AnomanderRake wrote:
On units and force org:
40k has a lot of details about certain armies that feel grandfather-claused in and unhelpful, particularly mixed-weapon units. The question of splitting fire would be rendered less important by splitting units up more thoroughly; if a "Tactical squad" could be composed of independent rifle sections and heavy weapon sections, for instance. My impression of the kinds of forces people tend to build in 8e seems like people are moving in that direction on their own; I see
IG armies with massed heavy weapon units a lot more than I see heavy weapons placed in Guardsman squads, and
GW seems to be moving in this direction themselves with the way Primaris units are armed. The idea of squad leaders remains a sticking point; Bolt Action rules
de-emphasize melee a lot and "melee units" tend to have a special rule that gives them more/better melee attacks rather than statting out specific melee weapons, so needing to be able to account for the sergeants having specialist kit does inhibit trying to make squads more uniform.
Part of the reason for homogenized squads is that 8th edition has a lot of special abilities that reward squad specialization despite having access to split fire. Giving
IG orders to a heavy weapon squad means you're buffing 3 big guns instead of only a single big gun in an infantry squad, for instance. If I'm building a deepstriking squad with lots of special guns, I probably want to focus on anti-tank or anti-infantry rather than doing a half-decent job of both because the stratagem I used to deepstrike them was an investment.
I don't think I'd like to see a
de-emphasis on special weapons and squad leaders. They add a lot of personality to various units. Eldar were my first army, and even there I really appreciated being able to do little things like giving a power weapon to a swooping hawk exarch despite the squad not being especially good at melee.
What is your objective with potentially simplifying squads? If it's just a matter of split fire, you could always limit split fire to two targets per squad.
On weapons: I've been reconsidering the degree to which GW splits up statlines between armies. Go back far enough and you see different factions sharing the same weapons or weapons with different names and identical statlines (Tau, Eldar, and the Imperium all have "flamers", Eldar fusion guns and Imperial meltaguns are the same thing, etc.), and given the necessary compression of numbers to account for Bolt Action's simpler statline it seems like it might be worth creating "generic" statlines to represent similar weapons that have different names in different armies.
I wouldn't be opposed to this, but I question how much compression there really is. Lots of armies have access to flamers, and eldar vs imperial meltas are the same. But how about plasma? Eldar, tau, and imperials all have different stats for their plasma equivalents. Drukhari blasters aren't really meltas, and liquifier guns aren't really flamers. A burst cannon is not a shuriken cannon is not a heavy bolter even though they all occupy similar roles. So depending on how much you want to squint when combining profiles, you might not simplify things quite as much as you expect. But I'm not especially opposed to this idea. If a liquifier gun becomes a flamer, that's probably fine.
On the statline: As Bolt Action is set up to represent WWII armies it doesn't use "statlines", units instead have a training characteristic (Inexperienced, Regular, or Veteran) that influences their morale, durability, and shooting accuracy. K47 adds extra keywords to account for more varied speed, strength, and durability; Antares has a full statline with Agility (terrain crossing), Accuracy, Strength, Resilience, Initiative, and Command. I think having the statline is a good idea for ease of reference; Antares' Agility and Initiative are used for mechanics specific to its rules (terrain crossing tests and opposed Initiative to deal with reactions) so they may not be entirely necessary.
Given the wide variety of units in
40k (even ignoring the big stompy robots), I think you'd need a relatively detailed statline unless you're going for some very abstract (think
Apoc) rules.
On "melee armies": The problem of going to Bolt Action as a starting point is that it's largely a game about shooting; melee is a fairly cursory part of the system. Units can't be "locked in combat", two units fight, whoever does the most damage wins and the other unit is wiped out. Most 40k "melee armies" have access to the tools to do shooty things as well; off the top of my head the only exceptions are Daemons (who have almost no shooting) and Harlequins (who have pistols and a limited selection of heavy weapons). The problem is that if I design these rules such that melee is a niche strategy like it is in Bolt Action people with, say, Blood Angels armies aren't going to up and start using more of their shooty elements to account for the quirks of the system, so I've got to develop melee more.
Yep. Melee is too big a part of
40k to drop or really
de-emphasize. I have been thinking about some of the melee systems of editions past. I know that sweeping advances were much maligned, but they did have the benefit of combat frequently ending in one side being wiped out. Part of me wonders if a less annoying mechanic for ending combats in a bloody and decisive fashion might be found.
Thought on morale: In Bolt Action units with pins on them need to make an order test (Ld test in the style of old-40k, 2d6 roll under Ld-pins) or they go down (duck, cover, don't do anything for the turn). Back in 4e the Black Templars had a rule where if they failed a morale test in the shooting phase they ran forwards instead of running away, I wonder if it might be an interesting variable to give more units automatic behaviors on failing an order test? Space Marines "know no fear" so if they fail an order test they can move some before going down, Tyranid "instinctive behaviour" might make some units move to hide in terrain, that kind of thing?
Personally, I've never loved the forced action/inaction mechanics for morale in
40k. Being pinned ("going to ground") frequently felt out of character when it happened to squads that had taken relatively light casualties. Losing a game because a
2d6 roll decided to shut down your unit at a key time always felt really arbitrary. The instinctive behavior rules were kind of annoying to resolve/remember; I don't know of any tyranid players including myself (though I mostly ran things that didn't have to worry about
IB) that
liked the rule. It was always spoken of as, "Oh yeah. This is one of those rules
GW gave us to punish us for playing xenos instead of marines.")
Lately, my pet preference for morale mechanics is to have them shut down special abilities that are meant to represent leadership. Units that fail morale can't use orders from
IG commanders or reroll auras from space marine captains or certain strats that represent them pulling off challenging maneuvers.
