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 Canadian 5th wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:
DING DING DING! Winner. You are correct in your 2nd statement, I can design a list to beat SM's that doesn't require me to kill much, and a lot of competitive Ork players have already done so. And you want to know why? Because its about the only way to win with orkz right now. Who cares if you lose 90% of your army and kill very little of theirs, you still win because you held the capture points for 3 turns before basically getting tabled.

I don't know if you've ever played attrition hammer, but its not much fun after the first few times. Being forced to take a list designed to die by turn 4 without killing much of anything is rather 1 dimensional and boring. But that is what Orkz are being forced to do to win or even compete at tournaments right now. And as a fan of the faction that literally coined the phrase DAKKA its kind of sad that we can't gun down a basic damn tac marines with anything approaching a good return on investment.

What makes killing units any more fun than not killing them if both outcomes lead to you winning the game? In both cases, you as a player perform the exact same actions (building a list, moving models, rolling dice) in both cases you score points based on a set of mission objectives, and determine if you've won lost or drawn. The only difference is that in the defensive case your opponent removed fewer models from the table.

What about seeing your opponent remove models from the board makes the game more fun for you to the point that performing all other actions in the same way but not doing that one step makes the game unfun?

Because seeing your opponent remove those models is visual feedback that your army is accomplishing something. It is more visceral than adding ticks to a tally chart on a sheet of paper.

Like, say you're playing a video game and using a sniper rifle. What feels better, hitting a headshot and seeing the head explode to the sound of HEADSHOT! or absolutely nothing happening?

This is game design 101, here.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Like, say you're playing a video game and using a sniper rifle. What feels better, hitting a headshot and seeing the head explode to the sound of HEADSHOT! or absolutely nothing happening?

The shot itself is almost anticlimax because if the game is well designed getting into position to take it is what makes sniping worthwhile. I play RPGs, the Franchise modes in sports games, 4x games; the setup, seeing your plan come together in the end, is the payoff.

If you need constant flashing lights, loud announcers, and an ever increased sense that 'u are t3h special' you might just want something other than a tabletop wargame.

EDIT: I changed the end example, bashing people for a medical condition isn't cool.

You might be right in a hardcore simulation game. But 40k ain't that. It's identity has more in common with Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament etc. than it does with games including simulated ballistics trajectories. 40K is fast ultraviolence with hitscan weapons, not the careful positioning, ballistics calculations and breathing control of a real sniper.

How rewarding do you think 4x games would be if you had no visual marker of how well your strategy was going? So no overlay showing your controlled territory, or your cultural/religious influence etc. You just do your thing and at some arbitrary point the game ends at which point you find out whether or not you won. And how rewarding as a player would it be if your chosen faction had only one way to try and win and no way to deviate from that to counter your opponents strategy due to a massive power imbalance between your faction and that of your opponents?

Right, but my original point was that watching the number of marks on your tally chart tick up is not engaging gameplay on its own.

Seeing your opponent removing models from the board as a result of your clever manoeuvre feels better than watching your numbers go up on a piece of paper.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

Wyches shouldn't be chaff.

Also, I don't think Wyches were ever slaughtering units of marines in one round, even under ideal circumstances with what drug they rolled.

Wyches typically killed units by inflicting enough casualties to win the combat, make their enemy run away and then catch them. Guess what? Marines were immune to being wiped out this way due to their special snowflake rules which allowed them to flat out ignore the main risk of engaging in Cc along with pretty much every other rule which was based around morale.

So instead Wyches were grinding them down over multiple turns of attrition. In 5th edition, 14 Wyches plus a hekatrix with agoniser cost the same as a naked ten man tac squad with sarge with bolt pistol and chainsword. Assuming the Wyches rolled +1 strength as their drug and they got the charge, it takes them 3+ rounds on average to wipe out that tac squad.

Dudeface wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Racerguy180 wrote:

Brotherjanus wrote:I like that they have started to make 2 sets of rules, one for matched and another for narrative/casual. The hard part is keeping it fair for matched play.

this is the best thing to happen to 40k in a very long time. I dont give a flying feth about tourney balance but I care that fluff/rules are more integrated between what's fluffy and what works on the tabletop.

They should be separated and the power gamers/waac/donkey-caves should stick to their fethed up variation of the game and we will stick to just having fun.

Except your gak balance is worse for casual play so...

And you missed the point - in a narrative casual group playing for fluff, they work around the balance issues generally.

Which would be a lot easier if those balance issues were smaller to begin with. If you know that 2000 points of army A = 2000 points of army B (within a small margin of error) then it becomes much easier to build interesting narrative scenarios involving stuff like imbalanced forces.

Nothing quite like taking what you intended to be a heroic last stand rearguard action against overwhelming odds akin to Thermopylae and ending up with a decisive slaughter of the attackers because that 1000 points of army A was actually more akin to 1500 points of army B and the terrain set up to simulate the defenders holding a strong defensive location made up the remaining 500 point discrepancy.

A perfect example of where a narrative game can be skewed by rules is in the Bucklebury Ferry scenario for the LOTR SBG.

On the side of good you have Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin. On the side of Evil you have 3 Ringwraiths. If Frodo makes it to to the opposite board edge, which involves crossing the Brandywine river, then Good wins. If Frodo is slain, Evil wins.

So what is the problem? The Ringwraiths start spread out, are subject to rules which simulate them searching for the Hobbits and so cannot all immediately head to their location, and their statline only had a single attack and a single wound. The Hobbits also only had a single attack each but there were four of them and Frodo and Sam both had 2 wounds. So the Hobbits had a greater chance of winning a fight against an individual wraith from rolling more dice (especially if they manage to get the wraith into a position where it is trapped, which doubles their attacks against it) and then could fish for sixes to kill them.

So instead of running away, it was a viable strategy to go Ringwraith hunting with your band of Hobbits.

Dudeface wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
" not the red thirst as per the current codex,"

I don't think we need to discuss this any further.

I agree, clearly the fluff in your mind is different to their most recently published book. Unless you're telling me GW wrote their own fluff wrong somehow of course.

Well, considering GW retconned Tau fluff when they introduced the Riptide to make it seem like it was deployed to combat heavy armour such as tanks and titans when the Hammerhead was superior at this task and was not an experimental new weapon and so available in superior numbers and within existing logistics channels, I'm going to go with the latter option.

SecondTime wrote:
The hammerhead was too sensible i guess.

The whole Tau schtick of combined arms was too sensible. It would have got in the way of selling ever bigger robot kits for ever bigger profit margins.

It takes effort to design an army around a balanced mixture of mechanised infantry, auxiliaries, elite battlesuits, armoured vehicles and air support. Much easier to make a big overpowered robot as the centrepiece.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Except you're blatantly saying Orks are fine being wounded on a 5+ by a Lasgun and then just dying. Thats not appropriate for the lore at all.

Ciaphas Cain killed an Ork Warboss with a single laspistol shot through the eye.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
The issue with changing the dice is purely availability of dice.

Mini d12s are a nightmare to come by in any sizable amount. Go try to buy just 10 of them. Contact dice manufacturers. Good luck.

they're also hard to roll in large quantities.

Step 1) Hold dice

Step 2) Let go of dice.

At the quantities of dice that 40K currently needs to play some factions (such as orks) no physical die is easy to roll because our hands cupped together have a finite volume and the dice exceed that volume.