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40k is notoriously imbalanced. Despite this, over the past decade the tournament scene has greatly expanded. Large tournaments and rules groups like NOVA and ITC have created new missions / win conditions. These new rules can dramatically change the face of the game. However, I believe they are still far short of balancing it.

My question is, if GWs underlying system is salvagable, why don't groups attempt to balanace the game by making more drastic rules changes, such as changing points costs, or changing rules?

The Tyranny of "Officaldom"

 Easy E wrote:
The Tyranny of "Officaldom"

Pretty much this. That and a lot of people have a kind of slavish view of authority, be it GW.. or other. There is another and more subtle guiding force against "house rules" even when said house rules are actually, factually, fair and balanced..... and that is those who enjoy and seek to take advantage of rules for their own benefit over others. It's a hidden force, one under the skin as it were.

A lot of people actually like rules they can bend, misinterpret (look in the rules forum for examples of pedantic arguments that are beyond absurd where people twist the syntax and meaning more than then 9th Circuit Court of Appeals when ruling against freedom), for some kind of unfair advantage. They won't come out and admit it, even when they are aware of it, and not all people are aware of the guiding push behind their actions. A large number of people cannot abstract beyond the skin deep thinking, of themselves or others even if it makes them NPCs.

I play most "house rules". Mostly because I take a Conservative Approach to many things in life, which is applied as the philosophy of: all new ideas must prove that they have both merit and are beneficial before they are accepted.

Which is how I've handled 5,6,7,and now 8th and as a result I have a very house ruled 7th that brings back "that which is of merit" from 8th, as well as cleans up 7th and removes rules that were absurdly abused (toe-touching area terrain BS, Super Friends, etc). My rules play fast and fair. But I don't think others would accept them even though they'd make great tournament rules and larger rules.

The final note of why people like an "official source" is that everyone has opinions, they are like arseholes.. we all have em and they all stink. Which is to say someone doesn't like templates, others do. Some like mortal wounds, others don't. So they look for someone "in authority" to dictate things to them because they lack the capacity as free thinking individuals to come to consensus. I don't have those feelings, in fact I tend to resent some bureaucrat thinking he can dictate right and wrong to me, then again , I am an American and we all generally feel that way, except the NPCs. Just as when I play in my FLGS and someone wants to house rule something and presents it in a concise, reasonable, rational, well explained manner, even if we don't know how it will change things. I am willing to give it a go just to see. After all. I love that kind of thing.

Creating house and special tournament rules is fine, but needs to be done very carefully, as there is tremendous potential for abuse.

meatybtz wrote:
A lot of people actually like rules they can bend, misinterpret (look in the rules forum for examples of pedantic arguments that are beyond absurd where people twist the syntax and meaning more than then 9th Circuit Court of Appeals when ruling against freedom), for some kind of unfair advantage. They won't come out and admit it, even when they are aware of it, and not all people are aware of the guiding push behind their actions. A large number of people cannot abstract beyond the skin deep thinking, of themselves or others even if it makes them NPCs.

I play most "house rules". Mostly because I take a Conservative Approach to many things in life, which is applied as the philosophy of: all new ideas must prove that they have both merit and are beneficial before they are accepted.

Which is how I've handled 5,6,7,and now 8th and as a result I have a very house ruled 7th that brings back "that which is of merit" from 8th, as well as cleans up 7th and removes rules that were absurdly abused (toe-touching area terrain BS, Super Friends, etc). My rules play fast and fair. But I don't think others would accept them even though they'd make great tournament rules and larger rules.

The final note of why people like an "official source" is that everyone has opinions, they are like arseholes.. we all have em and they all stink. Which is to say someone doesn't like templates, others do. Some like mortal wounds, others don't. So they look for someone "in authority" to dictate things to them because they lack the capacity as free thinking individuals to come to consensus. I don't have those feelings, in fact I tend to resent some bureaucrat thinking he can dictate right and wrong to me, then again , I am an American and we all generally feel that way, except the NPCs. Just as when I play in my FLGS and someone wants to house rule something and presents it in a concise, reasonable, rational, well explained manner, even if we don't know how it will change things. I am willing to give it a go just to see. After all. I love that kind of thing.

Official rules, when badly written, are a major pain. But without them at all, what's stopping the older, WAAC player from telling the 10-year old kid who just got into the hobby a few days ago that their own army can shoot five times on ones while the kid's models can only shoot once on fives? House rules are good when played among friends who know and trust each other, but among strangers and mere acquaintances, there has to be an established, official set of rules or all you get is confusion, bad feelings, and time wasted.

And what's with all the political stuff? Besides sounding like a Youtube meme-screed, you seem to be implying that someone wanting established rules for a game makes them some kind of mindless drone. I for one do not want to have to make up rules every time I play a Warhammer game, and would rather just look inside a codex or supplement.

- House Rules segment the playerbase
- House Rules often solve one problem and create another
- House Rules are usually based on somewhat limited scopes of the game. They often falter when they encounter models or even entire factions their creators are unfamiliar with.
- House Rules do not often play well with new releases, which are often done aware of issues with existing rules/and models and include changes to compensate.
- House Rules do not absorb official errata well.

Basically, if you've ever worked with code, house rules are what happens when two people work on the same file simultaneously. Both sets of changes might improve things, but when they both go to check in their changes. the version conflicts are often a mess to deal with.

„Officialdom” has a very strong grip on the community and there are two main reasons for it.

First is pick-up games culture that is dominant way to get games. True gaming friendships are a rarity, most people have gaming acquaintances at most, so everything that increses the need for pre-game talk/negotiations or prolonged, repeated communication/meetings increases the difficulty of gaming first and adds to experience second for those people. Even official set of narrative add-ons is too much for most folks that restrict themselves to matched-play subset only.

The second reason why you don’t see more unofficial rules/codices out in the open is that once a small group of likeminded players that are all in for such sort of things get established it branches out and becomes self-sufficient. There is very little reason to present fandexes or rules reworks that work well for one group to the general public, because there are always more people who will point out why they don’t like your work (often in not so polite ways) than those who will give you usefull feedback, and even less those who will adapt your work for their own use. It is just not worth the time you might otherwise spend on more work on your rules or more games with them.

And a word about popular houserules formats like ITC - there is only so much you can modify on the basic level of rules that does not break higher level rules interactions. ITC creates it’s very own meta by means of set of missions and terrain rules. You could change point costs if you seek balance, but that is basically it. Go deeper, change basic rules and you immediately must adjust all existing codices to accomodate. Add a fandex and you must convince a very uncompromising community that this fandex is fair and balanced and we all know those endless public balance discussions...

And one more point from experience - writing rules and codices takes a lot of effort, rarely anyone is willing to go to such lenghts just to play a 3hrs game once or twice a month. GW rules as flawed as they are, are readily available.

INTA and ITC used to due this during the dark days of 6th and 7th Edition 40K. The rules were widely considered to be unplayable straight from the book and GW refused to errata the general rules or the Codexes.

With the advent of 8th Edition, the playing community abandoned the practice. Now there are just slight adjustments and custom missions.

 spaceelf wrote:
My question is, if GWs underlying system is salvagable, why don't groups attempt to balanace the game by making more drastic rules changes, such as changing points costs, or changing rules?

Speaking from experience, house rules cause suspicion. Is this a rule that is going to unfairly help the player who created it? Do I have the time and mental energy to jump through all the intellectual hoops required to evaluate this rule in conjunction with every other relevant rule in 40K?

This is why, in my experience, small house rules (what counts as what for terrain, assault weapons working as intended, etc.) are more amenable and widely accepted than larger points changes.

Its very difficult to keep balance in a game with over 20 factions and a staggering amount of models - not even counting weapon and upgrade choices. Play testing alone is going to be a nightmare.

The justification I usually get from the people I play with is that they want to keep to a broader standardized model where random people can walk in and play a game without being told "Oh, we don't play Warhammer, we play our strange homemade version".

I've rebuilt a lot of the game but I don't expect it to get much play if I'm not at the table.

 spaceelf wrote:
40k is notoriously imbalanced. Despite this, over the past decade the tournament scene has greatly expanded. Large tournaments and rules groups like NOVA and ITC have created new missions / win conditions. These new rules can dramatically change the face of the game. However, I believe they are still far short of balancing it.

My question is, if GWs underlying system is salvagable, why don't groups attempt to balanace the game by making more drastic rules changes, such as changing points costs, or changing rules?

Short answer : Try it!

Long answer:
* Getting agreement for balance is hard, getting people to agree on anything related to this is very hard given their own view, the massive number of combinations and possible interactions.
* Decent playtesting is long, can be boring and takes alot time.

eg: Try and get agreement on how much a basic Imperial guardsman is worth....(I dare you)

We have used House rule packs successfully- but even amongstgood friends we had arguments, disagreements and compromises - it was an improvement over 6th/7th but that was such a bad rules set it had to be.

Basically everything people have said. While I play(ed) a heavily modified version of 40K, I only play with 7-8 other people in my local group. Issues can be huge:

1) Tournament prep...gotta play by the main rules.
2) Pick-up games, gotta play by the main rules.
3) Every time an FAQ or Errata comes out, you then need to FAQ or Errata your house rules, which can be a huge process.
4) GW games have very quick edition turn-around. A quality community re-write (ala YakTribe with Necromunda, etc.) can be a 5-10 year process to make something super squared away.
5) Introducing new gamers or friends can be a bit problematic.

The best way to tackle this is only if you have a small dedicated group who all agree to "fix" the game (it's not as difficult as people make it out to be), and stick to it. However, so many 40K gamers are spazzes with short attention spans, this can be a tough ask in many gaming groups.

 spaceelf wrote:
My question is, if GWs underlying system is salvagable, why don't groups attempt to balanace the game by making more drastic rules changes, such as changing points costs, or changing rules?

Because if you actually succeed in a meaningful way GW will cease and desist your rules out of existence.

Large-scale house rulesets like ITC also have a toxic and negative effect on the gamebalance in the long run because of the difficulty of trying to balance rules and armies for two different styles of play.

While there aren't many house rules per say, the homebrew missions employed by ITC are - while internally balanced quite well - not built with the same priorities as GW-created missions. There's a huge emphasis on killing power, driven mostly by the fact that going the distance and playing for objectives will usually not score enough points to win tournaments, while tabling your opponent early usually will.
There's also the time constraints to consider, which heavily punish large horde armies and MSU while giving extra freedom to smaller, elite armies or armies which require less individual rolls.
This is not a strictly bad setup - in fact, it's quite good for what it is and facilitates relatively smooth, consistent tournament play - but it means that a lot of armies see very different results in tournament play than in casual play. (Sisters of Battle are a recent example of an army that, in addition to desperately needing an FAQ, are a fairly strong army in non-ITC settings, but struggle in ITC tournament settings.)

So, as a game designer, how do you balance that? GW seems to write and balance their releases based off of their own missions, but then updates points values based off of the results of public tournaments, and I can't for the life of me understand why they do it this way.

Edit, since I realized I never directly described my opinion on GW missions: They seem balanced far less heavily towards DPS. Most Eternal War missions award no points for direct killing with the exception of First Strike and Slay the Warlord, and give almost all points for holding objectives and playing the mission. The only reward for killing is that your opponent can't contest or hold their objectives or take away yours, which is pretty significant in its own right. This makes hordes, MSU, and tanky armies much more viable since they can score points even without massive DPS, but doesn't leave glass cannon armies out in the cold since killing your enemy still provides tactical utility. It's my personal favorite for balanced tournament play, but needs two restrictions: The missions need to be announced in advance, and time constraints need to be a lot more generous than ITC.

Maelstrom missions, meanwhile, give somewhat more room for killing since there's about a dozen cards which directly reward DPS, but the incentive their is less to play to an overarching mission and more to deal with reactive challenges. Deciding how to interact with new goals every turn makes for poor tournament play, but can provide for extremely interesting and fun pickup games due to the on-the-fly nature of the game.

I understand that the official rules have authority and that house rules can cause suspision, and divide the playerbase.

However, GW rules are terribly balanced to the point of unplayability. The community is already involved in modifying the rules, a la ITC.

Maybe I will give it a try.

I strongly suspect that changing points costs cannot fix everything. But it is worth considering how much can be fixed with it.

I routinely create whatever rule I like. I change cost of weapons. Add completely new abilities. I add new mechanics like for example that psychic unbinding is affected by amount of enemy psykers nearby. I play my games with armor values, penetration drop off. I will print my rules out too.

I do not know why most people are so slavish when it comes to authority. If big brother doesn't explicitly state that it is fine, they just can't function. Recently I had revealed on Reddit that there is an excellent loophole for new peope to get into W40k for 20 bucks. You only need to buy Adeptus Titanicus knights and you you have brand new army for 20 bucks. Oh, how much nerd rage I had encountered.

Houserules are basically forks and patches to a codebase. Over time they become unmaintainable.

What makes more sense is writing your own rules from scratch. Check out https://onepagerules.com/portfolio/grimdark-future/. There are others too.

A.T. wrote:

 spaceelf wrote:
My question is, if GWs underlying system is salvagable, why don't groups attempt to balanace the game by making more drastic rules changes, such as changing points costs, or changing rules?

Because if you actually succeed in a meaningful way GW will cease and desist your rules out of existence.

They actually can't do this. You simply can't sell them if you're linking names directly to 40K. There is nothing GW can do to stop you from playing with your miniatures in any way you want.

 Elbows wrote:

1) Tournament prep...gotta play by the main rules.
2) Pick-up games, gotta play by the main rules.
3) Every time an FAQ or Errata comes out, you then need to FAQ or Errata your house rules, which can be a huge process.
4) GW games have very quick edition turn-around. A quality community re-write (ala YakTribe with Necromunda, etc.) can be a 5-10 year process to make something super squared away.
5) Introducing new gamers or friends can be a bit problematic.

3, 4, & 5 is less of a problem depending were you start.
if you are going with a more independent rules set that is not just a patch you can ignore Erratas/FAQ and new Editions from GW and introducing new people is not different
1 & 2 are the problems, and if you don't have a major TO supporting your version of the game it won't fly outside the local group


But overall it will be easier to just take an existing game and write lists for it to use GW models at local games than to try to create 40k rules

 Elbows wrote:
They actually can't do this. You simply can't sell them if you're linking names directly to 40K. There is nothing GW can do to stop you from playing with your miniatures in any way you want.

However they can and have stopped people from publishing unit and weapon stats, etc.

"Why don't more people do this?"

- Remember the INAT/Adepticon FAQ?

- I think a few game designers got their start trying to fix what GW refused to.

To be honest, it's a lot easier to just give up on 40k, and see what the rest of modern wargaming has to offer, than it is to try to fix 40k. Look at some of the discussions that take place in the proposed rules section concerning how to "fix" command points. An actual solution to command points has to have all of the following features:
* Address the issues with stratagem variability
* Address the force composition issues
* Have enough playtesting with all of the forces to demonstrate that it's an improvement

GW can get away with putting out an edition change that says 'If your army book references a rule that doesn't exist, just ignore it. Regardless of how radically that changed your unit's effectiveness, we're not going to change anyone's point values". Third parties trying to convince people to use their alternate rules don't have that luxury.

SamusDrake wrote:
Its very difficult to keep balance in a game with over 20 factions and a staggering amount of models - not even counting weapon and upgrade choices. Play testing alone is going to be a nightmare.

Which is why community should do it. They are better qualified and top of that community has interest in balanced rules. Gw's interest lies in unbalanced. Gw doesn't want balance

A.T. wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
They actually can't do this. You simply can't sell them if you're linking names directly to 40K. There is nothing GW can do to stop you from playing with your miniatures in any way you want.

However they can and have stopped people from publishing unit and weapon stats, etc.

It also depends on where you are. Under US copyright law fan projects that don't make money are generally covered under "fair use" and you can't sue over them, but common law "fair dealing" is a lot more restrictive on the purposes you're putting the copyrighted material to, and outside the Commonwealth you've got no chance.

A.T. wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
They actually can't do this. You simply can't sell them if you're linking names directly to 40K. There is nothing GW can do to stop you from playing with your miniatures in any way you want.

However they can and have stopped people from publishing unit and weapon stats, etc.

For a fandex? Which? If you mean copy-pasting GW pts then sure, but AFAIK GW will not stop you from creating a list of your desired costs and sharing it for free.

 vict0988 wrote:
For a fandex? Which? If you mean copy-pasting GW pts then sure, but AFAIK GW will not stop you from creating a list of your desired costs and sharing it for free.

I guess the highest profile incident would be the wave of cease and desists that GW sent out in 2009. It was pretty broad - rules summaries, army builders, etc.
Dakka link - https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/264704.page

Of course that was 10 years ago, just sticks out to me as that was when I was writing my own rules.

A.T. wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
For a fandex? Which? If you mean copy-pasting GW pts then sure, but AFAIK GW will not stop you from creating a list of your desired costs and sharing it for free.

I guess the highest profile incident would be the wave of cease and desists that GW sent out in 2009. It was pretty broad - rules summaries, army builders, etc.
Dakka link - https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/264704.page

Of course that was 10 years ago, just sticks out to me as that was when I was writing my own rules.

How were you affected? I've shared my codexes for four years now, can't say they'll never get targeted, but they'll never get targeted. That's from the perspective of someone that only started the hobby 10-ish years ago it and only started sharing fan rules 4 years ago. Making a list of names and desired changes pretty much cannot be theft, using GW's promo material or art is when it is used to promote your material and not to discuss the promo material, copying most of the content of a codex probably is, but I think you'll have trouble hunting people down for a wish-list of changes. Not to mention people working with GW being given access for free and continuing to show rules and pts in their entirety, it's fair to say GW policy changed a lot these past four years.

lot's of people do, it's just not talked about much because frankly when you start talking about "Well in my gamesd with my house rules" it's irrelevant to everyone whose not playing in your games

I play a heavily house ruled version of 6th and I can assure you i wouldnt be to everyone's taste: house ruling is great in that it helps you bend the game to how you enjoy it and to achieve it often means solving problems we personnaly encounter in my group with our habits, armies, and scnarios.

So is that that we have house ruled deepstrike because we dislike the suidcide drop delete button it can be, melee to help the orks out and make the process simpler, a few units to make them a bit more viable and cohorts of other stuff. But if you were to play by our rules you would maybe hate it!

House ruling is what I love in tabletops since I never go to tournaments: there's nothing to stop me and my group from making the game what we like.

 vict0988 wrote:
How were you affected? I've shared my codexes for four years now, can't say they'll never get targeted, but they'll never get targeted. That's from the perspective of someone that only started the hobby 10-ish years ago it and only started sharing fan rules 4 years ago.

Personally not too much. I was asked to take down a mid 5e fandex as a precaution by a forum mod, but as indicated early 5e was when GWs approach to their IP was 'bring the hammer down'.

Times change, though not to much that I think they'd let a genuine rival to their product slide.

A.T. wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
How were you affected? I've shared my codexes for four years now, can't say they'll never get targeted, but they'll never get targeted. That's from the perspective of someone that only started the hobby 10-ish years ago it and only started sharing fan rules 4 years ago.

Personally not too much. I was asked to take down a mid 5e fandex as a precaution by a forum mod, but as indicated early 5e was when GWs approach to their IP was 'bring the hammer down'.

Times change, though not to much that I think they'd let a genuine rival to their product slide.

How about 9th age? That got some traction as Age of Sigmar was born. It seems to have developed a universe of its own, but it's still largely a copy of WHFB.