OSSR: WH40K, 3rd Edition

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OSSR: WH40K, 3rd Edition

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OSSR: Warhammer 40K, 3rd Edition
In The Grim Darkness Something Something War!

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Pictured: Black Templars. Not included in this book: rules for Black Templars. Also: go fuck yourself.

Our musical accompaniment for this shall be D-Rok because it's metal that is literally about Warhammer 40K. Look, we don't have quite the talent pool to work with as when we're doing Cthulhu inspired Metal or vampire inspired music. At least we aren't doing Bolt Thrower. At least, not yet. Depends on how much we drink during this project.
Koumei:

Warhammer 40k and D&D both have some interesting similarities: I started with 3rd Edition in both cases, and 3rd Edition is the best Edition in both cases. Also elves are almost always better than orks in both games (regardless of edition). I’ll stop scraping for similarities. I first walked into the store and asked about getting started just a few weeks before 3rd Edition 40K hit, so they set me up to pre-order the box set, and an extra Tactical Squad (the exciting new one that wasn’t all snap-fit mono-pose!)

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This is what you had before that. Your average army probably had 30+ of those.

What this means is my first purchase included some plastic palm trees, the rules, dice and templates, two plastic measuring sticks that really hurt when you whack someone on the forearm with them (probably why they stopped using these), and two Tactical Squads, a Land Speeder and some number of Dark Eldar Warriors. It was actually an exciting time in Warhams, because a new faction was released (and was spiky and edgy even before goth turned into “new” emo, and their basic Troops were multi-pose with lots of bits) and the iconic SPACE MARINES were getting new plastic kits with all sorts of bits and pieces. Crazy times.

So the take-away of this is that my knowledge of prior editions comes mostly from three sources:
  • 1. Various tales and references by others.
    2. Looking over old Codices, which had crazy shit. Seriously, check out the individual vehicle damage tables back then.
    3. Necromunda, which is basically 2Ed.
FrankT:

With Koumei taking the heavy lifting of someone for whom 3rd edition was a gateway drug, I guess I'll be playing the part of someone who had already been playing 40K when 3rd edition came out. Probably the biggest questions you have going into this are probably “What the hell is Warhammer?” and of course “Why should I care?” Well, WH40K is a sci-fi spinoff of a fantasy tabletop miniatures game, and you care because it's the biggest game in the tabletop minis sector and has been for more than twenty fucking years. And in the tabletop minis business, popularity is quality. The sad fact of that matter is that the barrier to entry to start playing is hundreds of dollars worth of little army guys, and if you want your army to not look like ass it's going to take hundreds of hours painting and assembling it. This means that it very much isn't like an RPG that one of your friends can lend you the book after badgering you to give it a shot. You need other players and other players are only going to exist if they know there are other players for them and so on.

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Without another player who has spent hundreds of dollars on their miniature army, this is all you can do with your toy soldiers.

So right around the start of the 90s, WH40K eclipsed Warhammer Fantasy Battles as the biggest minis game, and that meant that when the third edition of 40K came out in 1998 it was already going to be the best minis game by definition just because of playability. Was it good? Bad? Compared to what? In table top miniatures, most games are literally unplayable outside of gaming conventions. You don't fucking know enough people who have Full Thrust or Critter Commandos miniatures to have a league so those games might as well be written in Farsi.

In any case, we should probably be drinking something appropriately British. For this I nominate Trooper, the Iron Maiden flavored beer. The label says “Premium British Beer” and I definitely agree that is British.

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In all reality, I believe we're going to run out and drink “whatever is left in the cupboard.”
Koumei:

You think it’s hard now to find a group for any other minis game? These days, Privateer “PLAY LIKE YOU HAVE A PAIR OF BIG METAL MANLY BALLS” Press exists at all, much as we might lament this fact, Star Wars has some kind of thing going that is pretty damn popular, and you can get micro-groups here and there for stuff like Anima Tactics or Infinity. Also, the Internet means you can more easily organise a small group or find someone in your city who plays the game you backed on Kickstarter or whatever.

Back then, that was not the case. You either played Warhammer Fantasy, or you played Warhammer 40K, or you played a spin-off like Epic 40K. Or you fucked the hell off. To think I could have chosen that last option. It’s very possible I wouldn’t have found my way into roleplaying, but on the other hand…
FrankT:

The origins of 40K are basically pretty stupid. Games Workshop made shit for D&D in the 70s and in 1983 they decided that they should probably release some half assed rules for playing games with their fantasy minis. When they realized that they could become a vertical monopoly they did so in 1984 – becoming their own distributor, producer, and store. By 1985 they had a virtual stranglehold on the entire United Kingdom gaming community, and they decided in 1987 to steal a bunch of shit from Laserburn of all fucking things and make a science fiction spinoff of their fantasy monopoly. The science fiction version rapidly became more popular, and the guy who made Laserburn went on to join the company and then take it over in some kind of wasp eggs in a caterpillar type scenario.

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So 40K is literally Poochy the fucking Dog – a spinoff of an established franchise, incorporating a bunch of stolen elements from other stuff because someone in marketing heard the kids like that shit. The setting is just the fantasy armies of the time in space. And that space part is just a bunch of stuff from other science fiction games and Heavy Metal Magazine.

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Yes, this Heavy Metal Magazine.

There's a giant pile of lore for 40K, but that shit is all post-hoc, which is a big part of why none of it makes any sense. It's also why it's constantly contradicting itself. Warhammer 40,000 exists because of a marketing need, and everything that entails. You don't care about this game because of the fluff, the fluff is all retconned bullshit anyway. You don't care about this game because of the rules, the rules weren't exactly cutting edge in the fucking eighties and seven editions later they still aren't. You care about Warhammer 40K because it's effectively the only game in town and if you want to actually do this fucking hobby you can like it or lump it.

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Look: you painted some dolls and put them on the floor. You can play this “game” or you can admit to yourself that you are legally an adult and like to spend your time playing with dolls.
Koumei:

To be fair, you might not buy into the lore in and of itself, but you could very well say “Wow, the art looks fucking metal, and these painted minis look awesome.” And people would tell you bits of lore that appealed to them and then that’d sound awesome to you back then and you’d buy into it. Similarly, you could say “sounds good” to the concept of the game without knowing the actual rules, so you’d buy into it at first for gameplay reasons without knowing you were making a bad decision.

These days we have a thing called the Internet (you’re probably utilising it in order to read this), so you have no excuse for making that mistake.
FrankT:

The first edition of 40K was called Rogue Trader and it's almost completely unplayable. There are random tables to roll on to figure out what guns your little spacemen and space elves get, and I have no fucking idea how you're supposed to actually do that considering that each little space dude is a model that costs actual money to own and real time to paint. Were you supposed to roll your armies up literally months in advance and then buy pieces of them? What the ever living fuck?

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Ranxerox is angry. Also formative to the creative process that created the “look” of 40K being basically one of the things that most of 40K's early artists masturbated to in their teens. Not this picture in particular though. Ask your parents.

In Rogue Trader there is no “balance” and it doesn't even seem to have been a design goal. When you buy a major hero you roll 7D6 to determine how many times you roll a d20 and consult a chart to figure out what your stat boosts are over the normal racial profile. Look, it's just fucking insane and playability doesn't seem to have been a concern.

Second Edition was more of a game, but it was also really clunky and had a lot of randumb shit in it. And by dumb, random, and clunky I means that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy was tractor explosions. Vehicles had their own charts and crazy bullshit happened when they got damaged – often ultra-killing models in surprisingly large areas. You could make a degenerate army based on getting a lot of cheap vehicles with supercharged engines and just driving them up to expensive enemy units. It was dumb. Degenerate armies in those days were called “Beardy” by old school Warhammerists because of unfair tactics that Dwarf players could use in a previous edition of Fantasy Battle.

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Ramming fucking speed!

And of course the actual galaxy being described changed wildly between editions, with various races and factions vanishing without a trace or being pulled out of some fanboy's asshole with every revision.

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These are Squats. That's like space dwarves. I don't think anyone masturbated to these, but they are egg-shaped. We aren't going to talk about Squats, ask your parents.

3rd Edition was a real ground-up overhaul, an attempt to make an actual game you could plausibly collect and play. And because of that, it was very well received. I'm not going to tell you that it was golden rainbows and unicorn flavored candy or whatever, but it was better than what came before (or since!) and it was decent enough for the time. We're talking 1998, a grimdark year for gaming generally, as TSR had gone bankrupt and the biggest RPG was Functionally it meant that Games Workshop could spike the ball on the entire hobby and consolidate their power even more. But such market dominance rarely lasts long, and a few years later Games Workshop was competing against a resurgent D&D and Magic the Gathering and shit and was shaking their proverbial cane at newfangled games played by kids these days to justify falling profits. I mean, it's either that or acknowledge that 3rd edition was popular in no small part because it was faster to play and more streamlined than previous trainwrecks, and that cranking out expansion material that only ever made shit more complicated and longer to play eroded the main selling point.

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Much easier to just blame kids these days than admit you made poor decisions.
Koumei:

Yeah, it’s a tricky position to be in: you can’t just release the game then let that be it, so you have to do something to support it. But by the same token, the more assorted shit you release for the game, the more crap that piles up and the more of a tangled mess you end up with. It’s kind of easier with RPGs because there is no hardcore tournament scene, indeed people don’t really play in the stores as much as they do “at Greg’s house”, so they can include or exclude whatever expansions and rules they like, and even buying a new book means one person can provide the rules for everyone with no commitment beyond that. When it’s a tabletop wargame, especially one that involves buying extra minis, that stops being true.

So what this means is they finally made the game playable and a lot smoother than it used to be, but that wasn’t going to last too long. And indeed, looking back at it nineteen years later, it didn’t.
FrankT:

The 3rd Edition rulebook is has a lot of pages, but not that many words. A lot of pages are given over to big splashy pen and ink art, or diagrams, or photos of cool models people did. That's not even a joke. It's actually like that.
Koumei:

I kind of like that, to be honest. And seriously, I mentioned before that one of the reasons you’d start collecting is because you walk past the store and see their quality painted minis there. So you may as well do a similar thing in the actual rulebooks. Often enough they did the same with the boxes:

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Sometimes they used drawn art instead, so you saw a rad picture of your Heavy Weapons Squad:

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But it’s definitely better to show you what you want your finished product to look like, with a suggestion (or, with earlier stuff that had no alternate options, an exact representation) of what you’ll be making from the parts inside. Complete with Duncan-tier paint jobs.

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Duncan is a meme, but also a good-quality (if sort of generic) painter

Anyway, that’s getting off topic. The point is, it’s actually a strength that they didn’t use many words. They provided a lot of pictures that were arguably the selling point for new people they wanted to rope in, and also didn’t give you a complete War and Peace equivalent word salad to wade through. The reason being that War and Peace would not exist – there is only war, after all.
FrankT:

Not only is there only war, but the future has grim darkness. We have overwrought Warhammer 40K cover taglines to thank for the term “Grimdark,” which is a term that now has its own Wikipedia entry. Yes, Warhammer 40K is so metal that it actually creates words that the English language needs to describe how metal it actually is.

3rd Edition Warhammer 40,000 is much better organized than earlier entries, and honestly much better organized than later ones as well. We'll be tackling it in five sections:
  • Rules
  • Fluff
  • Armies of the Imperium
  • All the Other Armies
  • All the modeling advice and shit plus a wrapup.
Given the amount of WTFery that has gone down in this genre, we may get sidetracked and take a few extra posts. But we will try not to.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I remember the good ol' days of Eldar guardians out numbering orks and being lead by a fearless Avatar
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Re: OSSR: WH40K, 3rd Edition

Post by angelfromanotherpin »

FrankTrollman wrote:The setting is just the fantasy armies of the time in space. And that space part is just a bunch of stuff from other science fiction games and Heavy Metal Magazine.
I think you get a lot more accurate if the magazine you referred to was 2000 AD because while GW stole liberally from several sources, I think the majority of those sources were actually in that one publication. The Arbites just cold are the Judges. Chaos and the inquisition just cold are the opposing sides from Nemesis the Warlock. The mutatis look a lot like the mutants from Strontium Dog. The space marines and the machine spirits are less obviously like the Genetic Infantry and biochips of Rogue Trooper, but you can see the influence.

Sure, the immortal God Emperor is a Dune reference, and the genestealers are an Alien knockoff, and the tech-priests are probably a Foundation rip, et multiple cetera, but GW mined 2000 AD so much they sank multiple shafts.
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Post by Stahlseele »

These are Squats. That's like space dwarves. I don't think anyone masturbated to these, but they are egg-shaped. We aren't going to talk about Squats, ask your parents.
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Post by Voss »

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This is what you had before that. Your average army probably had 30+ of those.
Not... really. Or at all. That looks like a marine from Space Crusade (a joint game they did with Milton Bradley). They weren't really all that common, neither was the snap fit design- it honestly offended their sculptors for a long time, these were back in the days when the sculptors actually had input over the release schedule (which was still emerging from 'whatever the fuck we decided to make' to the publicly traded company form of 'this month will be two ork waves, next month will be a codex month (because those drive sales) and then wood elves (on their ~7 year cycle) and so on and so forth')

Most marine armies were a ridiculous hodge-podge of metal and hybrid metal-plastic marines (plastic arms and backpacks for the metal legs/torso/head), and maybe some of the original plastic marine kit if you were old enough.
In Rogue Trader there is no “balance” and it doesn't even seem to have been a design goal. When you buy a major hero you roll 7D6 to determine how many times you roll a d20 and consult a chart to figure out what your stat boosts are over the normal racial profile. Look, it's just fucking insane and playability doesn't seem to have been a concern.
Eh. In the book... kind of. But not really. Rogue Trader actually assumes rather blithely that there is a third person involved in the form of a game master who's going to write a fair scenario, set the table and have some say in the forces to keep you from face stomping the other player and adjudicate all manner of things including the holes in the rules..

6 months after it launches they've got army lists in WD that get sort-of bound and published as the Warhammer 40,000 Compendium (also known as a the Red Book of the Astronomicon... because it's red and the guys at GW at this stage are still half-assing it and are mostly just wacky fucks). But there are actual army lists, points and stuff pretty quickly. But they original design for the game was an RPG lite with a judge and two people with fairly small forces consisting of a couple squads and a hero or two.

Third edition really turns away from that model permanently, as the point values from 2nd to 3rd edition are essentially halved. Meaning your 2000 points of space wolves (which were 40-50 points a piece for the shitty Blood Claw novices) is now a 1000 point army and you damn well better get to buying.

Or adjust to a lower points value for games, but that...never really caught on. There was a psychological itch that GW hit (I suspect by accident), that players just had to have a certain amount of toys and the best shit on the table or it wasn't interesting. So points got smaller, armies got bigger and surprisingly few people objected to the blatant manipulation.
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Post by shlominus »

Voss wrote:They weren't really all that common
oh, but they were. they were in the 2nd edition boxed set and everyone that played marines used them. they definitely were the most common 40k minis at the time.

http://pro.bols.netdna-cdn.com/wp-conte ... lo-res.jpg

the space crusade dudes were of much lower quality.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I looked up Ranxerox, wasn't expecting all of the non nun/bondage related titties
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Post by Voss »

shlominus wrote:
Voss wrote:They weren't really all that common
oh, but they were. they were in the 2nd edition boxed set and everyone that played marines used them. they definitely were the most common 40k minis at the time.
Hmm. I don't remember seeing them much (even though I must have some somewhere, seeing how I have that box). It wasn't like later boxed sets where people bought multiples to get more squads/individually sell the other army bits.

I suspects its because I and the people I knew that played started earlier, and had no compelling reason to switch to the crappier marines.
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Post by Blicero »

Frank wrote: So right around the start of the 90s, WH40K eclipsed Warhammer Fantasy Battles as the biggest minis game...
Is there a single main reason 40K ended up being the more popular Warhammer game? (E.g. better rules, better art direction, the wargame fanbase tends to prefer science fantasy over fantasy, etc.) Or is it one of those situations where there were a lot of small factors that each contributed a bit?
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Post by Voss »

Blicero wrote:
Frank wrote: So right around the start of the 90s, WH40K eclipsed Warhammer Fantasy Battles as the biggest minis game...
Is there a single main reason 40K ended up being the more popular Warhammer game? (E.g. better rules, better art direction, the wargame fanbase tends to prefer science fantasy over fantasy, etc.) Or is it one of those situations where there were a lot of small factors that each contributed a bit?
Personally... part of it was they did a lot more with 40k as a setting and a property with recognizable features. Sure, it was fucking derivative, but it wasn't Germans fighting Scottish orks, norse dwarves, the same fucking elves that everybody has, some rats they stole from Fritz Leiber and some chaos stuff 'borrowed' from Moorcock and Anderson.


In modern parlance, you can meme the fucking out of 40k and remember it for being 40k. Warhammer fantasy is... not memorable. The parts that aren't historical or generic as balls fantasy are blatantly stolen (rats from Leiber, chaos from Moorcock and Anderson), and have since become generic anyway. (I'm pretty sure I can hit a half-dozen names for ratmen off the top of my head).

But the central theme of Warhammer Fantasy is... some shit covered German peasants, nobles and witch hunters will inevitably die to horrible forces beyond their control, and also there are elves and dwarves and stuff, but the older races are dying and not particularly relevant. Also there is a French country, but it gets retconned every decade or so. Some other Europeans are also around, but frankly don't count. [And if you go way, way back, there are also some racist caricatures of Arabians, Pygmies and Japanese]. There just isn't much of a reason to care. You might like gritty grimderp fantasy, but you still won't care, as the characters are mostly assholes and it should be blatantly obvious that they're stuck with 'suffer horribly and die' if they're lucky.

Now the genericness was actually intentional to start with, because they had all these D&D minis laying about, but, well, long run... they never really did anything with it.


Also Fantasy wanted bigger units and bigger armies and so more time and more money. It took 40k three editions to really scale up (the first two were very much happy with 30-40 models), and even then you could get away with 40-50 models unless you picked a horde army. On the fantasy side of things, even early on, 40 models could be one damn unit. And if you were playing skaven or gobbos, it could still be less than 100 points out of 2000 or so.

So I'd say partly background and partly simple economics.
Last edited by Voss on Wed May 17, 2017 2:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by souran »

Blicero wrote:
Frank wrote: So right around the start of the 90s, WH40K eclipsed Warhammer Fantasy Battles as the biggest minis game...
Is there a single main reason 40K ended up being the more popular Warhammer game? (E.g. better rules, better art direction, the wargame fanbase tends to prefer science fantasy over fantasy, etc.) Or is it one of those situations where there were a lot of small factors that each contributed a bit?
The reason it was more popular is because it simulates "modern" warfare as opposed to ancient warfare. That's really it. There is no secret sauce or major rules change. In fact, you could pretty easily derive the rules to third edition 40K from 5th edition fantasy. There are some major difference between the games (40K you get +1 attack for charging, fantasy you get to strike first [at least at the time]), and morale is generally a bigger thing in fantasy than 40k but movement is fundamentally the same as the rules for skirmisher's in fantasy, shooting is identical except they removed most of the modifiers to hit and the guns are more complex weapons than bows, melee is basically identical.
Also Fantasy wanted bigger units and bigger armies and so more time and more money. It took 40k three editions to really scale up (the first two were very much happy with 30-40 models), and even then you could get away with 40-50 models unless you picked a horde army. On the fantasy side of things, even early on, 40 models could be one damn unit. And if you were playing skaven or gobbos, it could still be less than 100 points out of 2000 or so.
It wasn't that the armies were even that much bigger, it was that you could get useful things to fill out your army for a lot less real cash regardless of your army. In fantasy, you would eventually run into needing to buy a unit that was only metal sculps. Even if you were only running reasonable sized units in the 16-30 models range that still could end up being 4 times as expensive as a tank or dreadnought. The metal infantry sculpts were often sold 2 to a blister for $6-8. That means you could easily spend $160 on a unit. Tanks for 40k seemed expensive to teenaged me at $35-55, but when you really investigate value for points vs. value in dollars it was easier to put togther an effective 40K force than a fantasy force. My nids army cost less than my high elves army but had more models due to having more plastics and more useful stuff.
Last edited by souran on Wed May 17, 2017 3:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Painting up a squad of five dudes with a variety of weapons is an easier barrier of entry than a block of 30 spearman
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Post by maglag »

souran wrote:
Blicero wrote:
Frank wrote: So right around the start of the 90s, WH40K eclipsed Warhammer Fantasy Battles as the biggest minis game...
Is there a single main reason 40K ended up being the more popular Warhammer game? (E.g. better rules, better art direction, the wargame fanbase tends to prefer science fantasy over fantasy, etc.) Or is it one of those situations where there were a lot of small factors that each contributed a bit?
The reason it was more popular is because it simulates "modern" warfare as opposed to ancient warfare. That's really it. There is no secret sauce or major rules change. In fact, you could pretty easily derive the rules to third edition 40K from 5th edition fantasy.
Following that I would say the main 40K advantage is that you get to simulate both "modern" and "ancient" warfare. If you want a gunline with WW I-II tank support and aircraft, it's there. But you can also bring space wolves riding wolves with wolf talismans and wolf axes led by their wolf priest with their wolf magic.

You get to attract both the fantasy and sci-fi fans and lots of stuff in between!
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Post by DrPraetor »

WH40K was more successful because the units looked cooler, had more variety, and looked more fun to paint. The figure-design guys ran the show at Games Workshop because they knew on what side their bread was buttered (or whatever vile organ meat paste the Brits put on their toast.)

Second to that, the barrier to entry was somewhat lower than Fantasy Battle.

Third to that, the fluff - while inane, and making no sense - also had lots of awesome metal shit, which was synergistic with the models. Say what you will, the people who write the WH40K fluff are really into it and it shows. People obviously do care because they buy fucking novels.

Fourth to that was any difference whatever in the rules, which were basically the same. In a game where a basic space marine is mechanically identical to a knight with a flintlock pistol, I don't know you can say anything about "simulating" modern warfare, but it does have somewhat more dakka and that does improve gameplay, making some difference at the margins.

Look, the only serious competitor I've seen to 40K - like, lots of people playing it - is War Machine : http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/cygnar

people play War Machine because you can get some awesome-looking steampunk robots and stuff for a relatively small startup cost, and for no other reason.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

In the old days, you could get 10 man tactical squads of marines which were part marine and part plastic, the same you got in blister packs (the one with the flamer was all metal, though), or you could get 6 man multi part plastic models (with bolters and knives and that's it). The marines that just snapped together came with the 2nd ed box set, and also for some time after with the paint set.

In 3rd ed, they introduced new marines, which are still compatible with the stuff today (they had the new bolters without the stock and with curvy foregrips). I thought it was 1 squad of 10 marines, though...and a Landspeeder model that wouldn't go together well.

Myself, I liked 2nd ed. Now, it was a bit of a complicated mess, but (IMHO), that was because it wasn't for fighting armies with, it was for when you had 3 squads and you called it an army. I was annoyed with the massive changes into 3rd ed, but I was young and grumpy back then.

Never really got into fantasy that much. I think part of the appeal of 40k was that you didn't muck about with movement trays and wheeling and so on, every model moved by itself.
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Post by talozin »

Voss wrote: [And if you go way, way back, there are also some racist caricatures of Arabians, Pygmies and Japanese].
I need to go find my copy of Warhammer Armies and scan the Pygmy section, because I'm pretty sure the internet would actually explode if someone published this shit today.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

DrPraetor wrote:.. they knew on what side their bread was buttered (or whatever vile organ meat paste the Brits put on their toast.)
Here's an actual stock photo of that:
Image
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed May 17, 2017 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Hicks
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Post by Hicks »

So whatever side their bread was beaned with tomato sauce? Dosen't have quite the pithy ring to it.
Last edited by Hicks on Thu May 18, 2017 8:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

souran wrote:
It wasn't that the armies were even that much bigger, it was that you could get useful things to fill out your army for a lot less real cash regardless of your army. In fantasy, you would eventually run into needing to buy a unit that was only metal sculps. Even if you were only running reasonable sized units in the 16-30 models range that still could end up being 4 times as expensive as a tank or dreadnought. The metal infantry sculpts were often sold 2 to a blister for $6-8. That means you could easily spend $160 on a unit. Tanks for 40k seemed expensive to teenaged me at $35-55, but when you really investigate value for points vs. value in dollars it was easier to put togther an effective 40K force than a fantasy force. My nids army cost less than my high elves army but had more models due to having more plastics and more useful stuff.
This is very true, and it had important consequences for how games played out at the table as well. Basically, the cheapest way to field a half-decent mid '90s WHFB army was to embrace the much-maligned tactic of Hero Hammer, a practice in which you built your army around champions, special characters and santa sacks filled with magical swag instead of buying another block of tiny men. It led to a lot of dissatisfaction all around since on the one hand you obviously don't want to price people out of the hobby yet on the other hand you also don't want situations where the magical item rules are so lax that people decide to just go ahead and push their Dwarven Runelord off of the opposing army's RNG. After all, people don't really want to buy and paint giant blocks of pikemen just so that Witch King expies can fly over them and gank your leadership corps.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

This makes me want to OSSR Blood Bowl.
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Post by Nath »

Whipstitch wrote:Basically, the cheapest way to field a half-decent mid '90s WHFB army was to embrace the much-maligned tactic of Hero Hammer, a practice in which you built your army around champions, special characters and santa sacks filled with magical swag instead of buying another block of tiny men.
From what I remember, similar strategy could be ridiculously efficient with WH40K 2nd edition as well. Characters had high stats, several wounds, access to non-modifiable armor save and some powerful weapons, and unlike squads weren't forced to shoot at the closest target. Spending the maximum allowed points onto characters and using them to go after the opponents' characters and smallest squads could often net you enough points to win (especially with the Assassins, Witch Hunt or Take and Hold mission cards).

Some armies had ways to beat such setup, but there were costly.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

A cheap jump pack Vortex grenade can kill anything tho
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Post by Voss »

Nath wrote:
Whipstitch wrote:Basically, the cheapest way to field a half-decent mid '90s WHFB army was to embrace the much-maligned tactic of Hero Hammer, a practice in which you built your army around champions, special characters and santa sacks filled with magical swag instead of buying another block of tiny men.
From what I remember, similar strategy could be ridiculously efficient with WH40K 2nd edition as well. Characters had high stats, several wounds, access to non-modifiable armor save and some powerful weapons, and unlike squads weren't forced to shoot at the closest target. Spending the maximum allowed points onto characters and using them to go after the opponents' characters and smallest squads could often net you enough points to win (especially with the Assassins, Witch Hunt or Take and Hold mission cards).

Some armies had ways to beat such setup, but there were costly.
Not really. The various power fields ranged from decent (4+) to awful (5+). Some factions had access to 3+, but even then just plowing them down with heavy weapons was viable, even some of the crappier ones. A single shot that did multiple wounds (which could easily range from d4 to d10 or 2d6) sneaking through meant the end of characters.
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Post by DrPraetor »

I recall that the 40K 2nd ed. imperial guard gunnery teams were, indeed, able to more than take care of their cost in characters - and were not especially expensive (in real $) to field. There were various ways to cheat the targeting requirements, which I don't remember.

One thing I did find irritating about the shift from 2nd to 3rd ed was that the Space Marines lost the ability to field Servitor-crewed Tarantula sentry guns, which I rather liked as a teenager.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Contemporaneous 40k games allowed you to center your army build around a primary death star but generally not to the same extent as you could in pre-6th edition WHFB, particularly since there were a few armies that were really built around the concept. For example, Vampire Counts took the tarpit/deathstar duality to an extreme and thus managed to piss people off both coming and going. They could be an expensive army to field if you really doubled down on fielding stupid amounts of zombie chaff but ultimately you weren't coming to the table without a stupidly expensive general as your centerpiece. That's because of your mandatory general choices even the "budget" Vampire Count weighed in at 185 points before any extra trimmings. And frankly, you WERE going to kit that asshole out, because your army would literally fall apart if he died as opposed to just virtually falling apart. Vampire Count generals were fucking buzzsaws in combat but they may as well have had a Day-Glo bull's-eye painted on they asses.
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