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 Unit1126PLL wrote:
...

You don't have much imagination for someone who needs your games to have a narrative

JohnnyHell wrote:“My plucky battalion held out long enough for the Guard’s main spearhead to ambush the opponent’s reserve forces, destroy them then wipe out the survivors of this battle. It turned the tide in this sector through one heroic company’s sacrifice.”

There. Took me about six heartbeats to think that up. Not hard!

You can also set the stakes up front if you’re so inclined. Doesn’t all have to be post-rationalisation.

I realise this is a level of *gasp* narrative that may shock and appall some of the wannabe tourney folk. Just look away if that’s you.

Your plucky battalion held out about one minute. Based on the rate of fire of tank cannons (roughly 1 or 2 rounds per turn) the turns are 10-20 seconds long. If we're being generous and saying every turn is 20 seconds of combat, your "plucky battalion" held out for about 100 seconds, and for the last ~40-60 seconds probably was at 30% strength or lower (the point at which most ground units are incapable of resistance in most military documentation).

The number of times in which <100 seconds of combat is the difference between success or failure in an overall sector is minimal, and so if this happens EVERY TIME then I'd argue it's a tortured rationalization.

Sherrypie wrote:Last Crusade game I played I won 50-45 while losing every single model I had (I was required to do lot of Actions, thus being somewhat limited in my ability to dish out pain in return). My Death Guard terminator strike force was sending a message to the Tau by setting one of their important towns on fire deep in their own territory.

Despite total losses, the mission had succeeded. Didn't require much narrative gymnastics to make sense of that.

As for the topic itself: 9th is very much a playable, even enjoyable game, if both players are on the same wavelength on how cut-throat or thematic they want the game to be.

So you lost every single model of Deathguard Terminators and yet you won the battle?

That's exactly what I am talking about. That doesn't make any sense. Terminators are rare and powerful relic suits from an ancient, forgotten age. Losing every single one is a travesty that would likely cripple a warband forever.

Also, I bet your models got experience and "survived" that battle, huh. Wow, so narrative. I guess soldiers in 40k don't even die, especially in suicide missions. Narrative!

Toofast wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
...

You don't have much imagination for someone who needs your games to have a narrative

Or, I choose to actually play a narrative in universe, assuming the rules are intended to function as a replication of what "really would happen" in universe. You know, like rules do

what I don't do is make up rationalizations that literally don't make sense with 2 secs of thought and then say "look how narrative hurr durr". Any old fool can make gak up, but I'd argue it isn't narratively genuine if it makes no effort to actually make sense in-universe.

 Sim-Life wrote:


but if GW designed the game well it SHOULD be playable on Planet Bowling Ball

Serious question: Really?

As I've mentioned before, I don't actually consider myself to be a "Wargamer" - I've played a dozen or so wargames a handful of times, but 40k was the only one that really grabbed me. Having less knowledge of wargames than most dakkanaughts, it's genuine curiosity. I always thought that terrain was always a HUGE part of wargames, and that this was by player choice. I've never known people who either expected or wanted to play on sparse tables.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

The Newman wrote:
I know I'm in a minority for this, but I played 2nd-5th and 8th, and I think 9th is the best version of 40k I've ever played. I've had actual come-from-behind victories in 9th and that's not something I've seen happen very often.

I think it depends on your perspective. I agree the scoring system allows technical victories from behind, but I don't think they are narrative victories.

If my army is reduced to 5 troops minis and your army has a tank and two squads left, the fact that I "win" on VPs doesn't mean anything narratively.* In fact, it I feel like it is a BAD thing that I won the game, because now I have to narratively justify how the hell that happened when the troops would have been obliterated 5 seconds later.

*I realize many forced ex post facto justifications can be offered. That isn't the point.

I know I'll get labeled with calls of "Forge the Narrative" here, but figured I'd chime in anyway.

So first things first: If you want a narrative game, there is no such thing as "and objective" - I mean, that's what they are on the mission sheet of course. But when you put them on the table in a narrative game, that changes:

"The book says I need to put objective A here: this third party model is Darian Krane- the only surviving pilot of a group that did a flyover in enemy territory, and as such, he's got intel."

"The book says the second objective goes here: the panel on this piece of terrain is a data terminal that contains aerial images that can be used to infer patrol patterns."

"The book says I need to put an objective here: Remember two games ago when the Imperials captured the idol of Gork? Well, this building is the Research facility where the artifact is being catalogued."

"The objective says I have to kill vehicles: that's because the vehicles that have come for the idol of Gork are members of the Speedwaaagh that killed crippled Chaplain Greggor Vance, who is still in the care of the apothecarium; the marines are eager for vengeance."

That's the part of the story that happens before deployment. The next part is figuring out why each of the units going for the objectives are the one's chosen for their particular duty- Librarian Immershade is familiar with the defensive features and security protocols common to research facilities, so he can tackle the idol; squad Delphi was once shuttled into a theatre of war by the pilot, so they should be able to make a visual ID., etc.

The story that emerges through the battle is about who got (or failed to get) which "objective" and what that means to the continuing saga of the campaign.

You and I have talked before about how the Crusade system isn't lethal enough- no one actually dies, they all just become incapacitated during battle and then heal up with scars afterwards. I get how that piece may not be ideal for your campaign depending on what you want: I find the high lethality method is good for attrition campaigns where you start with a huge roster which gets whittled down via casualties. For escalation style campaigns like Crusade though, that's a hard system to use. The injury system, while less than perfect, does make the escalation system work.

PenitentJake wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:


but if GW designed the game well it SHOULD be playable on Planet Bowling Ball

Serious question: Really?

As I've mentioned before, I don't actually consider myself to be a "Wargamer" - I've played a dozen or so wargames a handful of times, but 40k was the only one that really grabbed me. Having less knowledge of wargames than most dakkanaughts, it's genuine curiosity. I always thought that terrain was always a HUGE part of wargames, and that this was by player choice. I've never known people who either expected or wanted to play on sparse tables.

It depends on the game and the setting, of course.
A lot of 19th century wargames are open field battles because that's how those armies functioned and how many of the historic battlefields actually were. You'll get some woods and hills on the edges (for assembling the men), but the main engagement area is literally fields & pastures with some fences, hedges and farmhouses, because that is where those infantry blocks and cannon detachments worked*.

*in the sense of firepower and trying to out-'grit' each other. It was a pretty terrible method of warfare from the point of view of modern tactics and strategy.

WFB was often quite similar to that expectation, the table set up was largely for maneuver room. The 'woods in the middle of the board' was something usually only WE players did, and much later the stupid random effect terrain happened and many people wanted to not deal with _any_ of that.

Even in 40k, early games didn't have quite the same obsession with everyone hunkered down in ruins or hiding behind random skyscrapers that appear from nowhere. The first 40k mission was 'battle at the farm' in the RT rulebook, and it was just that. Marines defending a farmhouse from marauding orks advancing across the open space around it. Most WD battle reports for several editions were (iirc) 7-8 pieces of terrain arranged neatly in table quarters. The classic SW vs Orks battle (2nd edition) with pretty much all the named characters mostly involved fighting around a wrecked predator and a hill, with a few pieces of terrain elsewhere on the board.


Now, planet bowling ball is dull. But planet choked-full-of-ruins* with no room for tanks to move is equally dull.

*as is GW's obsession with (human) ruins as the only terrain in a galaxy full of weird and terrible nonsense.

If you were only ever hitting on 6's and he was only ever hitting on 2's then I'd check both your rules because it sounds like someone was playing something wrong somewhere.

The best piece of advice for playing 40k right now is to actually play with the terrain rules. I know that sounds like a ridiculous statement to make but I'm increasingly finding people with the most egregious issues with the current state of the game are literally playing games with basically 0 useable terrain or are often not even using the terrain rules properly. Even then the strength of the terrain rules and their keywords allows you to be flexible with their application; like giving things the obscuring keyword even if they aren't a 5" high ruin for instance. But hey, if you're not even using the obscuring keyword anywhere then I guess it's basically back to 7-8th where armies really did shoot you off the board by turn 2.

@Unit - so you can’t post-rationalise a battle result, yet CAN spend time applying randomly real-world-esque critique of someone else’s attempt at fluff for a result? That’s… sure, ok. I missed the part where the timespan of a game is measured by holding down the trigger and the game ending when your clip runs out. Apply some imagination, man. You’re actively TRYING to not have fun, it seems!

Plus, to real-word you back (patently absurd though any such conversation is) you seem to think people can run an awful long way in a minute, given 5x turns of movement. A turn is not a fixed timespan in my head. You missed out manouvering, aiming, hiding, daring combat, space magic and all the other cool stuff for the sake of a poor attempt at a rebuttal that ignores most of the game.

@Sim-Life - that’s a nonsense take. GW designed the game to use scenery. Not using it and expecting a good game is a fool’s errand.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Sherrypie wrote:Last Crusade game I played I won 50-45 while losing every single model I had (I was required to do lot of Actions, thus being somewhat limited in my ability to dish out pain in return). My Death Guard terminator strike force was sending a message to the Tau by setting one of their important towns on fire deep in their own territory.

Despite total losses, the mission had succeeded. Didn't require much narrative gymnastics to make sense of that.

As for the topic itself: 9th is very much a playable, even enjoyable game, if both players are on the same wavelength on how cut-throat or thematic they want the game to be.

So you lost every single model of Deathguard Terminators and yet you won the battle?

That's exactly what I am talking about. That doesn't make any sense. Terminators are rare and powerful relic suits from an ancient, forgotten age. Losing every single one is a travesty that would likely cripple a warband forever.

Also, I bet your models got experience and "survived" that battle, huh. Wow, so narrative. I guess soldiers in 40k don't even die, especially in suicide missions. Narrative!

In a deep strike where the objective was property damage instead of taking territory? Said damage was caused and the mission thus accomplished. That is winning, yes. Some victories are costlier than others.

As for the survival part, some handwaving is always required to make any miniature game campaign system work unless one goes for a limited campaign roster that gets attritioned down (for the record, I'd love to play some like that, but it requires a dedicated crew). I don't expect every model that goes down as a casualty to die (especially with marines, that can be both teleported away or extricated with Thunderhawks and comparable shuttle craft when incapacitated by injuries), even less so in a game where affecting enemy units requires taking away models as there are no pinning mechanics or wavering fighting spirit to reduce the units' effectiveness instead. 40k as a game has always produced high casualty rates and larger than life personas: it's fun to play campaigns, less fun to create permanent physical models that you couldn't use later on because they died once in a previous game. 1:1 representation between models and their fates in such mechanical frameworks is not a good idea to get stuck on. Like in my example, maybe I did mechanically lose all of my models and still win the scenario, but because the result was a victory, in diegetic terms that meant my force also managed to extract their wounded and slip off with them in the raging firestorm they had caused before the opponent's reinforcements could go through and finish them off instead. 40k games are localised to small areas and last only a short while, showing a highlight reel of a singular clash instead of the larger picture of the war they happen in.

I remember the Space Marine rules (Epic) noted that one turn of Close Combat represented an entire 40K battle!

It's playable, but there's better games.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
I remember the Space Marine rules (Epic) noted that one turn of Close Combat represented an entire 40K battle!

Yup, an assault (or engagement, depending on the edition) which resolves company level clashes does precisely that. There's firefighting, close quarters combat and escalating support from nearby detachments firing in all in one go, as you'd expect from a regular 40k game. In all of these games, it's also pretty fluid on what timescale they're operating on. Heck, even in 40k you might have a full-fledged sunrise or sunset happening between the rounds

PenitentJake wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:


but if GW designed the game well it SHOULD be playable on Planet Bowling Ball

Serious question: Really?

As I've mentioned before, I don't actually consider myself to be a "Wargamer" - I've played a dozen or so wargames a handful of times, but 40k was the only one that really grabbed me. Having less knowledge of wargames than most dakkanaughts, it's genuine curiosity. I always thought that terrain was always a HUGE part of wargames, and that this was by player choice. I've never known people who either expected or wanted to play on sparse tables.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

The Newman wrote:
I know I'm in a minority for this, but I played 2nd-5th and 8th, and I think 9th is the best version of 40k I've ever played. I've had actual come-from-behind victories in 9th and that's not something I've seen happen very often.

I think it depends on your perspective. I agree the scoring system allows technical victories from behind, but I don't think they are narrative victories.

If my army is reduced to 5 troops minis and your army has a tank and two squads left, the fact that I "win" on VPs doesn't mean anything narratively.* In fact, it I feel like it is a BAD thing that I won the game, because now I have to narratively justify how the hell that happened when the troops would have been obliterated 5 seconds later.

*I realize many forced ex post facto justifications can be offered. That isn't the point.

I know I'll get labeled with calls of "Forge the Narrative" here, but figured I'd chime in anyway.

So first things first: If you want a narrative game, there is no such thing as "and objective" - I mean, that's what they are on the mission sheet of course. But when you put them on the table in a narrative game, that changes:

"The book says I need to put objective A here: this third party model is Darian Krane- the only surviving pilot of a group that did a flyover in enemy territory, and as such, he's got intel."

"The book says the second objective goes here: the panel on this piece of terrain is a data terminal that contains aerial images that can be used to infer patrol patterns."

"The book says I need to put an objective here: Remember two games ago when the Imperials captured the idol of Gork? Well, this building is the Research facility where the artifact is being catalogued."

"The objective says I have to kill vehicles: that's because the vehicles that have come for the idol of Gork are members of the Speedwaaagh that killed crippled Chaplain Greggor Vance, who is still in the care of the apothecarium; the marines are eager for vengeance."

That's the part of the story that happens before deployment. The next part is figuring out why each of the units going for the objectives are the one's chosen for their particular duty- Librarian Immershade is familiar with the defensive features and security protocols common to research facilities, so he can tackle the idol; squad Delphi was once shuttled into a theatre of war by the pilot, so they should be able to make a visual ID., etc.

The story that emerges through the battle is about who got (or failed to get) which "objective" and what that means to the continuing saga of the campaign.

You and I have talked before about how the Crusade system isn't lethal enough- no one actually dies, they all just become incapacitated during battle and then heal up with scars afterwards. I get how that piece may not be ideal for your campaign depending on what you want: I find the high lethality method is good for attrition campaigns where you start with a huge roster which gets whittled down via casualties. For escalation style campaigns like Crusade though, that's a hard system to use. The injury system, while less than perfect, does make the escalation system work.

The problem for me is those don't actually make much sense. I mean, that's not generous: some do. But like:
1) Why are you saving a pilot? Why doesn't my army just blat him in the face with a shuriken cannon if he has vital intel? Do we need the intel? If so, can I use psychic interrogation on him? Wait no, immersion broken, he's just a arbitrary space on the table.

2) That one makes sense-ish, but like, why? Wouldn't a more fun mission be playing the reconnaissance troop that gets to create those images in the first place, rather than the guy who goes to download them from... some random spot that happens to be exactly between to fully mustered battalions? Are both armies sent there to retrieve the data? Why would the eldar need to know their own patrol routes?

3) Can I destroy the idol to prevent it from falling into enemy hands? Or perhaps transport it to... idk, orbit? Why am I doing research on the battlefield? If the Ork army has infiltrated the enemy lines - a) how and b) wouldn't that be a more fun mission to play first? And how did a research facility survive anyways?

4) This one makes sense I guess, though it's a bit silly in that trading a company of marines for some Ork buggies destroyed may be "Vengeance" but it's hilariously one-sided in the long run. If the Imperium kept up that rate of trade, well...

Obviously disagreements exist - but I think its great that the mission is something different than "who has the most left at the end of the game". Because such just pushes you going into full lethal with no care for anything else.

Now I do think 40k 9th edition is too lethal. Because GW have skewed the stats.

We are in a world where if both parties lined up 12" from each other with no terrain you'd expect to table the opponent (or get very close). I'm not... totally sure that was the case in past editions (although ymmv). 9th is obviously more lethal than 8th - because they've tuned the damage output up. They didn't have to do that.

JohnnyHell wrote:@Unit - so you can’t post-rationalise a battle result, yet CAN spend time applying randomly real-world-esque critique of someone else’s attempt at fluff for a result? That’s… sure, ok. I missed the part where the timespan of a game is measured by holding down the trigger and the game ending when your clip runs out. Apply some imagination, man. You’re actively TRYING to not have fun, it seems!

Plus, to real-word you back (patently absurd though any such conversation is) you seem to think people can run an awful long way in a minute, given 5x turns of movement. A turn is not a fixed timespan in my head. You missed out manouvering, aiming, hiding, daring combat, space magic and all the other cool stuff for the sake of a poor attempt at a rebuttal that ignores most of the game.

@Sim-Life - that’s a nonsense take. GW designed the game to use scenery. Not using it and expecting a good game is a fool’s errand.

The fact that GW's rules are so shoddily abstracted that time has no meaning is a bad thing, not a good thing. People CAN move extra far, and that's a bad, bad thing. Comparing the rate of fire of, say, a Castigator to the rate of movement of an Imperial Guard squad under Move Move Move indicates that humans are either superhumanly fast, or the Castigator has the worst reload mechanism of the game. And nothing I said has anything to do with holding down the trigger and everything to do with the rate of fire of tanks, which historically (barring some outliers) usually is between 6 and 20 seconds. That neatly lines up with many games that do actually care about how well they're abstracting reality. Most good games go for a rough timespan they're trying to replicate - many miniatures games it's a few (usually 6-20) seconds of combat. The fact that 40k doesn't do this - or rather does it so badly you can't find the time scale - is a horrible problem.

And yet nothing you've said rebuts the point that the battalion held out for literally less than 5 minutes, tops. That's not a meaningful engagement to the sector, that's just folding on contact with the enemy.

Sherrypie wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Sherrypie wrote:Last Crusade game I played I won 50-45 while losing every single model I had (I was required to do lot of Actions, thus being somewhat limited in my ability to dish out pain in return). My Death Guard terminator strike force was sending a message to the Tau by setting one of their important towns on fire deep in their own territory.

Despite total losses, the mission had succeeded. Didn't require much narrative gymnastics to make sense of that.

As for the topic itself: 9th is very much a playable, even enjoyable game, if both players are on the same wavelength on how cut-throat or thematic they want the game to be.

So you lost every single model of Deathguard Terminators and yet you won the battle?

That's exactly what I am talking about. That doesn't make any sense. Terminators are rare and powerful relic suits from an ancient, forgotten age. Losing every single one is a travesty that would likely cripple a warband forever.

Also, I bet your models got experience and "survived" that battle, huh. Wow, so narrative. I guess soldiers in 40k don't even die, especially in suicide missions. Narrative!

In a deep strike where the objective was property damage instead of taking territory? Said damage was caused and the mission thus accomplished. That is winning, yes. Some victories are costlier than others.

As for the survival part, some handwaving is always required to make any miniature game campaign system work unless one goes for a limited campaign roster that gets attritioned down (for the record, I'd love to play some like that, but it requires a dedicated crew). I don't expect every model that goes down as a casualty to die (especially with marines, that can be both teleported away or extricated with Thunderhawks and comparable shuttle craft when incapacitated by injuries), even less so in a game where affecting enemy units requires taking away models as there are no pinning mechanics or wavering fighting spirit to reduce the units' effectiveness instead. 40k as a game has always produced high casualty rates and larger than life personas: it's fun to play campaigns, less fun to create permanent physical models that you couldn't use later on because they died once in a previous game. 1:1 representation between models and their fates in such mechanical frameworks is not a good idea to get stuck on. Like in my example, maybe I did mechanically lose all of my models and still win the scenario, but because the result was a victory, in diegetic terms that meant my force also managed to extract their wounded and slip off with them in the raging firestorm they had caused before the opponent's reinforcements could go through and finish them off instead. 40k games are localised to small areas and last only a short while, showing a highlight reel of a singular clash instead of the larger picture of the war they happen in.

But the damage to the Tau empire was what, a tau neighborhood? A tau town? Truely, the shatterers of the Tau Empire, this Warband. I'm sure if Pflugerville, Texas burned down the US would be on its knees in days. The warband will be especially terrifying after losing every single one of their irreplaceable relic suits to set a town on fire.

As for the handwaving of casualties, perhaps my point is that the 40k rules are actually really bad for narrative campaigns, precisely because they don't include mechanics that would actually reduce lethality and compel withdrawals before literally every single man on the battlefield is slain.

In Infinity, I don't have to forge the narrative. ITS missions, meaning missions used in tournaments, are what many people here would consider narrative missions.

There's one where you have to rescue civilians, where killing them loses you points, and you need specialists who can grab them.
There's a mission where frostbyte will kill any troops in the exclusion zones if they aren't Heavy Infantry, in a Mech suit, or are a robot, and you can use hackers to turn off heating devices to kill them.
You can do missions with High Value Targets, who you need to capture and bring into your zone, or rescue from the enemy, all while trying to do your secondaries.

I know these wouldn't work as well in 40k, but this proves that they can do missions where I don't have to forge the narrative. They have amazing models in a universe I love, but they can't provide me a good narrative unless I do it myself?

@Unit
Casualty doesn't mean dead. Technically speaking, if you get a splinter while in combat you can be recorded as a casualty.
Terminator suits can have a failsafe built in that means that any fallen Astartes gets teleported back with any living one. In the case of CSM there could also be a Sorcerer who uses wizard powers to extract forces from the field. So in the instance of Sherrypie's Terminators, if all were casualties and the leader's last act was to activate the failsafe, then the suits would be teleported back to their ship in orbit and very few would be lost as a result. As for the mission itself, there is nothing to suggest that the mission is the only act these Terminators have committed, rather it is just the Fire Caste response to said acts. The DG strike force could have been slaughtering the settlement for hours before help arrived and are in the stages of finishing the job when a reactionary force shows up.

You do understand there is a hell of a lot of stuff in 40k right? There are so many things going on that you can't possibly know every single detail in existence. Take for example your point about fully removed units gaining XP. We've already established that casualties =/= dead so if a unit is fully removed then perhaps some of the unit survived, injured but alive. The remainder of the unit takes whatever experience they gained in the battle and teaches it to replacements. Or if the unit is something like Astartes who can consume cranial matter to gain the memories of the donor, then they could easily see how the donor died and avoid the same mistake in the future. I mean you've got Daemons which are functionally immortal and Tyranids which can recreate the exact same beast a thousand times in a thousand places. You lack imagination.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
In Infinity, I don't have to forge the narrative. ITS missions, meaning missions used in tournaments, are what many people here would consider narrative missions.

There's one where you have to rescue civilians, where killing them loses you points, and you need specialists who can grab them.
There's a mission where frostbyte will kill any troops in the exclusion zones if they aren't Heavy Infantry, in a Mech suit, or are a robot, and you can use hackers to turn off heating devices to kill them.
You can do missions with High Value Targets, who you need to capture and bring into your zone, or rescue from the enemy, all while trying to do your secondaries.

I know these wouldn't work as well in 40k, but this proves that they can do missions where I don't have to forge the narrative. They have amazing models in a universe I love, but they can't provide me a good narrative unless I do it myself?

All of this is true, but one has to consider that Infinity has a much better foundation to achieve this effect than 40k does. Infinity is a lot less abstract in the way your miniatures interact with the board. Infinity is also mostly about single miniatures achieving things at a time, which in turn helps with the whole "action movie" flair. Tarik Mansuri dodging a Missile Launcher ARO, then jumping a gap between two rooftops, taking out an enemy line trooper while doing so, is a lot more granular and involved than "let me roll 52 dice to have this blob of units shoot that blob of units".

The challenge for GW going forward is to construct their game in a way that allows for an organic narrative to develop that doesn't feel trivial within the context of what is actually happening on the board.

 Gert wrote:
@Unit
Casualty doesn't mean dead. Technically speaking, if you get a splinter while in combat you can be recorded as a casualty.
Terminator suits can have a failsafe built in that means that any fallen Astartes gets teleported back with any living one. In the case of CSM there could also be a Sorcerer who uses wizard powers to extract forces from the field. So in the instance of Sherrypie's Terminators, if all were casualties and the leader's last act was to activate the failsafe, then the suits would be teleported back to their ship in orbit and very few would be lost as a result. As for the mission itself, there is nothing to suggest that the mission is the only act these Terminators have committed, rather it is just the Fire Caste response to said acts. The DG strike force could have been slaughtering the settlement for hours before help arrived and are in the stages of finishing the job when a reactionary force shows up.

You do understand there is a hell of a lot of stuff in 40k right? There are so many things going on that you can't possibly know every single detail in existence. Take for example your point about fully removed units gaining XP. We've already established that casualties =/= dead so if a unit is fully removed then perhaps some of the unit survived, injured but alive. The remainder of the unit takes whatever experience they gained in the battle and teaches it to replacements. Or if the unit is something like Astartes who can consume cranial matter to gain the memories of the donor, then they could easily see how the donor died and avoid the same mistake in the future. I mean you've got Daemons which are functionally immortal and Tyranids which can recreate the exact same beast a thousand times in a thousand places. You lack imagination.

This is exactly what I mean by post-facto justifications. "Oh, they all had teleporters!" Tell that to my Eldar, tabled by Grey Knights. "Well, a wizard did it!" Alright, 10/10 narrative.

The rest is just more of the same. Ex-post-facto rationalizations to make the rules fit the fluff, rather than the rules just being designed to .... well, fit the fluff.

Unit1126PLL wrote:

But the damage to the Tau empire was what, a tau neighborhood? A tau town? Truely, the shatterers of the Tau Empire, this Warband. I'm sure if Pflugerville, Texas burned down the US would be on its knees in days. The warband will be especially terrifying after losing every single one of their irreplaceable relic suits to set a town on fire.

As for the handwaving of casualties, perhaps my point is that the 40k rules are actually really bad for narrative campaigns, precisely because they don't include mechanics that would actually reduce lethality and compel withdrawals before literally every single man on the battlefield is slain.

People rarely play with 10 000 models at once, cover a whole planet on one table or otherwise require any such shenanigans to represent an important narrative event with a game that shows a localized highlight of the larger conflict with a platoon level force of models. Like I said, 40k shows the cool pulpy action movie bash where the larger context culminates. My XIV legion didn't only send 20 men to attack a planet, nor was having some of them beaten up a bit a major loss for their armoury (since what happened in that singular spearhead on our table didn't necessarily mean the entire thousands strong force was incapacitated). The destruction the operation caused wasn't limited to the single neighbourhood we had physically on the table either. Who knows how long they'd been there or if they had been telehopping through dozen cities earlier on before the Tau finally managed to bring them to battle? Why does this seem hard for you to accept in the framework of "sure would be fun to play out some cool wargaming scenarios"? Like Gert aptly put it:

Gert wrote:@Unit
Casualty doesn't mean dead. Technically speaking, if you get a splinter while in combat you can be recorded as a casualty.
Terminator suits can have a failsafe built in that means that any fallen Astartes gets teleported back with any living one. In the case of CSM there could also be a Sorcerer who uses wizard powers to extract forces from the field. So in the instance of Sherrypie's Terminators, if all were casualties and the leader's last act was to activate the failsafe, then the suits would be teleported back to their ship in orbit and very few would be lost as a result. As for the mission itself, there is nothing to suggest that the mission is the only act these Terminators have committed, rather it is just the Fire Caste response to said acts. The DG strike force could have been slaughtering the settlement for hours before help arrived and are in the stages of finishing the job when a reactionary force shows up.

You do understand there is a hell of a lot of stuff in 40k right? There are so many things going on that you can't possibly know every single detail in existence. Take for example your point about fully removed units gaining XP. We've already established that casualties =/= dead so if a unit is fully removed then perhaps some of the unit survived, injured but alive. The remainder of the unit takes whatever experience they gained in the battle and teaches it to replacements. Or if the unit is something like Astartes who can consume cranial matter to gain the memories of the donor, then they could easily see how the donor died and avoid the same mistake in the future. I mean you've got Daemons which are functionally immortal and Tyranids which can recreate the exact same beast a thousand times in a thousand places. You lack imagination.

As for casualties, I've got to remark how modern combat veterans tend to shake their heads at soldiers who go into combat without any kind of eye protection. You don't need to die when a puff of dust or a speck of sand (that you might've thrown around yourself) in your face can render you incapable of fighting

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
This is exactly what I mean by post-facto justifications. "Oh, they all had teleporters!" Tell that to my Eldar, tabled by Grey Knights. "Well, a wizard did it!" Alright, 10/10 narrative.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Runes_of_the_Warp

The rest is just more of the same. Ex-post-facto rationalizations to make the rules fit the fluff, rather than the rules just being designed to .... well, fit the fluff.

If the rules fit the background Space Marines would never lose.
As for your fancy Latin, do you understand the concept of an after-action report or storytelling? You can't tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end before the end. We're only discussing people's past games because (I presume) nobody is currently in the act of playing a game of 40k.

 Sherrypie wrote:

Unit1126PLL wrote:

But the damage to the Tau empire was what, a tau neighborhood? A tau town? Truely, the shatterers of the Tau Empire, this Warband. I'm sure if Pflugerville, Texas burned down the US would be on its knees in days. The warband will be especially terrifying after losing every single one of their irreplaceable relic suits to set a town on fire.

As for the handwaving of casualties, perhaps my point is that the 40k rules are actually really bad for narrative campaigns, precisely because they don't include mechanics that would actually reduce lethality and compel withdrawals before literally every single man on the battlefield is slain.

People rarely play with 10 000 models at once, cover a whole planet on one table or otherwise require any such shenanigans to represent an important narrative event with a game that shows a localized highlight of the larger conflict with a platoon level force of models. Like I said, 40k shows the cool pulpy action movie bash where the larger context culminates. My XIV legion didn't only send 20 men to attack a planet, nor was having some of them beaten up a bit a major loss for their armoury (since what happened in that singular spearhead on our table didn't necessarily mean the entire thousands strong force was incapacitated). The destruction the operation caused wasn't limited to the single neighbourhood we had physically on the table either. Who knows how long they'd been there or if they had been telehopping through dozen cities earlier on before the Tau finally managed to bring them to battle? Why does this seem hard for you to accept in the framework of "sure would be fun to play out some cool wargaming scenarios"?

There are tons of games out there that do platoon scale combat and manage to have one side withdraw without suffering 100% casualties. That's rather my point - military realities (the rarity of terminator suits for example) will force units to withdraw even when their morale is unbroken. Units taking 60-80% casualties without disintegrating is a huge deal historically and typically sees those units remembered through the ages. The exceptions are very rare and are typically when one side has no choice (e.g. Cannae or Thermopylae where armies became surrounded).

100% casualties isn't "some of them beaten up". Casualty in 40k means the model cannot fght any more. Considering Marines can fight with one arm removed, or half their head gone - and PLAGUE MARINES can endure even more before collapsing, I would say they're a good bit worse than "beaten up". And given the rarity of Terminator suits, the Tau would've had to lose like a major leader or minor planet to make the loss worthwhile. Don't forget, the death-guard literally cannot replace their terminator suits. Once one's done, it's done. And since they were all incapable of fighting, barring "a wizard did it" as a narrative tool, the Tau probably finished most them off and captured most of the suits to boot.

 BertBert wrote:

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
In Infinity, I don't have to forge the narrative. ITS missions, meaning missions used in tournaments, are what many people here would consider narrative missions.

There's one where you have to rescue civilians, where killing them loses you points, and you need specialists who can grab them.
There's a mission where frostbyte will kill any troops in the exclusion zones if they aren't Heavy Infantry, in a Mech suit, or are a robot, and you can use hackers to turn off heating devices to kill them.
You can do missions with High Value Targets, who you need to capture and bring into your zone, or rescue from the enemy, all while trying to do your secondaries.

I know these wouldn't work as well in 40k, but this proves that they can do missions where I don't have to forge the narrative. They have amazing models in a universe I love, but they can't provide me a good narrative unless I do it myself?

All of this is true, but one has to consider that Infinity has a much better foundation to achieve this effect than 40k does. Infinity is a lot less abstract in the way your miniatures interact with the board. Infinity is also mostly about single miniatures achieving things at a time, which in turn helps with the whole "action movie" flair. Tarik Mansuri dodging a Missile Launcher ARO, then jumping a gap between two rooftops, taking out an enemy line trooper while doing so, is a lot more granular and involved than "let me roll 52 dice to have this blob of units shoot that blob of units".

The challenge for GW going forward is to construct their game in a way that allows for an organic narrative to develop that doesn't feel trivial within the context of what is actually happening on the board.

I agree completely. If GW makes it so I can experience a narrative on the board, I'll gladly play, even if there's terrible balance. Infinity is enough for me until then, even if I vastly prefer 40k's universe and models. Though, i feel that large scale missions can still do the civilian mission I mentioned, and it would work like 10 marines or 20 guardsmen moving forward to grab the citizen, then keeping them in the middle of their group, maintaining a close formation, or using look out sir rules to protect the inquisitor.

 JohnnyHell wrote:


@Sim-Life - that’s a nonsense take. GW designed the game to use scenery. Not using it and expecting a good game is a fool’s errand.

If the second sentence was true then we wouldn't have had two editions in a row with bad terrain rules. As to the third, Voss addressed it better than I could.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

The Newman wrote:
I know I'm in a minority for this, but I played 2nd-5th and 8th, and I think 9th is the best version of 40k I've ever played. I've had actual come-from-behind victories in 9th and that's not something I've seen happen very often.

I think it depends on your perspective. I agree the scoring system allows technical victories from behind, but I don't think they are narrative victories.

If my army is reduced to 5 troops minis and your army has a tank and two squads left, the fact that I "win" on VPs doesn't mean anything narratively.* In fact, it I feel like it is a BAD thing that I won the game, because now I have to narratively justify how the hell that happened when the troops would have been obliterated 5 seconds later.

*I realize many forced ex post facto justifications can be offered. That isn't the point.

I didn't even mean that kind of a scenario, I meant I've had games where I had a bad couple of turns, hadn't killed my priority targets, and was behind on points, and still managed to swing the game back because I'd traded early board position for mid-game material advantage.

I think the last page of back-and-forth does highlight why I'm having a good time with 40k and a lot of people aren't though, and it comes down to what I want out of a game. I don't care much about the narrative, I'm looking for a contest of strategic and tactical acumen. Preferably with the emphasis on the second one. 40k still feels like it's decided in the list-building phase a lot of the time, but it feels like the issue is point balance rather than some fundamental flaw in the game design.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

But the damage to the Tau empire was what, a tau neighborhood? A tau town? Truely, the shatterers of the Tau Empire, this Warband. I'm sure if Pflugerville, Texas burned down the US would be on its knees in days. The warband will be especially terrifying after losing every single one of their irreplaceable relic suits to set a town on fire.

I don't think you thought through this example. Because there are multiple times where the destruction of a single village or even the death of a single person impacted the US as a hole to a huge degree. If the "neighbourhood" held the families of the heads of a cast for example, or a "school" for young eterals you could have a devastating effect on the tau population. What if a entire sectors of the tau empire would be hard pressed on eternals in a generation, because an entire batch of them got slaughtered? There would be disstress, casts could worry about some place becoming Farsight Enclave 2.0. etc

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

There are tons of games out there that do platoon scale combat and manage to have one side withdraw without suffering 100% casualties. That's rather my point - military realities (the rarity of terminator suits for example) will force units to withdraw even when their morale is unbroken. Units taking 60-80% casualties without disintegrating is a huge deal historically and typically sees those units remembered through the ages. The exceptions are very rare and are typically when one side has no choice (e.g. Cannae or Thermopylae where armies became surrounded).

There are. 40k is not one of them, nor is it trying to, being an over the top heavy metal album cover in a tabletop game form. That point is not important here, when we're discussing the times when such exceptions happen and how many 40k scenarios in particular revel in setting them up. So instead of saying "such Pyrrhic victories make no sense" (to you), the question being asked is "how does it still make sense even if the victor lost most or everything" and exploring that option. Thermopylae is a great example of the larger context mattering outside what we see on the table, which you've thus far been somewhat obstinate about: even if all the Spartans died and the Persians overtook the pass itself, the Greek side still mechanically won on the objectives by stalling long enough for the larger war to turn bad for the opposition.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

100% casualties isn't "some of them beaten up". Casualty in 40k means the model cannot fght any more. Considering Marines can fight with one arm removed, or half their head gone - and PLAGUE MARINES can endure even more before collapsing, I would say they're a good bit worse than "beaten up". And given the rarity of Terminator suits, the Tau would've had to lose like a major leader or minor planet to make the loss worthwhile. Don't forget, the death-guard literally cannot replace their terminator suits. Once one's done, it's done. And since they were all incapable of fighting, barring "a wizard did it" as a narrative tool, the Tau probably finished most them off and captured most of the suits to boot.

That's one way to think about it, not an objectively correct one. All that removal means is that said model stops fighting effectively for the duration of the game. Just by taking your previous read on the duration of the game (which is, again, your subjective take on it), the game is so short that a casualty could just as well represent a soldier being temporarily knocked out by banging their head against a wall after being thrown by an explosion. Becoming unconscious, stunned or dazed is a very normal thing on the battlefield. Or being buried under rubble for a moment before digging themselves out after the firing ceases, powered armour is very handy in that regard. Again, the point is to make narrative sense of the abstracted game results as they happen, which isn't hard unless you're taking a very strictly literal read on the game moves.

As for the rest, you only need a "wizard did it" if you can't look at the game as a snapshot of the larger fight. Can't force you on that point, but that really hasn't been a problem in my circles for decades.

I will slightly disagree with your Thermopylae metaphor. In 40K the 2 sides are equal whereas in the context of Persians and Greeks that small unit of Spartans delayed almost the entire Persian army. This enabled the Greeks to gather their manpower and organize against the Persian invasion. In 40K there isn't really that scale of conflict being reflected. Both sides are of equal stature and therefore each side is equally expendable. If you're going to claim that the defender was a delaying force then it couldn't have been defending much since the attacker isn't using overwhelming force to capture/overrun the objective/defenders to get to their goal. If you're going to play a Thermopylae type scenerio then the defender should have maybe 500 points to the attackers 2000. Both sides should start with CPs equal to what their starting points are (3 and 12 respectively). Then you declare that the defender has to keep the attacker from exiting some limited area of the map. Should the attacker not get X amount of points off the map before the end of Turn 5 the defender wins. Anything else the defender loses. That's a Thermopylae scenerio.

40k currently functions when played by people with large collections and a high degree of system mastery who readily communicate what they're expecting from the game and know how to set up games where neither player has lost before deployment. It breaks down very quickly if one player gets attached to using specific models or a specific army, or if the players have a slight mismatch about what kind of game they're expecting, or if neither player has the system mastery to determine that they accidentally set up a match in which one of them lost the game when deciding which models to buy years earlier. It isn't a straightforward pick-up-and-play experience, no matter how much it pretends to be.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
40k currently functions when played by people with large collections and a high degree of system mastery who readily communicate what they're expecting from the game and know how to set up games where neither player has lost before deployment. It breaks down very quickly if one player gets attached to using specific models or a specific army, or if the players have a slight mismatch about what kind of game they're expecting, or if neither player has the system mastery to determine that they accidentally set up a match in which one of them lost the game when deciding which models to buy years earlier. It isn't a straightforward pick-up-and-play experience, no matter how much it pretends to be.

What rubbish. The only thing you've gotten right in there is players needing to communicate. But that's been true since before 40k existed....
You do not need large collections & high degrees of system mastery to enjoy a game of 40k.
Likewise you can generally* get by the same models/army for many years.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
There's one where you have to rescue civilians, where killing them loses you points, and you need specialists who can grab them.

That's not how Rescue has worked for some time. Any trooper can synch civilians, but specialists can synch two of them. And you can't kill them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ccs wrote:
What rubbish. The only thing you've gotten right in there is players needing to communicate. But that's been true since before 40k existed....
You do not need large collections & high degrees of system mastery to enjoy a game of 40k.
Likewise you can generally* get by the same models/army for many years.

Bruh if I bought clowns and my opponent bought Orks or Guard, no amount of communicating is gonna make games fun.

Hecaton wrote:

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
There's one where you have to rescue civilians, where killing them loses you points, and you need specialists who can grab them.

That's not how Rescue has worked for some time. Any trooper can synch civilians, but specialists can synch two of them. And you can't kill them.

Thanks for the correction, I was gonna play that mission soon.