Hopes for 10th Edition

[Jye Nicolson]

It seems strange to be talking about 10th just as 9th has finally given Codexes to everyone (well, World Eaters soon) and we're embarking into the promising Arks of Omen season with a comprehensive rebalancing. But like Psychic Awakening for 8th, the Arks of Omen campaign books and the Boarding Actions playmode are being treated by folks at large as the endgame, and chatter about 10th is starting up.

So let's chatter about 10th!

Now I am a massive fan of 9th - the core rules are streamlined and hit a good level of abstraction for me, the terrain rules have been *great* (especially Obscuring which on a reasonably set up board keeps the game from being a shooting gallery), and Crusade has successfully broken the "all Matched Play, all the time" hegemony. The army rules are thematic and characterful, each faction has a lot of rules making them play like themselves (witness how differently the Marine chapters play despite sharing a couple of hundred datasheets). It's the most fun I've had with a tabletop game, even beating out the magnificent Underworlds that's hitting its own sweet spot right now.

I do agree though that there's a level of complexity in the game that hurts its accessibility. It would be amazing if that could be fixed.

The thing is, that complexity is not in the core rules. Strategems are held by many - myself included - to be a key factor in cognitive overload, but the core has like six of them and Command Reroll isn't exactly a brain breaker. The lethality that made Armor of Contempt a necessary patch (and the size of the rebalance required to remove it again) came from weapon profiles printed elsewhere. Army rules, detachment abilities, campaign and warzone rules - it's the stacking of things that causes the issue, and none of them are printed in the core. Of course, Crusade is in the core so that does count, but its problem is that it's layered on top of so many other things, not that it is inherently complex - it's just a straw that can break the camel's back.

So while I disagree that the game would be better if the core rules tacked back to 30K, or 5th edition or whatever, more importantly I think that's orthogonal to the problem. You could keep the core rules virtually identical and address the complexity issue by completely redoing the supplemental material. As an owner, appreciator and player of...many...9th Edition codexes, I hate to say it, but if you want to smooth the game's learning curve, they have to go.

What would I wish for?

- Core rules very similar. Lots of clean ups are possible but broadly I think the abstractions and hooks are good.

- Ugh...Indexes. Free PDFs for everyone and apologies to Guard/World Eaters.

- Army rules are split into three tiers, Basic, Intermediate and Advanced. Basic are like subfaction traits, a light dusting of Crusade rules and not much else. Advanced is lots of stuff that's good for 2000 point games, most of the strategems etc (moving some strats back to datasheet rules would be good though). Basic should be pretty balanced for the new player experience. Advanced should be tournament balanced. Intermediate is there mostly so you don't have to swallow the full complexity of Advanced to move out of Basic.

- The default suggestion is to start with Basic/Combat Patrol, move to Intermediate/Incursion, and then finally to Advanced/Strike Force.

- Crusade starts at Basic/Combat Patrol and explicitly structures your journey into a learning curve thar than hitting you with full army rules + Crusade rules at once. There's a suggested parallel path for non-Crusade play (Basic Corebook Combat Patrol missions --> Intermediate/Incursion Tempest of War --> Advanced/Strike Force, for example). Tournament play is of course all the trimmings.

- Crusade mechanics, campaign mechanics, seasonal matched play mission mechanics etc should be about the same level of complexity, and maybe core rules + army rules + play mode rules at Advanced level should be about the same total weight as core rules + army rules are now.


I'm not going to get that wish, and as an off the cuff forum post it has its own problems (what's the mechanic that lets a player at Basic play a Crusade game against an experienced player who wants to use their Advanced rules? Giving them CP isn't going to work), but some kind of learning curve structure would be a way to handle the game's complexity without losing the depth and flavour of the current army rules.

I'm sure literally nobody else would want that, so what do you all have in mind?

[Primarch]

With the caveat that I have never played 9th and only 4 games of 8th...

10th is, according to some rumours, meant to be a bug departure from the 8th/9th rules. I heard one rumour that it will be more focused on special characters and centerpiece models, (aka HeroHammer) that is why the new boxed sets all come with a named hero. Obviously only time will tell.

There are a lot of things I would change about the game, so here is my short(-ish) list.

Alternating Activations - This completely gets rid of the game over before you take your 1st turn scenario. It also adds a lot more decision making to the game.

Opposed WS in melee - You need fewer special rules to represent more highly trained combatants. Guardsmen shouldn't be hitting a Harlequin on the same score they hit a Grot.

Vehicles have real armour and facing matters - Killing a tank from behind should be easier than from the front, and you should need a dedicated AT weapon to do so. LoS should be measured from the gun mount, not the radio antenna or the front fender.

All the rules in one place - I very much approve of GW saying that the new Arks series won't be necessary for playing an army. Ideally all of the rules for your army should be in your codex and nowhere else. Campaign books and supplements should cover new ways to play or new missions, not super special units.

Free PDF's - Hahahah! No really, Codexes can still have all the background and fluff in them, but dataslates should be available for free and updated automatically. Smaller companies manage this, I don't see why GW can't.

Risk Vs. Reward mechanics - Deepstriking units shouldn't automatically land on target, scattering out of position should be a possibility. Balancing the risks against the potential reward is an important choice.

Less Rerolls - I remember watching part of a game where a player had 9 or 10 attacks hitting on 2+ with rerolls and then wounding on 2+ with rerolls. At that point why bother with dice at all? Yes, it feels bad when your key unit misses its shots, but making everything auto-hit/wound just adds to the lethality of the game. Rerolls should be a once per game kind of thing.

Friction - Some games have a pinning mechanic which means that units under fire have a harder time following orders than units which are safely out of sight. The current wound mechanic where big units deteriorate as they take hits is a good first step.

Soup should be less effective than a pure army list - It is already easy to simply pick the most meta stuff from your armybook, so I don't see why you should be able to pick all the best stuff from across a range of books. It especially punishes those armies that don't have a keyword that covers 20 codexes. Having allies to fill in the gaps in your core force should come with a steep cost.

[Jye Nicolson]

Soup actually is less effective in 9th! There's a limited number of ways to do it without actively losing buffs on your main army, but that usually comes at the cost of the allies not getting theirs. Occasionally someone pulls a galaxy brain tournament list that gets a slight edge for a particular combo, but for the most part as soon as an army got their Codex they abruptly stopped wanting to soup.

(with a handful of exceptions it's not actually possible at all in the Arks of Omen season, and you haven't been able to mix subfactions of the same army in Matched Play for a while).

So they can probably stay the course there if that's a goal.


Edit: Re alternate activations, I just kind of don't believe they'll do it But even most GW games outside the big two do it, and I'd be here for it if it happens!

[The Other Dave]

I agree with what Prim says about rerolls - there's enough dice rolled in 40K (too many, really) that adding on rerolls can just a) slow the game to a crawl, and b) allow the player to mitigate a lot of the randomness that makes dice games fundamentally dice games. In AT, for example, rerolls are very rare and special things, letting them feel impactful when they do occur.

(I also agree about alternating activations and battlefield friction, but IGOUGO in particular is such a fundamental part of how 40K works that I can't really see them ditching it. Real friction would be nice too, but ever since RT, 40K's morale rules have been weaksauce at best and I don't see that changing either. TBF, I think I may be unusual in the degree to which "my guys don't always do what I want them to" rules make my eyes light up.)

Speaking of Titanicus, I also much prefer how AT does stratagems to how 40K does. You get a small number of stratagems per game, and each is (in general) one use only: you get a small number of cool thematic moves that can really swing things to use once per game, and again each one you play feels big and momentous in a way that 40K stratagems just don't. Failing that, I'd like 40K to at least go the route of AoS in stratagem use, where all but the completely generic "stratagems" are command abilities baked in to your various leaders' datasheets. Again, there are fewer per army, and you get to / have to curate: if I take this leader, I get this stratagem, if I take this sub-faction, I get this one, and you'll generally have a half dozen at most going into a game. Personally, I think about 85% of the mental load of current 40K is stratagems, both yours and your opponent's, and streamlining the system in some way or another is really necessary. Most of the rest IME is the minutae of combat, to wit:

The other thing I'd like to see change is making the combat rules as abstract as the shooting rules are: in shooting, you basically just say "I'm shooting at those guys with these guys," treating each unit as a unit, and roll a bunch of dice. In combat, all of a sudden you treat each model in the unit as an individual and have to worry about millimeter-scale model placement and where each individual model's hits are allocated, which really slows things down (and adds to mental load), doubly so if you get those juicy rerolls in. I don't really think saying "if two units are in combat, it's a chaotic swirling melee so just roll the dice for all their model's weapons no matter where each model happens to physically and precisely be, and apply the hits" would make the game any less tactically interesting. (Basically, I like the fundamental abstractness of a lot of 8th/9th edition as a supported-platoon-level wargame, and I'd like to see 10th lean into that even more.)

[jus]

Opposed WS in melee - You need fewer special rules to represent more highly trained combatants. Guardsmen shouldn't be hitting a Harlequin on the same score they hit a Grot.

I really want to see a return of proper WS. Yes, it will slow the game down, but it makes so much more sense.