Saturday, June 25, 2011

6th ed Rumblings

by Anonymous Foodie


I am going to say one thing about the current rumors of 6th ed...

Calm the Eff down!

I have played through three editions of this game - 6th will be my fourth.  Let me tell you a little secret about the past couple of changeovers...

Since 2nd, 40k has moved toward a simpler, more streamlined, quicker to play version of itself.  More "kid-friendly", if you will.  While I never played 2nd ed, stories of the "template phase", the unofficial phase used to keep track of and move all of the random gas clouds, vortex markers, and other things caused by various wargear and conditions, were still things of infamy.

Every time one of these new, "dumbed down" editions has come to light, people have complained.  For every one of you who is now looking at these rumors and saying "No way!", "Too complicated!", "Convolusion at it's worst!", there was an evil twin saying the exact opposite.

Despite all of this, I have been able to play, and find people to play against, through three editions so far.  There are always complaints, there are always cries of joy.  There is always change.

And, while I'll not say that no one has ever quit with a new edition, the game as a whole has continued.  People adapt, learn new ways to play, new ways to have fun.  Which, if you think about it, is kind of the point of this game.

I've spent this morning looking over the rumors... some skimming took place, and I haven't even made it all the way through.

But it's early... a lot of this could be true, could be false, could be half-true.  Like saying against a Tank Shock, you can't use grenades.  So no more strapping a Meltabomb to a vehicle in a last ditch effort?  I would think (read; hope) that this is meant to imply no normal (offensive/defensive) grenade use.

Now, I'll throw out a few notables with regard to my armies that I've seen so far... and a lot of it is nice.

First off, more varied movement (other than 6"/12") is something many people like from other games.  So is the "cover halves your movement, period" style of moving through terrain.

Fast Skimmers (read; Raiders) having the movement docked to 8" threw me for a minute.  Hey, the fastest army just lost a third of their speed... schwat??  So I kept reading, looking for the caveat... and I found it.

Surging.  Aka, moving twice your normal speed.  It's the equivalent of cruising speed, really.  So I didn't lose 4", I gained 2".  Because I can now move 16" and fire one weapon (or all, in the case of any of my vehicles that have multiple, thanks to Aerial Assault).  Suck it, Speed Freeks.

Now, there was that little bit about open-topped not allowing you to assault after disembarking, but I'm wondering if Fleeting will allow you to do that instead.  On the plus side of this, Open Topped no longer means the vehicle is easier to damage, and I can fire out of my vehicles on the move.  Even heavy weapons.  If I have to drop my Wyches for a unit of Trueborn that can fire massive amounts of splinter or dark matter fire while moving 16" around the board... I think I'm okay with that.  I've always been a Kabalite at heart anyway.

See?  Tactics can change.

Now, something that Nids will love.  Move Through Cover gives you an I-test to ignore terrain.  Period.  No more rolling mutated snake-eyes and cursing your ability to "navigate terrain well".  If I roll a 5 or less, my Genestealers just run at you.  No I1 penalty.  Just rending death.

Hormagaunts, with the Bounding Leap rule, don't even need the I-test.  Who needs grenades?  I just eat the trees as I go.

And perhaps even better - Assault weapons act as a 2nd CCW *if* you charge.  If I remember correctly, and I do, my ENTIRE ARMY is armed with assault weapons (if, that is, I bothered to give them a gun instead of a big stabby arm instead).

I guess S4, I5, Poisonous termagants (on the charge, near a Tervigon) weren't deadly enough... so now they get 3 attacks instead of 2.  If they had move through cover, they'd actually be head over heels better than Hormagaunts if this turns out to be true.  But they don't... which is good, because it gives you a reason to have variety.  Hormagaunts will always be Y good.  Termagants are only X good, but can be Z good under the right circumstances.

Now, all of this said... don't get too worked up just yet.  Fully comprehensive Codices (aka, Codexes) have been "leaked", only to be discovered as intricate forgeries later.  These same, or other, people have had plenty of time to get to work on a document of this size.  And they're obviously hitting buttons that are meant to be hit with how much I've heard/read about this in the past few days alone.

In the end... we'll see.

8 comments:

  1. Well met, brother, all the recent ho-hah going on about this has had me feeling confused, depressed and in the end, not really caring after I've slept on it. We'll just have to wait and see, if it sucks, then I'll just stick to the modelling aspect of the hobby, as there will no doubt be cool looking mini's coming out.

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  2. I still think that is blatant wish-listing and a bunch of bullshit.

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  3. The Rumours make it look like Mr Cavatore wrote a great game before he left. I am just not going to get my hopes up about how much Grandma Wendy will keep in the final product.

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  4. It's too early to get bent out of shape about anything. People should save proclaiming the end is nigh until the books is actually in print.

    As for me I'm going to thrown down and say that this is probably someones wish list. At most it could be a very early draft of a very experimental set of rules. I could see the design staff trying out some off the wall stuff to see what works and what doesn't.

    Overall, the rules smell very amateurish. Like they where done by someone who thinks they have a good grasp of game design, but has never tried out any of them on the table top. Basically, they look like a lot of the games I've tried to design. I see lots of needlessly complicated rules that a few rounds of play testing would filter out. Over complicated rules don't always increase the complexity of the game, and to me is a sign that this is nowhere near being a completed professional rule set. If this is the real thing, expect even the released version to be very different.

    I also see lots of old school elements that you used to see in games from back in the day. Stuff that would show up in games Star Fleet Battles, but most modern game designers don't use them anymore because they turned out to be a bad idea.

    As for why someone would go to the effort to make such a complex hoax; there are these things called 13 year olds. They have nothing but time and a sense of humor that finds it funny to fool people much older and wiser than they. Some of them even have a moderate grasp of the English language. It doesn't necessarily require all that much work. Someone could have easily taken their buddies fan rules and posted them as the real thing.

    Chill

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  5. I am chill, happy even. Though everyone thinks I'm slitting my wrists or something. I'm still playing the game guys! I played Gibbs last week at the FLGS and went to a tourney today. Sheesh!

    I mean, worst case, what happens? Warpath and Level 7 suck, GW releases a crappy 6th edition, and we just keep playing 5th for at least a couple of years after that.

    But I really think that with 3 companies in the market, one of them will get it right. Whether that's GW or one of the upstarts. So I'm actually happier about the hobby's prospects than I have been in 6 months or so.

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  6. We will have to see how move through cover interacts with other rules -- it will be awesome if it becomes a sort of frag grenade on an I roll. Termagants have move through cover btw, they did lose fleet this edition though (which might be what you meant).

    Also since Tyranids have a caveat that they don't have actual CCWs and never gain an attack by having extra ccws, the assault weapon bit doesn't help them. Would have been awesome though.

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  7. But sir, Termagants DO have move through cover.

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  8. I'm excited about the possibility of being able to fire my darklances and splinter cannons out of my raider while moving at 'cruising' speed. Kabals are definitly the way to go, and Sliscus will of course be my HQ (and maybe a haemonculi). Though the thought of loosing the ability to jump ship straight into combat kinda makes me think twice about a Coven- or Cult-based DE army.

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out dang bot!

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