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Wayniac wrote:
If they made crusade a completely different set of rules chances are you would see it not be touched at all and essentially be a waste of paper

GW should actually have pretty good numbers on how successful these could be as 9th edition had several Crusade only books as well as narrative only books (IIRC the Vigilus II books didn't have any matched play content, right? ).

artific3r wrote:
Matched play is the standardized sport that you can play anywhere, with anyone, in any country or culture, while narrative is the one where you and your friend get together to tell a cool story together, except not everyone has friends to do this with, and even when you do you're not sure if the guy on the other end is really your friend, or if they even define fun in the same way that you do.

There's a pretty easy way to tell if they define fun the same way as you do.

ccs wrote:

artific3r wrote:
Matched play is the standardized sport that you can play anywhere, with anyone, in any country or culture, while narrative is the one where you and your friend get together to tell a cool story together, except not everyone has friends to do this with, and even when you do you're not sure if the guy on the other end is really your friend, or if they even define fun in the same way that you do.

There's a pretty easy way to tell if they define fun the same way as you do.

Spoiler:

It's called having a conversation. Maybe several conversations. You know, talking with them....

In theory it's easy. In practice nobody does it. We must design games around how people behave, not how we wish they behave.

Going back to the point about wargear, I have a question - how would people feel about having a universal wargear table in the core rulebook? (Could maybe limit it to Infantry characters or somesuch if you're worried about possible abuse.)

Idea is that even in older editions there were some items that were available across multiple armies (e.g. bionics). Moreover, there are many pieces of wargear that confer identical or near-identical effects (an extra attack, an invulnerable save, FNP etc.).

Thus, this would give all factions a pool of wargear to pick from for their characters (which, as the descriptions would indicate, would represent different things in different armies).

This would help limit bloat and would allow faction-specific wargear to have more flavourful and unique abilities.

Doesn't work for Tyranids, Necrons, Daemons and honestly it would be weird on Eldar and Tau outside of the most generic wargear.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've thought that GW should have adopted the mission style from Risk, where the players are assigned specific objectives to take before the game starts, and those are hidden information from the other player.

Table gets set up with 6 objectives on it, players then draw a card or roll on a table to determine what their victory objectives are (so, player A needs to control objective 1, 3 and 6 while B needs 5, 3 and 2). At the end of the game, if one player controls their mission objectives and the other doesn't, then the player who does wins. If both control or neither do, it goes to secondary win conditions, 1 point for controlling an objective in your DZ, 2 for in no mans land, 3 for in opponents DZ for an example off the top of my head.

The fact that you don't know what exact mission your opponent is on allows for tactical play, trying to feint for objectives you don't need to draw forces away from elsewhere, for example.

Streamline the game systems so it takes less time per turn, up the number of turns, and introduce meaningful psychology and pinning systems to make it so there are is a viable role for weaponry and wargear that isn't pure lethality or protection against said lethality.

The "argument" against this approach is that it creates conditions where the scenarios are not balanced for both parties. If player A's objective draw requires them to hold the objectives that are mostly on their side of the board, but player B's objective draw forces them to have to slog across the table to take and hold their opponents objectives, then that gives player A an advantage of being able to play defensively to hold their objective while B has to play offensively to seize them from their opponent, instead of creating a situation where both players objective requirements are equally challenging.

There are ways to avoid this issue of course with careful scenario/objective/mission design such that all possible objectives/goals that a player can be assigned are approximately proportional/equal in difficulty provided both players field a reasonably balanced list to account for the risks associated with any given mission draw, I just don't trust GW to be intelligent about how they go about it to ensure that that is what happens.


Its not perfect, but I think Malifaux kind of gets it right with creating fun fluffy narrative asymmetric yet still mostly balanced scenario design via its Strategy and Schemes system. The design of the various strategies and schemes, as well as the way they are generated and selected, allows for some pretty interesting encounters that give both sides a decently equal chance of winning. Schemes in particular are interesting, as they are secret objectives which rely on the use of scheme markers that get placed over the course of the game, this allows you to create some fog of war as to what you are doing and which schemes you are pursuing, as your scheme marker placement could possibly allude to multiple different schemes, and you can even place what are essentially bonus scheme markers that don't really do anything for you to trick your opponent into thinking you're going for a different win altogether. Malifaux does have the unfortunate side effect of often generating ties as a result however. My understanding is that on the whole Americans are not culturally fond of tied outcomes (which is why American major league sports are often structured in such a way to reduce/eliminate/prevent/disallow tied outcomes), which is why some editions ago (I want to say 4th into 5th or 5th into 6th) GW reworked the scoring system to eliminate or significantly reduce tied game outcomes (and with it elimated the degrees of loss/victory scaling that they used to use. Now a win is a win and a loss is a loss, as opposed to draw/minor/major,etc. which IIRC AoS still uses, interestingly enough). IIRC the last 2 or 3 editions have basically made it statistically improbable if not outright impossible for a game to result in a tie as well. I'm sure theres ways to adress the tied game scenario otehrwise if thats a real deal-breaker, though I think my fellow countrymen should just put their big boy pants on and accept that outcomes aren't always binary.

Just use Chain of Command's scenario design outlined above:

1) Let the players determine their own deployment via a mini-wargame patrol phase at the beginning AFTER they determine the scenario.

2) let the players finish their listbuilding AFTER they see the map and scenario.

Wayniac wrote:
If they made crusade a completely different set of rules chances are you would see it not be touched at all and essentially be a waste of paper

Only way to avoid that is to pump narrative 40k full of flavor and make matched 40k as bland as possible for the sake of balance. In that case though, instead of having narrative 40k wither on the vine and die in favor of matched 40k, you run other risks:

-competitive community dies out when they realize their super-balanced but sterile game isn't fun to play
-narrative community dies out when they realize their super-flavorful game isn't really all that balanced
-both narrative and competitive communities die out and search for another game that strikes a better middle ground between these two ends of the spectrum
-both narrative and competitive communities join together to force the game back towards a unified ruleset that makes neither party truly happy, but sucks less than the separate skewed rulesets
-one of the two communities hijacks the others community and bastardizes it into something its not intended for (which is what the competitive community has already done with 40k to begin with, basically), which brings us right back to where we started

Realistically though, I agree with the assessment that matched is the default way of play and the community at large is fully indoctrinated into that mindset. I unfortunately know many more people who turn up their nose at anything that deviates from the competitive 40k template than I do people willing to play non-competitive 40k formats. Even though I would prefer playing using narrative rules myself, I basically haven't found an opponent willing to do so and regard all the non-matched segments of the various rulebooks and codecies to basically be a waste of time, money, ink, and paper which is being published for an audience that doesn't really exist at the scale needed to justify the effort put into supporting it. Even the other likeminded casuals seem to have a stockholm syndrome type complex where the suggestion of playing crusade or a narrative play type format engenders a response to the effect of "why would I do that, so some kid can come in and harsh the vibe with a cheesy list? No thanks, I'll stick to matched play points and the latest scenarios, they are more balanced" - even though they bitch constantly about the competitive community and power gamer mentality. Its a complete no-win for me.

On Missions?

I am, and will always be, a strong advocate of that being determined after lists have been written.

Get the missions right in terms of variety of Win Conditions, and you encourage lists which have a bit of everything, as you’ll never really know what’s ahead of you.

Determining Mission then writing or adapting your army list just doesn’t sit right with me. In my mind, it’s closer in terms of overall sportsmanship to my opponent waiting to see what I’m fielding before writing their own list (yes, I’ve had that happen. No it’s not fun, even when you beat them).

And hey. Skill with a “take all comers” list seems a greater achievement than cheesing the meta. At least in my opinion.

There is no reason why there can't simply be two games. They're already halfway there with Crusade.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Just use Chain of Command's scenario design outlined above:

1) Let the players determine their own deployment via a mini-wargame patrol phase at the beginning AFTER they determine the scenario.

2) let the players finish their listbuilding AFTER they see the map and scenario.

Point 1 is too sophisticated a mechanical design for GW and doesn't cater to the level of predictability that competitive gamers want from the game. It would never survive as a concept for the same reason that symmetric terrain is now the default - competitive gamers won't stand for any rules or systems which could potentially call into question their self-assured belief that they are the second coming of Erwin Rommel (who was a loser anyway, but thats besides the point). That type of deployment minigame could easily create conditions which essentially determine the game in the deployment phase if you play it wrong, before the game even really starts (much like asymmetric terrain could if you didn't know what you were doing). Adults in the room would say that its part of the game and is just as much a measure of your skill as building your list or anything else and thus has its place in tournaments, but to an all too large segment of the competitive community would say that the minigame isn't "real 40k" and uses different skills and has too much of an impact on the games outcome, etc. and therefore is bad and ruining the sanctity of the competitive experience by not placing both players on as equal ground as possible. Modern 40k feels bland and soulless in large part because the competitive community has caused GW to filter out any and all mechanisms, rules, systems, and gameplay elements that deviate noticeably from what competitive gamers deem to be part of the core gameplay loop or introduce skills which they deem to be accessory to that core play experience, and likewise anything which they have determined to result in unbalance through their own uninterrogated misapplications of logic. Asymmetric terrain is gone because on the surface symmetric terrain appears to give both players an equal chance of success, even though interrogating and logic-ing that out would reveal that isn't even remotely true and in fact it likely disadvantages one player over the other in actuality. Blast and flamer templates are gone because placing your minis to minimize their impact and placing templates to maximize their impact were deemed to be non-core skills (and to be fair I kind of agree with that) that skewed game outcomes by giving players who had better spatial reasoning skills an advantage over players who were otherwise better generals, etc.

Point 2 is just a non-starter unless that system involves a "progressive deployment" type system (i.e. at the start of each turn you can deploy 500 points worth of army from your collection, decided then and there rather than in advance). Of course the problem with that is that it skews in the direction of the player with the larger collection will be the winner. Nobody, not even casual gamers, wants to sit there for an hour while your opponent tries to min-max and optimize their army list. I pre-write lists for my armies to standard points levels in advance so I can pick-up and go if someone asks me for a casual game, no need to keep anyone waiting while I crunch numbers to figure out my list. I find players who don't have their lists written in advance to be rude and extremely inconsiderate of *my* time by making me wait while they figure things out, and I simply refuse to play with them as a result. This is even more true in a competitive environment, and I don't think anyone will get much enjoyment from turning listbuilding into a timed exercise to prevent the problems that can otherwise arise.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

artific3r wrote:
There is no reason why there can't simply be two games. They're already halfway there with Crusade.

splitting the playerbase is a good reason for it. compare the size of the community that plays regular 40k to the size of the community that plays almost anything else that GW produces. Theres a stark difference in size there - even with other games that use the same models as 40k. Kill Team and Apocalypse might as well not exist for how little play they get.

If you are not willing to split the playerbase (and to be fair GW is definitely not willing to do so) then matched play will continue to be the only real way to play.

The elephant in the room is that matched play will always be the more popular way to play. Call it indoctrination, call it ease of play, it doesn't really matter. There is either two games or there is one matched play game.

 vipoid wrote:
Going back to the point about wargear, I have a question - how would people feel about having a universal wargear table in the core rulebook? (Could maybe limit it to Infantry characters or somesuch if you're worried about possible abuse.)

Idea is that even in older editions there were some items that were available across multiple armies (e.g. bionics). Moreover, there are many pieces of wargear that confer identical or near-identical effects (an extra attack, an invulnerable save, FNP etc.).

Thus, this would give all factions a pool of wargear to pick from for their characters (which, as the descriptions would indicate, would represent different things in different armies).

This would help limit bloat and would allow faction-specific wargear to have more flavourful and unique abilities.

I think that works fine for pretty generic stuff. You'd probably still want to keep the points values separated for factions though.

Even Tyranids had access to force fields in the past with the Voltage Field upgrade, and that could be on Monstrous Creatures.

The playerbase is already split. Narrative players don't want to play the 10e tourney style ruleset. Competitive players don't want to play an easily-cheesed narrative style game.

Meanwhile casual players don't really care whether its narrative or competitive, but tend to default to competitive because its more universal and ubiquitous. So competitive is always going to be a lot bigger, not because of marketing or design support or anything, but because it's intrinsically easier to have fun with for the average player (when taking into account how easy it is to find games, how easy it is to reach an understanding of the kind of experience you want, how much self-balancing it requires, etc).

Dudeface wrote:
Whilst options have been reduced, they've not been hit as heavily for other armies as a whole in comparison. That's ignoring that codex is now actually 5 fully fledged separate books now.

You wanna retry that? Those separate books have invalidated entire armies and swathes of models. Even basic things like jump packs on our Lords have been removed.

Haven't been hit as heavily? Chaos has been the hardest hit. The only comparable army is Dark Eldar, who have systematically had all their options removed as they slowly revert back to OG 3rd Ed standards.

Matched Play is a solid base. The focus on that, and seeking ever greater balance is, for me, An Objectively Good Thing.

As I’ve said elsewhere many times, as a Sad Old Git, I’m well used to GW’s rules and the need for home made fixes and patches. But I’d always take a base set of rules which need fewer fixes and patches.

I love my narrative gaming. I want my games to tell a story. And I don’t mind asymmetric missions, even if one side’s Win Condition is simply “try not to get everyone ded”. And to my mind, there’s nothing better than a finely crafted narrative tree campaign, where the person running it has to adapt things on the fly as games are won and lost, affecting the wider picture of the war zone.

But a decently balanced base set of rules doesn’t stop me deliberately applying my own wonk in such missions. Indeed in many respects? It makes it’s so much easier to apply said Deliberate Wonk, because putting your thumb on the scales works better when the scales are properly balanced in the first place.

And I’m quite capable of creating my own progression rules. I’ll lift from there, borrow from there and cobble something together.

So the focus on Matched Play doesn’t, when you stop and think about it, limit my weirdness and oddity gaming one jot. If anything it increases my opportunities, because I’m spending less time setting House Rules for really basic stuff.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
Whilst options have been reduced, they've not been hit as heavily for other armies as a whole in comparison. That's ignoring that codex is now actually 5 fully fledged separate books now.

You wanna retry that? Those separate books have invalidated entire armies and swathes of models. Even basic things like jump packs on our Lords have been removed.

Haven't been hit as heavily? Chaos has been the hardest hit. The only comparable army is Dark Eldar, who have systematically had all their options removed as they slowly revert back to OG 3rd Ed standards.

I am sure the actual WE playerbase would have his skull.
And lets not forget that codex tzangoor is also ...magnificent.

While the csm codex absorbs lost & the damned like a too dry plant water ... and turning into codex cultists and whatever is underpriced/easy to stack buffs ontop.

Frankly, the average person just isn't very creative, and competitive play is great for that. Narrative play requires effort. Worse, it requires creative effort, and that's not something everyone has. This loss of player-driven narrative creativity is at the core of what makes recent editions feel so soulless for people who really enjoyed older editions. Unfortunately the number of not-so-creative people that play the game vastly outweighs the number of creative people. The roleplay-focused audience is just kind of niche. But like I said, that's ok. GW does care deeply about that audience. If they didn't we wouldn't have things like Necromunda or AT.

Not everyone needs to have it though.

I’m not claiming to be competent at it, but I’ve run more than a few narrative campaigns. All the participants need do is get on board that this isn’t about just roflstomping your opponent, but weaving a narrative all our own.

It’s like running an RPG. Get folks on broadly the same wavelength, and you’re gonna have a great time. You just need to be prepared to boot anyone who won’t embrace the narrative side of it, and maintain some semblance of control/authority as the GM.

Your LGS is very lucky to have guys like you. It's always a treat playing in a well-run narrative campaign. I wish it were more common. I'd prefer it to be the default honestly. But we're in the minority now. Narrative players were probably always destined to be the minority. GW just never realized it until they actually tried courting competitive players in recent editions.

artific3r wrote:

ccs wrote:

artific3r wrote:
Matched play is the standardized sport that you can play anywhere, with anyone, in any country or culture, while narrative is the one where you and your friend get together to tell a cool story together, except not everyone has friends to do this with, and even when you do you're not sure if the guy on the other end is really your friend, or if they even define fun in the same way that you do.

There's a pretty easy way to tell if they define fun the same way as you do.

Spoiler:

It's called having a conversation. Maybe several conversations. You know, talking with them....

In theory it's easy. In practice nobody does it.

And I think we just learned what happened to the "soul" of the game.....

Happens with everything that becomes huge and successful. Well almost. There are exceptions. With some adjustments, I think GW has a fair shot at becoming one of those exceptions. They have the talent for it.

That's not really fair IMO.
Running a campaign takes a lot of time and effort. The more people there are the more competing ideas about what they want to happen show up and if people aren't satisfied they'll just not bother.
When you throw in the issues of real life like work, families and the such, a lot more pressure gets put on both the GM and the players to make it work so nobody wastes their precious time.
A GM has to keep the momentum going which isn't always possible and a campaign will naturally taper off when live inevitably gets in the way.
The GM has to tread a very thin line between fairness and being viewed as heavy handed as well. The last event I attended had some problem players who took extremely powerful lists that also happened to be very narrative driven but the EOs didn't push for a change in those lists despite the issues being well known in advance. For my friends who played against these lists it almost ruined their weekend and nobody wants that.
I really don't see how GW could make it more attractive to specifically play narrative over basic matched play (not tournament, matched) when narrative has more barriers to keep things enjoyable.

Yeah I can see that, the "soul" was lost as 40k when from a niche game to a mainstream one.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
the mission style from Risk, where the players are assigned specific objectives to take before the game starts, and those are hidden information from the other player.

ome editions ago (I want to say 4th into 5th or 5th into 6th) GW reworked the scoring system to eliminate or significantly reduce tied game outcomes (and with it elimated the degrees of loss/victory scaling that they used to use. Now a win is a win and a loss is a loss, as opposed to draw/minor/major,etc. which IIRC AoS still uses, interestingly enough). IIRC the last 2 or 3 editions have basically made it statistically improbable if not outright impossible for a game to result in a tie as well.

Players love it when the challenge is to meet all objectives to clear the stage with S rank, in single player vidya games. You can have this in a two player table top game too: make it the goal of each player to get S rank


Easily this can mean specific super heavies and characters must be alive at the end of the the game, or you don’t win. It’s not a tie, you, individually, failed the win condition. You get at best an A rank.


Potentially you can have player 1 get S rank (4 units reach opponent’s table edge?) and player 2 get S rank (destroy all enemy battleline units?)

Maybe it sounds like participation trophies for sissies

As for US pro sports, MLB has had huge jumps in attendance and TV numbers, subsequent to some rule changes. This is something wargames could benefit from but maybe not GW

Having been going on a review of 2nd ed for a while, it really strikes me that the modern 10th ed (and from probably 8th onward) and 2nd ed approach how they apply rules to units differently.

In 2nd ed, you had a lot of relatively similar units, and characters profilewise and you chose your wargear to customise them. But they were each designed to reflect their fluff descriptions.

Modern 40k is very much a rulesforward approach, where HOW you decide what mechanics to give a unit is based on how much utility it will have and less on what it is supposed to be.

Simulationist vs gamist perhaps (not a new idea, it's just more obvious looking back at 2nd where the emphasis was).

artific3r wrote:
The playerbase is already split. Narrative players don't want to play the 10e tourney style ruleset. Competitive players don't want to play an easily-cheesed narrative style game.

Meanwhile casual players don't really care whether its narrative or competitive, but tend to default to competitive because its more universal and ubiquitous. So competitive is always going to be a lot bigger, not because of marketing or design support or anything, but because it's intrinsically easier to have fun with for the average player (when taking into account how easy it is to find games, how easy it is to reach an understanding of the kind of experience you want, how much self-balancing it requires, etc).

Thing is that there aren't many players that will truly define themselves as "narrative players", and based on my experience even those that don't like competitive stylings of the ruleset (such as myself) will still play it, at least until it makes them miserable enough that they quit, or they do what Grotsnik does and house rule and adapt the rules. Point is, the playerbase is not as split as what you imagine it to look like, but formalizing the split by releasing "Rogue Trader 2nd Edition" as the narrative counterpart to "Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition" will result in a much broader split (or render one of those two games basically an also-ran that gets no support like Apocalypse). Part of GWs market dominance is driven by its ubiquity - walk into just about any hobby shop or miniature gaming club and you will find people to play with. Splitting that playerbase makes it harder, because now you're potentially walking into a shop looking to play 40k 10th and only finding RT2 players, or vice versa. I know plenty of people who only bother with 40k because they are basically guaranteed being able to find games, if you split that playerbase in two then you're going to start losing people to other games that are no more or less accessible than whatever flavor of 40k is not accessible to people in someones local community....

...on second thought, GW should do it.

artific3r wrote:
Frankly, the average person just isn't very creative, and competitive play is great for that. Narrative play requires effort. Worse, it requires creative effort, and that's not something everyone has. This loss of player-driven narrative creativity is at the core of what makes recent editions feel so soulless for people who really enjoyed older editions. Unfortunately the number of not-so-creative people that play the game vastly outweighs the number of creative people. The roleplay-focused audience is just kind of niche. But like I said, that's ok. GW does care deeply about that audience. If they didn't we wouldn't have things like Necromunda or AT.

I would argue that the problem is that life is just moving at an increasingly faster pace for many people and time is a precious resource. Setting up a proper narrative game takes more time and effort. You can't just show up at the shop and ask a rando for a narrative game and expect to have a solid narrative experience with it. Yes, you can set up a basic narrative story with a quick custom scenario and basic terrain layout in a pinch but for the most part that will give you a game that is more like a casual pickup game iwth less balance and extra steps than it will a truly narrative-driven experience. A lot of the onus for that lies with GW though, as they do not provide players an adequate toolset to rapidly set up an engaging narrative game. The scenarios they provide you are relatively bland, and not really connected to a true narrative experience- they require the players to do a lot of work forging the narrative for themselves instead of providing players with enough material and structure that it creates a basis for them to build on with the players only needing to fill in some blanks. Likewise theres not a lot of rules in modern 40k that actually contribute to narrative flavor, and kind of for good reason as they often meant that game outcomes were skewed as a result of dice rolls that had consequential random effects, like a sorceror turning himself into a chaos spawn or an ork tank that blows itself up because it dakkadakka'd too hard.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
Having been going on a review of 2nd ed for a while, it really strikes me that the modern 10th ed (and from probably 8th onward) and 2nd ed approach how they apply rules to units differently.

In 2nd ed, you had a lot of relatively similar units, and characters profilewise and you chose your wargear to customise them. But they were each designed to reflect their fluff descriptions.

Modern 40k is very much a rulesforward approach, where HOW you decide what mechanics to give a unit is based on how much utility it will have and less on what it is supposed to be.

Simulationist vs gamist perhaps (not a new idea, it's just more obvious looking back at 2nd where the emphasis was).

Good observation. Theres certainly dangers in going too far down the simulationist rabbit-hole, but GW has put too many layers of abstraction into the game over the past few editions and disconnected a lot of gameplay and tabletop happenings from any semblance of verisimilitude with the lore.

Wow man... Since my last post, I've agreed with so much of what I've read that I had to doublecheck I was still on Dakka!

I want to reply to everybody, but I took a lot of work home with me tonight and I'm only on a short break... Like WAY too short to multiqoute the ten or so posts to which I want to reply.

Good food for thought though; thanks for the all-too brief distraction.

Back to bidness!

Yeah, I've had some real positive vibes on dakka ever since the big pie thread happened. Seems like we're all getting along much better, almost like one big happy family lol.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Yeah, I've had some real positive vibes on dakka ever since the big pie thread happened. Seems like we're all getting along much better, almost like one big happy family lol.

Big... pie thread? Should I even ask...?