Beasts of war brought us some videos with more of the rumored changes to 40K.
Well, the Beasts of War videos are certainly interesting to say the least.
They have 3 videos in a series talking about the new rules coming in 6th ed 40K. These guys usually do have accurate info, so I would be willing to accept that these are most likely true, at least in part.
And that worries me.
They indication more and more that 40K will be mimicking the Fantasy rule set. This baffles me. I understand why they would want to make the systems similar as it makes cross-over between game systems a lot easier. However, why in the blazes would you take the more successful system (40K) and mimic the less succesful system (Fantasy)?
If anything, make Fantasy more like 40K. But perhaps I am generalizing too much. Some of the things like charge reactions sound like they could be cool (shooting a charging unit before it hits you) but coupled with only units in range of weapons or in the first row being hit by shooting means that charging as we understand it now will be really nerfed. If you add in random charge lengths and pre-measuring, wow, assault armies are taking it in the shorts. Again, we don’t have all the information so we can’t be sure, but this sounds to be giving a lot of power to already powerful shooting armies.
Challenges may be in. Yuck. Challenges are really cool from a cinematic perspective (if a Character issues a challenge to a squad leader or enemy character they must accept or not be able to fight at all), but who in the hell wants to HAVE to fight Draigo or not attack at all? Again, a cool idea that may not work in practice.
All of these rumors together sound like a game that is definitely going more and more towards a beer and pretzels type of set-up. That is what GW has said their game is all along, it just is a bit of a bummer. That fake rule-set we saw was such an improvement in my eyes, it eliminated a lot of randomness and sped up play. That would ave been fantastic, but it really does appear that that is not what we are getting.
So we’ll see what happens. If we do have random charge lengths, challenges, reactionary fire to charges and only front rank models dying to shooting it will be a more cinematic game, for sure. I just feel that it will at the same time be a game that is less about tactics and smart play and more about luck and just playing for a laugh. If that is the case, so be it. I enjoy casual gaming quite a bit, and we love Apoc, so we can accept that. However, I will be very curious to see how the tournament/con crowd reacts to it.
We’ll keep the rumors and opinions coming as we get them!