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.

Greetings folks!

So I thought of another fun little "proposed rules" challenge to throw at the good citizens of this forum. This time it involves everyone's favorite GW poster boys: The firstborn space marines!

(Note: I do NOT want this to turn into a "I hate primaris" thread. We have plenty of those already, thank you!)

Okay, here is the challenge:

First things first: strip away ALL the shared space marine special rules. No more "And they shall know no fear", no more "bolter discipline", "combat doctrines", "shock assault" or chapter tactics (custom or normal). While your at it? No more stratagems either. These poor simple folks just can't use them. None of that. It ALL goes. What we have left is the units themselves, their weapons, and whatever special rules might already be present. Got it? Good.

Next: using the SAME point cost, and the SAME statline: take a firstborn space marine unit of your choosing and add ONE new special rule that makes up for everything it lost. Try to be as balanced as possible, but also try to get creative with it.

Just for an example: a friend of mine suggested that for Sternguard you could add a rule where they get to fire whatever their ranged weapons are even if they are engaged in melee. Sorta a "big guns never tire" type deal but for infantry. I'm not sure how balanced that is, considering everything lost, but I liked the idea anyway. That's where the idea for this challenge came from, BTW. I wanted to see what other folks could come up with :-)

I know how creative this community can be, and I love to see you folks flex your creative muscles every once in awhile, so don't let me down!

Do we have to ditch ATSKNF, Bolter Discipline, and Shock Assault? Without those, our hypothetical units go from being a "barebones" unit to something vaguely marine-shaped that also lacks rules common to every marine.

Is the goal of stripping those rules to give us a "special rules budget" with our unique rules being roughly as powerful as the rules removed? If so, it might make more sense to just let us keep those rules and just accept that whatever we come up with might require a slight upcharge.

If you want to do all that why not go back to 5th edition where the biggest thing that happened to marines is that they got both a bolter and bolt pistol, rather than choosing one or the other.

So what is actually the goal here? By removing all of the shared rules you're making Firstborn utterly worthless no matter that additional rule you add.

 Gert wrote:
So what is actually the goal here? By removing all of the shared rules you're making Firstborn utterly worthless no matter that additional rule you add.

See, to me that's the challenge of it! Sure, keeping the rules is easier and would probably require an upcharge of points when you add in the new special rules, but to me that's not as interesting as trying to figure out how to keep roughly the same power level but with a more unique flavor.

Regarding my friends Sternguard idea, I think a way to make it even more balanced/fluffy without all the usual marine rules would be something like:

"
Ranged Combat Experts: This unit may fire its ranged weapons even when engaged. During the Fight Phase, instead of attacking normally it may instead choose to fire any ranged weapons it is equipped with a second time.
"

This may go swing too far in the other direction towards imballanced, but it does seem to be a nice replacement for the usual rapid fire rules boost, the leadership boost, the extra attack when charged/charging, combat doctrines and chapter tactics. It also fits with the Sternguard being the "shooty" veterans, so it makes sense that they would pretty much just always be shooting.

So you're taking away simple rules that apply army-wide to add individual rules for individual units that are going to be worse than the army-wide rules. Your friend's suggestion isn't imbalanced it's just flat out worse than what Firstborn currently get. It's not really a challenge to give Firstborn units character because they already have character from army-wide rules and the difference in weapons, equipment, and tactics compared to Primaris.

My thing is just that taking away rules common to all marines conveys a weird and specific story.
Like, your friend's suggestion could be an interesting thing to give sternguard, but why would you take away bolter discipline, etc. on top of it? Did the sternguard somehow become more susceptible to fear than any other marine unit? Did they spend so many hours practicing up-close gun kattas that their long-ranged marksmanship (bolter discipline) got rusty?

If I were to make a marine unit that didn't have access to ATSKNF, BD, or SA, I'd probably feel compelled to fluff them as being some sort of scout initiate whose hypno-indoctrination hasn't taken and who is basically kind of cruddy at combat compared to a full-fledged marine. But I get the impression that you want us to come up with marines that are different from normal marines rather than just worse, so the extra limitations don't jive with that.

It changes your challenge from, "Come up with some cool optional rules for marines," to, "explain why this weirdo in power armor is such a clumsy coward compared to his brothers."

I think there's a lot of potential in allowing some chapters to swap out BD or SA for alternative special rules. Like, it would be neat if the Raptors chapter could swap out Bolter Discipline for the ability to ignore LoSir! (a nod to their old rule that let them treat bolters like sniper rifles). But that doesn't seem to be what you're going for.

It does feel weird to take away something so ubiquitous to the Space Marines. On top of that, what's being removed is a lot, you'd have to come up with a pretty OP rule to account for all that you are loosing. (Your friends example is a great case of this. That's a really cool ability, but not OP enough to come close to what you gave up for it.) Even so, I'll give this a try.

Assault Marines - Thunderous Fall: When deploying Assault Marines using Death From Above (I'm assuming they still have that, because of the jet packs), they may be set up within engagement range of an enemy unit. That unit takes 1 MW on a roll of 4+ for each member in the Assault Marine Squad.

Is that OP? It sure as hell is, and I'm still not positive it makes up for what was lost, but I think it's at least close.