Kill Team 2018 in July

[Konrad]

Ooh. I need to get a look at these rules. We used to have the most fun doing Kill Team style multi player (5-6 I think once 8) games from Rogue Trader on to probably 3rd or 4th ed. Be great if this worked for something like that.
I really, really wanted to get into the New Necro, but it's so fussy and fidgety and nothing about it (asides from beautiful models) really sucked me in. The old game works good 'nuf for me.

[Primarch]

I've started painting a bunch of minis just for Kill Team. I'm not particularly sold on the rules, but I figure I should make at least a little effort.

[The Other Dave]

I've started painting a bunch of minis just for Kill Team. I'm not particularly sold on the rules, but I figure I should make at least a little effort.

Just in the interest of getting some discussion going - what are your thoughts on the rules?

I'm trying to resist doing something dumb like buying a box of plague marines or grey knights until I actually get some games in. So far I'm managing, heh.

[Primarch]

Just in the interest of getting some discussion going - what are your thoughts on the rules?

Honestly, I feel that there isn't an awful lot to them. Given that they dumped SW:A because people bought it (A bizarre reason if ever there was one), KT doesn't appear that well fleshed out. It looks like a Copy/Paste job from the Troops section of most army lists, with a very simple campaign system bolted on the side. The rules look playable, but there is nothing that really sells them to me. Or to put it another way, I can see it being a game people play, but not a game people love.

In terms of specific criticisms:

No Daemons, Sisters of Battle, Sisters of Silence, Custodes or Chapter specific Marines. (Interestingly Grey Knights have abilities that target Daemons).

A plasma gun has the same chance of taking out a model as a lasgun.

Charging/Melee seems like it is at a big disadvantage compared to shooting.

The slowest models charge as fast as the fastest. Some models charge (on average) slower than they walk. The Nid Lictor is much better off walking at their opponents.

Hitting a model multiple times doesn't increase the chance of taking it out.
E.g. A model with a flamer is charged and used overwatch, scoring 6 hits (lucky!), continuing their lucky streak, they roll 6 wounds and the enemy fails all of it's saves!! The first injury roll is a flesh wound. The following 5 hits are... ignored. The charger completes their move and tears the flamer dude to pieces. (Or maybe just causes a Flesh Wound).

Some teams have a ludicrous amount of options available, others are really limited.

I think that's all I picked up from my first read through. Like I said, it's playable, but doesn't go much beyond that. I get the feeling that GW's goal was simply to knock out a skirmish/campaign game because they knew it would sell no matter what, rather than to make a great game for it's own sake.
But then again, I'm a terrible cynic.

[The Other Dave]

Fair enough points, mostly! I mean, it's still 40K, which is a pretty streamlined ruleset - although your cynic flag is flying pretty high, yes. Like, I'm not sure I'd characterize them as having dumped SW:A "because people bought it" so much as "because they were never planning to support it at all beyond the initial release" - what with it being a limited edition box and all.

The faction / model / wargear choices are apparently based almost entirely around "do they have a box of plastic troops available, and do the wargear options come in said box," which while it isn't a great means of choosing, is at least understandable, especially as they're targeting the game as much towards people new to the hobby as towards old grogs like us with massive model collections. Which, yeah, leads to some armies having more options, but it's either that, giving more options to players who have been in 40K longer, which has its own set of problems, or having even fewer factions in the game.

Daemons, or at least some kind of daemons, are apparently coming out in the forthcoming Rogue Trader expansion, although who knows what else will be in there (besides, presumably, the Rogue Trader faction). Sisters will probably get some rules when plastic Sisters come out. Custodes and Sisters of Silence, sure (although the former are well along towards terminator levels of power, and they're out). But really, the rulebook is packed to bursting as it is - there's only like half a dozen pages of fluff in there, and fully half the thing is faction rules - adding chapter-specific marines and Sisters of Silence or whatever may well have just been a page-count decision. (Personally, I could see cutting random name generators in favor of trying to cram daemons in there, but OTOH if you put in one set of daemons you really have to put in four, and again you're looking at a lot of pages that way.)

Random charge distances not related to a unit's move distance - eh, they're a thing in 40K and have been since, when, 7th edition? I don't know, I was away from the game at the time, heh. It is what it is. Being able to spend command points for re-rolls mitigates this somewhat.

The one thing I'd note about your thoughts on the rules is that yeeeeah, a plasma gun has the same chance of taking out a model as a lasgun, except that it'll wound and crack armor a lot more easily and does multiple damage when overcharged - which does allow you to roll multiple injury dice, none of which things are exactly small factors. A supercharged plasma gun hitting a marine in the open will take him out about 50% of the time, and a lasgun will take him out about 5% of the time, if my maths are right*. That's... extremely significant, without even having to mess with injury rolls at all.

But we'll see how it plays! I might not even like it (although since I like 40K well enough to keep playing, I reckon I probably will, heh).

*The plasma gun is wounding on a 2+, allowing a 6+ armor save, and taking the marine out in 27 out of 36 combinations of two injury dice. The lasgun is wounding on a 5+, allowing a 3+ armor save, and taking the marine out of action on a 4+.

[Primarch]

Like I said, the rules look ok. Just not great.

There are close to 30 pages of random name/background generators in the book. Since they have no effect on game play, they could have had one large table of background to choose from and easily freed up a couple of dozen pages for extra factions, which have plastic options available. I can see why Custodes wouldn't be included, but Sisters of Silence are (in fluff terms) perfect for Kill Team, plus their one kit is quite versatile and I have some. Daemons wouldn't necessarily be 4 different forces, 1 force with each god being represented would work.

Fair point about only including models which have a plastic kit, (Ork Kommandos??).

I'm not a fan of random moves in general, regardless of whether other games do it or not.

The Plasma gun is probably not worth overcharging unless your target is in the open and not at long range. If you roll a 1 to hit, you take yourself out. I can see a lot of Plasma-Sniper combos coming up.

I'm not sure I'd characterize them as having dumped SW:A "because people bought it" so much as "because they were never planning to support it at all beyond the initial release" - what with it being a limited edition box and all.

But...

*The "dropped like a hot potato" support for Strike Force Armageddon was mostly, apparently, because they had no idea it would be so popular (it being launched by Old GW, who did no market research and had no meaningful communication with fans), and its success was part of what led them to decide to release a "proper" 40K skirmish game in Kill Team.

At the end of the day, I'll give it a try and see how it goes. Real play always gives a better feel for a game than just reading the rules.

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, I think plasma / sniper is something you'll see a lot of. (All my lists with plasma guns also make them snipers. ) At least they changed the wording on them - in 40K proper your plasma gun has a better chance of exploding if you're at a penalty to hit since it's on a modified roll of 1 or less rather than just a 1 on the dice - which if you want to talk about odd rules, it's a doozy. Shooting at fliers makes your gun blow up more.

Kommandos, Eldar Rangers and Flayed Ones are the resin models that snuck in, presumably because they're so thematically appropriate?

You caught me on the dropped support thing - when I started this thread, I didn't know that SW:A was a limited edition box, and knowing that it was has shaped what my GW Kremlinology suggests to me was going on, heh.

And yeah, in the end, for all that I'm pumped about kill team and plan to play a bunch of it, I definitely agree that 40K isn't, like, a particularly great rules system. 8th edition is good enough, and my current thinking about game rules is that good enough is, in general, good enough, especially if a bunch of people play. And really, my thoughts on "what 28mm is best for" are well known, so a more skirmishy version of 40K almost can't help but be an improvement in my book.

[Konrad]

I'm looking forward to giving it a try, even though I'm with Prim on my expectations of rules balance, loopholes etc. GW has never written particularly tight rules. I imagine there will be a dozen fixes and house-rules on the forums withing weeks to patch it up. I mean there is no way a half dozen designers cloistered in a top-secret battle bunker in Nottingham can test play anything as well as 100000 geeks on Dakkadakka. Remember Combat Patrol back in ....6th?..... We played the heck out of that. I figure once the community gets the bugs worked out, this will be really fun.

[me_in_japan]

I'm increasingly keen to play this. I keep eyeballing various seldom-used piles of minis, thinking "I could proxy that as IG, or maybe GSC or..." and then my mind wanders to actually just buying a box of whatever I was going to proxy for and...

also, eldar, deldar, quins and stinkies all seem fun. Aaaaand, I have a buttload of industrial terrain I bought for Infinity and never really used. So yeah, I'm in. Probably even buy a rulebook at some point

fwiw, GW have politely asked everybody to playtest the heck out of it, send in feedback, and lo an FAQ shall be forthcoming, so if'n y'all have any comments to make re rules, by all means fire them GW-ward. Might even see something come of it. See the GW community page for details n stuff.

[The Other Dave]

I drove down to the Casa del MiJ today for a game of 40K and a game of Kill Team, and it was good fun (although neither of us could reliably roll higher than a 2 most of the game - a genestealer and a tyranid warrior were locked in combat with a guardian and a dire avenger for what felt like most of the game). I ended up losing by objectives, although again I might have been more in the game if either of us had been able to hit or wound anything at all.

The only thing we noticed (which may balance out over many games and/or with different matchups or scenarios) is that the roll to see who gets to move first seems to be extremely important - there were a couple rounds where, if I (Tyranids) had had to move first I'd have probably gotten extremely shot up, but as MiJ (Eldar) moved first we were instead guaranteed another round of combat. It might be something to look out for when we play a bunch of games this next week!