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 Lance845 wrote:
You are welcome to your opinion.

But 40k the game does not do a good job of making you feel like you are experiencing the lore of 40k. It does a good job of playing long, drawn out, slogs in which players take turns swinging a massive club that is their entire army at each other while the other person looks at their phone until they have to roll ineffectual overwatch or make some armor saves.

I have never seen someone be fully engrossed in the game by turn 3 when it's not their turn. Especially during the movement phase. The game is designed to go for 2 or 3 more turns AFTER that point. That doesn't sound epic, or like the exciting stories, or like anything most people would want to dedicate many hours of their day doing. As big as 40k is it's still a tiny niche hobby mostly because of how inaccessible and bad of an experience it is for the larger population.

My experience of 40k is different. I viscerally enjoy the game and I've tried to put some thought into why I jones for it. I find it difficult to record a game, particularly past turn 2 or so because by that point I'm pretty invested in the action.

40k has been tailored to MAKE THINGS HAPPEN!!!1!11! It's paced like a summer action movie, not an English drama.

Bolt Action purports to be 1/56 scale, but it clearly is not. The basic infantryman carries a rifle with an effective range of at least 300m - just under 1,000 feet, which scales to over 17 feet on the tabletop. SMGs are accurate out to 50 meters, which would still translate into about 36" on the tabletop. It is not possible to suspend disbelief when the ground scale is so far off from the model scale, which makes it a very poor WW2 game precisely because the simulation gets so much wrong.

Frankly I do not see anything alluding to realism or simulation in this marketing pitch.

40K in my opinion, is made to sell a massive collection of models, how ridiculous they die and how unfaithful their battlefield behaviour is to the lore is irrelevant as far as the system goes.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
Frankly I do not see anything alluding to realism or simulation in this marketing pitch.

40K in my opinion, is made to sell a massive collection of models, how ridiculous they die and how unfaithful their battlefield behaviour is to the lore is irrelevant as far as the system goes.

Dude, if they specifically say that their game intends to put you right in an actual, real-world battle that happened, then that is a simulation pitch. They went out of their way to specify Blitzkrieg, North Africa, D-Day and the Russian Front. OTOH, if they had said "Play games of make-believe battles that have absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened in World War 2, aside from the ghoulish skin that we've draped over an aging husk of 40k", then you would be correct.

As for how 40k behaves, it's more accurate to the game universe than Bolt Action is to the real world.

This does not mean they intent to take you into a simulation of the actual battles.

"Heroes of Normandy" and "memoir 44" can claim the exact same line and they are neither close to simulation of reality.

They give you the armies in these battles the rules to play these battles and the models to represent the troops for these battles, maybe even scenarios for specific battles, they can be true to their word without ever touching the simulation of reality scenario.

Now if they had wrote something along the line of "making you experience the full experience of WW2 combat in unparalleled realism", yeah I would call them on everything unrealistic they have in the system.

Yeah I can only talk about 40k and how my friends and I experience it really. Whether or not everyone else experiences it the same way is up to the individual. I was just pointing out some pretty clear differences between 40k and other systems that may account for its continued popularity and dominance in the tabletop scene.

"Gameplay is king" is a good mantra to go with when designing games (a play on Pixar's classic "story is king" mantra) but it's certainly not the only factor in making a successful product. I think this is especially apparent when we come back to the subject of this topic, which is designing for bad players, or rather how to get mechanically "bad" players to like your game.

In a game like 40k, lots of people just want to have a good time and play with toy soldiers and roll some dice. They're not playing ultra optimized competitive lists and could probably care less about whether or not it's balanced or even whether or not they win. They'd be as invested in winning a game of 40k as they'd be invested in winning a game of Monopoly or something. It's more about the unique experience of immersing yourself in the setting with a bunch of sweet physical models and getting to watch some of their fluff play out on the tabletop.

Game design is certainly a huge, huge aspect of it, but like most of you I don't think the game on it's own is anything close to approaching a tightly thought-out, nuanced system. But with a tabletop game you have many other tools available to you to get people engaged and 40k is certainly an example of one that plays to the strengths of the format.

If you took everything out of 40k and reduced it to just the handful of units/models/gameplay interactions that exist in the current iteration of the competitive meta, it would probably be a complete failure of a product. Lucky for GW shareholders, they have a lot more to offer to their audience than just "competitive 40k".


Automatically Appended Next Post:
One more thought on the mechanical design of a game: designing for balance and accessibility is generally always going to be a high priority, but it's not always necessarily the ultimate goal.

When you have access to the quality of IP source material that GW has (not to mention their super talented team of writers and artists), designing mechanics that best leverage that IP probably actually supersedes designing mechanics that produce deep gameplay. You can engage a "bad" player by giving them other ways to be "good", such as being a good painter or being someone who's great at making awesome themed armies or someone who gets really creative with conversions or even making terrain. Even if they suck at the competitive side of the game, you can still design in different vectors for them to engage and be creative and "succeed" in their own ways. Consider that 40k is a game where painting/modeling-focused gamers can engage with narrative gamers and can engage with competitive gamers all under one ruleset.

It doesn't have to be a game designed exclusively for Spikes. For mass appeal you want to make sure your Timmys and Johnnys also have something substantial to engage with.

Source on the terms:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2002-03-08

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
This does not mean they intent to take you into a simulation of the actual battles.

"Heroes of Normandy" and "memoir 44" can claim the exact same line and they are neither close to simulation of reality.

They give you the armies in these battles the rules to play these battles and the models to represent the troops for these battles, maybe even scenarios for specific battles, they can be true to their word without ever touching the simulation of reality scenario.

Now if they had wrote something along the line of "making you experience the full experience of WW2 combat in unparalleled realism", yeah I would call them on everything unrealistic they have in the system.

Actually, that is *exactly* what it means in plain English (I understand that your English is marginal, but far better than my Greek).

I have not played "Heroes of Normandy", so I cannot comment on that, but I have played Memoir '44 extensively, and it is easily the best WW2 simulation game of the lot. M'44 is at a higher level of abstraction where range is not unreasonably scaled, command is fairly sensible, and strategy works. M'44 is far superior to Flames of War, to say nothing of the nonsense garbage that is Bolt Action. M'44 has a number of WW2 scenarios tied to actual WW2 battles, and they play pretty true to what one might expect, being well-balanced and full of tension.

It seems that you don't have a clear understanding of what "realistic" and "simulation" actually mean. Realistic means that the game has features and rules that tie to reality, something that M'44 does far better than BA. M'44 is also a better simulation than BA because strategy and tactics matter, along with the psychology of command - something that Warhammerish games just don't get. When a game that purports to be a WW2 game fails some very basic checks tied to the reality that it's supposed to represent, it's a bad game, simple as that.

Thanks, I do not feel my English is marginal though, but I can agree that they need improving in everyday conversations, something I work on.

For me at no point in the marketing speech you quoted, they claim the words simulation, or realistic, or imply the game delivers anything true to life, I feel there is some bias when you read this quote, putting more in a game system you already feel is already bad.

As I said above they claim they put you in command of the most brutal and famous battles of WW2, they do not claim they do that in a realistic way, or a simulation way.

I can understand the expectation that since it is a historical setting it must be as close to reality as to can be, but to be honest it is not a requirement, if it conveys the feel well for the majority of consumers then it is fine.

I can understand your comments and your disengagement such mechanics give you given your expectations, but for me at least they never claimed to be a game simulating reality just a game that puts yo in WW2 and for most people it does just that.

Now for the realistic and simulation debate, I understand English is a language were a word can mean several things, but in wargames, I feel and I can be wrong,that particularly in wargaming, we use realistic for game systems that feel real and simulation for game systems that try to portray reality as accurate as it can be.

In that assumption bolt action can be realistic in the general sense but not a simulation, likewise Memoir 44 is quite realistic but I would not call them a simulation.

To end up positively something we both agree, Memoir 44 is indeed a far superior system to bolt action.

I would say try and watch some heroes of Normandy gameplay it has many good design ideas in it, nothing ground breaking, but many things nicely connected in an interesting system.

OK, that's fair. I might look in to HoN, although I'm sufficiently well-satisfied with M'44 that I'm not actually hungry for another WW2 game. We were actually very hopeful for FoW, but that just didn't work out.

 Lance845 wrote:
You are welcome to your opinion.

But 40k the game does not do a good job of making you feel like you are experiencing the lore of 40k. It does a good job of playing long, drawn out, slogs in which players take turns swinging a massive club that is their entire army at each other while the other person looks at their phone until they have to roll ineffectual overwatch or make some armor saves.

I have never seen someone be fully engrossed in the game by turn 3 when it's not their turn. Especially during the movement phase. The game is designed to go for 2 or 3 more turns AFTER that point. That doesn't sound epic, or like the exciting stories, or like anything most people would want to dedicate many hours of their day doing. As big as 40k is it's still a tiny niche hobby mostly because of how inaccessible and bad of an experience it is for the larger population.

So extremely true.
I'll stick to Bolt Action and Black Powder if I want something fun and engaging.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
OK, that's fair. I might look in to HoN, although I'm sufficiently well-satisfied with M'44 that I'm not actually hungry for another WW2 game. We were actually very hopeful for FoW, but that just didn't work out.

I suggest you look into HoN from a design perspective, it is definitely more "gamie" than Memoir 44 but I do feel the overall game system has many good ideas and interactions to study as a designer.

I agree on the "Hook" element that we were talking about. However, the nature of the "Hook" is the trick and can be very different from game to game.

The Hook can be the setting, the rules, the models, the battlefield interactions etc. This is a great topic on its own, but let's look at some "popular" mini lines and see if we can find the "Hook"?

In board games it's easier to find the hook because the game is usually built around it. Miniature games are harder because there's more genre expectations, and the product being sold tends to have more distance from the rules.