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 djones520 wrote:


I find the scale to be to much. It's hard to find meaning, when the sheer size just means there is no meaning.

Yup. I think the apparent uselessness of the struggle is an important aspect of the story. Even if I could win with my Imperial Guard (and don't kid yourselves, people), what would it mean? That another wave of xenos/daemons/rebels will get me tomorrow. It is futile. It's also a commentary on the gamer at the same time. One grand cosmic joke, courtesy of GW.

Why aren't you laughing?

 Warpig1815 wrote:
I think the heart of the issue isn't really whether we should go forward or expand previous areas. I think the core of it all is that people just want to see something a little different.

Yes, I'd agree with that. My point is that the 'story vs setting' distinction is a bit of a red herring. Perhaps the real distinction should be between player's preference for the source of their stories – those written by GW, and those made up by the players/gaming groups themselves.

In the past, GW have been at pains to make it clear they don't want to have things that are 'official' or 'approved'; and that they regard the openness and size of the setting as a large part of its appeal.

[players] don't want the whole thing blown up in their face, but at the same time, we're bored of seeing the same generic events churned out with different characters, but the same feel, and all crammed into one tiny span of time. M41 is just about as full as it can be now, but GW mercilessly cram more in.

I suspect if you were to ask the designers, they'd treat this as a feature, not a bug. The 'minute to midnight' setting is there as an entry point and for players who want a 'party line'; if you want more, you have to use your creativity and imagination and put some work into the many, many plot hooks.

Let me be clear, I'm not trying to pick a fight – when this discussion has popped up in the past, it's often got antagonistic as like-minded enthusiasts talk at cross-purposes to one another, which is a shame. There's no right answer, as far as I'm concerned; but if anyone feels that 40k has grown stale, I'd say that the more effort you put into exploring the setting, the more you'll get out
It's very rewarding!

+++
To put it another way, moving the storyline on wouldn't solve anything; it'd just move the goalposts. Any progression would result in something less dramatically compelling, not more, precisely because the the 'minute to midnight' setting of the Dark Millennium is spelled out to be the darkest hour – there's nowhere thematically satisfying for it to go. Think of it as a cliffhanger. The resolution is never as exciting as the next cliffhanger.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Apologist wrote:
Having always been a 'setting over story' player, I've never quite understood why people wanted things to be resolved – i.e. for things to be played out in the background. That's what I always took the game to be – essentially similar to historical gaming: 'Can I save Tantris II?', 'What would have happened if Commander So-and-So was in system?'.

It's grown stagnant for me. It's got a large part to do with why I've latched onto 30K so hard, in that it is "new". We all knew the basic premise of the story, but it's being fleshed out now in ways it never was before, and it's fresh.

This is at the core of the split, and I can see where the 'story over setting' approach comes from now, even if I disagree with it.

Essentially, there are already ten thousand years of past campaigns to investigate – millions of worlds, billions of characters and trillions of soldiers. I'd love to see GW look at some of the many galaxy-wide events like the Nova Terra Interregnum, the Beast Arises, the Pale Wasting or the Age of Apostasy. Each of these has the potential to be as broad, creative and interesting as the Horus Heresy or the Dark Millennium (i.e. the 'default' 40k) period; and they don't undermine what's at the heart of the Warhammer 40,000 setting.

I typed out responses to a lot of folk, but frankly it was just a less eloquent version of the above.

I think this is just going to have to be an agree to disagree thing, but I appreciate people sharing their views, I at least now have a better understanding of exactly why you're all wrong (yes, that is a joke, in case the emoticon was insufficient)

I don't know i quite like historical campaigns, I actually really wanted a War of the Beard one ( an actual summer campaign )
The Age of Apostasy would be interesting, you could have battles featuring Tazyn as he ended up with Vandries head

The way I see it, it's a matter of scale.

Other fictional wargames universes have undergone massive shifts in background and been none the worse for it. E.g. The Clan Invasion in Battletech. (Then they did horrid things with the heroclix nonsense, but let's ignore that). People happily gamed in those past eras - the succession wars, etc. The background makes it very clear that a few powerful individuals are extremely important, and have the ability to reshape the Inner Sphere to their will - or at least attempt to.

But Battletech takes place in about 1000 years time, and the timeframe for the game is a couple of centuries. The explored bit of the galaxy simply isn't all that big, so Big Stuff Can Happen and Individual People Are Important.

The 40k universe, on the other hand, is supposed to be mindcrushingly massive. It's right there on the first page of the rulebooks:

"For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh - the stuff of which the Imperium is made.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of these times. It is a universe you can live today if you dare - for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little confort or hope. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
But the universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed"

Does this sound like a setting which can have really major events happen suddenly? The Tyranids, something which could conceivable EAT THE GALAXY, turned up less than three centuries ago and the Imperium is still trying to work out the scale of the threat and what to do about them. Any change would be glacially slow.

That's one of the points of the Grim Darkness. People mistake grim darkness for the Dark Eldar torturing people, or some Chaos maniac boiling the entire population of a hive world to make a really tasty mug of coffee/elixir of immortality. That's not grim darkness, that's just nastiness.

The grim darkness is that the Dark Eldar do this because they're terrified that something worse is coming to get them, and in the end no matter what they do, they're right, it will. The Chaos Maniac of Ultimate Evil might get turned into a mindless, gibbering spawn by his gods - not because he failed, but because they thought it would be a bit of a laugh, or because they're so out of touch with reality, literally, that they thought they were doing him a favour.

Nobody and nothing in 40k really, genuinely matters. This is the whole concept of the setting, the running joke that underpins it all (and it started out as a running joke - Rogue Trader is full of stuff about how the Adminstratum doesn't even notice that everyone in an entire sector has been dead for 400 years because a bit of paperwork got mis-filed, or whatever). The Imperium is a dreadful, unchanging, hateful, grinding place that is still better than ANY of the alternatives.

Progressing the story in 40k is actually anathema to the whole setting.

However, going back and doing history books, examining past campaigns, showing the stuff that happened in the past 10,000 years - yes, absolutely. That'd be awesome.