Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 auticus wrote:
Yeah I was still playing WM back then (and I played Cryx) and I got out because of that. That and no one wanted to do anything except for tournament play.

Well the latter part is another issue entirely, but the former is basically what I meant. You can have lists that are both fluffy and extremely good, lists that aren't fluffy at all that are extremely good, lists that are fluffy and near-worthless, and everything in between. So ultimately I think there isn't a real definition of when it's "too much", it's totally subjective. Which, incidentally, is a big reason why I think it's so hard to know when to tone it down because what constitutes it is often not easy to pinpoint.

I do, however, think the majority of cases have clear cut and dried "this should be toned down" attitudes, which again brings us back to the person not wanting to or even saying the other person needs to "git gud" and stop caring about the fluff/theme/etc. when picking a list. How many times have we seen people here say how they shouldn't have to tone down their list, but their opponent needs to pick better units so they can play with a "good" list too? That attitude is the one that's damning because it immediately comes off as hostile and puts you at odds with the overall design of the game when you are straight up told that you should be choosing an army and units based on everything *except* how good they are (judging from the vast majority of material put out by GW themselves).

I guess what it really boils down to is that competitive players only find enjoyment in competitive games; they are often unwilling to broaden their horizons to narrative or, god forbid, Open play. Now sometimes the reasons are valid if exaggerated (yes, open play lets you field whatever nonsense you want without limit but are you really that concerned about "winning" an open play game that you would do it just to be an ass? If not, then what's the issue as you can just exercise self-restraint and not rely on boogeymen to gak on the entire idea of that game style) but I do feel that your die-hard competitive people are missing out on the vast majority of the game by taking 1/3 and making it the whole game.

However, I also feel that there is no point in approaching a game to lose. In one way or another, any game you play whether it's open, narrative, matched, or cutthroat competitive is a player vs. player game, so you should be trying to win. It's the level of that attempt which casues the issue. I haven't talked to anyone who plays to lose; I've talked to plenty of people who aren't concerned with winning to min/max, but that's not the same as trying to lose. In most cases, the person just wants to pick what appeals to them and not get their teeth kicked in because someone brought an optimized LVO-style tournament list to a casual or fun game night. If you ask me, the person who brings an uber-optimized list to a non-tournament event is at fault because that's the outlier (in the majority of cases) so should be the thing with advance warning, even if it's a simple "I'm testing out my tournament list" or "I play a competitive list" sort of addendum to a Facebook post when you say you're going to be there for games.

It's apparently the lack of mutual respect for fellow gamers that is the issue, which is why we see so many "Power Level is garbage and anyone who uses it or even thinks its okay is a virtue-signaling CAAC dumbass" type of vitriol where there's absolutely no respect for other people who like a different style or even bothering to understand that there are 3 ways to play for a reason, that is the underlying issue here and in my experience that comes way more often and more broadly from the comp players. The complaints against comp players are often misattributed to your WAAC type that only gets fun when winning, doesn't care a lick about the game beyond a unit's stats, would prefer that books had zero fluff and just statlines, and in general are the sort of player who is only happy in a tournament environment but still goes to game night to wreck face. It's often too broad a label as the majority of tournament players don't behave that way and simply enjoy one aspect of the game. As I said earlier it seems to be mainly a US thing as Europe and Australia they tend to embrace more than just playing to min/max and win.

Wayniac wrote:
How many times have we seen people here say how they shouldn't have to tone down their list, but their opponent needs to pick better units so they can play with a "good" list too? That attitude is the one that's damning because it immediately comes off as hostile and puts you at odds with the overall design of the game when you are straight up told that you should be choosing an army and units based on everything *except* how good they are (judging from the vast majority of material put out by GW themselves).

It's worth pointing out that you have two people asking the same thing of the other. Both essentially come down to the idea that the other should buy more stuff and change what they play to conform to the other's expectations. Both come across as rather hostile to the other perspective. It's very easy to perceive a player asking someone not to use a tournament list is demanding the opponent let them win. The sense of "how much is too much" makes stepping down feel like a risky prospect, as its easy to step back, still win and make the opponent no less happy. I've certainly run some pretty silly and fun stuff that still gets labeled cheese, but that's just more down to certain people that are unwilling to accept their own failings and need to find something to blame. Personally, I side the other way, but mostly because I get a lot of joy out of the opportunity to learn and improve. Taking something that failed and getting it working is half the fun and I think its overall healthier to rise to the challenges you face then expect them to conform to the reality you're imposing on yourself.

I think where a lot of players get stuck is the idea that the only thing they can do is play whatever faction and list is currently on top. There's a lot of ways to improve lists without just copying the top and there's a lot of room to play suboptimal units as long as you're not insisting on spamming them. Having the humility to expect failure and coming in with an attitude seeking to improve has made me a lot happier compared to the days when I used to approach games seeking or expecting success.

So, I was listening to podcasts again today, and besides the usual suspects I tried a 'normal' 40k podcast as the guys listed their most under-rated units in 8th 40k.

The podcast was enjoyable, and the discussion intelligent enough, even good-hearted.

One thing that stood out were the dimensions brought to bear in analysis.

Each of these under-rated units were evaluated in terms of combo-buffing, shrink-wrapping, probability maximizing point cost efficiency, as well as the value of a standard model kit being small, and so easily hidden (so, modeling for advantage OEM style, let's call it shopping for modeled advantage...).

There is a language community that trades in terms of these dimensions of value. I believe that this is what these people see when they look at these models - bonuses, buffs, unlocked combos...

But that has me wondering - again - why bother with the models at all?

If - as I have read so often lately - Apoc is the new 9th edition that everyone wants, e.g. even faster gameplay! moar models! more abstraction, why bother with the models, at all?

Stack cards in rows, power them up with adjacent cards, burn command point cards to counter hard targets or save damaged units - why bother with the models when the desk/list building is the most important determinant. Terrain? Cover? There are cards for that.

See, this is the issue, for me. I liked listening to the podcast, sure, but I would not wan to play that game. I did enjoy some CCGs about 30 year ago. But Warhammer was different, and I liked that better. The tournaments valued sportsmanship and fair play, rules knowledge and modeling, themed armies and respect for the mythology all equally with winning. People didn't want to be "that guy" (the one with the 33 dark reapers behind a wall - spam). Sure, this is fun, once or twice, but the idea of collecting 33 dark reapers just to beat people made this person "that guy".

Now that it is a "competitive" CCG, it seems that everyone is supposed to line up to be that guy, next, I like the "game" a lot less.

So, maybe comp 40k is less 'off the rails' than 'the only train in town'.

And, this feeds the exclusionary attitudes in both directions, the "casuals" (if you can call 30yrs of hobby "casual") feeling excluded and the "competitive" players at least tacitly excluding these others simply through the use of a common evaluative framework and language.

That is something I notice. Everything now has this quasi-CCG language. Bubblewrap, Daisychain (both of which may have existed before but I certainly never recall seeing these ever used in White Dwarf's battle reports or games years ago), buff synergy, etc. It's like a different language that has bled into everything.

It used to be a running joke in Warmahordes that the models weren't really necessary and you might as well use the bases (everything went off the base size) with a portrait of the model in the middle; it would make moving them much easier. Seems like it's almost the same for Warhammer, although thankfully not at that extreme.

It seems the days of "do I like this model" or "Does this model fit my army background" being the major questions are long gone, and I seemingly missed the memo. There's too much emphasis even on the non-competitive (I think that word is better suited than "casual") side of things on the metagame, and less on the spectacle of the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeff white wrote:
See, this is the issue, for me. I liked listening to the podcast, sure, but I would not wan to play that game. I did enjoy some CCGs about 30 year ago. But Warhammer was different, and I liked that better. The tournaments valued sportsmanship and fair play, rules knowledge and modeling, themed armies and respect for the mythology all equally with winning. People didn't want to be "that guy" (the one with the 33 dark reapers behind a wall - spam). Sure, this is fun, once or twice, but the idea of collecting 33 dark reapers just to beat people made this person "that guy".

This resonates with me since I too remember a time when tournaments rewarded themed armies and having respect for the background material and punished people who would gak on the lore for the sake of min/maxing a list to focus on winning all their games. And I remember when if you spammed plasma or took 33 dark reapers or 3 Wraithlords (back when they were really, really good) you weren't the sort of player most groups wanted around and it was clear that you were a "hardcore" tourney player who only cared about getting 1st place in events and probably were only playing 40k not because you really wanted to, but because there was a large community with regular tournaments.

Well, you're listening to a non-visual medium that somewhat limits what can be discussed in terms of visuals. I guess the question is what would you like them to talk about? Keep in mind, part of the problem is that there's not really a shortage of impressive looking models out there, and much of what draws people's attention is color scheme. You get quite a bit of "amazing looking model/paint job" comments in most podcasts, but it's hard to speak with substance and I think we all just kind of dismiss it after a while.

It's also worth noting that even when analyzing rules (which admittedly generally could be represented by a token base) there's an element of playing with cool toys that draws in even the most competitive players. In fact, a lot of the rules analysis comes down to the fact that the rules are kind of the features of the toy. Yeah, that Boba Fett is really cool, but how much cooler would it be if its backpack could shoot the missile?

At some point the quality of the features of a toy affect how much fun you can have with it. Boba Fett with missile backpack sounds cool, but if the missile spring is so weak it just barely gets past his helmet still doesn't live up to the description. Similarly, a lot of models have rules that sound really cool, but don't practically work unless your opponent gives you the perfect setup or chooses to ignore them long enough to trigger or it or chooses TO ignore them to avoid triggering it. A lot of rules analysis really comes down to "does this play as cool as it sounds?" and honestly, a lot of the disappointment people have comes from the reality that highly random abilities that sound fun aren't nearly as entertaining when the reality is they just don't actually happen.

If GW could come up with a more balanced rule-set then the questions of "do I like this model" or "does this model fit my army background" or even "does this model fit my preferred method of play or strategy" would be much more community wide accepted questions.

This is why the hate towards tournament players wanting a more tight and balanced rule set is so crazy to me. If the difference between a true to the fluff 2nd company UM list and a triple disco list + Morty wasn't an auto-lose in two rounds for the UM player EVERYONE would have a better time.

Stacking buffs, daisy chaining, character targeting, tri-pointing and a slew of other feels bad, immersion breaking in-game moments are not things that have to happen. They are a result of bad GW rules writing (which after 9 editions and 30+ years shouldn't be a thing). Better technical writing, more in-depth and harder play-testing and moving away from the idea of 40k as a gentlemen's game between friends where you are to house rule how the rules work and what is "cheesy" vs what is "allowed" would make the game better for all consumers of the game.

A tighter, more balanced rule set that focused on list building as putting together a tool-box for strategies you want to try to execute would help bring in the other elements of the game that a lot of players are finding missing (army themes, fluffy forces, faction identities). Instead finding the most broken combos/units to just brute force your way to victory is how a lot of armies are built and it ruins the game for people who don't want to make that sacrifice.

Encouraging things like theme'd armies, actual faction tactics/strengths/weaknesses and the narrative side of the game part through balanced rules/units is something that should be the goal and we shouldn't let GW wiggle out of their responsibility of providing rules that promote that. What we have now is a bad frame work of sloppy rules which only really work when you either agree to push them to the limits (tournaments) or house rule them to fit your group (narrative/open/casual within a close group).

Mind you, I really like going to tournaments and engaging in competitive play because the game does work when you push it to the limits and everyone has the same idea of what is going on. The community is bigger and more accepting, there isn't some weird gate-keeping where I have to prove my worth to join the secret club. No one cares if I can't play but once a month or can't spend hours painting/building terrain/units for the battle of Andraxas reenactment. I find tournament play more casual than a lot of what people call casual play.

Wayniac wrote:

It used to be a running joke in Warmahordes that the models weren't really necessary and you might as well use the bases (everything went off the base size) with a portrait of the model in the middle; it would make moving them much easier. Seems like it's almost the same for Warhammer, although thankfully not at that extreme.

Is it? Apoc is basically a CCG with two types of cards - those oddly shaped ones you move around the table and garrison predefined spaces with, and those you play from hand, which contain a vast majority of flavor mechanics and interactions this game has to offer. The last major difference is that you still measure distances from card to card with tape measure and not spaces, but actual minis do not really matter anymore - you don't even remove miniatures as a way of recording sustained damage so you can have the same overcrowded looking table with full, half or quarter of your initial force.

Haven't' played apoc to really know, honestly. Also while I'm not going to quote it 100% agree with bananathug about how the "immersion breaking" tactics exist due to overall poor rules writing. I don't think anyone is really hating competitive players wanting a better set of rules, it's the fear/thought that these "better rules" will eschew everything BUT those immersion breaking things and remove anything that's narrative from the game. That's the fear.

Warmahordes was like that. Amazing set of rules, extremely clear and concise and with no ambiguity. And the game was pure garbage for everything BUT competitive focused tournament play because it had all of those rules that encouraged that sort of incredible depth that tournament players loved (daisy chaining, laser precise movement, combo stacking that you could build up and hit at a moment's notice, etc.) but which made it feel totally unsuited for narrative play since the entire game felt so gamey that it made you not care about anything but the game. Besides that it had little to no customization and what amounted to special characters in every game, and the end result was an amazing tournament game that pushed that mindset above everything else, even if you wanted to play it narratively you still ended up playing suboptimal competitive just because of how the rules were written.

The rules didn't encourage narrative play because they weren't cinematic, they were mechanical. That's what people are afraid of when they seem to "argue" against wanting better rules, it's not wanting the game to lose everything that doesn't fit a competitive set of rules.

Everything now has this quasi-CCG language.

Starting with WM, wargames began intentionally moving towards hybridizing board games and CCGs for commercial reasons.

The language of CCGs and board games has become lexicon in wargames now as well.

When I say 40k seems like a CCG, its not just because I see the similarities in CCG mechanics and have played classical wargames since the 1980s. Its because as a game dev as well I attend conferences and I know for a fact from those conferences that it is intentional that wargame designers intentionally for commercial reasons moved away from wargame tropes and began taking from CCG and board games.

Because those things sell hot and wargames never really did until the CCG hybridization started. It was Warmachine that was the real first commercial success of the magic the gathering hybridization of models and ccg mechanics.

And its only getting more and more blatant.

Classic wargames and maneuvering and battlefield tactics on a table is hugely niche. It was niche in 1975 and chainmail, it was niche in the 80s and 90s, and is even more niche today as classic wargames have shrunk in sales and desirability. Table skill is quite simply not fun for most people. Losing because you can't figure a game out is frustrating and causes people to quit.

However, list building, combo chaining, board games and card games, those have some kind of draw that cannot be matched by traditional wargames, nor will they ever. There is an addiction mentality at work when it comes to those mechanics, similar to how we learned to monetize mobile apps through addiction mentality hooks.

Honestly, one of my favorite things about Apoc is that there's a lot fewer specific rules tied to things. Like, I can pick whatever power weapon I think looks the coolest and make my guys however I want. Things don't die until they get to do something cool for the most part, stuff like that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:

Because those things sell hot and wargames never really did until the CCG hybridization started. It was Warmachine that was the real first commercial success of the magic the gathering hybridization of models and ccg mechanics.

I think that's largely because those mechanics are engaging and rewarding. A lot of classic wargames are either really fiddly as a result of trying to simulate really complicated ideas with very limited tools or excuses to do something with your excellent diorama. Honestly, even in those rules, the concepts of resource management and meaningful decisions that drive modern gaming still exist; they're just not something the developers were aware of and therefore didn't use in ways they can control. Ultimately though, I don't really feel like classic wargames really made the models any more important than current games do; current games are just trying to do more with what is inherently a static, featureless toy.

I feel like where modern games have really stumbled is their attempts to broadly codify terrain into their rules without forcing construction requirements on their players. That element is easily the most DIY that remains in gaming and the sheer amount of potential variety that creates has lead developers to come up with increasingly non-impactful rules to limit unintended interactions. Its one of the genre's more unique features but one that I feel has rarely been leveraged properly.

 LunarSol wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:

Because those things sell hot and wargames never really did until the CCG hybridization started. It was Warmachine that was the real first commercial success of the magic the gathering hybridization of models and ccg mechanics.

I think that's largely because those mechanics are engaging and rewarding.

As auticus said:

 auticus wrote:

There is an addiction mentality at work when it comes to those mechanics, similar to how we learned to monetize mobile apps through addiction mentality hooks.

All reward. No risk. Indeed, they are very rewarding. I have had to do many projects with that exact design goal.

And boy does it sell.

That leads me back to what I say regularly: GW has horrible balance in 40k and AOS because they intend it to be so, because thats part of the addiction cycle.

I guess I don't equate engaging and rewarding gameplay with addiction mechanics. I mean, I guess in the sense that anything enjoyable has an addictive element associated with it, but if we're literally arguing that we shouldn't design things to be fun because people might enjoy them... I think that's taking the argument a bit far.

The mobile app problem comes less from the rewarding elements of the game designs and more from the attempts afterward to create artificial barriers to that enjoyment and charge to circumvent them. There was a whole era of mobile game design the exploded the gaming market almost entirely on the back of really good game design and I'd largely label that era a good thing. It was the next wave of those games with "energy bars" and other systems designed to frustrate players into paying to enjoy games as they used to that really created the problems.

 auticus wrote:
All reward. No risk. Indeed, they are very rewarding. I have had to do many projects with that exact design goal.

And boy does it sell.

That leads me back to what I say regularly: GW has horrible balance in 40k and AOS because they intend it to be so, because thats part of the addiction cycle.

If that were true new releases wouldn’t have garbage rules. Primaris and CSM were incredibly disappointing releases except for a small selection of models.

 Kirasu wrote:

 auticus wrote:
All reward. No risk. Indeed, they are very rewarding. I have had to do many projects with that exact design goal.

And boy does it sell.

That leads me back to what I say regularly: GW has horrible balance in 40k and AOS because they intend it to be so, because thats part of the addiction cycle.

If that were true new releases wouldn’t have garbage rules. Primaris and CSM were incredibly disappointing releases except for a small selection of models.

This is a fair point, actually. I'm not really sure what Games Workshop intend when they release their new kits with sub-standard rules.

 Kirasu wrote:

 auticus wrote:
All reward. No risk. Indeed, they are very rewarding. I have had to do many projects with that exact design goal.

And boy does it sell.

That leads me back to what I say regularly: GW has horrible balance in 40k and AOS because they intend it to be so, because thats part of the addiction cycle.

If that were true new releases wouldn’t have garbage rules. Primaris and CSM were incredibly disappointing releases except for a small selection of models.

I doubt that, the new stuff certainly has it's massive ups, not the shadowspear stuff, but the new CSM f.e.with red Corsairs trait.
The reaper chaincannon.
Lord discordant.
The improved rules access via Vigilus ablaze etc.

Edit: especially the havocs and csm needed some kind of additional lure /bait to be sold and they got it.
Or gw atleast attempted to give it to these units.

nou wrote:
but actual minis do not really matter anymore

The miniatures have never mattered. 40k has always been a game where the miniatures are just pretty tokens, comparable in function to the cardboard tokens of older hex-grid wargames. Yeah, you can say that LOS exists, but honestly is the difference between TLOS and an approximated LOS drawn between base centers really significant outside of how many arguments it can cause? Not really.

 Peregrine wrote:

nou wrote:
but actual minis do not really matter anymore

The miniatures have never mattered. 40k has always been a game where the miniatures are just pretty tokens, comparable in function to the cardboard tokens of older hex-grid wargames. Yeah, you can say that LOS exists, but honestly is the difference between TLOS and an approximated LOS drawn between base centers really significant outside of how many arguments it can cause? Not really.

Add to that 8ths fethed cover system

Wayniac wrote:
This resonates with me since I too remember a time when tournaments rewarded themed armies and having respect for the background material and punished people who would gak on the lore for the sake of min/maxing a list to focus on winning all their games.

I too remember the days when tournaments were dominated by cliquish "soft scores" where any list that beats you is "overpowered cheese" and "poor sportsmanship" and anyone who doesn't comply with your personal headcanon on what their army is supposed to consist of is a "WAAC TFG" who "doesn't care about the fluff". Let's not ever go back there again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeff white wrote:
If - as I have read so often lately - Apoc is the new 9th edition that everyone wants, e.g. even faster gameplay! moar models! more abstraction, why bother with the models, at all?

Stack cards in rows, power them up with adjacent cards, burn command point cards to counter hard targets or save damaged units - why bother with the models when the desk/list building is the most important determinant. Terrain? Cover? There are cards for that.

You're missing the point of why people like Apocalypse. It isn't the poorly designed and easily discarded CCG mechanic, it's the fact that GW has cleaned up a ton of rules bloat without sacrificing any meaningful depth, and has even increased strategic depth by finally getting rid of the idiotic IGOUGO system. Instead of having to roll to see how many shots you roll, roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save, roll to FNP, and add various re-rolls and modifiers at every step of the process you translate all of that rules bloat into a simple D12 roll. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out which melee weapon is 5% more effective against the metagame you just have "small arms" and "close combat weapons". Etc. Trying to get rid of the models in favor of more CCG mechanics is going in the exact opposite direction!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wayniac wrote:
I do, however, think the majority of cases have clear cut and dried "this should be toned down" attitudes, which again brings us back to the person not wanting to or even saying the other person needs to "git gud" and stop caring about the fluff/theme/etc. when picking a list. How many times have we seen people here say how they shouldn't have to tone down their list, but their opponent needs to pick better units so they can play with a "good" list too? That attitude is the one that's damning because it immediately comes off as hostile and puts you at odds with the overall design of the game when you are straight up told that you should be choosing an army and units based on everything *except* how good they are (judging from the vast majority of material put out by GW themselves).

Thank you for demonstrating the problem with CAAC attitudes. Why shouldn't both players have an obligation to meet in the middle regarding power level? Why should the player with the stronger army have the entire obligation to buy and paint new models, use units they don't like, adapt their approach to the game, etc, while the player with the weaker list is entitled to use exactly the models they have chosen to use and never improve their list strength or on-table skill? FFS, you're even declaring it a "hostile attitude" to suggest that both players should take on an equal share of adapting. This is ridiculous favoritism towards a particular style of play and in no way reasonable.

I guess what it really boils down to is that competitive players only find enjoyment in competitive games; they are often unwilling to broaden their horizons to narrative or, god forbid, Open play. Now sometimes the reasons are valid if exaggerated (yes, open play lets you field whatever nonsense you want without limit but are you really that concerned about "winning" an open play game that you would do it just to be an ass? If not, then what's the issue as you can just exercise self-restraint and not rely on boogeymen to gak on the entire idea of that game style) but I do feel that your die-hard competitive people are missing out on the vast majority of the game by taking 1/3 and making it the whole game.

You could say the exact same thing about "open play" players who refuse to consider competitive play. Why don't you criticize them just as strongly for being unwilling to broaden their horizons?

or even bothering to understand that there are 3 ways to play for a reason

PL is not a separate "way to play" and has zero reason to exist. It's functionally identical to the conventional point system, except the point costs it assigns are less accurate due to systematic flaws. I criticize PL like I do because it's literally true: there is zero reason to ever use PL instead of conventional points unless you are trying to make a statement about how opposed to competitive play you are.

(And don't forget, narrative games can work just fine with the conventional point system and did so for decades before 8th edition invented PL.)

 Kirasu wrote:

 auticus wrote:
All reward. No risk. Indeed, they are very rewarding. I have had to do many projects with that exact design goal.

And boy does it sell.

That leads me back to what I say regularly: GW has horrible balance in 40k and AOS because they intend it to be so, because thats part of the addiction cycle.

If that were true new releases wouldn’t have garbage rules. Primaris and CSM were incredibly disappointing releases except for a small selection of models.

You cant have the cycle if everything is good. They join an overall collection of models that rise and fall in power.

 auticus wrote:
You cant have the cycle if everything is good. They join an overall collection of models that rise and fall in power.

Of course everything can't be good and still have this cycle. But you can (and obviously should) make the new releases the strongest options so that people have to buy them. It's bad business to make new releases weak and give little reason to buy them until some hypothetical future date where they maybe become good. The fact that GW is failing so spectacularly at this approach to sales is pretty strong evidence that balance issues are the result of GW's rule authors being really bad at game design, not a calculated attempt to use unbalanced rules to drive sales of models kits.

Except that, at least on the AOS side of things, there are rules designers on the team that were part of fan comp systems for AOS that did a really good job.

So if its true that GW rules authors are really bad at game design, there must be something special about walking through the door of the Ivory Tower that strips them of their mental facilities and renders them inept.

Or ... its intentional imbalance.

Twenty plus years paying attention to Games Workshop leads me to conclude that their design team with a few exceptions here and there over the years are just unprofessional and incompetent as feth. Particularly when it comes to long term planning and maintaining design consistency from codex to codex. I don't think they are masterminds planning things carefully to maximise profits, just a bunch of lazy and clueless wasters slapping stuff together based on whatever excites them week to week.

They are carried by their artists, both 2D and 3D, and that spark of genius of the 40k setting, growing gradually dimmer by the year as it is bastardised by people who do not understand it.

 Peregrine wrote:
PL is not a separate "way to play" and has zero reason to exist. It's functionally identical to the conventional point system, except the point costs it assigns are less accurate due to systematic flaws. I criticize PL like I do because it's literally true: there is zero reason to ever use PL instead of conventional points unless you are trying to make a statement about how opposed to competitive play you are.

(And don't forget, narrative games can work just fine with the conventional point system and did so for decades before 8th edition invented PL.)

Unless you don't want to spend a couple hours writing up a list. At which point PL is handy, say for the first time player who doesn't know what a point is or how many of them would be an army. It's accessibility that costs you nothing.

Lets please not turn this into dakka's 1,491th PL vs Points thread.

 Da Boss wrote:
Twenty plus years paying attention to Games Workshop leads me to conclude that their design team with a few exceptions here and there over the years are just unprofessional and incompetent as feth. Particularly when it comes to long term planning and maintaining design consistency from codex to codex. I don't think they are masterminds planning things carefully to maximise profits, just a bunch of lazy and clueless wasters slapping stuff together based on whatever excites them week to week.

They are carried by their artists, both 2D and 3D, and that spark of genius of the 40k setting, growing gradually dimmer by the year as it is bastardised by people who do not understand it.

For 40k absolutely, the design team definitely seem to not "get" design. But for AOS at least the majority of the team are new (it used to be the same people in the original AOS days and expanded) and are regular names in the UK tournament circuit, which is why I think you see at least more of an attempt at balance (with the usual caveats of wanting listbuilding and CCG-style combo stacking to be the norm) there. When it comes to 40k however it seems like it's the same people from 6th and 7th edition who showed in interviews that they seem to design like children do ("It would be so totally awesome if..." instead of having solid math and formulae).

They have stated unequivocally in the past though that the miniatures come first and then the studio makes rules for them. Even in the most recent White Dwarf, while the article is for AOS, Jervis gives the example of some Deepkin model, and it was basically that the sculptors make the model first, and then the studio uses the model to determine what it should do (e.g. "It has a large bladed weapon, so that's probably Rend -1"). Which to me seems totally backwards as there should be an open communication between the two of them; the rules team and the miniature team should be constantly talking about what needs to be done, when it sounds like the miniature designers work in isolation (or best case scenario might have an idea of things themselves) and then "hand-off" the finished model to the rules team to shoehorn in. Which is why we see some things that feel out of place popping up in the lore; because the model was designed for looks and the rules team had to come up with how it slotted into the setting. Which is all fine and dandy in AOS because of how it is, but hurts in 40k because of the 30 years of history.

 Peregrine wrote:

nou wrote:
but actual minis do not really matter anymore

The miniatures have never mattered. 40k has always been a game where the miniatures are just pretty tokens, comparable in function to the cardboard tokens of older hex-grid wargames. Yeah, you can say that LOS exists, but honestly is the difference between TLOS and an approximated LOS drawn between base centers really significant outside of how many arguments it can cause? Not really.

I am going to have to call you on this one.
This is false, especially given the current state of affairs relative earlier incarnations.

We managed LoS, proportions of models, even talked through "it is only the wing-tip" issues just fine.
Only see the antennae? Not enough to affect anything on the damage chart, so - no shot.
Laser pointers work wonders to work out percentages if this is the issue, facing and so on, easy.

Realistic terrain and cover presumptions,
reflected in rules that at least try to capture this battlefield dynamic,
help also.

So, granted the current state of affairs may as well be a card game,
it certainly wasn't this way when I committed to this system so long ago.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:


They are carried by their artists, both 2D and 3D, and that spark of genius of the 40k setting, growing gradually dimmer by the year as it is bastardised by people who do not understand it.

DIng ding ding ding ... We have a winner!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:

 jeff white wrote:
If - as I have read so often lately - Apoc is the new 9th edition that everyone wants, e.g. even faster gameplay! moar models! more abstraction, why bother with the models, at all?

Stack cards in rows, power them up with adjacent cards, burn command point cards to counter hard targets or save damaged units - why bother with the models when the desk/list building is the most important determinant. Terrain? Cover? There are cards for that.

You're missing the point of why people like Apocalypse. It isn't the poorly designed and easily discarded CCG mechanic, it's the fact that GW has cleaned up a ton of rules bloat without sacrificing any meaningful depth, and has even increased strategic depth by finally getting rid of the idiotic IGOUGO system. Instead of having to roll to see how many shots you roll, roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save, roll to FNP, and add various re-rolls and modifiers at every step of the process you translate all of that rules bloat into a simple D12 roll. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out which melee weapon is 5% more effective against the metagame you just have "small arms" and "close combat weapons". Etc. Trying to get rid of the models in favor of more CCG mechanics is going in the exact opposite direction!

You might be using more models, but it is difficult to see how this game isn't just a simpler card game.
Miniatures, realism, so much less...
What you describe seems like a card game with fewer unique cards lined up in rows that get removed when card Ax can target card By and player A rolls high enough given some comparison between stats on Ax and By. On a D12.

So great.

GW took a terrible game, got rid of the worst of it, and made something even simpler to sell more models to people who want moar models and faster games with fewer discussions because, you know, people can't discourse with civility when their own vested interests are at stake over a miniatures war game.
OK.

This is not a satisfactory status quo, by my measure.

You OK with this?

In the end, I can see Apoc being the new tourney rule set, or at least informing some new edition that adopts some of the mechanics,
as it lets people showcase super nifty and huge (commission) painted armies and work through three games a day without anyone running out of time.

For garage and basement play, unless the idea is simply to put everything on a table today, I can't see the appeal.

As for a pickup game, maybe OK - solves some problems I guess, matching expectations,
and list-buildiness becomes even more of the central thing.

Not my expectations - I have zero interest in investing time into 28mm EPIC when it looks weird on a 6x4 table.
6mm epic, sure. Liked that game when I played it decades ago.
But, the charm that was squad level play - "Jones!" - is absent in a flurry of mad plastic that might as well be cards in a deck.

 LunarSol wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Having a regularly scheduled game night where people just show up and play is pretty nice on everyone's schedule. You don't have to really put any effort into making the game happen, its just there waiting for you and when someone moves to the area they can just ask what night it is and likely show up to meet everyone and join the group. Basically, the negotiation was done years ago with the group's momentum carrying itself without any real intervention.

Even with a scheduled game night I see people communicate on social media in the store/club's Facebook group or otherwise to arrange games, or at the very least a "Hey I'm going to be at the shop if anyone wants a game" sort of message, which often gets someone to respond and a get set up in advance.

Sure, but there's still not much effort in that. Certainly not the kind of effort we're talking about in negotiating armies.

There doesn't need to be that much effort, though.

We have a club that meets on a regular night (Wednesday evenings). However, nobody here wants to carry their army around at work all day and THEN on public transport to the club after unless they know they're gonna get a game, so games are organised on social media. The club has a default 'level' for 40k of 'pretty casual, don't be a dick' and then people can state if they want something different.

That might be as simple as posting "Anyone want a game of 40k this Wednesday? I can bring Tzeentch or Eldar" to something like "Anyone want a competitive game on Wednesday? I'm practising for a tournament."

That's it. Generally it works pretty well. Occasionally someone new asks on the forum what sort of games we play, and they get pretty much the same in response.

 jeff white wrote:


You might be using more models, but it is difficult to see how this game isn't just a simpler card game.
Miniatures, realism, so much less...
What you describe seems like a card game with fewer unique cards lined up in rows that get removed when card Ax can target card By and player A rolls high enough given some comparison between stats on Ax and By. On a D12.

What version of 40k was this not the case? It sounds like the issue is more that you've played enough to see the machinery behind the curtain. Is it having the statline on cards that breaks the illusion, because a card is just a summary of a unit profile. Realistically there's always been a "card" floating behind any unit on the table that determines how it interacts with the cards behind any other unit. I don't see how that's ever been different.

 Kirasu wrote:

 auticus wrote:
All reward. No risk. Indeed, they are very rewarding. I have had to do many projects with that exact design goal.

And boy does it sell.

That leads me back to what I say regularly: GW has horrible balance in 40k and AOS because they intend it to be so, because thats part of the addiction cycle.

If that were true new releases wouldn’t have garbage rules. Primaris and CSM were incredibly disappointing releases except for a small selection of models.

My issue with my Chaos Bois is that there are just way too many model profiles in the codex. I will never use half of them.

To be honest I would rather see a tighter pool of models for each faction, with better rules. Right now, I have to make choices for my Chaos marines in the Heavy Support spot between like 8 different units, I can't run them all, so I am forced to pick and choose. I don't like that.