The Gaming Den

Rise Primarch story summary:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/p ... 20192.page

A lot of stuff happens

If by stuff, you mean a bunch nobodies die. Mostly Guilliman is awoken, moved to the other side of the Galaxy, has a private talk with dad, cypher is imprisoned (rather than executed or taken away) in the imperial palace (cue dramatic escape that happens...elsewhere) and the audience is not allowed to see the important bits.

Voss wrote:If by stuff, you mean a bunch nobodies die. Mostly Guilliman is awoken, moved to the other side of the Galaxy, has a private talk with dad, cypher is imprisoned (rather than executed or taken away) in the imperial palace (cue dramatic escape that happens...elsewhere) and the audience is not allowed to see the important bits.

Sounds at least different than the End Times. In the End Tmes, at this point half the known universe would have been drowned in a sea of Khorne and Nurgle (with occasional Tzentech and Slaneesh).

I don't think Guilliman's reaction is necessarily bad given it's his initial one. Seeing everything he worked towards mostly destroyed and/or misinterpreted makes that kind of reaction believable. If the emo angst continues after then it's a problem.

And also, of course it's the Ultramarines. At this point I'm surprised we have not seen GW give them their own DA/BA/SW/GK style codex.

saithorthepyro wrote: And also, of course it's the Ultramarines. At this point I'm surprised we have not seen GW give them their own DA/BA/SW/GK style codex.

The "basic" spech merines codex already is the ultrasmurf codex. Rowboat literally wrote it, and his spawn proudly follow it.

Remember, after the Horus Heresy, over half of the loyalist spech merines still standing were ultrasmurfs. Most chapters in 40K are thus directly descended from ultrasmurfs. At most there's been some slight deviations (represented by different chapter tactics rules), and then the DA/BA/SW/GK are the special snowflakes who almost started another civil war over not wanting to follow Rowboat's book.

Ultrasmurfs however are the "baseline" spech merine. Because somebody needs to actually follows the base rules, otherwise you fall in "all drows are misunderstood rebels dual wielding scimitars" land.

Plus ultrasrmufs already have arguably the cheesiest named character among spech merines with Trigurius.

8th edition cometh:
http://natfka.blogspot.com/2017/03/new- ... anges.html

Rumors include...

- return of save modifiers
- return of movement stat
- charging lets you strike first
- Ld check is count casualties and add a d6, the amount it exceeds your ld score by you lose that many wounds of dudes (AoS does that)
- 'themed armies will be buffed', sounds like formation of some sort


Return of movement stat is sensible as the current edition has a bunch of "roll a d6 / reroll one of those d6's" addons to make 6" 12" movement more varied

Return of Movement Stat is good if it means doing away with the various special rules that just modify that and all the random movement things, but I worry about the bit where it's implied Unit Types are going away "to make it easier and all contained in your unit entry".

Save Modifiers... I'm not really a fan. I prefer static AP values. I was previously on the fence but Frank's rant convinced me. Also I like that Bolters (which inform Guardsmen, Orks and Wyches to fuck off and die) don't reduce Power Armour to a 6+. And the Save Modifier system means one of the above things has to go away.

Striking first on the charge could maybe help Orks and such? Like, I don't think Power Fist Marines need that, but Ork Boyz benefit more from +999 Initiative than they do from +1 Attack. Same with things like Flayed Ones for that matter. Though it does make it a bit weird when you charge things like Eldar with your Plague Marines and hit them first. Also it means Dark Eldar Wyches don't particularly value their innate high Initiative. With the first round of combat typically determining how the whole thing is going to go, having Initiative only relevant for "not the first round" is a problem.

I don't care much about the Ld thing, anyone who intends on being in close combat has some version of Fearless anyway. But it's kind of strange that losing guys just makes you lose more guys, rather than people having a chance of running away. Actually I'd kind of like to see more stuff involving people retreating, trying to regroup, chasing down retreating foes and all that. Kind of like how morale tends to work in the DoW games.

For "buffing themed armies" it might be formations, or it might just be "You can slap any units on the table, but if it's all one faction you get some kind of benefit like re-rolling your Warlord Trait or better Morale". I kind of hope the current formation rules go away, replaced by "You can either take units the normal way, paying points and customising everything, or you can take datasheets, where all options (even the number of models per unit) are pre-selected and you can't customise it and the points are listed right there at the top". So fine-tuned "system mastery" options vs simple fast-build choices that get some minor improvements.

Also it looks like Death Guard/Plague Marines are the next to get their plastic stuff, including a new plastic Mortarion. The marines appear to be very... 3D? Like, with the pock-marks in their armour, things like shading are going to stand out a LOT.

So as a new player (been painting up a bunch of Necrons but have yet to play a game), can I still use my 7e codex when the 8e core rules come out, or do I need to wait for a codex update to play the game?

You use your existing Codex until a new Codex comes out. It's possible that the new edition will change the rules so much that existing codices are all incompatible with the rules (such as if they do indeed give everyone their own Movement stat, or change Saves to a new 2d6 system with different Save values from before, or whatever), in which case either they'll release a quick update pdf for free or everyone will keep on using 7Ed and ignore 8th. It's also possible the core rulebook will basically have some kind of wording that works as a placeholder, or has a whole "And here is the Movement value for everything that currently exists, by Codex" appendix or something. This still means older codices get a bumpy ride, mind you, as things don't quite work so well in the new environment, and newer codices fare better because they may have actually been designed with the new edition in mind (like the 5E Necron codex in 6E).

Besides, it could be a while before 8th even hits. Rumours were previously suggesting that'd be for next year, so you'd still have all of this year to use them in their current state.

They might do an Age of Sigmar style pdf release of existing armies, followed up by armybooks that have more detail

Wow. Bringing back Movement speeds, and Save Modifiers?

What the fuckity fuck? Is it the 1990's all over again?

Seriously; what the fuck.

Save Modifiers were never a good idea. First of all, because they aren't actually different from changes to Strength vs. Toughness. And secondly, because they lead to bizarre arms races. And thirdly because the differences in toughness and armor values do not have consistent or sensible effects against different opposition.

Beating toughness or beating armor aren't actually different. Technically you only roll the one if you've succeeded at the other, but it wouldn't change the odds to swap the order you do it in. If you rolled armor saves first and rolled to wound with a number of dice equal to the failures the chances are the same as doing it the other way around.

But the bottom line is that if you find that 1d6 isn't a big or curvy enough RNG for you, the correct choice is to use a bigger or curvier RNG, not to roll 1d6 multiple times and obfuscate matters.

-Username17

I never liked how Save modifiers fucked with the gameplay in 2e WH40k, they seemed needlessly complex. Having to remember and apply "whatever" -Modifer a specific weapon had to the targets armour saving throw value.

Worse still, back then there were both more total weapons statted out and listed in the rulebooks (many of which were never going to be used, who ever used web/net-guns? How about defoliant missiles?), although it was wasted since most armies used many of the same weapons. Eldar & Guard used Lasguns and Orks & Marines use Bolters.

Compounding this was a special armour save rule that didn't just say "fuck off, your armour is not good enough" when the Strength modifier pushed the armour save into the negatives. Forcing players to take extra resolution steps, whereby they try to see if their doomed miniatures have their Saving throw dice explode. Honestly, the "AP" rule of 3e was a pretty big step forward in terms of speeding up combat resolution.

Giving Eldar only shuriken catapults; and orks only shootas/blastas, were also good improvements over 2e's weapon rules.

3rd edition was the high water mark of 40k rules. Everything they did before or since was worse. 4th and 5th edition weren't a lot worse, because they were very very similar to 3rd edition. But even then the ways they were different were some poorly implemented and confusing complications that were obviously created to favor some author or another's favorite army. D6 edition and everything after was just a parade of chucklefuckery.

The fact is that 40k has a pretty ponderous resolution system for the number of models it has on the field, and simplifying it is pretty much better across the board. Introducing additional layers of complexity almost can't be worth it. Even the most well intentioned additional layers of complexity are going to slow down the game more than they do anything particularly cool. And let's be honest here: I don't think we can really point to anything written for 6th edition that was put in with good intentions or particular craft or skill.

Going back to the well of 2nd edition is particularly odious. That's when the game was a confusing hack on fantasy battle rules. Who exactly do they think is going to be energized by a return to that?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: Going back to the well of 2nd edition is particularly odious. That's when the game was a confusing hack on fantasy battle rules. Who exactly do they think is going to be energized by a return to that?

-Username17

Despite the horrible start, Age of Sigmar did end up reviving the Warhammer Fantasy line of models once GW got out the General's Handbook with actual point costs for units and proper battle rules.

So basically GW dudes in charge probably looked at the results and decided "Let's do the same with 40k!".


And speaking of adding layers of complexity, there's also this from Rise of the Primarch:



You get 3 Command Points plus +1 per detachment/formation. Rumor is that it'll become standard in 8e, as a way to "reward" players taking specific formations.

On the other hand, the game is already pretty bloated as it is. Eldar basic troops have what, 3 special rules, two of which affect movement and one of which is making you roll extra dice for movement, then their guns have pseudo-rending, and that's before you check if their leaders are handing out any extra special rules. If Eldar troops simply got extra base movement and their shuriken catapults are +1 armor penetration, that would probably make the game run smoother than it is right now.

I think armor mods are going to work like AoS 'rending', it's a number unrelated to weapon strength, usually just a -1 or -2.

I hope they keep a str vs toughness chart, I don't like how AoS has flat wound rolls with multiple wounds on everything.

There's also a not-Necromunda game, Armageddon:
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/03/ ... rules.html

maglag wrote:Despite the horrible start, Age of Sigmar did end up reviving the Warhammer Fantasy line of models once GW got out the General's Handbook with actual point costs for units and proper battle rules.

Age of Sigmar was GW attempting to confirm their claim that rules and fluff didn't matter. They were wrong. Age of Sigmar went over like a dead cat. Everyone hated it except for a tiny group of fart sniffers.

After the spectacular failure of Age of Sigmar, GW went into full panic mode and started throwing shit at the wall trying to come up with something, fucking anything to salvage things. The General's Handbook is not only a capitulation, it's three different systems.

I don't know how much - if any - General's Handbook has righted the ship. It's less than a year old, GW is famously weird about releasing sales figures, and it would be hard to separate the pre- and post- General's Handbook AoS sales just as it would be to separate the AoS sales from 40k sales or Blood Bowl sales or whatever. Like how it was well after the Hundreds of Thousands debacle that the magnitude of 4th edition D&D's failure was apparent, and even then there were cultist holdouts on Something Awful that denied the obvious until Essentials was canned. It just takes time to find out if a tabletop game is a success or failure. There are no independent Nielsen Ratings for table top games, and no company is going to admit that they aren't going to support a product part way through its initial sales cycle.

Age of Sigmar was such a massive and total catastrophe that it was obvious to even the most casual observer that it had failed. But even then it took most of a year before Games Workshop even hinted that this was the case. On that background, I don't know what would even be considered "success" for General's Handbook. More sales than Age of Sigmar seems like a very low bar to clear.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: Age of Sigmar was such a massive and total catastrophe that it was obvious to even the most casual observer that it had failed. But even then it took most of a year before Games Workshop even hinted that this was the case. On that background, I don't know what would even be considered "success" for General's Handbook. More sales than Age of Sigmar seems like a very low bar to clear.

-Username17

Before AoS, Warhammer Fantasy was already pretty stagnant. You needed huge blocks of copy-paste infantry to be remotely competitive and there was a pretty big rules bloat. It was basically impossible for new players to join and old players were leaving. GW needed something new.

Now you're probably right that "Age of Sigmar was GW attempting to confirm their claim that rules and fluff didn't matter" and "Age of Sigmar went over like a dead cat". But actually plenty of people liked:
-That the story moving forward in any way was better than eternal stalemate. And there's several cool over-the-top fluff bits here and there.
-That there were now only 4 pages of core rules and then each unit got a warscroll with their own stats and special abilities.

What most everybody hated was a complete lack of point costs or remotely balanced army building method that resulted in AoS being an unplayable mess. Several people actually started projects to assign point costs to AoS warscrolls.

Then General's Handbook fixed that huge problem, plus reigning down a bunch of borked rules. And that made all the difference. People actually started playing AoS in stores, tournamets popped up all over the place. More than they were playing WH Fantasy in the years before. And Path to Glory seems to be pretty popular too.

Plus, AoS is much easier to demo and draw new people in. You see new blood joining. You even have sigmarines for newbies who want a list of a few elite dudes on the "good" side.

More in particular, General's Handbook was so successful that GW is already working on General's Handbook II: the Sigmar strikes back.

We may not know the exact sales statistics after General's Handbook, but we know they were good enough that GW approved of a direct sequel in record time.

Yeah, it's safe to say that AoS itself was a failure. Also, that EXCEPTION-BASED DESIGN needs to die in a fire (we've known this for how long now? When was 4E D&D unleashed upon the world?)

But the amount of AoS/WHFB being played saw a surge shortly after the Generals Handbook, sales probably jumped up as well. And that surge in play was bigger than what it got when AoS was released. As in, "a splat book did more for the game than the entire new edition and factions did". Which typically means the core designers for the base project fucked up so badly that they have to cut their little fingers off. And... that's true in this case. The base product was such a failure that a splat book was enough to save it.

And GW will probably not take away any useful lessons there (such as what AoS did wrong that the Handbook did right), instead figuring "that if we turn everything upside down and get the infinite monkeys to type, everything will either be great or be easily fixed by a Handbook". Note: the playerbase is already hostile towards Errata (and rightfully so, to be honest) so they may not be as forgiving of Fuckup Rulebook -> Rulebook Revised Honest.

Koumei wrote: But the amount of AoS/WHFB being played saw a surge shortly after the Generals Handbook, sales probably jumped up as well. And that surge in play was bigger than what it got when AoS was released.

There was no surge in play when AoS came out, unless you count a negative value as a surge.

The tournament scene disintegrated overnight, and even Pathfinder 9th age came out. General's handbook reversed the downhill crash.

maglag wrote:More in particular, General's Handbook was so successful that GW is already working on General's Handbook II:

This is the dumbest fucking thing I've seen in a long time. Companies rushing books to print that promise to radically change their core ruleset is not strong evidence that they believe their ruleset is popular. It just isn't. Essentials wasn't evidence that 4th edition was going strong.

Now I personally don't find the proposition that General's Handbook material is more popular than AoS material was particularly mind blowing. I'm sure it is. But considering how badly Age of Sigmar was received, that's not a strong claim. You could be selling tumbles with syphilitic whores and get more customers than Age of Sigmar did. It was the most unambiguous failure of a flagship product of a major table top company in my lifetime. New World of Darkness and 4th Edition D&D were failures, but it took years for that to become commonly accepted wisdom. Age of Sigmar tanked so hard and so fast that gamers agreed that it had done poorly. Doing better than Age of Sigmar is not an achievement. Doing better than Age of Sigmar is what we expect from 6 year olds with boxes of crayons.

Now overall, Games Workshop had slightly lower revenues in 2016 than it had in 2015. And 2015 wasn't a great year either. Hundred million dollar companies don't roll up and vanish overnight for the most part, and Games Workshop has a lot of room to continue collapsing before it's gone. And let's face it - Fantasy hasn't been the biggest brand of Games Workshop since some time in the 90s. Whether Age of Sigmar does well or poorly won't make the company sink or swim. But there's no solid evidence that General's Handbook was any kind of absolute success.

maglag wrote:Before AoS, Warhammer Fantasy was already pretty stagnant.

Yes. I think everyone can agree that Warhammer Fantasy was dying a slow death. A ruleset that looked like it was from the 80s because it was coupled with crass money grabs in the form of horde incentives and hugely monetarily expensive monsters and heroes that perversely limited profits by acting as huge barriers to entry for new players. They needed to do something.

But needing to do "something" doesn't mean that it's OK to do "anything." Age of Sigmar was still a dumpster fire and everyone involved should be fired.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

maglag wrote:More in particular, General's Handbook was so successful that GW is already working on General's Handbook II:

This is the dumbest fucking thing I've seen in a long time. Companies rushing books to print that promise to radically change their core ruleset is not strong evidence that they believe their ruleset is popular. It just isn't. Essentials wasn't evidence that 4th edition was going strong.

But General's Handbook II isn't being promoted as a radical change to their core ruleset. It's being promoted as a more polished version of General's Handbook, stuff that's proving too good getting more expensive and stuff that's under-used getting discounts. General's Handbook framework worked well enough that GW is keeping with it.

FrankTrollman wrote:

maglag wrote:Before AoS, Warhammer Fantasy was already pretty stagnant.

Yes. I think everyone can agree that Warhammer Fantasy was dying a slow death. A ruleset that looked like it was from the 80s because it was coupled with crass money grabs in the form of horde incentives and hugely monetarily expensive monsters and heroes that perversely limited profits by acting as huge barriers to entry for new players. They needed to do something.

But needing to do "something" doesn't mean that it's OK to do "anything." Age of Sigmar was still a dumpster fire and everyone involved should be fired.

-Username17

That was then, this is now. AoS was dumpster fire by itself, but AoS+General's Handbook appears to be more successful than WHFB 8th edition was, with more new player blood joining and more games and tournaments and more online discussions. Just check their facebook page.

Plus remember what sparked this particular discussion. That GW seems to be about AoSize 40K itself. This means GW was pretty satisfied with how AoS+GH turned out.

maglag wrote:That was then, this is now. AoS was dumpster fire by itself, but AoS+General's Handbook appears to be more successful than WHFB 8th edition was, with more new player blood joining and more games and tournaments and more online discussions.

I don't know where you get that idea. When I try to find the largest Age of Sigmar tournaments, here's what I get:

Yesterday was the At Ease Carnage tournament held at At Ease Games in San Diego. The event was run by our very own Scott Reed utilizing the upcoming Las Vegas Open tournament pack. The turnout was phenomenal! We had 20 players show up for the 3 round event. It was the largest Age of Sigmar tournament in the SoCal area to date.

20 players. In San Diego. And that was their biggest tournment.

I live 16 miles from Games Workshop. Not like some fucking Games Workshop branded shop, but the actual headquarters in Nottingham. If I made a day of it, I could physically walk there. And you know what? Age of Sigmar is a fucking dead letter here. People play X-Wing and shit.

-Username17

It's also important to keep in mind that GW also did several fire sales of entire portions of the product line (Brets, tomb kings particularly) to get rid of their stock. In some cases they did this multiple times. But these were all counted as AoS sales, despite, well, erasing these factions from the universe. some of those sales overlapped with the generals handbook, and made AoS seem stronger on paper than it actually was. They conditioned the fan base to rush 'last chance sales' even as they exploited them with such sales again and again- both with price hikes on the models (because limited quantities) and doing 'finding' more stock to do 'additional' last chance sales with.

The other chicanery they got up to is the simply fact that several 'AoS' armies are just old warhammer armies with new boxes. So except for buying shitty cardboard and printing crappy photos on them, they essentially had no cost, as they were old models whose development costs were paid for long ago when they were originally sold. Again, on paper profitable, but disingenuously so.


@maglag- it baffles me that AoS fans don't see a yearly Generals Handbook tax as the amazing fuck you it actually is. The first product wasn't even impressive, people bought it to have official point values, even if those point values look like they were shit into cans and just stamped on the page with as little thought as possible. They're very ballpark round numbers that reflect nothing of the absolute legion of special rules that infest every unit and bizarrely distinct shield and weapon types

FrankTrollman wrote:I live 16 miles from Games Workshop. Not like some fucking Games Workshop branded shop, but the actual headquarters in Nottingham. If I made a day of it, I could physically walk there. And you know what? Age of Sigmar is a fucking dead letter here. People play X-Wing and shit.

-Username17

Oh?
Since when have you been back?
I thought you were somwhere around eastern europe?

maglag wrote:There was no surge in play when AoS came out, unless you count a negative value as a surge.

The tournament scene disintegrated overnight, and even Pathfinder 9th age came out. General's handbook reversed the downhill crash.

I am fairly certain that Blood Bowl is presently selling better than AoS in my area.