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Hobby blog of an inveterate omnigamer

Painting Recipe: WWII British Infantry

February 9, 2024

WIP recipe:

Fine details: Cups (Brown for late war, white with blue rim for early), Canteens (Green-brown), Binoculars (Black)

Year in Review and Hobby for 2024

January 9, 2024

Forge Fathers from Mantic’s Firefight

For an inveterate omnigamer, I was actually pretty focused last year:

I was sort of serially monogamous with games, and it was nice—I spent time in communities that I really enjoyed and identified the semi-competitive-to-narrative niche that I vibe with as I slouch into aged grognardery.

This year, I want to do a better job of being part of gaming communities—sticking around over time, getting to know new people. The fellowship is one of the things that appeals to me most about tabletop gaming, but it’s tough when you’re dad-aged and irregularly available, and even tougher if you keep hopping from game to game.

Every year, I’m surprised by where my whims take me, but in 2024 I hope to focus on:

Historicals

You stick around in the hobby long enough, this is where you wind up, right? Like how everything turns into crabs.

I’ve been stockpiling Early Imperial Romans for a while, and partly I want to make some progress on my shamepile, but more than that I’ve felt the pull getting stronger and stronger. It’s an area where I could theoretically even throw some dice with my dad (God help me, I’m painting some Bolt Action Brits, and enjoying the list-building, and learning more about WWII).

I’m planning to spend a lot more time on historicals at Adepticon (assuming I’m able to attend), and I’d really like to get to know more of the local community. There are a bunch of Ancients rulesets I’d like to try (Infamy Infamy, Strength & Honor, Hail Caesar) and I hope to work through my Rome & Gaul project sufficiently to run a game. I’m also feeling the pull of Napoleonics at multiple scales—I’ve tried and enjoyed Et sans resultat, and I’m interested in Black Powder (Epic or otherwise), Valour & Fortitude, and Soldiers of Napoleon, among others.

Mantic

Mantic really don’t get enough credit—their rulesets are fantastic, and their newer plastic models have a wonderful retro-modern quality that makes them uniquely pleasurable to build and paint. I really dig both the Firefight rules and the Forge Fathers model range, and I want to spend more time on Mantic stuff this year. Firefight is my top priority game for Adepticon (again assuming I can attend). Longer term, I hope to complete the Abyssal Dwarf army that I’ve had on the go for an embarrassing amount of time and play some Kings of War locally.

BattleTech

Man, BattleTech is such a delight; I expect this will be my go-to casual game. (Casual in terms of vibes, rather than rules weight.) I already have several Lances painted up and some narrative games on tap—looking forward to working on some more terrain and to the Mercenaries Kickstarter coming in (with a lot of fun vehicles in tow).

These are probably the outer limits of a reasonably scoped hobby plan, but…

Wild cards

…of course, an omnigamer tends to get seized by whims, and it’s fun to try and predict which whims will do the seizing.

While I remain exhausted with GW—and the exhaustion clearly saved me from wasting time and money on Legions Imperialis—I am Old World-curious. The rules look promising, the design team is solid and seemed to have time to get it right, and I have most of an Empire army in a suitable state of semi-progress. Elsewhere in Specialist Games, I have a Blood Angels army that I’d still like to finish. Outside of modern/supported GW, my unpainted Warmaster models have been grabbing my eye, and I’d like to give Conquest a go at some point. I’m in a real rank-and-flank mood.

Prediction-wise, the slightly hotter takes are perhaps the games I think I won’t get into:

I was going to enumerate more games and companies I’m not jiving with, but on second thought, here’s a hobby goal: I want to spend time writing about games that bring me joy—the painting, the strategy, the history and lore…especially when it’s all grounded in thoughtful, beautiful games designed and orchestrated by passionate people. The joys and the people are, after all, the point.

Why does 40k 10th edition feel so hollow?

November 24, 2023

There are a lot of reasons you might want a lower barrier to entry for a tabletop game.

So there’s plenty of incentive to simplify. The player and designer-driven incentives are predicated on the game being a certain thing—-a particular sort of experience that you want to build and have and share. The seller’s incentive doesn’t really have that predicate, except insofar as the company is bound by players’ and creators’ wishes.

In the best cases, you get a design that opens up an existing experience to a wider audience. I don’t love D&D 5e, and I really don’t love WotC, but 5e obviously succeeded at this (and raised the siren call to other companies). 40k did something similar with 8th edition. Datasheets, simplified Strength/Toughness and AP calculations, removal of Initiative: these were all changes that made the game more accessible without doing material damage to the experience. These days I appreciate Initiative steps and tables and so on, but they’re not sine qua non for 40k.

But there are some fundamental characteristics of the experience that you can damage through simplification. While there’s obviously an element of subjectivity here, I reckon it’s the synthesis of these aspects that bring in a majority of players and lead them to spend time on this rather than something else:

The fact that you’re playing this game with another person is the glue that brings it all together. You’re immersed in a shared narrative. Your list and painting/modeling are expressed to someone. You make interesting choices in contest or collaboration with another brain. Simplicity is good insofar as it makes it more likely that you can have the essential, distinguishing qualities of the experience with someone else. But simplicity isn’t necessarily a good in itself. It should facilitate those qualities in the ruleset.

This is the sink at the heart of 40k 10th edition. Where it simplifies, it more often than not does damage to the core experience, making it less immersive, less expressive, and less interesting. It feels hollow, and it’s kind of fascinating how the company rapidly iterated its ruleset toward that hollowness.

Anyone paying attention to the game knows that there have been massive issues around faction balance, play-testing, quality control, and particular universal special rules from the start, and persisting to various degrees despite constant rules churn. But I’m more interested in the problems with the core game. To my mind, the major areas of decay in 10th edition are unit composition, movement and morale, and terrain.

Unit composition

This is the big one. In standard 10th edition play, units have fixed unit sizes and (points-wise) models can’t be purchased individually. Additionally, disparate weapon profiles have been consolidated in things like multi-weapons, and different load-outs for a given unit are condensed into a same-pointed profile, and there’s very minimal capacity to sprinkle in things like heavy weapons. Additionally, in 10th, “leader” characters like Space Marine Chaplains can only be paired with a (usually) short list of specific units.

Taken together, this amounts to a pretty dramatic hollowing out of unit composition. As a player, you have a much tighter decision space both game-wise and creatively. There’s less room to do something weird and idiosyncratic and experimental. This not only changes the experience when you’re at the table, but when you’re hobbying and mulling over lists.

Defenders of the 10th edition changes note that the new rules resemble Age of Sigmar, which works just fine. And AoS 3 does work just fine–it’s a fantastic ruleset (which will be needlessly churned away within a year). But what this defense misses is that these rules don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re not quite comparable from game to game. A certain granularity of force creation is part of the texture that folks look to 40k for. In AoS, fixed unit sizes exist in a context of a game that is generally getting more granular (after its initial design was overly simplistic by executive diktat). AoS also succeeded a massed battle game; large, fixed unit sizes aren’t really in tension with the vibe underlying the fiction. 40k, by contrast, is more squad level, so you might reasonably expect a greater degree of personalization.

Here, the same rules move can have different effects on immersion. In theory, fixed unit sizes and highly constrained leaders and simplified weapon profiles reduce the “balance surface” of the game. But the reality is that it sacrifices expressiveness and decision-making on the altar of a balance that will never be achieved, not least because the imbalance is driven principally by the game’s continuous churn.

And while it’s not a rules issue, it bears noting that GW didn’t discuss this change–a change they clearly knew would be unpopular among many players–until after pre-orders for the Leviathan box were in. Smart from a short-term sales perspective, but deeply, deeply cynical, and it’s stuck in my head as they’ve started flogging new games and box-sets. (More on that at the end.)

Movement and morale

I’ve had an easier time finishing standard-sized games of classic BattleTech or Horus Heresy during a game night than equivalent games of 10th edition 40k. In a reasonably balanced game, 10th just drags, with tedious movement/Overwatch interplay and an even-more-tedious charge phase. (Or else the game is less-balanced and over instantly.) The tedium isn’t merely a function of duration–it’s the feeling that too few interesting decisions were actually made. The charge phase’s base-to-base requirement is maybe the purest manifestation of the problem: while there are decisions involved, you’re mostly spending your time adhering to the constraints. It’s not tactically interesting, it’s not expressive, and it’s not immersive.

I mention movement and morale side-by-side because they’re two sides of the same mechanic: you want to put a unit in a particular spot to achieve a particular goal, usually either to hold an objective or to attack something. In theory, morale presents some friction against your accomplishing that goal in that spot. The Battleshock mechanic sounds good for this, reducing a unit’s ability to hold objectives. (Relatedly, having an Objective Control stat for units is a good idea–albeit not an original one, and notably additive rather than subtractive.) Battleshock just…doesn’t happen. It’s a heavily foregrounded element of the game that simply doesn’t occur as seemingly intended, rarely coming up or affecting outcomes at all. And that’s kind of wild. It makes you suspect that certain gears in the rule system are so shoddily thrown together that they never really click or turn like they should. Battleshock should prompt interesting decisions and convey a lovely sense of narrative. Instead, it does nothing.

Terrain

10th edition’s approach to terrain doesn’t even achieve the simplicity mandate. It’s more complex and less functional than 9th, with the much-discussed Towering rule for things like Knights creating, effectively, two different sets of terrain rules.

Somewhat less-discussed is the weirdo use of terrain base profiles to determine line-of-sight. You end up with constant cases where purely hypothetical obstructions to LOS have no real correspondence with actual model’s-eye-view line-of-sight. This is meant to simplify, but the counterintuitiveness actually slows things down and confuses decision-making, while being totally immersion-busting. Abstracted LOS and terrain can be great, but the approach here is slapdash and inconsistent.

Lowering the bar

This is a little rant-y. Partly I’m recognizing that 40k isn’t for me anymore. But there are some broader design lessons. Simplicity and accessibility are goods, but you can’t live by those goods alone–they’re goals insofar as they lower the barrier of entry to the essential, distinguishing qualities of an experience. But you can’t lower the bar indefinitely without fundamentally changing the attraction.

10th isn’t an awful ruleset so much as it is a profoundly mediocre one that takes several unnecessary steps backward from previous editions. There are a few good ideas in the mix, like free digital datasheets and the mission deck and the return of Universal Special Rules. (Although two of those three are more details of implementation that could have been applied to past editions, and the third is a conscious flashback). The good moves are just undermined by unforced errors and ultimately, a misguided sense of what the game should be.

It’s not just a design question, either. While I’m not sure that the present design team has anyone at the level of a Jervis Johnson or a James Hewitt, there are folks who have worked on past editions and who are doubtlessly thoughtful and well-intentioned and love the game. But they’re working in a particular context, under particular constraints. 10th isn’t just a dull ruleset with poor balance, but a mess of QC issues like misprinted mission cards–all stemming from the same corporate orientation toward growth and speed at minimum cost.

I’ve been kind of shocked at how thoroughly my interest in GW games has tanked in the months since 10th came out. I should have been the precise target audience for, say, Legion Imperialis or The Old World, and even though I doubt either will be subject to the same nonstop churn as 40k, I can see the telltale cracks of half-assery and it makes me tired. The company just doesn’t take the time to do things well, and over time it has hollowed out any desire I might have to give them money for half-baked shit.