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If you can play old GW games, then you must have some trusted friends to play with as opposed to strangers doing pick-up games at the local store. A lot of the frustration on dakkadakka seems to stem from players who just play against random joes in casual/tournament games. Designing a fun narrative and getting involved in it is a lot easier when you're playing with an established group of people whom you know personally.
My advice to GW gamers has always been: don't play in tournaments, don't play with competitive players unless you want to experience a lot of frustration and lose games before deployment is over. But I understand that for the guy who lives in the middle of nowhere with a just a single struggling hole-in-the-wall LGS, you don't get so much choice over your opponents. You probably can't get your friends to play due to the cost of the minis, so you end up with sort of a "blind date" system for gaming. You can't just choose not to play with Ted because he's smelly and obnoxious and does an annoying victory dance whenever he tables you with his unbound army of flyrants and knights; there's nobody else around to play with.

So here's where leaving the narrative to the player falls flat. You don't choose who the 40k fans in your local area are, so if one of them cares only about winning by shooting you to death with his tournament cheese list then you're probably stuck with him anyway.

 jasper76 wrote:
So my friend has more 40k campaign books and special supplements with different game rules and scenarios than I care to try and count.

Do these books just not provide good enough narrative tools, or is the idea that they haven't produced enough material?

I think the argument is that these aren't good enough. The way most people read these is "these are dataslates - additional options for your army - include it in your regular games". Alternatively, others think of it as "If we are playing a Damos Gulf campaign, then I can take these units". Neither of these are about providing a structure on how to run a Damos Gulf Campaign. That, at least, is how I see it. I'd like to see something like "Here's some styles of campaigns; map-based, narrative-based, escalation-based, reinforcement-based, item-based, character-based, dwindling-forces-based, etc." and then go through an example of each. A good example would be the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. It's not just a resource of charts and magic items, it also tells you how to build interesting campaigns, interesting encounters, and how to handle players rather than just handling their characters.

 Yarium wrote:
I'd like to see something like "Here's some styles of campaigns; map-based, narrative-based, escalation-based, reinforcement-based, item-based, character-based, dwindling-forces-based, etc." and then go through an example of each. A good example would be the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. It's not just a resource of charts and magic items, it also tells you how to build interesting campaigns, interesting encounters, and how to handle players rather than just handling their characters.

This! GW apparently likes publishing books more than they like to produce minis, and I figure they'll take any excuse to put out another book. GW basically sees each book as a catalog for their models though, so there would have to be some models/terrain that GW is trying to hawk.

 jasper76 wrote:
So my friend has more 40k campaign books and special supplements with different game rules and scenarios than I care to try and count.

Do these books just not provide good enough narrative tools, or is the idea that they haven't produced enough material?

40k's campaign books are really wonky, they're not really very good at all. They basically have a bunch of fluff on a particular battle or series of battles, some formations (which of course can apparently be used freely outside the campaign), and some minor-variant missions with no real connection to each other or timeline, nor a and only some extremely light notes on what units should be present, if at all . There's really very little actual "rooting" of the gaming material to the fluff of the particular engagement.

Essentially, they're typically "take your usual army, one side may or may not ay have to make some minor changes, play on a slightly modified normal normal rulebook mission, and go". GW just writes handful of missions, says "well, play through these in whatever order you like, or play through sequentially and whoever had the most VP's at the end wins!"

Relative to something like the old Battletech campaign books,or RPG campaigns, there's not a whole lot to them, and the narrative structuring is almost nonexistent. There's no branching missions/cause-and-effect, if you win one it doesn't make any difference in any of the others, nothing really carries over from mission to mission, etc. As far as an actual narrative campaign goes, it's paper thin in substance.

People are buying and using the campaign books for the one or two very strong formations they contain that can be used outside of the campaign, but not much else.

So, ultimately, we get a big, expensive book that was designed as a narrative supplement, that's not really actually very good at doing that, being primarily used to cherry-pick the powergaming elements out of it for use elsewhere because GW decided it's perfectly fine to do so. That's emblematic of the issue with GW's products. The implementation is atrocious, and a "narrative forging" product doesn't really do its job and instead drives powergaming.

 Yarium wrote:
Throwing this out there Haldir, but maybe your game attendance is down because you're trying to reinforce old way of playing? I'm hearing the same thing from people now who try to play AoS like it was still Fantasy. It's not the same game that it used to be. If you try to force it to be that, you're not going to have fun.

40k as it is now allows for tons of unique and awesome interactions with allies and formations and unique detachments. Give it a go, start with "small" 1500 point games, and let each other bring some of the new "broken, no fun, won't play!" stuff - you might be surprised!

How do you enforce the new ways of playing when half of the people are having pre decurion dex and the others post decurion. And the ally idea is stupid the way it is right now. iT may have been fun if iit add a little new stuff to an already existing lists that worked. But it doesn't work like that. Some armies can play solo, like an eldar player can play an eldar army. While an IG army should actualy play wyverns with main army being something else and knights, because IG have no way to deal with LoW or other knights. In fact after some time the IG player starts to notice that the IG part of his list only hinders him in winning.

Also is 1500 small?

 Blacksails wrote:

I really enjoy the pot shots at saying anything not nice about GW/40k. Really helps move the discussion along you know. And you know, the irony of being negative yourself to people you think are negative.

Just get tiring reading post after post of it. That is all. Carry on as normal.

@Vakathi, when LOTR was popular, GW printed a whole bunch of books with IMO excellent campaignss and scenarios, some of which included pre-set army lists. I didn't think I would like this at first (not making my own army list), but most of those lists were very well balanced for the scenario and victory conditions. I had great fun running through alot of those scenarios, and Id like it if they started putting together some similar stuff for 40k.

 jasper76 wrote:
So my friend has more 40k campaign books and special supplements with different game rules and scenarios than I care to try and count.

Do these books just not provide good enough narrative tools, or is the idea that they haven't produced enough material?

If the campaign books are meant to be the main narrative supplements for 40k.... then no, they do not provide good enough narrative tools. There needs to be actual gameplay mechanics that foster the collaborative storytelling that you would want out of narrative gameplay - the campaign books have some tools for that, but they're very simplistic compared to what tabletop RPGs have been doing for decades.

I've been participating in a narrative campaign that a friend of mine is running (mostly in the role of an Opposing Force for the main players when needed), and it's a really cool experience... but he's basically had to cook up all the narrative gameplay mechanics from scratch, because they don't currently exist in the game, nor do they really exist in the campaign books. The FFG 40k roleplaying games have been a great source for harvesting ideas for narrative play.

Makumba wrote:

 Yarium wrote:
Throwing this out there Haldir, but maybe your game attendance is down because you're trying to reinforce old way of playing? I'm hearing the same thing from people now who try to play AoS like it was still Fantasy. It's not the same game that it used to be. If you try to force it to be that, you're not going to have fun.

40k as it is now allows for tons of unique and awesome interactions with allies and formations and unique detachments. Give it a go, start with "small" 1500 point games, and let each other bring some of the new "broken, no fun, won't play!" stuff - you might be surprised!

How do you enforce the new ways of playing when half of the people are having pre decurion dex and the others post decurion. And the ally idea is stupid the way it is right now. iT may have been fun if iit add a little new stuff to an already existing lists that worked. But it doesn't work like that. Some armies can play solo, like an eldar player can play an eldar army. While an IG army should actualy play wyverns with main army being something else and knights, because IG have no way to deal with LoW or other knights. In fact after some time the IG player starts to notice that the IG part of his list only hinders him in winning.

Also is 1500 small?

40k has always been in a state of "codex creep" even before pre/post decurion, with certain armies being "haves" and others "have nots". I'm sure for casual games you can figure out your own balancing factors. For tournaments though, well, you shouldn't try to artificially enforce balance. Players that play well, or even just "bought the winning list" should still be rewarded - but you also have painting awards, and sportsmanship awards, and best overall! If half the players are uber and the other not, then chances are at a tournament, if you lose your first game, you (at most) will only have 25% of the bottom half bracket in the second round be ubers, and only (at most) 12.5% in the third round. In other words, the players with more balanced armies will tend to fight each other, and that's a good thing!

As for 1500, no it's not small, but I find older player with big collects try to shoot for playing as big games as they can. I've found that making sure you don't just go big fast is a good way to keep the game fresh. There's been a real resurgence of Combat Patrol in my area recently, as people realize that smaller games are just as interesting, if not sometimes more so, than smaller games!

Try harder.
I TO very sucessful events once a month that are as competative as we can get in my area. Generally turn out about 17 or 18 people. We follow ITC and have maybe 1 or 2 stumper questions. Everything else is in the rules and covered by ITC. TO DATE a netlist has never won an event. Ive held maybe 25 - 30 events so far. Adamantine lance got stomped, FSE with TE allies got stomped. Out top winners are homebrew space marines and homebrew blood angels. We have people in the meta who are skilled and actually put work and time into getting a tourny victory.

I feel we are missing the big picture as a consumer. 40K is overloaded with overtly convoluted rules that you have to pay for. Codices with broken units and formations that you have to pay for. Not to mention an ever shortening life span. AOS is free rules and free war scrolls. GW is a terrible rule writing company but have the best fluff , models and artwork . So use them as a loose framework and make the game that you and people in your area enjoy.

 jasper76 wrote:
@Vakathi, when LOTR was popular, GW printed a whole bunch of books with IMO excellent campaignss and scenarios, some of which included pre-set army lists. I didn't think I would like this at first (not making my own army list), but most of those lists were very well balanced for the scenario and victory conditions. I had great fun running through alot of those scenarios, and Id like it if they started putting together some similar stuff for 40k.

Yeah, that would be great (in theory, if designed well) but is unfortunately diametrically opposed to GW's current paradigm of "take anything and everything from everywhere at any time!"

die toten hosen wrote:
Try harder.
I TO very sucessful events once a month that are as competative as we can get in my area. Generally turn out about 17 or 18 people. We follow ITC and have maybe 1 or 2 stumper questions. Everything else is in the rules and covered by ITC. TO DATE a netlist has never won an event. Ive held maybe 25 - 30 events so far. Adamantine lance got stomped, FSE with TE allies got stomped. Out top winners are homebrew space marines and homebrew blood angels. We have people in the meta who are skilled and actually put work and time into getting a tourny victory.

A lot of issues with the lists you're talking about aren't so much that they're going to be unbeatable for everyone, but that they're unbeatable for large numbers of opponents, and resulting in lots of games that just aren't fun.Sure, an Adamantine Lance may not win an event, but the games it does win are likely one-sided curbstomps that nobody wants to spend 2 hours rolling dice for, and present such an effective hardcounter for many armies that they've got no chance of winning either. That's a really terrible play experience for many, and only "balances" on a very high scale "meta" level, not in terms of a typical game.

Also, you're talking about using a set of community developed house-rules which radically change many core rules and victory conditions that results in radically different games from "pickup" play using just the straight core ruleset.

WoW, it's almost like net lists are specifically designed to win with as little effort as possible or something? weird right?

1: Summoning is only as broken as the number of models you have, and when used within moderation, very fluffy
2: 2+ rerollable will fail eventually, yeah its a cheese move, but it's no garentee of victory. work around the often 1 normal speed model.
3: Allies is fine, untill someone abuses it. Guard + space marines makes perfect sense, chaos + daemons, Eldar + dark eldar are all fluffy and good for the game
4: doesn't take long untill people start spamming psykers

I hate to repeat myself, but it sounds like people abusing game mechanics *gasp* break the game.

I hope that 40k never goes AoS. I've tried around 10 games of AoS and I don't like it. Yeah, free rules are nice, but the rules are too loose, and at quite a few points, plain stupid.

Been mostly just playing exclusively with Friends now. It has made the game a lot more fun since no one really list tailors or WAAC, its mostly been... well, Forging a Narrative and running fun scenarios we create or fluff lists we always want to play.