New Year's, New Documents

It's a new year, and I'm proud to present major changes to the site.  I have rewritten and presented the Core Rules as a PDF (click on the picture). 

The Core Rules v2

I have also made my first Force Book, describing the Martian Colonists (click on the picture). 

The Martian Colonists v2

Over the next few weeks and months, I will be writing and adding Force Books for the Free Martians, the Brutes, and the Ancients.  These are all working documents.  I'd welcome any comments you might be kind enough to forward.  

Yule Time

When Odin rides across the sky with a bunch of dead people!  For real!

The time around the Solstice is the time when the days are shortest, the world is dark, and getting through the winter is on everyone's mind.  It's also the time when the days start to lengthen again, giving rise to thoughts of rebirth. 

So naturally, people stuck in the dark, with little else to do, tend to have a big winter party: Yule, Christmas, Saturnalia, etc. 

They also tend to think about death a lot.  Christmas time has a lot of creepy stories associated with it, and one of my favorites is the Wild Hunt.  During this liminal season, between life and death, when everything is cold, processions of the dead were believed to ride through Northern Europe.

So when Santa rides across the sky, with his eight tiny reindeer, just remember: it could be a lot worse.

How to Design a Comp System for 40k?

The Warhammer 40k world is reacting to the release of Escalation.  Warhammer 40k continues to be the train-wreck from which I can't look away, or maybe the abusive spouse I can't bring myself to leave.

This column was inspired by a post by Goatboat over at Bell of Lost Souls.  He asks whether it is possible to create a tournament system by "broad changes instead of just small 'faq's' to fix specific unit rules".  He then gives some suggestions.

More or less, he's asking for a kind of soft comp system.  For those who don't know, a comp or "composition" system judges tournament players' army lists.  It either gives them a score that helps rate their final place in the tournament or outright forbids certain combinations or units.  Various ones have been tried -- I encountered my first ones back in 3rd edition Rogue Trader tournaments -- but GW has abandoned them, and they have fallen out of favor for most players.

I have written about 40k balance issues before here and here.  My conclusion has been that 40k's woes result from several problems combining together: some unit are under-priced, some rules are too powerful, and armies can be abusively min-maxed in several different ways. Any real fix would need to originate with GW and would require a rewrite of all the Codices and changes to the core rules.

But in the interest of amateur game design, I will try to design a fix that meets Goatboy's criteria:  one that is universally-applicable to all existing armies, that changes few or no core mechanics, and does not mess with the sealed box of existing Codices' unit descriptions or point values.

Most 40k abuses involve maximizing specialist units beyond the capacity of a "normal" army's ability to counter them.  So most of my fixes will concentrate on reducing the number of specialized units an army can take.  Largely this means strictly limiting the Force Organization Chart.

1) Let's start with Goatboy's suggestion that there be only one Force Org. I like this one.  So overall, there will be a limit of 1-2 HQ, 2-6 Troops, 0-3 Elites, 0-3 Heavies, 0-3 Fast Attack, and 1 Fortification.  Any allies must come out of this allotment too.

2) Limit all Non-Troop units to 0-2 of any particular unit.  So you could only have a maximum of 2 Whirlwinds or 2 Wraithlords or 2 units of Sternguard or whatever.  Dedicated transports are instead subject to a limit of 0-4 of the same type.

3) Any mandatory Troops who do not purchase a Dedicated Transport must be taken at their maximum size.  Any mandatory Troops that do purchase a Dedicated Transport must be taken at the maximum size that will fit in the transport.  (As an exception, if the player intends to run an Independent Character with the unit, it must instead be taken at the maximum size that will still allow the Character to fit in the transport with it.  The Independent Character chosen must begin the game as part of the chosen unit.)

4) For every 500 points (or fraction thereof) over 1000 points, the player must take another mandatory Troop choice, subject to the rules above.

5) Limit all Fliers or Flying Monstrous Creatures to a total of 0-2 combined.  

6) Disallow any Lords of War, any model with a Str D weapon, or a Void Shield.

7) I also like Chumbalaya's suggestion from the comments.  As a special Tournament rule, no 2+ Armor or Invulnerable save may ever be rerolled. 

The idea here is to prevent maximization of particular capabilities by duplicating units or transports.  It prevents minimization of mandatory selections.  It particularlly limits Fliers, which require a strong investment in unusual equipment to counter in large numbers than other types of model.  Number 7, is pretty much there just to stop Screamstar and/or Jetbike Seer councils.

This is a hardly a fool-proof system.  It punishes some armies more than others.  But it may at least be less bad than current, unregulated Warhammer 40k.  In the absence of competent attention by Games Workshop itself, I think that's the best we can hope for.

Rewriting

I've started revising my core game rules this weekend.  My intention is to bring the quality up to the level of a professional print publication, or as nearly as I can manage on my own.  Right now, I'm doing it in Word.  Eventually, it will become a PDF for the site.

My first pass will be a play test version of the core rules, with only minimal art.

The next step will be a series of army books for each of the four armies I've been developing.  I'll start with the Colonists and the Free Martians, which are farthest along.

I also want to create a generic World War II infantry list. This site is largely an adjunct of www.wwpd.net and a lot of readers come here from www.boltaction.net.  I'd like to lure some of you readers into trying out my rules with figures you already have. 

So, there's not much to show on the blog at the moment, but work continues...

A Sample Page

Game manufacturing

A really cool post from Frontline Gaming today, on manufacturing in China.

Squanto Was Awesome

Eat me.

In traditional American thanksgiving mythology, Squanto appears at the "friendly Indian" who helped the Pilgrims survive their first years at Plymouth.  This story is true (ish) but wholly inadequate.  The long-suffering Tisquantum was actually born in a Native American village in the spot where the Pilgrims would later settle.  He was kidnapped, sold to Spain as a slave, won his freedom, then hung out in England for years, hoping for a ride home.  The English eventually dropped him off in New England, but he discovered that his entire tribe had died of disease.  So he moved in with his neighboring Wampanoag.  When the Pilgrims showed up, settling in his old village, he apparently felt more loyalty to his old home than to his adopted tribe, and assisted the newcomers.  Of course, the Pilgrims were ungrateful European religious fanatics, who ended up conquering most of the neighboring tribes later anyway.  So, all things considered, Squanto's choices may have been a bit unwise.  But he lived a fascinating life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

More 40k Thoughts

I think it's pretty clear that Warhammer 40k has long had serious problems of game-balance.  I enjoy casual games with the system, but in a tournament or other highly-competitive environment, it's far too easy to create lists that are abusive. (40k's woes are in marked contrast to the relative stability of Flames of War, as I discussed here.)

Naturally, I'd like my own game to avoid similar pitfalls, so I've been thinking about the origins of 40k's balance problems, and how to escape them.  I have concluded that 40k's woes stem from several sources, and that there is no single, simple fix for them.

Abusive versus Competitive

Let's start with some definitions.  40k's problem is that its current set of codices too easily permits players to produce abusive army lists.

My first definition: "An abusive army list is an one that maximizes one axis of the army's capabilities to such an extent that it overwhelms the opposing capabilities of any likely opponent."

Any particular army a player can choose has different elements, such as numbers, armor, vehicles, flyers, and so forth.  It also has certain countering capabilities: anti-tank weaponry, high-AP marine-killers, anti-air weapon, and so forth.  Any of these axises of capability can be increased (usually at the expense of some other axis of capability).

Naturally, players have choice about exactly what kind of army they want to play, and what trades of capability they find desirable.  And, indeed, competitive list building (deciding what parts to maximize or minimize or emphasize) is an important and enjoyable part of a bring and battle wargame. Most players try to build lists that emphasize one capability, so that opponents will have trouble countering it.

The difference between a competitive list and an abusive list is then largely a matter of degree.

There are, of course, some necessarily subjective key words in my definition.  How much advantage is "overwhelming"  and how much is a normal part of the variety of armies?  Exactly how does one decide what's likely in an opponent?  Some local environments will be different than others.  But even if there's some fuzz around the edges, I think the core meaning remains clear enough: an abusive army seeks to win the game before it is played, by fielding a force that a "typical" foe simply will not posses the tools to counter.

My second definition: "A balanced meta-environment is one that does not permit the creation of abusive army lists."  Simple. The game lists should prevent any army from becoming so distorted that it's abusive.  (Now, it well may still be possible to create an underwhelming army that stupidly forgoes certain key elements, like an army entirely made of lasgun-toting guardsmen, but that's a different issue.) 

Abuse Me

An abusive army overwhelmingly maximizes a particular capability.  An army list can reach this threshold in any of several ways, or (more subtlety) by some combination of them.  Here are the most common offenders:

Under-costed Units

Some units just cost too little for what they do.  I'm sure we can all think of examples from 40k.  And, honestly, I have a lot of sympathy for the mistakes of game designers.  It's difficult to tell, before publication, what's the appropriate value for a unit, because there are so many factors involved.  But an under-costed unit is easy to abuse.  Take a lot of them, and whatever capability that unit represents will increase with every duplicate choice.  Or, if the unit is a mandatory choice, make it as small as possible, so that you have more room elsewhere in the list for your desired axis of capability.  (Ie, take only 2 small units of Cultists so you can have more Heldrakes, or take 5 man Dire Avengers squads so you can have more Wave Serpents.  Or whatever. ) 

Over-costed Units

This is the not-so-evil twin of an undercosted unit.  It basically makes any army taking them bad, which of itself does not lead to abuse.  But if, for example, all of army A's anti-infantry is really good, but all of army B's tanks are too expensive, it may force army B into a bad match-up.  For example, armor 14 might be a counter to many abusive builds, but Land Raiders have long been just a bit too expensive.  So few people take them.  Subtle, but it's a factor.

Spam

"Spam" is internet slang for a duplicated unit.  If someone takes three Heldrakes, or three Landraiders, or six units of thirty Chaos Cultists, then they're "spamming" that unit. Spamming is an obvious way to maximize a particular capability: take a unit that has that capability, then take a bunch more.  Now, spam is not always abusive.  I could take six identical tactical squad units, with a flamer and missile launcher, and no one would care.  Spam usually only works if the unit has some really special ability or is under-costed already.  Nor is spam entirely the same as being undercosted.  There are plenty of units that if run in small numbers are not abusive for the point cost, but if run in large numbers can be. Most armies can deal with one Riptide.  They probably can't deal with four.  Spam is essentially abuse of the Force Organization chart, and it becomes more common (and annoying) when using multiple FOs, due to allies, high point games, or whatever. 

Synergy

It's also possible to spread a capability out among many units, in such a way that when they are combined, the end result is abusive.  For example, one unit with an Ignores Cover weapon is an annoyance.  An army that takes Ignore Cover weapons on multiple different units may end up with so many weapons that cover (an essential part of the game) just becomes meaningless.  Or, there are abilities that can be countered separately, but together "stack"  into something crazy good.  (For example, the Screamer Star or the Jetbike flying Seer Council.)

Healing the Broken: Is is Possible?

There are systems of "Comp" that try to layer a second set of rules or choices on top of the existing set of Codices -- by limiting force org choices, or forbidding duplicate units, or requiring set percentages of different unit types.  But I'm skeptical: I don't think 40k can be fixed in any easy way.  The game designers would have to rewrite the line of codices and (I think) fundamentally alter and limit the Force Organization chart. 

So what are the lessons for my game?  I have a couple of take-aways:

1) If I expect an army to consist mostly of a particular type of unit (like infantry) I must require armies to take them.  Low minimums will be abused.  So, for my game, I think the core of every army will be three basic squads of troops. 

2) Conversely, especially powerful units like vehicles, that don't have a natural counter, should be limited in number.  So, for my game, I think armies will be limited to 0-3 light vehicles and 0-1 tanks.

3) Avoid powers that stack.  I think all my Doctrines will be limited: only one will affect a unit at a time.

4) I have to get the point values right.  If and when I don't get the point values right, I must immediately correct them.  Even if it requires errata and FAQs.

5) I must provide game-balance whether I like it or not.  Even if I, as the game designer, do not care about creating a tournament-capable, balanced meta-environment, and say so, like Games Workshop has done, people will still play tournaments with my game and then be surprised it's not balanced. 

Enough complaining.  Next week: Thanksgiving.