40k The Balancing Act

[Arkhan Land]

def agree on dice expansion Ide either want to see a D12 to double the current stats versus D6 relationship, or a D10 to mirror percentages but that would require a more intense re-working and maybe... gasp... math

I also want some sort of weight/threat/build limitations similar to Fanatsy/Historical Battles/PC Mech-Games like Mechwarrior and Heavy Gear (If you guys remember threat/weight limitations) where there would be caps on how much armour/flyers/ammo you would need or take in relationship to eachother. In a more realistic space-faring game, people would think twice about taking so many tanks if it meant your troops could only dish out three rounds of real firepower and that it could limit your flyers ability to zoom due to lack of fuel needed to get back for transportation.
Realistically speaking I dont think you would need to go that far into it, but essentially imagine that there is a limit on the amount of wounds/hull points you can take, Flyes/Skimmers/Bikes etc weighing an extra wound or hullpoint due to the need for fuel/support and suddenly you have yourself a real classy situation, or admittedly a real classy mess. In the Heavy Gear/Mech-Warrior series games its easier because those are PC games where the calculations are done for you, in a Tabletop strategy this same process would take so long it would mean people would probably be able to do very little list adjustment right before battle unless they were willing to brave the numbers! (probably not hard program for me to make as an TI-8X Program, or a basic text only App) but you see thats a lotta goshdarn work!

[Wolfshade]

I totally disagree

The more sided dice you have the more range of results you roll. Therefore the more dice you need to roll to experiance "expected results", conseuqently you could get a collection of good or bad rolls that lead to issues with balance.

The FoC is an attempt to balance forces out in a rather crude way, perhaps the fantasy % version is better. Though this might need the point price of Elites to fall back a little to get them into a force.

There was a tabletop strategy game where there were myriad different computations, so you would register all of your units into the system and then when you played a game you would log what action was taking place and against whom, then the server would churn away and pop out a result of what the result of an action was, like shooting close combat etc. It suffered from 2 big issues, 1) the servers went down for months at a time, 2) secondhand models that were still registerd couldn't be re-registered to a new owner. Without the servers there was no way a game could take place and unsurprisingly the game died off.

[Dave Mcturk]

when i was a 'serious' wargamer i steered away from 'games' like 40k, the dice bucket mechanism seeming very clumsy and time consuming, dabbled with early 40k and epic was great, played a lot of 4th, but since 5th havent played anything else {weekends away not an option !], think the green wombles missed a chance to really sort 6th out ... but ce la vie... and thats another thread... but 2d6 gives a range from 1:1 to 6:6 and is plenty for a table top generator, the numbers crunch quick and the visual is easy [simple if you like]... the D8/10/12/20 just, imo, make things even more clunky !

the standard single dice multi resolution is very often easier {if opponent agrees of course} to average down to one roll,

for example if 30 orc choppies charge in giving 120 attacks on a four, and at ST4 they need 4's to wound, we either roll 60 to wound or 30 saves depending - at lower dice volumes where averages may break down more then we return to the dice bucket !

[Veteran Sergeant]

D3 and D6 mechanics, with re-rolls, forces the designer to make real choices, versus fudging with a d8 or d4 . Or d100/d1000 tables. Ugh. Generally, when I see other than 6-siders being used, I often have to wonder just how hard the designer worked, because those non-standard dice allow for a lot of kitchen sinking, vs cutting the fat to get to the core of the simulation.

LOL at the idea of tabletop 40K being a "simulation".

It's one of the most ridiculously abstract tabletop games out there, where the focus is on the ease and speed of play over any other individual considerations. Any and all complexity inherent to most wargames has been bled out of the game over subsequent editions. This isn't a bad thing necessarily. It makes the game more accessible to beginners and people looking for a more casual gaming experience. But at no point is it a sign of sophisticated game design, lol.

In not all cases is this a bad thing, but it will always suffer the drawbacks of a d6 system. Warhammer's struggles with the D6 system is the variance of the abilities of individual models. You have a system based on 16.6% changes of probability, but where the statistics often exceed the total of 6, and the baseline model, the Space Marine, is a 4 in most "rollable" stats, which makes the measure between "bog standard" and "elite" 16.6%. D6 can work in simpler games. If you're talking WW2, and everyone is a human being, the weapons are effectively comparable, and nobody has any real personal armor to speak of, the 16.6% gap is less of a problem because it can represent the more gradual differentials between, say, poorly trained Soviet conscripts and elite German Fallschirmjäger and a lot of stats don't actually need to be differentiated at all.

Ultimately, to be a "better" game, 40K needs to move away from its d6 mechanic. However, will that make it a better selling game? When you talk about 2nd Edition, you get plenty of complaints that it was too complicated and took too long to play. So I think the gaming demographic has really spoken as to what they want. They want to complain about how crappy the mechanics are, but they want them to remain easy and quick to play, with as much abstraction as possible.

[Veteran Sergeant]

The other problem 40K has with balance is trying to be everything at once. Trying to figure out how to balance the value of a model with no ranged ability against one with a ranged weapon, but at the same time, keeping the rules as simple and easy to play as possible. 3rd Edition is really the culprit here, as the drastic refocus on getting models into hand to hand combat to facilitate single-turn combat resolutions. This created armies which were hand to hand focused in a game with guns.

The problem is that hand to hand has varied in power from ruleset to ruleset, to where 6th Edition's return to a "shooty" focus leaves a lot of players crying "nerf!" because their hand to hand units are less powerful. The slow downward creep in point values again make the differentiation between units difficult to measure. There are so few points difference between individual infantry models that it is easy for something to quickly become over or undercosted in comparison to one of its near-peers in another list. In other game systems, because they have a narrower focus, it is also much easier to determined equivalency. If we're playing Ancients, maybe you've got one side playing Romans, and the other side playing Gauls. Ultimately while there are ranged units in the game, it's a game which is going to revolve around the maneuver of infantry and cavalry units attempting to close distance and poke eachother with sticks. A game set in WW2, Vietnam, or Modern is going to revolve around maneuver warfare of infantry and armor attempting to shoot one another where close combat is going to be short and brutal for everyone involved. It might have rules for flying units, but they're going to recognize the scale of the battlefield as opposed to 40Ks extremely slow moving flying aircraft (that are still ridiculously hard to hit, lol). 40K's attempt to be everything at once (easy to play, simple ruleset, lots of models, radical mix of unit capabilities, focus on making sure people get to use all their toys as much as possible) is a huge barrier to creating a "balanced" game.

[Dave Mcturk]

i think i have to disagree with the above poster, ok the swing shift on a single d6 is always 16% per pip, but the multiple points values, the variation in movement and weapons, and the other variable stats are the 'core' of the game - even if they are abstract, the 'dice bucket' is just a resolution mechanism, the fact that the green wombles continually fail to balance or play test or to correct flaws by faq is what affects 'balance' not the resolution mechanism, one of the biggest flaws is the fact that even extremely high WS and ST units/characters still need a 3 to hit in cc, that is a 16% flaw that they seem incapable of correcting ... [but low WS and =ST gets a re-roll to wound if poison against all T ?] .... oh my...

and tbh the 'biggest' abstraction' in 40k is the failure to get any sort of scaling right... but as with any game ... it is the same for both players ... so a level playing field

[DarkLink]

The game is not ill balanced because it uses D6s.

[Wolfshade]

The game is not ill balanced because it uses D6s.

Worryingly, I agree with you DL.