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 thunderingjove wrote:
Once again, I think it's a style question. GW is going for a more conversational, or literary style...

...which is not well suited to rules for a complex game system.

And so the end result is a flawed game system.

What we have is a divided community; one faction are yelling there is a turd in the pool, another faction trying to polish it, and the final faction is yelling it is a delicious candy bar we should all take a bite!

 Crimson Devil wrote:
What we have is a divided community; one faction are yelling there is a turd in the pool, another faction trying to polish it, and the final faction is yelling it is a delicious candy bar we should all take a bite!

You forget the people who saw the turd in the pool, left frustrated, and occasionally move back over to the pool to yell at the people who are still in the pool just because they like being angry.

Exalted nonetheless.

spaztacus wrote:
The more I look around here at dakkadakka and talk to gaming friends, the more I've some to this conclusion:

The problem with GW rules (40k mostly) is not the rule writers per se....it's people and their inability to use common sense, the English language and their idea that if I think the rule sucks, I'm going to interpret it the correct way.

-Summoning demons as a SM. Of course you can. Conjuring a unit could not be " deployed" because it would not exist at first. And if GW didn't want everyone being able to summon demons, then they would not have made it a primaris power, nor would they have given non-chaos armies the ability to take the powers in question.

-grav weapons follow the standard flow of vehicle damage. It always causes a Hull Point lost and immobilized, which can also cause another Hull Point loss given the correct circumstances.

These just seem to be the biggest 2 going on right now. People need to use common sense, the English language and also realize its a game that supposed to be fun, not rule lawyered to death

This is exactly what I thought you'd be saying based off of the title.

In my group we sat down and listed all the things that we felt were missing, the things that the rulebook didn't cover and the things we felt were clearly broken this weekend.

Then we made a whole pile of house rules to fix it.
So yeah, we can do that. But really why should we have to?
We're not downloading some Fan-made PDF here. We're paying a premium for what by rights should be a finished product.

In legal terms we call this "blaming the victim."

 thunderingjove wrote:

dresnar1 wrote:
"The English Language did it!", WTF?? It has nothing to do with the English language and everything to do with then ineptitude of the rules department headed by Jervis Jhonson.

Once again, I think it's a style question. GW is going for a more conversational, or literary style, but we as gamers would be better served had they chosen a more technical style. It's the difference between a treatise by Decartes, and a Cartesian essay by Spinoza.

This. GW would rather their rules were readable by the general public, than utterly precise. I see a lot of fan-dexes and fan-made rules that are written to be 100% water-tight...and they're god-damn unreadable. I will happily sacrifice a little clarity for a lot of readability, even if I understand why people would rather have more unambiguous rules.

KommissarKarl wrote:

 thunderingjove wrote:

dresnar1 wrote:
"The English Language did it!", WTF?? It has nothing to do with the English language and everything to do with then ineptitude of the rules department headed by Jervis Jhonson.

Once again, I think it's a style question. GW is going for a more conversational, or literary style, but we as gamers would be better served had they chosen a more technical style. It's the difference between a treatise by Decartes, and a Cartesian essay by Spinoza.

This. GW would rather their rules were readable by the general public, than utterly precise. I see a lot of fan-dexes and fan-made rules that are written to be 100% water-tight...and they're god-damn unreadable. I will happily sacrifice a little clarity for a lot of readability, even if I understand why people would rather have more unambiguous rules.

So the standard to which you hold up GW's rule writing is not other professional game companies, but amateur fan-made rules? That right there says it all about both GW's rules and their current supporters...

PhantomViper wrote:

KommissarKarl wrote:

 thunderingjove wrote:

dresnar1 wrote:
"The English Language did it!", WTF?? It has nothing to do with the English language and everything to do with then ineptitude of the rules department headed by Jervis Jhonson.

Once again, I think it's a style question. GW is going for a more conversational, or literary style, but we as gamers would be better served had they chosen a more technical style. It's the difference between a treatise by Decartes, and a Cartesian essay by Spinoza.

This. GW would rather their rules were readable by the general public, than utterly precise. I see a lot of fan-dexes and fan-made rules that are written to be 100% water-tight...and they're god-damn unreadable. I will happily sacrifice a little clarity for a lot of readability, even if I understand why people would rather have more unambiguous rules.

So the standard to which you hold up GW's rule writing is not other professional game companies, but amateur fan-made rules? That right there says it all about both GW's rules and their current supporters...

That's not what I said at all. You can compare GW's rules to other companies if you like, so long as those other rulesets are written for a game of the same scale as 40k, with the same level of diversity in weapons and armour, with a similar number of races (each with a large amount of diversity within them), with a psychic phase and a huge amount of special rules that reflect the background and lore.

KommissarKarl wrote:
That's not what I said at all. You can compare GW's rules to other companies if you like, so long as those other rulesets are written for a game of the same scale as 40k, with the same level of diversity in weapons and armour, with a similar number of races (each with a large amount of diversity within them), with a psychic phase and a huge amount of special rules that reflect the background and lore.

You could also make a point that if your writers are incapable of writing clear, concise rules for the system that you want to make, then maybe you should either scale down your goal, or find better writers...

Whether or not anyone else is doing it has no impact on whether or not GW's effort is a good one.

KommissarKarl wrote:
This. GW would rather their rules were readable by the general public, than utterly precise. I see a lot of fan-dexes and fan-made rules that are written to be 100% water-tight...and they're god-damn unreadable. I will happily sacrifice a little clarity for a lot of readability, even if I understand why people would rather have more unambiguous rules.

Clarity and readability are not mutually exclusive concept.

Consider this:

"The number of psychic powers a Psyker can use each turn depends on his Mastery Level."

compared to this:

"A Psyker can cast X psychic powers per turn, where X equals his Mastery Level."


What does the first mean? Twice the amount of psychic powers as his ML? The same? Half, rounding up? The sentence does not specify, and is not invalidated by any of the interpretations.

Obviously, reasonable people can agree that it means a ML3 psyker can cast 3 powers, etc, but some times shoddy rules writing can be interpreted in different ways by equally reasonable people. Take for instance the issues of cover saves for vehicles and its interaction with the Ignores Cover USR, and Graviton weapons vs. saves on vehicles in 6th edition.

KommissarKarl wrote:

PhantomViper wrote:

KommissarKarl wrote:

 thunderingjove wrote:

dresnar1 wrote:
"The English Language did it!", WTF?? It has nothing to do with the English language and everything to do with then ineptitude of the rules department headed by Jervis Jhonson.

Once again, I think it's a style question. GW is going for a more conversational, or literary style, but we as gamers would be better served had they chosen a more technical style. It's the difference between a treatise by Decartes, and a Cartesian essay by Spinoza.

This. GW would rather their rules were readable by the general public, than utterly precise. I see a lot of fan-dexes and fan-made rules that are written to be 100% water-tight...and they're god-damn unreadable. I will happily sacrifice a little clarity for a lot of readability, even if I understand why people would rather have more unambiguous rules.

So the standard to which you hold up GW's rule writing is not other professional game companies, but amateur fan-made rules? That right there says it all about both GW's rules and their current supporters...

That's not what I said at all. You can compare GW's rules to other companies if you like, so long as those other rulesets are written for a game of the same scale as 40k, with the same level of diversity in weapons and armour, with a similar number of races (each with a large amount of diversity within them), with a psychic phase and a huge amount of special rules that reflect the background and lore.

Then I will direct you to MtG or WMH, because both of those games fill those requisites and both have rule sets that infinitely clearer than anything GW has ever written.

PhantomViper wrote:

KommissarKarl wrote:

PhantomViper wrote:

KommissarKarl wrote:

 thunderingjove wrote:

dresnar1 wrote:
"The English Language did it!", WTF?? It has nothing to do with the English language and everything to do with then ineptitude of the rules department headed by Jervis Jhonson.

Once again, I think it's a style question. GW is going for a more conversational, or literary style, but we as gamers would be better served had they chosen a more technical style. It's the difference between a treatise by Decartes, and a Cartesian essay by Spinoza.

This. GW would rather their rules were readable by the general public, than utterly precise. I see a lot of fan-dexes and fan-made rules that are written to be 100% water-tight...and they're god-damn unreadable. I will happily sacrifice a little clarity for a lot of readability, even if I understand why people would rather have more unambiguous rules.

So the standard to which you hold up GW's rule writing is not other professional game companies, but amateur fan-made rules? That right there says it all about both GW's rules and their current supporters...

That's not what I said at all. You can compare GW's rules to other companies if you like, so long as those other rulesets are written for a game of the same scale as 40k, with the same level of diversity in weapons and armour, with a similar number of races (each with a large amount of diversity within them), with a psychic phase and a huge amount of special rules that reflect the background and lore.

Then I will direct you to MtG or WMH, because both of those games fill those requisites and both have rule sets that infinitely clearer than anything GW has ever written.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with PhantomViper. WM/H has 12 unique factions (considering the games are usually played together/against each other), of which each has a significant number of units- at the very least equivalent to 40k factions.

GW has 17 factions listed for 40k, 5 of which are variants of Space Marines, another which is a lesser version of Imperial Guard (Codex:MT), another which is a faction of 2 units (Codex: Imperial Knights), and the rest are unique. Of unique factions then, there are 12 (still including the Knights).

spaztacus wrote:
-Summoning demons as a SM. Of course you can. Conjuring a unit could not be " deployed" because it would not exist at first. And if GW didn't want everyone being able to summon demons, then they would not have made it a primaris power, nor would they have given non-chaos armies the ability to take the powers in question.

-grav weapons follow the standard flow of vehicle damage. It always causes a Hull Point lost and immobilized, which can also cause another Hull Point loss given the correct circumstances.

Not sure why these issues would be major issues:

1) fluff wise any SM army who was turning towards chaos could summon deamons, may be they just finally snapped and said screw the empereor.. If you dont want to summon them then don't, why some people can't accept this is beyond me.

2) Grav weapons really people are worried about grav weapons?


The real issue to me is the run away psychic phase and deamon factory.

In reality is not a big deal at FLGS a gentelman agreement and house rules are about to be accepted by the owners. I'm just not going to be anywhere near a compettive tourney.

I'll tell you what the problem is. Terrorists and Commies. They are ruining everything.

 Ailaros wrote:

If somebody doesn't like something because they expected more, that's only a reflection on the person with the expectations, nothing else.

Really? If I expect my hard drive to not catch on fire and delete all my files, and it does just that, it's my fault because my expectations are wrong?

If my company writes an app and users download it expecting it to work and not just crash as soon as they start it, and it doesn't, that's on the users, not me?

If I expect my gmail account to keep my data password protected, and Google puts all my information on a publicly shared website, that's my fault for expecting too much?

Of course not, that's ridiculous. You can state that our expectations are high, certainly, and even argue if that's justified. But to say anyone who is disappointed is always in the wrong is BS. There's a whole concept out there for people who produce products called expectations management, and GW doesn't engage in any of it because they don't engage their customers, particularly when it comes to rules. That's the crux of the problem almost all of us have; quit trying to make it sound like we're the ones who are wrong when we get nothing but crickets from Games Workshop to address our concerns, and every other company on the planet actively uses social media and other outlets to engage their customer base and improve their offerings.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Murdius Maximus wrote:
I'll tell you what the problem is. Terrorists and Commies. They are ruining everything.

DAD?!

I don't want my games to start with a discussion about how much of the rulebook we are going to ignore or change.
I don't want to spend £50 on a new rulebook and then mentally cross out or reword entire sections.
I don't want to bring an army to the table, only for my opponent to throw a tantrum because my list of necessary houserules and limitations on army construction, doesn't match theirs.
I don't want to feel guilty for building an army on themes I like because it has components that are grossly unfair to fight against.
I don't want to have 'glitches' in the rules that have no specified resolution and so games will have different outcomes based on whose interpretation wins a 4+ roll.

I want to Forge a Narrative, but I want that narrative to be based on my decisions as a general and the actions that occur in-game, rather than as a result of self-policing and 'gentlemens agreements' that neither player is actually going to use the rulebook as it is written.

The game is now in its 7th Edition and we still have problems like driving vehicles sideways, pivoting for extra movement or specialised lists being massively superior to the jack-of-all-trades armies.
People keep arguing against it as though clear rules and fun games are mutually exclusive. They are not; balance benefits everyone and even the most casual player can appreciate having all the units of an entire codex on equal footing. Fun is not a result of imbalanced mess, it comes as a result of circumstance, breaking the odds and rules that are as inventive as they are evocative.

You can have both flavour and balance, if you take the time to write proper rules. That GW has yet to achieve this, or even come close to it, after so many years is not a sign of strength, nor is it something to envy. It is purely that the background is strong enough to sweep the rules under the rug, but there is no reason not to have both.

The problem that I have with the rules is that there are so damn many of them. Nothing is easy. I dunno if that is the root issue of everything, but it would seem to me that the game just has too many rules. I don't excuse GW for writing like crap, and I certainly don't excuse what is very certainly a lack of testing. A game with this many rules needs to be paid better attention to by the people making it. I honestly feel that if GW lurked in the forums a little more, they would have a much better idea of what's what.

That being said, I do think that we tend to Rules Lawyer a bit extensively on some things. In a tournament, I totally get that. I can totally see how pivoting can be a game changing situation. I can totally see how sweeping a unit that contains a character with EL (Necrons) can change the game in a big way. But if I am kicking back and gaming with my friend, I really could give a rats ass about some of this stuff, because frankly, our games tend to take about 3 hours or more, so what's the point of extending that game by arguing. And I have truthfully seen or run into very few situations that we couldn't solve by just flipping to a page in the book and just coming to agreement right there if there is an issue. Using plastic dudes to pretend shoot other plastic dudes while acting like a savage while drinking=fun. Arguing about rules=NOT fun.

Besides, if I'm going to pay $82.50 for a PLASTIC FRAKKIN MODEL I expect that the rules for the game it belongs to to be very well done and clearly written. They have made their money back ten fold for the molds, now dump that cash into some serious rules R&D.