Is Game Balance Really a Good Thing for Narrative Players?

They say a balanced game is good for both competitive and narrative players. This is true, conceptually, but as with all things it depends on the execution. With frequent balance updates, Games Workshop’s design studio have achieved an incredibly tight win/loss ratio across Warhammer 40,000's many factions. Moreover they have been tweaking individual units that see too much or too little time on the table. It’s an incredible effort entirely alien to the 40K of yesteryear, and in general I think it's great.

Unfortunately win/loss rates and the frequency with which certain units appear in tournament lists are an incomplete picture. There’s no avoiding the fact that almost all the available data comes from the tournament circuit, so Games Workshop are in a tricky position, but I think one of the most consistent areas where I find myself disagreeing with their approach to balancing the game is when something is balanced at the expense of immersion.

Take Space Marine Intercessors. 

There's a limit to how cheap you want these lads to be. Space Marines shouldn't be numerous, they're too elite for that. But the studio felt that the poster boys' basic troops had been a bit left behind, so gave them the ability to fire four shots each when targeting the same enemy unit. In isolation, this seems good, in that it makes an Intercessor about as good as a Hellblaster or Infernus Marine, just with a different niche. It encourages people to include more of the army's core unit. But it also means they outperform veteran space marines like Terminators and Sternguard Veterans, and most importantly, makes them massively more potent than their Chaos counterparts. That is not an immersive outcome.

To show good faith I played a couple of games using this new rule, and then decided to stop after I found Intercessor units casually gunning down swathes of heavy infantry thanks to Oath of Moment combining with 40 AP-1 shots. I specifically remember the breaking point when I cut down a whole load of Jeff's Word Bearers and had the greasy feeling of unearned victory.

Ultimately, tournament fans are playing a completely different game to narrative dorks like me. I don't need four shots on my Intercessors; I use them because they should form the spine of my army, not because it's optimal to do so.

So that's an example of an individual unit tweak, but perhaps more importantly there are examples where an entire faction is achieving a tenable win/loss rate by functioning in a manner entirely contrary to the narrative. I am speaking here primarily of Orks. Yes, I know, Orks is never beaten, but right now it seems their primary method of winning games is to box their opponent into their own deployment zone and rack up a lead on all the objectives. Their job is literally to die too slowly for the opponent to score. It's... not really how you picture a fight with the galaxy's krumpiest ladz. The gold standard of a battle against Orks is where they give you an almighty wallop, knacker themselves in the process, and then the bloodied remnants of both sides fight tooth and nail until one side finally stops moving.

Part of the issue seems to be that they don't have much if any ability to hurt vehicles. There's a few units in there that can legitimately threaten enemy hulls, such as Meganobz and the giant lumbering liability that is the mighty Stompa, but for the most part the Orks' primary anti-tank weapon, the ubiquitous rokkit launcha, was effectively relegated to dealing with heavy infantry and light vehicles in the transition to 10th edition, with nothing stepping up to replace it in the role of tank hunting. Even Beast Snagga units are, in my experience, of limited effectiveness. Add to that my annoyance that the humble lasgun is exactly as effective against Orks as a boltgun thanks to Orks now being T5, and there are some pretty weird interactions going on here.

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By this point you'd be forgiven for wondering where I'm going with all this, so I'll tell you: house rules. This is wargaming; unless you're playing in events where by definition everyone needs to turn up using a common ruleset, the point of a non-digital gaming experience is that you aren't locked into anything.

In the case of Space Marines, this is particularly easy, since I just nerf myself. Not only do I ignore the double shot rule on Intercessors, I also ignore the shoot-on-death rule that makes Hellblasters such a feel bad unit for my opponents. They're still a perfectly serviceable glass hammer at 110 points, and I use them regularly.

With something like Orks, where my own army is underpowered, that's trickier. Wanting to buff the effectiveness of my own army could look whiny at best. But my goal with my Orks was never to win lots: they are a force explicitly designed to provide my opponents with a fun but beatable challenge, with a variety of target types to reward my opponent for having a diverse army, in a mix of units perfectly on-theme for Goffs. But for me to provide my opponents with fun games, I do have to be able to give them a challenge. It says a lot that when designing Fury of da Beast I frequently needed to give the Orks a bigger points advantage compared to Fury of the Swarm since I found they just didn't do much to the Players' forces, even with the huge buffs I chucked at their ranged attacks.

I am slowly, inexorably, coming to a very stupid conclusion: the only way to fix this properly is to completely rewrite the Orks' codex myself.

This is obviously a stupid idea, and not one I seriously intend to follow through on (historically, this means there's a 40% chance I'll follow through on stupid ideas anyway). But for all that Orks have a balanced win/loss ratio, I cannot currently make meaningful use of them in a more narrative environment the way I could in past editions. I can rewrite the Codex, or I can start another army and hope the Orks return some day. And all the while, I surely can't complain, since they have a reasonable win rate in tournaments.

So watch this space. Will my love of Orks force me to do something supremely stupid, the true zenith of House Rule Mountain? Or will I take my licks and paint something else instead?

If you're an Ork player and think I'm talking out of my ass, please, please tell me what I'm missing in the comments.

Off to work we go