State of the Sector, Eighteen Months In
or, the Disjointed Musings of two War Gamers on the matters of Balance Passes, List Chicken, and Crusade being A Lot
They Changed It, Now It's (Too?) Good
Oath of Moment.
Oh god, Oath of Moment. And Intercessors. Let's talk about them too.
So it was decided to give both a buff as apparently basic Codex Marines were were under performing at tournament level. I humbly suggest that they have WAY over corrected, especially when you stack the two. Intercessors now put out the same volume of fire as a unit twice their size - in our most recent game Von had a horrifying moment where my Intercessors finished off a damaged Monolith with sheer weight of bolter fire.
Imagine if this had actually worked, and also the Space Marines were taller.
That's basically what happened.
Would they be as bad if they didn't ALSO get a +1 to Wound from Oath of Moment?
Not as bad, but still too good. The bucket of dice to which the Intercessors now have access is scary when it's layered up with other "invisible rules" - Oath of Moment, Army and Detachment rules, Leader abilities, and so on. This is, in my ever-humble opinion, one of the most obnoxious things about current 40K: there are four discrete layers of crap that exist outside the realm of reading the board state and going "that's a Space Marine, and he's got a boltgun." I watched a Goobertown video about the state of the game for casual players, a while back, and while I don't agree with the premise I agree with a lot of his conclusions.
This problem - the theatre of rules - layers onto a core issue with the design of modern 40K. A decision has been made that anything can wound anything else, if it just shows a six on the wound roll - and likewise, anything can be wounded, if it just shows a one on the saving throw. Once that's a thing, quantity of fire becomes that much more dangerous. I'm not a statistician, you want Variance Hammer for that, but you don't need to go four decimal points deep to understand that when you have six possible outcomes, the impact of each bonus, malus or reroll is highly significant. Case in point, when those Intercessors get +1 to wound, they're twice as likely to get some chip damage onto something like a Monolith.
One solution to this is mitigating the impact of each modifier by making the dice bigger (thanks, Greg. Threg.). I would prefer to introduce another layer to the Wound chart. IF my S is triple your T THEN you just get wounded, no roll: IF your T is triple my S THEN I cannot wound you, no matter what. This is going to sound a bit hypocritical coming from a Necron player, but I don't actually think every small arm in the game should be able to chip any main battle tank to death. I'm not mad because everyone's got My Special Thing, I'm mad because making That Special Thing the baseline for the game feels silly.
Or how about this: there's the rule that some units have where they reducing incoming damage by one, to a minimum of one per hit. How about we ditch that second part and then give the rule to all vehicles? If vehicles are reducing all incoming damage by one - or maybe more for REALLY tough stuff - then they become immune to chip damage and you don't get a repeat of The Monolith Incident from our most recent game...
That could also work! And that lets you keep things like Gauss weapons effective against vehicles because you just give them Damage 2, which also makes them scary to heavy infantry, without the need to give them a special snowflake rule. This is what whatshisname (Brent?) from Goobertown was saying - if you want to make a unit or a gun better, give it better stats.
Bottom line is, we both think recent changes to the Space Marine rules have been an overcorrection, and one of us is a Space Marine player. That ain't brilliant.
Army Lists and Chronic Wembling
During our time with Crusade, we've pretty much always followed a simple procedure for picking upgrades for units: which upgrade fitted the emergent narrative best? My Aggressors went toe to toe with a Monolith and the last dude simply REFUSED to die? That was cool, let's give 'em Battle Scarred Resilience.
BUT: these upgrades were frequently chosen in isolation with no thought given to how they interacted with the rest of the army and whatever upgrades THEY might have...
And then suddenly I hit a critical mass of upgrades, went to put together a list for our most recent game and realised that literally EVERYTHING now had some form of damage mitigation and that I'm not playing Codex Space Marines any more, I'm playing Temu Death Company.
I had never planned this. I didn't see it coming.
I have a confession to make here. A lot of my upgrades were picked to mitigate inadequacies with the rules. Time and time again I passed up Cool Stuff in favour of "can I have +1 to hit so I don't have to play Awakened Dynasty all the time?" or "can I have +1 A and D on this weapon so it actually DOES something?"
Units had to earn their stripes fair and square, but I was trying to make them better at doing the thing, rather than commemorate the thing having been done in the first place. Except giving the Skorpekhs Heroic Intervention for free. They learned that from Kaine doing it to them.
As such, I ended up with a similar raft of stuff that hadn't really been considered in any context, except mine wasn't more than the sum of its parts and yours definitely was.
I think we both had the same issue, we just came out at opposite ends of it. Building an army in Crusade requires you to consider not just the abilities on the unit's datasheet but also the Army Rule and Detachment Rules and any Enhancements AND Crusade relics and honours and scars on top of that. It's a whole extra layer of obfuscation between me and how things will function on the tabletop, and that means...
When I actually sat down to write a list for our most recent game, and checked the Crusade notes for each unit as I added them to the list, and then stopped and thought about how they interacted with other units and THEIR abilities, enhancements and honours and relics, and then the new and improved version of my army rule, I realised my Order of Battle had unintentionally turned into an absolute war crime. And it was going to be really hard, bordering on impossible, to field a list that didn't make Von feel like I'd deliberately set out to shit on them.
I remember there was one point where I asked you to stop sharing lists, because all I was getting from them was "oh god he's sitting down and dojoing and working out synergies and one-round-kill orders of operation and getting sweaty." That's unfair to you - you were fretting and fussing for my sake - but in the moment it was putting a nasty edge on the interaction between your theoryhammer and my more impulsive "I want to try this thing this time!" approach.
You did end up stomping me in two rounds, but that wasn't because of Crusade bells and whistles: it was because I deployed badly and rolled worse, and as such I still had a good time! It would have been miserable - both "hard to win" and "insufferable to play" - if every single Space Marine on the field had some kind of damage mitigation, but it was all different rules so it wouldn't even be easy to implement, and I was having to think which unit had +1 to hit and which unit had +1 to reanimate and uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
Definitely uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
And it WAS so much more fun to play without all the extra cruft. We were laughing, we were telling jokes. YOU cheered when I killed your Monolith.
All Crusade is Narrative, Not all Narrative is Crusade
To come back to your point about "too many rules for our flat brains" for a moment, though: our Army Rules, or rather our Crusade Army Rules (another layer! another layer!). Mine were fun, and impactful, and the main reason I stuck it out with Crusade as long as I did. I enjoyed turning systems on with Agendas even if I didn't win games. I enjoyed the choice of keeping the small bennies or activating the master systems. Because they operated at the army level, it wasn't too much to remember - it was like having a second set of stratagems that didn't cost command points.
Whereas yours... well. From where I'm sitting, unless you especially wanted Your Dudes to become Chapter Master and Chief Apothecary and Chief Librarian and Chapter Champion (and have an additional non-datasheet-ability to remember! another layer!), Honour didn't do anything. Because you weren't going to replace your Infiltrators with Heavy Intercessors or your Intercessors with Terminators. You bought the models you wanted, and you wanted to use them, and replacing the units would even mean giving up abilities - some of which, like "sticky objectives," are kind of a big deal.
This. Why is it the Necron abilities all seem to actually do something whilst the ones in the Marine Codex look like nothing more than a thinly veiled ploy to make me buy more models? If my Intercessors get an upgrade, then it should make them Intercede HARDER, not Terminate. As it were.
So here we are, me and Von. Over a year into playing Crusade and finally having some cogent thoughts and opinions on it. It's not easy to keep up this red hot pace of up to the minute commentary, you know.
Anyhow - we've realised something: the two most fun games we have played in probably the last year have both been ones where we - for whatever reason - just tossed Crusade out the window. Having less stuff to think about, less rules we have to remember and try and keep straight in our minds let us devote more time to actually doing the stuff we enjoyed - throwing dice and yelling 'WHY WON'T YOU DIE' at stubborn lone models that are scuppering our entire plan.
What plan?
I jest, but my approach is extremely vibes-based, and this is why I've enjoyed going off-book. I don't want to be locked to the same units for game after game after game, especially when there's months between those instalments. If I want to jump sideways and play an all-light-vehicles Starshatter Arsenal build, or use my new Lychguard in an Obeisance Phalanx capacity, I want to be able to do that. On the day, if necessary.
And I have this idea called Team Gravis Bastard I want to give a whirl at some point...
It doesn't mean that we have to abandon the Narrative thus far Forged at all. Crusade's mechanics are basically RPG elements for either a solo experience - "Your Dudes, this is their Story" - or a league set in this or that metaplot location. As my colleague has correctly identified, we don't need any of that. All our games are followed up by this half-day session where we finish off last night's takeaway, have a good rant about the state of the hobby, and work out what the next story beat's going to be. We can do that just fine with Open Play - especially when I've still got last edition's Open War mission deck lying around to add just enough variety that it's not all "line up and touch four divots" all the time.
Variety is the spice of life and, it would seem, wargaming too.
Your "All vehicles at -1 damage + boosting special small arms to Damage 2" proposal may have just accidentally provided an answer to the Make Pulse Rifles/Carbines Great Again issue that I am told is quite a problem in your 10th edition 40k.
ReplyDeleteThe consequences of importing Warhammer elements wholesale into 40k have been disastrous, and the Golden BB wounding system is a good example of how game mechanics are not guaranteed to work across every setting.
Always Wounding on nat 6s works in 8th edition Warhammer because it's explicitly intended for an environment where even Strength 4 is pretty special, and most armies are expected to be mostly comprised of blocks of archers and spearmen that need *something* to have a fighting chance against big monsters and tough armour saves, especially in the context of making those basic archers and spearmen matter more (which is of course why the same game rules horked up Steadfast and Horde Fighting).
That model isn't really applicable to an environment like post-5th 40k where even Strength 5 is considered mediocre and just about every unit has access to some kind of big gun or lightsaber that's explicitly designed to put big holes in giant monsters and war machines.
In any case I largely concur about the wounding madness, though I ended up going with a different expedient of simply playing a different 40k game where solutions to that are already in place.
That's a very fair point regarding WFB mechanics not migrating over terribly well, and the plenitude of Bigger Weapons in space opera land. The weird thing is someone in the Studio clearly understands this, because the cap of 10 in a characteristic was dropped to allow for S18 guns shooting at T13 targets that have 22W - in other words, allowing the same rule set to acommodate the Big Lads.
DeleteWe actually have a local Tau collector, who came out of the woodwork last weekend to spectate on my game with Alpharius. We'll have to confirm this rumour about cruddy pulse rifles with him directly.
And another thing! Although I've advocated for higher damage on special small arms, and although giving Space Marines additional wounds or attacks has certainly made them feel as CHONKY as they should do, there have been... consequences to introducing those ideas.
For good or ill, Space Marines are the baseline profile of the game - the yardstick by which others' characteristics shall be judged. Making them two-wound, four-attack, this-would-have-been-a-hero-in-the-old-days profile pushes up the minimum threshold for what qualifies as a "good weapon" to an (even more) unacceptable degree. It's an unfortunate consequence of having the elite, best-of-the-best warriors also be everyone's starter army: there's so much in the game that has to be worse than baseline in order to sell that fantasy.
On Campaign Play,
ReplyDeleteThere certainly does seem to be some winners and losers with the bespoke crusade rules everyone gets. I have observed before that the Tau crusade rules - a sad affair that already felt phoned in in 9th edition and seems to have been simply been reheated for 10th, and amounts to a glorified map campaign that the other person doesn't even seem to have much agency over - was a key element of GW's failure to win me back into the Nuhammer fold, and something I still cite as damning evidence for how no-one in the GW studio seems to really know what to do with the Tau line.
Anyway, it seems to me that the crusade bloat is something of an ultimate expression of the game designers shouldering responsibility for fun, as applied to a narrative context. A kind of application of tourneycorn logic to the narrative sphere.
Take diplomacy for instance, which I am lead to believe is reduced to a kind of currency in the Tau crusade rules. I, a Tau player, would rather like to do some good honest negotiating and dealing in my campaigns, but I'd really rather just do it the old fashioned way by hashing agreements and pacts out with the other player(s) directly, a la the actual Diplomacy (though ideally without nearly as many real murders as that infernal game causes). In the case of opponent(s) being unreasonably intransigent, a simple "Roll dice, add Charisma + Current Renown, you'll take the result and you'll like it" opposed test to enact my bidding will suffice.
Point is, I don't really *need* the rules to hold my hand through all that, and I certainly don't need them to reduce the whole art of politics down to an arbitrary number to move up or down. Between Warhammer Adults, a lot of the resource management and number games baked into the crusade rules seem somewhat redundant.
Which is kind of why I'm growing ever more appreciative of the elegant simplicity of 3rd/4th edition's campaign rules which trust that players will be able to figure things out for themselves more often than not, and why I am growing a little nervous now that one of my 2004hammer regulars is suddenly getting ideas about salvaging 10th edition crusade rules for use in 2004hammer campaigns.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. 40K has... problems... as a setting for diplomatic events (something about the poster children being xenophobic, theofascist walking refrigerators with the permanently arrested personalities of teenage boys), but taking a step back and employing a bit of realpolitikal attitude isn't that much effort. And I think diplomacy in campaign play, like psychological warfare, is something best practiced between players rather than awkwardly simulated by hard rules, especially the abstraction that the Tau Crusade offers.
Delete(There's a sidenote here about Crusade doing three things at once. It's trying to be a single player campaign, where you level up Your Dudes and you have Your Strategic Layer which does whatever it does, switch on bits of your tomb world or take over multiple planetary systems or get to be Chapter Master one day. That's the Codex rules. Then it's trying to accommodate the traditional multiplayer wargames campaign, in a variety of forms - monster hunting, resource gathering, planetary conquest - that's the Crusade Books themselves, which ALSO double up on RPG elements like the ones in the Codices. And THEN it's also the main vector for metaplot advancement, with each book being set in a particular warzone and updating you on what the centrepiece kits are doing to each other. No wonder it's a mess.)
"Tourneycorn logic in the narrative sphere" is a recurring issue. It's telling that the RPG elements build up ever more elaborate wombo combos of weapons, traits, relics, hidden upsides of scars: it's pitched at minmaxers. In a competitive game (that is to say one player wins and one player loses, the foundational form of the game, not anything about the circumstances of play) there's no counter-incentive to be a good party member and hold back. I think a lot of Crusade is written to appeal to the kind of content creators whose reviews of the books and rules focus on How Busted Good These Rules Are and skip the scenarios because they're not the matched play deck which is of course the standard and best shoot me now. You know who they are. I believe you've written about Battlefleet Gothic Tau for them.
What's the meme format? "You like Crusade books because you can forge incredible OP custom characters, I like Crusade books because they add proper scenarios to modern 40K. We are not the same."
Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting anything like a model UN in my 40k games, but if I'm playing as a faction of altruistic neo-Wellsian space explorers, and one of their whole things is that they actually talk out deals and make friends and otherwise have a keen grasp of soft power instruments, then I would kind of like to be able to have some option of leveraging that in a campaign I'm playing should I wish. Particularly in a way that does not involve me buying and painting more models (since I'm about as good as Douglas Addams at working to deadlines).
DeleteAt any rate I bring the concept of diplomatic channels up as an example of an important concept that is likely to appear in the strategic layer of a campaign, and which hardcore narrative types are likely to find important, but which does not really translate into the toruneycorn world of wombo combos and shuffling divots and cards to make numbers go up or down.
Maybe it's a lack of exposure, or maybe it's sample bias from the meta vloggers and... them (actually my Battlefleet Gothic piece is probably the nicest thing ever written about the Tau on that god-forsaken pit)... but that's something that's an impression lingering with me the more I study the crusade rules of your 10th edition game - there's a distinct austerity of the *human* element in them. It's all numbers this and D6 that, with no real framework or channels for the kind of human to human inter-player sphere where important campaign stuff like diplomacy and psychological warfare and subterfuge have a natural home.
Maybe I'm just spoiled by the 4th edition Warhammer 40,000 book and tabletop game of kings Battlefleet Gothic. I suddenly feel an ode coming on..
Well, quite. The same goes for mercenary warmongers who take payment in guns, fuel and leftover dental matter, or manipulative fortune-tellers who need to manipulate somehow, or for that matter protocol-obsessed robots whose ragged empire is now full of things that don't understand the rules. I think you're spot on: Crusade is very much a Warhammer for Children enterprise, a self-contained theatre of rules in which you don't have to actually negotiate with or take responsibility for another person.
DeleteIronically, one of Those People is very much doing the Lord's work, and I think as long as Those People give Charlie Brassley an expanded platform they are doing something right. If you're not a Beard Bunker reader I urge you to become one. Same with the Woffboot. It's telling that these people do without Crusade for their antics, though: they have arrived at the same place Garbutt and I have, where these rules do something that is not the thing we want them to do, and if anything rather limited by comparison. Less is more, and people have to make their own fun. Nunc dimitis.