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Ibris is the one with the memory of a mayfly because it wasn't all those characters that made Superfriends broken, it was Invisibility LOL

 Blndmage wrote:

They are lots of cooperative games that aren't RPGs.
There are lots of games that have been using the same rules for decades, if not centuries, Monopoly, checkers, chess, the Royal game of Ur.

Like playing house or running around with a model going pew pew, yeah there are games like that. W40k is not that. Every game that has a win condition is automaticly, in its very nature compatitive. The worse thing about the w40k situation, is that the people who claim to not care about winning or gaming or competition, could house rule their games and do what ever they want with existing rules. Something they claim they do already. Yet somehow this is not enough, the narrative rules have to be added to normal games. True LoS, paint score in the game, making the company which struggles with one game system write 2-3 for different ways of playing. etc

You think chess, checkers or monopoly is non compatitive ??? I either misunderstood something strongly or I am probably missing something important here.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Irbis wrote:

You either have memory of mayfly, or are just parroting excuses of that extremely toxic and waaac game club of yours, because that's exactly what happened in both 7th and 8th editions. Hello? Herohammer rings a bell? Superfriends? 3 BA/SW captains that for some reason dumped their chapters and were playing Doom on their lonesome? Cherrypicked CSM crap that somehow always amounted to sticking wings or disc or bike or palanquin or whatever on most broken neckbeardy melee weapon/trait combo and Leeroiying it into enemy army to delete it on rerollable 2+ roll?

Gee, I have no idea why people might dislike that. Sure, it only sunk both editions, but anyone who calls out anti-fun netlisters on that gak somehow is the one at fault, not dudes actually doing so, eh?

I don't know what hero hammer or super friends means, I assume those are older builds of some sort. I do remember suicide smash captins from 8th, because that is when I started to play the game. my army is +2 sv, if that was powerful in the past, I wish I have played my army back then and now when they were really bad tough.
And people so optimise armies to their budget. What are they suppose to do, buy bad stuff? What if the stuff they like is the strong stuff. Plus I remember the advice to marine players or me, being given in 8th. In order to properly play w40k, because marines are ultra bad, I should always start my army with the loyal 32, followed by something like a castellan. And to be honest I would rather have a strong army out of my own, singular, codex then to be forced to buy 3 books and 3 different armies to have a somewhat valid army to play.

Karol wrote:Every game that has a win condition is automaticly, in its very nature compatitive.

... that's just not true.

What, are party games competitive? Musical chairs? Pinata?

You think chess, checkers or monopoly is non compatitive ???

Yes - or, at the very least, can be played not competitively.

To be played "competitively", the win condition has to be the primary reason for play. When the win condition is simply a by-product of playing the game for the experience or shared activity, then it is no longer competitive.

Man, GPT-3 has clearly overfitted its Irbis model. That was too on the nose to be a real Irbis-post.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
To be played "competitively", the win condition has to be the primary reason for play. When the win condition is simply a by-product of playing the game for the experience or shared activity, then it is no longer competitive.

While it is of little surprise to anyone that many players don't understand this nuance, it is to my endless disappointment how many players fundamentally do not comprehend the very concept of a win condition simply being a means to an end.

If we lost Bikes because they were competitive at some point in the past Tyranids should really fear for their flying hive tyrants because for many editions they seemed to be the only competitive option in the whole Codex.

Snarky post blaming knife-ears for removing CSM options.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
If we lost Bikes because they were competitive at some point in the past Tyranids should really fear for their flying hive tyrants because for many editions they seemed to be the only competitive option in the whole Codex.

Lost the full Dakka Flyrant option. Which was just as BS. Hundreds of models invalidated. A Chaos Lord on bike can at least make a nifty champion.

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Ibris is the one with the memory of a mayfly because it wasn't all those characters that made Superfriends broken, it was Invisibility LOL

It helps that I had no context for this reply (the original was on the previous page), and I took this as a reference to the old cartoon with the Wonder Twins.
It still makes more sense than the original post.

Gadzilla666 wrote: Chaos Lords, with jump packs, and.......on bikes.....are "what ruined 8th and......7th edition? That's what broke 7th?

Always remember-
Bikes: just as bad as virus bombs.

Karol wrote:

 Blndmage wrote:

They are lots of cooperative games that aren't RPGs.
There are lots of games that have been using the same rules for decades, if not centuries, Monopoly, checkers, chess, the Royal game of Ur.

Like playing house or running around with a model going pew pew, yeah there are games like that. W40k is not that. Every game that has a win condition is automaticly, in its very nature compatitive. The worse thing about the w40k situation, is that the people who claim to not care about winning or gaming or competition, could house rule their games and do what ever they want with existing rules. Something they claim they do already. Yet somehow this is not enough, the narrative rules have to be added to normal games. True LoS, paint score in the game, making the company which struggles with one game system write 2-3 for different ways of playing. etc

You think chess, checkers or monopoly is non compatitive ??? I either misunderstood something strongly or I am probably missing something important here.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Irbis wrote:

You either have memory of mayfly, or are just parroting excuses of that extremely toxic and waaac game club of yours, because that's exactly what happened in both 7th and 8th editions. Hello? Herohammer rings a bell? Superfriends? 3 BA/SW captains that for some reason dumped their chapters and were playing Doom on their lonesome? Cherrypicked CSM crap that somehow always amounted to sticking wings or disc or bike or palanquin or whatever on most broken neckbeardy melee weapon/trait combo and Leeroiying it into enemy army to delete it on rerollable 2+ roll?

Gee, I have no idea why people might dislike that. Sure, it only sunk both editions, but anyone who calls out anti-fun netlisters on that gak somehow is the one at fault, not dudes actually doing so, eh?

I don't know what hero hammer or super friends means, I assume those are older builds of some sort. I do remember suicide smash captins from 8th, because that is when I started to play the game. my army is +2 sv, if that was powerful in the past, I wish I have played my army back then and now when they were really bad tough.
And people so optimise armies to their budget. What are they suppose to do, buy bad stuff? What if the stuff they like is the strong stuff. Plus I remember the advice to marine players or me, being given in 8th. In order to properly play w40k, because marines are ultra bad, I should always start my army with the loyal 32, followed by something like a castellan. And to be honest I would rather have a strong army out of my own, singular, codex then to be forced to buy 3 books and 3 different armies to have a somewhat valid army to play.

I mentioned chess, Monopoly, The Royal game of Ur, even checkers, to counter your point about playing "games under the rules people used in the 60s." The Royal Game of Ur in particular is easily 4,000 years old. People still play it.

Re this whole „existence of win condition means that the game is competitive” crap. There are two meaning of the word competitive, which are conflated on dakka constantly and universally, a lot of times to justify a cutthroat approach to the game. The first meaning is „adversarial” - there are two sides acting against eachother to first meet the win condition of the game. The second is „to sort involved players according to their prowess”. Those two are not the same, and while all competitive games (in the second meaning) are adversarial, not all adversarial games are competitive. You can’t have a meaningfull tic-tac-toe or rock/paper/scissors championships, despite both of those games being adversarial.

edit: on a second thought, there is a game that is competitive (in the second meaning) while being cooperative at the same time - Rubber Bridge played in non-teamed mode. In this mode, your pairing with three of your "opponents" will change throughout the evening, after each full game, until everybody played in team with each other. In this mode, the overall winner is decided by how good you are at cooperating with your opponents, not by how good you are at being an adversary to them.

Voss wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Ibris is the one with the memory of a mayfly because it wasn't all those characters that made Superfriends broken, it was Invisibility LOL

It helps that I had no context for this reply (the original was on the previous page), and I took this as a reference to the old cartoon with the Wonder Twins.
It still makes more sense than the original post.

Gadzilla666 wrote: Chaos Lords, with jump packs, and.......on bikes.....are "what ruined 8th and......7th edition? That's what broke 7th?

Always remember-
Bikes: just as bad as virus bombs.

Yeah I want Ibris to not be a coward and get back here to defend their statements.

7th was trash top to bottom.

Unlike 9th, the core rules of 7th were irrevocably broken.

In HH you get by because of just how much patching over they've done and the fact that you'll only ever have to deal with at most 4-6 different armies.

Even then, you can still see areas where the rules become stupid (dangerous terrain and binary armor saves comes to mind.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Karol wrote:Every game that has a win condition is automaticly, in its very nature compatitive.

... that's just not true.

What, are party games competitive? Musical chairs? Pinata?

You think chess, checkers or monopoly is non compatitive ???

Yes - or, at the very least, can be played not competitively.

To be played "competitively", the win condition has to be the primary reason for play. When the win condition is simply a by-product of playing the game for the experience or shared activity, then it is no longer competitive.

Musical chairs is DANGEROUSLY competitive. I've seen NFL level injuries come out of that game.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Ibris is the one with the memory of a mayfly because it wasn't all those characters that made Superfriends broken, it was Invisibility LOL

Invisibility wasn't really necessary for end of 7th deathstars. Most deathstars had a high invulnerable saves, ablative wounds, 4+ or better feel no pains, and tank characters like smashfether who couldn't really be hurt no matter what you did.

I had a tournament at the end of 7th where me and my opponent both had 1000+ point deathstars crash under the effects of Sisters of Silence. We lost 2 wounds each. 1000+ points of melee death. 2 wounds each.

I don't think I've ever seen pinata not be competetive, even among 4 yr olds.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I don't think I've ever seen pinata not be competetive, even among 4 yr olds.

Yeah. Not that I'd call breaking a pinata a game, but when I was a kid, whoever broke it got first pick, so... yeah. Pretty cutthroat.

[edit- read that wrong the first time. Fixed)

Noncompetitive games with win conditions off the top of my head (there are plenty more):

Pandemic: Fall of Rome (probably other versions too, but that's the one I have)
- you cooperate with your fellow players to conquer / ally with the barbarian hordes before roman society collapses.

Forbidden Island - you and your fellow players Scrooge McDuck your way across a sinking island to collect all the treasures and escape before the island sinks.

Forbidden Desert:. Your treasure laden airship crashes in the desert and y'all got to go find all the parts and fix it before you die of dehydration.

There's plenty more. These are just the ones I have. Cooperative boardgames are a fairly major subgenre of boardgaming. And tbh, my wife and I have yet to win any of them (except for once when we misunderstood the rules of Forbidden Desert )

Karol wrote:
Every game that has a win condition is automaticly, in its very nature compatitive.

That's not true, it all depends how you approach the game. Just because there is a winner in the end doesn't mean its a competition.

Oh wait, it'ts Karol again, nvm

DeadliestIdiot wrote:
Noncompetitive games with win conditions off the top of my head (there are plenty more):

Pandemic: Fall of Rome (probably other versions too, but that's the one I have)
- you cooperate with your fellow players to conquer / ally with the barbarian hordes before roman society collapses.

Forbidden Island - you and your fellow players Scrooge McDuck your way across a sinking island to collect all the treasures and escape before the island sinks.

Forbidden Desert:. Your treasure laden airship crashes in the desert and y'all got to go find all the parts and fix it before you die of dehydration.

There's plenty more. These are just the ones I have. Cooperative boardgames are a fairly major subgenre of boardgaming. And tbh, my wife and I have yet to win any of them (except for once when we misunderstood the rules of Forbidden Desert )

And of course, Blackstone Fortress.

PenitentJake wrote:

DeadliestIdiot wrote:
Noncompetitive games with win conditions off the top of my head (there are plenty more):

Pandemic: Fall of Rome (probably other versions too, but that's the one I have)
- you cooperate with your fellow players to conquer / ally with the barbarian hordes before roman society collapses.

Forbidden Island - you and your fellow players Scrooge McDuck your way across a sinking island to collect all the treasures and escape before the island sinks.

Forbidden Desert:. Your treasure laden airship crashes in the desert and y'all got to go find all the parts and fix it before you die of dehydration.

There's plenty more. These are just the ones I have. Cooperative boardgames are a fairly major subgenre of boardgaming. And tbh, my wife and I have yet to win any of them (except for once when we misunderstood the rules of Forbidden Desert )

And of course, Blackstone Fortress.

Not familiar with it...but now I'm intrigued and am going to check it out heh

nou wrote:
But when you play on unquantifiable dioramas? TLOS is the only way to write terrain rules that will be usable anyhow, because you simply cannot write quantified rules that will account for naturally looking terrain.

Well, the evidence from multiple games is you can, but tends to be area terrain rules (this area with some ruins, counts as ruins, you can see 10cm within/in/out).

The_Real_Chris wrote:

nou wrote:
But when you play on unquantifiable dioramas? TLOS is the only way to write terrain rules that will be usable anyhow, because you simply cannot write quantified rules that will account for naturally looking terrain.

Well, the evidence from multiple games is you can, but tends to be area terrain rules (this area with some ruins, counts as ruins, you can see 10cm within/in/out).

Only if you can establish clear enough boundaries for such areas. On cityscapes you often can, on continuous hill/rock landscapes you either have to use TLoS or default to near planet bowling ball environment of binary visibility. To be perfectly clear - I’m talking about fully modeled tiles or full tables that actually look like a landscape, not simply a nice looking table with discreet terrain pieces on it. No stepped hills, no scenery bases or other „crutches”. On all of those TLoS results in a lot more terrain influence than quantified terrain designations.

ccs wrote:

Dai wrote:
Its just not the same game/hobby as when we were young dude. There are options out there but the likes of us are just seen as old men yelling at cloud by many in the GW scene now.

That's fine. We're old & set in our ways - wich are oddly more flexible than the new kids ways.

Oh no it is the Inquisition game all over again - we are the radicals!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

nou wrote:
A lot of 40k players are also obsessively focussed on list building as the core aspect of the "skill" and this focus alone makes it hard or straight up impossible for them to understand why "historicals" are still very much adversarial games that test generalship skills.

List building emphasis is a deliberate design choice. It is how to get engagement outside of the relatively few games a player will have in their expected time buying GW models. I do wonder how net lists have impacted that, only GW would know with sales figures though.

nou wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

nou wrote:
But when you play on unquantifiable dioramas? TLOS is the only way to write terrain rules that will be usable anyhow, because you simply cannot write quantified rules that will account for naturally looking terrain.

Well, the evidence from multiple games is you can, but tends to be area terrain rules (this area with some ruins, counts as ruins, you can see 10cm within/in/out).

Only if you can establish clear enough boundaries for such areas. On cityscapes you often can, on continuous hill/rock landscapes you either have to use TLoS or default to near planet bowling ball environment of binary visibility. To be perfectly clear - I’m talking about fully modeled tiles or full tables that actually look like a landscape, not simply a nice looking table with discreet terrain pieces on it. No stepped hills, no scenery bases or other „crutches”. On all of those TLoS results in a lot more terrain influence than quantified terrain designations.

I'd rather play with stepped hills and scenery bases than have a lovingly-modeled rolling countryside result in the very top of the head of one of my troops being visible to the enemy and thus getting the entire squad killed because his tetanus-locked posture is unable to crouch. Which will take five extra minutes to resolve, as we check exactly which of the firing models can see it because they're each positioned slightly differently (and god help us if other terrain on the table gets in the way of doing this). Then I'll try to return fire with my heavy weapon teams, but being modeled with tripod-mounted guns means they are unable to see out of their trench, helplessly incapable of hefting their guns onto the sandbags. Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, a slightly steep (but in theory completely traversable) hill is dotted with empty bases, marking the position of a squad whose pewter sculpts will not stand upright in their heroic action poses. They're shooting straight through a dense patch of jungle to hit a unit on the other side, because whoever made this jungle terrain couldn't realistically make it 100% impossible to see through, and so thanks to TLOS the terrain might as well not exist and is less influential than under a more abstract system.

I really, really like realistic terrain aesthetically, but treating LOS completely literally in a mass-battle game with statically-posed models- not to mention an implicitly non-linear ground scale- causes a bunch of problems. I find it much more tolerable in skirmish games where there's only a handful of models on the table, and individual positioning is something I'm willing to deal with, rather than a tedious hassle when moving a squad of 20. Those games also tend to be consistent about how they handle positioning, unlike 40K where your exact position and visibility matter for assessing whether you can be shot at but have no impact whatsoever on whether you can be removed as a casualty.

 catbarf wrote:

nou wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

nou wrote:
But when you play on unquantifiable dioramas? TLOS is the only way to write terrain rules that will be usable anyhow, because you simply cannot write quantified rules that will account for naturally looking terrain.

Well, the evidence from multiple games is you can, but tends to be area terrain rules (this area with some ruins, counts as ruins, you can see 10cm within/in/out).

Only if you can establish clear enough boundaries for such areas. On cityscapes you often can, on continuous hill/rock landscapes you either have to use TLoS or default to near planet bowling ball environment of binary visibility. To be perfectly clear - I’m talking about fully modeled tiles or full tables that actually look like a landscape, not simply a nice looking table with discreet terrain pieces on it. No stepped hills, no scenery bases or other „crutches”. On all of those TLoS results in a lot more terrain influence than quantified terrain designations.

I'd rather play with stepped hills and scenery bases than have a lovingly-modeled rolling countryside result in the very top of the head of one of my troops being visible to the enemy and thus getting the entire squad killed because his tetanus-locked posture is unable to crouch. Which will take five extra minutes to resolve, as we check exactly which of the firing models can see it because they're each positioned slightly differently (and god help us if other terrain on the table gets in the way of doing this). Then I'll try to return fire with my heavy weapon teams, but being modeled with tripod-mounted guns means they are unable to see out of their trench, helplessly incapable of hefting their guns onto the sandbags. Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, a slightly steep (but in theory completely traversable) hill is dotted with empty bases, marking the position of a squad whose pewter sculpts will not stand upright in their heroic action poses. They're shooting straight through a dense patch of jungle to hit a unit on the other side, because whoever made this jungle terrain couldn't realistically make it 100% impossible to see through, and so thanks to TLOS the terrain might as well not exist and is less influential than under a more abstract system.

I really, really like realistic terrain aesthetically, but treating LOS completely literally in a mass-battle game with statically-posed models- not to mention an implicitly non-linear ground scale- causes a bunch of problems. I find it much more tolerable in skirmish games where there's only a handful of models on the table, and individual positioning is something I'm willing to deal with, rather than a tedious hassle when moving a squad of 20. Those games also tend to be consistent about how they handle positioning, unlike 40K where your exact position and visibility matter for assessing whether you can be shot at but have no impact whatsoever on whether you can be removed as a casualty.

I never said that TLOS is without flaws, but you are exaggerating possible problems by sticking to 40k mess of rules. I refer wargame mechanics as a whole, wargaming is much broader hobby than GW products. Visibility rules can be written so that tip of the head or an antennae aren't granting visibility. One of the reasons why I got into miniatures wargames in the first place was a simulationist approach to LoS compared to hex-based wargames. So I, prefer to have to resolve some infrequent issues with visibility instead of abstracting everything further than necessary.

And BTW, tripod mounted guns and troopers lying on the ground should have different visibility than standing troopers in a lot of battlefield situations. As long as game is symmetric in that regard, so that tripod mounted guns have visibility restrictions both ways, once as a boon, once as a hindrance then all is good. But I have to stress here - I prefer simulation wargames and I understand perfectly, that 40k never really was one, and this is my personal preference. I have given up on 40k being made to my liking a long time ago, so I'm not advocating for such rules in it anyhow.

nou wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

nou wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

nou wrote:
But when you play on unquantifiable dioramas? TLOS is the only way to write terrain rules that will be usable anyhow, because you simply cannot write quantified rules that will account for naturally looking terrain.

Well, the evidence from multiple games is you can, but tends to be area terrain rules (this area with some ruins, counts as ruins, you can see 10cm within/in/out).

Only if you can establish clear enough boundaries for such areas. On cityscapes you often can, on continuous hill/rock landscapes you either have to use TLoS or default to near planet bowling ball environment of binary visibility. To be perfectly clear - I’m talking about fully modeled tiles or full tables that actually look like a landscape, not simply a nice looking table with discreet terrain pieces on it. No stepped hills, no scenery bases or other „crutches”. On all of those TLoS results in a lot more terrain influence than quantified terrain designations.

I'd rather play with stepped hills and scenery bases than have a lovingly-modeled rolling countryside result in the very top of the head of one of my troops being visible to the enemy and thus getting the entire squad killed because his tetanus-locked posture is unable to crouch. Which will take five extra minutes to resolve, as we check exactly which of the firing models can see it because they're each positioned slightly differently (and god help us if other terrain on the table gets in the way of doing this). Then I'll try to return fire with my heavy weapon teams, but being modeled with tripod-mounted guns means they are unable to see out of their trench, helplessly incapable of hefting their guns onto the sandbags. Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, a slightly steep (but in theory completely traversable) hill is dotted with empty bases, marking the position of a squad whose pewter sculpts will not stand upright in their heroic action poses. They're shooting straight through a dense patch of jungle to hit a unit on the other side, because whoever made this jungle terrain couldn't realistically make it 100% impossible to see through, and so thanks to TLOS the terrain might as well not exist and is less influential than under a more abstract system.

I really, really like realistic terrain aesthetically, but treating LOS completely literally in a mass-battle game with statically-posed models- not to mention an implicitly non-linear ground scale- causes a bunch of problems. I find it much more tolerable in skirmish games where there's only a handful of models on the table, and individual positioning is something I'm willing to deal with, rather than a tedious hassle when moving a squad of 20. Those games also tend to be consistent about how they handle positioning, unlike 40K where your exact position and visibility matter for assessing whether you can be shot at but have no impact whatsoever on whether you can be removed as a casualty.

I never said that TLOS is without flaws, but you are exaggerating possible problems by sticking to 40k mess of rules. I refer wargame mechanics as a whole, wargaming is much broader hobby than GW products. Visibility rules can be written so that tip of the head or an antennae aren't granting visibility. One of the reasons why I got into miniatures wargames in the first place was a simulationist approach to LoS compared to hex-based wargames. So I, prefer to have to resolve some infrequent issues with visibility instead of abstracting everything further than necessary.

And BTW, tripod mounted guns and troopers lying on the ground should have different visibility than standing troopers in a lot of battlefield situations. As long as game is symmetric in that regard, so that tripod mounted guns have visibility restrictions both ways, once as a boon, once as a hindrance then all is good. But I have to stress here - I prefer simulation wargames and I understand perfectly, that 40k never really was one, and this is my personal preference. I have given up on 40k being made to my liking a long time ago, so I'm not advocating for such rules in it anyhow.

Can you reference any example rules paradigms from TLOS simulationist games that address the two generic concerns in catbarf's post? Which are (at least as I read them):

1. Utilizing single models for individual fighters can never adequately represent (simulate) the range of poses/stances/gaits/etc. those fighters would assume in reality

2. Miniature terrain (at least at the scales games are played at) can never adequately represent the complexity of terrain in reality

I'm curious what the solutions to those problems are in the systems you say you prefer.

 Altruizine wrote:

nou wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

nou wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

nou wrote:
But when you play on unquantifiable dioramas? TLOS is the only way to write terrain rules that will be usable anyhow, because you simply cannot write quantified rules that will account for naturally looking terrain.

Well, the evidence from multiple games is you can, but tends to be area terrain rules (this area with some ruins, counts as ruins, you can see 10cm within/in/out).

Only if you can establish clear enough boundaries for such areas. On cityscapes you often can, on continuous hill/rock landscapes you either have to use TLoS or default to near planet bowling ball environment of binary visibility. To be perfectly clear - I’m talking about fully modeled tiles or full tables that actually look like a landscape, not simply a nice looking table with discreet terrain pieces on it. No stepped hills, no scenery bases or other „crutches”. On all of those TLoS results in a lot more terrain influence than quantified terrain designations.

I'd rather play with stepped hills and scenery bases than have a lovingly-modeled rolling countryside result in the very top of the head of one of my troops being visible to the enemy and thus getting the entire squad killed because his tetanus-locked posture is unable to crouch. Which will take five extra minutes to resolve, as we check exactly which of the firing models can see it because they're each positioned slightly differently (and god help us if other terrain on the table gets in the way of doing this). Then I'll try to return fire with my heavy weapon teams, but being modeled with tripod-mounted guns means they are unable to see out of their trench, helplessly incapable of hefting their guns onto the sandbags. Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, a slightly steep (but in theory completely traversable) hill is dotted with empty bases, marking the position of a squad whose pewter sculpts will not stand upright in their heroic action poses. They're shooting straight through a dense patch of jungle to hit a unit on the other side, because whoever made this jungle terrain couldn't realistically make it 100% impossible to see through, and so thanks to TLOS the terrain might as well not exist and is less influential than under a more abstract system.

I really, really like realistic terrain aesthetically, but treating LOS completely literally in a mass-battle game with statically-posed models- not to mention an implicitly non-linear ground scale- causes a bunch of problems. I find it much more tolerable in skirmish games where there's only a handful of models on the table, and individual positioning is something I'm willing to deal with, rather than a tedious hassle when moving a squad of 20. Those games also tend to be consistent about how they handle positioning, unlike 40K where your exact position and visibility matter for assessing whether you can be shot at but have no impact whatsoever on whether you can be removed as a casualty.

I never said that TLOS is without flaws, but you are exaggerating possible problems by sticking to 40k mess of rules. I refer wargame mechanics as a whole, wargaming is much broader hobby than GW products. Visibility rules can be written so that tip of the head or an antennae aren't granting visibility. One of the reasons why I got into miniatures wargames in the first place was a simulationist approach to LoS compared to hex-based wargames. So I, prefer to have to resolve some infrequent issues with visibility instead of abstracting everything further than necessary.

And BTW, tripod mounted guns and troopers lying on the ground should have different visibility than standing troopers in a lot of battlefield situations. As long as game is symmetric in that regard, so that tripod mounted guns have visibility restrictions both ways, once as a boon, once as a hindrance then all is good. But I have to stress here - I prefer simulation wargames and I understand perfectly, that 40k never really was one, and this is my personal preference. I have given up on 40k being made to my liking a long time ago, so I'm not advocating for such rules in it anyhow.

Can you reference any example rules paradigms from TLOS simulationist games that address the two generic concerns in catbarf's post? Which are (at least as I read them):

1. Utilizing single models for individual fighters can never adequately represent (simulate) the range of poses/stances/gaits/etc. those fighters would assume in reality

2. Miniature terrain (at least at the scales games are played at) can never adequately represent the complexity of terrain in reality

I'm curious what the solutions to those problems are in the systems you say you prefer.

As I wrote above "more abstraction than necessary". Your post suggests, that there are only two states, full abstraction or full simulation. As to mechanics - all sorts of cover modifiers, where you start with TLOS and then alter the result, like proximity cover for example to represent ducking behind or along a wall, squad based visibility with modifiers by head count, posture markers/modifiers, hiding mechanics, even 40k had "Go to ground" implemented once. Depends on the scale of the game really. Of course wherever this is feasible, area cover rules are usually also there, but restricting terrain rules to just area/full block/full LoS is throwing baby out with the bathwater and can produce such idiotic situations like Knights toe-dipping in area terrain. There are also placement conventions or aids for things like tripod mounted weapons behind low walls etc. I never had a problem resolving such situations, but that is because I play with players of the same mindset. As I wrote in my opening post - it is quantifying terrain rules in wargames that is a difficult problem. Even hex/square board wargames tend to have ambiguous LoS situations and all sorts of solutions and wordings are implemented to limit that, but never achieve perfect unambiguity. A problem as simple as elevation obscuration is really hard to account for without some sort of TLoS or heavy abstraction and corner passing in board RPG LoS systems is a reason why e.g. Tannhauser has map based, predefined LoS paths. Real life situations however, tend to have very straightforward answers as long as your goal is not to win a tournament, but to achieve verisimilitude of real life battle.

In Infinity, you have Silhouettes, which you can draw LoS to and from at any point of the Silhouette. If you go prone, the Silhouette is the size of your base. It's not perfect, but it is decent, and works well enough.

w40k could have the same. Infantry size 1, nobz/termintors/bikes size 2, dreads/kans size 3, tanks size 4, knights and land raiders size 5.
and then really small stuff like nurglings, reaper bases, grots etc could have some rule that represents how small they are. Maybe they get better cover, maybe they are harder to hit over certain range etc.

Then terrain could have sizes. If you are the same size standing behind it or in it, you get cover. If it is bigger you can't see over something. And then to help high cost stuff like LR or Knights something that is 2+ higher, can see over certain high of terrain. so no hidding behind a size 2 ruin from a knight when you are infantry. At the same time a knight or LR can be smacked from range too.

All the problems with shoting swords, banners, dynamic models etc are gone. Need of L shaped terrain everywhere is gone. A ruin, building, rubble etc can be any shape because the size is fixed and the blocking is checked from the terrain pice base etc. Ah and even better it has even a plus for melee. because unlike right now, you can't remove the walls from the base, with everything having a set size True LoS is not needed so units can be placed in melee and there is no problems what happens if have to balance a huge base on a wall to reach melee etc.

Altruizine's got it.

I will readily admit that I'm being a bit unfair by using 40K's handling of TLOS, but there are some fundamental issues that come with applying a literalist interpretation of line of sight to models and terrain that, by the nature of being physical and static models, are at least somewhat abstracted to begin with.

Like, the fact that sniper modeled in a crouching pose can't see over the wall of his vantage point is not something I am willing to brush off with 'well it goes both ways, he can't be seen either'. A lovingly-built rendition of a WW1-esque trenchline is impractical to actually play if the LOS rules mean your heavy weapons can't actually shoot from their sandbag emplacements. An urban cityscape becomes silly if you're deciding which squad to put in a building based on how many models are actually standing and thus able to see out the windows. And a jungle-heavy board might as well be open terrain unless you are willing to invest a lot of time and effort to make actually dense, completely obscuring foliage, but then you can't enter it because your models physically won't fit.

I've played a number of TLOS-based games that resolve these issues, but the answer is always to kludge in an abstracted system of determining LOS that ignores the physical models and table. And it makes me wonder why, if we're drawing LOS from imaginary cylinders or defining terrain such that it always or never blocks LOS, we're maintaining the pretense of TLOS as a mechanic to begin with. It especially bugs me because virtually all the TLOS games I've played have area terrain anyways- it's just relevant to movement, rather than shooting. We set an arbitrary boundary where the woods start and the models get half movement or take difficult terrain tests or some other abstract effect on movement, but when the same unit shoots through the same woods, then we care about the exact position of every tree. It's inconsistent, and projecting a laser pointer through the trees is way too nitpicky for a game with 100+ models on the table.

For mass-battle games I much prefer to decouple the gameplay from the physical representation of the terrain. At the very least, it makes it a lot easier to build functional terrain, like woods areas with removable trees so models can fit, or multi-story buildings that don't actually need staircases to traverse internally. The smaller the game the more I'm willing to accept literal representations of terrain.

@Karol

What you just described is exactly how it worked in 3rd and 4th ed 40k. Models and terrain had size/height values. For some unfathomable reason this was discarded in the change to 5th and the game has been poorer for it ever since.

 catbarf wrote:
Altruizine's got it.

I will readily admit that I'm being a bit unfair by using 40K's handling of TLOS, but there are some fundamental issues that come with applying a literalist interpretation of line of sight to models and terrain that, by the nature of being physical and static models, are at least somewhat abstracted to begin with.

Like, the fact that sniper modeled in a crouching pose can't see over the wall of his vantage point is not something I am willing to brush off with 'well it goes both ways, he can't be seen either'. A lovingly-built rendition of a WW1-esque trenchline is impractical to actually play if the LOS rules mean your heavy weapons can't actually shoot from their sandbag emplacements. An urban cityscape becomes silly if you're deciding which squad to put in a building based on how many models are actually standing and thus able to see out the windows. And a jungle-heavy board might as well be open terrain unless you are willing to invest a lot of time and effort to make actually dense, completely obscuring foliage, but then you can't enter it because your models physically won't fit.

I've played a number of TLOS-based games that resolve these issues, but the answer is always to kludge in an abstracted system of determining LOS that ignores the physical models and table. And it makes me wonder why, if we're drawing LOS from imaginary cylinders or defining terrain such that it always or never blocks LOS, we're maintaining the pretense of TLOS as a mechanic to begin with. It especially bugs me because virtually all the TLOS games I've played have area terrain anyways- it's just relevant to movement, rather than shooting. We set an arbitrary boundary where the woods start and the models get half movement or take difficult terrain tests or some other abstract effect on movement, but when the same unit shoots through the same woods, then we care about the exact position of every tree. It's inconsistent, and projecting a laser pointer through the trees is way too nitpicky for a game with 100+ models on the table.

For mass-battle games I much prefer to decouple the gameplay from the physical representation of the terrain. At the very least, it makes it a lot easier to build functional terrain, like woods areas with removable trees so models can fit, or multi-story buildings that don't actually need staircases to traverse internally. The smaller the game the more I'm willing to accept literal representations of terrain.

In all wargames you have to have LoS rules that start with "draw an imaginary straight line" and then proceed from there. Even if your table is flat and only have some impassable, fully obscure blocks sticking out and effectively playing a 2D game, then you still have to define a minimum percentage of a visible model/base that creates actionable LoS, because you have side to side partial obscuration at the edge of the block. And it doesn't matter if you set this percentage to "full base" or "a pinky is enough", you will still get edge cases, even on grids. You are focusing on 40k mess of "can you lit a left pinky with a laser" and call it TLOS, while in all seriousness it is a spectrum of increasing abstraction. You are fine with area/full block/full LoS, some people wan't a bit more detail, some will use differently posed models in a skirmish game to use as realistic TLOS as possible. Some games have area terrain with penetration depth, some will have binary inside-outside only, some will have full TLOS rules for area terrain, etc.

Basically, it is the old discussion of "should it be a wargame or should it be a war themed game".

@ 4th ed style height brackets: everything is fine and clear as long as both models are on the same elevation level or near the edges of a hill. As soon as they are not you have to use TLOS to see if this hill in between is high enough to block LoS, or you're throwing height advantage out of the game that is supposedly a wargame. This is a basic problem with grid based wargames.