Switch Theme:

Open Source Community Rules  [RSS] Share on facebook Share on Twitter Submit to Reddit
»
Author Message
Advert


Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:
  • No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
  • Times and dates in your local timezone.
  • Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
  • Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
  • Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.
If you are already a member then feel free to login now.




Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




Reposting this here in proposed rules as it probably belongs here more:

I'm working on a large re-write of what I'm calling "open source rules" for 40k. I'm essentially rebuilding everything from the ground up using tools I've developed to make it a lot quicker to create and maintain all the army data. And IMO the core rules are a lot cleaner. For those of you interested I'd love to collaborate with you on this. So far there are only a few of us building out the factions but we've got a decent amount done already.

I've seen many posts around here with proposed changes to 9th and I would like to channel that energy into this project and with enough folks we can pull this off.

Grim Darkness rules and factions: https://wargame.indiegamerules.com/games/grim_darkness
Main page with some project info and discord/github links: https://wargame.indiegamerules.com/

Any thoughts or feedback? I'd love to hear it.

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2021/05/17 01:55:44


 
   
Made in dk
Loyal Necron Lychguard






Why not just play with 1-page rules? https://onepagerules.com/portfolio/grimdark-future/

How do you determine points costs for units? When I see an Undying Machines Scythe Fighter is 126 pts I don't think "oh, they must have determined that 125 was too little and 130 was too much", I think "this seems lazy and that means it's probably imbalanced". GW proved me right with the 8th edition indexes.

Have you playtested the rules yourself? Have you witnessed other people playtest the rules, have they been able to get through a game without needing to ask you for explanations on rules they did not understand?

What do you mean by making it easier to maintain the army data? You could just have a Google Docs document where you keep the rules and points and then turn it into a PDF once a month and upload it on megaupload for players. I don't see how maintaining data is a major hurdle.

Your game seems quite a bit different from 9th, what is the incentive to switching over? Cleaner rules? 9th edition rules are already extremely clean. Writing rules in your system means not using GW names, that's a major downside. I think you should mention that your game has alternating activations, I know a few Dakkanauts are interested in any system that has it.

Making your game work in Battlescribe would let you use the Battlescribe 2 TTS tool to make it easier to play on Tabletop Simulator.

You should add an extra weather effect and condition so people can roll a D6 to determine it if they want.
   
Made in us
Norn Queen






I read the quick start rules and I like a lot of what I see. Have you guys looked at all into the simplifying elements of apocalypse?

In particular that you abstract the stat line into a unit stat line instead of a model stat line? At the scale 40k plays at this tends to work better imo.

It also means when you go to fight between a 30 model blob of hormagaunts versus a 30 model blob of ork boyz you don't need to measure and count to see how many models actually get to fight. You just roll the dice for the unit.

Good work on this. Interested in seeing it develope. May contribute in some ways when I have time.


These are my opinions. This is how I feel. Others may feel differently. This needs to be stated for some reason.
 
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




 vict0988 wrote:
Why not just play with 1-page rules? https://onepagerules.com/portfolio/grimdark-future/

How do you determine points costs for units? When I see an Undying Machines Scythe Fighter is 126 pts I don't think "oh, they must have determined that 125 was too little and 130 was too much", I think "this seems lazy and that means it's probably imbalanced". GW proved me right with the 8th edition indexes.

Have you playtested the rules yourself? Have you witnessed other people playtest the rules, have they been able to get through a game without needing to ask you for explanations on rules they did not understand?

What do you mean by making it easier to maintain the army data? You could just have a Google Docs document where you keep the rules and points and then turn it into a PDF once a month and upload it on megaupload for players. I don't see how maintaining data is a major hurdle.

Your game seems quite a bit different from 9th, what is the incentive to switching over? Cleaner rules? 9th edition rules are already extremely clean. Writing rules in your system means not using GW names, that's a major downside. I think you should mention that your game has alternating activations, I know a few Dakkanauts are interested in any system that has it.

Making your game work in Battlescribe would let you use the Battlescribe 2 TTS tool to make it easier to play on Tabletop Simulator.

You should add an extra weather effect and condition so people can roll a D6 to determine it if they want.


Hi. Thanks for the questions. So, I have played OnePageRules and in my opinion they are too simple and aren't all that interesting. I think they end up losing a lot of the flavor and depth of the game. With that said, I have play tested the game a good bit so far and it's gone well. I definitely need some folks to proofread/give feedback on the rules themselves.

As for maintaining the data, what I've built is a tool to create armies and upload them directly in then app with very little math involved. The points are based on formulas I've developed and along with the app they can be updated game-wide pretty quickly. You can see the "40k" data here:
https://github.com/wargame-engine/wzff . You can edit any of the files and click a button on the site and it'll let you upload and test the data. Then later it can be merged into the repository so everyone gets your changes. The challenge with managing a game as large as 40k is making wide changes or even updating points for literally hundreds of units. This way, a lot of things can be changed in one place and apply everywhere.

It is quite different than 9th. That is the idea. It's also abstracted to work with many game settings. Just looking for folks for the 40k one at the moment. Unfortunately yes we can't use GW names, but frankly no community project can even if it's non-profit. They can easily shut you down for trademark infringement (even the battlescribe repos, just wait). Frankly I'd rather avoid any legal trouble and be able to keep the project publicly hosted and easily accessible.

The issue with battlescribe is you have to maintain a completely separate copy of all the data if you decide to do do it that way and very few people know how to maintain battlescribe repos so it would likely just be me. With the way we do our data as described above, I'm going to put together a custom army builder that uses that data directly so it only needs to be maintained in one place and people can easily add their own units directly into the list builder as well.

As far as the weather effects go yeah. At the moment there is a limited list. I would like to add more based on the settings so we can have ones more specific to the setting. In the mission generator tab you can just press a button and it will give you a mission, optional weather and game conditions randomly so you don't need to roll and dice for it.

Overall I'll update the main post with some more info. I've put a bit of work into the main site page to kind of summarize already but I do think it would be helpful to have an overview here as well.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Lance845 wrote:
I read the quick start rules and I like a lot of what I see. Have you guys looked at all into the simplifying elements of apocalypse?

In particular that you abstract the stat line into a unit stat line instead of a model stat line? At the scale 40k plays at this tends to work better imo.

It also means when you go to fight between a 30 model blob of hormagaunts versus a 30 model blob of ork boyz you don't need to measure and count to see how many models actually get to fight. You just roll the dice for the unit.

Good work on this. Interested in seeing it develope. May contribute in some ways when I have time.

Thank you. I haven't looked into apoc rules yet. I could have an optional rule section for something like that. I think the game plays quick enough that large point games shouldn't be a huge issue. You'd be surprised how fast things go when you aren't rolling to hit, re-roll all the dice, rolling to wound, re-rolling 1s and then rolling saves. If you have any interest in contributing, we need everyone we can get. Any skills will do even if its just proof-reading the faction sheets to make sure we haven't missed model options or statlines. Best way to reach us is the discord link on the website home page. I'll link it here as well:
https://discord.com/invite/M9sets4

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2021/03/09 16:45:46


 
   
Made in dk
Loyal Necron Lychguard






I get a 404 from the GitHub page. Is there any chance you can post the calculation and explain why the calculation looks the way it does? All pts costs in your game are determined by algorithms then?
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




 vict0988 wrote:
I get a 404 from the GitHub page. Is there any chance you can post the calculation and explain why the calculation looks the way it does? All pts costs in your game are determined by algorithms then?

Fixed the original link. It decided to add the period at the end of my sentence to the url lol. And yes. They are all determined by an algorithm. The game rules rely on less yolo-pointing and playtesting until it feels right and more raw power calculations. The formula takes into account all the special rules, weapons, weapon skill etc etc and generates the final point cost that we can then tweak if need be. Often you don't get round numbers and honestly, you can tell a game hasn't done the math on efficiency if they do. Typically when you see that they're just "guessing and checking" the points. In theory for higher point cost models I could automatically round to the nearest 5 points (I did that in the past) but you lose granularity. And honestly as soon as you start adding on like 3 point upgrades you'll end up with non-round numbers anyway. If there's a compelling argument to round out the numbers I'm open to it though.
   
Made in dk
Loyal Necron Lychguard






I have not been able to find your pts algorithm.

Rounding is good for presentation. I think you should do it for anything that costs more than 80 pts and round to the nearest 25 for anything that costs more than 400 pts, options leading a 425 pt vehicle to cost 443 is fine, but when I found out that a 426 pt model with no upgrades was worth less than 400 then I lost a tonne of confidence in GW.

It might be something to do with having rules for significant digits hammered in throughout High School. You have to consider both whether the digits you are presenting are significant (going from 125 to 126 is less than a 1% increase) and whether your measuring apparatus are exact enough for you to say with a high degree of certainty that there was 40,23% hydration in a dough and not 40,22% hydration in a dough. If your measurement device is only accurate enough to measure somewhere between 35%-45% hydration then you are misleading the reader of your paper (or in this case pts cost) about how certain you are about the balance of the points cost of this unit.

When I wrote papers in high school I did not guess what was balanced and tried my way until I got the right answer, I made calculations and rounded numbers off based on whatever rules the subject had.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/03/09 21:39:49


 
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




Noted about the points rounding. I'll consider it going forward. It's probably lower on my list than some other things atm but I'll see where it goes. For now I would like to find some folks who are particularly interested in "owning" some of the factions so we can get those planned out and going. I have rough outlines for most but they'll need to get built out further.
   
Made in ca
Longtime Dakkanaut





(oops, wrong post!) moderate please delete.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/03/12 00:22:24


 Galef wrote:
If you refuse to use rock, you will never beat scissors.
 
   
Made in us
Regular Dakkanaut




New Mexico, USA

Cool idea! I had the same one, and also used a D10-based system for mine: https://gitlab.com/Pointedstick/wasteland-tactics/

Like you, I tried GrimDark Future but found it a bit too simple for my tastes, and felt that the world needed an open-source wargaming ruleset that would never become tainted by commercialism and money. I never plan to have paid content for mine.

I like that you've embraced your digital medium rather than adapting anything to a more print format like I've done. I really like the random mission generator. It's super cool.

I feel like your wording needs to be tightened up just about everywhere though. There are a lot unclear interactions where details need to be spelled out. Needs proofreading too.
   
Made in us
Decrepit Dakkanaut




If it needs proof reading for grammatical errors I'm the guy for that. Well, sometimes. I'll take a peak tomorrow after work. Someone said you went with D10 and I really do believe that's the future.

CaptainStabby wrote:
If Tyberos falls and needs to catch himself it's because the ground needed killing.

 jy2 wrote:
BTW, I can't wait to run Double-D-thirsters! Man, just thinking about it gets me Khorney.

 vipoid wrote:
Indeed - what sort of bastard would want to use their codex?

 MarsNZ wrote:
ITT: SoB players upset that they're receiving the same condescending treatment that they've doled out in every CSM thread ever.
 
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
If it needs proof reading for grammatical errors I'm the guy for that. Well, sometimes. I'll take a peak tomorrow after work. Someone said you went with D10 and I really do believe that's the future.

Yeah getting a comprehensive list of typos and other oddities would be great. Can post them here:
https://discord.com/invite/M9sets4
Or feel free to open issues here:
https://github.com/wargame-engine/root/issues
   
Made in us
Dakka Veteran






I'm happy to help with proof reading on the side as well. I'll also freely offer my opinions for improvement.

Like I said on the previous thread, I think this idea has real merit. If it goes well and ends up becoming popular, I wouldn't be too surprised if GW tries to rip off your ideas or even pick up you and your team to help with a future major revamp of 40k rules or perhaps another side game like Necromunda.
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




We are moving along nicely now. Some major revamps to the "wound" system and I've been cleaning up a lot of the army lists. Would love to have some tickets open for unclear or obviously wrong points values so I can track those for fixes soon. Thank you everyone who has stopped by
   
Made in au
Regular Dakkanaut




I admit I was only skim reading on the bus but... When do models actually get removed? I couldn't see any reference to that happening.
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




Zustiur wrote:
I admit I was only skim reading on the bus but... When do models actually get removed? I couldn't see any reference to that happening.

It is loosely stated under the Save rolls section in the shooting sequence though I agree this could be more clear.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In other news I have released the beta version of the army builder that is fully compatible with all game modules we have as well as any custom ones that get created.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/03/25 04:40:01


 
   
Made in gb
Lieutenant Colonel




I have a couple of suggestions.

Primarily just name changes of stats.
If the unit is engaging in an Close Combat Assault with Melee weapons , would 'Assault' or 'Melee' be a better alternative name for the Strength stat?(As the strength of the model is only part of its effectiveness.)

Rather than calling it s 'Save' value, on the stat line. Why not call it an Armour value. As the Armour Penetration value of the weapon can be compared to the Armour value of the target model to determine the final 'save' roll.

Secondly.
As the player takes 2 actions per turn. Rather than list actions individually ,why not list the actions sets as Orders?
Eg

Advance.
The unit may move and shoot.(Can not shoot ''move or fire'' weapons.)

Charge ,
The unit may move up to double its Move value. The unit can not make ranged attacks of any kind. It may fight in Close Combat if it charges into an an enemy unit. (The target of the charge MUST be declared before moving the unit into Close Combat.)

Dig in.
The unit remains stationary ,it can not make any attacks , but counts as in ''Hard Cover'' , and +2 to courage value .(Easier to Rally )

Evade,
The unit may move up to its movement value. It can not make any attacks , but gains Light cover if moving through open terrain , or counts as in Hard Cover if it end its move in Light Cover.

Fire Support.
The unit remains stationary and gains maximum effect from ranged weapons (Move or fire weapons can fire , etc.)And unit gains +1 to hit with ranged weapons.

Over watch.
Unit remains stationary , but may fire at any enemy unit , at any point during the enemy activation if it is in line of sight to the unit on over watch.

These are just examples (borrowed from other games.)But I think it helps players focus on the tactical interaction more.
You could allocate the 2 action 'Orders' at the start of the action phase.(Eg place a counter face down next to each unit in good order. With A,C,D,E,F.O as appropriate .) Some games use this sort of order allocation to great effect.

These are just some ideas for discussion.







This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/03/28 13:00:56


 
   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




Lanrak wrote:
I have a couple of suggestions.

Primarily just name changes of stats.
If the unit is engaging in an Close Combat Assault with Melee weapons , would 'Assault' or 'Melee' be a better alternative name for the Strength stat?(As the strength of the model is only part of its effectiveness.)

Rather than calling it s 'Save' value, on the stat line. Why not call it an Armour value. As the Armour Penetration value of the weapon can be compared to the Armour value of the target model to determine the final 'save' roll.

Secondly.
As the player takes 2 actions per turn. Rather than list actions individually ,why not list the actions sets as Orders?
Eg

Advance.
The unit may move and shoot.(Can not shoot ''move or fire'' weapons.)

Charge ,
The unit may move up to double its Move value. The unit can not make ranged attacks of any kind. It may fight in Close Combat if it charges into an an enemy unit. (The target of the charge MUST be declared before moving the unit into Close Combat.)

Dig in.
The unit remains stationary ,it can not make any attacks , but counts as in ''Hard Cover'' , and +2 to courage value .(Easier to Rally )

Evade,
The unit may move up to its movement value. It can not make any attacks , but gains Light cover if moving through open terrain , or counts as in Hard Cover if it end its move in Light Cover.

Fire Support.
The unit remains stationary and gains maximum effect from ranged weapons (Move or fire weapons can fire , etc.)And unit gains +1 to hit with ranged weapons.

Over watch.
Unit remains stationary , but may fire at any enemy unit , at any point during the enemy activation if it is in line of sight to the unit on over watch.

These are just examples (borrowed from other games.)But I think it helps players focus on the tactical interaction more.
You could allocate the 2 action 'Orders' at the start of the action phase.(Eg place a counter face down next to each unit in good order. With A,C,D,E,F.O as appropriate .) Some games use this sort of order allocation to great effect.

These are just some ideas for discussion.








Hi! Thanks for the feedback. As far as Save/AP goes I do actually want to change "AP" to be a bit less of a specific term. Something like Piercing comes to mind but I have to think about it. Rest assured I will try to clear up the terms there so it's a bit less confusing. As far as the order system goes, I actually used to have a system where you chose single orders but I felt it wasn't flexible enough. The current action system IMO has the most tactical options that you can mix and match depending on what you need your units to do for the round. Additionally, some special rules come with actions that can take up one of your two action slots so it works well being extendable.
   
Made in gb
Lieutenant Colonel




The only reason I mentioned AP vs Armour is because its an easy way to get comparative results across all units types.
I am a fan of slightly more complex core rules that cover more of the game play in a more proportional way. Than relying on lots of special rules that can add complication and slow the game play down. (Adding extra dice rolls for example.)

I understand you want to keep the core rules close to the level of complexity in 40k.
But comparing values on a universal resolution table with values of 1 to 10, to give D 6 result of 0 (Auto success ) to 7(Auto Fail without modifiers.) Can deliver a much wider range of intuitive results.

My only concern with single actions , taken one after the other, is units can react 'unrealistically' to opponents actions .
It allows players to correct tactical blunders too easily.
(Unless you impose a robust restrictions to stop 'gaming' you way out of tactical mistakes. )

Simply saying units effected by a specific condition have limited actions is standard across lots of war games.

Eg Suppressed units must move to cover within the suppressed units move distance. Or may fire at the closest enemy unit counting as having moved. (If there is no cover within the suppressed units move value.)

Anyhow , if there is any ideas or alternative methods you want to discuss, I am happy to help if I can.


   
Made in us
Fresh-Faced New User




As an update this project is still very much going. See the first post for how to join us and contribute. We now have a fantasy module here:
https://battleforged.indiegamerules.com/games/fantasy_realms
   
 
Forum Index » 40K Proposed Rules
Go to: