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 An Actual Englishman wrote:
It seems to me that whenever there's a hyper points efficient unit 9 times out of 10 it's from FW. I guess GW want to shift some of that expensive resin, huh.

Hanlon's Razor.

What's far more likely is that GW's base rules create the issues that allow FW units to be unbalanced because GW tends to write their codices in a vacuum. I mean, do you really think anyone who wrote the Iron Hands book even considered what the rules would do with Leviathan Dreads?

I wish they removed FW, removed supplements, removed Vigilus, removed WD rules and removed PA. Lots of the rules themselves can stay with updated version for each factions codex but the rule bloat is just too insane. Put some of the FW units like those for custodes in a codex update and then put 90%+ of the others into Legends. It has nothing to do with actual power level.

If you were to actually buy the rules for a IF list with a FW unit, Vigilus detachment etc you would pay more for the rules alone than I paid for my whole Empire of Dust army for Kings of War. I paid like 180€ and I think all the rules for a IF only list is just above that and spread out in 6 books and quite a few online documents.

This is why I and a few other players I know have put 40k on the backburner since the rules for this game is chaos and almost impossible to keep up with. It will just be harder and harder for GW to "balance" all the rules and for us players to keep track of.

Klickor wrote:
I wish they removed FW, removed supplements, removed Vigilus, removed WD rules and removed PA. Lots of the rules themselves can stay with updated version for each factions codex but the rule bloat is just too insane. Put some of the FW units like those for custodes in a codex update and then put 90%+ of the others into Legends. It has nothing to do with actual power level.

If you were to actually buy the rules for a IF list with a FW unit, Vigilus detachment etc you would pay more for the rules alone than I paid for my whole Empire of Dust army for Kings of War. I paid like 180€ and I think all the rules for a IF only list is just above that and spread out in 6 books and quite a few online documents.

This is why I and a few other players I know have put 40k on the backburner since the rules for this game is chaos and almost impossible to keep up with. It will just be harder and harder for GW to "balance" all the rules and for us players to keep track of.

All of those bar the codex are optional, simply don't buy them? but Any model that has a rule that you can purchase should keep some support imo, even if it involves rolling them into a new codex and out of FW.

Regardless of optional, it is inarguable that a ruleset dispersed amongst 5-6 sources is incredibly sloppy design.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
For a tournament, there is no harm with removing FW at all.

Maybe not for you personally, but as someone who fell in love with Custodies in 8th this would kill any chance of fielding a competitive force in an ITC. Our TROOPS are Forge World units.

Banning Forge World is not the solution, fixing the mess you created is (looking at you GW). No one was talking about banning Chaplain Dreadnoughts until GW flipped the table on the meta.

meh, as a Ravenwing player, I'm not moved. And I'm looking at the Custodes book right now which distinctly has Troops in it. I also saw many Eldar players doing well without Troops of any kind.

As for GW doing it right, good luck with that.

OK, I'll step back a little bit. It would be better for the game to temporary remove FW, and the Vigilus books until GW balanced them accordingly. heck, take out the marine expansions too for tournaments, that would go a long way to take care of that crap. You would then see a lot of marine soup though for sure.

 bullyboy wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
For a tournament, there is no harm with removing FW at all.

Maybe not for you personally, but as someone who fell in love with Custodies in 8th this would kill any chance of fielding a competitive force in an ITC. Our TROOPS are Forge World units.

Banning Forge World is not the solution, fixing the mess you created is (looking at you GW). No one was talking about banning Chaplain Dreadnoughts until GW flipped the table on the meta.

meh, as a Ravenwing player, I'm not moved. And I'm looking at the Custodes book right now which distinctly has Troops in it.

As for GW doing it right, good luck with that.

The Custoides codex has A troop choice, but it's not competitive, by comparison that would be like having only Scouts (and then only if Scouts sucked [they don't]).
The only way to play Custodies competitively is with FW models, and even then they are mid-tier at best /end

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
It seems to me that whenever there's a hyper points efficient unit 9 times out of 10 it's from FW.

Hrm, from my perspective, 8E's balance issues have certainly not been dominated by FW units.

Of the balance issues in 8E, FW related stuff has been largely what, Malefic Lords in the early index days, and a couple Dreads with FW post Iron Hands (and Iron Hands would still be broken without them)? Nothing on the level of say, the Castellan, or even the consternation that humble Guardsmen has garnered over the course of the edition. Certainly nothing FW related in 6E or 7E matched Heldrakes, Wraithlords, Deathstars, Scatterbikes, etc in the competitive metagame.

I guess GW want to shift some of that expensive resin, huh. FW units also contain some of the most sloppy rules writing I've ever seen that is, frankly, embarrassing.

I don't really see why there should be a separate FW rule book for units. They should be included in codexes for clarity and balance. Although, that said, they're not even consistent with this - my Warboss on Warbike is a codex entry despite existing only as a FW miniature, as are my Nobs on Bikes.

This largely comes down to the fact that GW wants codex books to just be core studio stuff that comes from the main product lines, and FW was doing stuff they couldn't do in plastic or didn't have the studio bandwidth for, and for some reason has no desire to change this.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Lol, go get the statistics in this one, because your assumption is utter nonsense.

Obliterators, plasma termites,letters, Alpha legion, plagueburst crawler plaguebearers,etc are all from gw as are -4 to hit Lord discordants and other BS of that calibre. And that is just chaos.

Further the whole of 8th nobody cared about fw dreads , IH show up and Look what happened.

People have been using FW dreads for some time. They are efficient without IH, just not broken.

I distinctly recall a number of broken FW stuff, and it always felt the most egregious.

E - I probably should've been clearer - I'm talking about since all editions of 40k, not just 8th.

a buddy of mine this weekend was talkgin abotu the FW balancing and the dreamed up scenario i hope goes as he put it

GW rules writing team inviting FW to discuss rules

GW employees "here take a seat, welcome, we can begin the slideshow"

gw employee "for the first slide we have the leviatan, what the actual gak were you thinking, now see slide 2, the warhound titan... in what world are these rules points and units even belonging on the same table?"

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Lol, go get the statistics in this one, because your assumption is utter nonsense.

Obliterators, plasma termites,letters, Alpha legion, plagueburst crawler plaguebearers,etc are all from gw as are -4 to hit Lord discordants and other BS of that calibre. And that is just chaos.

Further the whole of 8th nobody cared about fw dreads , IH show up and Look what happened.

People have been using FW dreads for some time. They are efficient without IH, just not broken.

I distinctly recall a number of broken FW stuff, and it always felt the most egregious.

You sure?

Because let's see 7th, nope, FW wasn't even top cheddar, even the one aboslute genious purge formation applying to Vraks arty tyrant wasn't a top contender for the most broken stuff.
6th? Are you having a giggle mate?
5th (member GK)?

So then see 8th, ok we had Malefic spam, when there were A not many cheaper psykers and B allying was utterly stupid and C Ro3 not beeing a thing, you know what we also saw, flyrants alot of them. Then what was there, castellans, IG batteries, ynnari. Congrats, you have found 1 exemple of a FW unit beeing fethed due to GW having no clue about allies at the start of 8th which might aswell be renamed to be another edition completely at this point considering how many more rule interactions we have now.Superfriends also existed aswell. Oh the possesed bomb is now also a thing (cue GW and PA) i guess and well IH of all sorts, and marines of any flavour beyond some supplements that were more moderate comparatively..

 Vaktathi wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
It seems to me that whenever there's a hyper points efficient unit 9 times out of 10 it's from FW.

Hrm, from my perspective, 8E's balance issues have certainly not been dominated by FW units.

Of the balance issues in 8E, FW related stuff has been largely what, Malefic Lords in the early index days, and a couple Dreads with FW post Iron Hands (and Iron Hands would still be broken without them)? Nothing on the level of say, the Castellan, or even the consternation that humble Guardsmen has garnered over the course of the edition. Certainly nothing FW related in 6E or 7E matched Heldrakes, Wraithlords, Deathstars, Scatterbikes, etc in the competitive metagame.

Again. Not just talking about 8th ed.

There were a number of FW units key to certain 7E builds iirc.

"GW plans to rebalance all of FW's rules"

I don't suppose they could actually finish writing them first?

Not Online!!! wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Lol, go get the statistics in this one, because your assumption is utter nonsense.

Obliterators, plasma termites,letters, Alpha legion, plagueburst crawler plaguebearers,etc are all from gw as are -4 to hit Lord discordants and other BS of that calibre. And that is just chaos.

Further the whole of 8th nobody cared about fw dreads , IH show up and Look what happened.

People have been using FW dreads for some time. They are efficient without IH, just not broken.

I distinctly recall a number of broken FW stuff, and it always felt the most egregious.

You sure?

Because let's see 7th, nope, FW wasn't even top cheddar, even the one aboslute genious purge formation applying to Vraks arty tyrant wasn't a top contender for the most broken stuff.
6th? Are you having a giggle mate?
5th (member GK)?

So then see 8th, ok we had Malefic spam, when there were A not many cheaper psykers and B allying was utterly stupid and C Ro3 not beeing a thing, you know what we also saw, flyrants alot of them. Then what was there, castellans, IG batteries, ynnari. Congrats, you have found 1 exemple of a FW unit beeing fethed due to GW having no clue about allies at the start of 8th which might aswell be renamed to be another edition completely at this point considering how many more rule interactions we have now.Superfriends also existed aswell. Oh the possesed bomb is now also a thing (cue GW and PA) i guess and well IH of all sorts, and marines of any flavour beyond some supplements that were more moderate comparatively..

Why are you so defensive about FW?

Because you are demonstrably wrong?

7th had Skatach Wraithknights. Generally, FW was a non-factor because of bad integration with the Detachment system which dominated 7th. It'd be like if FW not only didn't benefit from all the IH buffs, but cancelled them in any Detachment they were in.

8.16 had Big Bird and Malefic Lords.

8.17 had CSM and SM Fire Raptor.

8.18 had Custodes vehicles and butcher cannon Dreads.

8.19 has Leviathan.

Those are the truly gross units, then we have units like the Tyranid -1 to hit HQ, AM Vulture Gunships and the Necron Gauss Pylon that while not directly gross were some of the very best units for their respective factions. I think it's to some degree fair to be outraged when FW is the most competitive option for a faction, generally, FW is pretty weak though. In 6th the idea that FW was OP was still widespread enough that I think it was banned at many tournaments.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
For a tournament, there is no harm with removing FW at all.

Maybe not for you personally, but as someone who fell in love with Custodies in 8th this would kill any chance of fielding a competitive force in an ITC. Our TROOPS are Forge World units.

Banning Forge World is not the solution, fixing the mess you created is (looking at you GW). No one was talking about banning Chaplain Dreadnoughts until GW flipped the table on the meta.

meh, as a Ravenwing player, I'm not moved. And I'm looking at the Custodes book right now which distinctly has Troops in it.

As for GW doing it right, good luck with that.

The Custoides codex has A troop choice, but it's not competitive, by comparison that would be like having only Scouts (and then only if Scouts sucked [they don't]).
The only way to play Custodies competitively is with FW models, and even then they are mid-tier at best /end

there are a lot of units in many books that suck, you were just being disingenuous that you needed FW to play. You don't.
besides, Custodes aren't even a fleshed out faction and should probably soup at this point until GW gets round to expanding them.

And to add on about the Dreads, yes, it's been like this for 8th. When asking for List advice for Deathwatch the response was always "take a Levi dread". Or for DA "Take Contemptor dreads". Never seen anyone advocate actual dreads within the codex before. Why is that?

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

Lol, go get the statistics in this one, because your assumption is utter nonsense.

Obliterators, plasma termites,letters, Alpha legion, plagueburst crawler plaguebearers,etc are all from gw as are -4 to hit Lord discordants and other BS of that calibre. And that is just chaos.

Further the whole of 8th nobody cared about fw dreads , IH show up and Look what happened.

People have been using FW dreads for some time. They are efficient without IH, just not broken.

I distinctly recall a number of broken FW stuff, and it always felt the most egregious.

You sure?

Because let's see 7th, nope, FW wasn't even top cheddar, even the one aboslute genious purge formation applying to Vraks arty tyrant wasn't a top contender for the most broken stuff.
6th? Are you having a giggle mate?
5th (member GK)?

So then see 8th, ok we had Malefic spam, when there were A not many cheaper psykers and B allying was utterly stupid and C Ro3 not beeing a thing, you know what we also saw, flyrants alot of them. Then what was there, castellans, IG batteries, ynnari. Congrats, you have found 1 exemple of a FW unit beeing fethed due to GW having no clue about allies at the start of 8th which might aswell be renamed to be another edition completely at this point considering how many more rule interactions we have now.Superfriends also existed aswell. Oh the possesed bomb is now also a thing (cue GW and PA) i guess and well IH of all sorts, and marines of any flavour beyond some supplements that were more moderate comparatively..

Why are you so defensive about FW?

TBH most FW units are utter turd, I'm not up to speed on orks but are any of their FW units OP in any capacity? The biggest offenders of the edition, so far, seem to be the castellan, shield captains on bikes, smash captains, IG CP farms, shining spears + dark reapers in old ynnari lists. None of those used FW units, only some of the marine lists recently.

 bullyboy wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
For a tournament, there is no harm with removing FW at all.

Maybe not for you personally, but as someone who fell in love with Custodies in 8th this would kill any chance of fielding a competitive force in an ITC. Our TROOPS are Forge World units.

Banning Forge World is not the solution, fixing the mess you created is (looking at you GW). No one was talking about banning Chaplain Dreadnoughts until GW flipped the table on the meta.

meh, as a Ravenwing player, I'm not moved. And I'm looking at the Custodes book right now which distinctly has Troops in it.

As for GW doing it right, good luck with that.

The Custoides codex has A troop choice, but it's not competitive, by comparison that would be like having only Scouts (and then only if Scouts sucked [they don't]).
The only way to play Custodies competitively is with FW models, and even then they are mid-tier at best /end

there are a lot of units in many books that suck, you were just being disingenuous that you needed FW to play. You don't.
besides, Custodes aren't even a fleshed out faction and should probably soup at this point until GW gets round to expanding them.

sisters of silence really should have been part of the book. they were introduced as talons of the empiror and should have stayed together to compliemnt eachother

While I agree that FW needs rebalancing, I still voted no because it's the entirety of 40K that needs a rebalancing. There are things in 40k that just does not make any sense in terms of balance : why is that some armies have 6 pages of stratagems while overs have just 3 or 4 ? Same for relics : why is it that some codex have 1 page of relics while others have4 pages or even more ?
Even in the same codex there are things that just does not make sense. For exemple the Kheres pattern assault cannon is a 22 pts 24 inch Heavy 6 s7 pa -1 d1 weapon and the twin ironhail autocannon is 20 pts 48 inch Heavy 6 S7 pa -1 d2 gun ??? How does that makes sense ?
So jus discussing FW is pointless in my opinion : it's the entirety of the 40K rukeset that needs a change.

 vict0988 wrote:
7th had Skatach Wraithknights. Generally, FW was a non-factor because of bad integration with the Detachment system which dominated 7th. It'd be like if FW not only didn't benefit from all the IH buffs, but cancelled them in any Detachment they were in.

8.16 had Big Bird and Malefic Lords.

8.17 had CSM and SM Fire Raptor.

8.18 had Custodes vehicles and butcher cannon Dreads.

8.19 has Leviathan.

Those are the truly gross units, then we have units like the Tyranid -1 to hit HQ, AM Vulture Gunships and the Necron Gauss Pylon that while not directly gross were some of the very best units for their respective factions. I think it's to some degree fair to be outraged when FW is the most competitive option for a faction, generally, FW is pretty weak though. In 6th the idea that FW was OP was still widespread enough that I think it was banned at many tournaments.

Skatach Wraithknights were no more an offender than the regular ones. Imagine saying a unit is broken for being based on a broken unit to begin with! Also Butcher Cannons and the Custodes vehicles were not broken to begin with and merely things holding up armies that were poor to begin with. THEN you're making claim the Leviathan is broken when nothing happened until Iron Hands appeared.

So no, that outrage is illogical and should be pointed out as such.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
For a tournament, there is no harm with removing FW at all.

Maybe not for you personally, but as someone who fell in love with Custodies in 8th this would kill any chance of fielding a competitive force in an ITC. Our TROOPS are Forge World units.

Banning Forge World is not the solution, fixing the mess you created is (looking at you GW). No one was talking about banning Chaplain Dreadnoughts until GW flipped the table on the meta.

meh, as a Ravenwing player, I'm not moved. And I'm looking at the Custodes book right now which distinctly has Troops in it.

As for GW doing it right, good luck with that.

The Custoides codex has A troop choice, but it's not competitive, by comparison that would be like having only Scouts (and then only if Scouts sucked [they don't]).
The only way to play Custodies competitively is with FW models, and even then they are mid-tier at best /end

Best custode list at LVO (the most competitive tournament period) was 5-1 (68th over all out of over 700 so top 10% army...) and was mostly that non-competitive troop choice.

Dudeface wrote:

Klickor wrote:
I wish they removed FW, removed supplements, removed Vigilus, removed WD rules and removed PA. Lots of the rules themselves can stay with updated version for each factions codex but the rule bloat is just too insane. Put some of the FW units like those for custodes in a codex update and then put 90%+ of the others into Legends. It has nothing to do with actual power level.

If you were to actually buy the rules for a IF list with a FW unit, Vigilus detachment etc you would pay more for the rules alone than I paid for my whole Empire of Dust army for Kings of War. I paid like 180€ and I think all the rules for a IF only list is just above that and spread out in 6 books and quite a few online documents.

This is why I and a few other players I know have put 40k on the backburner since the rules for this game is chaos and almost impossible to keep up with. It will just be harder and harder for GW to "balance" all the rules and for us players to keep track of.

All of those bar the codex are optional, simply don't buy them? but Any model that has a rule that you can purchase should keep some support imo, even if it involves rolling them into a new codex and out of FW.

Its not as much as being forced to buy them but to illustrate how beginner unfriendly the game is right now. You cant really recommend a new person to buy the rules before they have an army anymore. Just a waste of money, sharing a download link and showing battlescribe is much much more helpful. I havent bought a single book so far in this edition since I jumped back in just a year ago and found out I needed a bunch of pdfs anyway and the space marine supplements and the following PA books are just making my blood boil due to how bad they are for the game. Not in the actual rules but how they make the game harder to learn, how much a cash grab they are and all the apparent lack of care GW showed when they wrote them. BoB is spitting the consumer in the face in how bad it is done.

You could probably build a legal battleforged list that needs 13 or more different rules sources besides FAQs and Erratas. How the hell am I supposed to know if my opponent is cheating or playing stuff wrongly or not if it would take me almost an hour to just go through all the rules he could use in a single game. I havent seen any one cheat so far in this edition but the amount of misunderstandings and misplays due to all the different rules sources and wordings are staggering. I can play most wargames 2-3 times and have my 4th or 5th game go smoother than my next 40k game when it comes to playing the rules right. And most other games have 3-10x the amount of core rules and it is still so much easier.

This game needs to prune extra rules and models AND then rebalance the game. GW cant do it with the huge amounts of models and rules they have know and rebalancing at this point is just pointless if it is GW that does it. Will just change what units are bad or broken as usual and not really fix anything.

bananathug wrote:
Best custode list at LVO (the most competitive tournament period) was 5-1 (68th over all out of over 700 so top 10% army...) and was mostly that non-competitive troop choice.

I'll be honest, i gave up on them after the SM release.

This is an excellent point, i might have been a little overzealous in my defense of FW but my point still stands, you can't remove FW after ten years of being an integral part of both game systems.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

bananathug wrote:
Best custode list at LVO (the most competitive tournament period) was 5-1 (68th over all out of over 700 so top 10% army...) and was mostly that non-competitive troop choice.

I'll be honest, i gave up on them after the SM release.

This is an excellent point, i might have been a little overzealous in my defense of FW but my point still stands, you can't remove FW after ten years of being an integral part of both game systems.

Doesn't the placement and list of that player prove that FW is not integral to the game? It's just an add-on, ten times more so than any of the actual supplements at least. "So do you want free rules?" "Yes?" "Ok, here ya go!"

Yoyoyo wrote:
Regardless of optional, it is inarguable that a ruleset dispersed amongst 5-6 sources is incredibly sloppy design.

isnt this how most RPG books are? sure they are cheaper but there are a lot of them for the same system.

 Desubot wrote:

Yoyoyo wrote:
Regardless of optional, it is inarguable that a ruleset dispersed amongst 5-6 sources is incredibly sloppy design.

isnt this how most RPG books are? sure they are cheaper but there are a lot of them for the same system.

In my experience with TTRPGs, there's a core set of rules, usually in one book, though D&D does three.

Then there's more sourcebooks that have options for you to use, but ideally, they're balanced against each other. You get more OPTIONS, but not more POWER.

So, if I wanted to play D&D 5E with EVERY SOURCEBOOK, I'm dropping $500+, probably (didn't actually google all the prices). But if I just want to play D&D 5E, I only need to drop a little under $120 on Amazon. Plus it comes with some dice! And that's the cost for books that the group only needs one of TOTAL, so you can split the cost among everyone playing.

Whereas the supplements for SM are literally extra power at no cost other than the money it takes to buy the book. That's NOT how it should be.

 Desubot wrote:

Yoyoyo wrote:
Regardless of optional, it is inarguable that a ruleset dispersed amongst 5-6 sources is incredibly sloppy design.

isnt this how most RPG books are? sure they are cheaper but there are a lot of them for the same system.

No. The vast majority of RPGs can be played entirely with 1 book.

Every other book is optional. DnDs Dungeon Masters Guide isn't needed to play. It's just extremely useful. The monster Manual isn't needed to play (you could just make up monsters stat blocks) it's just extremely useful. Every other book adds options (but generally speaking not power creep) and offers fluff or prebuilt adventures that you don't need to play the game and are just more sources to make the DMs life easier. Optional quality of life improvements.

1 book and some paper and pencils is all you need to play a RPG.

Dudeface wrote:

Klickor wrote:
I wish they removed FW, removed supplements, removed Vigilus, removed WD rules and removed PA. Lots of the rules themselves can stay with updated version for each factions codex but the rule bloat is just too insane. Put some of the FW units like those for custodes in a codex update and then put 90%+ of the others into Legends. It has nothing to do with actual power level.

If you were to actually buy the rules for a IF list with a FW unit, Vigilus detachment etc you would pay more for the rules alone than I paid for my whole Empire of Dust army for Kings of War. I paid like 180€ and I think all the rules for a IF only list is just above that and spread out in 6 books and quite a few online documents.

This is why I and a few other players I know have put 40k on the backburner since the rules for this game is chaos and almost impossible to keep up with. It will just be harder and harder for GW to "balance" all the rules and for us players to keep track of.

All of those bar the codex are optional, simply don't buy them? but Any model that has a rule that you can purchase should keep some support imo, even if it involves rolling them into a new codex and out of FW.

Psychic Awakening is not optional. It is required. They are full on codex updates.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

Yoyoyo wrote:
Regardless of optional, it is inarguable that a ruleset dispersed amongst 5-6 sources is incredibly sloppy design.

isnt this how most RPG books are? sure they are cheaper but there are a lot of them for the same system.

No. The vast majority of RPGs can be played entirely with 1 book.

Every other book is optional. DnDs Dungeon Masters Guide isn't needed to play. It's just extremely useful. The monster Manual isn't needed to play (you could just make up monsters stat blocks) it's just extremely useful. Every other book adds options (but generally speaking not power creep) and offers fluff or prebuilt adventures that you don't need to play the game and are just more sources to make the DMs life easier. Optional quality of life improvements.

1 book and some paper and pencils is all you need to play a RPG.

while true... i would say for a beginning DM would have the best experience with at least the monster manual, dungeon masters guide and players handbook. other books and addons being optional. pretty sure adventurer's leage advised gms to have all this as well.

on the 40k front though as the 40k core rules for 8th are literally on a free pamplet you could call that the "rules, get your army codex and ignore all the errata/ and changes and have a good game.

hell you could use the free/downloadable pamplet, an app like battlescribe, and still play a game.

The 'free pamphlet' or Battle Primer is incomplete. It has only the core rules and is really only usable for Open Play. The BRB is still required for all Narrative Play and Matched Play rules.