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 JNAProductions wrote:

 vipoid wrote:
I might have less of an issue with psychic powers being guns or fixed buffs if they hadn't also removed all choice.

Worse still is that we've adopted the godawful mechanic from AoS, wherein a model's spell/psychic power known is determined by their mount.

Thus, an Eldar Farseer is only ever allowed to know Eldritch Storm and Fortune. Unless they plonk their arse on a Jetbike, in which case they immediately forget Fortune and learn Guide instead.

Oh but then Eldrad apparently forgot both of those and instead learned Mind War and Doom.

Yeah.

Psychic weapons as actual weapons? Good.
Appropriate buffs done in the appropriate phases? Good.
No choice of psychic powers at all? Big honkin' bad.

Oh sure. I agree with that. But that's a problem with lack of customization/options; not with how psychic powers are being handled in general.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.

That awkwardness IS fluffy. Psychic activity is anathema to the standard laws of physical science; it's presence bends reality- THAT is the fluff.

Powers behaving like guns feels like something easily taken for granted or overlooked, both in terms of mechanics at the table and in terms of the way it comes across as a narrative. Psychic powers are supposed to feel abnormal and dangerous, not like a choice between one gun or another. You can point to perceived reliability in the fiction, but typically the characters depicted in the fiction aren't the generic psykers, or the battles depicted aren't psyker vs psyker. And on the table, in 9th at least, there were considerable methods to buff, maximize, focus or otherwise augment both psychic tests, abilities and even equipment.

10th's system often just uses "psychic" to explain a rule that could be present from another source; for example, in the few rare instances when a character has a utility psychic power, it usually takes the place of a datacard rule... Which is not how psychic powers are supposed to work; they are not "instead of" they are "in addition to," and the psychic phase mirrored that fluff.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

"This power makes your BA librarian grow wings and fly. So we resolve it *after* the Movement phase, and then it sticks around for an extra turn instead of just happening in this turn's movement phase."

This is the type of ability that is likely to merely take the place of a datacard rule that would otherwise be there. So sure, you could get it to happen in the same movement phase as you cast it, but it would be the only thing you could do, rather than one of the things you could do. And even less fluffy than that is that it's all every other librarian can do too... I mean unless they're wearing different armour. Now sure, that Librarian will also have a psychic shooting attack and a psychic melee attack, but these will also be the same as every other librarian of the same type's abilities, and in some cases these abilities are merely substitutes for weapon for weapon attacks, rather than an additional ability.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer.

Except I think it's unfluffy to describe it that way, because no one in 40k shoots fire from their fingers. That's what a casual observer might see, but it is most certainly not what actually happens. It is far more accurate to say that the Psyker uses the power of their mind to tear hole in reality that allows them to manipulate warpfire in such a way that it leaps from their hands to one or more targets- a hole through which daemons might enter the world- a fact that has lead the Imperium to hunt you and your kind across the galaxy.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

No need to bring DtW

Deny the Witch has nothing to do with the fluffiness of the user of a psychic ability; it's about the fluffiness of other psykers in their immediate vicinity. Removing their ability to suppress psychic activity interferes with their fluff, and diminishes the value of all psychic units by removing one of their primary battlefield roles.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

or psychic tests into it.

I could be convinced to let psychic test go, or perhaps to not require them for all psychic abilities, but they offer us further opportunities to communicate narrative information- equipment can modify psychic tests, psykers can receive modifiers in certain types of psychic tests to represent specialization, modifiers to psychic tests can be conferred as battle honours, and perhaps more importantly, they are the vector for perils of the warp.

And sure, adding hazardous is arguably adequate for representing Perils, but it suffers too- double 1's and double 6's both cause Perils, but in one case the power succeeds and in the other it doesn't- this was fluffy AF: psychic powers are dangerous even when all goes well. And of course, a perils can be modified too- ie. an ability that causes ALL doubles to invoke Perils. And finally, while hazardous works, putting it in it's own phase makes it feel less like a random wound and more like the localized daemonic incursion it was meant to represent.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Let the psychic null units be immune to it.

Absolutely yes, but don't also let that be the only effect of being a null, because in the fluff, it isn't. Nulls make psychics feel ill and interfere with their concentration. Nulls can also weaponize, focus and direct their power. And again, having systems for these abilities allows for modification and customization. Are there levels of nulls- those who only possess the passive abilities, vs. those who have been trained to use them actively? Absolutely.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Let sisters get a FNP against it or whatever.

That's basically all the ability has ever been.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

I feel like GW's designers got really excited about adding a psychic minigame to the system, and then players kind of came to expect that psychic powers had to be this whole elaborate subsystem

See, I feel like the designer went "Okay, in this world we're creating, psychics tear holes in reality to the place where daemons live in order to exert their powers. This means that psykers are misunderstood, hated, revered. Some are hunted to be trained in order to become powerful weapons, others are rounded up by the thousands to be sacrificed in order to allow Imperials to use the daemon realm to travel the vast distances necessary to maintain their besieged empire. Now let's make a system that reflects as much of that as possible, an make it stand out, because it's one of the fundamental themes of the game."

 Wyldhunt wrote:

and that they should be entitled to shut down a librarian's abilities even though they aren't entitled to shut down a captain's abilities in a similar way.

A captains abilities are based on experience, chain of command and reputation, and commanders across factions have similar characteristics. Psychic abilities involve tearing a hole in reality and manipulating an energy that is difficult to comprehend without sacrificing part of one's sanity. The skills used to disrupt one of those abilities should bear little to no similarity to those necessary to disrupt the other, and there are plenty of other abilities that do disrupt the captains abilities.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

It never felt fluffy to me, and I mostly like how powers are handled at the moment. Although losing your powers when your friends die is weird.

.

It is weird, isn't it? I think the "All Terminator Librarians must have this and only this psychic power" is a bigger mechanical weirdness for me... But their both way weirder and less fluffy than "There's a psychic phase."

Dandelion wrote:
Reimagining the FOC to be tailored per faction, but also enforcing that some models are simply rare or unique and can’t be spammed would be helpful. Using marine first companies as an example again: having more than 1 veteran squad of any type (be it termies, sternguard or vanguard) should be unusual. Likewise, land speeders are also relatively rare, even though they are not elite, and the same could be said for scouts.
Room for exceptional battles can still be there, e.g. defending a fortress monastery does imply all veterans to be present, but that would fall more under narrative rules as opposed to pick up games. Simply requiring permission to bend the rules could be sufficient.

The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before. Having lots of vets/termies present should be rare, but not if you're running a first company list or a Death Wing list, right? Similarly, Wraith Guard ought to be pretty rare, but not in an Iyanden list where they're supposed to make up a huge portion of the force. And Iyanden might be a big enough name to get a special rule saying wraith units can be an exception, but then you have Iybraesil (my canon-but-minor craftworld) that supposedly favors banshees as the heart of its millitary force. Chances are, Iybraesil won't be getting enough attention to have a designer say, "Yeah, go ahead and run as many banshees as you want," even if banshee spam is arguably less of a major change than wraithguard spam.

Additionally, using lore to determine what is and isn't rare is sort of missing the mechanical point of the FOC which is to prevent people from spamming things that are problematic when taken en masse. If we want list building rules that prevent people from fielding skew lists or hyper lethal lists, we need it to detect those traits somehow; not just an FOC that prevents Saim-Hann players from fielding more than 3 windrider squads.

 Dysartes wrote:
...possibly with a trade for less of slot X.

Ahh! Trading slots wouldn't work. You just trade away the things you were never going to take anyway (like Fast Attack slots in an Iron Warriors army) to get more of the thing you want to take.

Giving things up is always a problematic thing, as you risk creating situations where the things you are giving up were never important in the first place, so you are sacrificing nothing for an instant gain.

 Dysartes wrote:
Don't tie it to a character, just say you can use the core FOC or the codex FOC, and away you go.

Weirdly, in the case of Tyranids (and probably Guard, and maybe even Orks), doing it by characters makes the most sense.

I like the idea of faction-specific FOCs. I think to the way that Tyranids were organised in 2nd Ed Space Marine (the Hive War expansion), where it was done hexagonally. So a Dominatrix or Hive Tyrant could have 6 units linked to it, and you could attach other synapse creatures to expand that (so Tyranid Warriors could attach 3 units rather than 6). Taking more Synapse creatures allowed you to take more other things.

It's also more viable now than ever - you could even have things like neurogaunts add more slots so that you get the simulation of adding more synapse without adding big models so you can really go gaunt heavy.

Esp with GW changing synapse around so its less of a "you lose now" when you lose it. Which honestly is fitting; Tyranids should lose potential when losing it; but should still remain highly effective fighters.

And then you give Synapse back to things that lost it (for no fething reason) like the Broodlord and the Parasite. And reinstate units like the Tyrgon Prime, as synapse units that could add other units, but in a more limited fashion than, say, a Hive Tyrant or Tervigon.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before. Having lots of vets/termies present should be rare, but not if you're running a first company list or a Death Wing list, right? Similarly, Wraith Guard ought to be pretty rare, but not in an Iyanden list where they're supposed to make up a huge portion of the force. And Iyanden might be a big enough name to get a special rule saying wraith units can be an exception, but then you have Iybraesil (my canon-but-minor craftworld) that supposedly favors banshees as the heart of its millitary force. Chances are, Iybraesil won't be getting enough attention to have a designer say, "Yeah, go ahead and run as many banshees as you want," even if banshee spam is arguably less of a major change than wraithguard spam.

Additionally, using lore to determine what is and isn't rare is sort of missing the mechanical point of the FOC which is to prevent people from spamming things that are problematic when taken en masse. If we want list building rules that prevent people from fielding skew lists or hyper lethal lists, we need it to detect those traits somehow; not just an FOC that prevents Saim-Hann players from fielding more than 3 windrider squads.

Things like all deathwing terminators or banshees are what I want to avoid, at least for matched play. It’s not all too different to an all knight list. Additionally, each sub faction is defined by more than just the same unit over and over. Yes windriders are a staple of saim Hann, but there are also shining spears, vipers, falcons, and bike seers. In addition, saim Hann riders will dismount and fight on foot, and they will bring wraiths, foot aspects and artillery if needed. Reducing them to “lots of windriders” is a disservice to the faction. For a bit of historical analogy: the mongols are famous for horse archers, but they were also extremely proficient at sapping, diverting rivers and building artillery on site.
That said, I don’t mind formation differences, I just think it should very measured.

Anyway thinking back on it, the current system is close to good, it just needs refinement. It should not run off datasheets but maybe a new type of unit keyword (each keyword is shared by similar units), it needs to be more varied than 3 or 6 of each, and it needs to scale somehow.

PenitentJake wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:


And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.

That awkwardness IS fluffy. Psychic activity is anathema to the standard laws of physical science; it's presence bends reality- THAT is the fluff.

Nah. Something being fluffed as weird/spooky isn't a reason for the real-world game rules to be clunky. Like, we don't want daemons to shoot in the fight phase and and fight in the movement phase just for the sake of being weird.

Powers behaving like guns feels like something easily taken for granted or overlooked, both in terms of mechanics at the table and in terms of the way it comes across as a narrative. Psychic powers are supposed to feel abnormal and dangerous, not like a choice between one gun or another. You can point to perceived reliability in the fiction, but typically the characters depicted in the fiction aren't the generic psykers, or the battles depicted aren't psyker vs psyker.

I feel like I've read a ton of books featuring librarians, GSC maguses (magi?), eldar seers, and chaos sorcerers, and in none of them do the psykers make constipation faces and then poop their pants instead of making psychic phenomena happen. The "generic psykers" that we see on the tabletop are more often than not extremely good at what they do and perfectly capable of using their powers reliably. Randomly failing to cast powers and then blowing up about it is *maybe* appropriate for like, wyrd boyz and unaugmented human psykers.

And on the table, in 9th at least, there were considerable methods to buff, maximize, focus or otherwise augment both psychic tests, abilities and even equipment.

The fact that they need additional special rules to make psykers reliably cast powers and not die doing so (ghost helms on eldar) strikes me as more of an admission that the basic rules weren't doing a particularly good job of representing psykers in the first place.

10th's system often just uses "psychic" to explain a rule that could be present from another source; for example, in the few rare instances when a character has a utility psychic power, it usually takes the place of a datacard rule... Which is not how psychic powers are supposed to work; they are not "instead of" they are "in addition to," and the psychic phase mirrored that fluff.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here. I'm not opposed to psyker units having special rules beyond the ones that represent their powers. That's not an argument I'm making.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

"This power makes your BA librarian grow wings and fly. So we resolve it *after* the Movement phase, and then it sticks around for an extra turn instead of just happening in this turn's movement phase."

This is the type of ability that is likely to merely take the place of a datacard rule that would otherwise be there. So sure, you could get it to happen in the same movement phase as you cast it, but it would be the only thing you could do, rather than one of the things you could do. And even less fluffy than that is that it's all every other librarian can do too... I mean unless they're wearing different armour. Now sure, that Librarian will also have a psychic shooting attack and a psychic melee attack, but these will also be the same as every other librarian of the same type's abilities, and in some cases these abilities are merely substitutes for weapon for weapon attacks, rather than an additional ability.

I *think* you're touching on the same note addressed in previous above posts about psykers not having options. Which I agree, stinks. But a lack of versatility or multiple powers on psykers doesn't mean that mobility powers ought to be handled outside the movement phase.

Except I think it's unfluffy to describe it that way, because no one in 40k shoots fire from their fingers. That's what a casual observer might see, but it is most certainly not what actually happens. It is far more accurate to say that the Psyker uses the power of their mind to tear hole in reality that allows them to manipulate warpfire in such a way that it leaps from their hands to one or more targets- a hole through which daemons might enter the world- a fact that has lead the Imperium to hunt you and your kind across the galaxy.

I mean, lots of things in 40k can be described in cool ways. That doesn't mean we need convoluted rules to handle it, and we certainly don't need to tie every single psychic attack to mortal wounds the way we did in 9th. The avatar of khaine is an unfathomably ancient spirit wrought in iron and given life through the sacrifice of an ancient hero. Sounds cool. His sword is strength X, AP Y, Damage Z, and we don't need a separate phase of the game to represent that.

Deny the Witch has nothing to do with the fluffiness of the user of a psychic ability; it's about the fluffiness of other psykers in their immediate vicinity. Removing their ability to suppress psychic activity interferes with their fluff, and diminishes the value of all psychic units by removing one of their primary battlefield roles.

The thing is, I've read a lot of Black Library novels, and suppressing psykers with your psykers just isn't a huge part of those stories. Sometimes specific psykers like librarians with psychic hoods will tell (not show) that they're doing that sort of thing, but certainly the wyrd boy is never going around saying he's shutting down a farseer's ability to see the future or preventing a librarian from throwing lightning. Rather, we see psykers successfully making psychic effects happen. And we certainly don't see librarians failing to put up a kine field X times out of 10 because he rolled badly on a psychic test.

As for the value of psychic units:
A.) I get plenty of value out of blasting through heavy armor, using precognition to alter dice rolls, and using psychic defenses to keep my units alive. I don't need DtW on top of that for those units to be useful.
B.) And if there really was a worry about the value of psychic units, we literally have a unit of measurement of that value in the form of points. Shave a couple points off if the absence of DtW is really making your librarians useless.

I could be convinced to let psychic test go, or perhaps to not require them for all psychic abilities, but they offer us further opportunities to communicate narrative information- equipment can modify psychic tests, psykers can receive modifiers in certain types of psychic tests to represent specialization, modifiers to psychic tests can be conferred as battle honours, and perhaps more importantly, they are the vector for perils of the warp.

The problem here is that it sounds like you're assuming that the default is that a farseer will fail to see the future X times out of 10. Which just isn't supported by the fluff and feels weird to me. I don't even like that there's currently a 1 in 6 chance that my farseer fails to do his main job right now. I don't particularly mind rules that make psykers more likely to perils or fail to use their powers. I mean, they were annoying when we had things like wolf tail talismans in 5th, but at least that felt like the SW were paying points for a chance to have their cool thing happen rather than psykers just randomly failing to be cool.

And sure, adding hazardous is arguably adequate for representing Perils, but it suffers too- double 1's and double 6's both cause Perils, but in one case the power succeeds and in the other it doesn't- this was fluffy AF: psychic powers are dangerous even when all goes well. And of course, a perils can be modified too- ie. an ability that causes ALL doubles to invoke Perils. And finally, while hazardous works, putting it in it's own phase makes it feel less like a random wound and more like the localized daemonic incursion it was meant to represent.

The double 1 and double 6 thing always worked pretty well. No argument there. But the "random wound" thing has been the case more often than not since I started playing in 5th edition. So if you want to make a pitch for putting a bunch of player-agnostic daemon models on the table 1 in 18 times that a psyker casts a power, I feel like that's a whole other discussion.

Also, I will mention that there was a point in 8th where my warlocks were so likely to explode from casting psychic powers that they felt like more of a liability than an asset. That didn't exactly live up to the fluff.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Let the psychic null units be immune to it.

Absolutely yes, but don't also let that be the only effect of being a null, because in the fluff, it isn't. Nulls make psychics feel ill and interfere with their concentration. Nulls can also weaponize, focus and direct their power. And again, having systems for these abilities allows for modification and customization. Are there levels of nulls- those who only possess the passive abilities, vs. those who have been trained to use them actively? Absolutely.

I'm not opposed to there being some sort of system to let nulls be extra cool. However, the only units in the game that are psychic nulls are what? One assassin and sisters of silence? That seems like something you create a subsystem unique to those units for; not something you need to contort the core rules to represent.

See, I feel like the designer went "Okay, in this world we're creating, psychics tear holes in reality to the place where daemons live in order to exert their powers. This means that psykers are misunderstood, hated, revered. Some are hunted to be trained in order to become powerful weapons, others are rounded up by the thousands to be sacrificed in order to allow Imperials to use the daemon realm to travel the vast distances necessary to maintain their besieged empire. Now let's make a system that reflects as much of that as possible, an make it stand out, because it's one of the fundamental themes of the game."

Hard disagree, man. Because while perils of the warp sort of represented that kind of thing, psychic tests and DtW never did. Librarians making poopy faces while failing to shoot lightning doesn't do a good job of conveying any of the above.

A captains abilities are based on experience, chain of command and reputation, and commanders across factions have similar characteristics. Psychic abilities involve tearing a hole in reality and manipulating an energy that is difficult to comprehend without sacrificing part of one's sanity. The skills used to disrupt one of those abilities should bear little to no similarity to those necessary to disrupt the other, and there are plenty of other abilities that do disrupt the captains abilities.

We're starting to see a smidge more captain disruption in 9th/10th, but we certainly don't have a "Deny the Commander" roll that every autarch, warboss, and royal warden gets to make whenever a captain tries to hand out buffs. And again, as impressive as the mechanisms for wielding psychic power are, regularly failing to make psychic stuff happen just is not part of the lore. Poopy face librarian is not canon.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

It never felt fluffy to me, and I mostly like how powers are handled at the moment. Although losing your powers when your friends die is weird.

.

It is weird, isn't it? I think the "All Terminator Librarians must have this and only this psychic power" is a bigger mechanical weirdness for me... But their both way weirder and less fluffy than "There's a psychic phase."

See above about me being in favor of more options for psykers. While I wish 10th edition psykers had more variety and flexibility, the things that they *can* do in 10th are better represented (to me) than they were in 9th. 10th edition librarian might bleed out the nose when he shoots extra big lightning, but he never poops his pants while failing to make lightning in the first place.

I also can't put my finger on it but just the visuals of the game feel "off". I was reading white dwarf from 5th edition and idk why but everything looks so much better than they do today.

Wayniac wrote:
I also can't put my finger on it but just the visuals of the game feel "off". I was reading white dwarf from 5th edition and idk why but everything looks so much better than they do today.

Just off the top of my head I think that army aesthetics were more thematically coherent, based more around infantry, and more consistently scaled. And the tables were bigger.

I also think armies looked better on the table when the models are on smaller bases. There's been a base size inflation going on.

I also don't trust GW to ever fix these things.

Auspex put up a video about the most used Marine armies at recent tournaments. There were some key factors to basically all of them:

1. Vanguard Detachment.
2. Marneus Calgar.
3. Apothecary Biologis.
4. Uriel Ventris
5. A max unit of Aggressors.
6. A max unit of Centurion Devastators w/Lascannons*.
7. Lots of Inceptors.

GW will see this and do one or all of the following:

1. Increase the points of Aggressors.
2. Increase the points of Centurions.
3. Make it so Centurions can't use the Vanguard special rule.
4. Restrict what Ventris can give Deep Strike to (or flat out change it to his unit).
5. Make it so Centurions can't get Infiltrate from Blade Driven Deep.
6. Drastically increase the costs of Apothecary Biologis (like from 55 to 75 or even more).
7. Nerf Inceptors.

If Detachments actually impacted the structure of your army, so that units that are really fething obviously not "Vanguard" units (like Centurions!) weren't something you could take, this kind of problem wouldn't exist.

*A unit that is a victim of the nonsensical and arbitrary twin-linked/not-twin-linked crap that 10th has saddled us with, where a Land Raider's clearly twin-linked guns aren't, yet the two very obviously separate Lascannons on a Centurion are twin-linked.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe a hot take: I like how psychic powers work right now. In the novels, psychic powers aren't failing left and right and constantly getting shut down. They're reliable abilities. Sure, prolonged or especially flashy use of them can end up hurting the psyker, but Ahriman isn't going, "Okay, there's a 25% chance that I'll forget how to see the future, and then a 33% that this wyrd boy is going to stop me from doing so once I get started." And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.

Yeah, I don't much care about there being a psychic phase or a psychic "minigame". And I'd argue that right now psychic powers don't work because psychic power is a meaningless distinction that, when it does interact with the rules, only makes the attack/effect worse (remember: the psychic tag is always a bad thing - it actives additional saving throws, and confers no additional benefits). Worse, as I said, some psychic powers cease to function if the psyker doesn't have any friends around to cheer him on. Even psychic hoods stop working if the Libby isn't near people.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer. No need to bring DtW or psychic tests into it. Let the psychic null units be immune to it. Let sisters get a FNP against it or whatever.

The fact that it's a psychic flamer or whatever should probably mean something. Right now they're just another gun/melee attack that is less effective against certain targets. It's never more effective. There's no reason for any of these abilities to be psychic abilities.

I think if a Psychic attack is just more powerful than a similar non-Psychic attack (a psychic flamer could be S5 AP-1 as compared to S4 AP0) that’d be fine, even with Psychic itself being a negative sometimes and never a positive.
In the lore, are there units that are MORE vulnerable to psychic attacks over regular ones?

Regarding the FOC, my main problems with it basically boiled down to the org roles being really arbitrary and not actually meaning anything. So you had some factions being forced to pay a troop tax on underpowered units that didn't necessarily fit their army's fluff.

That is why when we play our oldhammer games the 4th ed eldar codex is the gold standard because every troop option fits the lore of the craftworlds.

uthwe? dire avengers check

saim hann-guardians on jetbikes-check

even iyanden allows wraithguard as troops but with the restriction that they must be taken in 10 man squads.

etc..

This is born out in many other factions either through FW books or things like index astartes articles etc...

kestral novum has a unique ork big mech army list with lore friendly troops, same with the book for the necrons (a close combat themed force with a tomb world infected by the flayer virus).

The lore friendly tweaked FOC is one of the things that really feels good and appropriate about playing the older editions. when i see an army on the table just by it's compostion i know it is white scars or an iyanden war host or an ork force from the bad moons. this also ties into Wayniacs point as well.

10th edition and really everything since 8th (and some would say parts of 6th onward) are just skin suits wearing a 40K face but are not really 40K in look or feel.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before.

I don't have a problem with this. I don't think that the rules can cater to every possible variation of every possible list. I think it should take the approach that the Marine Detachments has, using them to show off an archetype or a Chapter (Vanguard is what Raven Guard would be, for example).

In the case of your Banshee example, that would be a "Swordwind" archetype, represented in the fluff by Biel-Tan in the same way a "Ghost Warrior" archetype is represented in the fluffy by Iyanden. And if your chosen army is "Oops! All Avatars!" well then too bad. You chose a theme that's clearly not in keeping with the fluff.

 JNAProductions wrote:
I think if a Psychic attack is just more powerful than a similar non-Psychic attack (a psychic flamer could be S5 AP-1 as compared to S4 AP0) that’d be fine, even with Psychic itself being a negative sometimes and never a positive.
In the lore, are there units that are MORE vulnerable to psychic attacks over regular ones?

I think the logical retort to 'psychic attacks aren't just guns and shouldn't be treated like them' is 'okay, so how are they different?'.

Are they less reliable, more prone to the whims of the warp? Do they incur a cost on the caster that limits how often they can be invoked in a single battle? Do they not require line of sight, or ignore armor, or cause morale effects?

IE if they aren't just Brain Guns, use mechanics that reflect that. Having them functionally be Brain Guns but resolved in their own phase isn't fluffy and thematic, it's just lazy design.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe a hot take: I like how psychic powers work right now. In the novels, psychic powers aren't failing left and right and constantly getting shut down. They're reliable abilities. Sure, prolonged or especially flashy use of them can end up hurting the psyker, but Ahriman isn't going, "Okay, there's a 25% chance that I'll forget how to see the future, and then a 33% that this wyrd boy is going to stop me from doing so once I get started." And while putting everything in a "psychic phase" could be useful for not forgetting some of your powers, other powers felt really awkward not happening in the phase they were obviously meant to happen.

Yeah, I don't much care about there being a psychic phase or a psychic "minigame". And I'd argue that right now psychic powers don't work because psychic power is a meaningless distinction that, when it does interact with the rules, only makes the attack/effect worse (remember: the psychic tag is always a bad thing - it actives additional saving throws, and confers no additional benefits). Worse, as I said, some psychic powers cease to function if the psyker doesn't have any friends around to cheer him on. Even psychic hoods stop working if the Libby isn't near people.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
And psychic powers that manifest as shooting attacks really should just be shooting attacks with a keyword. If I shoot fire from my fingertips, it should behave a lot like a flamer. No need to bring DtW or psychic tests into it. Let the psychic null units be immune to it. Let sisters get a FNP against it or whatever.

The fact that it's a psychic flamer or whatever should probably mean something. Right now they're just another gun/melee attack that is less effective against certain targets. It's never more effective. There's no reason for any of these abilities to be psychic abilities.

First of all, the whole thing of psychic powers going away when your friends die is weird. I've said as much in recent posts and am not defending that point.

As for the psychic tag always being a drawback...
A.) The *advantage* of psychic weapons is that the model has that weapon at all. Because of his psychic might, my farseer can throw an eldritch storm at the enemy that chews through armor far more easily than most weapons. Without it, he'd be down to his pistol. (And possibly a spear.) In general, psychic shooting attacks are pretty powerful weapons, at least compared to common infantry-portable weapons. The starting point of these weapons is that they hit harder than a conventional weapon does.

B.) Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the more psychic-focused armies got some benefits that target psychic weaponry. Some Grey Knight detachment rule that powers up weapons with the psychic tag or what have you. Actually, I guess Thousand Sons already have exactly that even if it is a little lacklustre.

C.) Why does the existence of a tag have to have some positive advantage tied to it?

D.) I started playing in 5th. From 5th through 7th edition, psychic shooting attacks used normal shooting gun profiles. Powerful guns, but standard guns; usually with some flavorful special rule added on. In some of those editions, they were even resolved in the shooting phase just like guns. It wasn't until 8th edition that psychic powers became tied to Mortal Wounds.

JNAProductions wrote:I think if a Psychic attack is just more powerful than a similar non-Psychic attack (a psychic flamer could be S5 AP-1 as compared to S4 AP0) that’d be fine, even with Psychic itself being a negative sometimes and never a positive.
In the lore, are there units that are MORE vulnerable to psychic attacks over regular ones?

Well, the 4th edition eldar codex gave warlocks an always-on "destructor" power that was essentially a heavy flamer. That did a pretty good job of selling the idea that you weren't just getting a flamer's worth of fire out of this power; you were getting a *heavy* flamer's worth! It got the point across and worked well.

And FWIW, the enemies that are supposed to be especially vulnerable to psychic attacks are daemons, but I'm personally not inclined to advocate for an army-wide weakness to psychic weapons for daemons or anything like that.



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 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
The risk you run is that you wind up with a haves-and-have-nots situation like before.

I don't have a problem with this. I don't think that the rules can cater to every possible variation of every possible list. I think it should take the approach that the Marine Detachments has, using them to show off an archetype or a Chapter (Vanguard is what Raven Guard would be, for example).

In the case of your Banshee example, that would be a "Swordwind" archetype, represented in the fluff by Biel-Tan in the same way a "Ghost Warrior" archetype is represented in the fluffy by Iyanden. And if your chosen army is "Oops! All Avatars!" well then too bad. You chose a theme that's clearly not in keeping with the fluff.

Great example. So in 8th edition, the Biel-Tan subfaction bonuses were:
* +1 Ld on aspects
* Reroll 1st to hit with shuriken weapons.

The former rule obviously being very low value, and the latter literally not helping about half the aspects at all and also encouraging melee aspects like banshees and scorpions to risk making their charges more difficult by killing nearby models. The Iyanden rules were something like fearless infantry and units with wound brackets count as having double their current remaining wounds. Which meant that the craftworld defined by its lack of warm bodies got a rule that encouraged you to take large squads of warm bodies. Ulthwe had a little counter-intuitive weirdness as well, albeit mostly because their guardian-heavy armies really wanted to be using Biel-Tan's shuriken-buffing rules or Iyanden's fearless rules more than their own FNP rule. All of which I bring up to point out that GW isn't necessarily very good at writing rules that fit a given faction even when they try to.

I agree that handing out detachments doesn't feasibly let you cover every possible army archetype. That's why I feel like the point of an FOC type rule should be to identify and address problematic skew builds, hyperlethal combos, etc; not just restricting any build that doesn't happen to revolve around whatever units are arbitrarily designated as "troops" that edition and then hoping GW throws your army a bone.

(To be clear, I'm not necessarily opposed to something like the detachment system we have now. It's just that the rule of 3 is already prone to targeting some armies more than others, and bringing back the troop tax doesn't automatically help with that.)

EDIT: Maybe what we need is an anti-FOC. That is, rather than a list of rules saying what you are allowed to bring, maybe each faction should have a set of restrictions that specifically tell you what you can't bring in a list. Or at least, tell you a maximum number that you can bring. So rather than telling eldar players they can only bring 3 squads of banshees, maybe you instead put a cap on how many falcons can begin the game with fire dragons embarked inside them or put a cap on what percentage of my army can be units with more than X wounds per model to cut down on tank skew lists or whatever.

I liked the idea of 7th edition formations. Though there balance was not good. It makes sense to me for armies to have a to&e (table of organisation and equipment). Something would need to be done about some specialised formations (SM First Company and IG Armoured Company, for example). While some need to be scrapped. But I don't think that will happen.

 Da Boss wrote:
In moderation, in some special circumstances, I agree about special formations. I think MESBG goes way overboard because they're catering more to a tournament focused crowd (which is fine - it was the organised play scene that kept that game alive, I'm happy GW is making a game that those people like, it's just not for me). I prefer the simplicity of the blue rulebook.

Part of the problem at least has to be the move away from comparative charts for opposed rolls while keeping the D6 based system and the spread all the way up from a grot to a knight titan in the game. It's not surprising they have to fall back on a lot of bespoke rules with those sorts of limitations on this sort of scope of game.

One of the main issues I also see with nuhammer is that it just coddles players too much in this sense. In a game with a knight and a grot, why should anything be able to wound 'anything'? Units being garbage or lists being weak is fine, because it's logically asinine to think that something like a bunch of guardsmen with no heavy support stand a chance in hell against well, most threats. Same reason why I pine for instant death, and would adhere to nothing being immune to it. I don't care if it's Guilliman, Creed, or Jimmy the generic hero, twice the toughness - instantly dead upon failed save. Was such a simple thing to remember and 'just makes sense' as a wargame. Now instead of opposed WS rolling you just have the ability to get easier to hit rolls in melee, or that anything of any toughness can be wounded by anything of any strength. I feel glad I don't bother with nuhammer anymore tbh, talking about 10e in a gamestore and pointing out how 40k isn't a real wargame anymore led to some of the strangest mental gymnastics I've seen from some current players.

PenitentJake wrote:


Except I think it's unfluffy to describe it that way, because no one in 40k shoots fire from their fingers. That's what a casual observer might see, but it is most certainly not what actually happens. It is far more accurate to say that the Psyker uses the power of their mind to tear hole in reality that allows them to manipulate warpfire in such a way that it leaps from their hands to one or more targets- a hole through which daemons might enter the world- a fact that has lead the Imperium to hunt you and your kind across the galaxy.

Fairly sure there was a librarian in the soul drinker books that summoned fire from his finger tips and they heated his gauntlets and burned his hands? Might be misremembering.

Kind of feel the forum's gone round and round on the FOC before and this page is just showing the issues.

I tend to agree that 10th armies can not appear like fluffy armies. (Although most of the competitive ones would have fit into the old FOC without much difficulty, so its unclear the freedom itself is a problem). This has been my criticism of AoS. There's no illusion that this collection of units is an organic force. Its "X is good, Y is good and Z is good, so I took X, Y and Z". I wrote a post about this about 2 months after 10th was released.

To some degree it was always ever thus. At least today no one's claiming their Knight Castellan+loyal 32+3 BA captains force is totally justifiable in the fluff - and look its fine, I've given them all names.

But you end up with the subjectivity of it. "Woops all Avatars" isn't fluffy. Why though? Because GW say it isn't? But that just means they've not created the "woops all Avatars" Craftworld yet. Why is spamming jetbikes or wraithguard fluffy? Is it just that the fluff for these Craftworld's has been with us since 2nd edition, i.e. the last 30 years or so?

We get "the FOC is to stop unit spam."
But this leads to Guard Player: "I like tanks. I'm playing the faction because I like tanks. Let me take tanks."
GW: "Okay then, take all the tanks."
Everyone else: "well if they can spam tanks, why can't we?"
GW: "uh... actually we'd like to sell tanks, so sure, its fine."

I guess you can just say tough, each faction will have 3-6 "detachments" which are fluffy that you have to buy into, with hard restrictions to prevent people getting round them. But I'm not sure that would be so fun. I can't see GW wanting to restrict people's purchases either.

Saying 25% of the force must be Batteline could be a fix - but that's a huge investment for armies that don't have many battleline units. Should every Ad Mech army have to take 60-70~ Skitarii Rangers/Vanguard?

Rites of War would have fixed this. IDK if the new Heresy has it, but having an FOC plus a Rite that changed it both good and bad (e.g. X unit now counts as troops, but you need at least 2 compulsory units of X and every unit requires a transport) would have been way better than what they did before (just FOC and let you take other things) or what they do now (No FOC at all, take whatever crap you want)

It's definitely contributed to armies barely looking like armies. Hell, armies still looked like armies in 5th edition, and I'd say even possibly in 6th and 7th (although formations/detachments were IMHO great ideas executed poorly).

What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

 Tyran wrote:
What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

Obviously it's one that they think is their example of an army, not the example anyone else puts forward.

One that looks like an actual representation of what a typical force in the lore might look like.

Wayniac wrote:
One that looks like an actual representation of what a typical force in the lore might look like.

By that logic, we've never seen a Space Marine army.

Wayniac wrote:Rites of War would have fixed this. IDK if the new Heresy has it, but having an FOC plus a Rite that changed it both good and bad (e.g. X unit now counts as troops, but you need at least 2 compulsory units of X and every unit requires a transport) would have been way better than what they did before (just FOC and let you take other things) or what they do now (No FOC at all, take whatever crap you want)

It's definitely contributed to armies barely looking like armies. Hell, armies still looked like armies in 5th edition, and I'd say even possibly in 6th and 7th (although formations/detachments were IMHO great ideas executed poorly).

I like Rites of War quite a bit. However, they do have the same limitations as other "special detachment" type rules in that you just have to cross your fingers and hope GW remembered that your personal faction exists. I hate to keep bringing up Iybraesil, but it's a pretty good illustrator of this point. The chances of GW going, "Hey, let's be sure to include a detachment specifically for that craftworld that uses a lot of banshees," is pretty slim.

So Rites of War are great, and I'd love to have them in 40k. However, I'd also be 0% surprised if I ended up just having to find the not-Iybraesil option that sorta kinda fits if you squint.

Tyran wrote:What is even an "army that looks like an army"?

I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I think part of the "this doesn't feel like an army" thing for me is that I don't really have any "core" (for lack of a better term" units that I find myself taking multiples of. Instead, I'm taking hodgepodge lists with one of this, one of that, etc. This is largely because some of my units depend on stratagems to survive, and I'm only allowed to protect a single unit with something like Phantasm or Fire & Fade every turn.

Just the other day, I was considering picking up some more windriders thinking that having a bunch of bike squads at the heart of my army would be a good way to represent an Iybraesil force ranging ahead and searching an area for signs of a relic. But then I realized that any windrider squads I take after the first would just have to sit in place after shooting meaning they'd most likely shoot once and then die.

So I kind of feel like there are incentives in place to avoid taking duplicates of some units, and that in turn kind of makes armies feel like a collection of units that can make the most out of strats instead of an army with a theme/identity. .The army I've played against that felt most "like an army" this edition was probably the eldar army painted like Iyanden that ran a lot of wraiths. I lcould look at it and go, "Yep. That sure is a craftworld that is relying on its dead to do a lot of the heavy lifting."

Dandelion wrote:

I’ve noticed that under the current rules, units typically do everything you want them to, all the time and with little to no drawbacks. Previously heavy weapons could not move and shoot, now they can do so and charge. You can fall back with little consequence. Heck, even just being able to shoot all weapons on a model is fairly new. Feel free to have a model do a couple flips shooting targets at two ends of the board and still charge a third. There’s no action economy or any attempt to simulate any fog of war, which simplifies gameplay to just “move shoot charge” until one side wins. It also ramps up lethality and makes early turns very long.

Part of the problem is that its almost impossible to compensate drawbacks when options exist that don't require hard decisions. People like the idea of having to make choices, but when rubber hits the road, you just don't take that stuff in favor of things that aren't quite as strong, but work all the time. Counterplay is great in theory and 40k needs a whole lot more of it, but you have to go to pretty incredibly lengths to compensate for something that might not work at all. One thing that's shown up a fair bit in this thread is things people miss from old editions that didn't really see play. There's a lot of things that we like in theory because they feel like fun decisions to make, but in practice just aren't efficient or convenient enough to see play.

I think another factor is the turn sequence. Because its whole army activations if you're on the tail end of a player having an alpha strike on you; you really can't afford to have wild-card abilities all over the place that suddenly don't work.

So people put pressure on reliability so that when things happen they know they'll happen because their game plan already go thrown out the window in the previous players turn.



I think if it were alternate unit activation there'd be more room for wildcards to happen because you don't quite get that same alpha-strike impact. So you've got room to adjust your plan around the rolls and such whilst also dealing with your opponents wildcards at the same time.

What's an army that looks like an army?

Its subjective - but lets take us away from 40k, to the exciting world of Total War Warhammer (HBMC knows.) In the game you can encounter fairly crazy random armies (and the AI loves a skew). So in that game its not uncommon to have to fight battles against "woops, all Stegadons" or "woops, all artillery".

This is what I mean by being unnatural. How have the Stegadons got there without handlers etc? How has this car park of cannons, rockets and mortars found itself in the middle of nowhere?

Or to pick on AoS - here are two top lists from a smaller tournament a month ago:


I'm sure both of these lists are interesting to play - but there's no way they feel like natural representations of either army.

Its very far away from the idea that you pick an HQ - and that's simultaneously your general and you in the world of 40k. You then have some basic troops from your faction. You get yourself an elite unit, that's maybe a bodyguard for your HQ, maybe something else. You maybe get some fast things and then you have a tank/monster/artillery piece to show off. Maybe this is contrived - but it feels fluff led.
Not "The Yncarne, Night Spinners and a buffed up Wraithguard are still undercosted, so I took the Yncarne, some buffing characters, 3 Night Spinners and rounded my army off with a brick of 10 Wraithguard." You can paint your army yellow but its not changing the issue.

How do you get an army of Stegadons?

Easy - migrating herd of Stegadons; the handlers perhaps killed earlier in the day and now the Stegadons are roaming without handler direction.


How do you get an army of artillery?

Easy - artillery brigade that was isolated from the main army whilst en-route to larger engagement is now being ambushed.




I very much get your point of wanting to have "armies". It's a constant warground with wargames in terms of having armies that visually represent what most of us commonly imagine an army to be; VS the statistical chances of the models winning in an engagement.

The former can create very thematic forces (even if those themes might not be based on reality and instead on film or media); but they might not be statistically the most powerful.

The latter can create forces that are on paper very powerful, but which might appear odd in the lore - eg as you say an army of artillery etc...

The main thing is that any wild combination can be justified in some form. Armies don't just march in pure perfect formation and perfect compositions. Indeed moving armies around means that often you will have imperfect groups about all the time. Heck many real world armies are just whatever the heck could be rounded up and pressed into an army at that moment.



Some wargames go with very restrictive army building to help drive home the designed games vision of what an army should be. Other games are more open and GW have always been in the latter group of being more open.