Phobos wrote:
The question isn't really about my preferences. I am just curious to know if the rules underlying these games are in and of themselves, good. From reading here and elsewhere, it seems that what carries these games is their inertia and being the most popular because "everyone plays it". Thats why I put the parameters I did in the
OP.
Personally I've never played a game of either outside of a Gamesday event. I've always just liked the lore and models. Though somehow, I do have current rule books for both.....
The rules of the games are intentionally simplistic, and deliberately 'overly random'. This has some good consequences, and some bad ones.
The game is intentionally simplistic, so it's fairly easy to learn how to play, and reasonably quick for someone to become conversant with the rules. It doesn't require, or reward, system mastery nearly as much as more complex games. That is all for the good. On the other hand, that enforced simplicity means that a lot of detail is simply lost, either through the very rough granularity of the rules (based on
d6 and 1-10 stats) or through sheer abstraction. That enforced simplicity also means that a lot of results are very 'swingy'. Either a weapon does nothing to you, or it kills you. There's very little to represent disabling a vehicle, much less a model.
The game is also overly random. By 'overly random' I mean that things that, in any reasonable sense, would happen very infrequently, happen with terrifying regularity. That's partially a consequence of the very simple, granular system, but it's also a deliberate design choice by the rules writers. Within the background, for instance, infantry laser weapons are almost laughably ineffective against power armored marines, allowing them to advance into blazing torrents of such fire. Within the game, 1 out of every 9 shots that hit will incapacitate a normal Space Marine. Plasma weapons incapacitate or kill their users at a horrific rate far outside what would be acceptable for 'real world' use in the game world. Horrible psychic mishaps which a trained psychic spends decades, if not centuries, training to avoid occur in normal battles. While this does make the game 'cinematic', and means that the players have to prepare for rare events that, statistically, should probably actually only occur in one out of every thousand games, it does make the game play less predictable (for better or worse) and mitigates the advantages of a skilled player (again, for better or worse).
Finally, and most frustratingly to me, the game design does not evolve. Each edition is a new iteration of the game rules, rather than a steady, slow improvement on the basic game rules. Rather than starting with a basic rules set and using the editions to improve and balance those rules, it really seems as if the designers insist on 'reinventing' the assumptions of the game with each edition, which means that, while glaring balance problems are often solved in a new edition, they are replaced by other glaring balance problems. Entire styles of play and army lists are invalidated as fundamental assumptions about the game are changed as often as minor points costs.
Having said all of that, it's not a unremittingly bad rule set, particularly depending on what experience you want out of a game.
I only played Warmachine/Hordes briefly, but compared to Warhammer
40K, Warmahordes requires a higher level of game mastery. It rewards a higher level of game mastery, and it requires a higher commitment to list building and planned combinations. Warmahordes is structured more towards competitive tournament play, and successful tactics are divorced more thoroughly from "real world" (or even "game world") tactics. In my experience, whether you like a model or not is almost irrelevant to Warmahordes. If you face certain armies, you will NEED to take certain units, or lose consistently. You can only choose to play a 'fluffy' list composed of stuff you like to model and paint if you are prepared to lose consistently and early. List construction appears that important. In Warhammer, there are some incredibly good units which show up, and which need to be planned for in a competitive environment, but it's not a bedrock, baseline assumption like it seems to be in Warmahordes. That's neither good nor bad. It's just a different design philosophy.
Warhammer
40K is also less rewarding to the careful, deliberate, list builder. If you play an army and take a unit or two of most things available in your codex, your army will NOT be terribly competitive, but it will also not vary too much in power from edition to edition. If you, on the other hand, take strongly themed (or carefully structured) armies, with an emphasis on the most effective, competitive units (or an emphasis on a particular play style, like Deep Striking, etc), your army may be MUCH more competitive, but can drop dramatically in effectiveness (or even legality) with a change in rules from edition to edition.
The game isn't successful just because of inertia and popularity. The background is amazingly deep and very well developed. The background (to a greater or lesser extent) is important to the rule set. The imagery is distinctive and well-developed. The game rewards, for the most part, the long term collector and the creative hobbyist. While there are quite a few old models which have been abandoned by the company (the entire Squat army, for instance), you will find fewer games with a broader range of models which are still usable in active play. Space Marines from 2 decades ago or more are still perfectly usable in the modern game.
If you don't care at all about the background, aesthetics, or 'creative' hobby aspects of the game, there's not much to recommend it as a ruleset divorced from all of that, simply because the ruleset has, all along, been developed in conjunction with that background, aesthetics, and hobby in mind.
