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Sort of a mash-up of questions raised during the second half of one of my go-to podcasts for long dog-walks, these days (Look Out, Sir! in case anyone is interested).

After reviewing Adepticon reveals, these questions/topics came up, and seem to reflect ongoing discussion in different threads here on Dakka, so I am making this multi-poll as an opportunity to air ideas on any or all of them. Note that mulitple answers are possible, including answers that might contradict one another!

Before someone comments that the poll is imperfect, leaves out options, is somehow broken, sure, I understand that. The idea here is to provide a forum for discussion, with the poll simply motivating said discussion, while also hinting at how Dakkanauts generally feel about the polled issues.

To me the core rules aren't horrid, it's the bolt-ons, army specific stuff and general stats that needs addressing.

I get it's not what the shareholders think is clever but I honestly think the game needs to dial back the firepower and make armies smaller again by a reasonable margin.

Dudeface, I could get behind that assessment. Sure. Though not a fan of tanks with wounds and lack of facing and so on, I suppose that I could let that go if the bolt-ons as you say were mostly unbolted.

I am definitely onboard the decreasing lethality and decreasing expected army size, as this is a return to earlier days and opens up possibilities that movement and placement play out for more turns on a tabletop that would at least seem bigger, with fewer unit and greater distance between them. I suppose that decreasing firepower also involves reduced weapon ranges in general, reduced charge and movement ranges for most units, etc... just my take.

Dudeface wrote:
To me the core rules aren't horrid, it's the bolt-ons, army specific stuff and general stats that needs addressing.

I get it's not what the shareholders think is clever but I honestly think the game needs to dial back the firepower and make armies smaller again by a reasonable margin.

I don't think that the size of the armies alone are that big of an issue, i think more that the escalatig scope of the system is an issue as in what is commonly fielded, not too long ago flyers were things of rariety, nowadays they hardly are, same with superheavies.
Some of those things have increased the scope of 40k to its detriment since the system has to facilitate them specifically and created issues that are still present which if GW would've designed them smarter (looking especially at knight armies) would have been far more likely to not be so problematic..

the size itself is an issue insofar that i rekon that it leads to burn out or percieved overly high entry cost barriers. That being said, smaller armies would atleast partially combat the ever growing cost of the game and entry cost, but i reckon so long gw is profiting from pricerises they will push for them...

personally, the bolt-ons are also imo an addition off fake choice partially to plaster over the really barebones stuctures some armies have in regards to options for units and commanders aswell as equipment, compared to actually customizable army rules they are very shallow and feel aenimc in many cases but by their spread out design manage to kinda capture the playerbase and "hype " them up again. Also the staggered release means that it creates a kind of " arms race " seemingly since none of the new codices are seemingly tested at the same time against one another in a fashion, leading to very disjointed codices design philosophy and mid edition switches of philosophy.

I never buy models based on rules so I voted in the poll all the options that reflect that. IMHO it's too soon to re-write everything from scratch, I hope 40k stays pretty much the same game for another 2-3 editions. Unless GW decides to release all the codexes at once, instead of starting with the indexes and then releasing a codex every month. Which is never gonna happen.

Attention to tournament scene is also a good thing since it helps balancing the game. Yes, we'll never have a perfectly balanced game but no way an OP list (mind I said list, not faction) exists more than a few months at most now and I'm very happy about that.

I've really enjoyed 9th apart from the creeping lethality. Unfortunately I don't know how to fix that without a fairly significant rules reset.

GW's probable solution is just the ugly approach of adding more and more special rules.

But to my mind at least there's not really a point to "everyone gets more AP... but everyone gets more armour and invuls", "Everyone gets more damage, everyone gets -1 damage traits" and "everyone gets rerolls, btw these armies now get rules to prevent rerolls". The damage should have just never have rocketed up in the first place. Its just more complexity/bloat/minutiae that has to be kept track of.

And unfortunately, barring a reset I don't think you can't go back. "Hi guys, here's the new Guard book, btw it does about third the damage for points the Harlequins one does." "So you mean it sucks?" "Oh yeah, totally, 30% win rate incoming, but hey, new edition, new paradigm and all..."

Tyel wrote:
I've really enjoyed 9th apart from the creeping lethality. Unfortunately I don't know how to fix that without a fairly significant rules reset.

Points hikes and harsh limitations on the numbers of units a player could take (like flyers or ork buggies) can be a pretty effective fixes as well.

Points adjustments could easily fix both custodes and harlequins, and they are both supposed to be low model count but with extremely powerful tools. Tau, drukhari and Eldar could easily be put in line with a few points hikes and 0-1 or 0-2 limitations of their most spammable OP units.

 jeff white wrote:
Sort of a mash-up of questions raised during the second half of one of my go-to podcasts for long dog-walks, these days (Look Out, Sir! in case anyone is interested).

After reviewing Adepticon reveals, these questions/topics came up, and seem to reflect ongoing discussion in different threads here on Dakka, so I am making this multi-poll as an opportunity to air ideas on any or all of them. Note that mulitple answers are possible, including answers that might contradict one another!

Before someone comments that the poll is imperfect, leaves out options, is somehow broken, sure, I understand that. The idea here is to provide a forum for discussion, with the poll simply motivating said discussion, while also hinting at how Dakkanauts generally feel about the polled issues.

At the end of the day, current system sales, so it's unlikely to change much.
I believe it sells because the miniatures are gorgeous, not because the game is good.
I also believe that has always been 40K selling point : the miniatures, that's why GW expand every range in every direction.

I think if the community want to really punish GW, they need to adopt recognized systems like onepagerule and stop buying codexes, disengage from "official" or "endorsed" GW events.

Unlikely to happen, because plastic addicts and meta-chasers kinda love what GW is throwing at them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Blackie wrote:
I never buy models based on rules so I voted in the poll all the options that reflect that. IMHO it's too soon to re-write everything from scratch, I hope 40k stays pretty much the same game for another 2-3 editions. Unless GW decides to release all the codexes at once, instead of starting with the indexes and then releasing a codex every month. Which is never gonna happen.

Attention to tournament scene is also a good thing since it helps balancing the game. Yes, we'll never have a perfectly balanced game but no way an OP list (mind I said list, not faction) exists more than a few months at most now and I'm very happy about that.

That's the wrong approach, tournament scene helps to adjust the pricing on outlier units. It doesn't address rules creep (stratagems, special rules, army doctrines) and tedium creep (IGOUGO, buckets of rolls).

Rules creep (stratagems, special rules, army doctrines, etc...) are corrected through FAQs and similar updates. Tournament scene helps fixing these things as well.

 Blackie wrote:
Rules creep (stratagems, special rules, army doctrines, etc...) are corrected through FAQs and similar updates. Tournament scene helps fixing these things as well.

You can correct a rule, it's still here, an additional layer to memorize, worded differently in every codex, and basically breaking a core rule to the benefit of the unit its allocated to.

The creep is the encyclopedia of different rules actually existing, not them being overpowered.

 Blackie wrote:
Points hikes and harsh limitations on the numbers of units a player could take (like flyers or ork buggies) can be a pretty effective fixes as well.

Points adjustments could easily fix both custodes and harlequins, and they are both supposed to be low model count but with extremely powerful tools. Tau, drukhari and Eldar could easily be put in line with a few points hikes and 0-1 or 0-2 limitations of their most spammable OP units.

I'm not really convinced.

I mean if you increase the points cost of Harlequins, Custodes etc units - you are nerfing their cannon and upping their glass. The issue is that they likely just become the faction that disappears off the table in a few turns rather than the other way round.

When you look at Tau, what's necessary is to take a sledgehammer to the synergies behind the units. Its the datasheets with montka, markerlights, sept bonuses, warlord traits and stratagems surge over the top. You can nerf all the points - so they just have a unit less on the table. And this will relatively impact tournament win percentages etc. But I'm not sure changes my complaint - which is that everything dies too quickly. "You can only take one crisis squad unit per detachment" would both be a lame change - and one which again, doesn't fix the issue I'm outlining.

Everything has to die quickly - otherwise you can't finish a game in the expected time. And that model density is to support sales.

yeah, at this point "toning down" really means "cutting rules". Every codex has just so much crap to remember

Like, why do exarch get special stat buffs only IF they have an exarch power and the stat buffs are given randomly. just give all exarchs 3W and +1bs/+1A.
Why is there so many stratagems



Automatically Appended Next Post:

The_Real_Chris wrote:
Everything has to die quickly - otherwise you can't finish a game in the expected time. And that model density is to support sales.

i can play a game of OnePageRules with the equivalent number of models that 40k has in about 2h and thats with me socializing a ton during the game. Number of models and speed of the game arent automatically related

Siegfriedfr wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Rules creep (stratagems, special rules, army doctrines, etc...) are corrected through FAQs and similar updates. Tournament scene helps fixing these things as well.

You can correct a rule, it's still here, an additional layer to memorize, worded differently in every codex, and basically breaking a core rule to the benefit of the unit its allocated to.

The creep is the encyclopedia of different rules actually existing, not them being overpowered.

Yeah, I should have included this idea about bloat and rules creep as it was an important aspect of the podcast discussion and I failed to represent it in the multi poll… good point.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
To me the core rules aren't horrid, it's the bolt-ons, army specific stuff and general stats that needs addressing.

I get it's not what the shareholders think is clever but I honestly think the game needs to dial back the firepower and make armies smaller again by a reasonable margin.

I don't think that the size of the armies alone are that big of an issue, i think more that the escalatig scope of the system is an issue as in what is commonly fielded, not too long ago flyers were things of rariety, nowadays they hardly are, same with superheavies.
Some of those things have increased the scope of 40k to its detriment since the system has to facilitate them specifically and created issues that are still present which if GW would've designed them smarter (looking especially at knight armies) would have been far more likely to not be so problematic..

the size itself is an issue insofar that i rekon that it leads to burn out or percieved overly high entry cost barriers. That being said, smaller armies would atleast partially combat the ever growing cost of the game and entry cost, but i reckon so long gw is profiting from pricerises they will push for them...

I more meant the smaller tables would be better with less models on them. They could simply say "points don't change but standard games are 1500" and you'd get the same effect. The boards are too full to me, it clearly comes from a place of corporate want as well rather than for any real reason.

A lot to unpack here. I do enjoy a good thought experiment.

40K is better with GW "catering" to the tournament scene.
Yes, but not to the exclusion or detriment of all else; which is what GW is currently doing. While this may seem hypocritical of me if you're familiar with my posts lambasting competitive play, allow me to briefly explain.
Prior to 9th edition, I dare say, the entire W40K community in the US was fractured and broken into two camps. There was a rivalry between the Nova zealots and those who played GW's Eternal War and/or Maelstrom of War missions. So, while I abhor completive play, I understand that it's here to stay and it is better to have GW at the helm providing cohesion.

Anticipated 10th edition: Discourages me from buying and building and painting and modeling units according to current rules, because these may change!
To an extent. I've been doing this long enough to have seen things be good one edition, bad the next, but great in the following edition. This is why I tend to stick to the rule of cool when building my models. While it may or may not be good now, it's likely to change in the future. I also believe it makes me a stronger player as I often have less than optimal units and wargear.

Codex power creep: Discourages me from buying further into this edition.
Absolutely. When an edition goes off the rails it discourages me from buying anything, it discourages me from playing; both then discourage me from building & painting. It's like a complete shut down because I refuse to chase the meta.

Advancing narrative: I was clamoring for an advancing storyline and, regardless of how it was done, am happy that the 40K story has moved on..
More like... I was not clamoring for advancing the storyline, but I'm happy that the story has moved forward a bit. There is a lot of new lore that I do not like, but there is also a lot of new lore that I do like.

Advancing Storyline is okay.
9th edition is the best edition 40K has had so far concerning its core rules. Problems lie in the lethality of Codizes, no models no rules and too many stratagems.
Codex Creep keeps me from buying/ playing more.
Core rules can stay the same, but if there has to be a 10th edition we'd need some alternation/ activation or reaction mechanic, otherwize leave it as it is, just balance the damn thing.
Tournament focus lead to the most boring and samey mission style 40K has ever had (this is despite me saying it's the best edition... because I can just play 8th edition mission and I'm fine).

What I'm buying has nothing to do with the next edition so I skipped the first two.

Just imagine playing vs Tau and their out of LoS shoting, and them reacting to you going first turn, then only way before you had a slight chance to win against them. At the same time the tau player will smile and tell the WE player that the game is balanced, because he can react with his bolt pistols to tau movment too.

I could only answer 2

1 tournament play should not be the focus of the company, but then they gave up on the original theme and purpose of 40K about 10 years ago.
2. not only is this not a good edition it rivals 6th as being one of the worst editions the game has ever had,

As for 10th edition.....or anything else GW is doing. i don't care, i am not the target sales audience. i am not chasing the meta. i have over 10K points of marine minis between 2 armies not counting my admech. i have a full chaos fleet for BFG and i have 5 epic armies and all the codexes as well as rule books for all the above. so i never need another thing from GW. terrain or mini wise that i could easily get far cheaper 3d printed.

Even more important we have a strong active community that plays older editions of 40K regularly.

As a guy who exclusively plays Crusade and exclusively buys content for Crusade, I disagree with the sentiment that the EDITION as a whole is focused on tournament play.

Certainly Matched Play is tournament focused, and Matched Play is certainly played more frequently in stores. But that is absolutely not the same thing as saying the entire edition is tournament focused.

There is actually more exclusive Crusade content this edition than there is exclusive Matched play content.

Dudeface wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
To me the core rules aren't horrid, it's the bolt-ons, army specific stuff and general stats that needs addressing.

I get it's not what the shareholders think is clever but I honestly think the game needs to dial back the firepower and make armies smaller again by a reasonable margin.

I don't think that the size of the armies alone are that big of an issue, i think more that the escalatig scope of the system is an issue as in what is commonly fielded, not too long ago flyers were things of rariety, nowadays they hardly are, same with superheavies.
Some of those things have increased the scope of 40k to its detriment since the system has to facilitate them specifically and created issues that are still present which if GW would've designed them smarter (looking especially at knight armies) would have been far more likely to not be so problematic..

the size itself is an issue insofar that i rekon that it leads to burn out or percieved overly high entry cost barriers. That being said, smaller armies would atleast partially combat the ever growing cost of the game and entry cost, but i reckon so long gw is profiting from pricerises they will push for them...

I more meant the smaller tables would be better with less models on them. They could simply say "points don't change but standard games are 1500" and you'd get the same effect. The boards are too full to me, it clearly comes from a place of corporate want as well rather than for any real reason.

making the boards smaller was a mistake, regardless how you slice it, since the difference between transports and infantry are too minescule to matter on them anyways.
But yeah, by extention the smaller tabels did saturate the already too large ammount of modells far more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

PenitentJake wrote:
As a guy who exclusively plays Crusade and exclusively buys content for Crusade, I disagree with the sentiment that the EDITION as a whole is focused on tournament play.

Certainly Matched Play is tournament focused, and Matched Play is certainly played more frequently in stores. But that is absolutely not the same thing as saying the entire edition is tournament focused.

There is actually more exclusive Crusade content this edition than there is exclusive Matched play content.

Crusade is the one good thing in a massive pile of gak though, and "Good" is really subjective to which faction you play, because some of the crusade content for some factions is just designed horribly.

PenitentJake wrote:
As a guy who exclusively plays Crusade and exclusively buys content for Crusade, I disagree with the sentiment that the EDITION as a whole is focused on tournament play.

Certainly Matched Play is tournament focused, and Matched Play is certainly played more frequently in stores. But that is absolutely not the same thing as saying the entire edition is tournament focused.

There is actually more exclusive Crusade content this edition than there is exclusive Matched play content.

Okey, but that is a bit like saying that 8th or any other prior edition is good as long as you house rule it and play it with "like minded people".

 aphyon wrote:
I could only answer 2

Spoiler:

1 tournament play should not be the focus of the company, but then they gave up on the original theme and purpose of 40K about 10 years ago.
2. not only is this not a good edition it rivals 6th as being one of the worst editions the game has ever had,

As for 10th edition.....or anything else GW is doing. i don't care, i am not the target sales audience. i am not chasing the meta. i have over 10K points of marine minis between 2 armies not counting my admech. i have a full chaos fleet for BFG and i have 5 epic armies and all the codexes as well as rule books for all the above. so i never need another thing from GW. terrain or mini wise that i could easily get far cheaper 3d printed.

Even more important we have a strong active community that plays older editions of 40K regularly.

Lucky duck...

Lucky duck...

Indeed, just got my cogs handed to my admech (7th ed codex) by the dark eldar (5th ed codex) this last weekend. had loads of silly fun......side note, dark eldar not loving the flamer/heavy flamer as much as i love giving it to them.

Karol wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
As a guy who exclusively plays Crusade and exclusively buys content for Crusade, I disagree with the sentiment that the EDITION as a whole is focused on tournament play.

Certainly Matched Play is tournament focused, and Matched Play is certainly played more frequently in stores. But that is absolutely not the same thing as saying the entire edition is tournament focused.

There is actually more exclusive Crusade content this edition than there is exclusive Matched play content.

Okey, but that is a bit like saying that 8th or any other prior edition is good as long as you house rule it and play it with "like minded people".

Not really? There's no special permission for crusade or house ruling required, certainly no more than playing with a grand tournament pack in a pick up game.

Karol wrote:
Just imagine playing vs Tau and their out of LoS shoting, and them reacting to you going first turn, then only way before you had a slight chance to win against them. At the same time the tau player will smile and tell the WE player that the game is balanced, because he can react with his bolt pistols to tau movment too.

i'm assuming you mean like infinity does?

obviously it wouldn't work without putting serious work in the rules... and in infinity, when you shoot as a reaction, you shoot with a heavy nerf (only one shot)

just change 40k's system to anything but IGOUGO and that would make it a million times more enjoyable.

Anticipated 10e - Meh? I can't say that I'm looking forward to it, but it won't stop me from buying minis I like.
Tourney Catering - I think it's better that GW takes notice of the tourney scene and reacts to issues there accordingly, but I don't think tourney play should be the main focus of the rules team (a main focus, sure, but not the main focus).
Power Creep - Hot take: how about GW just doesn't do power creep in the first place? That'll necessitate a reset, sure, and possibly more than one if there's some minimum power creep that GW just can't sort out, but the issue with power creep is that it happens in the first place, not how often power gets reset.
New Ed New Rules - I think that this might be linked to the power creep (cf. T'au being bottom-tier up until they got a 9e 'dex), so no, I don't think the rules should be drastically changed every edition.
9 Ed Best Ed - I can't speak too directly to this as I've not played 9e, but from what I've seen it looks like GW hasn't learned a damn thing from 5e-8e, and 9e is just following down the same path as 6e/7e did.
Advancing Narrative - Meh. It certainly could have been handled better, but I find I don't care much either way.
Codex Power Creep - This will be the first edition that I don't buy the IG 'dex at release. Depending on how the reviews go, I might not buy it at all. I just can't get interested in staying on the hamster wheel.

As a Guard player, I'd say that a more accurate answer to the affect of Power Creep and potential of 10th edition for me is that, I will no longer buy based on what's "competitive" anymore. As Guard sits at the bottom of the competitive scene, now is the time for me to buy/build/paint what I like as there's good deals, and decent stock, on places like eBay.

Additionally, and maybe it's just burnout from the amount of gaming I had been doing, but I really think GW needs to further separate competitive play and narrative play. It's not fun when I have to abuse the PL system and bring the tightest list I can (and plan my next game over the course of a week) just to have a chance of winning a game in a narrative campaign. I'd rather have the chance of bringing fun stuff (Krieg with a smorgasbord of Leman Russ tanks, or a Scummy Guard army with lots of special/heavy weapons squads and kitbashed light vehicles) than go all out on my opponents.

The only one i would need to expand on/is not really reflected in the poll is that i always thought an advancing storyline would be cool but the execution has been poor and have been convinced that really it never could have been that good given all the circumstamces of being a model company and war game.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Crusade is the one good thing in a massive pile of gak though, and "Good" is really subjective to which faction you play, because some of the crusade content for some factions is just designed horribly.

Very true- Crusade is one aspect of the game where I feel for Marine players- I found their bespoke Crusade content to be pretty weak, though that's based on just the SM dex and the DW supplement, because those are the only marine books I have; I'd like to think there is some good stuff for other marine flavours, but I don't know.

From what I've seen, the big Crusade winners are Tau, GSC, Druhkari and Sisters; their content is amazing. There's a lot I haven't seen, so I could be missing out on a sleeper hit, but I try to keep up with Goonhammer reviews of the dexes I don't buy, and no one else has really jumped out at me.