OSSR: WH40K, 3rd Edition

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Judging__Eagle
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Whipstitch wrote: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.
My alternative was to spread the eggs far and wide in my own Vampire Counts armies.

General: Blood Dragon. The most combat-survivable choice.

Necromancers: Lots of cheap ones. then rely on almost always having enough dice to drown out even Elves/Dark Elves in magic winds checks.

Troops: Some variety is key here. You'll need masses of anything to be effective, but special troops can be helpful in small amounts.
Special troops:
[*]Spirit Hosts that can screen your central column from archery (also draw in enemy heroes w/ magic weapons). Usually cost-effective for a unit of 3

[*]UD cavalry can be a great way to send to the flank and target archers/rear. Hellhounds can also be used as point-effective/light cavalry.

[*]Wight Guard can be great at soaking/slaying heroes due to their auto-wound barrowblades and high defenses for the rest of Vamp Counts line troops.

Regular Troops:
[*]Bring more Skeletons & Zombies than you'll field. About 10% more at least; but 50% of what you're fielding might even be. It's challenging, but not impossible to paint ~100 skeletons in a pair of weeks. Even with 2/3/3 coats of prime/paint/ink & flocking, skeletons paint easily compared to even the simplest unit of an other faction.

[*]Skeletons: In skeleton regiments, the one thing that will be of concern is regimental depth. You'll lose skeletons en masse on every morale failure, they don't have great stats, no-low armour, maybe shields. So you'll lose lots over the course of the game no matter what.

However having deep rows will allow the better skeleton weapon; the spear, to allow two ranks to attack the enemy. With full command sections and a Necromancer character acting as sub-commanders, Leadership issues; and even unit "reinforcements" are made a bit more tolerable.

The other option is that a smaller regiment of chaff-equipped skeletons can be used to buffer the one of the flanks of the primary spear skeleton coloumn.

[*]Zombies: More of a buffer/tarpit and arrow-catchers than real threat. Zombies are psychologically scary, so playing that aspect up can make opponents act irrationally. Also, while they have initiative: last, a blob of them can make mincemeat of non-melee units, and are nasty if they are supporting the main column.

[*]Summoned Skeletons/Zombies: If you have to speedbump, use Skeletons as speedbump formations b/c you'll get more; while zombies should be summoned to existing formations for maximum unit yield. Skeletons should be added to the primary column as often and regularly as possible.

Shenanigans such as adding skeletons to an undersized, but max upgraded skeleton regiment; while having large chaff skeleton and zombie regiments on the flanks is a way to gank the games point system to get "free" higher cost UD models into play.

[*]UD Bats can also be really good at harassing enemies in the rear/archers
I think that playing Dominions has affected how I'll describe fantasy units and tactics, but I think that's probably for the best. Some of the really good breakthroughs in [Tome] that Frank & Kieth made have their roots visible in Dominions.
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Post by Username17 »

OSSR: Warhammer 40,000, 3rd Edition
Rules of the Game

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At least it doesn't say “Da Roolz!” or something.
Koumei:

Some people really like the in-character way that certain editions of Ork Codex would be written. Form over function there. You can write all the in-character fluff you like, but if your actual rules aren’t laid out in a simple, easy-to-read fashion, you can go fuck yourself. Twice.
FrankT:

Warhammer 40k is and always has been a wargame, which means that individual dudes are inherently more limited in how they can interact with their environment than an actual RPG character. It's not like they can talk shit out or go to the store or something, there is only war! Characters pretty much just run around shooting things. And so it may come as something of a surprise that models in Warhammer 40K have more stats than D&D characters do. And in the first edition, they had even more. 2nd and 3rd edition simplified the profile significant;y, but originally every single model had:
  • Move
  • Weapon Skill
  • Ballistics Skill
  • Strength
  • Toughness
  • Wounds
  • Initiative
  • Attacks
  • Leadership
  • Intelligence
  • Cool
  • Willpower
You may wonder what fucking difference it is supposed to make how smart or cool someone is while they are trying to beat people to death with a chainsword while grenades are going off, and that was a question that Games Workshop never really answered. By 3rd edition the stats of Move, Intelligence, Cool, and Willpower were all gone. And the only one that anyone complained of was the removal of Move. In 3rd edition, all infantry travels at “infantry Speed” which is 6 inches (15 centimeters) , and while there were some grognards that complained about this, it was overall a positive change.

Now obviously there is still a lot of room for simplification. Having a higher Toughness makes you harder to kill, while having more Wounds makes you harder to kill in a statistically slightly different way. Having more Weapon Skill makes you better in close combat, while having more Initiative or Strength both make you better at close combat in a statistically slightly different way. This creates tradeoffs and choices, which in a n abstract sort of way is good. But those tradeoffs are actually really weird and don't have much to do with anything other than the odd breakpoints of the RNG. Everything is done on a d6 (except Leadership type rolls which are done on two), so the absolute shift of getting +1 on a die is 16.7%. But more importantly, the game is about rolling a shit tonne of dice and then counting hits – which means that the fact that rolling a 4, 5, or 6 happens 50% more often than rolling just a 5 or 6. So that's the difference between needing 20 soldiers to get a job done and needing 30.

But while these breakpoints are certainly real and they have a big impact on what the correct tactical choices are in any given situation and what units and equipment are good or bad to purchase in the first place, there's no real in-world logic to any of it. If you have a unit with 4 Toughness and 1 Wound (which is most models in 3rd edition) and you increase the Toughness to 5, that makes you take twice as many shots to die from Strength 3 weapons, 50% more shots from Strength 4 weapons, 33% more shots from Strength 5 weapons, 20% more shots from Strength 6 weapons, and has no effect on Strength 7+ weapons. If instead you went from 1 Wound to 2, it would still be 100% more shots from Strength 3 weapons, but it would also be 100% more shots from Strength 4-7 weapons, and be equally useless against Strength 8 weapons. Clearly the second wound is worth more than the 5th Toughness, but how much more? If your opponent is going to use only strength 3 and strength 8 weapons, there's no difference. If your opponent uses a lot of strength 7 weapons the difference is night and day. There is a difference, but it isn't one that makes any particular in-world sense.

You might think that they would have gone somewhere with the fact that Laser weapons are mostly strength 3 or strength 9, while bolter weapons are strength 4 or 5, so having extra Wounds is being tough in a way that isn't better against Lasers than having more Toughness, but is better against bolters. And you'd be wrong. In fact, there are even a couple of rarer laser weapons that are Strength 6 and the wounds versus toughness thing doesn't even hold up. All the units just have a bunch of numbers on them, and sometimes those numbers matter but mostly they don't.

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Deep Choices!
Koumei:

If they actually used the entire 1-10 spread of numbers (as opposed to basically every infantry-sized person being Toughness 3 or 4, occasionally 5, and all small-arms being Strength 3 or 4, occasionally 5), then we could talk about how Strength 1 attacks would also be weird with the above layout: you would need twice as many to kill the T 4 W 2 guys, but you would be literally unable to hurt the T 5 W 1 guys. But we don’t have the option for people to buy really shitty SMGs that are Strength 1 but make 3-4 shots each. So it just doesn’t matter. Hell, the difference between “A space marine who contracted bone cancer and tuberculosis, and thus is Tougher” (that’s a Plague Marine, for those at home) and “Aforementioned diseased Marine ON A BIKE” is only noteworthy for Bolters, Heavy Bolters, and Eldar Lasers. Strength 8 weapons still wound both of them on a 2+, Humans still wound both of them on a 6, and because bikes augment your Toughness but you use the base value for Instant Death, Strength 10 weapons still cause Instant Death to both.

So yeah, you have a spread of ten numbers, but that’s bigger than the actual RNG, so they spread the usefulness out across there with a lot of numbers being identical to each other in a lot of cases, and then they also don’t use a bunch of these numbers. It would probably be more sensible to, oh I don’t know, reduce the stat spread to 1-6? Still, at least they’re not uncapping it and stretching it out such that 1 ALWAYS fails and 6 ALWAYS succeeds, regardless of who is shooting what. That would be fucking retarded and you’d have to be a stupid asshole to make a game that did that.
FrankT:

Every faction in the game has various elite troops and the fluff for each one is written by different people who all rant about how their faction is the very bestest of bestness of best being. Listen to a proper Space Marine or Eldar fanboy go off on the subject and you'll be confronted with a very long winded diatribe about hundreds of years of badassery training and the immense number of dudes one can kill.

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It's like a purity seal, but you know... more awesome.

Now the first thing we have to get across is that absolutely none of this ranting is born out in the actual table top game. Like, at all. The RNG is just a d6, so the best of the best still flail and fail pretty often, the worst of the worst succeed at shit all the damn time, there just isn't room for any unit to be much more than 6 times as good as any other.

Which didn't stop Games Workshop from trying! In 2nd edition, statline creep had gotten pretty insane, when you go through the Harelquins in Codex: Eldar, you got characters that have Ballistic Skills of 7. There are only 6 numbers on the fucking dice! And there are other characters that have a Ballistics Skill of 8 instead. What fucking difference does that make?! I know that earlier editions constantly jerked off to penalties to hit for various shit, but take a step back and think about how bullshit that is. A normal soldier has a BS of 3 and hits on 3 numbers, so a total penalty of -3 pushes him all the way off the RNG. Some asshole with a BS of 8 has the same set of penalties and isn't even on the RNG yet. It's fucking pointless.

Warhammer has always ranted about maximum stats of 10, but as previously noted the RNG being only 6 numbers long and many rolls demanding that 6s succeed and 1s fail there was really only room for about 4 consequential stat values in most cases. Now in 3rd edition, number inflation was kept way more under control. Leaders stopped getting massive bloat in strength and toughness, BS skills were kept relatively sane, and all in all there was a lot less pointless high end stat bullshit. There's still no real space for a stat of 1 to actually mean much, but by keeping those stats pretty solidly between 2 and 5 they managed to mostly avoid wetting the bed.
Koumei:

I personally think Chaos fanboys are the most annoying for their “Each one is the best” wank, but that combines with their complaining every single time their Codex isn’t the complete best one. Ork players, on the other hand, are only annoying at the actual table (as is anyone who has some kind of universal warcry they bellow out in fairly small stores, so that includes a lot of Imperials that aren’t Mechanicus – which didn’t exist as a faction in 3rd – and also the followers of Khorne). Then again, if you let people debate about which force will eventually wipe out the entire galaxy as “the big bad”, then you can have Chaos, Orks, Tyranids and Necrons all throwing poo at each other.

Anyway, long story short, 3E introduced a change that is still basically true today - being the best fighters of your faction those days translates to having a slightly better WS (maybe – Vanguard Veterans and Terminators have the same WS 4 as other Marines) and 1 more Attack per turn. Compare Commissars with Guardsmen, Honour Guard with Marines, Berzerkers with Chaos Marines, Celestians with Sisters and so on. Heroes can slightly shift their Initiative, Leadership, Wounds, Attacks, and Skill stats upwards by a few points above the norm, but about the only things that get Ballistic Skill 10 for instance are basically Sniper Assassins, and back then, that didn’t actually mean anything. Later editions would introduce a re-roll system where if your BS is 5, you hit on a 2+, if your BS is 6, you hit on a 2+ but re-roll the miss with a 6+, and so on up to BS 10 being 2+/2+. And for a while, Master-Craft and Twin-Link were easy enough to get for the important guns of heroes such that if your BS was 5 or more, you just did that and had a 2+/2+ and ignored those other rules entirely.

But as I said, that doesn’t happen in 3rd Edition. And that’s all well and good. This is also the edition that makes the WS to-hit table fairly compressed, where you’re almost always hitting someone on a 4+, or a 3+ if you have something like Space Marines (you are – it’s the early days of 40K) and your opponent is fielding something like Imperial Guard (they’re not – see above).
FrankT:

Weapon and armor stat lines were simplified dramatically.

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A small sampling of 2nd edition weapons.

Gone were range category to-hit modifiers, close combat parries, armor save modifiers, sustained fire dice, and damage rolls. And a damn good thing too, all of those things are terrible and removing them was awesome. 3rd edition weapons just have strength, range, armor penetration, and weapon type. Weapon types have been restricted to pistol, assault, rapid fire, heavy, and ordnance. And Rapid Fire is just a hybrid weapon where you have the choice of using it as an Assault 1 at 12”, a Heavy 2 at 12”, or a Heavy 1 at 24”. Ordnance is just a heavy weapon that vehicles can't move and shoot with that can't be fired with other weapons.

Pistols now are basically just Rapid Fire weapons that have the option of being used as a close combat weapon. All of the close combat weapons became identical and just became “Attack at model's Strength” so we were no longer asked to differentiate swords, chainswords, flails, hammers, daggers, and all that other weird shit no one cares about. While some grognards were angry that the Harlequin's Kiss was now officially the same as a hammer, this was actually a completely positive change. The most obvious benefit is that players were no longer being punished for having the “wrong” sorts of close combat weapons on their models (swords were much much better than hammers, despite the game being literally named “Warhammer”), but equally important was just that differentiating between power axes and power mauls was a fucking waste of time. Models did not typically survive getting hit in close combat with fucking anything, so it was a big waste of text and headspace to figure out how totally head explodingly dead you were after being smacked in the face with whatever flavor of space weapon five times. The game gives a typical unit one hit point, no one cares how dead each dude is.

This basic understanding that units were probably either alive or dead at any given moment and it didn't make a great deal of difference how thoroughly an individual transitioned from one state to the other was something that the authors of 3rd edition clearly had, but equally clearly the people doing Rogue Trader and 2nd Edition didn't get that memo. You had individual weapons that did 2d12 wounds. What the shit? I understand that they were tracking hitpoints for vehicles in Rogue Trader and 2nd edition used strength plus wounds inflicted to determine whether you penetrated vehicle armor. This system was all super bullshit, and led to massive damage inflation which led to massive armor inflation and there was honestly no upside at all. You needed wacky sided dice and it was usually pretty much a formality anyway.

Sustained Fire Dice are also a nice thing to not have anymore. These were 6 sided dice with weird shit on the sides to determine how many times automatic weaponry hit. Each die had two “1s,” two “2s,” a single “3” and a “Jam.” If you rolled a Jam, your weapon couldn't fire next round, which was a fucking annoying piece of accounting. Also not remotely realistic, because a 2 sustained fire dice weapon like a heavy bolter would spend about a third of the time jammed, which in a 4 turn game like 2nd edition WH40K meant almost all the automatic weapons would jam up every battle. Seriously, what the fuck?
Koumei:

I’d argue that a heavy machine gun actually pumps out a more reliable number of shots than a bolt-action rifle or something, not a more variable number. Now sure, the reliability of any given bullet hitting is low, but the actual rate of fire should be a steady “X seconds holding the trigger multiplied by the Y bullets per second that the feeding mechanism uses, limited by the remaining ammunition”. That’s probably on American grade school math tests. Something where you aim, fire, then do something to chamber the next round and repeat is going to have more variables in the fire rate based on your own actions and whether you see something to shoot at – the machine gun is going to fire away at an area, regardless of whether or not you get a great shot at someone’s face.

Now, this all being said, it’s not like absolutely every close combat weapon in the game is “a close combat weapon”. You still have “Power Weapons” (sword, axe, maul, dagger, rapier, corkscrew, shovel, katana, folding chair, whatever), which are regular close combat weapons that ignore armour. If you have a Power Weapon and a Pistol (or sword or whatever) then the bonus attack for dual-wielding is made with your Power Weapon. Power Fists are Power Weapons, except they double your Strength and you hit last. Back then, the pistol still gave you an extra power punch. You still had Force weapons, but again it didn’t matter what shape they were, it was “A Power Weapon that can be activated for Instant Death”. Lightning Claws were “Power Swords that re-roll failed Wound rolls and you only get +1 Attack if you hold two of them”. There were only a few other special kinds, other than “the weapon this unique character has” (which even then tended to be “A Power Sword that hits at +1 Strength, so just write a higher S value on the sheet”). But you could fit all the regular ones on part of a page and leave the rest of the space for drawings or fluff text or filling in more information on either how close combat works (if you include the weapon write-ups in the Close Combat part of the book) or other weapon profiles (if you include all the weapon write-ups in one section).

Incidentally, it’s nice how Chainswords are just regular close combat weapons. Earlier, they were slightly different (Necromunda – and presumably 2Ed – making them “always S 4 Armour -1”), so you couldn’t model a guy as having that or a dagger or a crutch or whatever. It was nice of them to change Chainswords to “Close Combat Weapon”, and it would be stupid if someone changed it back.

No particular reason for calling out what a good idea that was, and how fucking stupid it would be to give them some other rule that makes them different.

Finally, a note on Pistols: back then, they were 1 shot moving or 2 shots stationary (and either way you could still assault someone). The only reason I bring this up is that pistols were typically held by unit leaders and by army leaders. And the latter of these tended to have a good BS, indeed, generally 5 or 6. They were also the guys who could spend points to swap their pistols for Plasma Pistols – which back then had the rule that they Get Hot on a 1 if you make 1 shot, a 1-2 if you make 2 shots and so on. So standing still, you could fire twice, roll a 2, and hit the opponent (thus you can’t re-roll it if Master-Crafted) but also melt your own face off.
FrankT:

One major annoyance of the new rules was that sponsons basically didn't work. A vehicle could only fire one non-ordnance weapon if it moved at all, and it couldn't fire any of its secondary weapons if it stayed still and fired its main cannon. So if you wanted to fire a Battle Cannon (which you did), you couldn't fire the side mounted weapons if you moved the vehicle and you also couldn't fire them if you didn't move the vehicle. It was catch-22, there was literally no situation where it was even legal to fire those things.

Which wouldn't have been a big deal, but mysteriously those sponson weapons actually cost points, so you were required to not use those parts if didn't want to take actual army points and flush them down the toilet on something that did actual nothing. And sure, you could say that there were actually lots of weird bits in the model kit that represented vehicle mods that were in no possible situation worth the points they wanted to charge you. But the bigger deal is that those sponsons actually weren't optional things you left off in previous editions. So when 3rd edition came out, you probably had already put together vehicles that you were then expected to tear pieces off of.


Your Leman Russ tank probably looked something like this, and when you pry the sponsons off, it looks kind of shit. The glue cracks and now there's an ugly hole in the side of your model.

More generally, the harsh restrictions on weapons firing and movement meant that most armies didn't move around very much.

In 3rd edition, when a vehicle explodes, the models inside just take hits, only about 1 Space Marine in 6 actually dies from having the Rhino transport they are in detonated by heavy artillery. Further, when a transport does get killed, you get to place the dudes on the map within 2” of the transport, and can put them in front, behind, or on the side. Crucially, this doesn't count as movement on your next turn. A lot of troops in 3rd edition did more movement by getting out of the flaming wrecks of their “transports” than they did the whole rest of the game.

This contrasts heavily with 2nd edition, where vehicles zoomed across the landscape and super elite mofos with jet packs ravaged the countryside but no one wanted to be within 6” of a transport, because those things were fucking death traps.
Koumei:

If your Russ tank moved, you could still fire one sponson or the front weapon, but basically, you didn’t want to move. Basically, you were taking side guns so that you could make the best of a bad situation – except you automatically had a front weapon whether you wanted it or not, so it was for the really rare situation where you had to move but also wanted to shoot someone slightly to the side of the direction you were headed.

Alternatively, if the cannon was blown off, you could then stand still and fire both sponsons and the front gun, but again, you’re making the best of a bad situation there. The person dealing the damage gets to decide which weapon is destroyed if they roll “Weapon Destroyed”, and they’ll almost always choose the big gun. So you could choose to spend the points on side weapons on the off chance that they roll “Weapon Destroyed” but don’t also roll “Crew Shaken”, “Crew Stunned”, “Wrecked” or “Explodes!” And then you’re a kind of shitty extra-expensive BS 3 Predator. I bet there’s an army out there that can take Predators at lower cost, at BS 4 and with the front gun being on a turret that rotates, if you really wanted that.

The book actually mentions that the 6-12 inches of movement for most tanks is slow, “but it represents a cross-country speed rather than moving flat out”. This shows a lack of understanding, however, of the fact that tanks aren’t moving 6-12 inches, they’re remaining completely stationary so as to fire all their guns (or Ordinance weapons at all).
FrankT:

Apologies that that rant took a while, next up we're doing more of a fluff rant, which means that it'll go quicker.
Last edited by Username17 on Thu May 25, 2017 9:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by souran »

All the things that Frank and Koumei have been talking about really get to the fact that as written 3rd edition 40K was basically a WW1 simulator.

The fire and movement and combined arms aspects of WW2 or modern warfare were simply not modeled.

A lot of this had to do with how terrible the weapon rules were/still are. While the change to the rapid fire/heavy/assault format was a huge improvement, it had the unintended side effect of making moving a terrible choice.

As noted, most tanks cannot move and fire in an effective manner. They have stand still to fire. What's more, most tanks don't actually carry a main armament that kills more than 1 or 2 infantry men at a time (The most common tank weapon is the freaking AUTOCANNON S7 2 Attacks).

If you wanted your tank to be able to kill enemy units you covered it in various high volume of fire weapons that could be fired while moving (Twin Linked Assault cannons). So basically the only effective tanks were really just jumped up gun trucks.

Similarly, the authors of the game seemed to forget that unlike the fantasy army counterparts, most units in this game were going to have mixed weapons. This meant that usually you were stuck doing the action of your slowest weapon. This weapon based hindrance revealed that shooting was actually way fucking better than assault in lots of very important ways.

In quick bullet points these are

1) The guns that most units have are more effective than their own melee attacks. Bolters (The basic weapon of spare marines) ignore the armor of MOST other types of infantry in the game. Eldar weapons are higher strength and better at penetration.

2) The number of attacks from standing still and shooting was usually similar to the number of combined attacks from shooting then assaulting. in 3rd edition you only get +1 attack in close combat if the model makes it into base contact with an enemy model. Otherwise a model only contributes +1 attack to the assault (assuming it gets within 3" of an enemy). Most charges don't get but 3-5 models into base contact with the enemy. That means that you probably only gained 3 attacks compared to standing and shooting twice and could possibly be losing total dice rolled if you lost out on attacks from a high rate of fire heavy weapon.

3) Both sides fight in the close combat phase regardless of whose turn it is. That means that your units can take casualties on your turn. Heck, your whole unit can get wiped out by an enemy on your turn. This cannot happen in the shooting phase.

Seriously, you don't even have to be that good at game theory to understand how BAD assaulting is compared to shooting. It takes unbelievably specialist troops to make assaulting even remotely appealing. Those troops tend to cost more points than their boring gun holding counterparts.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Good catch on the fuck-upedness that were Sustained Fire dice, and weapons that used it. I'm a bit surprised that the Assault Cannons "3 Jams = Death" didn't get a mention, but it's likely due to the fact that they're a less used firearm in all editions of 40k compared to the ubiquity of Heavy Bolters and Autocannons.

I think that I began to realize that 40k wasn't all that great around 2e when I found out that the Super-science micro-dreadnaught rotary cannons were so unpredictable that if they triple-jammed, the tactical dreadnought armoured user would be shredded apart. Instead of.. you know, the jams being cleared automatically b/c it's a bloody rotary cannon. That duds rounds that can cause jams are automatically cycled out whether they were fired or not is why rotary firearms achieve such a high rate of fire in the first place.

Of course, the downside was that I was playing 2e/3e Chaos, and my regular opponent (my younger brother) played Space Wolves. An army that could field all of it's terminators with Assault Cannons or Lighting Claws; instead of being limited by things like logistics, materiel, the scavenge-tech reality of the setting, or logic.
souran wrote:All the things that Frank and Koumei have been talking about really get to the fact that as written 3rd edition 40K was basically a WW1 simulator.
Except there's the way that 3e dealt with Frag grenades; compared to 2e. What might be a definitive anti-trench/bunker clearing infantry weapon of any "WW1 Simulator", was reduced to a removal of the Initiative bonus for units in cover when attacking them. Without even being able to cause harm or damage.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Fri May 26, 2017 4:25 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Voss »

In 3rd edition, all infantry travels at “infantry Speed” which is 6 inches (15 centimeters) , and while there were some grognards that complained about this, it was overall a positive change.
In the very short term. By the time even the dark eldar codex came out, it was clear that GW going to have shedloads of bullshit special movement rules to fill in for obliterating the movement stat. In the long term, this fucking exploded into a wall of absolute nonsense.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I get the impression that, more than most, writing this review is a game of 'don't re-enact this gif.'

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Post by DrPraetor »

I spent the period just after WH40K 3rd ed came out trying to electroplate a space marine army on Frank's porch.

I succeeded in melting a few of them but I never got the strike coats to conduct. I think I had the wrong rectifiers or something - at least I didn't electrocute myself.

Anyway, until it was nerfed in various updates, I enjoyed having a bunch of space marine tactical squads in rhinos.

For a brief time, I thought the rules for firing out of Rhinos and so forth were included on purpose, because the fluff at the time was very certain that space marines were supposed to have a lot these Rhino APCs and if the rules made them good, well, then tactical squads in Rhinos became the thing you'd field. It soon became clear that those rules had been basically a happy accident.

The Rhino was quite a bit tougher than the space marines, did provide better mobility which you did sometimes want, and the space marines inside could fire even when the Rhino was shaken (which it mostly was, if it wasn't destroyed.)

It was a bit odd, having a bunch of space marines firing their weapons out the windows of a parked APC.
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Post by souran »


Except there's the way that 3e dealt with Frag grenades; compared to 2e. What might be a definitive anti-trench/bunker clearing infantry weapon of any "WW1 Simulator", was reduced to a removal of the Initiative bonus for units in cover when attacking them. Without even being able to cause harm or damage.
Actually this is a truly inspired rules design. Grenades are not really weapons designed to inflict direct casualties (like say a rifle) they are a weapon designed to get your foe to displace or otherwise have to make a choice they did not want to make.

This would have worked well for a first world war game, anything that would let you change the dynamics of entering the trenches would be really good. However, 40K still has the problem that most units should NEVER get into an assault. Units that do want to assault generally already have high initiative or get the grenades for free.

The number of special rules in 40K isn't really that bad. Special rules are the bread and butter of a complex wargame. Every force should have something that they do that all the other forces wish they could do. However, none of the special rules in 40K make the game dynamic.

Compare 40k to Flames of War or better yet, Team Yankee. Team Yankee has flying units, units of varying degrees of competence, lots of mechanized forces etc. It also is a game that uses only 6 sided dice. However, it is WAY more dynamic.

The really crappy thing is that Rick Priestly COULD write really great wargames. Warmaster is an AMAZING wargame. It is dyamic, the armies are distinctive and the game actually hinges on how well you can command your forces.

Similarly, Epic 40k is, in my mind at least, as good Flames of War and I think its as good as Panzer Blitz/Panzer Commander.

However both Warhammer Fantasy and 40K were never good games. They are both barely functional rules designed to give you (poor) reason to collect tiny plastic statues.
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Post by Koumei »

Judging__Eagle wrote:I'm a bit surprised that the Assault Cannons "3 Jams = Death" didn't get a mention, but it's likely due to the fact that they're a less used firearm in all editions of 40k compared to the ubiquity of Heavy Bolters and Autocannons.
Actually, as of... I'm going to say 4th Edition, they became the bread and butter of Space Marines. You make four shots at S 6 AP 4 with the Rending rule, and back then I think that was the only ranged weapon with Rending. And Rending was straight-up better then, indeed the Assault Cannon was basically the reason why 5Ed weakened Rending's effectiveness. Yes, rather than removing it from the Space Marine gun, they just made Harlequins, Genestealers and whatever else very sad.

Their height of popularity was with the Grey Knights codex in 5Ed where you could give a Dreadnought an Autocannon and a Twin-Linked Ass Cannon and Psi-Bolts which gave +1 S to both of them (so S 8 AP 4 Heavy 2 + S 7 AP 4 Heavy 4 Rending, Twin-Linked).
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Post by maglag »

In 5th edition GK dreads were all about taking two twin-linked autocannons with psibolt ammunition. It even got nicknamed the Psyfleman dread. It makes no sense to take autocannon+ass cannon in 5th because the ass cannon had much less range, whereas 4 re-rollable S8 shots meant you could snipe anything softer than a land raider accross the table.

Rending being nerfed wasn't because of ass cannons, it was simply because it turned out all-genestealer armies and all-harlequin armies didn't need anything else to tear the enemy besides lots of rending attacks. Ass cannons were only really imba in 2e when they had a whooping S8 at longer range along a crapload of shots, and you could bring a lot of them. But in 3rd/4th there was simply no effective way for a SM force to spam them, so I guess you're really drunk for calling them their "bread and butter".

The later sucessor was the GK psycannon in 5th that had longer range and S and almost everybody in the army could take it.
Last edited by maglag on Fri May 26, 2017 8:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

souran wrote:

Except there's the way that 3e dealt with Frag grenades; compared to 2e. What might be a definitive anti-trench/bunker clearing infantry weapon of any "WW1 Simulator", was reduced to a removal of the Initiative bonus for units in cover when attacking them. Without even being able to cause harm or damage.
Actually this is a truly inspired rules design. Grenades are not really weapons designed to inflict direct casualties (like say a rifle) they are a weapon designed to get your foe to displace or otherwise have to make a choice they did not want to make.
Sorry, but I haven't ever come across any historical indication that grenades have been used as "area denial" weapons; especially with regard to WWI (minefields are probably closer to the definition of "area denial" weapon, as would chemical warfare clouds). From what I've reread* they were originally used as "siege" weapons. Then stopped being popular after Napoleon. Then were reintroduced when trenches became the norm. Specifically their power as siege weapons is because the indiscriminate manner of an explosion thrown beyond an enemy fortification is really effective at negating the physical barriers that are the primary defensive component of a trench/dugout, bunker/pillbox, or castle/wall. Even contemporary (21st Cen.) use of grenades seems to be that of "siege" work, where attackers or defenders need to bypass the physical barriers that keep them from shooting right at their enemies.

Now, actual casualties per unit from grenades seem to be low compared to other weapon (in WWI, looking at only 2 German units casualty amounts/sources). Artillery and firearms made up most casualties from that war. However, low casualties don't indicate a weapon was never used to kill with (in fact, any casualties demonstrate that the weapon was being used to kill); and low kill numbers from infantry grenades compared to fixed-place artillery are probably proportionate with how the other infantry weapon, the rifle, probably killed less people than the fixed-place machine gun.

If you've got descriptions of grenades being used as area-denial, I'd like to see what methods to achieve that looks like. The nearest example I've seen is that of primed and armed grenades being left in sand/mud, to act as impromtu mines when they are disturbed and the unsafed ignition spoon comes free from the main body.

*:
I went through a bunch of sites b/c I couldn't find anything similar to the illustrations from my HS history books on WWI grenade use vs trenches xor pillboxes/bunkers.

http://www.firstworldwar.com/weaponry/grenades.htm - Grenades were part of "bombing parties" and thrown into trenches, & dugout, by raiders to kill or flush out defenders into riflefire/bayonet range

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_World_War_I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenade Overall, the grenade began, and was reintroduced, as siege-related weapons. Certain manufactures of smoke grenades do have area-denial properties (i.e. caustic smoke), but that's a property of the chemicals used to create the smoke, not seemingly a deliberate feature.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ ... asualties/ - Mostly interesting are two German unit casualty source lists

http://io9.gizmodo.com/trench-warfare-i ... 1637657733 - Grenades were effective for defense and attack of trenches; while leaving the grenade users safe, and (ab)using the nature of trenches to remain unscathed

http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.ne ... nd_grenade - Basically repeating the first link; both sides used "bombing teams" for raids

http://canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/one-o ... m-stewart/ - Grenades and other explosives evened up the odds between entrenched and attacking troops. Entrenched troops could take cover from firearms attacks, or suffer single casualties per attack; while a grenade could attack everyone in the trench at once, and be more likely to hit than an attackers rifle would

http://canadianmilitaryhistory.ca/essen ... m-stewart/ - Further clarification and details of bombing teams and grenade doctrine in WWI; I had to google this continuation to the previous link b/c neither are among the links of WWI articles. Ironically dedicated bombing assaults that went parallel to a trenchline were less effective than direct assaults that were perpendicular to a trenchline. Eventually though, dedicated bombing teams got retired as a concept, and grenades were meant to be used by all members of a platoon in their advances.
Really, little of how fragmentation/Anti-personell grenades are used is part of 40k's grenade rules. They weren't great in 2e either.

Krak grenades are an other story. They've usually modelled thermite/anti-armour charges a lot in how they've been used historically (i.e. pray; get close to target; pray; throw/place at/on target; pray). Not having to adjudicate what a "blast" means to the rest of the game probably helped. I can't recall if Kraks were relegated to hand-to-tank use in 3e 40k though, or if they were able to be thrown at an enemy vehicle.
The really crappy thing is that Rick Priestly COULD write really great wargames. Warmaster is an AMAZING wargame. It is dyamic, the armies are distinctive and the game actually hinges on how well you can command your forces.

Similarly, Epic 40k is, in my mind at least, as good Flames of War and I think its as good as Panzer Blitz/Panzer Commander.

However both Warhammer Fantasy and 40K were never good games. They are both barely functional rules designed to give you (poor) reason to collect tiny plastic statues.
I consider my copy of Warmaster softcover as more valuable as a gaming reference than my 40k or WHFB hardcovers. Honestly, I still haven't figured out why WHFB isn't a slightly more detailed version of Warmaster; and likewise with WH40k and Armageddon/Epic 40k. The nearest that I can think of is that the epic lines are designed as wargames, and borrow from other similar scale wargames. While the 28mm lines are subconsciously designed as sort-of rpgs instead of wargames; possibly also that there aren't many wargames that model "individual unit members" scale battles.

The distinctiveness between WM armies is an other interesting feature. While WHFB armies have dozens of special details that don't often matter to what you'll put in your army; in WM it's the opposite. WM armies tend to have only a tiny amount of rules unique to their faction; but those small details will shape armies as being quite different from each other in almost all aspects of the gameplay. One thing that might stick out to someone coming in from WHFB is that WM is a "ranged favouring" game. If you can "Drive Back" a unit far enough with sufficient concentrated ranged fire; you'll destroy it, even if you couldn't have ever wounded it.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Fri May 26, 2017 11:09 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by souran »

Judging__Eagle wrote:

If you've got descriptions of grenades being used as area-denial, I'd like to see what methods to achieve that looks like. The nearest example I've seen is that of primed and armed grenades being left in sand/mud, to act as impromtu mines when they are disturbed and the unsafed ignition spoon comes free from the main body.
Judging_Eagle did you actually read and understand your own links? They all show the grenade as an area denial weapon. What do you think happens when you put an armed grenade into a space occupied by human beings? They are forced with a choice to DISPLACE and change their relationship to the terrain and change their ability to defend a position OR receive injury.

This is why grenades are important in CQB (Close Quarters Battle. The fundamental role of a flashbang or Fragmentation grenade is NOT DIFFERENT. The fundamental principles of CQB are speed, surprise and violence of action. The Grenades support the surprise leg of that triad. Now, grenades obviously can and do kill people, but the THREAT of injury that they represent is just as useful as the injury that they produce.

Now you are not going to have your mind changed because this is the internet, but seriously the U.S. army infantry school says you are wrong on this. However, that said you are far from the first person I have met that really doesn't like grenades being relegated to a rule governing special cases. You certainly COULD model anti-personnel grenades in such a fashion that they are a weapon that can inflict direct casualties or something like that, but then you will create situations where guys stand in the open, just at the edge of their assault range with whole squads flinging grenades. This is a situation that is its own parody. You don't see everybody in a squad flinging grenades at the same time, you have one man per fire team (or 1 per squad) throw a grenade while the rest provide cover. Additionally, if you convert them into a weapon then getting them to ALSO change the dynamic of assaults becomes a lot more difficult.

My argument was that grenades as a tool that changes the dynamics of an assault is an inspired choice that I would expect to see in a MUCH higher quality wargame (Like by SSI or Avalon Hill). Its a high level abstraction in a game that is basically all grit which is why I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Much like Judging_Eagle they want grenades to explode tiny plastic mans. The frag grenades rule is a good rule in a bad game played by people who usually want a different rule because their major way to determining value is how a thing interacts with the to wound and armor save rules. As opposed to what new tactical options are opened up.

Lets go back to Eagle's first argument: Grenades in 40k are not good for helping you clear trenches. Here he couldn't be more wrong. Now the first problem is that getting into the trenches an enemy is occupying is going to be a disaster long before you get there, but lets say that we are using troops that can actually make assaults with a chance of success (Say assault marines even though they barely qualify). Now, if you send them into a trench against say Orks and they don't have frag grenades, the Orks strike first. This is very very bad because your only real chance of winning this assault occurs on the first turn when you have the extra attack from charging. Additionally, you have higher initiative than the Orks so if you swing from striking last to striking first you could, in theory destroy enough Orks to clear all the ones in base contact and then they won't get to use their "Choppas" special rules because only models in base contact get to use the special properties of their weapons. In this case frag grenades massively change the dynamic of the assault from something that is probably a poor choice to something that is probably a good choice.

Now, as for 40K being a WWI simulator, the easiest way to see that is how disastrous any kind of movement really is. The loss of firepower from moving, and the exposure to the enemy that coincides with that movement, turn every game into the fucking Somme. One side leaves cover, attempts to take an objective, gets shot to ribbons, retreats, and then the other side does the same fucking thing. Considering that many weapons can fire across the entirety of any reasonable play space (the game suggests a 4 X 4 area for 1500 points then gives 36" range weapons!) the whole fucking table becomes the god damn kill box.

I consider my copy of Warmaster softcover as more valuable as a gaming reference than my 40k or WHFB hardcovers. Honestly, I still haven't figured out why WHFB isn't a slightly more detailed version of Warmaster; and likewise with WH40k and Armageddon/Epic 40k. The nearest that I can think of is that the epic lines are designed as wargames, and borrow from other similar scale wargames. While the 28mm lines are subconsciously designed as sort-of rpgs instead of wargames; possibly also that there aren't many wargames that model "individual unit members" scale battles.

The distinctiveness between WM armies is an other interesting feature. While WHFB armies have dozens of special details that don't often matter to what you'll put in your army; in WM it's the opposite. WM armies tend to have only a tiny amount of rules unique to their faction; but those small details will shape armies as being quite different from each other in almost all aspects of the gameplay. One thing that might stick out to someone coming in from WHFB is that WM is a "ranged favouring" game. If you can "Drive Back" a unit far enough with sufficient concentrated ranged fire; you'll destroy it, even if you couldn't have ever wounded it.
If you don't know the story of the Games Workshop Specialist lines here it is in brief: Rick Priestly wrote both Epic 40k and Warmaster (and a bunch of the other specialist games). He also was important in the early development of warhammer (and provided oversite on 3rd edition 40K). However, Rick was a "rules first" guy and wanted to make good games and not just a vehicle to move models.

Both Warmaster and Epic 40k include a recommendation to proxy the shit out of the game and try out several forces before picking which one you want to play. Both explain that accuracy in the minature is not as important as having an agreed upon token that can represent a particular part of your force. Those are GAMES first and a mini-sales second productions.

The 15mm games had a number of things working against them. First, there were other companies working in 15mm and Games Workshop hates that. Second, there is not as much detail in the minis and it reduces the amount of painting shit you can sell when working in the smaller scale. Basically GW was never going to put their whole support behind a pair of games that didn't fit their business model.

This is last bit is apocrypha, but the owner of the FLGS I frequented when Warmaster came out was told by the regional sales rep that Warmaster would be supported indefinitely , that they were going to try and wind down regular fantasy and replace it it with Warmaster. He believes that was done because of bunch of their US distributors didn't want to sell another game that would get 18 months of support and then die.
Last edited by souran on Fri May 26, 2017 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

souran wrote:Its a high level abstraction in a game that is basically all grit which is why I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Much like Judging_Eagle they want grenades to explode tiny plastic mans.
IIRC, my objection to that change was in part because the same grenades could be used to directly cause casualties in 2 ed, and now suddenly could not if throw by hand. The other part was that the same grenades could still be fired from a grenade launcher and could still directly cause casualties.

If they were always used for suppression and there were no launchers, I'd not have an issue. It'd be almost the only time suppression came up in that sort of way, though that is hard to represent.
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Post by souran »

Thaluikhain wrote:
IIRC, my objection to that change was in part because the same grenades could be used to directly cause casualties in 2 ed, and now suddenly could not if throw by hand. The other part was that the same grenades could still be fired from a grenade launcher and could still directly cause casualties.

If they were always used for suppression and there were no launchers, I'd not have an issue. It'd be almost the only time suppression came up in that sort of way, though that is hard to represent.
Well yeah, 40K is mostly shit at abstracting. Instead of doing things that are designed to make good/bad gameplay decisions at the command level, they instead just let you take another piece of equipment that usually turns out to be an extra strength 4 AP 5+ attack.

Now, one thing to also remember is that the 40MM grenades shot from things called "grenade Launchers" are very different devices than hand grenades.

Hand grenades are a metal shell encased in explosive with a set fuse. 40MM grenades also contain a fuse, but they also have a pressure sensitive fuse in the "nose" of the round so that if you shot them directly at something they explode on impact. This means that 40mm grenades can be used as a direct fire weapon to seriously give somebody a bad day.

Anyway, none of this changes the fact that in going from 2E 40K where grenades were a weapon to 3rd edition to where they are an ability is a pretty staggering change. And, the game didn't have any other follow ups. Hell, anti-tank grenades are just a fancy weapon. If they had made grenade launchers be a suppression weapon, and flame throwers contribute to assaults in a more nuanced way that just being a template and etc etc you would have an interesting game. Instead we got 40k
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Post by DSMatticus »

They haven't gotten to it yet, but I've always wondered which parts of the WH40K fluff people think work and which parts they think don't. For example, if you were making an IP-stripped derivative (or were a brand new headwriter with permission to reboot), what lessons would you take away from the grimderp clusterfuck that is WH40K?
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Khorne, the warp god, hating "people who use the powers of warp gods" without reference to what they're using said powers for is dumb. Likewise the endless drift away from the Imperium being explicitly, front-and-centre, presented as being as bad or worse than all the alternatives.

I am still angry that they retconned in fluff to make Adeptus Mechanicus refusal to innovate a justified security procedure instead of the blind stupidity it was always supposed to be.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sat May 27, 2017 8:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Omegonthesane wrote:Likewise the endless drift away from the Imperium being explicitly, front-and-centre, presented as being as bad or worse than all the alternatives.

I am still angry that they retconned in fluff to make Adeptus Mechanicus refusal to innovate a justified security procedure instead of the blind stupidity it was always supposed to be.
For as long as I can remember (which would be 2nd ed), that's not really been the case, or at least not unambiguously the case.

Certainly, they toned the Imperium down from being ridiculously evil space catholic Nazis into people the general public might want to play as or read about, but they'd always had the excuse that it was a nasty galaxy and they'd had to be nasty to survive.

The Ad-Mech is more of a grey area, but there'd always been fluff that could support the idea that they are more or less correct in their approaches. How much sense that fluff made is another issue, though.
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Post by Voss »

Thaluikhain wrote:
Omegonthesane wrote:Likewise the endless drift away from the Imperium being explicitly, front-and-centre, presented as being as bad or worse than all the alternatives.

I am still angry that they retconned in fluff to make Adeptus Mechanicus refusal to innovate a justified security procedure instead of the blind stupidity it was always supposed to be.
For as long as I can remember (which would be 2nd ed), that's not really been the case, or at least not unambiguously the case.

Certainly, they toned the Imperium down from being ridiculously evil space catholic Nazis into people the general public might want to play as or read about, but they'd always had the excuse that it was a nasty galaxy and they'd had to be nasty to survive.
Except their general nastiness (and the emperor's hubris) really actually made the galaxy worse. If you want a fairly accurate view of the Imperium, read Wrath of Iron it's essentially chaos vs Iron Hands, and for the civilians caught in the middle, it's fucking horrible regardless of who wins.

The Ad-Mech is more of a grey area, but there'd always been fluff that could support the idea that they are more or less correct in their approaches. How much sense that fluff made is another issue, though.
No, Ad Mech were firmly established as backwards spirit callers that would require a 5 minute ritual before they'd allow someone to apply some WD-40 and smack the 'on' button with a wrench, and to whom innovation and actually knowing how things work was heresy of the highest order.

When marine chapter #37, stuck different weapons on a predator tank (swapping AT weapons for anti infantry weapons (or the opposite) because they really had to kill a bunch of tanks/shitloads of infantry, the Ad-Mech had a decade long debate on whether said chapter should be excommunicated, hunted down and killed.
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Post by Username17 »

Voss wrote:If you want a fairly accurate view of the Imperium
There are no fairly accurate viewpoints on anything in WH40K because there is no setting bible and no story editor. There are various outlets: Rulebooks, Magazine Articles, Licensed Games, Novels, text on model boxes, and so on and so forth. And there is no one whose actual job it is to make sure those things line up in any particular way.

Stuff gets retconned out of the setting when people write lists and leave things off. Stuff gets retconned into the setting when people write about shit. New things in the setting were always there, and just never got mentioned in twenty years of fluff. Whole races get left out of the setting because some author didn't like them or just forgot they existed.

The original tirade about the Imperium is:
Rogue Trader wrote:To be a man in these times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in cruelist and most bloody regime imaginable.
That was the initial pitch: that the Imperium of Man was literally the worst. And various people have written up subsequent apologia to claim it isn't really all that bad or tried to one-up it with new factions that they claim are even more terrible still.

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Post by Username17 »

OSSR: Warhammer: 40K: Colons
Fluff!

Image
Tongue in cheek yes, but this is a fairly accurate depiction of one of the pivotal events in Warhammer history.

For musical accompaniment we are going to be listening to Manowar, because it is America's loudest band. Fuck yeah!
Koumei:

Honestly, the fluff of 40k could have a review thread all on its own. We’re not doing that, though, we’re talking about 3rd Edition, except when pointing out weird changes and differences, or because blood-alcohol levels say it’s a good idea to ramble about Rainbow Warrior Space Marines or something.
FrankT:

The fluff of 40K is and always has been something rootless and intangible. There is not now and never has been any kind of world bible or even any single person with any serious editorial control. There are lots of different outlets for writing about the setting of WH40K, and people who get contracts to write for any of them pretty much put anything they feel like into the setting. Very frequently people will write wholly incompatible things, and the result is that contradictory descriptions of things simply exist. Sometimes there are elaborate fan theories about how obviously incompatible statements in different books and magazine articles are actually simultaneously true, but honestly fuck those theories and fuck the people who make them.

Regardless, the big takeaway is that “major events” in the storyline are all retconned in – and they can be retconned out just as easily. The entire Horus Heresy plotline (and the Chaos factions as we know them) comes from Servants of Darkness – a book that came out well after Warhammer 40,000 was a thing. When the Space Marines were first unveiled there were no original chapters or successor chapters, no Chaos chapters. There were just a thousand chapters and they gave 12 example chapters. The whole idea of primarchs and gene seeds and shit all came later.

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Included: Rainbow Warriors and Ultramarines. Not included: Black Templars or any Chaos legions.

By 3rd edition, the game had been a going thing for over a decade, so you'd think that things would be pretty stable, and you'd be wrong. One of the two armies in the 3rd edition box set was the Dark Eldar, which were new to this edition (though in some ways similar to the Eldar Privateers that had existed before). And of course in 2nd edition you had Zoats and Squats and shit that were trashbinned when the new edition came out. And 3rd edition also laid down some foundations for expansion, and some were eventually followed up upon (there are now Kroot that you can field) and some were not (the Hrudian Night Warrior army never happened).
Koumei:

When it comes to declaring that something is “true” in 40k, you have to go with Schroedinger’s Canon. That’s not to be confused with Schroedinger’s Cannon, which is artillery loaded full of potentially-dead cats. They were commonly used in WWI to shoot down messenger pigeons. That’s a fact, you can just take my word for that rather than looking it up somewhere.

Image

Anyway, Schroedinger’s Canon is what it sounds like: any statement is both true and not true at the same time until specifically tested or written about, at which point it is one of the above, specifically for that piece of writing. Half-Eldar exist, that’s a thing. Also, Half-Eldar cannot possibly exist, Eldar are a completely biologically different species from humanity. If a given book decides to include a character who is Half-Eldar, they have chosen which statement is true for that book. If they decide to talk about someone fucking an Eldar (you would be surprised what the odds are of them doing that. Actually you wouldn’t be surprised), then that might raise a question and they might choose to answer it, and that answer will be correct and true for that book.

The same applies for basically anything else – Sisters falling to Chaos (or harnessing the Warp for their Faith, or… actually there are a bunch of unknowns for them), the Squats existing any more, several questions about the Dark Angels, where all the Tyranid intelligence and decision-making is located, what the Chaos Gods actually want out of their worshipers and what they have to offer your average cult leader or rogue lieutenant or whatever… there is a lot of stuff that has multiple equally correct yet contradictory answers. It’s the game of Zen, where the points mean nothing (or possibly not) and if it makes sense, you haven’t understood the question.

Also, I’m kind of surprised that nobody has ever really made any noise about the Zoats. I vaguely remember seeing some kitbashed minis for them, and the role they played, but for all the “Bring back Squats!” (didn’t happen) and “Bring back Genestealer Cults!” (did happen), there was never “Bring back Zoats!” There have been more people arguing for the introduction of Hrud (hasn’t happened yet) and Adeptus Arbites (3rd Edition Witch Hunters let you rename your Stormtroopers to Arbites, changing their Hellguns out for Shotguns, but that doesn’t really count). For the record, Eldar Corsairs did make their way back via Forgeworld, but not Eldar Exodites – you can’t play Elven Dino-Riders (equipped with the most modern technology of “sharpened tree branches”), and that saddens me a very little bit.
FrankT:

Probably the biggest thing to notice about the fluff in 3rd edition is that it's fairly consistent in tone. Something which was extremely not true in previous editions. There's a lot of comedy in the 3rd edition rulebook, but it's all in the Judge Dredd style “over the top fascism and atrocity as comedy of the absurd.” The Imperium wipes out all life on a planet because they are weirded out by the natives being friendly, millions upon millions of people die because the Imperial Overlords are stubborn to the point of caricature. But what you don't get are any of the “goofy” comedy elements that some authors had previously written into the setting.

Image
This is an Orc Cheerleader. Orks used to be mammals with a “physiology similar to humans” and have womenfolk.

The idea of Orks being asexual fungus people came much later – but was well established in the canon by the time 3rd edition came out. And by “well established” I mean that it had been repeatedly stated in several official sources. But of course these things propagate slowly through different game lines, and in 1998 the then-current edition of the Warhammer Roleplaying Game still talked about Half-Orcs.

3rd Edition has lots of comedy, but it's all ironic comedy. And for a brief period everyone tried to pretend that the “low comedy” elements of the setting didn't exist. Warhammer 40K was, in its third edition, mostly serious and straightforward. You didn't have any armies which began by rolling on comedic technology malfunction tables that caused them to win or lose the game almost immediately. You didn't have any troops that had dumb powers based on juvenile puns.

Image

This firm editorial control lasted... a couple of months.
Andy Chambers, 3rd Edition Ork Codex, 1999 wrote:Ork barbarity is also highly entertaining in itself. If you want a straight laced army that takes itself seriously try the Eldar or Sisters of Battle!
To put that quote in context: when 3rd edition came out, the Eldar stopped having access to a literal space circus full of killer clowns. The Eldar in the main official line of 3rd edition were reasonably straight laced and “for serious.” The Harlequins were relegated to magazine articles in Citadel Journal. But you can see that there were definitely people writing in various channels that wanted to fill up the game with slapstick low comedy, and once the floodgates of magazine articles and codices and shit were opened, some of the authors just fucking did that.
Koumei:

By the time I really heard of Harlequins, they weren’t Crazy Killer Clowns.

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If you only know of these guys thanks to the Fucking Magnets meme, I envy you.

For some unfathomable reason, people agreed that having a killer clown party was a really dumb thing in the war game, so it was… sort of changed. Now, the Haemonculi (not to be confused with Homunculus or, going by the helpful advice of LibreOffice, Harmonica) covens totally bring that back so don’t worry, if that actually was what you wanted, they got your base! But Harlequins became a series of stage performers, who put on intricate plays. Much better. And it just so happens that their acted fights are so well coordinated that when they go onto the actual battlefield, their real fighting skill is really good. Like, for 7th Edition when stats are generally kept to a narrow band, the basic Troop choice has WS 5 BS 4 I 6 A 2 and that’s the worst their mini-dex has to offer. So their performance arts has seriously boosted their combat prowess. But they managed to find a mirror’s edge in the fluff of still keeping that general theme of graceful dancing and weird costumes whilst not making readers say “That’s fucking retarded”.

Anyway, yeah. Previous editions had some really fucking goofy stuff in there, and 3rd Edition mostly ironed that out (I still can’t take Noise Marines seriously. I don’t care if sonic pulses are actually a realistic great idea for shattering objects, when you shape it like a guitar and give it to someone called a Noise Marine you undid all that hard work) in favour of dark comedy (which is arguably Britain’s biggest export. Well, once “White Settlers” stopped being the biggest export.) and tongue-in-cheek jabs. I kind of wish this were made during the Thatcher years, I bet there’d be some amazing stuff there. Meanwhile, Fantasy Battle was giving Lizardman heroes with names like Tiktaktoe.
FrankT:

One of the things that constantly pissed off purists was people playing armies that looked absolutely fucking nothing like the fluff. There were many reasons for this, mostly having to do with dollars and points. The fluff had various rants about what the armies were expected to contain, but actual models have costs in points and you have to buy them for real money. This means that players have a tendency to use a lot more elite troops than is typical for the army in question – because you have limits on your time and money and can't really afford to buy and paint really vast numbers of bullshit troops. But also the genuine effectiveness of troops against their points cost is pretty fucking random. The game designers did not and do not do a lot of math hammering (3rd edition rules are more math hammered than literally any other edition before or since and there are some pretty glaring issues even in the main book – starting with the useless sponsons purchaseable for tanks that can't fire them and moving on from there). Many armies have only a few units to begin with (for example: there aren't a lot of different Sisters of Battle models and in 1998 there were even less), so if some of the units your army could include are fucking terrible (a reasonably common occurrence to be honest) then you're going to want a really small number of actual different kinds of units.

A typical 2nd edition army was almost always one or two high cost character model and then a bizarrely lopsided armylist of weird shit. Mixed armies almost never happened, because why the fuckity fucksticks would you buy squads that weren't whatever your best squad was? And people were annoyed by that. When you see an “army” that is just composed of Chaos Warriors with terminator armor, it kinda seems like the fluff has been peed on and then set on fire.

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In second edition, I saw people field armies that were basically just two of these.

3rd edition presented a much more elegant solution to the problem than did previous editions. In 3rd edition you had a force organization chart, where you had to take at least two picks from the “troops” selections and one pick from the “HQ” selections. And you could take no more than 2 HQ and 6 Troops total. And then all the weird shit was divided into Fast Attack, Elites, or Heavy Support picks, and you could only have 0-3 of each of those. This meant that if you discovered that, for example, far and away the best thing Sisters of Battle could get were Retributor Squads, that your army wouldn't literally just be made of Retributor Squads. It would have 3 of them, and then at least 3 other things.

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Retributor Squads could pack four heavy bolters for surprisingly reasonable prices, which in turn meant that you fielded as many of them as you were allowed. Every time. But Retributors were also your best source of flamer squads and of anti-tank melta units, so you really wanted more Retributors than you were allowed.

Now this system was not without its problems. The first problem was that some of the missions talked about changing which picks you were allowed. That was seriously bullshit, because as noted these squads cost actual fucking money and if some mission says you are only allowed 2 Fast Attack picks instead of 3, you aren't going to call time and pay fifty dollars to get a new squad and paint it up before starting the game. That was just fucking stupid, and the battle missions that had serious alterations to allowed force organizations were called “the missions you fucking never play.”

But equally important is the fact that this whole thing doesn't scale very well. At super low points totals, the minimum core units use up all the points and you don't actually have much choice of what to field. At slightly higher point totals the points you have past the required core units are a harsher restriction than the limited points totals – when you can only afford 3 squads past the starting 3 units, the fact that you are only allowed 3 Elites or 4 Troops isn't meaningful at all. And of course for really high point totals you run out of things you are allowed to spend points on. The workaround for that was to allow people to field multiple force organization charts, with 2 troops and an HQ for each – but once you've done that we're pretty much back to the slots meaning almost nothing.

The force organization charts had a sweet spot of between 1000 and 2000 points, becoming one flavor or another of terrible if played on more or less than that.

And of course the very next year the Eldar Codex basically just shat on the entire concept by giving you Craftworld Theme armies that allowed you to turn pretty much anything in the army list into your basic troops. So if you wanted to run an army of all specialist troops you just had to announce that you were one of the holiday themed craft worlds and that the specific specialist units you happened to want to field lots of were core units for you.

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The Eldar Craftworlds were an excuse to minmax your army and an excuse to have a feast every couple of months.
Koumei:

To be fair, almost every sub-faction of an army (“This specific Chapter/Legion”, “This Ork Klan”, “This Tau Sept” and so on) is basically written up specifically because someone wanted to run an army with more X and less Y. But the thing is, back then, Eldar (to a vast extent) and Chaos (to a lesser extent) actually got that, whereas if you wanted to play Speed Freaks, you could go fuck yourself. They might have changed that with the Armageddon book (not to be confused with Epic Armageddon) or some other campaign thing. But it totally depended on what gave the writers a stiffy. There was no “Order of Raspberry Sherbet” that made Retributors or Dominions Troops.

There still isn’t, and I don’t have an image macro of the sadness brought by their lack of attention.

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Oh wait. I do.

Dark Eldar at the time were in a weird position where, as the Fast Attack army that Attacks Fast, they didn’t have any good Fast Attack things, so they filled their first choices up with 2x cheap HQ in a Raider, 6x minimum Warriors in Raiders (give Dark Lances and Blasters if possible), 3x cheapest Elite choices available in Raiders (give Dark Lances if possible?) and 3x Ravager, so that they can just fly around with an army of paper-thin vehicles that are nonetheless immune to Strength 3 and only Wounded on a 6 by Strength 4 and probably had some kind of Cover Save for going fast or for wargear, I can’t remember, firing out something stupid like twenty Dark Lance shots on the first turn. Then half that on the second turn when a huge number of vehicles turned into flaming wrecks, but whatever, if you made those shots count, you had a chance of winning.

This meant they were good to go for 1500 and under, and the further you went over that, the worse it got for you. Note that using multiple charts was not a core rule back then, and I have the feeling it was only some kind of “We here at White Dwarf suggest doing this”. So they wanted “Up to around 1500” or “Apocalypse”. And they didn’t want to ever take Fast Attack choices. Despite the playstyle of that army basically being Fast Attack (a Ravager is Heavy Support, but has similar armour to a fucking Chimera, and is faster than said Chimera, which is just a Dedicated Transport for Troops and Elites).

Although at least all of the Fast Attack choices back then were related to the Wych Cults (unless Scourges were Fast and not Heavy? I’m not sure I had started drinking or was even old enough, the last time I looked at the 3rd Edition Dark Eldar dex, which means my entire life’s worth of alcohol consumption sits between these two points), so because you weren’t playing a Wych Cult army, you could say you were being fluffy and thematic.

Getting back to topic, the organisation chart was mostly a good thing, and at the very least you could call it a vast improvement over what came before, or for that matter, the stupid percentage system Warhammer Fantasy went with a few years later. At least if you say “1 HQ 2 Troops minimum, build up from there”, people can build a 1000 point force that fits that, and then add chunks on in 500 point increments or whatever, instead of “This is my Leader for if the game is up to 2129 points, but if it’s 2130 or more, this Lord runs the show instead and changes the playstyle. I had best buy two entire armies.”
FrankT:

In the Grimdark Future, there is only war! Well, in pretty much any table top minis game, there is only war. It's a war game. You march tiny mens around and they shoot and/or stab each other. That's the whole game.

One of the key issues that a wargame has is that in order for me to field an army I have to buy models and paint them myself. That is a lot of investment, and I need to have people to play with before that investment sounds like something that isn't a giant waste or resources. But the other potential players are doing the same thing. What if we come to the table with armies that have no reason to fight? We could both be playing the same fucking army, for fuck's sake!

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A game like Flames of War, that does World War 2 has a big problem with people rocking up with only Axis armies. Hell, it can have the problem where one player brings in a force of Italians and the other player brings in a force of Maoist Chinese, and while they are definitely on opposite sides of the conflict it is also true that those two armies never got within three thousand miles of the same battlefield. This is a big problem.And Warhammer 40K solves this problem by having all the different factions be at war with all the factions, including their own faction. So even if both players are fielding the same flavor of Space Marine, there are still constantly internal struggles about hat shape, medallion coloration, egg opening sides, and other important heresies.

Of course even that doesn't explain conflicts involving the same fucking special character with an individual fucking name on both sides, which makes the decision in the various Codices to bring those fuckers back pretty confusing.

The deal where all the factions and subfactions are horrible villains certainly makes it easy to justify having a fight between whatever fucking army I brought to the table and whatever fucking army you brought to the table. But it is also a massive turn-off for some people. Some people don't actually want to be playing puppy kicking villains, and there exists a thriving branch of revisionism that claims that one faction or another are actually good guys. This gets super creepy when people claim that the literal space Nazis are actually heroes, but there are conservatives who claim that the Empire in Star Wars is actually the good guys, so that kind of fuckery cannot be escaped. There's obvious room for factions that are good, or even just less bad, but it's instructive how many 40K grognards lost their shit about the Tau.
Koumei:

Honestly, “shitty communications” makes for a great explanation for any number of battles. The Imperium can fight itself not just because they’re assholes (although they are) and constantly picking fights regardless of how smart it is (although they are), but just because a whole bunch of communication signals get distorted in the warp and two fleets bearing on the same planet (or planetary defenders and a “support fleet”) are convinced the other is Chaos. Chaos Marines can fight each other because each warband spots “Some Space Marines over there” and they lack the comms support to ask “Yo dawg, so, do you like Chaos?”

Now, on the topic of good guys, there absolutely are some in the universe. However, it’s not anyone big and important enough to affect the setting, or even enough people coordinated with each other to affect the setting. Your personal regiment of Guard could all actually be volunteer enlistees dedicated to serving their planetary system and defending it in whatever capacity against aggressors whilst taking in refugees regardless of ear-pointedness or green skin or whatever, and that’s great for their planets. But that’s a sparrow’s tear in a bucket compared to the actual Imperium of Man, or even just “The Imperial Guard” (as the Astra Militarum was known then, and should still be known). You can say your orks don’t just run up and pick fights with people (claiming they’re good as a species because they mean no harm by this, it’s just what they do, is both at odds with some of the lore (see Schroedinger’s Canon above) and also weird because you’re implying there’s nothing wrong with strangling people to death if you’ve had enough concussions to convince you that’s the right thing to do). You can have them trade with humans (this sometimes happens) and accept them in ork society (there was a whole book on this). You also don’t have enough models to break out of “a rounding error” on the total number.

I am absolutely including myself here – my collection of Adepta Sororitas are the Order of the Sacrificial Lilac, and I wrote that Order up as benevolent people that serve and protect Humanity in times of need, but that’s still the difference between your local priest who helped get your kid off drugs and paid out of pocket to house some homeless, and a high-ranking child molester and war profiteer in the Catholic Church. If anything, the small scale good is just helping give the large scale evil a good name, which is dangerous.

As for Tau, that’s a weird one, because certain things which are (and also are not) canon state that when they accept people into their society, it’s as sterilised manual labourers to be used as the first bullet shield in times of war, which is better than the Imperium for those same humans in basically the exact way that Poland’s occupation by the Soviets was better for them than their occupation by the Nazis. For the record, we’d have invoked some “Godwin alert, DRINK DRINK DRINK!” rule by now except:

A) It’s fucking Warhammer 40,000. Look at the fucking Imperial banner. They weren’t even pretending the Imperium wasn’t Space Nazis.
B) That law was retired when Trump had crowds perform a Nazi salute when pledging their loyalty to him, and basically it’s not coming back.

So anyway, according to some sources, Tau are still definite villains, they’re just a little less villainous than everyone else. According to other sources, that’s not explicitly the case, however there is still a strong theme in the official lore (as in, codices and core books and campaign books) of “the Ethereals use mind control to keep the order where everyone does their thing. It’s not the Greater Good, it’s mind control.” and they still present them as totalitarian Soviet-style communism rather than nice Scandiwegian socialism, along with a nice slice of British Colonialism.

So you can still make a strong case for them being “another faction of villains, albeit not as bad”. It’s harder to make a case for them being a straight-up force of good, because you need to ignore a lot of hints and assume they’re swerving everyone. What you can’t do is claim they’re AS bad as everyone else though, so whatever.
FrankT:

One area that Warhammer consistently trips on its own dick is with large numbers. None of the authors seem to have the slightest idea what any large numbers actually mean. When they say numbers they are almost always basically gibberish. It's like having a discussion with a four year old.

There are over a million inhabited worlds in the empire. There are a thousand chapters of space marines and each chapter has a thousand mans in it. And that means that if both those numbers are true, there are less than one space marine for each inhabited fucking planet in the galaxy. For all the ranting about how important Space Marines are, by the numbers they aren't important at all. They are outnumbered by other people by several billion to one, and if every Space Marine killed a person every minute of every hour of every day, they still wouldn't be as big a social problem as second hand smoke or drunk driving.

Every so often someone will notice that there are actually a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and that there being “over a million” worlds in the Imperium that for every inhabited system there are still a hundred thousand uninhabited ones. It's enough to make you wonder why people are willing to fight over territory.
Koumei:

We should still address the social problem of people going around getting killed by Space Marines. I mean is this really what we spend our taxes on? Something needs to be done about this.

Alternatively, someone needs to field an army of smokers. For Drink-Drivers you basically have Orks, and in fourth or fifth Edition they still had rules for certain vehicles careening out of control before exploding (kind of like second edition, but less powerful!), which is basically what drunk drivers do.

There actually is that quote about there being less than one Space Marine for every star in the galaxy, yet still always enough for the task at hand. The moral of that story is that there actually isn’t that much war going on and they’re barely needed at all. Because the vast majority of planets are therefore never seeing a Space Marine ever, and probably just winging it on Planetary Guard, and seeing as they are not deployed as individuals but as 1500 point armies, you could basically use a lottery system to visit planets and almost always come out free of Space Marines.

Also the sizes of armies in general are just small skirmishes – I’m pretty sure a pair of forces of fifty dudes and a few vehicles is actually fighting over “a town” and not much more than that, and the population numbers for the majority of worlds are bullshit small because “millions upon millions” sounds huge to a person sitting at home in a house of three, but guess what, Earth isn’t a giant planet and currently has around seven billion people. That’s even more than hundreds of thousands.

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FrankT:

Next Up: Armies of the Imperium.
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Post by Mechalich »

FrankTrollman wrote: One area that Warhammer consistently trips on its own dick is with large numbers. None of the authors seem to have the slightest idea what any large numbers actually mean. When they say numbers they are almost always basically gibberish. It's like having a discussion with a four year old.

There are over a million inhabited worlds in the empire. There are a thousand chapters of space marines and each chapter has a thousand mans in it. And that means that if both those numbers are true, there are less than one space marine for each inhabited fucking planet in the galaxy. For all the ranting about how important Space Marines are, by the numbers they aren't important at all. They are outnumbered by other people by several billion to one, and if every Space Marine killed a person every minute of every hour of every day, they still wouldn't be as big a social problem as second hand smoke or drunk driving.

Every so often someone will notice that there are actually a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and that there being “over a million” worlds in the Imperium that for every inhabited system there are still a hundred thousand uninhabited ones. It's enough to make you wonder why people are willing to fight over territory.
In fairness, this isn't exactly an uncommon problem in space opera generally. Any time anyone upgrades to the 'galactic' section of the scale they seem to forget just how big that is. I think it's visual, to be honest. If you see images of space it's possible to draw a big circle around a solar system or a galaxy and have nice neat little lines, but not any feature in between. So that's what people do, and because those are units the general public understands. Nobody talks about 'star cluster empire' (except for Mass Effect and they still couldn't resist the temptation to go galactic even in Andromeda) even though that's the sort of operational unit that would actually be viable.

It's still stupid, admittedly, and it's actually become considerably more stupid over time. Back when Warhammer 40K was conceptualized we barely had anything more than a giant guess as to how common planets actually were and you could actually say something like only one star in a hundred thousand has a viable world for settlement. You can't really do that anymore.
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Post by Koumei »

Thanks for having my back there on a couple of the image macros.

I'm not saying which, because it's fun to keep people guessing.
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Post by Ancient History »

The scale factor was one of the carry-overs from Warhammer Fantasy, where it makes slightly more sense since Herohammer was a thing and medieval conflicts could be bullshit small, but it's the entire reason that GW experimented with 6mm scale crap like Warmaster and Epic.
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Post by souran »

Ancient History wrote:The scale factor was one of the carry-overs from Warhammer Fantasy, where it makes slightly more sense since Herohammer was a thing and medieval conflicts could be bullshit small, but it's the entire reason that GW experimented with 6mm scale crap like Warmaster and Epic.
Pretty much every miniatures game is going to have "scale" issues because sculpting and painting are labor intensive.

GW didn't pick their goofy 28/32mm scale because they wanted to represent "small" medieval conflicts. They picked 28/32mm because the other guys in the industry at the time were doing 25mm and 28/32mm can have more detail because the model is slightly bigger. It also meant that in 1990 you couldn't use Rahl Partha for your warhammer army.

But issues of scale happen in really any game that counts individual models as distinct combants. Basically, they always have to few people. The other option is to say that the stand/base IS the unit and what sits on top of it is just flavor. This is the route that warmaster and epic went as well as some other games like Kings of War. The advantage is that you can then say that your unit represents tens/hundreds/thousands of guys without having to actually sculpt or paint that many.

Minis wargamers are a weird bunch though. I have talked to so many miniatures wargamers who absolutely HATE The idea of not being able to count individual casualties or really any kind of abstraction that doesn't let them say their plastic man killed that specific plastic man.

Rogue Trader wrote:
To be a man in these times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in cruelist and most bloody regime imaginable.


That was the initial pitch: that the Imperium of Man was literally the worst. And various people have written up subsequent apologia to claim it isn't really all that bad or tried to one-up it with new factions that they claim are even more terrible still.

The problem is that as far back as I can remember with 2E and the novels the situation was always pretty explicit that although it was a crapsack universe and the Imperium is literally the worst, all other options were even worse than the imperium.

Its a universe were you can be taking the bus to work and the guy next to you can turn into a demon without any seeming reason.Its a universe that by definition can't get better and is impervious to trying to "make sense" of it.

Like was mentioned every faction is given 5 stories where they are the only people who try and make the universe a better place and 5 stories of them being callous, evil, power hungry or just generally to incompetence to justify continued existence. That's on purpose. That's what is theoretically supposed to prevent the game from attracting the same sort of neo-nazi trash that shows up to play WWII wargames and just spends the whole time jerking off to how cool the SS were. [/i]
Last edited by souran on Mon May 29, 2017 4:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Orca »

Mechalich wrote:In fairness, this isn't exactly an uncommon problem in space opera generally. Any time anyone upgrades to the 'galactic' section of the scale they seem to forget just how big that is. I think it's visual, to be honest. If you see images of space it's possible to draw a big circle around a solar system or a galaxy and have nice neat little lines, but not any feature in between. So that's what people do, and because those are units the general public understands. Nobody talks about 'star cluster empire' (except for Mass Effect and they still couldn't resist the temptation to go galactic even in Andromeda) even though that's the sort of operational unit that would actually be viable.

It's still stupid, admittedly, and it's actually become considerably more stupid over time. Back when Warhammer 40K was conceptualized we barely had anything more than a giant guess as to how common planets actually were and you could actually say something like only one star in a hundred thousand has a viable world for settlement. You can't really do that anymore.
Since we still don't have any good idea how many of those planets are potentially inhabitable - the right size to have an atmosphere and the right distance from their star leaves a lot of possible ways to go wrong - that's not a big problem. Yet.

The bigger problem is that people forget that any inhabitable planets are likely to be at least on the order of the size of Earth. A couple of spaceships landing in random locations will likely be dealing with different environments, and without common, constant worldwide communications then they will most probably be dealing with different cultures too. A few hundred years of history is plenty for new cultures to emerge and space opera often gives you thousands.
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