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 Tyran wrote:
The reason is obvious, GW sells models, 40k players spend thousands on models. So people want stuff to be about those models instead of a strategic scope that goes far beyond the tabletop.

Oh, you're absolutely right. The end result though is that Crusade will never be a major mode of play for 40k. It's too much book keeping for too little entertainment value. You'd have a more engaging 40k campaign experience if you played a game of Warhammer 40,000: Risk and used 2000pt games rather than dice rolls to resolve battles.

 Las wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

Historical wargames have had campaign systems for decades. I've never seen one that works like Crusade.

For some reason, it's very difficult for 40k players (and GW proper post, like, 1999) to understand that in order for a wargaming campaign to be narratively and mechanically engaging, the majority of that campaign's ruleset needs to be about decisions made and what happens off the table, rather than on the table.

A good campaign system is primarily an off-table game, where the on-table battle is more akin to resolving a contested dice roll to decide the outcome of decisions. A battle where your character gets to use a magic sword is not engaging. A battle to decide a pivotal maneuver you've made at the operational or strategic level, even if its just a standard game of 40k, is far more likely to hold narrative weight.

GW had some narrative campaigns in WD in the 00s that were like that. Campaign maps, full armies from which the forces for each battle would be selected, territory gain and loss and working towards an overarching objective. In other words, battles that contributed to a strategic narrative, AKA a campaign. They also had campaigns for two players that used a flowchart system, where who won a battle would determine which one you play next, eventually leading to a story conclusion. Different system, but still the same idea of each battle determining what the next battle will look like, ultimately leading to victory or defeat.

Crusade is more akin to a sports league. You show up for your weekly match with your fixed roster of players, playing against whomever else is in the league, and while the players themselves may grow or suffer injuries, the outcome of the game itself has no significance besides the win/loss tally.

For that purpose I think it's fine as a structure for regular get-togethers at the local club- at least until someone accumulates enough advancement to break it. I just don't find it particularly interesting as a campaign system, let alone the sole or natural way that a wargame campaign system ought to work.

See, I think Crusade works pretty well on the whole. My main gripes with it are:

* I want more reasons to swap out units between games. As-is, there's almost no reason to add new units to your roster after a certain point, and you end up fielding your leveled-up units every game to the exclusion of alternatives.

* I want more reasons to *not* focus all my xp on a small number of units so that they level up faster.

* I want more crusade variants. Give me rules for a force that starts strong (with low XP) but then permanently loses units over time. Give me rules for a scenario where parts of my roster are commmitted to specific theatres of battle and thus my options for list building are more limited. Give me rules for unlocking my drukhari units as I claim relevant parts of Commorragh.

Basically, Crusade feels like a decent starting point, but it's under-utilized.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Las wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

Historical wargames have had campaign systems for decades. I've never seen one that works like Crusade.

For some reason, it's very difficult for 40k players (and GW proper post, like, 1999) to understand that in order for a wargaming campaign to be narratively and mechanically engaging, the majority of that campaign's ruleset needs to be about decisions made and what happens off the table, rather than on the table.

A good campaign system is primarily an off-table game, where the on-table battle is more akin to resolving a contested dice roll to decide the outcome of decisions. A battle where your character gets to use a magic sword is not engaging. A battle to decide a pivotal maneuver you've made at the operational or strategic level, even if its just a standard game of 40k, is far more likely to hold narrative weight.

I feel like there should be a GW game that represents an abstracted planet-level campaign. That is, a game where instead of putting armies on the table and rolling to-hit rolls, you're using your faction's preferred tactics and quirks to seize control of critical locations, make planetfall, etc. I guess the Fantasy Flight Conquest card game was sort of this?

They used to have the planetary empires or whatever it was called system that was a map based game and you fought actual games of 40K to resolve it.

But part of the problem is I don't think they have ever really put out interesting campaign rules. It's either basic stuff that's more like a league, like crusade, or it's just bogged down with extraneous stuff that makes people lose interest. For example I would never want to play in a map-based campaign because I've never seen one run successfully; they always break down because people don't want to move things around a map they want to actually play 40K.

What's interesting is AOS seems to get this at least a little better although path to glory still has problems. Ultimately though I think what people really want is to have an interesting narrative backdrop for their games and not have to keep records or notes or other sort of bookkeeping or have to play out a tactical game on a map before actually engaging on the battlefield

Wayniac wrote:
They used to have the planetary empires or whatever it was called system that was a map based game and you fought actual games of 40K to resolve it.

But part of the problem is I don't think they have ever really put out interesting campaign rules. It's either basic stuff that's more like a league, like crusade, or it's just bogged down with extraneous stuff that makes people lose interest. For example I would never want to play in a map-based campaign because I've never seen one run successfully; they always break down because people don't want to move things around a map they want to actually play 40K.

What's interesting is AOS seems to get this at least a little better although path to glory still has problems. Ultimately though I think what people really want is to have an interesting narrative backdrop for their games and not have to keep records or notes or other sort of bookkeeping or have to play out a tactical game on a map before actually engaging on the battlefield

I think part of it is the barrier to entry. Planetary empires wanted you to buy and paint a bunch of resin miniatures.

Compare the lift required to do Planetary Empires with something like this. https://store.warlordgames.com/products/bolt-action-combined-arms

Now imagine something like that translated into the 40k app, where a gaming club could play a static strategic level game asynchronously. Like an email based game of diplomacy but for the 21st century, right from the app. And then use their tabletop games to resolve actions.

It'll never happen, but I might even pay a subscription for something like that if it had semi-regular updates and new additions.

I believe there is some confusion with crusade ruleset in this forum. Crusade rule-set is designed for 4 game scenarios between two growing armies. They even give the example how to run one in one of the early publishing of the system. It's not intended to be this long open-ended perpetual growth enabler that many wish it was.

When you take into consideration that the intended goal is 4 game series, then the rate of XP growth makes a lot more sense.

The series is:
-Scenario 1
-Scenario 2 if player A wins, Scenario 3 if player B wins
-Scenario 4 if player A wins, Scenario 5 if player B wins
-Scenario 6 finale

EDIT: I may be conflating a different GW campaign publication with the Crusade rules, I will have to dig. Leaving it up in case someone finds this type of scenario play useful.

Tittliewinks22 wrote:
I believe there is some confusion with crusade ruleset in this forum. Crusade rule-set is designed for 4 game scenarios between two growing armies. They even give the example how to run one in one of the early publishing of the system. It's not intended to be this long open-ended perpetual growth enabler that many wish it was.

When you take into consideration that the intended goal is 4 game series, then the rate of XP growth makes a lot more sense.

The series is:
-Scenario 1
-Scenario 2 if player A wins, Scenario 3 if player B wins
-Scenario 4 if player A wins, Scenario 5 if player B wins
-Scenario 6 finale

I think you're confusing crusade with one of their other campaign systems from days of yore Because crusade is absolutely intended to be open-ended from what I've seen both in the previous edition and in 10th edition, And it didn't exist before that.

Wayniac wrote:

I think you're confusing crusade with one of their other campaign systems from days of yore Because crusade is absolutely intended to be open-ended from what I've seen both in the previous edition and in 10th edition.

I will have to dig through my documents to verify if I am crazy or not. Either way, every successful iteration of crusade rules that we've used had these short distinct scenario structures, so the book keeping bloat doesn't get out of hand.

 Tyran wrote:
The reason is obvious, GW sells models, 40k players spend thousands on models. So people want stuff to be about those models instead of a strategic scope that goes far beyond the tabletop.

You can have it be about the models.
The last (9e) Crusade my Rebel Grots fought in? What happened, Win or Lose, influenced wich models/units I'd use in the next game. It affected what upgrades I gave the units (this was not always the best & {gasp!}sometimes I simply rolled randomly). I also rarely ever paid pts to remove battle scars. So the force was showing some wear & tear by the end of the campaign.

What I fought and won against (or at least completed Agendas for) also influenced what future models I'd build & how I'd kitbash them. I fought a lot of Knights & Tau. So alot of units that I added to the roster as the campaign progressed incorporated Knights & Tau bitz. Existing units also got some of those bitz. Ex: My warboss in Mega-armor? He's now got himself a nice, if slightly krumped up, suit of Abandon's termie armor.
Sometimes my wanting to build something also influenced what units I specifically tried to kill. It didn't matter if that was tactically sound, wouldn't help with the mission or agendas.... The moment my one Knight foe opened up on my grots with that named relic gatling cannon? My Grots had to have it. All that Dakka!. That Knights fate was sealed. It was marked for death, killed, & looted. The Meks are busy prepping the cannon for the forces next Crusade & assure the Red Gobbo the thing will be ready in time.
The shop loved this! My Rebel Grots were very successful so their victories meant I was spending $ on kits just for bitz.

I'd also type up a battle report for each battle. From the grots PoV of course.

The result is I have a customized force with a history.

Of course MOST people playing Crusade don't actually do this. They approach it as an upgradable tourney roster. And then they wonder why "it didn't work".

Yeah, Crusade definitely works better when you use it as a framing device for your army's narrative. I fluffed my longest-running crusade army (in 9th) around a craftworld fleet that got separated from each other in the webway and had their safe route home blocked off. So as I played the campaign, I fluffed my agendas as being actions needed to help my seers find a safe path home. Every time I added units to my roster, I wrote a paragraph or two about how the new units were rescued by/able to reconnect with my fleet. My plan (that I never ended up doing) was to occassionally give myself the opportunity to try to "go home" (conclude my roster's crusade) and to give myself an overall campaign victory rating based on how many points worth of eldar I made it home with.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Basically, Crusade feels like a decent starting point, but it's under-utilized.

This post is slightly ninjaed by the one you've immediately just made...

But surely the issue is that if your friends agree, you can do anything you like?

I don't think GW meant for Crusade to serve as the be-all and end-all of narrative play. Its more a starting point. The narrative for each of the factions is fairly fluffy and free-flow if you want to adjust it a bit.

Its not a map campaign - which, I would agree with some above, I've never really seen work.
Its not a system of "starter battle, scenario A/Scenario B, Scenario X/Scenario Y, Final". Those can work - but often some of the scenarios are horrendously designed and consequently not that fun to play unless you can really embrace not playing for the rules.

Which I feel is the issue of narrative in general. Saying its a system armies get better until they become overpowered seems kind of "well... yeah?" I mean Necromunda, Mordheim, Bloodbowl etc kind of go the same way. If you play with people with that mentality its probably not going to be that fun. People have to sort of suspend their urge to optimise and thinking this the LVO finals.

I think that was Tyran's point, CCS. 40K players want systems that have to do with their 40K models on their 40K boards, and not what's happening in the greater conflict behind the scenes.

But I don't think it's fair to imply that players are 'doing it wrong' by just playing Crusade as written. It sounds like Crusade provided you the bare-bones escalation league framework, and you then did a significant amount of work with some personally imposed handicaps to forge the narrative out of what would otherwise just be a dry escalation league.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 aphyon wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
It sounds all nice what you say but in the end(6th/7th edition) you just took scatter lasers/ assault cannons/ auto cannons/ plasma guns that were good against every target. 8th introduced a much higher range of useful weapons because of the improved AP system and the damage stat.

The hull point system was idiotic and punished vehicles with a double damage system. there were a few good things that came out or should i say came back in 6th and 7th. overwatch, snap fire and grenade throwing, aside from that it was not an improvement over 5th edition.

8th introduced a more abstract system.

5th "introduced" weapons to do a specific job because it was based on a tactical wargame where you brought the right weapon to the right fight. surprisingly AT weapons designed to destroy armor or MCs were actually good at that job, killing hordes of light infantry not so much.

It is also why 5th ed is still considered the best of the 3rd-7th ed core rule sets even with its few well known flaws like wound allocation.

Not really. Everything was good at killing hordes due to the bad ap system, so weapons like the heavy bolter were basically useless, your Bolter killed guardsmen and Boyz good enough. And Plasma killed everything good enough, you didn't need an AP4 weapon that would plink from a 3+ armour that was worn by most infantry units in the game. It also led to strange situations where a lascannon would autowound a tank but needed a 2+ to wound a grot. Said lascannon also did nothing against monsters, or characters with Toughness 5 or better(yes, in 5th these weren't that common because of the unintuitive 4(5) ruling, but usually these chars would have at least a 4++, and then you also had eternal warrior).
Effectively there were no anti-MC weapons, you'd just drown these in shots or take your plasma, that, as said, worked against everything decently enough.

Compared to that the new system has more variance, it just suffers from the dumb points system in 10th and GW giving too many things damage 2.

Heavy bolters were very good as were many AP4 weapons, because of your focus on MEQ armies that was limited to 3 -marines of both flavors, sisters of battle (that were also T3 meaning HBs wounded them on 2+) and necron immortals, you ignore that almost no other army in the game had better than a 4+ save for 90% of its force-guard, orks, tau, tyranids, eldar of both flavors etc...

Additionally when there was far less volume of fire in the game a 3 shot weapon was a big deal when it had a 36" range.

Saying las cannons did "nothing" is also disingenuous, they absolutely did damage and did so easily against MCs as did every other high strength low AP AT weapon.


The new system isn't a new system it is an old import from WHFBs done poorly. the damage reduction system is a terrible mechanic that has led to an arms race of increased toughness and wounds. compared to when you paid for that 2+ or 3+ save in high points values but you all still had a single wound aside from characters and MCs. it also breaks immersion. when a ballistic plate gets hit by a round it doesn't get less effective by the AP of said round, it either stops the round or it doesn't-all or nothing. the older editions balanced this out via hard cover saves and blocking LOS terrain. forcing players to use more maneuver and tactical play.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Not that AT weapons WERE any good at killing MCs, except en mass, as was previously discussed...

And I would say that 4th ed was the better edition as it was the only time GW was brave enough to use a superior line of sight system to their idiotic 'look from the eyes of your static model standing on a rock shouting while he's supposed to be hiding in a forest' method...

I would generally agree. 4th and 5th had a lot in common, but there were certain things about 4th that were better and certain things about 5th I would port into 4th if I could. Likewise certain things from subsequent editions that I would bring back into 4th to improve it, but 4th probably had the best "bones" of any edition out there in terms of core gameplay mechanics.

Look up the poll we did here on dakka a couple years ago, as far as older editions go 5th won hands down by a large margin for core mechanics. anybody who played through the editions at the time could see the slow progression of improvements from 3rd-5th untill they just tossed it all in 6th, incidentally after almost all the original design team had left the company.

 aphyon wrote:

Heavy bolters were very good as were many AP4 weapons, because of your focus on MEQ armies that was limited to 3 -marines of both flavors, sisters of battle (that were also T3 meaning HBs wounded them on 2+) and necron immortals, you ignore that almost no other army in the game had better than a 4+ save for 90% of its force-guard, orks, tau, tyranids, eldar of both flavors etc...

Additionally when there was far less volume of fire in the game a 3 shot weapon was a big deal when it had a 36" range.

Heavy bolters were fine thanks to wounding T3 on 2+ and T4 on a respectable 3+ and because, as you said, a 3 shot weapon with good range was pretty solid at the time. AP4 was kind of a sore spot though. Having a "focus on MEQ" is fair given how likely you are to run into a meq army in a pickup game. So AP4 was in this awkward place where it may as well have been AP5 against most squishy targets, was good enough to invalidate the armor moderately expensive units paid for, but then did absolutely nothing against marines. (Other than scouts.) So it felt like you were (presumably) paying points for the ability to ignore the save of a fire warrior or howling banshee, but those points were kind of wasted against marines. Plus, it felt weird that a heavy flamer (AP4) could wipe out my entire squad of avengers without giving them a save, but the striking scorpions standing next to them in ever-so-slightly thicker armor could shrug off the majority of its damage output.

The current AP system has the upside that, if your gun pays for AP, you benefit from that AP regardless of whether your target has a 5+ save or a 2+ save.

Look up the poll we did here on dakka a couple years ago, as far as older editions go 5th won hands down by a large margin for core mechanics. anybody who played through the editions at the time could see the slow progression of improvements from 3rd-5th untill they just tossed it all in 6th, incidentally after almost all the original design team had left the company.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I was really sick of 5th by the end of it. The game revolved around transports and punished factions that had lacklustre troops or troops who didn't want to stand around on objectives. Plus the missions were pretty repetitive and included a version of kill points that was pretty brutal for squishy armies. I suspect I'd enjoy 4th edition quite a bit, but I'm not sure if I could enjoy a return to 5th.

The idea I have often heard is that 5th is best core rules but 4th has better codexes (because 5th codexes kinda broke the edition).

EDIT: Regarding the old AP system, it is also tricky to cost.

Weapons need to be costed so they are at their most effective against their respective save. In practice their cost exponentially increasing with AP and thus their efficency decreases against anything else.

E.g a bolter needs to be less efficient than a lasgun to counter the issue the bolter ignores 5+ saves. A heavy bolter needs to be priced against Fire Warriors and Scouts, but somewhat inefficient against GEQ.

It is also tricky to define how much a unit needs to pay for their armor. A 2+ save needs to be expensive because it counters anything that isn't a AP2 or 1. But at the same time if it is too expensive then it becomes a dice game to bypass with weight of dice.

 Tyran wrote:
The idea I have often heard is that 5th is best core rules but 4th has better codexes (because 5th codexes kinda broke the edition).

I think a mix of 4th and 5th rules would probably be ideal.

5th definitely had a lot of good rules, but it also brought some less desirable ones (e.g. TLoS). IIRC, cover saves were also a bit too generous.

Regardless, I'd put it out there as being by far the best starting point.

Codices are a tricky one because 5th had a lot of great books, but also (as you note) some that had terrible external balance. I've also heard that 4th-5th was when options started to decline, but that might depend somewhat on the army in question.

 Tyran wrote:

EDIT: Regarding the old AP system, it is also tricky to cost.

Weapons need to be costed so they are at their most effective against their respective save. In practice it means their efficency is logaritmical, with their cost exponentially increasing with AP.

E.g a bolter needs to be less efficient than a lasgun to counter the issue the bolter ignores 5+ saves. In a similar if counterintuitive way, saves need to be more efficient the better they are. A Terminator Unit needs to be tougher (points wise) against lasguns compared to a Marine unit.

And that is a tricky balance to hit.

I think both have their difficulties.

One thing I'll say is that it was a colossal mistake to try and just import saves (including invulnerable saves) and convert flat AP values into equivalent modifiers between editions. Because the two systems behave very differently and this really needed to be taken into account.

To give just a couple of examples:

- Invulnerable saves in prior editions existed either to give models a (usually worse) save when their armour was outright ignored, or (more rarely) for models like daemons/harlequins that have a weak-but-unmodifiable save in place of any normal save. However, when saves are based on modifiers, a model's armour save can (for the most part) also act as its own invulnerable save. For example, a Terminator hit by a plasmagun in 5th would have had no armour save. However, a terminator hit by a plasmagun in 8th would still have a 5+ armour save (i.e. the same as its invulnerable save). Obviously AP-4 and AP-5 weapons exist, but it's questionable whether an invulnerable save is needed just for those weapons (given the model is going to be paying for it but will rarely get much use out of it). Especially when we get to...

- The implementation of vehicles (and some MCs as well) was to give them average armour saves and often invulnerable saves. This was antithetical to the design of anti-vehicle weapons having AP-4 or AP-5, as those AP values were often unnecessary. Hence why (at least until their damage was upped in 9th) they were generally eshewed in favour of weapons with AP-2 or AP-3 but more shots. In essence, we ended up with an entire category of weapons that served very little purpose because the game was still trying to use the save and AP paradigm from the previous system.

Something I've kicked around off and on is the idea of getting rid of saves (or at least armor saves) entirely. Instead, we could just give models more wounds based on how durable we want them to be and maybe turn Strength/Toughness/AP/Armor into modifiers to the attacker's roll(s). And play around with Damage values, of course.

So in effect, there would be fewer outright failure points for an attack, but two lasgun shots would never be enough to kill a marine with (for example) 5 Wounds.

You'd still want to represent other defenses (evasion, cover, daemon weirdness, etc.) in some fashion, but we'd be sidestepping the problems of the current/previous AP systems.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Something I've kicked around off and on is the idea of getting rid of saves (or at least armor saves) entirely. Instead, we could just give models more wounds based on how durable we want them to be and maybe turn Strength/Toughness/AP/Armor into modifiers to the attacker's roll(s). And play around with Damage values, of course.

So in effect, there would be fewer outright failure points for an attack, but two lasgun shots would never be enough to kill a marine with (for example) 5 Wounds.

You'd still want to represent other defenses (evasion, cover, daemon weirdness, etc.) in some fashion, but we'd be sidestepping the problems of the current/previous AP systems.

The way I've seen it commonly done is to just have roll to hit -> roll to damage -> record damage. That means combining armor protection with toughness as a single 'how hard is it to inflict damage' stat, with wounds remaining the 'how much damage can this take' stat. On weapons, S and AP usually correlate pretty well so not a huge lift to combine, but you'd have to do some work with the comparative stats to avoid unintuitive breakpoints.

I'd be wary of anything that dramatically increases bookkeeping- Marines at 5 wounds is manageable with D6s, but if heavier infantry and vehicles get dramatically more, then that gets a lot harder to track.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Something I've kicked around off and on is the idea of getting rid of saves (or at least armor saves) entirely. Instead, we could just give models more wounds based on how durable we want them to be and maybe turn Strength/Toughness/AP/Armor into modifiers to the attacker's roll(s). And play around with Damage values, of course.

So in effect, there would be fewer outright failure points for an attack, but two lasgun shots would never be enough to kill a marine with (for example) 5 Wounds.

You'd still want to represent other defenses (evasion, cover, daemon weirdness, etc.) in some fashion, but we'd be sidestepping the problems of the current/previous AP systems.

You could probably do a lot by giving models an evasion stat and doing WS/BS vs. Evasion and then Strength vs. Toughness. High evasion would help to make units like Eldar more durable without having to up their armour or give them invulnerable saves (and would also mean that BS is no longer a flat roll most of the time), whilst higher toughness would largely take the place of saves. Could still have invulnerable/FNP saves (maybe make them one and the same, akin to the Ward saves in AoS?), but ideally these would be pretty rare.

I recall a post a while back (different forum, I think) where somone pointed out that you can replicate most of the current outcomes with just 2 rolls (and if the odds are so low that the result requires three rolls to achieve, something has probably gone wrong anyway ).

EDIT: Catbarf demonstrates his ninja skills.

catbarf wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Something I've kicked around off and on is the idea of getting rid of saves (or at least armor saves) entirely. Instead, we could just give models more wounds based on how durable we want them to be and maybe turn Strength/Toughness/AP/Armor into modifiers to the attacker's roll(s). And play around with Damage values, of course.

So in effect, there would be fewer outright failure points for an attack, but two lasgun shots would never be enough to kill a marine with (for example) 5 Wounds.

You'd still want to represent other defenses (evasion, cover, daemon weirdness, etc.) in some fashion, but we'd be sidestepping the problems of the current/previous AP systems.

The way I've seen it commonly done is to just have roll to hit -> roll to damage -> record damage. That means combining armor protection with toughness as a single 'how hard is it to inflict damage' stat, with wounds remaining the 'how much damage can this take' stat. On weapons, S and AP usually correlate pretty well so not a huge lift to combine, but you'd have to do some work with the comparative stats to avoid unintuitive breakpoints.

I'd be wary of anything that dramatically increases bookkeeping- Marines at 5 wounds is manageable with D6s, but if heavier infantry and vehicles get dramatically more, then that gets a lot harder to track.

Personally, I use counter or d10s to track wounds on things. A pair of d10s lets you track up to 100 wounds pretty painless, so I think the level of bookkeeping involved would probably be reasonable assuming d10s or counters are considered easy to obtain.

But I am open to being mistaken about that.

vipoid wrote:
You could probably do a lot by giving models an evasion stat and doing WS/BS vs. Evasion and then Strength vs. Toughness. High evasion would help to make units like Eldar more durable without having to up their armour or give them invulnerable saves (and would also mean that BS is no longer a flat roll most of the time), whilst higher toughness would largely take the place of saves. Could still have invulnerable/FNP saves (maybe make them one and the same, akin to the Ward saves in AoS?), but ideally these would be pretty rare.

I recall a post a while back (different forum, I think) where somone pointed out that you can replicate most of the current outcomes with just 2 rolls (and if the odds are so low that the result requires three rolls to achieve, something has probably gone wrong anyway ).

EDIT: Catbarf demonstrates his ninja skills.

There's a lot of merit to introducing an Evasion stat, but I tend to think of that as a semi-separate issue. Adding evasion doesn't really do anything to address the quirks of the current AP system.

Edit: Or you meant both switching to a saveless system and then also introducing an evasion stat. In which case, my apologies for failing to read properly.

 catbarf wrote:
I think that was Tyran's point, CCS. 40K players want systems that have to do with their 40K models on their 40K boards, and not what's happening in the greater conflict behind the scenes.

But I don't think it's fair to imply that players are 'doing it wrong' by just playing Crusade as written. It sounds like Crusade provided you the bare-bones escalation league framework, and you then did a significant amount of work with some personally imposed handicaps to forge the narrative out of what would otherwise just be a dry escalation league.

I think that it's completely fair to state that the people who don't add anything of their own to their Crusades, turning them into naught but dry escalation leagues, are doing it wrong. I mean Crusade is under the Narrative heading. What do they think "narrative" means?
Ok, maybe they don't need to go buy a Canus Rex Knight kit to turn into salvage/bitz & then build a Grot Mega-Tank from scratch around its gatling gun like I did.... But they need to do some kind of work. Put in some effort to tell a story.

 aphyon wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Not that AT weapons WERE any good at killing MCs, except en mass, as was previously discussed...

And I would say that 4th ed was the better edition as it was the only time GW was brave enough to use a superior line of sight system to their idiotic 'look from the eyes of your static model standing on a rock shouting while he's supposed to be hiding in a forest' method...

I would generally agree. 4th and 5th had a lot in common, but there were certain things about 4th that were better and certain things about 5th I would port into 4th if I could. Likewise certain things from subsequent editions that I would bring back into 4th to improve it, but 4th probably had the best "bones" of any edition out there in terms of core gameplay mechanics.

Look up the poll we did here on dakka a couple years ago, as far as older editions go 5th won hands down by a large margin for core mechanics. anybody who played through the editions at the time could see the slow progression of improvements from 3rd-5th untill they just tossed it all in 6th, incidentally after almost all the original design team had left the company.

Personally the LoS rules are far more important for tactical play than the other things 5th had, so that's why I default to 4th.

Also the need to test to shoot at longer distance targets was also a tactical consideration.


Sure, if I was going to fanbash something together, it would take the best bits of 5th and put them into 4th, but that LoS system was just so much better than anything GW have ever done that it put that game far beyond any of their others.

The blatantly untrue term 'true line of sight' is a scourge I'd like to see burned in fire...


But then, it's also ignoring the other issues that the 3rd ed paradigm has that I don't like, namely vehicles and the AP rules.

 Tyran wrote:
The reason is obvious, GW sells models, 40k players spend thousands on models. So people want stuff to be about those models instead of a strategic scope that goes far beyond the tabletop.

That's a really good point that I hadn't considered until now. GW don't sell strategic scope (well, not anymore anyway...). They sell miniatures.

So their campaign rules are going to be tied to those miniatures.

ccs wrote:
I think that it's completely fair to state that the people who don't add anything of their own to their Crusades, turning them into naught but dry escalation leagues, are doing it wrong.

But that's how Crusade's rules are structured. It's set up like an escalation league.

ccs wrote:
I mean Crusade is under the Narrative heading. What do they think "narrative" means?

Calling it narrative doesn't make it narrative though. Just repeating it over and over is approaching a style-over-substance fallacy.

ccs wrote:
Ok, maybe they don't need to go buy a Canus Rex Knight kit to turn into salvage/bitz & then build a Grot Mega-Tank from scratch around its gatling gun like I did.... But they need to do some kind of work. Put in some effort to tell a story.

Which wasn't Tyran's point. His point was that Crusade is miniature centric, and therefore focuses on the development of the individual units within your army as represented by the miniatures, not on some grand strategic interplay that takes place between games (and without minis!). Carbarf already explained this.

Tyran wrote:The idea I have often heard is that 5th is best core rules but 4th has better codexes (because 5th codexes kinda broke the edition).

EDIT: Regarding the old AP system, it is also tricky to cost.

Weapons need to be costed so they are at their most effective against their respective save. In practice their cost exponentially increasing with AP and thus their efficency decreases against anything else.

E.g a bolter needs to be less efficient than a lasgun to counter the issue the bolter ignores 5+ saves. A heavy bolter needs to be priced against Fire Warriors and Scouts, but somewhat inefficient against GEQ.

It is also tricky to define how much a unit needs to pay for their armor. A 2+ save needs to be expensive because it counters anything that isn't a AP2 or 1. But at the same time if it is too expensive then it becomes a dice game to bypass with weight of dice.

With our group interestingly enough there are many 3rd or 4th ed codexes we prefer to use under the 5th ed rules. witch hunters, demon hunters, tyranids, tau, orks, eldar, chaos space marines, demons, space marines specifically for the trait system or other specialized army lists from index astartes.

There are a few from 5th that make the cut-space marines, imperial guard, blood angels, space wolves, dark eldar and necrons.

There was only one codex that really broke itself in 5th edition-grey knights one can poke fun at Mat Ward for that but he did good work on other codexes.

Personally the LoS rules are far more important for tactical play than the other things 5th had, so that's why I default to 4th

I have never found TLOS to be a problem, but then again we use loads of terrain on our tables and as a friendly group if there is a question of LOS we let the target player call it. it isn't a tournament we are there to have fun. if i want 4th ed style area terrain rules, i can play DUST tactics/1947 since Andy wrote the 3d terrain rules for that as well.

Since we are on the topic i found this recent interview with Andy champers about specialist games, some of his insights in between talking about the games, that was about GW management are interesting.

You're admitting you need to let fiat decide pretty important aspects of the game, which is objectively poor game design.

The 5th ed los rules literally create modelling for advantage and they make it very hard to actually hide (just like modern 40k).

Maybe it's the fact that I started in 2nd where they literally had rules for hiding, but the ability to hide your advance and manoeuvre outside enemy loS is pretty vital to me for an interesting tactically challenging game.

So I much prefer actual true line of sight - true in the more accurate sense that those los rules are better reflections of the intelligence of soldiers taking cover on a battlefield, rather than moving around like a squad of cardboard cutouts all frozen in place.


Also, they allow for beautiful conversions and gamer creativity - jump troops in mid air, crouching snipers, mid flight daemons, counts as craziness etc with 0 negative impact on the quality of the game or the social contract between players because the rules make it impossible to model for advantage.

But isn't that what we get anyway, only just for some armies? Shoting through terrain, LoS being important for some faction (that have the rule) every edition since 8th, Some armies having so high movment and "tricks" that may as well have a rule "ignore terrain and weapon range". Problem is that GW doesn't give such rules to all armies, and doesn't give a balance rule to armies that aren't shoting, which creates a situation where shoting armies, which often have access to strong melee too, have a huge adventage over melee armies. Having armies that can kill everything on sight would actualy be more balanced that the stuff we had over the last 3 editions. But in general GW seems to try have the LoS rules of a skirmish game in what has become a large scale battle system. Elite armies today run 40+ models. Chaog knights have their walk the dog builds which spam the mini knights. It is horrible to balance all those things, especialy the way GW tries to do it, while living the LoS ignoring shoting and similar LoS rule breakers.


Very interesting video. Thank you for posting it Aphyon

 aphyon wrote:

With our group interestingly enough there are many 3rd or 4th ed codexes we prefer to use under the 5th ed rules. witch hunters, demon hunters, tyranids, tau, orks, eldar, chaos space marines, demons, space marines specifically for the trait system or other specialized army lists from index astartes.

There are a few from 5th that make the cut-space marines, imperial guard, blood angels, space wolves, dark eldar and necrons.

There was only one codex that really broke itself in 5th edition-grey knights one can poke fun at Mat Ward for that but he did good work on other codexes.

Imperial Guard definitely broke the edition (tank squadrons, aircraft squadrons, large blast high strenght good AP pretty much everywhere, etc.), and the same is true for Space Wolves (cheap heavy weapons spam and JotWW)... and maybe Dark Eldar? admittedly I don't remember much about that codex.

Grey Knights are remembered because they also broke the lore in addition to the rules, but they were just the last of codex power creep.

2 major notes:
1) on the topic of "meaningful options" and "meaningfulness":
There are 2 ways around game design: spoon-feed the players how things "should" work and just let them fool around, or give them a setting/reality to exist in, options to exist in that setting *with*, and let *them* decide how meaningful those options are. Then, let *them* decide whether to choose new/different options or not.

In the second perspective, the game designer's responsibility is to correctly model the setting/reality, and the player's responsibility to decide meaning for the options they are given within it. Balance is achievable by external controls, like points costs and army structure requirements - as well as keeping a tight lid on the playable factions. If your background/setting has a faction called The Unstoppable Doom, then maybe that faction shouldn't be playable on the tabletop - unless the name is a lie of course!

If it matters to me that my Company Commander has Carapace Armor or not, then let him have Carapace Armor. If you think it doesn't matter, then you are welcome to *not* choose that option - but when I save 33% more wounds inflicted on me than you do, maybe you will change your tune. Or maybe you won't, because unlike my army build, your Company Commander is not the lynchpin of your C2 Voxnet, and you have other solutions to the leadership problem built from other options like Trademark Items on your platoon commanders for the Reroll or the Independent Commissars doctrine to help keep your infantry squads in line at the front...

2) if crusade requires a bunch of homebrew add-ons to be a Truly Narrative system, then why publish it at all? I can homebrew rules onto the "default" 40k just as easily, and my fellow group members can accept or reject the homebrew just as easily.

reading through my old Tyranid 5th ed book last night and though 5th was far from perfect it portrays 40k so much better than what we have now, looing in the marine codex and the "first born" look as an army leagues better than anything primaris so far, in fact I had not noticed it previously but seeing a th ed marine army on display in that book brought it into stark contrast.

Marines then looked like an army in 40k, Primaris now look like a product based on marines and very corporate... soulless.

 Formosa wrote:
reading through my old Tyranid 5th ed book last night and though 5th was far from perfect it portrays 40k so much better than what we have now, looing in the marine codex and the "first born" look as an army leagues better than anything primaris so far, in fact I had not noticed it previously but seeing a th ed marine army on display in that book brought it into stark contrast.

Marines then looked like an army in 40k, Primaris now look like a product based on marines and very corporate... soulless.

How so? Can you elaborate on what specifically makes you feel that way?