.

I'm too lazy to go read my 4th edition rulebook. To clarify, does that mean you could shoot at any vehicle/monster you wanted to without an Ld test? Because that always struck me as the biggest problem with a lack of control over unit targeting.

It's one thing to have to shoot your bolters at some gaunts instead of the warriors behind them. It's another thing altogether to waste your devastators' lascannon shots on those gaunts instead of shooting the hive tyrant.

IIRC Split Fire was something that few units got by default, so if you had mixed squads there was still an issue of wasting anti-infantry firepower scratching a Hive Tyrant's carapace or wasting AT firepower on gaunts, just not necessarily as a result of the gaunts being 0.1" closer to the firing unit than the Tyrant.

 Jayden63 wrote:

The target priority stuff wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be. It actually forced people to consider how to move across the field and not just ram everything up the center. It actually helped make the game feel tactical.

I don't remember it feeling more tactical, but it sure felt more like a wargame. I actually played 4th last year and it isn't rose colored glasses - the game feels as I remember it.

Also as Arschbombe pointed you still had to shoot at the closest enemy monster and tank and you could ignore targets which are not eligible (can't see them, are in combat etc) or are fallling back.

Arschbombe wrote:No. You could ignore the closest unit to shoot at the closest Large Target (vehicle, artillery, monster) without an LD test. If you wanted to shoot a Large Target that wasn't the closest Large Target, you still needed to test.

Hm. I've probably just been away from competitive play for too long, but that seems pretty fun and reasonable, actually. It would give cheaper screening units and even cheaper monsters/vehicles more of a job by keeping your heavy hitters safe, and it would make positioning/deployment that much more important. It feels like there should maybe be some rule that lets you ignore the lone termagant you failed to kill, but that's not a huge thing.

waefre_1 wrote:
IIRC Split Fire was something that few units got by default, so if you had mixed squads there was still an issue of wasting anti-infantry firepower scratching a Hive Tyrant's carapace or wasting AT firepower on gaunts, just not necessarily as a result of the gaunts being 0.1" closer to the firing unit than the Tyrant.

That was a thing through 7th edition, iirc, so I imagine it was a thing in 4th too. That seems like a pretty easy fix though. Let units split fire per now, but:

* No shooting at more than 2 units at a time to avoid complicated scenarios.
* Let units shoot at the closest big thing OR non-big thing automatically. Shooting at the non-closest big or little thing requires a Ld test.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Arschbombe wrote:No. You could ignore the closest unit to shoot at the closest Large Target (vehicle, artillery, monster) without an LD test. If you wanted to shoot a Large Target that wasn't the closest Large Target, you still needed to test.

Hm. I've probably just been away from competitive play for too long, but that seems pretty fun and reasonable, actually. It would give cheaper screening units and even cheaper monsters/vehicles more of a job by keeping your heavy hitters safe, and it would make positioning/deployment that much more important. It feels like there should maybe be some rule that lets you ignore the lone termagant you failed to kill, but that's not a huge thing.

waefre_1 wrote:
IIRC Split Fire was something that few units got by default, so if you had mixed squads there was still an issue of wasting anti-infantry firepower scratching a Hive Tyrant's carapace or wasting AT firepower on gaunts, just not necessarily as a result of the gaunts being 0.1" closer to the firing unit than the Tyrant.

That was a thing through 7th edition, iirc, so I imagine it was a thing in 4th too. That seems like a pretty easy fix though. Let units split fire per now, but:

* No shooting at more than 2 units at a time to avoid complicated scenarios.
* Let units shoot at the closest big thing OR non-big thing automatically. Shooting at the non-closest big or little thing requires a Ld test.

Not sure if this was 3rd or 4th, but I remember shoot the big ones allowed units to "shield" units behind them that were up to one size category larger. So gaunts shielded warriors, warriors shielded tyrants. It promoted sending in a wave of smaller gribblies first, I remember really liking it.