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 Skinflint Games wrote:
I have to say, 3 years seems like a ridiculously short time to establish and flesh out an edition with a game of 40ks depth and size. I agree with those who say 5-6 years is far more reasonable.

Particularly with age, my mid-40s, 3 years takes about 5 minutes to pass.

I mean, that MAY actually be the case. 8th edition was a full re-write, but 9th was more like 8.5. 10th was a big overhaul again, and there's a reasonable chance that 11th edition will really be 10.5 and we won't get a big overhaul until 12th.

 vipoid wrote:


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.

Yeah, 8th ed magic was pretty bad. Preventing dispel scrolls from blocking irresistible force / miscasts was a mistake, especially when you can just take a cheap spell caster, throw a bunch of dice to trigger it and just delete a whole regiment and not even necessarily lose the spellcaster in the process. Meanwhile your opponent couldn't actually do anything because they took away the ability to dispel irresistible force spells with scrolls or their own dispel attempts, which I'm pretty sure was something you could do in earlier editions.

I know in 7th Miscast and IF were their own separate things and it was a harder to just throw enough dice to trigger it because of how power dice generation worked.
I don't recall mage bombs being a thing in 7th, but it did start to be a thing in 8th ed, and I hated it because it felt wrong. The point of miscasts was to introduce a level of risk to spell-casting because of how effective magic could be. Not only combining it with irresistible force but ALSO allowing you to throw enough dice to intentionally trigger it AND effectively make a resource such as scrolls useless completely misses the point of such a mechanic.

The problem of Sweeping Advance in particular was that a) Marines were immune to it, b) using initiative made it extremely faction locked and C) later (4th+) editions threw away outnumbering mattering for morale so hordes were soft locked out of it.

Orks and Necrons would basically never benefit from it because their faction wide low initiative, even thought Orks were mostly a melee faction and Necrons had their own melee specialist units. Even Tyranids would often struggle to activate it because they tended to lose a lot of bodies in combat if playing a swarm list.

And again most games would be against Marines. The fact that when it worked was such a strong mechanic meant that it basically made it a feel bad mechanic because it wasn't because you were outplayed or even luck, but because your opponent had a high Initiative elite army and you didn't (and in pretty much any other context Sweeping Advance rarely happened).

I'd put more emphasis on Jidmah's point about how faction disparity impacts this.

I'd have more sympathy for older morale for instance - or loss of control mechanics in general - if they were universal. But typically throughout 40ks history they haven't been. If you are the favoured faction (Marines/Eldar) it's often been of no consequence. People on forums aren't constantly saying you as the player should lose control. But you pick one of the other factions? Suddenly you should be piling up debuffs like there's no tomorrow.

In something like Bloodbowl that's fine. In 40k or WHFB it really wasn't.

At least Ork and Nid units were cheap. Necron units were expensive and had to deal with that stupid phase out rule, so losing an entire unit to a single initiative roll when most factions had double the baseline initiative of a necron unit was disproportionately harmful.

Especially when Necrons aren't even that effective in melee; on average they are about as good as tactical marines but without sergeant power weapons, and tac marines are mediocre in melee even with those.

I think only Tau are worse, and they are still cheaper and they could attack at longer ranges.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 vipoid wrote:


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.

Yeah, 8th ed magic was pretty bad. Preventing dispel scrolls from blocking irresistible force / miscasts was a mistake, especially when you can just take a cheap spell caster, throw a bunch of dice to trigger it and just delete a whole regiment and not even necessarily lose the spellcaster in the process. Meanwhile your opponent couldn't actually do anything because they took away the ability to dispel irresistible force spells with scrolls or their own dispel attempts, which I'm pretty sure was something you could do in earlier editions.

I know in 7th Miscast and IF were their own separate things and it was a harder to just throw enough dice to trigger it because of how power dice generation worked.
I don't recall mage bombs being a thing in 7th, but it did start to be a thing in 8th ed, and I hated it because it felt wrong. The point of miscasts was to introduce a level of risk to spell-casting because of how effective magic could be. Not only combining it with irresistible force but ALSO allowing you to throw enough dice to intentionally trigger it AND effectively make a resource such as scrolls useless completely misses the point of such a mechanic.

8th was horrible. Having played all of the WFB editions since 3rd, I can attest to the ridiculous pendulum swing that happened each new edition. From Heroes being godlike (you didn't even really need troops in 4th/5th) to barely mattering at all (6th) to what IMO was the best edition (7th) and managed to strike some balance, to 8th where it was simple...bring a L4 Wizard and some back-up, or lose. I don't recall my Slann MP ever losing a game, or my Saurus Oldblood ever winning one. It was dumb.

Then they burned it all down with AoS.

 vipoid wrote:

 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?

Certainly the probability affects how people feel about it. However there are plenty of weapons in the game that due to the mechanics, allow no save to most targets and cause enough damage to kill the target regardless.

And those are successful on a 3+ or 2+ to hit, and a 3+ or 2+ to wound. The target player gets no opportunity to do anything except remove the model. And it's usually only elite army players that complain it happens to their models, while guard et al instant remove their models when they're hit by most weapons.

So I absolutely agree that how the mechanics are implemented (the chance of success) has a big impact, but people are already playing with mechanics that remove player choice anyway. Hence my comments on perception playing a bigger part in this, because people accept the concept, but not evenly across the game.

Disruption/pinning/suppression/morale = interference as a concept is integral to war, it's one of the biggest influences on how soldiers actually perform beyond their training. It's how real wars are actually fought - we all know the bullets fired to casualties caused figures are crazy, because those bullets are causing interference even if not casualties. Hence my somewhat tongue in cheek comment about people playing wargames 'wrong' if they can't accept this as part of the game - it's like complaining your pawn can't move like a queen. It's an integral part of the type of game you're playing and removing it because it 'feels bad' turns the game into a far more abstract and less representative version of what it's claiming to be.

How you implement it (the probability) should be looked at, but like so many things in 40k it seems a lot of players jump from 'this mechanic isn't a good implementation of this concept' straight to 'delete this concept from the game because a bad rule was used to represent it'. Which in my mind is not the answer. You can have satisfying gameplay and good representation of the actual aspects of war that a wargame should be striving to simulate, it's just not as simple as roll a d6.

Tyel wrote:I'd put more emphasis on Jidmah's point about how faction disparity impacts this.

I'd have more sympathy for older morale for instance - or loss of control mechanics in general - if they were universal. But typically throughout 40ks history they haven't been. If you are the favoured faction (Marines/Eldar) it's often been of no consequence. People on forums aren't constantly saying you as the player should lose control. But you pick one of the other factions? Suddenly you should be piling up debuffs like there's no tomorrow.

In something like Bloodbowl that's fine. In 40k or WHFB it really wasn't.

I guess this is very much a YMMV thing but I liked that some factions had advantages in soft factors like morale. Again, I mostly played Guard; watching my army crumble because an officer got ganked was part of the charm, because it was offset by my army having a gakload of firepower as long as it could hold together. On the flipside, it felt fitting that the poster boy newbie faction was highly resilient to morale effects as a 'training wheels' sort of advantage (and paid for it accordingly).

I like that when I play Epic a horde of Orks is more unruly and harder to coordinate than an elite force of Space Marines, and I like that when I play Battlefleet Gothic coordinating my fleet of Tyranids is like trying to pick up jello with chopsticks but will I literally eat the other fleet alive if I can pull a plan together. It makes different factions feel different- and if I don't want to deal with that, I can just play any of the factions that are more reliable.

It just seems a little silly to me to play a faction like Orks and then dislike that the Boyz leg it when the Nob gets krumped, or to play Guard and dislike that the hive ganger trash don't stick around when half the squad gets mulched, or to play Tyranids and dislike that the Gaunts go to ground when all the synapse creatures are dead. It's part of their fluff, part of their character. If you wanted fearless elites, you could just play fearless elites.

The thing that I will complain about is that how GW implemented morale was very rudimentary and binary, and the And They Shall Know No Morale Rules got out of hand. But again, HH2.0 and TOW show how GW has taken the old ideas and given them a bit more depth, and there are plenty of other examples to draw from. For instance, I liked how Heavy Gear's morale system caused units to rack up penalties to their actions, but didn't take control away from the player- you could keep pushing if you wanted, but your effectiveness would diminish until you stopped to rally. Or in Epic: Armageddon, once a unit accumulates enough blast markers to become broken, additional hits inflict extra damage to the unit with no saves allowed. It doesn't flee off the board, but it becomes combat ineffective and highly vulnerable to further damage until you rally.

There are many ways to handle morale, and I resent this notion that it's an 'objectively bad' concept because it 'takes away control' or is 'lose more', as if these are universally bad things to have in a wargame and not just reflections of the very low tolerance for friction expressed by the average 40K player.