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.