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 techsoldaten wrote:

Darsath wrote:
I think it's important not to conflate financial success with critical success. Really, as far as Games Workshop as a company is concerned, financial success is their priority. As a consumer, we are concerned about the critical success (i.e. the actual quality of the product irrespective of sales).

Gonna conflate here. Critical success for a board game means people buy it. We lost a lot of game companies last year with really good, well-thought out rules, and now players are left with dead games.

You can't grow an apple tree in the arctic. Consumers are your ultimate critics and a ruleset without a business model is a really bad thing.

Honestly, out of everything that's happened with 8th edition, Chapter Approved and the FAQs are the best thing GW has done. Can't tell you how many people I've seen leave the game because of a static, inflexible ruleset that consigns your favorite army to victim status for years.

Going a little further, when 7th edition dropped, a lot of my friends boycotted the game and sold their armies. The logic was, we just paid for 6th, 7th is nothing more than a money grab that does nothing to improve the game.

The perception that the system will improve is more important than actually improving it. The perception the things you spend money on will have value a year from now is really important.

For what it's worth, there wasn't a terrible amount of changes from 6th to 7th. In fact there was so many similarities most people missed you were only allowed to use ONE grenade in the assault phase as a key change.

ERJAK wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 Wolf_in_Human_Shape wrote:

Stux wrote:

People simply don't realise how complex this stuff is, that's all there is to it. Everyone considers themselves an expert, but 90% of their ideas would just make things worse.

A near-universal truism for dakka.

90% is an underestimate.

Dakka is the gladiatorial arena for bad ideas. The winner is rewarded with disappointment as GW ignores whatever point you labored to make.

The doors to this arena are guarded by Creberus, the twin-headed beast of idleness. With one mouth, he makes you think complaining will lead to something, when the most it will achieve is a proper squatting. With the other, he breathes the breath of false hope, making you think the others here are reasonable people capable of rational discussion.

His job is to keep you away from the exit and focused on the endless stream of threads spouting from the pits of gibberish surrounding the arena. He serves his masters, the MODS, who perform the Rites of Red Letters to give everyone the impression the forum is a fair and decent place to spend time.

It's not. There's nothing of value here. No one has a good idea. The best you can hope for is to see a nice paint job on a model. In a sea of bad ideas, speaking just means you drown faster.

My eyes don't go high enough for how hard I want to roll them right now.

Yeah, the armchair game devs on dakka are routinely terrible and I could say you could bump that percentage up to 95% but there are some solid ideas in every forum. Sure the complicated, goofy, 'let's bring it back to second edition plus infinity plus Counterstrike plus backgammon' ideas that people run with are asinine 100% of the time. But ideas like 'space marine tacticals are too expensive, they should lower them a point or two and see if that makes them more viable' and 'GK are overcosted for what they do an should probably see 5-15% drops depending on how conservative GW goes' and 'the cover system could use some more development, but let's avoid doing -to hit because we've seen the problems with stacking that bonus before' come up a lot and are fine. No need to go all 'freshman drama club kid' about it.

'Freshman drama club kid' really hurt my feelings. Your insults are simultaneously insightful and revealing, you captured the essence of the my comment by dismissing it. Really good job.

GW just gave a presentation where they said they ignore forum comments. That means 100% of the crap people kick around on Dakka is meaningless except for the pretty pictures. Who cares how you categorize and sort white noise?

7th was really just a DLC adding a Pskyer Phase, and a quick FAQ/errata of the core rules. Not a big change at all.

That said:
"most people missed you were only allowed to use ONE grenade in the assault phase as a key change."
It wasn't that people missed the change - it's that some people took the verb "throw" as to mean ranged and not CC.

Bharring wrote:
7th was really just a DLC adding a Pskyer Phase, and a quick FAQ/errata of the core rules. Not a big change at all.

That said:
"most people missed you were only allowed to use ONE grenade in the assault phase as a key change."
It wasn't that people missed the change - it's that some people took the verb "throw" as to mean ranged and not CC.

Not to mention the ugliest of core rules purchases. That three book set for $80 US? Gross.

 techsoldaten wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 Wolf_in_Human_Shape wrote:

Stux wrote:

People simply don't realise how complex this stuff is, that's all there is to it. Everyone considers themselves an expert, but 90% of their ideas would just make things worse.

A near-universal truism for dakka.

90% is an underestimate.

Dakka is the gladiatorial arena for bad ideas. The winner is rewarded with disappointment as GW ignores whatever point you labored to make.

The doors to this arena are guarded by Creberus, the twin-headed beast of idleness. With one mouth, he makes you think complaining will lead to something, when the most it will achieve is a proper squatting. With the other, he breathes the breath of false hope, making you think the others here are reasonable people capable of rational discussion.

His job is to keep you away from the exit and focused on the endless stream of threads spouting from the pits of gibberish surrounding the arena. He serves his masters, the MODS, who perform the Rites of Red Letters to give everyone the impression the forum is a fair and decent place to spend time.

It's not. There's nothing of value here. No one has a good idea. The best you can hope for is to see a nice paint job on a model. In a sea of bad ideas, speaking just means you drown faster.

My eyes don't go high enough for how hard I want to roll them right now.

Yeah, the armchair game devs on dakka are routinely terrible and I could say you could bump that percentage up to 95% but there are some solid ideas in every forum. Sure the complicated, goofy, 'let's bring it back to second edition plus infinity plus Counterstrike plus backgammon' ideas that people run with are asinine 100% of the time. But ideas like 'space marine tacticals are too expensive, they should lower them a point or two and see if that makes them more viable' and 'GK are overcosted for what they do an should probably see 5-15% drops depending on how conservative GW goes' and 'the cover system could use some more development, but let's avoid doing -to hit because we've seen the problems with stacking that bonus before' come up a lot and are fine. No need to go all 'freshman drama club kid' about it.

'Freshman drama club kid' really hurt my feelings. Your insults are simultaneously insightful and revealing, you captured the essence of the my comment by dismissing it. Really good job.

GW just gave a presentation where they said they ignore forum comments. That means 100% of the crap people kick around on Dakka is meaningless except for the pretty pictures. Who cares how you categorize and sort white noise?

Uh, actually, what I read was kinda the opposite. They do try to pay attention to it, there's just so much all over the place it's hard for them to do so.

I really hope GW doesn’t pay attention here. There are posters here who think having an assault phase is a bad idea.

I've seen some really awful suggestions on this forum.

The real issue with GW is that they believe that most people are playing 40k on their dining room table. Like that somehow absolves them from having a balanced game, or units that are blatantly too strong/weak.

It was discouraging to read that specific piece of the commentary. Meet the new GW, same as the old GW. Focus on making a balanced game. For once.

Where is this commentary? I'd like to see it, I don't recall that being said in a long time. However, I agree. GW seems to balance for the average player who doesn't go to tournaments, enjoys adding rules and things to their game or talking to their opponent about "Hey how about if we did X" and having their opponent say "Sure, that sounds great!" instead of the people who want everything to be perfectly balanced as possible and want to min/max their armies to the nines and pick only the most optimal choices all the time ever. Which don't get me wrong, I think the former is way better than the latter, but there's that place towards the middle of the spectrum where both people would be reasonably happy (as you can't please everyone, after all) that continually gets missed.

Honestly, I think the issue is the game is too bloated and they keep adding lots of options and things which just bloats it further. I don't think it CAN be balanced at this point. There's too many "special snowflake" rules and too many options added to an army to sell a new model, not even getting into them allowing you to default to the Index so you can keep using your 20 year old models.

That's the biggest issue. Even if GW designers WERE competent (at least they're trying now) and wanted to balance it, the game has way too many options and units to even begin to try and balance it now. And they are going full speed ahead adding more and more while the stuff they already have doesn't usually work.

I don't know if i agree with that.

The real challenge is they can't collect meaningful data because they are not actively engaging with the community properly.

A list building app, and also, a formal GW tournament mission packet, with an event tracker, would allow them to mine all the data they need.

As it stands, BCP, ITC, & Battlescribe do this for them. There is no reason for an ITC mission packet. There is no reason for BCP. There is no reason for Battlescribe. GW should provide all of these. Then they have access to insane amounts of game data, from both tournament and casual.

Then GW could run a report like, "Show me all of the games with an army featuring shining spears & dark reapers, with a Ynnari warlord, breaking down by wins, losses, and ties, by opponent faction."

As it stands they have NO insight whatsoever into this information on their own. They rely on ITC, they rely on tournament circuits, and playtesters for this information. In honesty, the idea of "rules writers" adjusting points is comical anyway. If they had proper data they could apply machine learning to determine points costs.

 Marmatag wrote:
I don't know if i agree with that.

The real challenge is they can't collect meaningful data because they are not actively engaging with the community properly.

A list building app, and also, a formal GW tournament mission packet, with an event tracker, would allow them to mine all the data they need.

As it stands, BCP, ITC, & Battlescribe do this for them. There is no reason for an ITC mission packet. There is no reason for BCP. There is no reason for Battlescribe. GW should provide all of these. Then they have access to insane amounts of game data, from both tournament and casual.

Then GW could run a report like, "Show me all of the games with an army featuring shining spears & dark reapers, with a Ynnari warlord, breaking down by wins, losses, and ties, by opponent faction."

As it stands they have NO insight whatsoever into this information on their own. They rely on ITC, they rely on tournament circuits, and playtesters for this information. In honesty, the idea of "rules writers" adjusting points is comical anyway. If they had proper data they could apply machine learning to determine points costs.

Do you think the fact that tournaments tend to use different rules from casuals might affect this at all? For example, ITC has time limits, while casual play does not.

Can't disagree with that, Marmatag. I honestly think ITC is redundant and mostly results from the days when GW didn't do anything. I find it's telling that the 40k ITC rules has a bunch of additions and extra things to create its own self-contained meta (as evidenced by the fact that non-ITC tournaments have vastly different results), while the AOS ITC packet is basically "Use the matched play rules" and that's it. No extra cruft.

I absolutely agree GW needs to differentiate between Matched Play (i.e. where both players want balanced forces suitable for a pickup game) and Organized Play (where additional restrictions need to be in place since you know in a tournament things are going to be min/maxed to the nines) without having restrictions that globally apply to Matched Play regardless of if it is in a tournament or not.

I also agree they have no reason now to not have a proper listbuilding app. The one they have for 40k (Combat Roster?) is a complete joke and unsuitable for the majority of things. BCP I don't use enough to know what GW might do, I only know it's basically an event app for tournaments and if you pay you can view lists submitted to the event.

Addressing a single point..

I don't feel that GW could build a army builder that works better than Battlescribe. It takes a large team of people working pretty hard to keep Battlescribe in scope and its not even perfect. It still has errors.

A GW produced Army Builder will need to be Perfect to avoid damaging their reputation further, and splitting the community even further than it is.

Reemule wrote:
Addressing a single point..

I don't feel that GW could build a army builder that works better than Battlescribe. It takes a large team of people working pretty hard to keep Battlescribe in scope and its not even perfect. It still has errors.

A GW produced Army Builder will need to be Perfect to avoid damaging their reputation further, and splitting the community even further than it is.

That's why GW should just buy battlescribe or hire the guys that made it to make their app.

Wayniac wrote:

I absolutely agree GW needs to differentiate between Matched Play (i.e. where both players want balanced forces suitable for a pickup game) and Organized Play (where additional restrictions need to be in place since you know in a tournament things are going to be min/maxed to the nines) without having restrictions that globally apply to Matched Play regardless of if it is in a tournament or not.

But they did exactly that! It is just happens that for some reason many players insist using the organised event suggestion in their casual pick up games . (Which I think is madness, but YMMV.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:

That's why GW should just buy battlescribe or hire the guys that made it to make their app.

Only if they can make it less hideous and the output layout much neater.

 Crimson wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

I absolutely agree GW needs to differentiate between Matched Play (i.e. where both players want balanced forces suitable for a pickup game) and Organized Play (where additional restrictions need to be in place since you know in a tournament things are going to be min/maxed to the nines) without having restrictions that globally apply to Matched Play regardless of if it is in a tournament or not.

But they did exactly that! It is just happens that for some reason many players insist using the organised event suggestion in their casual pick up games . (Which I think is madness, but YMMV.)

See, I don't think they did. Other than maybe the detachment limit, I think everything else is just lumped under "Matched Play" without being called out as being for events (maybe the rule of 3 but I think that's just "Matched Play" as well). And, since most people seem to equate Matched Play with "balanced using points" and Narrative and especially Open Play with "unbalanced using power levels/whatever you want", they tend to take anything tagged "Matched Play" as gospel.

What I mean is more like most of the changes they've done such as the flyer rule, the rule of 3, the smite rule, etc. seem to all have been done to reign in tournaments. Those should have been "Organized Play" rules, not matched play rules, so every game using points didn't automatically include the stuff to help smooth out tournament games. You would have a divide between just rules meant for a relatively balanced game and a bunch of extra rules for tournament/competitive games where you need the extra restrictions. Right now they are interchangeable because it's all "Matched Play".

Honestly I think GW needs to do more to show that you can do Open/Narrative play with points; it's not only matched play that uses points since that seems to be the common viewpoint.

The rule of three is organised event rule as well. Most of the other things you mention are good additions to any matched game.

Then I don't know. I feel as though most people seem to take all matched play as gospel for pickup games, tournament or otherwise, and are too afraid to deviate for fear of things becoming "unbalanced" (which is automatically equated with "not fair"). For me, there's a difference between a matched play game and a competitive game, even if they use the same set of rules.

Wayniac wrote:
Then I don't know. I feel as though most people seem to take all matched play as gospel for pickup games, tournament or otherwise, and are too afraid to deviate for fear of things becoming "unbalanced" (which is automatically equated with "not fair"). For me, there's a difference between a matched play game and a competitive game, even if they use the same set of rules.

Yes, I absolutely agree, and this is why I think applying the tournament suggestions on casual games as a default is dumb.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
I don't know if i agree with that.

The real challenge is they can't collect meaningful data because they are not actively engaging with the community properly.

A list building app, and also, a formal GW tournament mission packet, with an event tracker, would allow them to mine all the data they need.

As it stands, BCP, ITC, & Battlescribe do this for them. There is no reason for an ITC mission packet. There is no reason for BCP. There is no reason for Battlescribe. GW should provide all of these. Then they have access to insane amounts of game data, from both tournament and casual.

Then GW could run a report like, "Show me all of the games with an army featuring shining spears & dark reapers, with a Ynnari warlord, breaking down by wins, losses, and ties, by opponent faction."

As it stands they have NO insight whatsoever into this information on their own. They rely on ITC, they rely on tournament circuits, and playtesters for this information. In honesty, the idea of "rules writers" adjusting points is comical anyway. If they had proper data they could apply machine learning to determine points costs.

Do you think the fact that tournaments tend to use different rules from casuals might affect this at all? For example, ITC has time limits, while casual play does not.

I'm a huge fan of time limits. 3 hours is more than enough time to play 5 to 6 turns, especially if a chess clock is involved. I don't think time limits, at this point, shape the game really to be that different from what it already is - in a general sense.

The biggest issue the game has right now, just from a general balance standpoint, is that some armies can field just way too many models. Removing time limits only exacerbates this problem, because with chess clocks, there is at least a downside to spamming undercosted infantry.

Also, I think something that might help reel in the "horde meta" is to give the "rabble" type horde units (Cultists, Poxwalkers, Ripper Swarms, etc.) a rule (call it something like "Undisciplined") saying that they cannot be used to hold objectives (or perhaps that they don't get Objective Secured). Part of the biggest issue now is you hardly see the main units in an army. You rarely see Chaos Marines in Chaos Space Marine armies, it's cultists for days and sometimes a couple of marines. Same with Death Guard. Removing the impact of having a huge blob for objective purposes might go a long way towards making you see more "normal" looking armies.

I also seriously think they need to stop you being able to take multiple detachments and get the stratagems from all of them; it should be only the detachment that your Warlord belongs to. This might help to put an end to the CP battery that still plagues the game now. I'm honestly not sure what else they can do to fix the CP/Stratagem abuse; it seems like a nice idea but one that is implemented very poorly.

Wayniac wrote:
Also, I think something that might help reel in the "horde meta" is to give the "rabble" type horde units (Cultists, Poxwalkers, Ripper Swarms, etc.) a rule (call it something like "Undisciplined") saying that they cannot be used to hold objectives (or perhaps that they don't get Objective Secured). Part of the biggest issue now is you hardly see the main units in an army. You rarely see Chaos Marines in Chaos Space Marine armies, it's cultists for days and sometimes a couple of marines. Same with Death Guard. Removing the impact of having a huge blob for objective purposes might go a long way towards making you see more "normal" looking armies.

I also seriously think they need to stop you being able to take multiple detachments and get the stratagems from all of them; it should be only the detachment that your Warlord belongs to. This might help to put an end to the CP battery that still plagues the game now. I'm honestly not sure what else they can do to fix the CP/Stratagem abuse; it seems like a nice idea but one that is implemented very poorly.

See, I'm the opposite and think balancing shouldn't be done to make armies 'look' a certain way, especially "normal" because that's entirely subjective and is going to be all over the place. Balancing should be done just for balancing and then armies look the way a particular player (who actually bought and painted that army) wants it to look.

dhallnet wrote:
Nah, I just don't believe saying "they suck" is good criticism. Particularly when you're talking about balance in a game that was never meant as a competitive game. That would be like competitive story telling : weird. They are more or less embracing it now because it's a demand from the community, doesn't mean they have to be perfect at it in a snap and forget everything they've done before (they are doing a decent job imho when you consider what they have to work with)

Yep. The rules never were the primary product, so I wonder why we are up in arms about them not being perfect. You just have to look at how AoS survived despite having barely any rules to understand that tight rules isn't what they sell.

This is exactly my point about incompetent game design! The idea that balance is only for competitive tournaments is utter ing lunacy. All of the things that make a good competitive game (good balance, clear and quickly FAQed rules, etc) also benefit casual/narrative/whatever play. But GW's authors in general and Jervis Johnson in particular have this insane idea that the reverse is true, that making quality rules somehow makes BEER AND PRETZELS games worse. That a game isn't CASUAL FORGE A NARRATIVE enough if you don't have to have a pre-game discussion with your opponent about how you're going to interpret ambiguous rules or what list building restrictions you need to follow so that both players have a good time. The only conclusion I can come to is that they hate competitive play so much that sabotaging their own game (and their own enjoyment of it) becomes a point of pride, allowing them to hold up the flaws and declare to the world that THIS IS NOT A COMPETITIVE GAME GO AWAY WAAC TFGS.

Poor sales compared to 40K/WFB, yes. We all know how and why specialist games got cut off, I'm not sure it's relevant to the "discussion" (if we really are having one)

It's relevant to the discussion because you're trying to claim that the strong sales of 8th edition are proof of rules quality, but simultaneously claiming that Epic is a good game despite having such poor sales that GW killed it and is making zero attempt to bring it back even as they relaunch other OOP games. You can't have it both ways, either sales prove rules quality or they don't.

Wayniac wrote:
Also, I think something that might help reel in the "horde meta" is to give the "rabble" type horde units (Cultists, Poxwalkers, Ripper Swarms, etc.) a rule (call it something like "Undisciplined") saying that they cannot be used to hold objectives (or perhaps that they don't get Objective Secured). Part of the biggest issue now is you hardly see the main units in an army. You rarely see Chaos Marines in Chaos Space Marine armies, it's cultists for days and sometimes a couple of marines. Same with Death Guard. Removing the impact of having a huge blob for objective purposes might go a long way towards making you see more "normal" looking armies.

I also seriously think they need to stop you being able to take multiple detachments and get the stratagems from all of them; it should be only the detachment that your Warlord belongs to. This might help to put an end to the CP battery that still plagues the game now. I'm honestly not sure what else they can do to fix the CP/Stratagem abuse; it seems like a nice idea but one that is implemented very poorly.

I'd much prefer CP to be tied to points, and Stratagems to be based off your Warlord. There is still plenty of places for synergy enough to drive Soup, (principally in the Psychic Phase, but some others) to keep Soup happy while not slamming the door on Mono faction play.

If D&D were balanced around "Casuals, go home", it'd be a terrible game.

If StarCraft were balanced around "Beer & Pretzels", it'd be a terrible game.

Maybe there's a middle point that's appropriate for 40k?

w1zard wrote:
Sure, technically this is correct, but it will be an extremely narrow and limited "Scion army" with at most 3 officers, and at most 3 command squads, and the rest of the points has to be spammed infantry squads and or spammed taurox primes. If I want more HQs I have to break my own doctrines by taking non-scion units which really breaks the theme of the army and makes it significantly weaker on the tabletop, and why would taking 4 command squads and officers instead of three suddenly make my hypothetical scion army brokenly OP?

I really don't see what your problem here is. Yes, if you limit yourself to picking from exactly four different units to build your army you're going to have a one-dimensional spam list. Three officers and command squads is plenty fluff-wise, and arguably more than is fluffy. The thing you're losing isn't fluff, it's the ability to spam plasma command squads and make your army more powerful.

(And TBH, your hypothetical army of mass scions isn't fluffy anyway. At a game size where RO3 matters at all you should have a small scions force fighting alongside other units, not a horde of them with nothing else.)

Yes, I mean an infantry heavy weapons battalion/support battallion led by officers, with only a couple of IS for screens. Super fragile, not remotely OP, and yet a pretty fluffy army made impossible by the rule of 3.

That isn't how IG armies work fluff-wise. Heavy weapons are allocated within infantry companies, you don't have an entire force of nothing but heavy weapon squads. And infantry companies fight alongside tanks/aircraft/etc, you should rarely, if ever, have a force of nothing but infantry. And TBH I'm glad this nonsense is excluded from the game, it would be an incredibly boring army to play with or against. You set up your gunline of spammed heavy weapons and roll dice each turn until someone loses. At no point would anything interesting happen in this "game", it would be a pure exercise in dice rolling.

 Peregrine wrote:

This is exactly my point about incompetent game design! The idea that balance is only for competitive tournaments is utter ing lunacy. All of the things that make a good competitive game (good balance, clear and quickly FAQed rules, etc) also benefit casual/narrative/whatever play. But GW's authors in general and Jervis Johnson in particular have this insane idea that the reverse is true, that making quality rules somehow makes BEER AND PRETZELS games worse. That a game isn't CASUAL FORGE A NARRATIVE enough if you don't have to have a pre-game discussion with your opponent about how you're going to interpret ambiguous rules or what list building restrictions you need to follow so that both players have a good time. The only conclusion I can come to is that they hate competitive play so much that sabotaging their own game (and their own enjoyment of it) becomes a point of pride, allowing them to hold up the flaws and declare to the world that THIS IS NOT A COMPETITIVE GAME GO AWAY WAAC TFGS.

Balance is good for casual games, if you can achieve it without sacrificing freedom! GW's tournament suggestions (and a lot of suggested balance fixes on Dakka) place additional restrictions on how you can build your army and what models you can bring. This is not something that is necessarily desired in more casual game.

 Marmatag wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
I don't know if i agree with that.

The real challenge is they can't collect meaningful data because they are not actively engaging with the community properly.

A list building app, and also, a formal GW tournament mission packet, with an event tracker, would allow them to mine all the data they need.

As it stands, BCP, ITC, & Battlescribe do this for them. There is no reason for an ITC mission packet. There is no reason for BCP. There is no reason for Battlescribe. GW should provide all of these. Then they have access to insane amounts of game data, from both tournament and casual.

Then GW could run a report like, "Show me all of the games with an army featuring shining spears & dark reapers, with a Ynnari warlord, breaking down by wins, losses, and ties, by opponent faction."

As it stands they have NO insight whatsoever into this information on their own. They rely on ITC, they rely on tournament circuits, and playtesters for this information. In honesty, the idea of "rules writers" adjusting points is comical anyway. If they had proper data they could apply machine learning to determine points costs.

Do you think the fact that tournaments tend to use different rules from casuals might affect this at all? For example, ITC has time limits, while casual play does not.

I'm a huge fan of time limits. 3 hours is more than enough time to play 5 to 6 turns, especially if a chess clock is involved. I don't think time limits, at this point, shape the game really to be that different from what it already is - in a general sense.

The biggest issue the game has right now, just from a general balance standpoint, is that some armies can field just way too many models. Removing time limits only exacerbates this problem, because with chess clocks, there is at least a downside to spamming undercosted infantry.

That's an interesting answer.

Imo the meat of the question is: "Do you think the fact that tournaments tend to use different rules from casuals might affect this at all?" To which the answer specifically about time limits is "No-ish" (they don't shape the game), then "yes" ("there's a downside to spamming undercosted infanty").

Bharring wrote:
If D&D were balanced around "Casuals, go home", it'd be a terrible game.

Actually D&D would be a much better game if it was balanced that way. One of D&D's biggest flaws is that balance is so unbelievably terrible (seriously, it makes 40k look like a perfect competitive tournament game) that everyone involved has to put huge amounts of effort into balancing the game, and a single player with a more optimized character than the rest of the party can quickly ruin everything. You could still have all of the customization and story building, but you'd be doing it from a foundation of balanced and functional rules instead of desperately trying to hold a house of cards together long enough to reach the end of the story.

And TBH D&D is a pretty good comparison with 40k from a business point of view. Both are terrible games that succeed in large part because of the critical mass factor: it's the game that everyone plays and the easiest to meet fellow players for, therefore it's the one that new players get started in, and therefore it continues to be the game that everyone plays. Better competition exists for both games, but because it lacks the critical mass advantage none of them have nearly as much success.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Crimson wrote:
Balance is good for casual games, if you can achieve it without sacrificing freedom! GW's tournament suggestions (and a lot of suggested balance fixes on Dakka) place additional restrictions on how you can build your army and what models you can bring. This is not something that is necessarily desired in more casual game.

The whole point of having rules at all is to sacrifice freedom. It's to turn MY SPACE DOLLS ARE SO AWESOME LOOK MY PRIMARIS ULTRASERGEANT WITH CITADEL™ PRIMARISBOLTER™ JUST KILLED ALL OF YOUR PATHETIC SPACE ELVES into "nope, you have to roll a 3+ to hit and you only fire two shots per turn". The matched play restrictions have been great from a casual point of view, they encourage fluffier armies and reduce unfluffy spam lists. And by having the restricted version of list building be the default it ensures that the only restriction-breaking lists you see are the ones that are so awesome and fluffy that of course everyone is going to give them a special exception, the ones that are built with a goal of exploiting the overpowered thing as much as possible get thrown out with a "no thanks, let's just play by the standard rules".

I think you and I disagree on what D&D, as a game, is.

I view it as a frame to craft a story, have fun with friends, and see where the dice, DM, and party members take us. The mechanics are there to provide a frame of reference, and provide an arbiter of probabilities and possibilities. You 'win' at D&D if everyone is having fun. You 'lose' if people aren't.

I get from your post, you consider the 'game' of D&D to be the mechanics. You 'win' if you kill an Ancient Red Dragon. You 'lose' if you TPK.

Those are both fully viable understandings of D&D.

I think discussion of 40k often has people talking past eachother because people are at different places across the continuum above.

Now, with my comment about balancing around 'Casuals, go home', I don't mean that it shouldn't be balanced. I don't think it's very debateable that more balance is better. I mean balance at the cost of the casual elements.

For instance, consider that in 3.x, wizards were OP compared to, say, Fighters at high levels. If that were balanced without impacting the flavor of either Wizards or Fighters, no problem. But if that were balanced by saying "Fighters past level 10 can cast 1 Wizard spell per level, blah blah blah", it would hurt the game. Wtf is a Fighter casting spells.

Similarly, Druids were considered OP. Could cast with the best of the spellcasters, and could go toe to toe with things like a Fighter using Wild Shape. A "simple" balance fix is just remove Wild Shape, or nerf it to the point where it's not effective anymore. THat makes the game more balanced. But I feel it makes the game worse - a Druid should be able to build a Wild Shape character that was good at going toe to toe with things.

But that's D&D. Now lets look at StarCraft. While I'd rather each faction and unit retain their flavor, I'd be willing to trade a lot more faction or unit flavor away in that game for the sake of balance. Still, a better fix that restored balance and retained flavor would be preferred, but balance was more important than flavor.

Bharring wrote:
You 'win' at D&D if everyone is having fun. You 'lose' if people aren't.

Exactly. Therefore balance is good, and it's bad to have a situation where you "win" at D&D if everyone is having fun and you "lose" at D&D if someone plays a wizard beyond level 5.

I get from your post, you consider the 'game' of D&D to be the mechanics. You 'win' if you kill an Ancient Red Dragon. You 'lose' if you TPK.

That is not a statement about mechanics, you "win" if you kill the dragon because you have accomplished your character's goals. You "lose" if you TPK on the first round of combat because that's a boring ending to the story and probably leaves everyone frustrated. You also "lose" if you roll initiative and then the wizard chains together a dozen spells and wins the encounter before anyone else can act.

For instance, consider that in 3.x, wizards were OP compared to, say, Fighters at high levels. If that were balanced without impacting the flavor of either Wizards or Fighters, no problem. But if that were balanced by saying "Fighters past level 10 can cast 1 Wizard spell per level, blah blah blah", it would hurt the game. Wtf is a Fighter casting spells.

Well yes, that would be stupid balance, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. Giving everyone the overpowered thing instead of fixing it to make it less overpowered is poor game design, as is killing class/character diversity because the only solution you can see is to make everything a wizard.

Similarly, Druids were considered OP. Could cast with the best of the spellcasters, and could go toe to toe with things like a Fighter using Wild Shape. A "simple" balance fix is just remove Wild Shape, or nerf it to the point where it's not effective anymore. THat makes the game more balanced. But I feel it makes the game worse - a Druid should be able to build a Wild Shape character that was good at going toe to toe with things.

Or the solution would be to force a druid to pick one or the other. If you take the wild shape class feature you get half-rate spellcasting advacement. Or maybe transforming into animal form is a huge drain of energy and removes all of your spells for the day (and can't be used if you have already cast spells). The class still has the ability to go in either direction, but it can't be the best at both. It's good for mechanics balance, and it's good for story balance because it prevents the rest of the party from feeling redundant.