Unit1126PLL wrote:I did mention in my post it may be impractical, but it's not impossible. As for "you can't reach the table" - I've played on a 12x8 before, and we managed. It's possible, trust me.
It might be possible, but it's a pain in the ass to deal with and has a much higher chance of broken models because you bumped someone's flyer while reaching across the table or whatever. And it almost certainly means acknowledging that you aren't going to be measuring with anything resembling accuracy, as it's very difficult to do so while leaning over 4' of table and reaching down between terrain pieces. There's a reason why even Apocalpyse games limit the table size and use non-rectangular tables to keep reaching distances to a minimum, along with minimizing terrain to keep the clutter out of the way. Trying to play a heavy-terrain
40k game on a 12x8 table would be a nightmare.
"Recommends" is not the same thing as "rules." GW recommends it precisely for the reasons you do, i.e. practicality. It's not a "rule" anymore than "3 detachments max in Matched Play" is a rule; it's a recommendation. The 40k rules (you know, the bits that aren't recommendations) actually function fine for a wargame, if players actually want to play a wargame and make the necessary spatial and temporal accommodations.
No, it isn't the same as a rule, but it does tell us what
GW considers "standard
40k" to be. At minimum you're having to deviate from the standard game and play a variant, even if it isn't a variant that is explicitly forbidden by the rules. It's just like how, if someone came up with a game-breaking tournament list with 15 detachments, we'd place most of the blame on the event for not following the 3-detachment guidelines and very little of the blame on
GW for failing to catch a balance issue in a weird variant game that they recommended against playing.
Vehicles are explicitly forbidden from moving through buildings/ruined walls, where no such restriction exists for woods in the rules.
Wrong. The prohibition is on moving through
terrain features, walls are merely mentioned as one example of a terrain feature. If the gaps between trees are not sufficiently large for the vehicle to fit between trees at all points along its route then the woods are impassible terrain for it, and most forest terrain pieces do not have large enough gaps.
As for "ruins/barricades don't hide anything" - sure, whatever man. That's not rules though, that's shoddy terrain. They can hide things, and the rules handle situations for hiding things, and in fact mandate that things not be hidden in order to be shot at. So... make better terrain? You don't have to change the rules to make this work. You just have to try and put a bit of effort into your fun.
Sorry, but a "barricade" that is 6" tall is not a barricade by any conventional understanding of the word (and anything shorter than that will not hide a vehicle). And the "shoddy terrain" you're talking about is the standard terrain kits that
GW sells for
40k. Do you not see a problem with
GW selling
40k terrain that can't be used for
40k and the game being designed around the expectation that players will make their own terrain out of solid boxes?
The problem here is not the terrain, it's the use of
TLOS and allowing any part of a model to count for
LOS such that 1mm of the tip of a hair-thin antenna poking out above the level of a terrain feature is enough to shoot at a vehicle as if the terrain wasn't there at all (and for the vehicle to shoot back as if the terrain wasn't there at all).
As for whether or not what GW sells/what other companies sell and if it blocks LOS or not: that's not rules, man. I don't know why you keep conflating "the way people play 40k" with "the 40k rules" because they're not the same. The rules function fine as wargame rules, but factors unrelated to the rules turn it into the CCG-like experience you're having. Those factors can be easily changed without changing/violating the written rules (not that you, apparently, can distinguish, but that's okay, I don't expect you to actually put in the effort to understand my point).
Of course it's the rules, FFS. It's that the rules for
LOS and cover are idiotic even compared to previous versions of
40k, and can't handle the typical wargaming terrain players use (including the terrain sold by
GW for use in
40k). And it's not like this is a very complicated problem to solve. Even rules as simple as "
LOS can not be drawn through windows/cracks/doors/etc in the walls of a ruin" and "models obscured by terrain get a cover bonus even if their base isn't within the terrain feature" would be a huge improvement and make terrain into a much more significant factor.
