Today Peteypab, Reece, and the Falcon talk about game design and how important it is to make units and faction rules that represent the greater 40k narrative. They also go over their favorite 40k factions, and why their primarchs can beat yours.
Chapter Tactics is a 40k podcast which focuses on promoting better tactical play and situational awareness across all variations of the game.
Show Notes:
- Head on over to 40kstats.com for more faction stats for all major ITC tournaments!
- Support us on Patreon this month and get a chance to receive random stuff from us!
- Click here for a link for information on downloading best coast pairings app where you can find lists for most of the events I mention.
- Check out the last episode of Chapter Tactics here. Or, click here for a link to a full archive of all of our episodes.
- Check out Skari on Skaredcast, for excellent 40k tactics videos and Monday Meta analysis.
- Commercial music by: www.bensound.com
- Intro by: Justin Mahar
Love the banter.
Sometimes you do want a giant goat with mountains on its back.
Sometimes you should feel judged when a friend doesn’t recommend werewolf Viking space marines.
Sometimes explainining exactly what a weed is seems like a good idea.
Kurze can see the future and is crazy.
I think cloned units is great, easy to keep it relatively fair and doesn’t complicate matters. I like that standard rules now just get a flavour name.
Honestly wish they’d have more units that were factionless like buildings just to give access. Still say assassins as factionless and available to everyone would be great conversion potential
Really good episode. Lots of good points raised all around. Some assorted thoughts that sprung to mind:
– About the low granularity, GW have kinda written themselves into a corner with this one, but there’s still a lot of room to add complexity with relatively simple changes to the core ruleset. Some deeper terrain rules, for example. Or adding keywords to weapons and psychic powers, so we can get stuff like “Avatar of Khaine is immune to flame and melta weapons” back without having to spend three paragraphs defining what that affects. USRs going away was a double edged sword. Relying on keywords can be a bit of a cruth design-wise but it’s one of the avenues left — right now stuff like Asterion Moloc’s skill at killing other Marines is completely unrepresented in the rules where it used to be a core part of his abilities.
– Segueing in from that, the part about FW characters being samey and generic –well, yeah, there’s only so much you can do with “Captain/Chaplain/Librarian Genericus is a skilled/disciplined/savage warrior who inspires loyalty/terror/fervor”. Xenos player here, but maybe making several dozen Marines could’ve taken a backseat to all the unloved factions we still have. That said, these were early edition Index rules — GW has gotten a much better handle on what works and what doesn’t in 8th ed since then, and I believe that if/when they redo the Indexes (God knows how far the pandemic has pushed the schedule on that) they’ll get much more interesting rules on the whole, especially since they’ll purportedly be written by the main team.
– Another problem with the shrinking design space is that some parts of the ruleset just aren’t very impactful. When was the last time morale mattered? Or some are way more important than others — with Initiative gone and weapon skill being a flat roll, there’s a lot less room to differentiate the skilled fighter from the strong one and at the end of the day Attacks * Damage is the king metric, with only special rules (whicj are fairly limited in scope) to pick up the pace. And don’t get me started on “Always fights first”.
Sorry for the wall of text, just got a lot of thoughts listening to this podcast. One last hot take: keyword issues aside, Ghaz was an amazing but of design and GW needs to do more rules like his.