Why I think 7th is the worst yet; and what it forgot (a negative view of 7th ed 40k)

[confoo22]

Once again my three main points for this headline are:

1) 7th edition is missing way too many BASIC rules that players should not have to invent them self.
2) 7th edition has many rules that do not work at all if played as RAW and people should not have to fix these basic rules by them self.
3) 7th editon had the BEST resource and information to become a really good edition but it failed to do so and still was the most expensive one.

Right on man, there are definitely issues with the rule set. And though I personally draw enjoyment from mission writing and rules tweaking I can completely understand why people find that frustrating and 100% agree that you shouldn't HAVE to do so after spending so much for the rules. I don't think that that makes this the worst edition yet though.

I've been playing since the tail end of fourth and I never had a great grasp on 4th's rules, but of the three that I did play regularly I'd have to say that 5th was the one I liked the least, mainly because I found the rules of that edition to really encourage particular play styles across all the codexes (parking lots, anyone?) while the most recent one at least lets you play more to your particular style and, in a non competitive format, have a chance at a fun and challenging game (please note I did not say balanced). That's not to say that some of the current codexes don't encourage particular lists over other, but at least that's more exclusive to the codex instead of the edition as a whole.

[40kGamer]

But I don´t think that GW planed to release this edition so poorly written. They just didnt test play it enough or did so with wrong people.

So you're thinking this is the playtest department?

Our club allready has about two A4 pages full of house rules - just to fix those major problems that 7th edition causes. Its hard for me to understand how people who dont have the luxury of playing with the same people everytime can overcome these problems without spending first at least 30 minutes to house rule things.

I've noted before that there is a lot more upfront time required to play a good game in 7th. Pick up games and event games have become nearly impossible to pull off without problems. And 7th has so many fiddly rules that may be cool in concept but they really bog down the game.

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This. Stupid ideas like vehicles not being able to overwatch are also problems I have with the rules. While I get maybe battle cannons should not, the whole reason every nation that can puts machine guns on them (and has since the beginnings of armoured warfare) is to repel attackers. And that's only one example. It's stupidity like this that makes me believe the proverbial monkeys on typewriters is what GW provides us. Eventually they may produce Shakespeare, but until then it's just garbage.

The no overwatch for tanks is super silly. A reworking of the old defensive weapon rule would be most welcome.

[Gleipnir]

Increasingly the game feels like if you want to get the most out of it you either need to house rule minor details and go the narrative route or play it as a 3 player game with one player acting as the referee of sorts managing setup and objectives and random tables to move matches along faster.

[ReveredChaplainDrake]

The no overwatch for tanks is super silly. A reworking of the old defensive weapon rule would be most welcome.

Overwatch itself is a really silly rule that needs to be sent back to the devs for a total overhaul. At the very least it should have to spend an edition sitting in the time out corner, thinking about what it did.

In order for me to come back to 7th, especially as a very bitter Tyranid player, I was going to have to accept that the game was never going to be fair. The best it could offer was its fluff, and the game let you play that fluff out. Basically I had to accept GW on their own terms. ...And they still suck. In fact, I think now I'm even more cynical and bitter against them because they fail so utterly at delivering a consistent narrative within the game. Instead, the actual gameplay is a bunch of stilted rules that work differently depending on what army you're using, rather than having all armies operate off a consistent, intuitive rules system, using special rules only when the basic rules cannot adequately represent what GW wants to convey. No wonder the games all take four hours. Nobody can keep track of all the rules.

1) Tau Stealth Suits, Tyranid Lictors, and benefactors of the Invisibilty psychic power are all capable of essentially being impossible to see. Yet they all work differently. Tau's gives them Stealth and Shrouded. Lictors give them precision Deep Strike and Stealth. Invisibility forces snap shots and making things super-hard to hit in melee, but confers neither Stealth nor Shrouded. Actually, speaking of Lictors, the Deathleaper forces snap shots and has Stealth, but like the Tau and the basic Lictor, it has no bonuses in melee...

2) And They Shall Know No Fear. In what should probably be the most blatant case of Exactly What It Says On The Tin in the entire rulebook, this rule ought to just be "ignore Fear". But no, instead it has this odd time-warping rally bonus that basically obfuscates whole game mechanics from applying to the Space Marines. It's not that it's overpowered (usually). It's just kinda' arbitrary. It's like they're Fearless... except not really. It's like they're so special that Fearless wasn't good enough for them.

3) Monstrous Creatures vs Walkers. Sometimes it's pretty simple enough to discern. Giant winged Baphomet-looking thing with a battle axe? Easy, Monstrous Creature. DING! Clunky trash can with pneumatic limbs? Well it's armored, so Walker. DING! Tau Riptide? Well, it's a big guy in a giant mecha... basically a fancy version of the Killa-Kan... I'm betting it's a walker- BZZZZZZZZT! Rats. Okay, Dreadknight. Well he's in a giant power lifter. Sentinels, Penitent Engines, and War Walkers all set the precedent that these kinds of things fall into the Walker category. Gonna' go with Walker here, too- BZZZZZZZZT! Oh come on! Okay, last round: Knight Titan. Oh no, not falling for that one again. Monstrous Creature- BZZZZZZZZZT!

Ooooooh, sorry but you didn't win the million dollars. Well, that's it for this week, folks. Tune in next week for another exciting episode of... WALKER... OR... MONSTROUS... CREATURE!

4) Psychic Powers, specifically for Tyranids. The current psychic / perils table are based off drawing power from the warp, as most psykers do. But Tyranids don't. They draw from the Hive Mind. They don't draw on the powers of Chaos at all, probably for this very reason. So their powers don't work like normal. (*rolls dice*) ...Huh. Funny, they seem to Perils just fine. Well, at least we block out the warp, making it harder for other armies to draw on the powers of Chaos when *they* cast... What do you mean we can't block them? ...How are their casters more likely to suffer daemonic retaliation with us standing around? What sense does *that* make? I thought the Perils of the Warp were supposed to represent the backlash of the raw warp. But I thought the Hive Mind was blotting out all that Chaos nonsense... ...Ow, I need an asprin. I think I just suffered a Perils of the Warp attack just trying to rationalize this...

5) Chaos Marines, specifically what happens to Marines when they turn traitor. I was just reading the fluff behind the Crimson Slaughter last weekend. Basically a bunch of Marines with presumably ample amounts of standardized technology razed a planet and were haunted by their deeds until they went crazy. And this was within a hundred years of the Black Crusade. So... in that time period, those recently-insanity-stricken marines went and threw out all their technology overnight (apparently piling all this tech into their drop pods and then firing them off into deep space...), started growing horns, mutated their Dreadnoughts into hideous fleshy thingies, managed to accumulate a ton of Cultists, and some even became Daemon Princes. Their praises to the Emperor aren't even cold on their lips yet. So in other words, not only are Chaos Marines all a bunch of technophobes (how the Iron Warriors live with themselves I'll never know...), but this recently-traitorous chapter basically replicated the corruption, daemonic pacts and warp mastery of the Black Legion, who have been at this rebellion for the past ten thousand years. Boy, I bet the ol' Luna Wolves feel like a bunch of idiots now. This succumbing-to-chaos-and-becoming-a-graver-threat-to-the-Imperium-than-all-the-xenos-combined thing is easier than I thought.

Suffice it to say, I could keep this up all day.

[Charistoph]

So you're thinking this is the playtest department?

Too many monkeys, not enough dogs.

5) Chaos Marines, specifically what happens to Marines when they turn traitor. I was just reading the fluff behind the Crimson Slaughter last weekend. Basically a bunch of Marines with presumably ample amounts of standardized technology razed a planet and were haunted by their deeds until they went crazy. And this was within a hundred years of the Black Crusade. So... in that time period, those recently-insanity-stricken marines went and threw out all their technology overnight (apparently piling all this tech into their drop pods and then firing them off into deep space...), started growing horns, mutated their Dreadnoughts into hideous fleshy thingies, managed to accumulate a ton of Cultists, and some even became Daemon Princes. Their praises to the Emperor aren't even cold on their lips yet. So in other words, not only are Chaos Marines all a bunch of technophobes (how the Iron Warriors live with themselves I'll never know...), but this recently-traitorous chapter basically replicated the corruption, daemonic pacts and warp mastery of the Black Legion, who have been at this rebellion for the past ten thousand years. Boy, I bet the ol' Luna Wolves feel like a bunch of idiots now. This succumbing-to-chaos-and-becoming-a-graver-threat-to-the-Imperium-than-all-the-xenos-combined thing is easier than I thought.

And none of this is exactly 7th Edition's fault, and goes WAY back to 3rd Edition or earlier. I used to have the 2nd Ed Chaos book, but not the Space Marines book, but even then, there were a lot of these same differences.

Still, I would love to see Loyalist Marines divided in to Codex and Legionnaires, and Chaos Marines divided in to Devoted and Renegade, then let the supplements fall.

Codex Marines would bring the Angels in with the Ultras and Templars moved over to Legionnaires with the Space Wolves. Basically, if you're mostly codex-adherent, you're in the first. If you use the codex more for toilet paper and comic relief while still operating more or less how your Legion did in the Grand Crusade, welcome to the Legionnaires.

Devoted Marines are those who are deep in to the cults of Chaos, including Black Legion, Word Bearers, etc. The Renegades are either under the "Chaos is okay for some, but I'm not worshiping" or "The Imperium sucks, we're outta here" groups like the Red Corsairs, Alpha Legion, Iron Warriors, and possibly the Night Lords.

But that has nothing to do with 7th Edition itself.

[John Bower]

5) Chaos Marines, specifically what happens to Marines when they turn traitor. I was just reading the fluff behind the Crimson Slaughter last weekend. Basically a bunch of Marines with presumably ample amounts of standardized technology razed a planet and were haunted by their deeds until they went crazy. And this was within a hundred years of the Black Crusade. So... in that time period, those recently-insanity-stricken marines went and threw out all their technology overnight (apparently piling all this tech into their drop pods and then firing them off into deep space...), started growing horns, mutated their Dreadnoughts into hideous fleshy thingies, managed to accumulate a ton of Cultists, and some even became Daemon Princes. Their praises to the Emperor aren't even cold on their lips yet. So in other words, not only are Chaos Marines all a bunch of technophobes (how the Iron Warriors live with themselves I'll never know...), but this recently-traitorous chapter basically replicated the corruption, daemonic pacts and warp mastery of the Black Legion, who have been at this rebellion for the past ten thousand years. Boy, I bet the ol' Luna Wolves feel like a bunch of idiots now. This succumbing-to-chaos-and-becoming-a-graver-threat-to-the-Imperium-than-all-the-xenos-combined thing is easier than I thought.

Ah, but you're forgetting 'the Warp' and its very nature. to the Chaos Marines that were legiones Astartes it's not 10k years since the HH, it's like a few years to them, time in the Warp is a nonsense and totally meaningless. So you can spend what you think is a day in the warp and find the Imperium has moved on 10k years, or spend a hundred years in the warp and find the galaxy hasn't even really missed you.

And a big thanks to the mods btw for removing the nastiness that occurred between daboarder and I; it was uncalled for on both sides and I'd like to apologise for what I said.

[World Of Pain]

Thank you for everyone who commented, posted their opinion and read this "open letter" of mine. In only 4 days we have had over 8400 views of this topic so I truly hope in my heart that one of those people is working for the GW and maby - just maby - this gave him or her something to think about.

PLEASE! TEST PLAY YOUR RULES MORE BEFORE YOU PUBLISH THEM! FAQ AND CORRECT THEM AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE TO FIX THOSE THINGS THAT YOU MISSED BEFORE PRINTING!

Love your stuff and work - so much that I wanted to write this to make things better.

[Andrew Thomas]

This. Stupid ideas like vehicles not being able to overwatch are also problems I have with the rules. While I get maybe battle cannons should not, the whole reason every nation that can puts machine guns on them (and has since the beginnings of armoured warfare) is to repel attackers. And that's only one example. It's stupidity like this that makes me believe the proverbial monkeys on typewriters is what GW provides us. Eventually they may produce Shakespeare, but until then it's just garbage.

I agree. That was my favorite doctrine in the WD Armoured Company list, back in 4th, the one that let you fire your sponsons at a charging foe. Luckily, the conversion I'm working on in the Blogs is going to fix that. (/shameless plug)
But yeah, the Maelstrom Objectives deck, especially in MM 6, is a clunky system, especially when the deck is still weighted heavily toward taking and holding positions.
And the Psychic Phase is far too swingy. Even if you optimize for a dominant Psychic Phase, you are still beholden to the dice, which is odd for an edition that seems hellbent on removing randomness from the rules set.

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And none of this is exactly 7th Edition's fault, and goes WAY back to 3rd Edition or earlier. I used to have the 2nd Ed Chaos book, but not the Space Marines book, but even then, there were a lot of these same differences.

Still, I would love to see Loyalist Marines divided in to Codex and Legionnaires, and Chaos Marines divided in to Devoted and Renegade, then let the supplements fall.

Codex Marines would bring the Angels in with the Ultras and Templars moved over to Legionnaires with the Space Wolves. Basically, if you're mostly codex-adherent, you're in the first. If you use the codex more for toilet paper and comic relief while still operating more or less how your Legion did in the Grand Crusade, welcome to the Legionnaires.

Devoted Marines are those who are deep in to the cults of Chaos, including Black Legion, Word Bearers, etc. The Renegades are either under the "Chaos is okay for some, but I'm not worshiping" or "The Imperium sucks, we're outta here" groups like the Red Corsairs, Alpha Legion, Iron Warriors, and possibly the Night Lords.

But that has nothing to do with 7th Edition itself.

I would buy those Codices.

[Andrew Thomas]

My conversions are finished, and I think I've knocked most of the bugs out of the system. Comments and conversion requests welcome.

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[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8665-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Introduction"]Battle Fleet Gothic-style 40k: Introduction[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8675-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Unit-Types"]Unit Types[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8677-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Armaments-amp-Leadership"]Armaments & Leadership[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8679-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Special-Orders"]Special Orders[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8680-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Turn-Sequence"]Turn Sequence[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8681-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-The-Movement-Phase"]The Movement Phase[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8682-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-The-Psychic-Phase"]The Psychic Phase[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8683-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-The-Shooting-Phase"]The Shooting Phase[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8684-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Damage"]Damage[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8685-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-The-End-Phase"]The End Phase[/URL]
[URL="http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/entry.php?8686-Battle-Fleet-Gothic-style-40k-Close-Combat"]Close Combat[/URL]

[asmodai66]

In 8th edition, its horrible to have no force org chart at all...