Nazrak wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
You know, I cannot for the life of me get people complaining that 40k supplements don't move the plot forward along enough...

*uses walker to very, very slowly ascend up to the soapbox*

In MY day, it was implicitly understood that the plot didn't move! And dagnabbit, we didn't WANT it to!

40k was, is, and, Throne willing, ever SHALL be, a game for enjoying fun personalized narrative gaming with your friends!

It's not a cutthroat tournament game, and it's not an ongoing saga.

The STORY is about YOU AND YOUR ARMY. The outcome of majour plot point is WHATEVER HAPPENS IN YOUR GAME.

For a solid 20 years or more (I think?) the biggest "story advancement" was "Oh no there's a bunch of undying, self-repairing, soulless Egypt-themed Terminators with ridiculously powerful weapons waking up!"… and even THAT was meant to feed to the one and ONLY "current" story point:

Everything was going really, really, really badly, and doomsday for the galaxy was right around the corner. It was just a question of HOW.

The exact same was true of Warhammer fantasy, too!

The clock was, for both settings, perpetually frozen at TWO! MINUTES! TO MIIIIIIIDNIGHT! The hands that threaten dooooooom!

Cadia and its allied Imperial forces were ALWAYS making a valiant last stand against the 13th Black Crusade, to hold the Cadian gate, because if Cadia fell, Chaos could swarm out of the Eye of Terror en masse, straight to Holy Terra! The Tyraids were ALWAYS overwhelming the Blood Angels, who (even with the aid of Necrons!) couldn't repel the massive swarm, and would likely soon be devoured! Daemons were ALWAYS threatening to breach Khaine's Gate, and spill forth into Comorragh to devour the souls of the Dark Eldar that had cheated them from their claim to their souls for so long! The Golden Throne was ALWAYS on the verge of flickering out! Thraka was ALWAYS pounding on Yarrick's gates! And so on.

How do the stories end? Well IT FRICKING DEPENDS:

Does your Chaos army beat your friend's Cadian IG army?

Does your Blood Angels army beat your friend's Tyranid army?

Does your Dark Eldar army beat your friend's Daemon army?

That was the point!!!!

If new stuff came along, that wasn't already part of the lore anyway, the general understanding was that it was just portions of the very very very big galaxy that had just not yet been described (as there's TONS of stuff that hasn't). Like the Tau Empire.

This was all done so the players had as much room to imagine and enjoy the story for themselves as possible. Just like "Oh there's 1000s of SM chapters!" and "We don't even KNOW who two of the Primarchs were!" and "Is the Emperor alive? Is He a God? Is he just a psyker? Is he actually a gross mouldy corpse on a chair and it's only the sacrificed psykers that keep the astronomicon going?".

The more GW answers, the more they tell the ongoing story themselves, the more that that is taken from us. Clearly they decided to shift their focus... which I dislike, PARTICULARLY as concerns the still raw wound of End Times... but just look at the silliness they've had to do to make this work in 40k: "All our big climactic events we held to for decades? All anticlimactically concluded, with NONE of them having any consequences anywhere NEAR the scale we said! Some had no real consequences at all! And also everyone inexplicably got the dates wrong, so that way we don't have to rename it 41k. Even though our current events span over a century. AND our normal human and T'au characters haven't aged a day in all that time! Even the ones who were already old-as-dirt, like Yarrick! But it's all good, because plot advancement!"

-ing SPARE ME.

I get that the idea of a SUDDEN apocalypse was more relevant in the 80s, with its Cold War fears, than now, where instead the idea of severe irreparable damage to the place everyone lives and the environment they depend on, a part of the civilization that's pretty much permanently ruined cos it was in the wrong part of that place, and everything SLOWLY COLLAPSING AND GOING TO , makes more sense, and is more relatable, with the fears of climate change, economic collapse, and resurgent fascism we have now... but still...

Don't YOU want to be the author of your army's story???

Oh man, this. ALL of this.

the_scotsman wrote:

JWBS wrote:
To be fair you could (and I would) argue that the marine base design needed updated more than some of the other factions. It was when they released Cadians that I became unhappy with the marine scale and I stopped painting them around then. It was only the release of Primaris marines that got me back into space marines. So by my reckoning, marines have been in need of an update for 10+ years.

I mean, that's just like, your opinion man.

I listed those three factions specifically because I believe their basic troops models are a major problem with them that causes people to be turned off from playing them. All three have basic troops that are:

-Hailing from about 3rd edition, with extremely option-poor, basically monopose sprues
-extremely cheap in-game, meaning players need to buy large numbers of these extremely old sculpts
-I'll be charitable and say they have....controversial elements surrounding their visual design.

With Guardsmen that's the super-aggressive heroic scaling to the point of falling in to the uncanny valley (with cadians but ESPECIALLY with catachans), the weird scale issues where they're enormous compared to space marines and even other supposedly human-scale models, and the fact that to make basic options from the kit you need to buy not one but three different kit boxes (Guardsman Kit, Command Squad Kit, and Heavy Weapons Team kit are required to have all the options a Guardsman Squad has in game).

With Guardians it's the bizarre pose, the fact that they're totally monopose with pretty much no room for variant poses beyond holding a gun underslung and taking a standing dump, and the ever-unpopular cone hat design.

With 'Gaunts it's the monopose nature, the stability (for hormagaunts who basically always fall forward) and the overall weird concept of a velociraptor with a laser gun for Termagants.

over the years I've played, I have played against more people who specifically structure their army to avoid those three basic troop types at all costs than I have people who play that army and just use those troops. All-wraith Eldar, All-tank or All-stormtrooper Guard, and all-monster or all-genestealer nids are far more common than one of those armies that just uses those basic building-block troop kits.

By contrast, space marines have always been a universal constant. At time of obsoletion there were something like NINE kits for tactical squad equivalents. Tactical Kit, BA Tacticals, DA Vets, Mk3 marines, Mk4 marines, and Space Wolf Pack even before you get in to the semi-distinct variants like GK, DW and CSM, or the second, fully supported marines-only game put out by Forgeworld. Claiming marines were not popular and were desperate for a redesign is a WILD-ass claim to me.

Primaris brought marines' scale to where they were meant to be with respect to human figures, specifically cadians who as I've already mentioned were way out of scale, but effectively made everything that other factions had that was supposed to look superhuman and imposing into weird silly dwarves. The upright necron units are also supposed to be 8-9 feet tall, as are Ork Nobz, Genestealers, heck - Chaos Marines are the most hilarious example. We now have a setting where humanity is supposedly fighting this uphill battle against terrifying foes...who are all scrawny little bitches who lose every battle to the big giant super-powerful heroes.

In fiction, in models, and in game, all the narrative tension has exited stage left with the addition of Primaris Marines. Great for Marty-Stu fanfiction, terrible for a game where you want ANYBODY to volunteer to play the NPCs who get boffed.