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 Skinflint Games wrote:
I have to say, 3 years seems like a ridiculously short time to establish and flesh out an edition with a game of 40ks depth and size. I agree with those who say 5-6 years is far more reasonable.

Particularly with age, my mid-40s, 3 years takes about 5 minutes to pass.

I mean, that MAY actually be the case. 8th edition was a full re-write, but 9th was more like 8.5. 10th was a big overhaul again, and there's a reasonable chance that 11th edition will really be 10.5 and we won't get a big overhaul until 12th.

 vipoid wrote:


Honestly, this was one of the reasons I despised the magic system in WHFB - almost every spell list had a huge AoE spell that was 'toughness test or die' or 'initiative test or die', and it was usually well worth throwing a pile of dice to try and get a Miscast (which would also prevent dispelling). As the damage was all but guaranteed to far exceed any cost, and if you successfully "miscast" then there was no counterplay at all.

Yeah, 8th ed magic was pretty bad. Preventing dispel scrolls from blocking irresistible force / miscasts was a mistake, especially when you can just take a cheap spell caster, throw a bunch of dice to trigger it and just delete a whole regiment and not even necessarily lose the spellcaster in the process. Meanwhile your opponent couldn't actually do anything because they took away the ability to dispel irresistible force spells with scrolls or their own dispel attempts, which I'm pretty sure was something you could do in earlier editions.

I know in 7th Miscast and IF were their own separate things and it was a harder to just throw enough dice to trigger it because of how power dice generation worked.
I don't recall mage bombs being a thing in 7th, but it did start to be a thing in 8th ed, and I hated it because it felt wrong. The point of miscasts was to introduce a level of risk to spell-casting because of how effective magic could be. Not only combining it with irresistible force but ALSO allowing you to throw enough dice to intentionally trigger it AND effectively make a resource such as scrolls useless completely misses the point of such a mechanic.

The problem of Sweeping Advance in particular was that a) Marines were immune to it, b) using initiative made it extremely faction locked and C) later (4th+) editions threw away outnumbering mattering for morale so hordes were soft locked out of it.

Orks and Necrons would basically never benefit from it because their faction wide low initiative, even thought Orks were mostly a melee faction and Necrons had their own melee specialist units. Even Tyranids would often struggle to activate it because they tended to lose a lot of bodies in combat if playing a swarm list.

And again most games would be against Marines. The fact that when it worked was such a strong mechanic meant that it basically made it a feel bad mechanic because it wasn't because you were outplayed or even luck, but because your opponent had a high Initiative elite army and you didn't (and in pretty much any other context Sweeping Advance rarely happened).

I'd put more emphasis on Jidmah's point about how faction disparity impacts this.

I'd have more sympathy for older morale for instance - or loss of control mechanics in general - if they were universal. But typically throughout 40ks history they haven't been. If you are the favoured faction (Marines/Eldar) it's often been of no consequence. People on forums aren't constantly saying you as the player should lose control. But you pick one of the other factions? Suddenly you should be piling up debuffs like there's no tomorrow.

In something like Bloodbowl that's fine. In 40k or WHFB it really wasn't.

At least Ork and Nid units were cheap. Necron units were expensive and had to deal with that stupid phase out rule, so losing an entire unit to a single initiative roll when most factions had double the baseline initiative of a necron unit was disproportionately harmful.

Especially when Necrons aren't even that effective in melee; on average they are about as good as tactical marines but without sergeant power weapons, and tac marines are mediocre in melee even with those.

I think only Tau are worse, and they are still cheaper and they could attack at longer ranges.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 vipoid wrote:


Honestly, this was one of the reasons I despised the magic system in WHFB - almost every spell list had a huge AoE spell that was 'toughness test or die' or 'initiative test or die', and it was usually well worth throwing a pile of dice to try and get a Miscast (which would also prevent dispelling). As the damage was all but guaranteed to far exceed any cost, and if you successfully "miscast" then there was no counterplay at all.

Yeah, 8th ed magic was pretty bad. Preventing dispel scrolls from blocking irresistible force / miscasts was a mistake, especially when you can just take a cheap spell caster, throw a bunch of dice to trigger it and just delete a whole regiment and not even necessarily lose the spellcaster in the process. Meanwhile your opponent couldn't actually do anything because they took away the ability to dispel irresistible force spells with scrolls or their own dispel attempts, which I'm pretty sure was something you could do in earlier editions.

I know in 7th Miscast and IF were their own separate things and it was a harder to just throw enough dice to trigger it because of how power dice generation worked.
I don't recall mage bombs being a thing in 7th, but it did start to be a thing in 8th ed, and I hated it because it felt wrong. The point of miscasts was to introduce a level of risk to spell-casting because of how effective magic could be. Not only combining it with irresistible force but ALSO allowing you to throw enough dice to intentionally trigger it AND effectively make a resource such as scrolls useless completely misses the point of such a mechanic.

8th was horrible. Having played all of the WFB editions since 3rd, I can attest to the ridiculous pendulum swing that happened each new edition. From Heroes being godlike (you didn't even really need troops in 4th/5th) to barely mattering at all (6th) to what IMO was the best edition (7th) and managed to strike some balance, to 8th where it was simple...bring a L4 Wizard and some back-up, or lose. I don't recall my Slann MP ever losing a game, or my Saurus Oldblood ever winning one. It was dumb.

Then they burned it all down with AoS.

 vipoid wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
I believe that the perception of what a rule is affects people more than its actual function.

You have no control over what a dice is going to generate - if people truly hated lack of control, they'd just use little wars rules and play RPS on each unit, or give each unit a fixed damage output they always generate when they target an enemy unit.

The uncertainty of hitting your target is no different to the uncertainty of your unit doing what you want it to, but the perception people have about it affects their enjoyment.

Do you think it might be less about control/uncertainty and rather about a small number of dice having a disproportional effect on the game?

For the same reason people tend to dislike stuff like the old Jaws of the World Wolf power - which was 'roll well or your monster/character is insta-killed, regardless of toughness, save, wound, points etc.'.

Even if it only ends up being a 1/6 chance, it's of little consolation in those games when you fail the roll. Especially when there's little counterplay beyond 'Roll better, noob'.

It would seem a similar issue with units not doing what you want. e.g. a unit of Necrons might roll 20 d6 for their hit rolls. However, if they first need to roll just 1 or 2 and those 1-2 dice determine whether they get to shoot at all, then the effect of those dice is very skewed compared with the to-hit dice that follow.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Certainly the probability affects how people feel about it. However there are plenty of weapons in the game that due to the mechanics, allow no save to most targets and cause enough damage to kill the target regardless.

And those are successful on a 3+ or 2+ to hit, and a 3+ or 2+ to wound. The target player gets no opportunity to do anything except remove the model. And it's usually only elite army players that complain it happens to their models, while guard et al instant remove their models when they're hit by most weapons.

So I absolutely agree that how the mechanics are implemented (the chance of success) has a big impact, but people are already playing with mechanics that remove player choice anyway. Hence my comments on perception playing a bigger part in this, because people accept the concept, but not evenly across the game.

Disruption/pinning/suppression/morale = interference as a concept is integral to war, it's one of the biggest influences on how soldiers actually perform beyond their training. It's how real wars are actually fought - we all know the bullets fired to casualties caused figures are crazy, because those bullets are causing interference even if not casualties. Hence my somewhat tongue in cheek comment about people playing wargames 'wrong' if they can't accept this as part of the game - it's like complaining your pawn can't move like a queen. It's an integral part of the type of game you're playing and removing it because it 'feels bad' turns the game into a far more abstract and less representative version of what it's claiming to be.

How you implement it (the probability) should be looked at, but like so many things in 40k it seems a lot of players jump from 'this mechanic isn't a good implementation of this concept' straight to 'delete this concept from the game because a bad rule was used to represent it'. Which in my mind is not the answer. You can have satisfying gameplay and good representation of the actual aspects of war that a wargame should be striving to simulate, it's just not as simple as roll a d6.

Tyel wrote:I'd put more emphasis on Jidmah's point about how faction disparity impacts this.

I'd have more sympathy for older morale for instance - or loss of control mechanics in general - if they were universal. But typically throughout 40ks history they haven't been. If you are the favoured faction (Marines/Eldar) it's often been of no consequence. People on forums aren't constantly saying you as the player should lose control. But you pick one of the other factions? Suddenly you should be piling up debuffs like there's no tomorrow.

In something like Bloodbowl that's fine. In 40k or WHFB it really wasn't.

I guess this is very much a YMMV thing but I liked that some factions had advantages in soft factors like morale. Again, I mostly played Guard; watching my army crumble because an officer got ganked was part of the charm, because it was offset by my army having a gakload of firepower as long as it could hold together. On the flipside, it felt fitting that the poster boy newbie faction was highly resilient to morale effects as a 'training wheels' sort of advantage (and paid for it accordingly).

I like that when I play Epic a horde of Orks is more unruly and harder to coordinate than an elite force of Space Marines, and I like that when I play Battlefleet Gothic coordinating my fleet of Tyranids is like trying to pick up jello with chopsticks but will I literally eat the other fleet alive if I can pull a plan together. It makes different factions feel different- and if I don't want to deal with that, I can just play any of the factions that are more reliable.

It just seems a little silly to me to play a faction like Orks and then dislike that the Boyz leg it when the Nob gets krumped, or to play Guard and dislike that the hive ganger trash don't stick around when half the squad gets mulched, or to play Tyranids and dislike that the Gaunts go to ground when all the synapse creatures are dead. It's part of their fluff, part of their character. If you wanted fearless elites, you could just play fearless elites.

The thing that I will complain about is that how GW implemented morale was very rudimentary and binary, and the And They Shall Know No Morale Rules got out of hand. But again, HH2.0 and TOW show how GW has taken the old ideas and given them a bit more depth, and there are plenty of other examples to draw from. For instance, I liked how Heavy Gear's morale system caused units to rack up penalties to their actions, but didn't take control away from the player- you could keep pushing if you wanted, but your effectiveness would diminish until you stopped to rally. Or in Epic: Armageddon, once a unit accumulates enough blast markers to become broken, additional hits inflict extra damage to the unit with no saves allowed. It doesn't flee off the board, but it becomes combat ineffective and highly vulnerable to further damage until you rally.

There are many ways to handle morale, and I resent this notion that it's an 'objectively bad' concept because it 'takes away control' or is 'lose more', as if these are universally bad things to have in a wargame and not just reflections of the very low tolerance for friction expressed by the average 40K player.

 catbarf wrote:


There are many ways to handle morale, and I resent this notion that it's an 'objectively bad' concept because it 'takes away control' or is 'lose more', as if these are universally bad things to have in a wargame and not just reflections of the very low tolerance for friction expressed by the average 40K player.

I don't think anyone is actually saying this though?

I think most of the people you think are saying this are actually complaining about a specific implementation of a morale mechanic (sweeping advance) or a particular characteristic of certain types of morale mechanic (a single roll of a single die wiping out an entire unit). The single leadership test or initiative check that removes an entire squad. I think it's pretty much all anyone's complaining about.

Obviously, morale is important, and I think most players want a morale system that matters. You are very much correct about how much those fluffy morale buffs were cool despite not being the optimal upgrades. Commissars shooting a deserter so that the rest of the unit auto-passes morale? Awesome. Whenever I encountered a subfaction with attempts at fear rules, I'd always attempt a build that leaned hard into the ability, just to see if I could make it as effective as it was interesting if I could find the right combination and the right strategy to maximize the impact.

Frequently, even when stacking leadership debuffs across strats, war gear, subfaction ability, unit rule... It still came up a little hollow, and it shouldn't.

Tyel wrote:
I'd put more emphasis on Jidmah's point about how faction disparity impacts this.

I'd have more sympathy for older morale for instance - or loss of control mechanics in general - if they were universal. But typically throughout 40ks history they haven't been. If you are the favoured faction (Marines/Eldar) it's often been of no consequence. People on forums aren't constantly saying you as the player should lose control. But you pick one of the other factions? Suddenly you should be piling up debuffs like there's no tomorrow.

In something like Bloodbowl that's fine. In 40k or WHFB it really wasn't.

As a long-time Eldar player, I'd argue that we were a "favored faction" when I came to Morale. We basically had +1 LD over humans and orks. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I lost some models due to bad rolls, failed the check, and fell back, then were completely unable to rally because the squad was below 50%. That was always the dumbest part of those rules. It should have been below 25%, but no, I now have 4 overly-expensive Aspect Warriors beating feet to the table edge and unable to do anything about it. It could be galling.

It really forced you to play certain ways in an attempt to avoid it happening. Smaller squads, maxing out things that didn't run like Wraithlords, Vehicles, and the Avatar, things like that.

I'd really like 10th edition morale and Battle-Shock to actually mean something, but I'm not keen to go back to that level of uncontrollable nonsense...you know, all except for the ATSKNF crowd. As others have pointed out, there is a limit to how much lack of agency people are willing to put up with. I'd love to see some serious penalties applied for failing that Morale Check, things like an inability to move except by falling back, penalties to hit as they keep their heads down and seek cover, etc., but probably not a return to wholesale removal of units. That happens often enough anyway.

The Ld and morale for Eldar/Elves is generally a counteract to T3 on more expensive bodies and general fragility.

I think one of the founding identities for eldar/elves was glass cannon. Which is fine as a core identity but GW have had trouble making them work, it basically creates an all or nothing army who have to be tuned really finely balance wise.

 catbarf wrote:
I guess this is very much a YMMV thing but I liked that some factions had advantages in soft factors like morale. Again, I mostly played Guard; watching my army crumble because an officer got ganked was part of the charm, because it was offset by my army having a gakload of firepower as long as it could hold together. On the flipside, it felt fitting that the poster boy newbie faction was highly resilient to morale effects as a 'training wheels' sort of advantage (and paid for it accordingly).

I like that when I play Epic a horde of Orks is more unruly and harder to coordinate than an elite force of Space Marines, and I like that when I play Battlefleet Gothic coordinating my fleet of Tyranids is like trying to pick up jello with chopsticks but will I literally eat the other fleet alive if I can pull a plan together. It makes different factions feel different- and if I don't want to deal with that, I can just play any of the factions that are more reliable.

It just seems a little silly to me to play a faction like Orks and then dislike that the Boyz leg it when the Nob gets krumped, or to play Guard and dislike that the hive ganger trash don't stick around when half the squad gets mulched, or to play Tyranids and dislike that the Gaunts go to ground when all the synapse creatures are dead. It's part of their fluff, part of their character. If you wanted fearless elites, you could just play fearless elites.

I think the issue is that certain factions didn't obviously "pay for it accordingly".
I think Synapse is a good rule for Tyranids. But if I remember correctly, the consequences of losing synapse has varied considerably. If Tyranids are "okay" then its kind of "okay". If however Tyranids are bottom tier (lets say 7th edition if you aren't spamming Flying Hive Tyrants and a couple of other units) then it can feel like another cross to bear for no obvious reason.

But I think there's also some tension here. I mean basic unsupported guardsmen are relatively cheap chaff units, typically used as bubblewrap for the more significant units (that bring the "gakload of firepower").
So if they get attacked, panic and run off (or get swept) it kind of doesn't matter - they've still done their job, even if perhaps it would have been better for you if they had held on a little longer.

Whereas GW had to tweak the rules basically every edition (until they gave up) to try and make Ork Boyz work. Because there was a very real prospect this relatively slow unit would waddle across the table getting shot, have difficulty making a charge, then get into combat only to fight second, potentially fluff its attacks, and be promptly wiped out.
I'm not really sure which "fantasy" that was going for, beyond being a sort of comic relief NPC faction. Its not so much the spirit of the game, as just being bad.

After a gap (mainly while I was at university and a bit after) I got back into Fantasy with 8th edition (boo, hiss etc) and I didn't want to take it that seriously - so I built the mainly goblin army I'd wanted but could never have afforded (re: persuaded my parents to buy) 10-15 years earlier. Animosity, stupidity on trolls, warmachines, fanatics and wizards could all conspire to blow up - and there were games where I inflicted significantly more damage on myself than the opponent managed. But since I knew what I was getting myself in for that was fine - like picking Goblins or Haflings in Bloodbowl.

But you've seen the complaints from various people here.
And its beyond morale. I mean CSM had that Champion of Chaos rule. You've just won a duel, woops spawn. Now sure - it wasn't that likely. But I'm not sure if you'd been a chaos player for decades you can be blamed for thinking this was kind of a silly and unwanted addition. Saying "Chaos players should embrace this rule" is at least questionable. Daemons had their weird table of "auto-win and auto-lose" - should they all have felt that was fluffy etc?

Yes you can argue all of this is just GW being bad and other games do it differently. And I agree, a re-imagined 40k where damage is largely inflicted by accumulated pinning, rather than a "here's some BS3+ rerolling everything S10 rerolling 1s AP-4 damage 3 shots, why not just take the models off the table" approach could be interesting.
But I can't see it happening.

Also - and I may have asked this before - you've talked about Epic a lot over the years - but I've never really worked out how Orks just aren't "worse"?
Its a bit like Horus Heresy. Maybe its changed in recent times as its in plastic and widely available - but in the old days it used to be the preserve of "deep hobbyists" - who wanted to show off their painting, their conversions, or just that they could afford Forge world tanks costing comical amounts of money. A game system can hide a lot of issues if you don't have players "trying to win" as the primary objective. 7th edition 40k might have even worked.

Tyel wrote:

Also - and I may have asked this before - you've talked about Epic a lot over the years - but I've never really worked out how Orks just aren't "worse"?
Its a bit like Horus Heresy. Maybe its changed in recent times as its in plastic and widely available - but in the old days it used to be the preserve of "deep hobbyists" - who wanted to show off their painting, their conversions, or just that they could afford Forge world tanks costing comical amounts of money. A game system can hide a lot of issues if you don't have players "trying to win" as the primary objective. 7th edition 40k might have even worked.

You didn't ask me, but as an Epic player who has a Feral Ork Horde (among other armies), typically they're pulling off wins despite having low success rates on activations, initiative retention, and such because you often outnumber your opponents, ala the horde part. Someone brings elite, expensive units to the table then looks shocked when they run out of units to activate that turn and I'm only half done. Then I have my way with them. Yeah, I might be pulling troops off the board by the handful sometimes, but there's usually more where those came from. It feels very "orky."

Epic also has the advantage of being abandoned by GW. It has a dedicated fan base that keeps it alive, publishes the rules, does their best to balance it, etc.

 catbarf wrote:

I guess this is very much a YMMV thing but I liked that some factions had advantages in soft factors like morale. Again, I mostly played Guard; watching my army crumble because an officer got ganked was part of the charm, because it was offset by my army having a gakload of firepower as long as it could hold together. On the flipside, it felt fitting that the poster boy newbie faction was highly resilient to morale effects as a 'training wheels' sort of advantage (and paid for it accordingly).

I like that when I play Epic a horde of Orks is more unruly and harder to coordinate than an elite force of Space Marines, and I like that when I play Battlefleet Gothic coordinating my fleet of Tyranids is like trying to pick up jello with chopsticks but will I literally eat the other fleet alive if I can pull a plan together. It makes different factions feel different- and if I don't want to deal with that, I can just play any of the factions that are more reliable.

It just seems a little silly to me to play a faction like Orks and then dislike that the Boyz leg it when the Nob gets krumped, or to play Guard and dislike that the hive ganger trash don't stick around when half the squad gets mulched, or to play Tyranids and dislike that the Gaunts go to ground when all the synapse creatures are dead. It's part of their fluff, part of their character. If you wanted fearless elites, you could just play fearless elites.

The thing that I will complain about is that how GW implemented morale was very rudimentary and binary, and the And They Shall Know No Morale Rules got out of hand. But again, HH2.0 and TOW show how GW has taken the old ideas and given them a bit more depth, and there are plenty of other examples to draw from. For instance, I liked how Heavy Gear's morale system caused units to rack up penalties to their actions, but didn't take control away from the player- you could keep pushing if you wanted, but your effectiveness would diminish until you stopped to rally. Or in Epic: Armageddon, once a unit accumulates enough blast markers to become broken, additional hits inflict extra damage to the unit with no saves allowed. It doesn't flee off the board, but it becomes combat ineffective and highly vulnerable to further damage until you rally.

There are many ways to handle morale, and I resent this notion that it's an 'objectively bad' concept because it 'takes away control' or is 'lose more', as if these are universally bad things to have in a wargame and not just reflections of the very low tolerance for friction expressed by the average 40K player.

I can appreciate the idea that some factions get to largely ignore morale effects as part of their fluff, in order to distinguish them and represent their particular characteristics. e.g. Tyranids being fearless so long as they are a Synapse Creature or in range of one. That's fine. It represents the Hive Mind's iron grasp over its creations - such that it can tell them to run headlong into a storm of gunfire and they won't think twice.

However, to my mind, there were two issues with this:

1) The sheer number of armies that ignored morale - whether through rules like Synapse, or And They Shall Know No Rules, or through innate Fearless (Daemons, all monsters, all vehicles) or through easy access to Fearless characters - far outweighed the armies that were actually affected by Morale.

Bear in mind, one of the armies given pseudo-immunity to most of the morale rules was Space Marines - a faction that represented about 8 separate armies all by itself, not to mention being the poster-boy faction.

Thus, we ended up with morale rules that most armies just ended up ignoring for one reason or other.

Maybe you still don't consider that a huge issue. However, it does lead me to:

2) The volume of rules and effects that ended up being pointless as a direct result of the above.

Let's look at some Dark Eldar gear:
Phantasm Grenade Launcher - doesn't work against Fearless/ATSKNF
Torment Grenade Launchers - doesn't work against Fearless/ATSKNF
The Archangel of Pain - doesn't work against Fearless/ATSKNF
The Armour of Misery - Fear special rule (doesn't work against Fearless/ATSKNF)
Ancient Evil - Fear special rule (doesn't work against Fearless/ATSKNF)

Wow, can't wait to use these items in a list. I'm sure it will go well, just so long as I'm not up against Tyranids. Or Space Marines. Or Daemons. Or Blood Angels. Or Space Wolves. Or Grey Knights. Or . . .

You get the picture.

You had swathes of gear that just weren't worth the paper they were printed on - because for every game against, say, your Imperial Guard army, you'd have another five where those items are just dead points because the entire enemy army is outright immune to the effects.

If most of the armies in 40k are going to be immune (or de facto immune) to morale through one form or other, I'd implore that we don't then dump 100 morale mechanics on an already pitiful army. Unfortunately, I don't trust GW to not do this.

A feature of Warhammer both FB and 40k is that it is best played with tailored lists with people working together to make an interesting game rather than trying to gain advantage. In those circumstances those items can be interesting and most people didn't play like that so it is probably better for them the way things have gone. However for those who did play like that it's a big blow to how interesting things can be made in different match ups.

If you have a group that can play tailored games, you can house rule whatever you want.

 Tyran wrote:
If you have a group that can play tailored games, you can house rule whatever you want.

While true, in personal experience I've found the fewer changes you have to make, the better. This is why I like Editions that give me a lot to work with.

10th has given me WAY less to work with than 9th. Having rules for something like Torchbearer Fleets and Armies of Faith is WAY better than trying to houserule something of that magnitude.

Were Torchbearer Fleets and Armies of Faith armies of renown?

No, they were both designed specifically as Crusade armies- you could use the army composition and base rules to field them in matched, but without the XP/ RP growth, you didn't get a lot of the flavour- Torchbearers had a story arc built into crusade- the fleet was bringing Primaris Greyshields to reinforce a marine chapter, so first you had to find them, then the Primaris had to bond with their new Chapter, and then finally they would become full members. For armies of faith, you had to walk the path of the faithful in order to grow spiritual power.

 Tyran wrote:
If you have a group that can play tailored games, you can house rule whatever you want.

Hmm, truer than when compared to pick up gamers maybe but y'know you don't always want to write a whole game!

Tyel wrote:
But you've seen the complaints from various people here.
And its beyond morale. I mean CSM had that Champion of Chaos rule. You've just won a duel, woops spawn. Now sure - it wasn't that likely. But I'm not sure if you'd been a chaos player for decades you can be blamed for thinking this was kind of a silly and unwanted addition. Saying "Chaos players should embrace this rule" is at least questionable. Daemons had their weird table of "auto-win and auto-lose" - should they all have felt that was fluffy etc?

(Apologies for the late reply, I've been out of town)

Sure, I do think there are specific mechanics where randomness is unwanted and more of an annoyance than anything else. But it depends a lot on your tolerance for friction in a wargame, and how reliable you expect your troops to be, and I think the general perception there has shifted over time. I remember when plasma guns didn't have a safe mode and access to to-hit rerolls was nonexistent- the sort of modern player who considers it horrendously grimderp that the Crimson Fists accidentally blew up their own chapter monastery probably doesn't like morale mechanics or mechanics that punish you for rolling a 1.

What I disagree with in these discussions is the proposition that these sorts of mechanics are axiomatically bad. Because for all the griping about morale, players seem just fine with rolling for Advance distances, rolling for charges, rolling to see how many shots you get, rolling to see if you get to roll, and so on. Randomness for mediating interactions between your army and your opponent's is obviously the core of any dice-based wargame, but in certain mechanics 40K still maintains randomness in your units' execution of their theoretical capabilities without direct interaction with the opponent, and in some ways more randomly than in prior editions. Personally, I find it easier to explain an under-half-strength Eldar unit flubbing a morale check and deciding to retire from the field than the same unit rolling snake eyes on a 3" charge and just not doing it.

The point being, some amount of randomness that takes control away from players is not automatically a bad thing. What matters is what it adds to the game and that it is balanced appropriately. Occasionally turning into a Chaos Spawn when you won a challenge might have been fluffy (I dunno, maybe?) but it didn't add much to gameplay, it wasn't something you could mitigate or plan around, it was just an occasional 'sucks to suck'. Morale was a mechanic that had specific conditions for triggering it, was always present, was something you could mitigate with good positioning of your leaders, and on the flip side was something you could exploit with good positioning and coordination to force tests on vulnerable units.

To Vipoid's point, the worst thing GW ever did with morale was to make some factions essentially immune to it, rather than have them mitigate aspects of it or interact with it differently. Again, taking a page from Epic, treating it as escalating disruption that culminates in the unit becoming temporarily combat ineffective (rather than units being fine until they suddenly decide to turn tail) would make it still applicable to ostensibly fearless armies. On that note:

Tyel wrote:
Also - and I may have asked this before - you've talked about Epic a lot over the years - but I've never really worked out how Orks just aren't "worse"?

It's two things.

First, having poorer activation rolls doesn't make them strictly worse for the same reason that having BS5+ and no armor in 40K doesn't make the entire faction strictly worse than Marines- they are balanced around it. Orks in Epic are extremely dangerous at short range and put out a lot of firepower and melee ability for their cost. Every army in E:A pays appropriately for their activation rolls. Frankly, armies like Marines or Eldar with reliable activation (1+, so they can only fail if taking penalties for being under fire or activating two units in a row) have a steeper learning curve than Orks or Guard, simply because you have to make the most of that advantage or you'll get swamped.

Second, Orks have a 3+ activation by default (for reference: Guard are 2+, Marines are 1+), but get a +2 to the orders that allow double-move or charging into combat. Again there can be penalties, but by default that's an auto-pass.

So while it's pretty hard to coordinate a horde of Orks to do any complex maneuvers, they rarely fail to get stuck in and you can reliably get up the board and into combat even while under fire. Meanwhile Guard are slightly more reliable in general, but once they start taking fire have a one-in-three chance of failure that you need to account for. And Marines auto-pass by default and essentially halve all morale effects, but pay accordingly, and if you try to mindlessly slug it out with a horde of Orks you will get eaten alive.

Again, as always there are other ways you could implement the core concept, and industry trends have moved away from 'roll to do anything' (though it isn't quite that bad; a formation that fails still gets to perform one action) and towards 'roll to do extra'. But it does differentiate the factions in fluffy ways and is appropriately balanced through mechanics and points.

Because for all the griping about morale, players seem just fine with rolling for Advance distances, rolling for charges, rolling to see how many shots you get

FWIW, I dislike random advance distances, random numbers of shots, and think random charge distances could probably be implemented better. For exactly the reasons you've expressed. Failing to get on an objective because you rolled a 1 isn't particularly dramatic or interesting. Neither is rolling snake eyes on a charge. They're just "sucks to suck" moments resulting from an unnecessary application of randomness.

(But that's kind of beside the point. I think I agree with your whole post.)

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Because for all the griping about morale, players seem just fine with rolling for Advance distances, rolling for charges, rolling to see how many shots you get

FWIW, I dislike random advance distances, random numbers of shots, and think random charge distances could probably be implemented better. For exactly the reasons you've expressed. Failing to get on an objective because you rolled a 1 isn't particularly dramatic or interesting. Neither is rolling snake eyes on a charge. They're just "sucks to suck" moments resulting from an unnecessary application of randomness.

(But that's kind of beside the point. I think I agree with your whole post.)

As someone who spent their time maneuvering blocks of troops around on a table and trying hard to beat my opponent to the charges in nearly every edition of WFB, random charge distances are a TRAVESTY. Even when I was playing 40k, the only randomness was the Fleet-of-Foot roll for my Eldar.

Random charge distances are random. And your point about players griping about Morale when they're fine with all the other random crap every single turn is SPOT ON.

IMO what would work better given 40k's current range of fearlessness etc, is to have a generic 'disruption' mechanic, and have different ways of it implementing depending on the faction. No one is immune, but each faction's reaction to it is different. It's all a disadvantage, but its differently disadvantageous depending on the faction in question.


you could treat it like an old vehicle penetration table with different effects depending on what you rolled and some armies getting a bonus to the rolls, so they don't roll 1s, or 2s on the table. They could be anything from, modifiers to hit, always count as moving, lose OC, move D6" away from closest enemy unit, can only move 1d3" during their next turn etc.

Or a unit is disrupted and you army determines what disruption means. You could even put it in their faction rules, a standard mechanic each faction gets. ie 'waaagh disruption = x', 'disruption protocols', 'gtace under fire' etc.

By making it a standard effect for each faction you also allow for easier balancing, rather than trying to make it equally balanced as a core mechanic.

On the initiative front, I think I see a recurring pattern in these threads where people that played Eldar or other higher initiative factions want initiative to do more and people that played Orks or Necrons don't want it to do anything.

It's a tricky puzzle to solve. The sweeping advance thing I feel has been brushed past a few times but I want to reiterate it again: It really sucked to have your WHOLE ARMY be bad at a core mechanic in this way. And that's also why Jaws sucked - for some armies it's a 1 in 6 chance of dying, alright, we can live with that, but in other armies it's a 4 in 6 chance of dying and that's a lot less palatable.

Initiative had more variance between faction core troops than Toughness and tended to be a bit "faction locked" as high or low, and so core rules that worked based on it were always rough if you played a low initiative faction. And the solution of "make 'em cheaper" only works to a point, eventually it becomes unwieldy to play your army because you have so many guys.

 catbarf wrote:
(Apologies for the late reply, I've been out of town)

No problem - I'm always interested to know what you think even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

I'm not sure for instance that players are that fond of other sources of friction - I think people have complained about almost every one of those points. Charges have long been debated (and failing extremely short range ones feels bad as you flag). Rolling to how many shots you get is a stupid way of simulating old blast template weapons and frankly I think should go.
I think the hostility has often been there for all or nothing mechanics. Failing a charge for example is often catastrophic. By contrast one unit rolling a under-average in the shooting phase might be bad, but it can be made up elsewhere.

You see the same sort of anguish with vehicle rules. It doesn't necesarilly feel good for tanks shrug off a dozen lascannon shots in one game - and then be taken out by the first shot of the first turn in the next. You can argue its "realistic" but thats not automatically a good thing in a game.

As you say, if GW hadn't made many factions immune to psychology, then it might have been a bigger feature of older editions. But they did - and while I know you say you can't just use GW's back practices in the past to condemn a concept, you do have to deal with the fact its GW writing the rules.

Thanks for replying about Epic. Although I'll admit having never played it I'm still a bit lost. Activations presumably alternate between players? In which case if Orks do just double move or assault, aren't they are functionally Marines - but cheaper/more powerful for the points? I'm now left spinning it the other way - how then do Marines avoid just being "worse Orks"? Presumably because in some scenarios you don't want to double move/charge into close combat? Would that make a "choppy Marine army" (if such exists?) just bad in Epic? I guess Marine players are more likely to go first, and theres ways to activate multiple formations.

I guess my cynical view in 40k is that Ork players have often been told they have to run straight towards the enemy because shooting isn't fluffy etc etc. But then the Marine/Eldar player should (mysteriously) get lots of tools to punish them for doing this. Which prompts this feeling like you are playing the NPC antagonist there to die faction.
Synapse always has that conflict too. "Its really powerful, it makes you immune to psychology". "So like... 2/3rds of the factions in this game?" Well if its not much of a perk, losing it can't really be a major disadvantage, or its just a faction disadvantage. Maybe you can smudge all this with points, but it doesn't necesarilly feel good.

Hellebore wrote:IMO what would work better given 40k's current range of fearlessness etc, is to have a generic 'disruption' mechanic, and have different ways of it implementing depending on the faction. No one is immune, but each faction's reaction to it is different. It's all a disadvantage, but its differently disadvantageous depending on the faction in question.


you could treat it like an old vehicle penetration table with different effects depending on what you rolled and some armies getting a bonus to the rolls, so they don't roll 1s, or 2s on the table. They could be anything from, modifiers to hit, always count as moving, lose OC, move D6" away from closest enemy unit, can only move 1d3" during their next turn etc.

Or a unit is disrupted and you army determines what disruption means. You could even put it in their faction rules, a standard mechanic each faction gets. ie 'waaagh disruption = x', 'disruption protocols', 'gtace under fire' etc.

By making it a standard effect for each faction you also allow for easier balancing, rather than trying to make it equally balanced as a core mechanic.

I feel like the obvious downside there is that it's a lot of extra design work for the designers to create and balance a bespoke set of debuffs for each faction, and then it's a lot of extra rules for players to learn/memorize. Current morale isn't ideal, but at least you know what happens when your opponent fails a batlteshock test without having to memorize a d6 table for their faction in advance.

Da Boss wrote:On the initiative front, I think I see a recurring pattern in these threads where people that played Eldar or other higher initiative factions want initiative to do more and people that played Orks or Necrons don't want it to do anything.

It's a tricky puzzle to solve. The sweeping advance thing I feel has been brushed past a few times but I want to reiterate it again: It really sucked to have your WHOLE ARMY be bad at a core mechanic in this way. And that's also why Jaws sucked - for some armies it's a 1 in 6 chance of dying, alright, we can live with that, but in other armies it's a 4 in 6 chance of dying and that's a lot less palatable.

Initiative had more variance between faction core troops than Toughness and tended to be a bit "faction locked" as high or low, and so core rules that worked based on it were always rough if you played a low initiative faction. And the solution of "make 'em cheaper" only works to a point, eventually it becomes unwieldy to play your army because you have so many guys.

Yeah. Old initiative was bad for the reasons you've mentioned. As an eldar player, I don't really want that version of it back. That said, it feels like initiative was a big part of our survivability that we never really got back/replaced in any fashion. Back in the day, if you charged your hormagaunts into my harlequins, I could take satisfaction in knowing that the expensive clowns who were supposed to be some of the best melee combatants in the galaxy would at least get some licks in before being overwhelmed by your horde of mooks. Now, a trash mob unit can potentially go into melee with a melee specialist and wipe them out with no casualties in return. Which just doesn't feel right.

Going from 7th to 8th, units like harlequins and wyches went from reliably getting some licks in and being harder to hit in the first place (compared WS) to being hit as easily as guardsmen and potentially not swinging a single attack while they're torn apart in melee. Their supposed melee prowess just goes away if they aren't the ones actively rolling dice. It felt better when both sides of a fight were likely to come away scuffed up and getting the charge just meant that the charger came out trading better. As opposed to now where charging means you frequently just wipe out the enemy entirely unless you're bad at melee or are charging a terminator brick.

IMHO battleshock only needs to be made more punishing and battleshock modifiers need to be written into the core rules so it actually matters.

My personal suggestion is that a battleshocked unit can only shoot and charge the nearest enemy unit.

Da Boss wrote:It really sucked to have your WHOLE ARMY be bad at a core mechanic in this way. And that's also why Jaws sucked - for some armies it's a 1 in 6 chance of dying, alright, we can live with that, but in other armies it's a 4 in 6 chance of dying and that's a lot less palatable.

I don't agree with the underlying implication that core weaknesses are a bad thing, particularly when this is already fairly well tolerated. Having poor army-wide morale is no different from having poor army-wide saves or poor army-wide BS or poor army-wide melee. It just has to be balanced appropriately and not break the game in other ways.

Particularly since, unless I'm forgetting any egregious examples, armies with poor morale always had ways to mitigate it. Tyranids had Synapse, Guard had officers and commissars, Orks had Mob Rule, and so on. If your whole army was getting swept, something had already gone very wrong.

(All that said, I never particularly liked how GW handled Initiative- it seemed like a clunky representation of speed, and using it to make one side unilaterally strike first and to resolve sweeping advance created a lot of issues, see: Orks)

Tyel wrote:I'm not sure for instance that players are that fond of other sources of friction - I think people have complained about almost every one of those points. Charges have long been debated (and failing extremely short range ones feels bad as you flag). Rolling to how many shots you get is a stupid way of simulating old blast template weapons and frankly I think should go.

I apologize for painting with such a broad brush because you and Wyldhunt are right, people do complain about those mechanics. It just isn't always the same people, and I don't see the same sort of sweeping declarations about how random charges are always bad because it takes away control or whatever. Everyone has their own threshold for randomness; I am only making the case that if you're playing a dice-based wargame to begin with, that threshold is not zero, and morale systems ought to remain in consideration.

Tyel wrote:Thanks for replying about Epic. Although I'll admit having never played it I'm still a bit lost. Activations presumably alternate between players? In which case if Orks do just double move or assault, aren't they are functionally Marines - but cheaper/more powerful for the points? I'm now left spinning it the other way - how then do Marines avoid just being "worse Orks"? Presumably because in some scenarios you don't want to double move/charge into close combat? Would that make a "choppy Marine army" (if such exists?) just bad in Epic? I guess Marine players are more likely to go first, and theres ways to activate multiple formations.

After taking an activation you can either turn over to your opponent, or attempt to retain the initiative and make another activation at a -1 penalty. So if you want to get a horde of Orks charging into melee at once, they're pretty reliable at that, where Guard might get the first activation off and then flub the second and then oops you have a problem.

Marines avoid being 'worse Orks' through a couple of means. They're reliable all the time, not just on those two orders, and that gives them flexibility. You can triple-move without shooting, you can sustain fire for +1 to hit at the cost of no moving. Orks have a more limited playbook and if you start trying the sort of fancy redeployments that Marines can do at will, you'll start failing a lot of checks.

Marines also have advantages in morale (they essentially halve the effects of suppression), force concentration, and tactical mobility. A Marine army can apply a lot of damage to a very narrow frontage (weapon ranges are very short compared to 40K), have organic transports allow them to get around the table and put all that force where it's most effective, and avoid getting suppressed or broken which would pin them in place. Orks can mitigate morale to a degree via Mob Rule, but it requires large units that are not nearly so easy to manage.

A choppy Ork army is all about disrupting the enemy with long-range fires enough for the big blobs of Boyz to get stuck in and win through overwhelming force and grinding attrition. A choppy Marine army uses small elite formations to gang up on your key units and dismember them one at a time, while being tough enough to eat the immediate retaliation and redeploy before being bogged down.

Epic's implementations of command-and-control and morale systems are both very simple, but they do an excellent job of differentiating the factions in fundamental (how they're organized, how they fight) rather than superficial (how much armor they wear, what guns they carry) ways. It's somewhat beyond the scope of the current discussion, but I really think that the lack of soft factors in current 40K is a contributing factor to some factions feeling off, or at least disconnected from their fluff, on the table.