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I like the idea of randomness to represent the chaotic nature of war and how you might want a squad to advance into a ruin to claim it but other factors stop it etc but I don't have faith in GW doing that justice properly.

 Hellebore wrote:


How those instances of lacking control are modelled however, where the rub is. Not the concept itself.

And this is the issue. I'm fine with random charges, psychic tests, random to hit, random saves, etc. I'm fine with random effects being associated with specific wargear that I can choose not to use. But for me, wiping out a unit because of a deepstrike mishap or wiping a unit out without swinging cuz you managed to tag are two of those poor instances of lacking control.

It's funny how the supposed "gotcha" of strats will drive some people crazy, yet they feel nostalgia for "woops your entire unit is dead because of a single random die roll which wasn't even associated with an attack."

Of course I suppose you could say the opposite- I'm not bothered in the least by the "gotcha" of strats, but getting wiped out in deepstrike mishaps or sweeping advances used to drive me crazy! I think it's because in the case of strats, there's at least a decision made by the enemy, typically an enemy unit that uses the strat and a resource cost for the action... Whereas mishaps and sweeping advances were just core mechanics that randomly wiped you out.

So, on the topic of Morale... Whipped that up.

 Tyran wrote:
Counterpoint, this game has both Tyranids and Necrons in it. The latter are literally robots, the former are literally hive-minded.

Like sure once a unit is out of synapse range I shouldn't fully control it anymore, but I do expect to have total control over units within synapse because that is the lore.

Yes, but your control is not the hive mind's control. The hive mind would not make gamist decisions over how to use its troops. Just because it can run them into guns ignoring everything, doesn't mean it will at every instance.

This gets into the equivalent of RPGs and metagaming - you as the player not acting as the character/general would. Which is that number 3 simulationist concept - how much of the game is you simulating the army's actions, vs playing an abstract game and making gamist decisions.

ie, you could play an army of orks that never gets into melee, running around shooting with their pistols and you could win the game that way. But is that representative of how the army would have actually acted in that scenario?

EDIT: And that doesn't factor in blast stunning, noise confusing units, being turned around by shots coming from every angle. While your troops are imperfect, there won't be an instance when the phenomena of a battlefield fails to interfere with their behaviour. People are just too used to the conceit that morale is the only way that these effects should be modelled and Fearless allows you to ignore those effects.

 Tyran wrote:
Counterpoint, this game has both Tyranids and Necrons in it. The latter are literally robots, the former are literally hive-minded.

Like sure once a unit is out of synapse range I shouldn't fully control it anymore, but I do expect to have total control over units within synapse because that is the lore.

Beat me to it. I'd like to see the Bugs go back to essentially being unbreakable until they're outside of Synapse, then revert to some for of Instinctive Behavior. Even if that meant 0OC, and being forced to move/use them in certain ways. Along with independent units, like Lictors, Genestealers, etc. behaving like everyone else. Make Synapse Great Again. Or at least make it mean something, and killing the Synapse nodes/creatures important.

Necrons can pound sand though. They've been OP since their introduction, and should be eliminated from the game entirely, like the Squats.

Kidding, obviously, but partly not. Necrons have always been Marine Tough, Eldar Deadly, and Tyranid Fanatic, with the toughest vehicles and monsters in the game. It's weird to me that they don't completely dominate every game and tournament, and yet they don't. I guess they must be OK, and GW might be balancing things just a tiny bit. They should definitely make them more expensive though, both in points and money. Double would be fine with me.

I hate Necrons, BTW. No, I won't show you on the doll where the Necrons probed me.

 Hellebore wrote:

This gets into the equivalent of RPGs and metagaming - you as the player not acting as the character/general would. Which is that number 3 simulationist concept - how much of the game is you simulating the army's actions, vs playing an abstract game and making gamist decisions.

ie, you could play an army of orks that never gets into melee, running around shooting with their pistols and you could win the game that way. But is that representative of how the army would have actually acted in that scenario?

I feel that while that argument may work in a historical in which the army and general in question actually existed and you could even find documentation about their tactics... It actually doesn't quite work in fiction and particularly not in 40k.

For example Tyranids can have wildly different tactics depending on hive fleet and situation, they can go from throwing endless waves at imperial defenses to outmaneuvering Orks with guerrilla warfare to bombarding daemons with artillery. Some hive fleets prefer massed subterranean assaults, some prefer air supremacy swarms, some prefer nidzilla monster spam and we even have examples of hive fleets changing prefered strategies over time.

So how can you tell how my army would have actually acted in that scenario? Hive fleet colours? What if it is a custom hive fleet

Orks also can have different strategies and tactics depending on clan culture and/or warboss preferences. Same goes for different Necron dynasties.

I guess the argument kinda works with Space Marines and Imperial Guard that tend to have very rigid Chapter cultures or regimental doctrines, but even there custom Chapters and regiments are a thing.

And to be even more meta, a core aspect of 40k is supposed to be "Your Dudes/ettes/Bugs", the player is supposed to at least partially define how they behave.

Edit: and to be honest, it is highly likely we wouldn't even agree on how an army would have acted in any scenario, because the supposed source that would determine that is highly arbitrary fiction that gets retconned half the time and/or has different authors each one with their own take and interpretation.

Edit#2: but you do have a point with loss of control for non-morale battlefield phenomena like concussions, difficult terrain, etc.

@Hellebore

Been thinking more about simulation vs. control- it's a good tangent, so I won't make this long, but Crusade can add to that lack of control, or up the scale on it. So GSC may or may not be successful it infiltrating institutions, Tau may or may not win over planets, etc. These MOSTLY affect the Crusade metagame, but that can trickle down to the table.

For an added layer of simulation, I tend to advocate for escalation in our campaigns as a result of narrative triggers rather than wins/losses or intervals. My GSC grow according to the brood cycle- so I start with Purestrains; their kills become brood brothers who beget acolytes... And so on. It'll probably take 10-15 games per brood cycle.

My Archon Ascendant has to make deals with the various other forces in Commorragh before they'll join him; Guard and Sororitas are reinforced from off world based on their discoveries of Cult activity and other threats, often through the intervention of Imperial Agents.

What happens on the table can be relatively stable when there's a layer of narrative barriers to player agency to create a simulation effect at the level of the war rather than the level of individual battles.

PenitentJake wrote:It's funny how the supposed "gotcha" of strats will drive some people crazy, yet they feel nostalgia for "woops your entire unit is dead because of a single random die roll which wasn't even associated with an attack."

Yeah, because those aren't the same thing at all.

The 'gotcha' of stratagems was that you couldn't reasonably learn and memorize all of them, so you would get caught out by lacking information that was supposed to be available to you. It was the game not functioning as designed.

The 'gotcha' of deep strike was when you deliberately chose a risky drop location and the dice didn't work out. You made an in-game decision with all the necessary information, choosing what level of risk you were willing to accept, and sometimes taking a risk means you're going to get burned. That's working as intended; the negative response is just 40K players being especially averse to randomness even when they have the power to influence how random it actually is.

 Tyran wrote:
Counterpoint, this game has both Tyranids and Necrons in it. The latter are literally robots, the former are literally hive-minded.

Wouldn't it be at least interesting if the perfectly synchronized psychic hive mind actually behaved differently on the table from press-ganged conscripts, centuries-old veterans, or screaming idiot hooligans?

A game where the hive mind faction's signature advantage is perfect command and control (so long as the psychic leader beasts remain alive), and that actually means something in practice, sounds dangerously close to being fun.

 catbarf wrote:

Wouldn't it be at least interesting if the perfectly synchronized psychic hive mind actually behaved differently on the table from press-ganged conscripts, centuries-old veterans, or screaming idiot hooligans?

A game where the hive mind faction's signature advantage is perfect command and control (so long as the psychic leader beasts remain alive), and that actually means something in practice, sounds dangerously close to being fun.

You should try Epic.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Yeah, I get ehat Catbarf is saying and it's a problem since 8th and has gotten worse with new units.
For example, in earlier times Orks had a choppa, big choppa or klaw, with named chars or relics being special. Now you have choppa, big choppa, special klaw for the Beast snagga Boss, special klaw for the trike Boss, special big choppa for the warboss, special klaw for the snagga warboss, special CC weapons for named chars. It's a point of needless complexity when at the same time in CSM World some Power fists are power fists and some lightning claws are lightnings claws but other Power fists and lightning claws are accursed weapons So the same bits having different rules. This leads to a need to look up these Profiles over and over (like you would look up the bloated base rules over and over in 6th/7th edition).

That's no longer true though. For the codex GW has worked to improve on this issue by a lot. The ork klaws you have given as an example are all AP-2 2 damage now, and 3 attacks S9 or 4 attacks S10 depending on whether a warboss or nob level character is wielding them, just like in the past. All most of the non-klaw weapons like big choppas, beastsnagga and buggy weapons are all Ap-1 2 damage with S6-7. The only odd one out is the powa snappa, which looks like a klaw, but has the profile of a big choppa. Bespoke weapons really only exist on models where having bespoke weapons makes sense.

True 'fearless' units that walk through hails of fire and aren't slowed down should take attrition damage that normal units don't and lose more models/wounds where a normal unit would test.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:


How those instances of lacking control are modelled however, where the rub is. Not the concept itself.

And this is the issue. I'm fine with random charges, psychic tests, random to hit, random saves, etc. I'm fine with random effects being associated with specific wargear that I can choose not to use. But for me, wiping out a unit because of a deepstrike mishap or wiping a unit out without swinging cuz you managed to tag are two of those poor instances of lacking control.

It's funny how the supposed "gotcha" of strats will drive some people crazy, yet they feel nostalgia for "woops your entire unit is dead because of a single random die roll which wasn't even associated with an attack."

Of course I suppose you could say the opposite- I'm not bothered in the least by the "gotcha" of strats, but getting wiped out in deepstrike mishaps or sweeping advances used to drive me crazy! I think it's because in the case of strats, there's at least a decision made by the enemy, typically an enemy unit that uses the strat and a resource cost for the action... Whereas mishaps and sweeping advances were just core mechanics that randomly wiped you out.

Well, there is science to explain that.

In general, people hate non-interactive rules. If the game or the opponent does something that causes a negative effect which they cannot avoid or influence, it’s always going to ruin most people’s fun. I say most people, because there are always those who love getting completely wrecked by forces outside their control—but we know for sure that they are a minority.

When it comes to taking risks, there’s that familiar matrix you can probably Google in seconds: high risk vs. low risk, and high gain vs. low gain.
I think we don’t need to talk about low risk/high gain. Most people enjoy rolling attacks for their big beatstick, firing the main gun on a massive tank, or rolling saves for Terminators—though we all know that one guy who completely flips their gak when they fail a 5" charge.

Competitive players will always try to minimize risk, typically preferring low risk/low gain over high risk/high gain. Beer & Pretzel and narrative gamers, on the other hand, love to go for high risk/high gain because it creates memorable moments—and even if it goes wrong, it was their choice to take that risk.
No one likes taking a high risk for a low gain unless they’re desperate. In the vast majority of cases, those are considered misplays.

Based on this:

Gotchas – People dislike them because they remove agency. WH40k is a game with (almost) no hidden information, so players expect to make decisions based on perfect knowledge. If you forget about a stratagem or ability, and that suddenly turns a low-risk move into a high-risk one, then it’s no longer the decision you made. You suddenly find yourself in a situation you didn’t want to be in, just because you missed a nuance.
I recently gotcha’d myself when playing against the new EC—charging into a character with "fights first." I was told the character was there and what it does, but with all the new information from a new army, and me being tired and stressed, I still missed it. It just feels bad when a whole game night turns into a fight you didn’t mean to pick.

Deep Strike Mishaps – Deep strike with scatter was mostly high risk, low gain. Even if you didn’t mishap, your unit was susceptible to blasts and flamers, might scatter too far from its target, or take damage from terrain. If you did mishap, there was a high chance your unit would be dead or useless for the rest of the game.
All successful deep strike units either had ways to mitigate mishap risks (drop pods, teleport homers, grav-chutes) or were cheap units with powerful weapons (like suicide melta squads) to justify the risk. Most other deep strike units either weren’t played or were just deployed normally.
The reason you probably never saw a deep striking Land Raider wasn’t because it was silly—it was because it was very high risk, low gain.

Sweeping Advances – This one is more complex. Older editions had general design flaws: unfair initiative distribution, mechanics that overly favored durable models, and the mess of fearless band-aids layered on top of each other. All of this played a big part in making sweeping advances one of the worst mechanics the game ever had.
But even without those issues, sweeping advances were never great. At best, it was a win-more mechanic that let an already-successful unit kill even more enemies to speed up combat. Today, we have better rules that achieve similar results in more balanced ways.
At worst, if you didn’t roll well or your opponent made enough saves, you could end up losing your entire unit. In 7th edition, this meant that any charge became a high-risk, low-gain move, because bouncing off a unit with layered re-rollable saves and Feel No Pain would wipe out your melee unit just for losing a single model. Often, the only way to mitigate this risk was simply not to run most melee units.

In short, sweeping advances turned melee into low risk/high gain for some armies and high risk/low gain for others, with no real player interaction beyond choosing your faction. That’s why some people miss the mechanic dearly—while many others hate it.

I believe that the perception of what a rule is affects people more than its actual function.

You have no control over what a dice is going to generate - if people truly hated lack of control, they'd just use little wars rules and play RPS on each unit, or give each unit a fixed damage output they always generate when they target an enemy unit.

The uncertainty of hitting your target is no different to the uncertainty of your unit doing what you want it to, but the perception people have about it affects their enjoyment.


you play around the fact that not everything always hits, it changes your behaviour by having you use multiple units, give up your reroll etc. Because it's seen as a feature of the game that your to hit is uncertain, it's part of the fabric that your unit won't just kill what it targets.

It should also be built in that your unit won't also function 100% at all times and act as if it has omniscient vision of the battlefield. Approaching the game knowing that is a feature means you play around it with the mechanics at hand. That to me is actually a wargame, because it's war in game form.

Modern 40k is very far from a wargame and no amount of super alien intelligences or super soldier discipline will ever override the imperfect conditions of the battlefield and its effects on the outcomes.

 Quixote wrote:
I never read the book, how exactly do these deep strike rules vary from the regular rules for Deep Strike?

Sorry, I missed your question.

Essentially, once per turn you can do a "surgical deep-strike" outside of 3" instead of deep striking regularly without any risk. If you do, you need to do a deep strike test on 2d6 and you get -1 to that roll for every units within 9" that isn't battle-shocked or OC0. For example, if you deep strike within range of an entire intercessor squad, you get -5 to that roll or +-0 if they are battle-shocked. If you deep strike between two LRBT, you get -2.

4+ you arrive safely
3+ battleshock test
2+ automatically battleshocked
1 or less is a mishap

Mishaps deal d3 or d6 mortal wounds in addition to going back into reserves, being forced to deep strike somewhere else, giving a nearby unit a reactionary move, getting battle-shocked and losing the ability to charge and/or shoot.

 Jidmah wrote:
In short, sweeping advances turned melee into low risk/high gain for some armies and high risk/low gain for others, with no real player interaction beyond choosing your faction. That’s why some people miss the mechanic dearly—while many others hate it.

I played Guard primarily from 3rd-5th. The implication that anyone who liked sweeping advance as a mechanic only did because it benefitted them personally is bs. Be better.

Edit, regardless:

 Jidmah wrote:
Today, we have better rules that achieve similar results in more balanced ways.

No, we don't, and that's the problem.

The purpose of morale rules in older editions was to provide a temporary (fall back) or permanent (sweeping advance) incapacitation of a unit through a means other than raw killing power. It allowed for melee units to punch above their weight, making it worth the risk of getting up the board and into combat. It allowed shooting to be effective without needing high lethality. It promoted use of combined arms, shooting units to soften them up before charging to force that critical morale test, making multirole units like Tactical Marines actually worth something. And it allowed units with mediocre to poor morale to have theoretically high raw power for their points, but be susceptible to getting wiped out by shock action- a characterization that fit my Guard much better than being fearless tarpits who now, at worst, become ineligible for stratagems I wouldn't blow on them anyways.

GW played around with the specifics over the editions, but the loss of these mechanics with no substitute has resulted in an escalation of lethality to the point where boards need to be choked with cover to mitigate alpha striking, and melee units expect a 50+% return in a single round of combat or aren't worth taking. In older editions having lower Initiative put you at a disadvantage, but right now between two melee-capable units whoever hits first usually wins.

Sweeping Advance stuck around in Horus Heresy, but the amount of complaining I've seen there is minimal compared to what I hear whenever it's mentioned in the context of 40K. It's a fairly straightforward wargaming staple- that morale failing in close combat can be catastrophic- that could be implemented a bunch of different ways but the simple one has the desired effect.

40k's old morale rules were terrible, and I'm glad they've been removed. They never fit the setting or real circumstances of the game, they were blatantly copied from large-scale ranked-combat historical wargames and shoved in without any regard for who was fighting or how they were fighting.

Very cool to spend the first two turns slogging my orks up the field, finally getting within 7" of the tau gunline, and then having the squad just turn around and all get shot in the back and die rather than charge them and easily win and survive. They weren't even allowed to go behind a building so they would stop getting shot. Nope, just turn around and walk backwards across the field. Back to France, because I am actually a block of 400 French conscripts retreating at Waterloo.

And let's not forget the squad of 20 necron warriors getting instantly obliterated by a couple of models that can't even ignore WBB. Or the 30-man guard squad with a commissar I wiped off of the board by driving an empty truck into them. Or that unit of 10 inquisitorial stormtroopers I wiped out with a single chaos cultist. And how GW just arbitrarily made space marines immune to sweeping advance because it was so "unheroic" to have it happen to you.

It's fine if you have issues with GW's previous morale rules and how they were implemented but personally I feel something is missing with them barely existing at all. I understand that it would be a big idea and there is a more than likely chance that GW would stuff up such a big change in some way but nevertheless it is part of what makes the modern game feel more shallow in my opinion.

 catbarf wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
In short, sweeping advances turned melee into low risk/high gain for some armies and high risk/low gain for others, with no real player interaction beyond choosing your faction. That’s why some people miss the mechanic dearly—while many others hate it.

I played Guard primarily from 3rd-5th. The implication that anyone who liked sweeping advance as a mechanic only did because it benefitted them personally is bs. Be better.

As I pointed out in the very beginning of my posts, there are people who love losing control and randomly losing their units to game mechanics they cannot influence. Especially among veterans, this is fairly common since that was part of earlier edition's charm - and those who hated it back then simply aren't around anymore to be veterans. However, this is untrue for the majority of gamers. Mechanics like that are proven to drive players away from games, irrespective of how they are implemented.

And to be blunt, IG never cared about losing combat unless they beefed up a unit to be good at combat - and then it usually brough characters which let them ignore moral and sweeps.

permanent (sweeping advance) incapacitation of a unit through a means other than raw killing power.

Permanent incapacitation is killing. You literally made a few rolls to kill a unit, and it's functional identical to rules dealing mortal wounds to units that fail a battle-shock test or after a charge.

It allowed for melee units to punch above their weight, making it worth the risk of getting up the board and into combat. It allowed shooting to be effective without needing high lethality. It promoted use of combined arms, shooting units to soften them up before charging to force that critical morale test, making multirole units like Tactical Marines actually worth something. And it allowed units with mediocre to poor morale to have theoretically high raw power for their points, but be susceptible to getting wiped out by shock action- a characterization that fit my Guard much better than being fearless tarpits who now, at worst, become ineligible for stratagems I wouldn't blow on them anyways.

Yes, that's what it did when everything went right. Except it regularly failed at every single thing you just listed when the armies involved were not marines or eldar. Ork boyz were getting sweeped by necron warriors, tyranid monsters never got to punch above their weight, and when your initiative was high enough, you never cared about your low leadership - assuming that low leadership wasn't ignored anyways.

GW played around with the specifics over the editions, but the loss of these mechanics with no substitute has resulted in an escalation of lethality to the point where boards need to be choked with cover to mitigate alpha striking, and melee units expect a 50+% return in a single round of combat or aren't worth taking. In older editions having lower Initiative put you at a disadvantage, but right now between two melee-capable units whoever hits first usually wins.

I'm not sure what game you are playing, but as a player of two combined arms armies which rely heavily on melee, my games of 10th are a lot less lethal than anything I've played since 5th. Melee often goes on for multiple turns, especially when durable fighters like gravis, terminators or MANz are involved. The main difference is that movement and model placement decide combat between two melee units of similar power instead of unfairly distributed initiative and leadership values. Unless you are a piece of paper picking a fight with scissors, of course, but that's also player agency and there are ways to avoid that.
"Sweeping" is much better represented by desparate escape, as it actually requires you to cut off their fall back route rather than just roll dice to prevent them from running down an empty field.

Sweeping Advance stuck around in Horus Heresy, but the amount of complaining I've seen there is minimal compared to what I hear whenever it's mentioned in the context of 40K. It's a fairly straightforward wargaming staple- that morale failing in close combat can be catastrophic- that could be implemented a bunch of different ways but the simple one has the desired effect.

Sweeping advances never was an issue when marines were fighting marines.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Dai2 wrote:
It's fine if you have issues with GW's previous morale rules and how they were implemented but personally I feel something is missing with them barely existing at all. I understand that it would be a big idea and there is a more than likely chance that GW would stuff up such a big change in some way but nevertheless it is part of what makes the modern game feel more shallow in my opinion.

Absolutely agree, battle-shock needs to have more impact. I just explained 10th to a returning veteran last weekend, and he correctly summarized it as "so, it basically does nothing?".

Edit: Fixed grammar

 Jidmah wrote:
Mechanics like are proven to drive players away from games, irrespective of how they are implemented.

If you're going to claim something has been proven, please cite your source for the proof.

It must be a snowy day in Hell right now, as I'm in the unusual position of agreeing with Hellebore on something.

 Dysartes wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Mechanics like are proven to drive players away from games, irrespective of how they are implemented.

If you're going to claim something has been proven, please cite your source for the proof.

It must be a snowy day in Hell right now, as I'm in the unusual position of agreeing with Hellebore on something.

Took me like five seconds to find a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875952124001228#sec9

Is this good enough for you, or do we now need to play the "that one doesn't count" game where I keep posting proof and you keep claiming that it doesn't count?

In general, for anyone who is invested in creating games, it should be considered common knowledge that less player agency results in less player enjoyment, and is especially relevant for GMs/DMs.

Sweeping Advance was a rubbish mechanic because not all factions were created equally; some factions had terrible initiative (like necrons), some factions had good initiative (like Eldar) and some factions didn't even suffer from that mechanic but could still inflict it (like Space Marines, because they're the golden child).

So you had some factions that were not only disproportionately affected by it, but can't even do it themselves because good luck trying to beat a roll off against a I6 unit with your I2 unit.
If GW had thought it through they would have given the factions weak to SA some means of protection or evening the odds, but they didn't so end result is a mechanic that harshly punishes some armies but not others, and that doesn't feel good at all.

Battleshock should change depending on if it's shooting or melee. If it's shooting then it should be more like pinning; unit is disabled for a turn and get a bonus to cover. If they aren't in cover then they must make a move to the nearest terrain feature away from an enemy and end their turn.

If it's in melee then the unit that failed its morale test may disengage, and the unit its fleeing from gets to make an attack of opportunity. Defensive grenades can be used to deny these extra attacks.
Alternatively it may hold its ground, but it suffers penalties to hit rolls and if it loses combat again for a consecutive time then it must disengage.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Mechanics like are proven to drive players away from games, irrespective of how they are implemented.

If you're going to claim something has been proven, please cite your source for the proof.

It must be a snowy day in Hell right now, as I'm in the unusual position of agreeing with Hellebore on something.

Took me like five seconds to find a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875952124001228#sec9

Is this good enough for you, or do we now need to play the "that one doesn't count" game where I keep posting proof and you keep claiming that it doesn't count?

In general, for anyone who is invested in creating games, it should be considered common knowledge that less player agency results in less player enjoyment, and is especially relevant for GMs/DMs.

If you play that game too often, you qualify for your own YouTube Channel.

In all honesty, do you find the removal of potential and devastating negatives to be an improvement or a downside on the game?

In WHFB, the Empire Engineers had Pigeon Bombs that had ridiculous ranges and were great for attacking small units... but there was always the chance that your pigeon came back and blew up over your Engineer.

Skaven had the same issue for a while with the Screaming Bell. It was amazing until it cracked on a poor roll, and then your chances of victory started to diminish quickly.

The only random death I can remember (but we were all happily entertained by it) in 40k was the Void Grenade (and its pretty metal template) deployed in an Apocalypse Mega Battle. The Void Grenade template, never went away, just kept scattering and annihilating everything it touched like Pac-Man on PCP.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Mechanics like are proven to drive players away from games, irrespective of how they are implemented.

If you're going to claim something has been proven, please cite your source for the proof.

It must be a snowy day in Hell right now, as I'm in the unusual position of agreeing with Hellebore on something.

Took me like five seconds to find a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875952124001228#sec9

Is this good enough for you, or do we now need to play the "that one doesn't count" game where I keep posting proof and you keep claiming that it doesn't count?

In general, for anyone who is invested in creating games, it should be considered common knowledge that less player agency results in less player enjoyment, and is especially relevant for GMs/DMs.

If you play that game too often, you qualify for your own YouTube Channel.

In all honesty, do you find the removal of potential and devastating negatives to be an improvement or a downside on the game?

Well, what's the reward? Having risk/reward mechanics is a stable of game design for a reason; you get a lot of benefits but there's a risk that something goes wrong to balance that out.
Vortex grenades can wipe out your enemies, but there's a chance that it can wipe you out too. The trick is to position your forces so that you have at least a turn to move to a safe area.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
In all honesty, do you find the removal of potential and devastating negatives to be an improvement or a downside on the game?

In WHFB, the Empire Engineers had Pigeon Bombs that had ridiculous ranges and were great for attacking small units... but there was always the chance that your pigeon came back and blew up over your Engineer.

Skaven had the same issue for a while with the Screaming Bell. It was amazing until it cracked on a poor roll, and then your chances of victory started to diminish quickly.

The only random death I can remember (but we were all happily entertained by it) in 40k was the Void Grenade (and its pretty metal template) deployed in an Apocalypse Mega Battle. The Void Grenade template, never went away, just kept scattering and annihilating everything it touched like Pac-Man on PCP.

I'll refer to my previous post about risks and gains. I don't know any of the WHFB examples you provided, so bear with me just guessing.

The engineer sounds like a low risk, low gain thing, much like Hazardous in 10th. Those are fine for a game. Taking chances is not the same as not being able to influence a mechanic. If you need those engineers to stay alive, I assume you could always just not use the pigeon bombs or bring a different unit. There was no decision you could take to avoid your armies bad initiative or getting sweeped by eldar.

Not too sure how the bell works from your explanation. Might be a high risk, high gain thing, which is not liked by competitive players due to inconsistency, but still can be a fun thing. That is, assuming you could just choose not to play it. If that bell was mandatory to successfully play a skaven army, then there isn't any actual player agency involved and it's a bad mechanic that randomly screws over the skaven player.
My admittedly short research to find out what it does tells me that you now can decide how hard to bang the bell, and it's more likely to break if you use a lot of dice. Sounds like a good rule where the player decides how much of a risk they are willing to take.

As for the void grenade, the issue is not the risk and reward involved. It triggered a chain of events that allowed no player interaction and had no counterplay whatsoever. Very similarly, in one of the 9th edition's planetfall crusade there was a mechanic which started every game with orbital fire raining down on the game after deployment, randomly hitting things for random damage. In some games it did absolutely nothing, in others it obliterated half a player's army before moving. My players absolutely hated it, because you could do nothing about it.

I dunno, vortex grenades just moved 1D6 inches a turn, right? That should be plenty of time for players to react to it and move around the hazard.

Orbital bombardment was pretty bad though. Getting nuked before the game even starts with no real way to react to it isn't fun.
Same issue why alpha strikes are such a problem.

 Hellebore wrote:
I believe that the perception of what a rule is affects people more than its actual function.

You have no control over what a dice is going to generate - if people truly hated lack of control, they'd just use little wars rules and play RPS on each unit, or give each unit a fixed damage output they always generate when they target an enemy unit.

The uncertainty of hitting your target is no different to the uncertainty of your unit doing what you want it to, but the perception people have about it affects their enjoyment.

Do you think it might be less about control/uncertainty and rather about a small number of dice having a disproportional effect on the game?

For the same reason people tend to dislike stuff like the old Jaws of the World Wolf power - which was 'roll well or your monster/character is insta-killed, regardless of toughness, save, wound, points etc.'.

Even if it only ends up being a 1/6 chance, it's of little consolation in those games when you fail the roll. Especially when there's little counterplay beyond 'Roll better, noob'.

It would seem a similar issue with units not doing what you want. e.g. a unit of Necrons might roll 20 d6 for their hit rolls. However, if they first need to roll just 1 or 2 and those 1-2 dice determine whether they get to shoot at all, then the effect of those dice is very skewed compared with the to-hit dice that follow.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Yeah, save or die is a problem. It's fine in RPGs like DnD because in those games you have access to buffs and stats that increase the chances of saving, but you don't get that in 40k, so you are completely at the mercy of dice. And that never feels good.

That's something I think a lot of designers don't seem to understand; the point of RNG mechanics isn't to be random for the sake of randomness, but to provide a level of uncertainty that the player has to prepare and account for.

If there's a mechanic that just outright kills your units with no real risk to the user or counterplay, then it's not a good mechanic.
It's why the Chaos mutation table or the Purple sun were such a stupid mechanics, because you had no control over what mutations you got and if you played a low ini faction and got hit by purple sun you can't do gak. And it was fairly easy to get high level spells like that off, even if you had dispel scrolls because you only had few of them but you're opponent can cast a lot of spells.

 Jidmah wrote:
Permanent incapacitation is killing. You literally made a few rolls to kill a unit, and it's functional identical to rules dealing mortal wounds to units that fail a battle-shock test or after a charge.

You're still missing the distinction. It is killing, which is the goal- making melee decisive, lethal, and an effective means of removing units from the table- but without requiring melee units to have such high damage output that whoever goes first has a good chance of knocking out the enemy before they can strike back. The damage didn't come from amping up raw killing power, but from losing the combat. Setting up conditions conducive to winning the combat allowed non-melee-specialists to produce decisive results in melee, and mindlessly throwing melee units into full-strength enemies with ways to mitigate morale was risky at best.

If failing a Battleshock test while in melee had more significant consequences then it would be a reasonable substitute. Except the same people would be complaining about 'lose-more' mechanics, even though that's the entire point, amplifying the effects of losing a combat without just dialing up stats. It rewards coordination and planning at a macro level; the current system has reduced combat to optimal weapon-target pairing and finicky millimeter positioning.

 Jidmah wrote:
Sweeping advances never was an issue when marines were fighting marines.

You know Marines in HH are Ld7 and don't get ATSKNF, right? Sweeping Advance is more relevant than ever there. I have to wonder how much of this common perception of the mechanic is colored by the problems you mentioned of 6th-7th.


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 vipoid wrote:
It would seem a similar issue with units not doing what you want. e.g. a unit of Necrons might roll 20 d6 for their hit rolls. However, if they first need to roll just 1 or 2 and those 1-2 dice determine whether they get to shoot at all, then the effect of those dice is very skewed compared with the to-hit dice that follow.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

That's part of why a lot of these 'single-check' mechanics rely on 2D6, rather than 1D6, because it produces a bell curve of results that can be used to significantly reduce the likelihood of those extreme events.

You can also incorporate, as a designer, various ways to influence the rolls. 3D6-pick-two-highest is a simple buff, or pick lowest as a debuff- that's how Trench Crusade resolves almost all actions and it works well. Or you can have a sliding scale of results like what The Old World is currently doing; exceeding your modified Leadership value produces different outcomes from exceeding your base Leadership. Or multiple morale states such that it takes extreme outcomes to go straight from 'fine' to 'broken and wiped out'.

There are lots and lots and lots and lots of ways to implement morale systems that detract from perfect player agency over their units (which, frankly, I don't think you can reasonably argue is axiomatically a bad thing- I don't see nearly as much grumbling about Advance or Charge rolls) but don't resort to the sort of 'heads you're fine, tails you die' binaries that lead to feels-bad moments. This is 100% one of those arguments where people unreasonably limit themselves to how 40K used to do it vs how 40K does it now.

+1 to catbarf, as usual.

@Morale, Two other things spring to mind:
The first is that those morale mechanics had an inbuilt forgiveness in that they often meant that a unit wasn't dead, rather it just lost a turn. But then it could rally and get back into the fight.

The second is that in some versions of the CC rules, outnumbering counted for more than inflicted casualties. This was actually pretty great for further manipulating combat results and giving value to troops that were otherwise pretty bad in combat. Plus it had the added benefit of protecting against potential Sweeping Advances because it was less likely that multiple units would run from combat.

And maybe just more importantly, Morale+Sweeping Advance added a new dimension of tactical solutions to a given problem, and further diversified armies. The complaint that some armies were more affected by Morale effects than others is just a feature in my book.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Yeah, save or die is a problem. It's fine in RPGs like DnD because in those games you have access to buffs and stats that increase the chances of saving, but you don't get that in 40k, so you are completely at the mercy of dice. And that never feels good.

I mean, even D&D has heavily cut back on the number of save-or-die effects. e.g. Petrification now requires two consecutive failed rolls before you turn to stone, and gives an entire round for allies to cast preventative magic.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

That's something I think a lot of designers don't seem to understand; the point of RNG mechanics isn't to be random for the sake of randomness, but to provide a level of uncertainty that the player has to prepare and account for.

If there's a mechanic that just outright kills your units with no real risk to the user or counterplay, then it's not a good mechanic.
It's why the Chaos mutation table or the Purple sun were such a stupid mechanics, because you had no control over what mutations you got and if you played a low ini faction and got hit by purple sun you can't do gak. And it was fairly easy to get high level spells like that off, even if you had dispel scrolls because you only had few of them but you're opponent can cast a lot of spells.

Honestly, this was one of the reasons I despised the magic system in WHFB - almost every spell list had a huge AoE spell that was 'toughness test or die' or 'initiative test or die', and it was usually well worth throwing a pile of dice to try and get a Miscast (which would also prevent dispelling). As the damage was all but guaranteed to far exceed any cost, and if you successfully "miscast" then there was no counterplay at all.

 catbarf wrote:

That's part of why a lot of these 'single-check' mechanics rely on 2D6, rather than 1D6, because it produces a bell curve of results that can be used to significantly reduce the likelihood of those extreme events.

You can also incorporate, as a designer, various ways to influence the rolls. 3D6-pick-two-highest is a simple buff, or pick lowest as a debuff- that's how Trench Crusade resolves almost all actions and it works well. Or you can have a sliding scale of results like what The Old World is currently doing; exceeding your modified Leadership value produces different outcomes from exceeding your base Leadership. Or multiple morale states such that it takes extreme outcomes to go straight from 'fine' to 'broken and wiped out'.

There are lots and lots and lots and lots of ways to implement morale systems that detract from perfect player agency over their units (which, frankly, I don't think you can reasonably argue is axiomatically a bad thing- I don't see nearly as much grumbling about Advance or Charge rolls) but don't resort to the sort of 'heads you're fine, tails you die' binaries that lead to feels-bad moments. This is 100% one of those arguments where people unreasonably limit themselves to how 40K used to do it vs how 40K does it now.

Oh yeah, I'm not objecting to the reintroduction of a morale system (or a system that means e.g. units have to pass a Ld test to not just shoot the closest target), I was just speculating as to why people might dislike such rules.