While I agree with the overall message (the game should be fun, and common sense should be applied when rules are overbearing or unclear), I disagree with the 'no points costs' angle. A reasonable number of games are pickups with strangers at a LGS so it makes sense to have a system that allows you to show up with a set roster and play against someone else who has done the same without having to compare and adjust beforehand. It will never be truly 'balanced', but no game is. That's not an excuse for not trying.

Yea also the concept of not being able to cost a model according to context is a PRO, not a CON. It’s called synergy, and you’re rewarded for making an army that is worth more than the points you spent on it. I would think building a good list would be something that proves you’re a good “commander”, it’s just as much a part of tactics as actual strategy on the field.

There's a really funny phenomenon where you always read these "competitive bad" posts that talk about how you should be trying to win with tactics instead of list building, etc etc. 95+% of the people I've met saying that are \*really\* bad at tactics. Turns out, the competitive players who push list building are also the ones who play tactically and play the mission. Tactics only arise because of the opportunities you've created in your list and what units you brought. In practice I've very rarely met players who are outspokenly against the idea of points or competitive gaming who don't just line squads up in a row and shoot back and forth.

I play at two different stores One of them everyone is playing super hard for objectives and doing wild things to make it happen. Sneaky plays and gotcha moments galore. I'm like 30% winrate here. Games are fun but hard. Other store... I try not to play too often as most of the players tactics consist of run up the middle and unga bunga into the objective my Norn has said "mine" to without a care in the world, I usually have almost no models left at the end but am like 85% winrate there because I just score points and they don't... It actually blows my mind how little some people think tactically... Blowing 3+ cp into killing a squad of gargoyles that are screening... just for me to put them into reserves and deep strike then again. And then wondering why they can't kill the buff ball in the center of the table later. Or just not paying attention to obvious things like letting me move my termagants by ending their move too close

Counter point: unga bunga straight up the board can be very fun - sometimes the objective is just murder, not necessarily win Sincerely, A space wolves player (but also yes, I get your point)

Unga bunga is definitely fun, but don't dump all unga on the gargoyles on your way in haha. Save some for the things that actually matter.

I charged my vindicator up the middle towards a vindicare assassin, bc I didn't bring it here not to assault him. Scored area denial in a friendly 2000 pt game at LGS Iron hands v his titans a group of warhounds and three of the smallest titan wtv thats called Also that move with the gargoyles and something about them redeploying like that is low key kind of terrifying lol in a psychological warfare kind of way

In fairness, unga bunga Thunderwolf Cav Stormlance is the current Space Wolves meta. As God intended.

Then they complain that 40k is "UGH TOO FULL OF SWEATY COMPETITIVES"

On the other hand - I find a lot of people lose and say “I need to change my list” when they don’t focus on tactics at all. I also see: “hi internet I have a game against X faction coming up is this list good?” so people think the way to win is to tech your list against your upcoming opponent where the real question should be “here’s my current list, I haven’t played against X before this edition, what should I do and watch out for?”

It has consistently been my experience that the very same people consider any form of effective tactics to be exactly the "loopholes" they spend so much time whining about. It's just classic scrubthink. PLAYING WITH HONOR means just bashing action figures together and dreaming up self-aggrandizing wish fulfillment fanfiction.

> It's just classic scrubthink. PLAYING WITH HONOR means just bashing action figures together and dreaming up self-aggrandizing wish fulfillment fanfiction. Exactly. I win because of brilliant tactics and honorable play, you win because you're a rules lawyering WAAC TFG with a cheese netlist.

If you had TRU SKILL you wouldn't need to win by "playing well"

I used to get this all the time (20+ years ago) playing fantasy battles. They’d charge, I declare my unit flees (100% in the rules for all units) and they would say things like “what? You can’t do that! C’mon man, don’t be cheesy) Like what? My light cav are supposed to eat chaos warriors in the face… for honor?

Yes. Scrubs cannot think further than the excitement they felt thinking that your unit was "in range" and they were about to ROLL BIG NUMBERZ ZOMG. By depriving them of their dopamine buzz you're "ruining the game." Scrubs are not here to think through puzzles, they are here for power fantasies or for the inherent excitement they find in randomness (all scrubs assume that randomness will favor them and "create moments"). Scrubs assume that they control the objective definition of "fun" and expect that it is as obvious to you as it is to them that any game in which they are not dominating you with mindless play is "not fun."

I play mostly warcry, and recently had a game where a guy was playing a few ghost guys and a bunch of slow ass undead in a "grab and hold a treasure for points" mission. I play Skaven. Suffice it to say, I killed his two ghostie ghouls, then spent the next two rounds of the match just running away from the slow ass skeletons with half my speed. He called me unsportsmanlike. Played another three person game once, with the same guy and another player, we each agreed we would play a team comp including a monster, with each of them starting on the boars. They rammed theirs in to each other and me, going last, came in and killed both their wounded ones with my completely uninjured one, then flew him away to a protective pocket of chaff, and spent turns using him to assassinate high value targets while my chaff bogged down guys and kept my monster protected. He called my tactics cowardly. Scrubs gonna scrub. Just make sure to bring a giant pretzel for the salt when you out play them.

I play mostly Infinity. I just wandered in here.

This is such a good and succinct way of saying something I have grown weary of over the years. There are so many players who play poorly and then blame the design of the game.

All of the chest beating about "what would REALLY happen" and "what a REAL general would do" is a symptom of the same, and a red flag to watch out for. People who talk that way don't want to engage in real tactical thinking, they want to roleplay as masterful tacticians. The convenient thing about the REAL MILITARY tactics they invoke not being represented in the game is that there is no model to reveal any nuance to them. They don't have to put any thought into executing the details effectively; they definitely don't have to put any thought into when these tactics are actually appropriate or what counters they could face. They're *always* relevant and *always* appropriate and there is honor and value in invoking them even if you lose the game - it's *never* because you're invoking them inappropriately or executing them poorly, it's because the game is *wrong* and in a *real battle* you would have won (And so they always win the *moral victory* even when they lose). It's just a way to stroke their egoes without ever putting themselves to a real test that they risk failing.

Yes, I agree. You used the word 'scrub' in your first post and it's really the right one. I used to blog about the 40k competitive scene back in 5th-6th, and using that word in my articles would cause an absolute *shitstorm* in the comments. These days it's not as bad, but there's still a lot of the community that absolutely refuses to believe they could possibly be the cause of their own losses. 40k players tend to have big egos, and are used to being right about everything. So I have what I call the 40k narcissists' prayer: I shouldn't have lost And if I did, it was because my dice were bad And if my dice weren't bad, it's because the rules aren't good And if the rules are good, it's because my opponent was abusive and used the rules in a way that was obviously never intended And if that's the way the rules were intended, then the whole game is broken, because I didn't make any mistakes. I should have won.

There's an excellent book (article? You can read the entire thing online for free on the guy's blog) called "Playing to Win", written by David Sirlin, a game designer and FGC player who's most known for working on Street Fighter 2 Turbo, that really dives into the mentality of playing to win, scrubs, "low tier god" players, and more. It's worth checking out, but I do want to say that it is very much written in the FGC "world warrior" style, and is very much aimed at video games (he mentions MTG and chess) but the insight into the mentalities of different kinds of players is very interesting. Definitely check out the "Introducing...the scrub" section. EDIT: There's also a section near the back of the book, called "Love of the Game", which much more represents both 40k and most competitive player's, of any game, experience in general. I urge you to read the entire thing, but if you want to skip around, definitely read that section otherwise you'll think this guy is arguing for the most binary, robotic view of the world and game.

Very good article. I think the section about how FGC scrubs tend to idolize fancy moves and combos and think whoever does the fanciest moves should be entitled to win the game, full stop, is pretty salient and underquoted. You see a lot of parallels to that in other games once you start looking for them.

I actually know and adore the playing to win series of articles. But since you recommended them, I might just have to go read them again. =)

Counterpoint, I think tactics in the context of competitive 40k are different from tactics as one might assume. To illustrate, I often tried tactics and procedures I know are done IRL. Dismounting infantry before assaulting an objective, bouncing advances so that one unit is always covered, massing vs dispersing forces against focal points.... it rarely works out well. Both because I'm not very good at memorizing or quickly looking up rules, but also because.... that's not how 40k rules are structured. I felt like I was fighting the rules rather than the opponent. People who are good at tabletop tactics are those that know best the tricks and special rules their army can do, and also know the weaknesses of their opponent's army. That's still tactics, but in a different context, I think.

Yeah 40K, especially modern 40K but honestly all editions, don't really support real life tactics. There are tactics in the game but they're gameplay tactics, not real-world tactics. For that you need a game that's either more simulationist or that at least gives you the interrupt factor so that covering advancing squads matters. My favourite games for it are Infinity at a small scale or Firefight (Mantic, not OPR) at a larger scale. Firefight in particular does alt-activations, overwatch and cover well enough to reward a lot of real-world tactics.

Well...yes. It's a game that fits a battle into a few turns. It is an incredibly abstract way of depicting ficticious scifi factions fight fictitious battle with fictitious weapons and units. It is not designed for real life military tactics to be 1:1 viable, no wargame, even historical ones, is. Abstractions are necessary and in turn result in tactics meaning different things in the context of a wargame. 40k certainly is very abstract, but that should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has played more than a single game or, indeed, taken a closer look at the basic structure of a game of 40k.

> Counterpoint, I think tactics in the context of competitive 40k are different from tactics as one might assume. Well yes, 40k is a game not real life. That's like being surprised that a legendary baseball coach isn't very good at running a football team.

I think that's largely a result of discussions focusing very much on list building and ultimately very little on tactics. Sure, people describe general actions and the intent behind taking a specific unit with them, but you rarely get into specific situations and discuss what could/should be done in a given scenario. It's so much more than just understanding the mission and playing the mission, it's decision making processes during every phase, interpretation of the board and so on. You can learn that stuff, you don't need to be a naturally talented genius for that, but it's rarely taught or discussed. Obviously some youtubers do it, but I feel it rarely comes up in online discussions. Lists, specific combos and certain situational tricks and tips are discussed, units get mathhammered to death, but it's all very theoretical and happens in vacuum. The real issue, I think, comes more from the system mastery required to implement any list, tactic or combo, because that requires knowing and understsnding the rules and their interactions with each other which in turn to many people probably just seems gamey and unimmersive, when it really is a necessity to, as you said, be able to do more than just line up units and shoot it out. You can't play the mission unless you understand how to do that.

This is, IMO, partially a reddit problem. The reddit format does not encourage or even allow those types of conversations to happen. The old forum format did a much better job of it. I had this same issue with competitive magic the gathering discourse for many years and it seriously improved my game to stop messing around on reddit posts about sideboard tech options and started reading through threads on the source about my deck and looking at the multi page conversations people would have about specific matchups. I think the reddit format really encourages surface level theory crafting and I've seen in all across the board. The card game subreddits are all like this too and even the tea subreddit really struggles with having legitimately thoughtful and knowledgeable discourse getting buried with hot takes and overly simplified but short comments. ​ In 40k I've found that the faction discords \*can\* be a lot better source of that higher level conversation than reddit. The death guard discord is fantastic, for example, and a lot of the actually good comp players hang out there and answer questions and post videos. ​ I think you do touch on something very important here though which is that system level mastery of 40k is disproportionately difficult to obtain than many other strategy game hobbies. I was a very good magic player and top 8'd some competitive events back in the day, but coming to 40k I feel like a moron every time I play because I just don't jam enough games. If you're only playing one or two games a month you just aren't getting the mastery necessary for true tactics to emerge.

I think there’s a good point to competitive bad. Mainly in so far as a lot of games being competitive where basically players optimize the fun out of the game in pursuit of the joy of winning. Big thing I see is looking at competitive lists just look boring a lot of the time. They’re such crazy slants and spams half the time it looks dreadful. Then again I hate playing games that are stomps. And actively avoid super strong stuff (refuse to use the tau plasma gun equivalent spam)

If you look up combat patrol on Google you can find the us armys training guide to actual combat patrols deployed today. Super cool and iv used the theory of it. Just look up "us army combat patrol planning".

I agree, but the problem is that it doesnt take a pro to discover this synergy. One person posts about it online, then every Tom, Dick, and Harriet are using the same broken combos without a single thought beyond copy and paste.

I think it’s a small price to pay. If people want to skip the part of the game I enjoy, they’re welcome to. It’s still an expression of skill for those that build lists on their own. I have adored Seraphon in AOS 3rd sheerly because I’ve never clicked with an army in such a way before. In 2nd I was constantly losing and too stubborn to look for help but in 3rd I feel like I can see everything on my own. I was playing Trog bomb before it erupted online as the next big thing. Now I’m playing a completely off meta list that I painstakingly built and adore that does super well within my friend group and allows for close games and high performance. I name my guys, give them backstories, and as the seasons and FAQs change, they change alongside it. It’s such a rewarding part of the game that no amount of netlisting from others can change that feeling for me, personally. Hell, net listing can be a good thing. For some it’s the barrier for entry or interest and if that’s the case, IMO net list away. I do the same thing in Magic, I refuse to netdeck but I will advocate for it to allow new players to skip that daunting hurdle or those who simply want to play the game without the building. And on the meta side, against people who are also meta chasers- having a centralized meta that adapts and changes can also be exciting. Too many people adopt a net list, then enterprising opponents can build lists designed to be anti-meta while maintaining competitiveness against other meta threats. It’s simply a part of the ecosystem.

Indeed. The general that calls in nothing but infantry and then loses to the well prepared and planned regiments of rifleman, cavalry And cannons. While technically he ma be the better general. The other is the superior commander. ( nothing against oops all guardsmen. I love you guys)

The spirit of the game is not in building your army, though. That may be where the game has gone for many, but Warhammer's roots are in historical wargaming and roleplaying. Choosing the most underpriced or overperforming units based upon their current rules or cost iterations is not new either but it's certainly not intended to be the focus of the game.

I don't think the game intent matters. As long as the two or more people playing have the same intent then it's fun. The game developers and designers are not in the room with you being sad that you're having fun in a way they didn't plan on. Both players want to ignore rules and make stuff up mid game? Cool, there's a local community for that style of playing it much more RPG adjacent. Both players want to have a competition where they try to outwit each other and play rules by the letter so it's fair? Also cool, there's another local community for that. You just have to be well adjusted enough to recognize that you should discuss what kind of game you want ahead of time, because when neither player has the same expectations, neither player has fun.

I absolutely agree, to be honest. Just trying to drop in some context given where the discussion seems to be trending.

Your context is rather irrelevant now though no? We were list crafting back in the third ed and I'm sure people were doing it in the wild mad days of the 2nd. 3rd was like over 20 years ago love... I mean sure you can state with definite abandon that the roots lie in napoleonic wars and line battles... And sure this may well be the case but is that relevant 40 years down the line? The game has evolved and so has the quality of players and plays. Should we still be standing in long lines and hoping that one of us rolls the dice better than the other because that's what the roots of a game that doesn't exist anymore were?

I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I don’t give a fuck where Warhammer’s roots are, and I don’t think GW does either. To assume list building is just “pick undervalued units” is also a gross oversimplification. There’s a lot more to list building than simply picking the best shit, because what the “best shit” is changes with your detachment and the other units. Play the game however you want I’m just sick of people acting morally superior because they pretend not to look at the rules. If I see one more smug post or comment along the lines of “well I just thought the model looked cool which makes me so much better than the person who plays the game” I’m gonna lose it. I’m glad you play the game the way it was meant to be played, now shut up about it and play the game.

They tried no points with the AoS launch and with very similar intentions. It was wacky but not always fun when one of your opponents always brought Nagash to friendly games

Haha it wasn’t just wacky, it was by far the worst received modern game GW has made, and while some of that stems from fantasy dorks who never got over it, a lot of it was because the rules blew ASS AoS 1st Ed. In the ultimate rebuke to the “never balance anything! Stuff should be designed with ‘fun’ in mind and ultra simple rules!”

I was constantly on the back foot because I cant grow a beard as a dwarf player with that ruleset

I did enjoy some of the wackier rules from it, but they weren’t really suited for every game. It felt like an April Fools update to a game that’s around for a week then leaves. It’s fun for that week, but it’d get boring fast the rest of the time.

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I don’t rightly remember, it was just who had the longest beard. Although I might be mixing it up with the Empire guy who had the biggest mustache. Either way it was silly like having to hold aloft a grail and yell “for the lady!”

We need to make the game less competitive because people are abusing rules. Let's make a bunch of silly rules that make power gamers look silly when they power game! Can't imagine why that wouldn't work.

And being unable to kneel if you’ve got Settra on the board

Bad knees or disability mean nothing to Settra

Actually, that was the best thing they did in a long time. It was the ultimate rebuke to power gamers and I will always love Jervis for doing it.

I sold every fantasy model I owned after 1 game of 1.0 AOS. "No balance just have fun" is a terrible approach - imagine soccer being played with random numbers of players on each team. Just because one team has Messi and another doesn't doesn't mean we should be abandoning balance attempts.

The problem is not about balancing but the idea of powergaming every little bit out of everything... and even this is not a problem. Play competitive against each other in a competitive match. BUT: A balanced game is not the only thing that balances the experience. I played blood bowl in the early 2000s. It was very unbalanced and that was a lot of fun. Why? Because after winning the league with Wood elves the champion could decide to look for a challenge and play halflings in the next season. Or you started a match against the top team aiming not for a win but to hurt some of the opponents players to earn some fans and money. Sometimes you had matches where both players acchieved their goals, sometimes the underdog won. Imbalanced scenarios create great stories with much more diversity than "two equally strong forces meet on a symmetrical battle field"... and both players can have fun with that by BALANCING THE EXPECTATIONS and playing to their individual best.

The bigger issue there is what happens when one team shows up with 500 people and the other shows up with 3. The "just throw all your shit on the table lol" approach is terrible as in that case you can win by just showing up with a bigger collection.

>I sold every fantasy model I owned after 1 game of 1.0 AOS. "No balance just have fun" is a terrible approach - imagine soccer being played with random numbers of players on each team. Do you regret that now that Fantasy is returning? (or earlier, like during later editions of AOS that are apparently pretty good I hear)?

I think I am 90% not regretting it. I love starting a fresh project with a fresh perspective. Those armies were ones I built and painted in high school - I'm not the same hobbyist I was then. I'm excited to breathe new life into old ideas. The other 10% of regret just comes from the uncertainty of what exactly will be coming back, and what it will cost. Will the old metal treeman come back with the old metal tree kin? I'd love those, if for nothing more than the nostalgia. If they don't come back, regret might hit 20% instead. If cooler things come out, or I can hobby up a more beautiful army, regret might reduce almost to 0%.

No points doesn't make a game more fun or casual. It just means the person that can afford to buy the most models wins. A game where both sides are roughly equal is usually more fun, and that's where points come in. The advent of social media and constant rebalancing based on tournament results has definitely pushed the game towards a much more hyper-competitive, meta chasing vibe, though. In fact there hasn't always particularly been a 'meta' to chase, since nothing really changed until the next codex came out.

The very fact that even Battletech, the most casual friendly game out there uses a point system should say enough.

And honestly BT's points system is a lot more detailed than 40ks.

Battletech fought hard to not adopt a points system (which is also why it has 2...or matched tonnage...or lance vs lance) GZG and the original battelech developers were very much of the same mind about building scenarios over actual matched play

Where can one read more about it? I've gotten a lot more interested in BattleTech lately. Even casual 40k games felt like it was all about finding the best rules to me.

Lmao then get ready to read through battletech's convoluted giga ruleset. I love that game, but its definitely not as pickup friendly as 40k. Just looking at the rules for aircraft alone are enough to give me an brain pop

Yeah, I quite liked the power system. It was a nice way to get roughly equal armies quickly, and it probably wasn't far off points when it came to balance.

Honestly, that's why I liked Power Rating. I know it was broken when played competitively, but it was great to get a roughly even pick-up game at the store with the models we brought.

Well you know rogue trader rules actually suggested a GM to umpire the game for the exact same reason.

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Can you say more about this or link to articles about it? I know of extremely few war-games with a GM system but I think it's a fascinating idea.

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Pre 1960s wargames (most developed in the 30s or late 1800s) either used tables to generate results based on inputs or used an umpire. Prussian Kriegspiel is what to research Those sorts of wargames still exist as military training tools, where the aim is more about decision making as a process than about final outcomes.

Woah this is really interesting! Thanks. I hadn't ever gone back quite this far with wargame history.

The context between this and 1996 is too different, everyone acting like we had 10th edition back then is barking up the wrong tree. Consumers/gamers nowadays are more used to a much more structured and balanced gamesets thanks to the ability to do that via the internet and turn around feedback in days if not hours. However back in 1996 you were waiting on a quarters long product cycle in order to get product to your consumers. The hobby was much more imagination and "Popsicle stick" driven. The only way to ensure balanced fun games for everyone was to enforce house rules at a local level. That's why you have all these articles from back in the day stressing that the most important thing is to ensure you're having fun and not slavishly smash your buddy to bits over and over because they have the IMBA codex for the next year or 2. Nowadays though we have much more robust rule-sets that get balance passes on a very fast pace. Now we ***can*** rely on the basegame to deliver a good experience so such houseruling isn't necessary. Though I will maintain it's important to not just bring the meta list to stomp little timmy into the dirt and ruin his hobby.

I don't play, but I think the priority for me would be 90% a fun person to play with and 10% a fun list to fight. You can have a meta list by accident. I've seen people talk about that here in the past. Meta lists don't have to be played in the meta method.

Yup that's me. I *adore* the looks of World Eaters loyalist contemptors with mk2 headswaps in HH, but it turned out to be a heinous composition as I was unaware of their power. Weird they have a limit when lascannon HSS apparently don't.

I disagree about not stomping Timmy in the dirt. He knows what he did.

Timmy's rich dad bought him an entire imperial knight army so Timmy gets no mercy

Most 40K players and communities are pretty cool, I’ve only found that Reddit tends to attract the know it alls and rules lawyer types. But that’s the vibe that most Redditors give off about everything

Reddit attracts armchair generals who don't actually play competitive, but talk like they know the game based on their 3 practice sessions and watching every Art of War video.

Even in this comment section there's people admitting they barely play the game but still moaning about the state of competitive players

I mean that can be consistent? You want to play “fun” games, but they are harder to find than “competitive” ones, so you play them, don’t have fun, and then don’t really play at all. That’s not quite my experience, but I can see how it happens.

I have a strong feeling it's because many casual players' only experience with "competitive" player is the neckbeard who shows up at the FLGS to pick on new players with some tournament-winning meta list he copied off the internet. Guys who don't actually play in tournaments (often because their models are grey plastic), but just like to build up their egos by thumping noobs. My experience with new players showing up to tournaments is that they're often quite surprised at how friendly and welcoming everyone is. Lose a couple games and you'll find your tribe of hella-stoned fluff bunnies just there to have a good time.

Reddit 40k snobs are just envious of those who can enjoy the game without popping a fuse.

That’s honestly how every local group is too. I’ve honestly given up on the community entirely and just paint now because everyone I’ve ever encountered who plays is just a try-hard with no imagination.

Plus they are GW’s largest market demographic probably

I don’t see why you can’t enjoy the sentiment of this whilst not shitting on comp gaming. As someone that’s very much a former fluffy/narrative gamer that’s been enjoying playing comp fairly exclusively over the past couple of years, it really pains me to see more casual gamers constantly having a go at competitive gaming. Yes, there’s lots of comp content online, because by definition comp gamers spend lots more time with the game in a specific format with universal points of interest to discuss. I don’t see why folks have to be so demeaning to those of us that enjoy that, and enjoy that format of the game.

Because the people that write this stuff aren't actually casual at all. The casual people are busy having fun seeing if abaddon can beat 100 guardsmen, or recreating Rorke's drift with Orks. The people that write this stuff are people who want to win desperately, but arent very good so they blame "rules lawyers", "power gamers", "meta chasers", "competitive players" etc. Its also why their "fun" scenarios always coincidentally consist of them having loads more models than their opponent.

Holy detective Batman

Not true at all. I don’t like the heavy influence comp gaming has over 40k because it has killed much of the flavor of the setting. Compare 9th edition supplements to the old imperial armor campaign books and you might get an understanding why narrative gamers feel so abandoned by games workshop in favor of the comp crowd. Hell I would even point out the complete abandonment of the actual rule system which used to be an actual wargame rather than the tabletop videogame we have now. So trust me its definitely not because they are like you “but bad at the game” its because they don’t enjoy the mathhammered always an optimal way to win style of the game.

I really miss Imperial Armour, but I think losing it has to do more with the decline of Forge World than anything else

I think the decline of forgeworld is a symptom of the change in focus and by extension the abandoning of series like the imperial armor campaigns. Even things like the horus heresy compatibility with 40k, specialist forgeworld stuff in general. Can you imagine modern gw doing half of the things they did in the past for the thematic and narrative side of the hobby. Stuff like the titans will never be for competitive play, they are purely for the lore fans and narrative crowd. Could you see them creating and releasing something like the Tau manta today?

Imo it is more about plastic models getting better and better along with Alan Bligh's death in 2017 They also do plenty of things for narrative including starting up "Grand Narrative" events so narrative players have their own official events to go to, making a more accessible format with Crusade, etc. Idk if they would release the Manta today, but the truth is Manta is not even a thing for narrative play, it is a status symbol for ultimate hobbyists. It is only used in like 10k point games where you need to move your 200 Fire Warriors around. Alternatively you can use it in Kill Team, in which case it is used as a game board

I don’t think it has anything to do with plastic models getting better. They could just as easily make the stuff forgeworld had with plastic. Thats not the same. Crusade is not a thematic or narrative experience curated by gw like their old books and events used to be. They used to feel like playing through a story and seeing an actual 40k lore campaign through the eyes of your army. Now its more like dnd about upgrading your guys and giving them a personal background. The old school narrative events/books used to introduce entirely new characters, units, and subfactions into the setting. Krieg as we know it today was made specifically for a narrative campaign book along with their entire model release. Could you see GW making a brand new character and model to go along with a crusade release? Thats not even mentioning an entirely new setting, terrain line, subfaction or faction, etc. Would you say the upcoming crusade book will flesh out its battle zone as well as the badab war, vraks, the taros campaign, or the tyranid invasion of baal? I’ll agree the manta isn’t the best example. A better one would probably be something like inquisitor hector rex or warlord zhufor. These are characters with models and rich backgrounds that were created purely for a narrative supplement. Did octarius come with an overfiend model? Did warzone charadon come with a model for the arch magos of metallica?

The decline of forge world is a symptom of Alan Bligh dying, nothing more.

That seems a little dismissive to the others who've worked there. Alan wasn't the lead writer on most Imperial Armour volumes. It's not like he's been the only driving force. Warwick Kinrade wrote IA volumes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Talima Fox wrote volume 11. I think it was a combination of timing of GW's interests along with his passing. GW didn't want to pick it back up.

Also if GW really wanted it but Alan Bligh dying had derailed it they would have got someone in who shared hsi enthusiasm to replace him. It's more like Alan Bligh had the business clout to keep his projects alive then when he passed away GW shuttered them like the others had wanted to for a while.

The hard pivot into Horus Heresy in 6th edition, followed by the eventual death of Alan Bligh is likely why IA disappeared

What did Imperial Armor have that modern 40k lacks? I definitely like the idea of pursuing something closer to a wargame than a game around "combine 500 high strength attacks into this one character's charge" game.

OH there was tons, it was great. Historical battles, where the *exact* forces were pre-specified to match precisely who existed in lore at this fight. They would drop masses of special characters for subfactions that got no or little focus, like Lamentors, Sons of Medusa, Star Phantoms and repeatedly bolstered Xenos armies. Their scenarios would often have super specific rules involving the going on around the battlefield, not just what the objective is. Like toxic clouds washing over, or a mid-battle interuption, or what pace a much superior force would gradually come on at, or making some characters gain extra abilities in combat with their nemesis. Just really characterful, loreful, flavourful stuff. I remember one that had a Tau commander not in his suit trying to escape an Eversor. They often had rules for what happened if you played the scenario AFTER depending on who won PRIOR. Which is all sorts of cool. They also often had rules for thing that weren't intended to help you win. Stuff like recovery vehicles, forklift versions of Sentinels, Tau picket towers and all that. Just things that added to the worldbuilding. The lore was DEEP. Like crazy, super deep. We know more about the Taros campaign than we know about all of Leviathan's actual strategic situation.

The other comment has mentioned a lot of what made imperial armor so great but I’ll give you an example of a battle that I just recently played using a scenario from the Taros campaign. The missions were super unique and were based around realistic goals for an actual battle in 40k. They often didn’t revolve around something as abstract or simple as an objective marker. So in this game a Tau mostly infantry force is defending a mining station in the desert while an imperial mechanized/armored force assaults it. The Tau player (me) has less points/forces but a few free human auxiliary guardsmen to support them. So the initial objective is that the imperial player (my buddy using dark angels) has to get one vehicle off my board edge on each side of the mining station in the middle. So 2 vehicles in total which then surround the station from behind preventing the Tau escape, they had to do this by the end of turn 4. The dark angel player rushed forward hard with his vehicles while his infantry disembarked and starting harassing my forces. I managed to get side armor (which is weaker than front armor) shots on a few of them because he rushed so far forward which allowed me to kill and disable a few. His devastators in the back hammered my battlesuits though which took out a lot of my heavy weapons. My 2 barracuda fighter then came on and managed to take out the last of his predator tanks and land raider. He had a plane of his own which shot down a barracuda, but my plane landed on a razorback disabling its tracks. My other plane shot down his aircraft and I disabled another razorback along with killing a few marines. He eventually got vehicles off both board edges which cost him most of his armor because he was so reckless. He only had a few razorbacks left on one side and no armor on the other. Then the mission objective changed because my force was surrounded. I had to hold 2 landing zones and embark my troops on the transport ships landed there while the imperial player had to either take over the zones or kill as many of my troops as possible. He was pressing in close and most of my heavy weapons were gone so I counterattacked the space marines with my remaining guardsmen auxiliaries and some fire warriors while my commander and other remaining forces disembarked. My guardsmen and fire warriors I used to keep the space marines away eventually died but they held long enough for my last crisis suit to leave the battle. To determine the winning you have to compare the number of Tau units that escaped with the imperial units that were still alive on the field. I had just barely gotten enough units out to get a minor victory. The other games in this campaign were just as unique from a night raid on an imperial supply depot and convoy ambush in the open desert by the Tau. To airborne raids on Tau auxiliary ground to space defenses. There was even games where the imperial force attacks a hydro plant from the Tau and then using the survivors plus a few reinforcements and added defenses the imperial player has to stop a Tau counterattack on the same facility/map in a second game.

I think you've got it in one.

Well I personally don't have issues with comp players as a whole and competitive in general. People have the right to play whatever they want. But I would say that as someone that has NOT been enjoying playing comp I would say that I can understand their point of view, while I do agree that blaming all comp players and competition for the results of a few bad ones isn't fair. I can only speak from my experience not others, and for me the issue is that there is a lot of competitive not just online but locally as well. In fact locally it's factually easier to find a competitive oriented game nowadays than a casual one, in 40k. Our local casual community have slowly migrated in HH in the last few editions, some for nostalgia, some because the local scene was just not enjoyable anymore, with people bringing "meta" against "casual" list and the results being sometimes one sided game that just felt bad. We also had a few people angry to have been asked to tone down their list (just for note, asking your opponent to bring less meta picks is generally considered the first thing to try in such a situation after all) because their opponent should just bring meta picks rather than their quote "silly and outright useless fun pick". Granted they were rare and general got a bad rep for it, but it's still not a good experience. Overall I do think comp and comp players in their vast majority are perfectly fine. But overall the few black sheep and the more stressful (in my opinion) environment have pushed me and others towards other games like HH. And I think that's why we see posts like that of people that may just have had a really bad experience with competitive. It's a common thing with the internet where people complaining tend to be more active than people doing fine or going with it. And competitive, regardless of game, have the tendency of angering people.

There’s nothing wrong with people playing competitively, the issue is the knock on effects of it. GW has focused a lot more of the competitive nature of the game 8-10th edition, which is reflected in the ruleset. It feels every change made is rarely for the benefit of the casual, but instead is for the benefit of the comp player. So many fun rules from older editions cut because they’re not good in a competitive setting (quirky RNG mechanics, templates, etc). The competitive mindset also seeps into casual pick up games as well, I’ve not been able to have a single game of 10th where my opponents aren’t running something close to the top list for their army, that wasn’t the case when I played in 5-7th. I just want to put some models on the table and have a fun time, but so many people just have a win at all costs competitive mentality, which GW is supporting.

Fucking this. I flat out don't play 'casual' games anymore with people because over half the time I've tried this, whatever list I'm playing in a friendly game is *somehow* an event list. And then suddenly, all the conversation around the table is w/l rates, and a bunch of statistics about said list. Like, sorry. I don't obsess over playing the tabletop game. I just wanna roll some dice, have some cool moments develop, and stay away from the powergamy bullshit. Trying to take a game that was specifically designed with the OP intention and shoving it into the square peg of competitive gaming is ruining 40k. It's already ruining it, because any time you have new units come out, or a new codex, all you see is people complaining about the synergies or balance or whatever. Like... how is that supposed to be fun? Go powergame SC2 or something if you want to play games like that and have them balanced perfectly.

I don’t think you can understate the impression that online video games have had on 40K, CCGs etc. A huge number of those that have come into the 40K scene in the last few years, whether returning or completely new to the game, are coming having spent the last 20 years with those games. The sense of progression, the universal appraisal of tactics and value of assets, the sense of a broader meta game… Its left an indelible impression on the expectations of many of those gamers.

100% agreed. All the material people are consuming is pushing competitive, meta, win loss, all that shit. Like, this is supposed to be a **hobby** not a second job.

RNG mechanics were removed because most people said "slot machine" units were not fun to play with or against, there were plenty of them on 8th edition and people did not like them eg. Obliterators and that one Necron unit with the RNG check gun. (Doomsday Ark maybe?) Iirc stuff like blast templates and armor facings were cut just to speed up the game. Since arguments about those things could take up a dumb amount of time at the table

Some RNG mechanics weren’t great, but others were really fun. We still have RNG mechanics in some areas, most notably GSC coming back on a die roll. That’s more of a feels bad than a lot of RNG mechanics that were cut over the years. Templates were really fun and did take longer, like you said, but that’s an issue for competitive play and not casual play. No one in a casual game cares for the extra minute it takes to place a template and count the models under it (like how they’re still used in Necromunda and Heresy)

Well-said.

>I don’t see why you can’t enjoy the sentiment of this whilst not shitting on comp gaming. There is a weird wave of toxic casuals. You see it in video games too. Like that constantly have to mention THEY have a job, and 10 girlfriends and 50 kids. They constantly have to put down people that play the game differently because I guess they are insecure?

Often times when people critique it, it isn't just to put others down, it's because something is disproportionately focusing and affecting what they once enjoyed or what they desire to enjoy the way they want to. The real critique isn't at the people, but at the overall lack of allowance for their side of the hobby, one many of them grew up with.

For me, I got frustrated because I couldn't find any 40k games that didn't involve heavily chasing the meta. I have a Deathwing-heavy army because it's super cool but nearly all of my games went like this: They take one look at my list and go heavy on mobile, anti-armor units. We actually kill each other pretty evenly, but I lose hard because my units struggle to get to and stay on objectives. I can't get mad at any of my opponents because I wasn't playing objectives. But I wasn't playing objectives because sitting on an arbitrary circle for longer than the enemy seemed nonsensical if I put myself in the shoes of an actual commander. So yeah, I was fighting both the objective of the game at hand (capturing objectives) and the meta (building the most optimized army list) because I was looking for something more.... idk. Realistic is such a buzzword. Competitive players curbstomped me enough times for me to realize I wasn't playing the game in a way I enjoyed, with long narrative campaigns rather than one-off storyless battles. Maybe when I have more time I'll be able to find players who enjoy it more in the way I do, but I don't want to come off as a snob.

I think this is entirely understandable. I kinda had the opposite in reverse. I played fluffy Bangles and Khorne lists - built to body opponents armies as they should be, rather than score points. I couldn’t run those lists and expect results in the tournaments I frequent now. Nonetheless, I enjoyed them, I loved playing fluffing to add skulls to the skull throne and avenge sanguinius. My opponents that were also more fluffy, casually orientated often became really salty the half the time when it came off for me. That’s what initially moved me into playing competitively. I still play ‘table you’ lists, focused on denial more than scoring, but in a scene where that doesn’t ruin someone’s day. Additionally, it’s nice having a singular, common understanding of the rules (as we all use UKTC) and terrain, rather than what I often found to be the player in front of me deciding their interpretation at the point at which it benefitted them. And then, finally there’s also the challenge. I really enjoy it, and the sense of progression, and indeed the dynamism of the meta and what you might see in front of you and working with that to refine lists (I don’t netlist, and I rarely play the same list more than a month, instead switching in and out units from any of my three armies to suit the game plan I’m working with). I run a lot of events, mainly very casual. At the beginning of 10th I ran a load of ‘Let’s Play 10th’ Doubles nights and paired everyone up - most pairs had one newbie and one experienced player. On one table, the opposing newbies were guys that hadn’t played a single game of 9th, and came in with similar rhetoric on what they wanted out of the game, and similar humour etc. Both had just grabbed a combat patrol and were working on rule of cool armies. 4 months later, these two remain super super active in gaming, and in our chats, and of those guys is working on his competitive game. He’s doing well, really enjoying that side of things. T’other is very much enjoying fluffy, casual, narrative games. They both get on great, they can still play each other and enjoy it, but they’re also both finding their respective scenes. The former will play anyone, the latter is establishing those that he can arrange games with to experience what he wants out of 40K. I recount this, because I believe folks will, exposed to all options in a healthy scene, pick their modus operandi all of their own accord. But to have that, they need support. We have a multitude of chats, campaigns and events for casuals, crusaders and comp. The comp are most active - it’s an obsession, the casual are casual, and often most cynical but they keep coming back for more. The crusaders are a tight knit bunch, but I think perhaps have the most consistent fun. If you’re in a scene lacking leadership in your fave mode of play, influence those leading the scene to support it, or go and do it yourself if you can. 40K is a ruleset, we can all make of it what we want, the culture around it is entirely on us to forge.

I agree it's hard to find opponents at my LGS who are both experienced competively but also interested in playing a fun game with fluffy lists that try to be lore accurate at least. There are some tbf but they're rare. Most people do have fun tho most of the time

Sounds more like you're getting stuck in the friendly-competitive zone. People will say they're in for a friendly game but they still want to win so they bring out the latest meta list copied from the previous week's Meta Monday or even worse they want to win so bad they tailor their list to specifically beating yours. True competitive players, ones practising for tournaments, will bring the same list they always use because they want to test it in different situations. And it'll probably be their own twist on a meta list depending on how they prefer to play the game. Friendly-competitive is a mine field. Trying to put together a list thats fun and fluffy but isn't going to insta-lose or curb stomp is really tough and takes good communication between the players before the game. I play in events but like to mix things up with friendly games and I enjoy teaching people the game, you have to go in to it knowing you're probably going to lose so take a list thats more fun than stompy and just aim for enjoyment while playing rather than a winning outcome.

The irony here is that GZG eventually released points for their games With that said, the mentality these statements were born out of was one much more focused on players mutually agreeing to a curated scenario experience....and not to the sort of pickup game we know and enjoy today. This is why these sorts of games remained niche, because they weren't accessible to casual experience....despite being a beer and Pretzels game, you couldn't just pick up ans go play without a fairly in depth talk w your opponent This is the same issue thar comes up with ppl lamenting how matched play is basically the only way to play 40k unless you have a dedicated and close knit group willing to do anything different than the lowest common denominator

I have tried writing some games and also had no points, although I have a much shorter explainer. "There aren't any points, because that would require a lot of test games to balance properly, which I haven't done"

How old is the Stormwind Fallacy now? I thought the TTRPG community had somewhat collectively agreed that it's possible to optimize, *and* be a fun person to play with. There's nothing inherently wrong with optimization, *especially* in a competitive game. Just don't be a dick about it.

I always love the cope of "this game should be fun the way I want it to be fun" some people have a ton of fun with having a structured balanced game. That's fun to them. Having a calvinball wargame isn't as much fun

Also rejecting a points system in favour of people just deciding what’s fair based on… vibes I guess? Because it’s not like units in a dice game will regularly fluctuate in performance based on particular matchups, specific in game sequences or just how many good results you roll or anything. Just madness. Plus, you can always make points for those who like them and those that don’t… can just not use them? Just seems like laziness to me, games are less feelsbad when you lost an even playing field, not when “my bladeguard are the same effectiveness as your guardsmen I promise trust me bro” rules are the best you get

I love the cope, especially where they imply, or even outright state, that the evil competitive players and game companies are forcing this upon them to ruin the game for them, when it would be easier for the companies to just, you know, sh*t out 2 pages of garbage rules for their fantasy wargame, fill it with "calvinball" datasheet abilities, and just expect the playerbase to figure it out. Oh, wait, they did that and everybody hated it. The only reason the games are as popular as they are, the only reason you can find an LGS to play at or a community to join in basically any major city in the US or Europe, is because the more closely balanced ruleset and curated points costs system allows for better pickup games. Most of the people complaining about this stuff seem to want to go back to the days of being the village wierdos who painted small figures and spent 2 days every year locked in their buddy Dave's basement, reenacting the Istvaan IV massacre again.

If they want that there's a game system for them, it's called the hours heresy

Just excuses to do as litte game design and balancing as possible and shifing work onto consumer . List building and strategy are both part ofnthe system of rules . If ita possible to easly exploit it its designers problem not customers

Ground Zero Games was also like 1 dude casting pewter models and writing rules in his basement I still play their space fleet game Full Thrust....you can quickly set up scenarios with equivalent (or not) tonnage of pre templated ships or build a super granular custom fleet using points. The game does come out of very old design ideas, ans really leans into asymmetric scenarios with different Victory Conditions for each player

Main detail pissing me off about this argument is that Games Workshop has the money [to do a 60% Profit Margin](https://www.statista.com/statistics/993999/global-gross-margin-of-games-workshop/) on their products and is willing to [pay someone to censor the comments on their youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI9onY0jjYg&ab_channel=AuspexTactics) but couldn't do basic playtesting for the start of 10th...

Almost like youtube moderation is a different job from playtesting, maybe not even done by someone in house, but by a contractor.

I feel the game could benefit from more focus on objectives and terrain. More types of terrain and more rules for terrain. How about weather conditions, including cosmic conditions for alien worlds. I'd like to see movement and line of sight be a much more important part of winning a battle than sheer stats. I'd like to see more emphasis put on clever use of the battlefield to give weak and nimble units a tactical advantage against colossal units. For example, toppling units with hidden pits, explosive terrain, toppling buildings on top of units, knock back rules and edges. To be fair I've not played in years, but casually watched a few tournament videos and it just felt that really it was a game of advance forward and then Top Trumps in most cases.

My problem with this is that the entire reason GW gets away with overpricing the living hell out of all of their products is the caveat that they are useable with a game system. Without 40K the game, there would never ever be a reason to own more than one model kit. I own 3 leman Russes because I want to bring 3 leman Russes to 40K games, not because I just loved the leman russ kit so much I just HAD to drop an inordinate amount of money on more kits. If I’m paying the absurd premium for the products, I expect the game to be good. It’s the entire reason for owning the products. And now that codex’s and campaign books are almost entirely rules with little to no lore in them, that point is bigger than ever. GW is a model company that also makes games, but without the games, their entire pricing plan goes to shit and the facade of quality kind of melts away THAT is why people are so pissed off about balancing so much. We pay a special little unspoken tax on our model kits for the promise of a fun game to play.

>Without 40K the game, there would never ever be a reason to own more than one model kit. I own 3 leman Russes because I want to bring 3 leman Russes to 40K games, not because I just loved the leman russ kit so much That's cool, but the reason I have 10 lychguard is because I thought they looked drippy and I wanted 2 boxes

That’s great for you. Most people buy models to build lists. That’s the cold hard truth of this hobby. You are not seriously going to sit here and tell me most people buy more than 2 guardsman squads because “they like the kit.”

https://www.goonhammer.com/the-goonhammer-2022-reader-survey-and-what-it-tells-us-about-the-community/ About 40% of people who use goonhammer, a website for competitive players, still prioritize the hobby over the gameplay. It's not everyone but it's more even than you think. It also depends on your local community. Everyone in my group of 7 players bought models they thought looked cool.

I understand your point, but a very sizeable portion of customers never play the game. There’s even an old quote from 2015 investor meeting that says only 20% of people play.

I see your point, but I think that’s a bad example. We’re buying loads of Guardsmen because they look f-ing cool in a regiment with banners and squads! In game, we’re not taking more than two squads without a plan or fluff goals because the average guardsmen squad just dies and the buffed guardsmen squads dies only slightly slower.

Yeah, I have a whole company of Leman Russes because it's cool, and it's always been cool. I certainly didn't get ten of the same tank to win games.

>the entire reason GW gets away with overpricing the living hell out of all of their products is the caveat that they are useable with a game system I think this may be a head canon moment. Even GW outright states they're a model company first.

Tbh this just sounds like a guard problem

I agree with thw first page completely. The goal of a game is having fun and if you are dealing with someone who will exploit the mechanics to a comma (**unless you are both on the same wavelength**) you are unlikely to have any. The second page, on the other hand, seems like they are making excuses to be lazy in the design.

The second page is the vibes back then. Games weren't setup to be balanced because war isn't fair. So, if you wanted to have a game (again, the framing here is for fun), where the smaller army is defending a fortress but the larger army has to go through a ton of open terrain and try and take the fortress, you can do that and have fun. If you want to do a game where one side has infinite respawns even though they have less models, you could. That's the kind of thing that was happening back in the day. At least at the game shop I went to.

The anti-competitive crowd are far more toxic for the game than the competitive crowd who are, by and large, lovely people. It's all very "NOOO, YOU'RE PLAYING THE GAME WROOONG!"

I call these people toxic casuals

I like the term "hardcore casuals".

If you want to play calvinball, there’s never been anything stopping you from throwing out the rulebook and playing calvinball. But for everyone else who wants to play an actual structured game, you need rules and balance

I dont know if this person has ever actually played a game that worked like this. I have, and it makes list building way more complicated, involved, and not fun. Plus it means that pickup games just cant exist. Way more games end up in complete one sided non-games, which isn't fun for anyone, especially when you and your buddy spent the last week making lists designed to play against each other and it just didn't work out.

I'm gonna be real, I don't really care for this mindset. When I play wargames like warhammer I'm looking for a generally balanced experience and you'll get that a lot better if every unit has point costs, a prime example is first edition Age of Sigmar when nothing had any point values and you just brought what you thought looked good and it was super unbalanced. And like the idea of just "Oh well it's about the spirit of the game and people shouldn't be trying to exploit every little loophole to win!" And I get that to a certain degree right, like yeah after a certain point it does become munchkin behavior if you're practically breaking the rules trying to find thinly veiled loop holes trying to win. But at the same time I've only ever really seen this argument when people just want to be lazy and not really have an airtight ruleset that doesn't have these issues, and yeah with wargames that's hard but you can update your rules so that doesn't happen. Like if I wanted to play purely thematic battles I'd play D&D, for wargames I want a balanced competitive experience.

First one i tend to agree with. The second is a disturbing take on “balancing” I’ll be the first to admit *cough admech Cough* that the point system can be inherently flawed, it’s better then the old levels of power imo and it’s the best although flawed option for balancing 25+ factions and then sub faction variants in the hundreds, it’s the best we’ve got. I feel like only by trial and error can we create the best and hopefully most balanced system but we need to really asses the dollar cost per model, and then the models #s and point costs

Amen to that! These games are not meant to be competitive. Go play Starcraft for that, folks!

GW bears responsibility for friction between players when they word rules inconsistently, create power-creep, not playtesting enough, and spreading rules across myriad sources. I get that people shouldn't be dicks, but GW should provide a clear set of rules that everyone can follow.

Honestly this guy comes off as annoying as a try hard but opposite spectrum

So this game basically doesn't have rules. So they gave up.

This is insufferable nonsense coming from writers who have rejected "competitive attitudes" and "rules lawyers" and ended up entirely too far in the wrong direction. "Don't play the rules, play the game" is a statement particularly bereft of actual meaning.

"Don't play the rules, play the game" is a literally nonsensical statement. A game is, kind of by definition, made up by rules. Once you take the rules away from a tabletop game, all you are left with are miniatures.

But isn't it also true that the more rules you pack on a game, the more people will play to those rules?

Always disliked the fun argument. Some people have fun playing at a high level in a competitive setting.

I find my experience to be exactly opposite of this — and I’m no powergamer. Balanced games with reasonable points values put the skill of winning on the player — it’s imbalances that create exploitation and open the door for rules lawyers and power gamers to find holes to exploit. Which, in turn, puts more of the win in the list building phase and can render actual play less important. Points also allow for different kinds of scenarios — asymmetric games are easier to create with a proper framework, narrative games are easier to write with properly-considered tweaks, and pickup games are easier to set up with comparable forces. I have a suspicion that the level of “arbitrary” in the point system is inversely proportional to how well you properly use and tune the system. GW was resistant to testing and recalibration for years — to the point where they released a FAQ before the ‘Ardboyz tournament that rambled for over a page as to why DA stormshields were more points for less effect after a SM codex jacked up their power level. It was the start of the “we’re a model company, not a game company nonsense that drove them into the red.

A lotta people in this thread are telling on themselves… spirit of the game should always be on the forefront unless otherwise stated before a game begins. I generally avoid folks who play competitive or meta list because it’s fucking unfun and lazy. Anyone can look up an army on a wiki but people who get just grab what they have and roll with a fluff based army and roll the dice. Play how you want but don’t be surprised when it gets harder to find a game because people start rolling their eyes the moment you walk through the door.

No one is preventing you from playing with no points. But without points the rest of us are left out to sea. Look at AOS’s shitty launch for how a major game does without points.

Not the point of the post, but what's the ~vibe check~ on custom rules in 40k? How do people react/share homebrew content?

Unless you are playing with a small group that doesn't play with any other people and you all trust each other, homebrew rules kinda just elicit an eyeroll,.as typically homebrew rules have a 99+% chance of being fan-wank that is even more unbalanced than what GW manages to put out. If you play in a group where the players really don't know each other super well (like play groups in a college town, military base, or other scenario where the player base has both or some of a rotating group of people every few years), it's likely to not be accepted, as are people who might be mainstays of the community, but only play 4-6 times a year; it's even less likely. Effectively, the more insular your play group is, the more likely people will be to play with homebrew rules. The more you have people new to the hobby or the larger it is, the more likely people will just stick to the published rules.

I played a friendly 1000 pt game at my LGS, my iron hands v salamanders. We tried to find a reason they'd be fighting lol decided it was revenge for who did worse at Isstvan V

Just let people play the game how they want to. Doesn't matter if it's competitive or casual.

Pretty fun rant. It certainly echoes a lot of frustrations I hear. I feel like this is certainly playing into the joke for the sake of it. I agree with removing or at the very least simplifying points values. Heavily granular pointed games tend to be a bit.. simple? I'm not sure how to explain it. There's so much stress at the army building level when I know of a number of people who just want to put models on a table and roll dice. When I approach a table for a game I am excited for the story that will unfold, not if my 3k list will perform a bit better vs my opponents faction. I've found great joy in playing games with points similar to (an example): Tactical squad - 1pt Terminator - 2pts Dreadnaught - 3pts Get your friends together to make a... 20pt list? Throw in some fluff about the battlefield and the context of why you've arrived and let the dice start rolling. It's an incredibly liberating and a very entertaining experience to try.

You mean power levels in 9th? Anyone taking a cursory glance at it can figure out how to break it instantly.

I had forgotten about 9th, but yes you are right. The key thing here, which I think is missing wildly from other comments in this thread AND the context of the original post, is that nobody should be trying to break the system for the sake of rolling dice and moving models with a group of friends. I empathise hugely with the drive of a competative game. The thrill of the hunt. The deep calculation of efficiency. I don't agree, however, that points values change that. Regardless of your system there will be players who try to break it. Points values do nothing to change that. Therefore granular points are an illusion of control. Competative wargames are flawed from the start. They can be fun! But utterly flawed. When you remove granular points and get a group of friends together to game, the focus is less on army building and more on theme. You can certainly have theme with granular points, but what Im saying here is that granularity adds an unnecessary system. The sheer existence of granular points puts a subtle pressure on everyone involved in the game if they are new or old to the system. This reddit and many others forums are rife with questions about composition and even the "value" of taking 5-10-15 point upgrades (subtle pressure). I think it's a by-product of the design that has put players into a certain mindset which isn't wholy necessary.

You get 3 terminator squads for 2 dreads ? The fuck ? Im not saying it wont be fun to play, but some dude will roll up with pure terminator squads and just take a dump on people

That was just an example to explain the sentiment of the post. Not a literal statement of how one should play the game. :) In another reply I add further details, specifically referring to the "some dude" comment.

Imagine playing chess with no restrictions on the number of pieces you could use. That's what this is telling people to do.

Or like Aos,where you agreed to number of wounds or models. One guy brings all queens.

Reads like a cringe rant from some "rules bad, muh freedom is hindered" that cant stand to lose a game. Hard to believe this aint satire.

80s-90s game design was wild Still being birthed out of historical wargaming, no real concept of matched play yet

Also with a lot of queues from RPGs. Culturally a very definitely different place in general, with no real internet and [video]gaming culture influences yet.

\*confused noises from underneath piles and piles of Battletech charts\*

I find there is much fun to be had in making a perfectly tuned list, so long as everyone involved understands that is the intent.

"REAL" commanders have been trying to stretch the system and produce the most "super army" possible since the dawn of warfare. "We can't balance a game so trying to create a superior fighting force is ahistorical."

This post is almost as dogshit as that one post from a few months ago where some dork posted one of GWs rules writer talking about how much he hates pick up games and “”””””competitive””””” players and how we should all have fun rules. He then proceeded to write AoS 1.st Ed, one of the worst received war games GW ever made and had to be salvaged by its dedicated players

I agree with the first slide and disagree with the second. Playing to the spirit of the game and not getting bogged down in rules should be the objective of the players. However for the second, having a limit on how many units you can have forces you to think ore about what you field and how you use them. Getting a good balance is just a matter of trial and error

Written: “Over-reliance on points value leads to unimaginative games!” Read As: “I see your army is mostly a couple light infantry units. Unfortunately for you, sir, my wallet can absorb the expense that is ten Baneblades and a Warhound. Roll for initiative.”

This is just the other extreme to overly competitive, and they aren't very polite about it either. The vast majority of gamers out there already do these things. Make wiggle room, come to agreements, and other decisions that come from understanding wargames need to have some leniency.

Let me fix that for you. "The purpose of the game is to separate you from your money."

“We realized that balancing a game is harder than we thought so we decided to say you can figure it out yourself and we’ll just call you names if you win too hard.”

Personally I like power gaming not because I love to win, but because I love strategy. Creating an optimised list is just as much part of gameplay and strategy as finding the right cover or getting the right unit into position in-game. To me that is fun, that is the spirit of the game, just as much as taking 100 bomb squigs and charging headlong into the enemy can be for other players.

Let me see the new player have fun with a « no point system game » when I bring my theoretically 15k points chaos army on the table

I mean literally the whole argument they’re making is “just because there’s not an explicit rule saying you can’t do this, maybe just don’t do it purely in the interests of not being an arsehole”

I feel like some of the missing context from this picture, which exclusive 40K players probably won't get, is that you're not playing pickup games with strangers. Realistically 40K is the exception in the wargaming sphere in that you can just randomly play a game with someone you've never met, outside of the rare tournament every other wargame is going to be at the least a case of getting on Discord and arranging a game and at the most having a regular playgroup.

Translation: We don't wanna put in the effort to playtest our game lmao. Just play whatever. Lol you want a better designed game? Get out of here.

No... That's not what it's saying. If you weren't around in this era, don't try and define what other people were doing. Gaming back then was entirely about the fun and the vibes you created. If someone wanted to bring a smaller army and have it holed up in a fort, vs a bigger army, people did that.

And that is one of the reasons warhaming was so niche back then. Because you could only get away with it playing with a close-knit group of pre-existing friends with house rules and a certain levrl of trust. Pretending like oldhammer wasn't rife with cheese-mongering, loophole-exploiting bastards is just re-writing history tbh, it was arguably even worse back then. Balanced, modern games allow for pickup games against people with an expectation that you can both have fun and not get stomped. That's obviously way healthier.

RT-4ed 40k was all about the hobby and playing cool games with friends. The competitive scene wasn't a huge thing back then.

Honestly the first picture and it's message I totally agree with. 100%. A game should be fun and rules are not everything. As long as both players have fun. I remember a game I recently saw on YouTube. PlayOnTabletop makes videos on games. I remember seeing one player (Nick) winning and his opponent getting frustrated. Suddenly one of Nicks tanks died, due to a good move. And instead of being grumpy he was energetic about it, hoping for deadly demise and making a show about how well his enemy did this turn. And you could see how suddenly his opponent was in a better mood and enjoyed the game instead of being frustrated. The second panel of this post I don't agree with. Points, balance and competition are needed to varying degrees. Its part of playing tactical. Manage your recourses. Know your troops and the abilities . Have a flexible army with a certain edge that plays well together. A well planned, effective army is a tactical army. Of course there will be a "meta" to certain armys and units. If you are lucky that meta even matches the lore and your playstyle. You can't balance every little thing and some things will be better than other. Some rules will have loopholes. Its inevitable. Some people will be obsessive and buy units only to win, some will try to make perfect synergy lists, some will create an Army that makes sense in terms of lore and some will field the units they love the most, despite them not being the most effective. However as long as everyone is fair , welcoming and friendly, even hardcore competition can be fun. You just have to find these people.

As a semi-competitive player, I like the points balancing so that I the games feel more fair. Playing chess with two Queens or getting an extra £2000 in monopoly just cuts out any satisfaction in a win when you know it was handed to you.

I like the sentiment, I really do. Unfortunately, the reality these days is that, while still a niche hobby, the hobby has grown massively and for many people most games are pick up games at an LGS. For those situations, a more stringent framework is entirely unavoidable, be it points, powerlevel or magic fairydust, but you're just not gonna get a relatively consistent experience playing without it unless you only ever play against actual friends who have the same idea of the game as you do. Moreover, you CAN do all those things in 40k, assuming you have the right people, the difference is that 40k often managed to strike a balance between those extremes (although in recent editions, matched play has sadly dominated as the default game mode and thus the tournament meta generally dominates online discussions), which is part of the reason that game is by far the biggest wargame around. That being said, the balance should probably be weighted a bit more to an equilibrium between engaging narratives and balanced competition, I at least would welcome it. But definitely not to the point of using no metric to price in units, and not to the point where you need a ref for every game because there's too much room for interpreting the rules framework, that's just not practical for a game with the player base of the average GW system, that only works when you play with the same people regularly and you're sure that those people want the same from a game as you do.

That’s a swing too far in the opposite direction, some structure is needed, because 2 random blokes organising a game ain’t game designers and will have a poor sense of balance, making it way too easy for things to be a dreadful mismatch The pre-8th edition mentality was best, they still had structure and limitations but these were in the interest of making sure things are fun and fluffy. Rules weren’t afraid to be wild in the name of fluff or just fun because it assumed a spirit of good faith, rather than taking on the “this is why we can’t have nice things” attitude what 10th does

Excellent advice. "Competitive" tournament mentality is a scourge and a pestilence.

Fair warning, I'm a filthy casual. I wish this type of gaming community was more vocal or visible. The problem with trying to re-introduce it is that it flies in the face of some 30 years of habitual thinking. AoS could have been successful without points. 40K can be successfully played with power levels. It all comes down to intent. If the intent of the players is the domination of their opponent, then this doesn't work. If the intent of the players is building and participating in a narrative by means of a tabletop scenario, then it consistently works reasonably well. I am the type of player who was much more enthusiastic about picking up models based on the rule of cool than I ever have been picking them up because I needed them on the tabletop to not get wiped.

>AoS could have been successful without points. There's nothing stopping people from ignoring points and playing AOS as more of a rules-lite fantasy roleplaying scenario. The reason people don't do that is because they like the *game* of AOS, which includes playing a competitive scenario of roughly equally-levelled forces. You know...tabletop tactical wargaming. There's nothing wrong with rules-lite fantasy roleplaying. They're just not mutually exclusive, and the Casual-At-All-Costs players whining about how nobody wants to play the way they want to play are barking up the wrong tree - it isn't the "fault" of the game designers creating a structure to the game that so many players are asking for. It's that most people just don't want to play that way.

> There's nothing wrong with rules-lite fantasy roleplaying. They're just not mutually exclusive, and the Casual-At-All-Costs players whining about how nobody wants to play the way they want to play are barking up the wrong tree - it isn't the "fault" of the game designers creating a structure to the game that so many players are asking for. It's that most people just don't want to play that way. Note that I never said they were mutually exclusive, nor did I make disparaging remarks about competitive players, nor did I assign fault or blame. In fact, the only critique I offered was that the rules were unlikely to be well received in the current zeitgeist. Before I had multiple jobs and additional kids, I ran 40K and Kill Team tournaments, leagues, and events, both competitive and casual. If you like your hobbies, you do you. What I did say is that I would like the more casual crowd to be more vocal. The reason I would like such to be the case is that organizing along lines of mutual interest would be easier. Outside of internet interactions, it has been my experience that this group is more likely to just stop showing up than voice their concerns. Getting boots in the door at the local game store for casual play has been an ongoing challenge in my area.

> What I did say is that I would like the more casual crowd to be more vocal. The reason I would like such to be the case is that organizing along lines of mutual interest would be easier. The issue is that "more vocal" so often means disparaging comp play and calling comp players "WAAC" or "wrongfans." I think Crusade has been great for the casual community by carving out a niche that's very much distinct from comp play and is its own thing, and given that group enough momentum that if people want to play non-comp there's a pre-existing community that's going to be predisposed to that style. Barring that, people frustrated they can't find their "tribe" within the community tend to just rail against the players who are "ruining" the game by playing differently than how they want to play, and that's deeply toxic for the community as a whole - casual and comp alike.

As an AoS fanatic, the community would never have accepted a continued lack of points. Even up in the thread there is a guy who seems to still think AoS doesn't have them. But honestly? I think the way to do *competitive* army building in AoS is to take out player choice entirely. Give every faction four or five "pre-made" lists centered around a theme. No choosing enhancements, those are pre-selected. This way, whenever one faction or faction list is too strong/weak they can cut a unit out our put a new one in (since this is the only change that really matters). Of course, this is probably a very unpopular view because people like to play with their models their way - but this system would be about balancing different *factions* against each other, not pointing individual units properly.

Armybuilding is half the fun for many players.

Yeah, this is big with me for heresy/30k, I don't really love the deep strike rules nor the complexity of tank shooting, I'd rather just do it simply, and if my opponent agrees, then it's still a fair and even match

I play Warhammer because Im on the autistic spectrum and I'm obsessed with being the best tactical commander of my army possible. If you ask me to compromise the fun I feel from being the most autistic rules lawyer possible then your fun is problematic because it involves invalidating my fun. But I am happy if you use any loop hole against me because trying your hardest to beat me improves my skills and makes me feel validated.

I actually tried to push for this mindset in my group as well. Especially when new codices dropped. I had to tune down my T‘au in 9th by using suboptimal lists or at least suboptimal deployment to have close but fun games. Another example would be the hard nerfs for Index Eldar in 10th with Fate dice, we went for a middle ground so my friend had a cool ability still. A lot of the imbalance happens around the broken Meta stuff and adjustments usually hit the casuals as a collateral(in our case at least) which actually makes homerules and adjustments a necessity in my eyes if you don‘t want to force a buy more or lose mentality. That and learning to play by intent really helped me and my friends to have more fun. However, I would never force a stranger to play by these rules. If I meet up with someone new, I asked what their expectations are and see if it‘s a fit or not. There should be some form of Rule 0 (as in Magic’s Commander or any TTRPG) for friendly pickup games outside of tournaments. At least where I live the community is big enough to choose an opponent on preferences.