Why I've spent most of 10th edition 40K playing the intro mission 'Only War'

People love the matched play missions, and I'm happy for them. Lots of variety, lots of numbers going up, lots of game balance levers for the designers to pull, and lots of randomness so that your games have great variety.

People also love Crusade missions. Lots of ways to follow the narrative progress of your army, lots of ways to earn rewards you can use to smack your opponent right in the beans. I did plenty of this in 40K's previous edition, and wrote about doing so on this very site.

And yet today's post is about why, after over twenty games of the current edition of 40K, I'm still playing the intro mission Only War.

When I started writing this, I thought I was going to write a celebration of the narrative flexibility of simplicity, but it soon became an exploration of the way Games Workshop's game design style has resulted in my ignoring more and more of their rules, and even whole game systems.

A good chunk of this avoidance is down to my finite brain capacity. In tenth edition, stratagems may have been stripped down now (thank the gods) but every unit now has a special rule. Charitably, a third of those rules do something interesting. The rest are cruft, and since you're paying points for them, they can't be ignored - but are often forgotten. In a context where you're struggling to remember what all your stuff does, my brain has reduced capacity to internalise arbitrary, constantly shifting secondary objectives where I must accrue POINTS for REASONS. This makes me wonder if I'm stupid, despite having successfully played this game since childhood and writing a entire gaming supplement for said game (Goonhammer's Fury of the Swarm; it seems to have been positively received, which is worth pointing out in the context of my possibly being a dummy).

Scoring victory points because you randomly drew a card that "kill a Character unit for REASONS" feels arbitrary. Yes, real battles involve opportunism. But we take those opportunistic moments in the game as an emergent result of being in conflict with our opponent and wanting to dunk on their characters, particularly if those characters are Word Bearers. The more arbitrary a rule is, the more I struggle to keep it present as I play the game.  A special rule that says "because your unit has the word 'executioner' in the name, you get a bonus against damaged units" is just stuff to remember. Conversely, if a rule makes narrative sense and meaningfully impacts gameplay (e.g. Stormboyz getting retreat and shoot/charge because as jump infantry they're good at hit and run tactics) then it takes far less effort for me to remember it.

On reflection, I don't think I'm stupid, I think I just struggle to give a shit about making numbers go up. I care about taking ground from my opponent, and killing their stuff. This is easily achieved by fighting over objectives. If I'm playing against like-minded opponents who take fluffy armies, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.

Given how arbitrary the current mission rules can feel, stripping them away to leave something as simple as possible does nothing to harm my ability to tell stories with the games I play, and have an interesting tactical to-and-fro with my opponent.

But even with the simplified missions, with 40K taking up so much of my brain space, the idea of trying to internalise another complex game like Kill Team or Necromunda just makes me feel old and tired, despite being young middle aged and keen. I want to want to play Kill Team, but just dipping an inquisitive toe in, there's a million different ploys and special rules and overly complex crunchery that, from what I've seen so far, continues to smell of MAKE NUMBER BIGGLY. Perhaps the incoming edition will change that, but I doubt it. I would dearly love to be wrong.

I think these over-detailed rules probably work to get some methodone-esque trace of narrative into games for the terminally competitive gamer. Take this Tac Op (how tacticool) from Kill Team's current edition:

You can reveal this Tac Op when a friendly INTERCESSION SQUAD operative incapacitates an enemy operative. At the end of the battle:

• If that friendly operative has incapacitated more enemy operatives than each other friendly INTERCESSION SQUAD operative has during the battle, you score 1VP.
• If that friendly operative has incapacitated more enemy operatives than each other enemy operative has during the battle, you score 1VP.

I think this is trying to evoke friendly intra-squad competitive bants, but how unengaged with a game do you have to be to not be inherently noticing which members of your army/team/etc are doing well, and imagining the natural back-and-forth between members of the team as they try to outdo each other.

If I compare this to a simpler game like Frostgrave, in which it really is as straightforward as "grab more treasure than the other guys," I get the same amount of narrative, if not more. It emerges naturally from the gameplay rather than emerging from a deck of cards that says "shoot the mans for bonus narrative." When playing Necromunda's current edition, we straight up ditched the tactics cards, and the game still felt more complex than the old version from the 90s. Now, Necromunda is a game that does a much better job of using its complexity to achieve great heights of narrative hilarity, but it's complex enough that I simply don't have the mental bandwidth to stay on top of that and 40K at the same time, and as a result, I spend less money on Games Workshop rulebooks.

And the thing is, Only War is so generic that it can be used to represent a whole bunch of situations, from control of key points on the front line, to different key buildings in an urban area, to supply caches and vital infrastructure.

This begs the question: will I only ever play Only War, or will I do something else? To a degree I've had a chunk of variety by testing all the co-op missions needed for Fury of the Swarm and the upcoming Fury of da Beast, but perhaps the time is coming where something between the complexity of a basic scenario and a giant deck of mission cards could be nice. You know, like a pre-packaged mission simple enough to account for lots of contexts.

Looks at fifth edition 40K rulebook.

You know what, the Seize Ground and Capture and Control missions are ostensibly very similar, but have very different outcomes, in that Seize will result in your classic 40K scrap over the mid-table, with some skirmishing occurring in each other's deployment zones, while Capture makes the mid-table meaningful only as the place you're trying to get through so that you can capture the enemy's stronghold.

There's also the Annihilation mission if you just want to smack each other, but honestly that should come with a requirement that the terrain is incredibly dense to give melee armies a chance. Plus also getting 1 kill point per dead unit is hilariously unbalanced when it comes to hordes versus elites.

Old faithful

Now, look, I can't go ahead and house rule all the cruft at the core of modern 40K. And in general I do think that the tenth edition's core mechanics are largely superior to any of its predecessors. But crucially the rules of missions are quite nicely separate from everything else, which gets me thinking: rather than whining about complexity, why not figure out what I'd actually want in a player-vs-player mission, and then play that?

It might be that there's other auto-includes, but here's what I've got:

• Progressively scored multiple objectives, like Only War. Good for:
• Salvaging vital supplies.
• Evacuating/nabbing civilians under fire.
• Endgame multiple objectives, like 5th edition's Seize Ground. Good for:
• Simulating general control of the area in a war with a semi-fluid front line.
• Sabotaging/protecting key locations or infrastructure.
• An endgame objective in each player's deployment zone, like Capture and Control. Good for simulating armies attempting to shift key strategic points in a static front line.

Those three would cover, for me, 90% of the games I'd want to play. You could choose to add additional mechanics on top, like night fights or whatever else, but people tend to find them more hindrance than help, with lopsided balance impacts depending on the factions involved. If, in a campaign I'm playing, there's a particular situation that doesn't fit into one of those three, I'd rather just collaborate with my opponent and figure out what to do. There was a time I'd be enthusiastically thumbing through Crusade mission packs, right up until it became apparent that some of them had balance issues so bad that they could not possibly have been playtested, at which point, one wonders why exactly one is paying for it. I'll buy a book of missions if I know the team behind it have been given enough time to create something truly excellent and well thought through, but the sheer pace and volume of releases of Crusade books quickly demonstrated that this was not the case. The problem is that 3-6 well-balanced missions is a much lower page count than fifty badly done ones, and that means making less money for the same amount of effort. From a crude business position, it makes no sense to pad things out.

Unless, of course, the long-term impact is that people stop using the product entirely. But I have no illusions as to where I sit in the overall numbers: I am a statistical irrelevance, and 40K is doing very, very well. This is a good state of affairs, since the thing we love is well supported and gets lots of cool minis made for it. And there's really nothing other than a little effort standing between me and the missions I'd like to play.

If there are other mission types you'd include in your "essential basic" scenarios, and/or if you'd be interested in me producing some basic, stripped-down missions compatible with tenth edition, please do let me know in the comments. I expect this to be just me, squeaking away in the corner, but you never know.