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TheLovablePlutonis posted:did the warhammer company die yet because it has been more than a year No, Fantasy got more screwed and 40K got clown elfs though, it's pretty sweet all around.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:13
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GW isn't going to die. It's the Terri Schiavo of miniature companies.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:34
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I loving hate formations with invisible rules upgrades its the worst like, oh this tank is ACTUALLY not a normal tank, it's part of this formation so its totally different even though looking exactly the same 40k is terrible
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Feb 17, 2015 23:01
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Moola posted:I loving hate formations with invisible rules upgrades its the worst What are you talking about? There is no formation that straight changes the rules. Some add to it, but it is really not that hard to keep track of. Babies play this game. This game is for babies. Why is it so hard for you?
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Feb 17, 2015 23:10
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Re: competitive chat When I played 40k I had just moved to a new state. Even as a new player I could tell the rules were trash, so I never bothered trying to build an unbeatable army or win every battle - I think my W/L ratio was something like .2, if that. Playing the game was really just a way to hang out with other nerds and show off my fancy painted army men while checking out other fancy painted army men. Now that I've got friends who play Malifaux and WMH I'm starting to get into those. Within my first game of each I saw how much more of an impact player choice has turn-to-turn, so since there's way less of a chance for a bad roll of dice to ruin the fun midway through I find myself wanting to actually get good at the games and build strong lists. Basically: Moola posted:40k is terrible
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Feb 17, 2015 23:11
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The best part about Malifaux; there's only 4 aces in a deck  Unless you're playing Lynch, where there's only 4 aces in a deck 
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Feb 18, 2015 00:52
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LordAba posted:What are you talking about? There is no formation that straight changes the rules. Some add to it, but it is really not that hard to keep track of. I said rules upgrades you lemon, like units gaining USRs. Also if you think this bolded part is true you might actually have autism. 40k is a loving nightmare to keep track of poo poo now; you have your rulebook for referencing all the USR and poo poo, your Codex to reference all your stats and extra special rules, your opponents codex for all their poo poo, you'll need a pen and paper or something to track your warlord traits and psychic powers, and now extra books for formation poo poo which you'll need to reference for the extra special rules they grant. And this is assuming you're not touching extra campaign missions or those stupid new cards. ALSO youll probably need to track wounds and hull points and stuff on your models so better have some system for that too! ITS A MESS! even the simple question of 'what army do you play' can take ridiculously long to explain. "Oh I play Space Marines, but i'm using the Clan Ruakan supplement rules and I have, allied Imperial Guard, I mean Astra Militarum and also an Inquisitor and a Knight too!" IT IS BAD!!!
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Feb 18, 2015 02:06
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OTOH it's really easy to keep track of target numbers and such because it covers a range of like 6 instead of 20+. Like, forty years from now my grandchildren will probably do something that involves the number three and I'll remember out of nowhere that a BS of 4 hits on a three. but for reals, memory issues are part of why the new proliferation of special snowflake force orgs/formations is such bullshit to me
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Feb 18, 2015 02:13
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JerryLee posted:a BS of 4 hits on a three. What a great example of a pointless number-that-references-a-different number. Why on earth isn't BS literally the number you need to roll to hit?
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Feb 18, 2015 02:14
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[redacted]
Apollodorus fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Feb 18, 2015 |
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Feb 18, 2015 02:24
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Except with armor, for no reason,
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Feb 18, 2015 02:30
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Leperflesh posted:What a great example of a pointless number-that-references-a-different number. Why on earth isn't BS literally the number you need to roll to hit? To keep it in line with every other kind of dice roll you need to do.
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Feb 18, 2015 02:34
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Leperflesh posted:What a great example of a pointless number-that-references-a-different number. Why on earth isn't BS literally the number you need to roll to hit? THIS! THIS! it should literally just read BS: 3+ its not even like WS that varies ffs
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Feb 18, 2015 02:37
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Hey guys remember when THACO was the arbitrary and complicated way to do saves in D&D? And how they changed that but GW still uses that for their game?
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Feb 18, 2015 03:06
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Moola posted:THIS! THIS! WS is loving garbage. A Bloodthirster has the same chance of hitting a grot as it does a Hive Tyrant. Even if they're adamant about there only being three relative levels and a chart why not just have three levels on the chart? WS 1, 2 and 3.
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Feb 18, 2015 03:41
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The worst thing is that WS is reliant on the opponent's WS, whereas BS doesn't need to cross-reference with any other stats (or modifiers, forbthe most part!). Having WS 9 or 10 means that (finally) WS 4 models hit you on a 5+ instead of a 4+, and you still only hit them on a 3+. Having BS 10 on the other hand leta you hit on 2+ with 2+ rerolls. It's not lile ranged is already the 40k meta already  High WS doesn't mean a thing, unless Lilith is involved. The chart really needs a huge overhaul to help fix melee in the game (hey GW, if you make melee the Next Big Thing you can encourage all those Tau and Necron players to buy whole new armies!).
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Feb 18, 2015 04:11
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Moola posted:I said rules upgrades you lemon, like units gaining USRs. Also if you think this bolded part is true you might actually have autism. Oh man, using dice or tokens to mark wounds is SOOOO HARD and COMPLETELY UNIQUE to warhammer and doesn't crop up in ANY GAME EVER. No other game places templates down on the field or comes with goofy combinations that I have never seen before. I mean, it's tough to tell the difference between "space marine" and "space marine on a bike". Come the gently caress on, I've had games against the Cyriss and Retribution that were more complicated then entire Apoc games. It's not like warhammer has that level of granularity... You literally have strength, toughness, and armor. Everything else is window dressing. Obviously I have autism. It is not you having attention deficit disorder. Nope.
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Feb 18, 2015 05:13
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Leperflesh posted:What a great example of a pointless number-that-references-a-different number. Why on earth isn't BS literally the number you need to roll to hit? I agree 100% FWIW but that wasn't my point (which you probably realize, just saying) Pretend I said 'space marines hit on a 3 when shooting' or whatever
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Feb 18, 2015 05:50
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Well yeah. The fact that Warhammer is such a crazy complicated game forces its players to memorize huge swathes of the rules, just to speed the game up to something sort of maybe tolerable. A better game (with better-organized rules) can actually allow a beginner to play reasonably quickly, because you don't have to look up tables constantly, or look up a special rule only to find out it includes two other special rules that you then look up to find out that one of those only applies in certain cases and the other means the whole unit follows yet another special rule. So you better memorize that poo poo. Anyway the way that BS and WS don't work the same is just as much of a problem as that BS is a number referencing another number. And I do know why it is that way, actually; it dates all the way back to the original warhammer fantasy battle, where it was "Bow Skill," and it's so that a bonus or malus to BS doesn't necessarily translate to a bonus or malus to hit, due to the thresholds. I think originally BS indicated what kinds of archery weapons you could use, too, like... I don't know, like you needed a higher BS to be allowed to use a longbow or something? You might have even had a different to-hit chart for each different ballistic weapon, indexed against the user's BS. Anyway it's one of those cases where you can't change the fundamental use/purpose of BS (or get rid of it completely) unless you're ready to publish changed stats on every unit in the game, simultaneously, and then potentially revisit points values for all those units as well. Since GW has always supported the games with piecemeal updates to each army, it's been stuck only being able to change the rules in ways that don't wholly invalidate existing army books. Except that they do anyway, and that's the biggest joke of all; that they've apparently felt constrained by the way they update the game, and yet, are such fuckups when it comes to rules changes that they radically change the game anyway with poo poo like introducing the steadfast rule in Fantasy, a sweeping change that suddenly made blocks of infantry good and small units of cavalry bad. Without updating points values for the existing infantry and cavalry in the game. So they might as well make wholesale rules changes anyway, like just printing a unit's to-hit number in the statblock and then designing everything that modifies it to be balanced based on that.
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Feb 18, 2015 06:24
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HiveCommander posted:High WS doesn't mean a thing, unless Lilith is involved. The chart really needs a huge overhaul to help fix melee in the game (hey GW, if you make melee the Next Big Thing you can encourage all those Tau and Necron players to buy whole new armies!). Good news! They changed A League Apart to just re-rolls to hit and to wound in challenges so now her WS doesn't mean anything either!
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Feb 18, 2015 06:47
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WS table should be the same as the To Wound table with 6 in place of the N/A imo
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Feb 18, 2015 07:11
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Leperflesh posted:Anyway the way that BS and WS don't work the same is just as much of a problem as that BS is a number referencing another number. And I do know why it is that way, actually; it dates all the way back to the original warhammer fantasy battle, where it was "Bow Skill," and it's so that a bonus or malus to BS doesn't necessarily translate to a bonus or malus to hit, due to the thresholds. I think originally BS indicated what kinds of archery weapons you could use, too, like... I don't know, like you needed a higher BS to be allowed to use a longbow or something? You might have even had a different to-hit chart for each different ballistic weapon, indexed against the user's BS. I would have assumed that the reason WS was sort of an opposed skill thing was because they wanted to have some sort of mechanical representation of parries. Of course, it'd probably be better to represent that as an invulnerable save in close combat, or something, and just make WS a flat value like BS. When it comes to a newbie being able to play the game much more simply, without looking up all the tables... well, from my point of view, yes and no. Yeah, I had to look up tables and statlines constantly for a while when I was learning 40K, but I came out of it with a more or less intuitive understanding of threat ranges, relative odds, etc., all the sort of thing that are eventually more or less necessary anyway. With a different game, it's like, yeah, you can roll the dice and add MAT from this card and compare it to DEF on this one, but it's still going to take a while to achieve that sort of system mastery, and in the case of a system that uses two or more d6 per action and has a much wider range of potential values, it feels to me like a harder task to achieve overall. The fact that the individual actions require less initial page-turning doesn't make the gameplay as a whole feel more accessible to me, in other words. None of this should be taken as a defense of GW's execrable approach to iterating their rules, or to say that I don't think 40k's system could be vastly overhauled for the better while retaining what I like about it.
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Feb 18, 2015 07:22
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The main thing to keep in mind with any system that uses multiple dice per result over a single die, is that while there are more possible results in a 2d6 or 3d6 or whatever, the odds become considerably more predictable. You always have equal chances of getting anything between a 1-6 in WHFB/40k, in Warmahordes you're a lot more likely to roll a 6-8 than any other possible result between 2-12, which makes that one roll you're making at a time a lot more predictable without completely eliminating the chance of an outlier in either direction.
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Feb 18, 2015 07:48
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Can next month's design challenge be to make a 40k that doesn't suck?
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Feb 18, 2015 07:58
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moths posted:Can next month's design challenge be to make a 40k that doesn't suck? We had a thread for just that but it failed because goon projects. Maybe having it be competitive rather than collaborative would get some would-be game designers to get off their asses instead of just being idea people?
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Feb 18, 2015 08:03
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Hra Mormo posted:Good news! They changed A League Apart to just re-rolls to hit and to wound in challenges so now her WS doesn't mean anything either! JerryLee posted:I would have assumed that the reason WS was sort of an opposed skill thing was because they wanted to have some sort of mechanical representation of parries. Of course, it'd probably be better to represent that as an invulnerable save in close combat, or something, and just make WS a flat value like BS.
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Feb 18, 2015 08:05
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I've been brainstorming an idea to try and align points costs for basic troops with actual math and it's really hammering home how cheap poo poo is nowadays. Is it GW's attempt to down play troop tax for the cool stuff, or just a way to sell more models? You decide!
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Feb 18, 2015 08:05
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moths posted:Can next month's design challenge be to make a 40k that doesn't suck? Let's make March "Make 40K Not Suck Month", for shits and giggles, than canibalize the best ideas for a closed colab project. Or something. Infinity melee is comparatively easy, and has the same effect - after modifiers, you want to roll under your score, and more than the opponent.
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Feb 18, 2015 08:50
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HiveCommander posted:Really? That sucks That sounds even more complicated than before. And should a guy with high WS hit another guy with high WS just as easy as he hit someonw with low WS?
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Feb 18, 2015 09:05
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Not a viking posted:That sounds even more complicated than before. And should a guy with high WS hit another guy with high WS just as easy as he hit someonw with low WS? I was just throwing out an idea that makes having high WS not almost entirely useless. Needing more than double the opponent's WS to be hit on something worse than a 4+ is just plain dumb.
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Feb 18, 2015 09:16
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Not a viking posted:That sounds even more complicated than before. And should a guy with high WS hit another guy with high WS just as easy as he hit someonw with low WS? I also would like to mention Force on Force and their 4+ mechanic. You hit on 4+, and the nice thing is that it's determined by troop quality. A heretic might be d6, a Space Marine a d10, d12 is heroes and stuff.
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Feb 18, 2015 09:24
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HiveCommander posted:The worst thing is that WS is reliant on the opponent's WS, whereas BS doesn't need to cross-reference with any other stats (or modifiers, forbthe most part!). The thing is 3rd ed WHFB and Rogue Trader had a wider variance for the dice rolling charts plus dealing with things like cover, range, target speed, ect meant things mattered more. They just massively dumbed down the game for 3rd ed 40K. poo poo in the revised Rogue Trader/2nd ed 40K having a WS of 7-9 versus some dude with a 4 meant in general you were very very likely to hit that dude 3 or more times with whatever uberstrength weapon you inevitably would have on such a murderbeast. Yeah 2nd ed/Necromunda close combat rules were basically good for skirmish fights only and your average 3-5th ed Ork Boyz Mob would take a loving day to roll that many fights but for the game scale RT-2nd had it worked well enough. (Or you could just backload original Rogue Trader combat in I suppose. While I love having a nearly complete RT collection honestly the rules are so loving scattershot you might as well just play 2nd edition and rip out the stupid poo poo like the Psychic phase while maybe using 3rd ed's army construction rules and finding ways to limit the all special characters with all the best wargear and some Terminators or other elite troops because why use Scouts when you can have 5 BS 5 Wolf Guard Terminators with 4 Assault Cannons, 1 Cyclone, all with Targeters?) They basically did a slow version of what Chambers did to my beloved Space Marine/Titan Legions Epic though not quite as severe. Simplified the game to absurd levels so presumably to sell more miniatures to play bigger games without all those interesting and flavorful rules that made things really loving fun if people weren't trying to abuse army construction. (3rd ed just found people finding new ways to abuse poo poo. Like the all indirect fire IG with hordes of guys in front of the Basilisks so you couldn't hit them like EVER. Or my CSM where I had Nurgling packs in front of my Havocs because multiwound and invulnerable Demon saves made them more useful than any silly old tank that instantly died on a 6. Or my Terminators who all became magically equipped with POWER MITTENS instead of Power Fists because LOL at attacking at Init 1 given the original 3rd ed Terminators were only moderately useful.) Also the game insists on always using D6s because even back then the devs said GW wanted to make sure kids could easily just raid their lovely board games for dice to play. Though even Monopoly has tried to evolve with the times. U Build Monopoly is basically a Eurogame mod of Monopoly and makes it pretty fun. Risk has done tons of tweaks to improve the game experience. GW titles refuse to advance at all. 4th-6th ed 40K basically kept putting poo poo back in the game that 3rd took out!
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Feb 18, 2015 09:53
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By the amount of Space Marines on a table, what would be the smallest interesting game? Like, if there are more than two squads, captain, and a tank. Also, which edition had the least Marines on the table?
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Feb 18, 2015 10:20
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The earlier the edition, the fewer models on the table, period. I re-read a 2nd Ed. White Dwarf and the battle report featured a 2000 pt CSM list with something like 19 models in it, including 3 bases of Nurglings and 6 Plaguebearers. It also included Abaddon and some Termis, but, hey, 19 models.
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Feb 18, 2015 10:22
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HiveCommander posted:The best part about Malifaux; there's only 4 aces in a deck I bought an official Malifaux deck and played with it a while and kept getting hosed by black jokers. I finally said gently caress it this is ridiculous and went through it and somehow my sealed cards had two of them. If it was the other way around it would have looked like I was cheating but serious what the gently caress.
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Feb 18, 2015 15:04
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JerryLee posted:I would have assumed that the reason WS was sort of an opposed skill thing was because they wanted to have some sort of mechanical representation of parries. Of course, it'd probably be better to represent that as an invulnerable save in close combat, or something, and just make WS a flat value like BS. No, that's not what is going on; in earlier iterations of the game there were actually parries. Each parrying weapon you had (usually a sword but not always) allowed you to force your opponent to re-roll one of his attack dice. The current WS/BS system is a mess because they took the system that existed in 2nd edition and tried to cut it down to make some sort of sense for a larger game without actually changing core stats. Obviously they should have just burned the whole thing down at the end of 2nd when they made a choice to switch the nature of the game, but they didn't. This is how close combat used to work: Two models in close combat both roll dice equal to their Attack value, as modified by any equipment, etc. Each model then picks their highest dice, and adds their weapon skill to that value to give their combat score. But! If you rolled multiple attacks, any 6 you rolled adds an additional +1 to your total, and every 1 you rolled adds a -1 to your score. There are also equipment effects, like you can use your sword to Parry your enemies high dice, and some weapons have modifiers (I think a Power Axe was -1 to your combat score in exchange for higher strength? Whatever). Whichever model has the higher total score wins that combat, and the value they beat them by is the number if hits you get. Then you roll to wound, save, etc. If you draw, the higher initiative wins with one hit. If you tie initiative, you roll off. If you tie your roll, you both pose with imaginary katanas to acknowledge the stalemate. Note that unlike current combat, only the winner gets to hit - you can't weather the enemies blows and then fight back, if you are too lovely to hit him you just get to eat punches all day until he kills you. Suck it. This means that a really high WS allows you to safely wreck everyone's poo poo. If my Avatar (WS10) gets into combat with your Space Marine, you can just go gently caress yourself - the only possible way that you can hit me is if I fumble all my attacks and you roll a 6 and then reroll the parry to a 6. Whereas a Hive Tyrant (WS8? I dunno) can actually win the combat. This was balanced out, sort of, but the rules for multiple attackers. In 2nd edition, every combat was essentially fought as a duel between two models at a time; if a model was engaged by multiple enemies, he fought them kung-fu style one at a time, and each successive enemy in that turn received +1A and +1WS to represent ganging up on the guy. So if your Avatar wades into a horde of Gretchin, he is going to pulp a bunch of them, but eventually around the 8th one the Gretchin have 8 attacks and WS9, and he starts losing - they won't actually hurt him, of course, but he gets bogged down. As you might imagine, while this is sort of ridiculous for a skirmish, actually doing this for games where you have dozens of models in combat is terrible and time consuming and makes you want to kill yourself, so they wanted to simplify it all down to something that wasn't so poo poo. But they didn't want to completely burn down the stats and everything, so instead they jigged it over to more or less the current method (which I think was in fantasy already, maybe? Who knows). Shooting was more or less the way it is now, but there were far more modifiers for situations and conditions. -1 if you moved, -2 if your opponent moved fast, -1 if he was behind a bush, -1 if he was at long range (or something, depending on your weapon), +2 if the target was large, on and on. This meant that instead of BS4 being a consistent 3+ to hit, it would be modified all over the place and end up meaning you could generally hit most things, where someone with BS10 could walk off a ton of penalties and land an overwatch shot at long range on a jetbike emerging from cover (-5). Even then this could have been rephrased around the actual hit roll instead of a number to reference another number, but frankly the BS to hit chart was hardly a footnote compared to the number of charts and numbers-referencing-other numbers in the game at the time.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:14
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Also, the fact that I can recall how 2nd edition combat works after 20 years is a goddamn testament to my wasted youth. On the off chance someone in this thread is a teenager and not an aging grognard, please do yourself a favor, dump this poo poo into the trash, and go find something to do that will be worth remembering in your dotage.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:16
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To be fair, that's such a convoluted and exacting process that you'd be hard-pressed to forget it once learned.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:24
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Radish posted:I bought an official Malifaux deck and played with it a while and kept getting hosed by black jokers. I finally said gently caress it this is ridiculous and went through it and somehow my sealed cards had two of them. If it was the other way around it would have looked like I was cheating but serious what the gently caress. Hahaha I had the exact same thing happen with some themed Bicycle deck I was using. I ended up needing to doodle on one with red marker (and I show them both to my opponent before the game). At least in that deck the jokers weren't explicitly expected to be used, in an actual Malifaux Fate Deck that's just ridiculous.
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Feb 18, 2015 17:02
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Note that 3E close combat was a return to the WHFB system that was also used in RT. Only 2E and its derivatives, Necromunda and Gorkamorka, used that absurd system.
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Feb 18, 2015 17:05
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