Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Anyone in this section of Dakka has probably seen some "Lore-accurate" Marine brews, where they get 85 wounds apiece, a 2+/2++/2+++ and have Bolters with S46 AP-10 D112. I exaggerate, of course, but I've never really seen a "Lore-accurate" take on other factions.

Something like Reanimation Protocols. Make it regen 2d3 wounds in each Command Phase, and when the last model of a unit is killed, instead of removing it, just lay it sideways on the table. It can still regenerate unless you roll snake eyes for their reanimation. Warriors might get to roll 2d6 instead of 2d3.
Make Gauss have AP equal to the number of hits from the whole squad, and every hit is an automatic wound, since they strip apart the target molecule by molecule.
Tesla can arc to enemy units near the initial target.

What are some fun, gonzo ideas that probably shouldn't see the tabletop but have groundings in lore and are fun to muse on?

Custodes Armour should be -3+. A natural 1 still fails, but Custodes Armour should be able to ignore a hole lotta AP from weapons.

Then guards should be deployed with whole regiment on 500 points game with full tank company and artillery division. Stats can be same as now. Oh, and don't forget preliminary orbital bombardment with 6d6 mortal wounds to every enemy unit

kabaakaba wrote:
Then guards should be deployed with whole regiment on 500 points game with full tank company and artillery division. Stats can be same as now. Oh, and don't forget preliminary orbital bombardment with 6d6 mortal wounds to every enemy unit

I explicitly did NOT discuss points, and that's for a good reason. This is not meant to be balanced-this is meant to take some of the hyperbolic lore and put rules to it.

I'd also like SOME degree of sensibility. Like, 6d6 Mortal Wounds is an average of 21. It's got a 90% chance of killing a Land Raider or any other W16 model before the game starts. Hell, my Nurgle Daemons list would, on average, be left with a dozen Plaguebearers, and an almost-dead GUO. And that's it.

It would also mean that in a Guard vs. Guard matchup, 90% of the table would be dead before the game begins.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Custodes Armour should be -3+. A natural 1 still fails, but Custodes Armour should be able to ignore a hole lotta AP from weapons.

So, I don't know if this is still in the rules, but it used to be that you could not modify something to less than 1. Which means that a 1+ armor (which was, very briefly, possible with Storm Shields before they were errata'd to +1 to Armor Save rolls instead of Save Characteristic) were effectively an unmodifiable 2+.
There is a way around this, if needed: Just give Custodes a 2+ Armor and +X to their Armor Save rolls.

I do feel like giving every faction the movie marine treatment could be fun, but then I imagine you basically end up with a game of Kill Team any time two elite factions face-off.

Eldar of all stripes: Give them basically ward saves (an invuln that happens after any other saves they take) that represents their anime-tier speed and reflexes. Consider having torrent/blast/fights first attacks bypass it. So in addition to being well-armored, your striking scorpions are also protected by their crazy ninja moves that make them even harder to kill!

Harlequins: The whole army is a bunch of lone op individuals with the characters being comparable to imperial assassins in terms of power. Basic troupers are somewhat less killy, but various abilities and stratagems trigger off of them. Special weapon troupers are their own datasheets and have special abilities reflecting their quirky weapons.

Thousand Sons: Redesign the psykers to be more expensive but also more flexible. A given psyker should have the option to choose from a list of powers to fit the situation. He should be able to do some combination of threatening tanks and buffing troops at the same time. Just make it feel like they're pulling from their grimoires instead of being stuck with two datasheet powers and the army rule, you know? Also, give the army the option to belong to a specific cult which then changes the list of spells they can cast with the army rule. So cult of time gets more mobility/rubric healing powers. Cult of mutation can debuff enemies or turn their psykers into beatsticks, etc. I also want cultists back, and I want them to be able to perform an action to cast a ritual that provides additional uses of spells or at least buffs psychic tests.

Tyranids: Build-a-bug toolkit wargear options. The thing that initially drew me to them was the sense that you could customize a bug to put your own bespoke critter on the table, but they've moved away from that over the years. I want building a tyranid unit to feel like it has 3rd edition dark eldar levels of wargear customization.

Ynnari: Can hang out with named characters. Because their lore is crawling with crossovers between them and various named aeldari characters, and it's bonkers that GW keeps tripling down on the idea that they don't work together. Also, give ynnari their scourges back while we're at it.

Vindicare Assassin

Special Rule: The Marked.

☆ Select a model on the board. Place a Marked token next to that model.

The Marked token stays with the model even if it leaves the board and then returns.

Whenever you make an attack with the Exitus Rifle targeting the model with the Marked token, you automatically hit the target as if you had rolled a natural 6.

If the model with the Marked token is killed. The Vindicare Assassin has done his job and leaves the battlefield. No VP are given to your opponent if the Vindicare exits play in this manner.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Vindicare Assassin

Special Rule: The Marked.

☆ Select a model on the board. Place a Marked token next to that model.

The Marked token stays with the model even if it leaves the board and then returns.

Whenever you make an attack with the Exitus Rifle targeting the model with the Marked token, you automatically hit the target as if you had rolled a natural 6.

If the model with the Marked token is killed. The Vindicare Assassin has done his job and leaves the battlefield. No VP are given to your opponent if the Vindicare exits play in this manner.

I like this one a lot.

Sisters of silence: if within 6 inches of a battleline daemon model, instantly banish it from the field. Psyker powers don’t work within 6 inches regardless of who is controlling them. Makes weak psykers attack themselves from hating it. Half damage from waithbone based attacks as it melts near them. Always has lone operative since their blankness makes them not even make sounds, weird silent footsteps.

(If stuff is wrong I stole the info from the lexicanum article on blanks and figured the sisters can do most of it)

IG: just give us back our Reserves every turn not once in battle. Nothing else needed.

For space marines?

I propose we use the new Tormentor Space Marine statlines from the Emperor's Children Rulebook.

Better attacks, movement speed, toughness, armour save etc all clearly indicate them to be 'better than baseline human'.

the-gentleman-ranker wrote:
For space marines?

I propose we use the new Tormentor Space Marine statlines from the Emperor's Children Rulebook.

Better attacks, movement speed, toughness, armour save etc all clearly indicate them to be 'better than baseline human'.

I have been thinking about how powerful marines really ought to be in 40k. There's the argument that they're supposed to be super powerful, possibly with in-universe plot armor stemming from their primarch heritage plus out-of-universe plot armor because being a hyper elite small group of badasses is theoretically their "thing."

But on the other hand, some people like to interpret all their super soldier advantages as being just enough to put them on even footing with the horrors of the galaxy. Plus there's a case to be made that a game of 40k represents what is basically a worst case scenario for marines. Instead of sending 5 guys to do a scalpel mission where they get to bully hundreds of unaugmented humans and their equivalents, you instead have half a chapter forced out into the open against enemies that are quite good at threatening marines actually. That is, 40k forces them to behave like guardsmen instead of spec-ops/shock troopers.

All of which leaves me kind of unsure of what I even want marines to be like on the tabletop. Their current rules probably fit the second interpretation pretty well, but I'm not sure how many would be excited to play marines if they were framed as guys who were "just good enough to basically be average vs non-horde enemies."

There is a trap in our logic. They are super HUMANS. And created to be on par with horrors of galaxy. To act in large formations of legions. Absolutely like regular army. And then we put them in role of super-elite and wanna them do same thing but in chapter size army. Virtually any chapter is a regiment.
And they fit that role on table. We send company to deal with comparable threat. Considering spec ops with 3 Marines do superduper mission, it's kill team things.

The intrinsic problem with marines is that they are a contradiction, and no way to fix that unless you accept a particular interpretation and apply it up and down the system.

They are a contradiction because they are super soldiers who are not rare. Their limitations are entirely bureaucratic. The human population of the imperium means that chapters have an endless recruitment pool and their causalities are always replaced with little issue.

If they were actually super super soldiers, then their recruitment means the imperium would just be awash with them and they'd be winning every engagement. But being 'just' super soldiers, their recruitment functions perfectly fine.

They were mass produced super soldiers created to take control of the galaxy in the power vacuum of the eldar empire's fall, they weren't expecting to face a galactic threat, but lots of little ones.

Their biology and equipment hasn't changed in 10,000 years so modern marines are no more powerful than when they were deployed as armies rather than the modern targeted strike troops. You could even argue they are weaker now due to deterioration of the geneseed.


The problem isn't with the marine profile, it's with the conflation of marines as a faction in a setting with lots of equal factions, with being a narrative protagonist.

IMO Wyldhunt, trying to contort a justification for 'protagonism powers' for marines is the worst action, because it inherently devalues any other faction and their players by telling them they are mooks for the protagonists.

The power of 40k is that everyone is the protagonist when you are in charge of them.

I don't think it really works anyways, because the space marine players don't want their protagonist to be objectively more powerful than their enemies, they want the protagonist to be the underdog who manages to win against the odds. That's fundamentally incompatible with adjusting their stats in-game. You can't beat the odds when the math is in your favor.

No one wants to read a story about their marines just killing termagants, because they're expected to beat them from the start (even though to you, a regular person, termagants would be terrifying). They want to read a story about one killing a carnifex. But if marines get buffed to frequently kill carnifexes then that becomes the new norm, and the special protagonist of your book needs to kill a biotitan. He must, in order to be exceptional, win the fight that his in-game stats say he should almost always lose.

And the thing is that for the most part that can happen in a game of 40k, it just happens in one out of a hundred games. Your friend's carnifex completely wiffs for three turns of combat and gets killed by a chainsword, and you laud that marine as a great hero and joke about it in future games. That's the sort of once-in-a-lifetime event that the book is meant to tell the story of, the "man bites dog" story, not the usual of the carnifex gobbling down 5 marines until he eventually dies to plasma. But to bookhammer readers, they don't have that broader context. They don't play 40k and see carnifexes eat marines on the table, they only see the marine protagonist kill the carnifex every time in their books. And then I guess wonder why the actual game doesn't reflect that.

I do believe the tabletop is a decent approximation of what happens if Space Marines are facing armies well equipped in heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and/or monsters.

The novels and games often have them in cover heavy battlefields facing waves of lesser infantry (Ork boys, Tyranid Gaunts, Chaos Cultists). Even Titus in all his bs protagonist plot armor still lost a 1v1 vs a Carnifex, and a modern Tyranid army has monsters much more heavily armed than a Carnifex.

 Hellebore wrote:

IMO Wyldhunt, trying to contort a justification for 'protagonism powers' for marines is the worst action, because it inherently devalues any other faction and their players by telling them they are mooks for the protagonists.

The power of 40k is that everyone is the protagonist when you are in charge of them.

I mostly agree. Like, a marine is supposed to be on roughly the same tier as an aspect warrior, if relatively well-rounded compared to the aspect warrior's specialized nature. I'm not interested in rules that let a single marine dunk on 10-man aspect squads just to glaze marines.

I do believe the tabletop is a decent approximation of what happens if Space Marines are facing armies well equipped in heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and/or monsters.

The novels and games often have them in cover heavy battlefields facing waves of lesser infantry (Ork boys, Tyranid Gaunts, Chaos Cultists). Even Titus in all his bs protagonist plot armor still lost a 1v1 vs a Carnifex, and a modern Tyranid army has monsters much more heavily armed than a Carnifex.

^ I think this is basically the issue. The stuff that makes marines look especially cool/impressive is all the small-scale zoomed-in stuff where they get to flex on lots of mooks. And 40k has seldom been a game with tons of mooks running around even back when there was a mandatory troop tax. The ratio of wimps-marines-can-dunk-on to elites-who-can-kill-marines-just-fine-actually leans heavily towards the latter in games of 40k. Which means 40k games are kind of just antithetical to the kind of spec-ops kill team type operations we see in books.

And that makes a certain amount of sense in-universe. Marines are really good at bullying a bunch of guardsman-tier enemies and using the element of surprise/their momentum to bust their way through to some important structure that needs sabotaged or to some important enemy commander hwo needs assassinating. They're not necessarily as effective when they're just shoved on the front lines en masse where every enemy tank shell is bound to hit at least some of them.

So I guess my only real caveat to agreeing with Hellebore here is that I think you *could* make "protag marines" work, but you'd have to address what is basically a conservation of ninjutsu issue. That is, an entire army of marines will just always necessarily make the marines feel underwhelming because whole squads of them are going to get wiped out over the course of a few game turns. So you'd need to do something like shrink the average size of a 40k game back down to like 2nd or 3rd edition standards (way fewer models/units on both sides) so that the marines can be credible threats to everything on the table but there simply aren't enough of them to go around obliterating everything. Or else maybe do something like restructuring the faction such that you end up with 90% of the army being like, guardsmen or something, and then you have a handful of marines sprinkled throughout the army who can be given absurd offense but who are dependent on having the squishy mooks around to conceal them while they cut their way through to key targets. And neither of those approaches seems likely.

What it basically is, is that all armies try to fight on the most favourable terms to themselves. Normal warfare is asymmetric warfare. No one fights on an even footing if they can help it.

So in that context, every army looks like elite badasses if they were able to pick the battle that favours them the most.

Marines just happen to have the rapid response capabilities to insert themselves into the most favourable conditions more often than not. But that means of they are caught in unfavourable conditions they should be slaughtered.

The novels, where marines are protagonists, inevitably have the marines deploying in conditions that favour their protagonism. So it's already set up to favour them. Actual mary sue marines where you deploy them in unfavourable conditions like on planet billiard board having to run into a row of tanks are pretty rare, because it is ridiculous they'd survive that.


This comes back to the concept of conflation of marine skill with plot armour/protagonism. That includes the story being written to place them in the most favourable conditions to let them 'naturally' win so it doesn't look too unrealistic.

What they need more of is fiction from other factions' perspectives where the marines are the enemies and are caught in unfavourable conditions and lose. You need to so both sides for the balance to appear.



IMO marines and eldar fight more similarly than they do differently. They both rely on that favourable positioning to win and the ability to ensure favourable positioning to increase chances of victory.

Only orks, nids and guard really can be said to fight in a conventional way and win because they rely on numbers and asymmetry doesn't help them (except in the opposite direction - overwhelming an outnumbered foe but that's true for any army).

 Hellebore wrote:
What it basically is, is that all armies try to fight on the most favourable terms to themselves. Normal warfare is asymmetric warfare. No one fights on an even footing if they can help it.

So in that context, every army looks like elite badasses if they were able to pick the battle that favours them the most.

Marines just happen to have the rapid response capabilities to insert themselves into the most favourable conditions more often than not. But that means of they are caught in unfavourable conditions they should be slaughtered.

The novels, where marines are protagonists, inevitably have the marines deploying in conditions that favour their protagonism. So it's already set up to favour them. Actual mary sue marines where you deploy them in unfavourable conditions like on planet billiard board having to run into a row of tanks are pretty rare, because it is ridiculous they'd survive that.


This comes back to the concept of conflation of marine skill with plot armour/protagonism. That includes the story being written to place them in the most favourable conditions to let them 'naturally' win so it doesn't look too unrealistic.

What they need more of is fiction from other factions' perspectives where the marines are the enemies and are caught in unfavourable conditions and lose. You need to so both sides for the balance to appear.



IMO marines and eldar fight more similarly than they do differently. They both rely on that favourable positioning to win and the ability to ensure favourable positioning to increase chances of victory.

Only orks, nids and guard really can be said to fight in a conventional way and win because they rely on numbers and asymmetry doesn't help them (except in the opposite direction - overwhelming an outnumbered foe but that's true for any army).

I'd agree with all that. Of course, that then leaves us with this weird situation where tabletop 40k is kind of the worst possible environment for showing off what people like about marines in the books. The books usually emphasize zooming in on a small number of bodies who take limited casualties, get to beat up hordes of mooks, and probably deliver some kind of killing blow to the enemy's leader or main facility or whatever. The tabletop instead requires that you field a bunch of guys (to cover ground, do actions, score objectives, etc.) who will then die in droves (because your opponent doesn't want to watch shots bounce off of you all game), and most of your force will be acting more like standard line holding riflemen or what have you instead of heroically dueling enemies or planting the meltabombs to blow up the facility.

Granted, I do think this is less of a problem in smaller games of 40k (like, 1k or lower) where there are fewer long-ranged artillery pieces blasting marines to dust the same way they would a bunch of guardsmen.

I would argue that standard 40k games are where both players are caught in slightly unfavourable conditions for each other.


No one is advantaged and so the battle is more bloody than if they were.


I think the obsessive 'balance' of the table, mirroring terrain and using abstract objectives etc is reducing any sense of this further.

They used to do deliberately asymmetrical missions, some of which were faction specific and published in their codex. That's where the 'lore accurate' perspective sits. But they clearly don't think they can create a balanced play experience in the current paradigm if they tried this.

Ie eldar and marines getting a free turn and deploying their units anywhere on the table, causing casualties before the enemy can do anything, or guard/nids/orks getting recycling units, or artillery bombardments off table etc.


Each faction should have a 'protagonist mission' that exemplifies their strengths and shows how that army claims victory, with asymmetric victory conditions that reflect this. Each one of these missions must be played on its own, you can't clash two different faction's missions together, but you can play them one after the other.

This is the flavour that is IMO missing from current 40k and it leaves the game pretty bland and tasteless in the name of balance.

Back in the old days of 3rd-4th when my friends and I used the rules as a guideline at most, we would give Space Marines 3 wounds (terminators 4, characters 5), gave them +2 sv, allowed them to shoot/fight twice per turn, and call it a day. Though we'd only have 5-10 of them on the table in a large game (my other friends both played guard infantry, so there were lots of squishy bodies everyone. It always felt pretty lore accurate to us, sending the Space Marine squad to secure the most critical objective on the table when the armies fought over the rest.

Now a days, a quick fix I find for things of that nature is to give baseline marines the stats of the Sagittarum Custodians:
M:6" T:6 SV:2+/4+ W:3 LD:6+ OC:2
Their guns are R:36" A:3 BS:2+ S:5 AP:-1 D:2 Sustained 1 Dev Wounds.
Melee is A:4 WS: 2+ S:5 AP-2 D:1
Targets hit are -1 to hit next turn.

I find this makes them feel like they have the proper weight and power to be close to lore accurate on the tabletop.