So like, almost no fluff whatsoever? No thanks. Going from a popular fleshed-out chapter in terms of fluff to almost non-existent would be one of the silliest things they could do.
And it would have no impact on how the army plays on the tabletop. Leave the fluff for a supplement, let the codex concern itself with insuring all the Space Marine variants are functional.
If you mean a supplement, ok, I could see doing that, but it seems like a LOT of work just to fold these guys into another book when it's probably flat-out easier to just keep them in their own. Especially when said book is already made and updating to a new edition will mostly involve some copy/paste with a few edits.
I would hold that it is far more work to maintain two (or four if we roll in everyone) separate books than just merge some special character entries.
Reclusiarch - Ok, no idea what these are
Promoted Chaplains. Chaps are important to BA because they babysit death company, which is why you could take 2 of these and 3 more chaps as elites if you wanted.
Assault Squads as troops - Add a line under the assault squad entry saying they count as troops for BA
CT works better, and that would be one of the easy things to do.
Good point. It is probably easier to incorporate all the force org modifications in a summary including the
BA chapter tactics. Merge chapter tactics, the force org mods and the fluff into a single page to introduce the chapter background and summarize the
BA force.
Chaplains as Elites - Just add a line to the chaplain entry saying they count as elites for BA.
Sanguinary Priests (3 in 1) (+ Jump Packs) - Upgrade option for apothecaries
Blood Chalices - Wargear restricted to blood angels
Lots of little foot notes that say "only for BA" that all the other marine players have to ignore.
Sanguinary Guard - Upgrade option for veterans
Assuming that includes giving them artificer armor, angelus guns and glaives, now you have to tell the prospective player that they're fearless, have Ld 10, can only be taken in sets of 5, have no sarge/character, and have different wargear options than veterans. I'd like to see how that looks on the points page. Probably a damn jumbled mess that would make the other marine players even more annoyed that the BA have invaded their book.
Honour Guard with Jump Packs - Just another upgrade option
Furioso Dreadnoughts (+the Frag Cannon) - Upgrade for the dreadnought
Furioso Librarians - Another upgrade for the dreadnought
more footnotes! footnotes and asterisks everywhere! BA can become known as the Footnote Marines! Or maybe asterisk marines.
Death Company - Upgrade for assault squads
Like sanguinary guard above, you have to tell the player that he no longer has a sergeant, the unit has a different unit size, the unit is 0-1 per detachment, and list the special rules and stat changes, as well as outlay the DC wargear selection, which is quite large and any DC member can snag things. Again, I'd love to see someone take the assault marine page from C:SM, and adapt it with all this in mind, and put up a picture of it without it looking like a complete catastrophe.
Death Company Dreadnoughts - A third upgrade for the dreadnought
So the dreadnought page is footnotes on footnotes on footnotes?
Assault Squad wargear options - Just list the additional options
footnote for BA only #2475025025720578
Land Raiders as Transports -
Deep Striking Land Raiders - Add a line in the relevant troops entries saying they may take Lander Raiders as a dedicated transport if running BA, a said Landraiders gain deepstrike
Fast Tanks - Vehicle upgrade available to BA
Baal Predators (Fast, Scout) - Another vehicle upgrade available to BA
More footnotes that would EASILY confuse the hell out of most people trying to read the codex and figure out what the hell they can or can't take. Anyone familiar with the previous codex might be able to hash it out, but someone new wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of this footnote maze you've created.
Not footnotes, upgrades. Look, virtually every codex is based around present the player with a based unit and then listing associated upgrades. You take a tactical squad, and then can buy it special weapons, heavy weapons,
cc weapons, transports, etc. All you need to do is make it so some of the upgrades are contingent on your choice of chapter tactics. Also, you need not copy every last detail associated with a
BA unit. For example, Death Company lacks a sergeant even though its parent unit, assault marines, has one. Why not just leave a sergeant in Death Company then, it is not like it will change anything. Death company just becomes a
FNP/Fearless upgrade with a additional wargear option or two.
Also, these entries are not dead weight for non
BA users. It would be perfectly reasonably that players running other
SM list would choose to vary the list from week to week, and would experiment with other Chapter Tactics, including
BA chapter tactics. As a great many of the models are shared, and many are just bit swaps, this would be seamless and effortless, especially because all the required rules are contained in one book.
Assault Squad discounted transports - Just drop, Rhinos are cheap as is
Whaaat? Why would we ever drop the jump packs then? Also the assault squads from the normal codex gets this. Why change that? It's one of the few things that DOESN'T need to change to accommodate the BA coming in.
Good point. We get this automatically so no modifications required
.
So that is 1/2 page to fluff, 3-4 pages to SC, 15 or so (depending on how you count them) upgrade options, 6 pieces of wargear, a chapters tactics substitution, 2 pages of psychic powers, and adding divination as a power available to librarians. This has got to be 8 pages tops, and that is assuming you retain everything. Certain entries, like the large number of special characters which account for nearly half of the extra pages needed, were probably introduced as padding and could be cut done. In any case, you are not doubling the size of C:SM by doing this. It is quite practical.
Not believable in the slightest. You're not even counting all the lines of text making other things longer by adding footnotes everywhere. Some of the units are still going to need their own fluff entry, or do you plan on putting a footnote in the book that says "go buy BA 5th edition book for explanation" on a bunch of the units?
Last time I checked, upgrades really don't take much space, just a couple of lines for each. As most
BA units appear to be modified versions of C:
SM, I don't think much elaboration would be required to justify their existence. You could probably just modify the parent units fluff to achieve this end. For example, in the dreadnought entry, you can mentioned that if a librarian is entombed in the dreadnought, he can still use his psychic powers, and then the in universe explanation for a Furioso Librarian becomes immediately apparent.
It is good to see that GW is finally getting codices updated in a decent period of time. But I would vastly prefer they spend there time getting the core armies right, keeping them up to date, making all the options in a given codex function, and ensuring a single codex enables numerous play styles, rather than fleshing out arbitrarily chosen subfactions. Every last core army in 40k needs to be updated and updated correctly, then, and only then, should time be devoted to specialist space marine chapters.
No game with a larger playerbase than ONE is ever going to be balanced. Ever. At any point in its creation. Even tic-tac-toe is unbalanced. If GW waited until they had 100/100 satisfied civilian playtesters for every release, the game wouldn't exist. 100 of anyone, even from the same demographic, can't agree on anything more complex than "it's dinner time." And sometimes not even that. You can go sit in the corner waiting for your holy grail perfect books, I'd rather just get more and more content. More fluff to read, more models to play with, more new game states that occur... Don't strawman this though, I like SOME balance, but not enough that they need to go over the damn books with microscopes before I get to play with it.
I am not looking for perfection, but I do think all core armies should be in a workable state before messing around with specialist factions. Having 2/3 of the units in each codex playable would be a reasonable objective. After all, if only around 1/3 of a given codex works, why would you fuss around with specialist codices and supplements? Certainly fixing the defunct units from such a codex would add just as much, if not more variety to the game than maintaining a supplement/specialist codex, with the additional benefit of ensuring all the books currently in play were usable and all armies are playable. Sisters shouldn't have to deal with a half functional pdf codex just because marines need a different set of rules for each of their painting schemes. Fix the core armies first, then go back to embellishing subfactions.
20000+ points