We love Warhammer 40,000, as I think this blog has demonstrated over the last 14 years. We're all working on 40K projects right now. And we would like to use the current, official rules as we have always done, connecting us to the wider hobby community. We just... can't, anymore.
Over the last few years, our gaming group has found the game harder and harder to play. We love the setting, we love Games Workshop's miniatures, we love getting around a table with each other and telling a story via the medium of dice and loud noises.
This post is intended as a constructive explanation of why Games Workshop's strategy towards its rulesets is forcing us to come up with our own solutions. We would prefer to use their rules; that would mean a lot less work for us! Perhaps one day we'll return to doing so, if things change enough.
This is not an attempt to bash Games Workshop; the intent is to provide feedback. I lack the hubris required to think my writing this might have any substantive impact on a global company; at best I can only hope it feeds into the wider discourse. One more tiny datapoint in the giant, globe-spanning swarm of humans who are delighted to get some paint on a tiny plastic space nutter waving a chainsword.
What Games Workshop is currently doing well
A lot. The company is clearly performing well financially, which it needs to for us to keep enjoying their stuff. They've made some smart licensing moves, and it's great how many more people I meet these days who have actually heard of Warhammer. The pace and quality of new miniatures being released is astonishing. As a result I sure do keep buying them, or battling with myself to not buy them, depending on the size of my hoard of unpainted grey plastic.
The new codexes for 11th edition, from a graphic design and lore perspective, are really charming to me. Someone new to a faction picking up those books will get a delightful amount of flavour and a helpful primer to the faction. It could be the magpie in me, but I was also rather taken with the visual design in the new Space Marines' Codex, like the gold foil detailing.
Some recent missteps aside (e.g. the stealth balance updates that confused everyone), the company's level of community engagement is also a delight.
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| The gold foil really is a cute touch |
Why it's so hard to make rules for 40K
Look, if you're reading this, you almost certainly know the answer to this question. The studio has to strike a balance between a number of opposing design requirements in their rules, for example:
- Competitive sicko-proof legalese rules vs more readable rules for casual/narrative players
- Letting the game enjoy some stability vs keeping things fresh with updates
- Streamlining rules vs satisfying those gamers who want loads of detail
Because of these opposing requirements, there's no such thing as the perfect version of Warhammer 40,000. Given the number of factions and units, there's also no truly balanced version of the game. A good portion of the balancing has to be done by the players acting as each other's GM, telling a story more than searching for any competitive edge.
So I acknowledge the difficulty, but the problems have slowly piled up. Let's talk about them.
The problems, and where they came from
Warhammer 40K's 8th edition came as a much-needed reset after the 6th and 7th editions reached a point where we had just switched entirely to playing Warhammer Fantasy for six years. Indeed, OG readers may recall that the Beard Bunker began in 2012 when we embarked upon the Hochland campaign.
As much as I enjoyed Fantasy, I missed 40K during that time, so when 8th edition arrived in 2020 with a complete reset, it made the game playable again. People, including me, look back on the brief period where everyone just had a get-you-by index with fondness, despite the lumpen balance issues. Perhaps there's something instructive in that.
As 8th edition's codexes began to roll out, we returned to the classic division of codex-havers and codex-non-havers. As the codexes multiplied, so too did the rules, reaching what I assumed was its zenith in 9th edition. As I wrote back in 2021, when I was in 'coping strategy' mode rather than 'this is now beyond me' mode:
Warhammer 40K's eighth edition ushered in a new era of streamlined core mechanics. It also gave us a baffling profusion of unit-specific special rules, stratagems, faction rules, sub-faction rules, and frequent updates. Ninth edition has added to that with the awesome Crusade mode, and while I welcome it, there’s now a lot to keep track of. In many ways I think this is the best 40k has ever been, but it also feels like the most complex, and the most overwhelming.
To be clear, this was one of the best and most active periods of 40K gaming our group has had (see here and here for examples). However, games often left us feeling fatigued. On balance it was an acceptable trade, but then 10th edition came along, and whilst it made some great changes to the core mechanics, three things worsened.
Problem one: unit special rules
Every single unit in the game got its own special rule, ballooning the memory load. I found I usually needed about ten games with a faction to internalise what I was doing. This made it much harder to pick up a new faction, a problem that had existed in 8th and 9th as well.
Problem two: limited character customisation
Customisation was spectacularly curtailed, moving from picking unique powers for your characters to having a set ability for each unit in the game. This was a casualty of needing to counterbalance the giant raft of special rules all units now had, and is a strange case of removing the 'your dudes' quality of 40K and replacing it with something that feels more akin to a Combat Card Game.
Problem three: finding out what the rules actually are, even with all the products in your hand
Eager to avoid copy/pasta errors, each rule is only ever expressed in one place. But finding that place is often non-trivial. Is it in the rules? The rules commentary? The FAQ? Sometimes it takes us fifteen minutes just to find out where a rule is, not least of which because they're written in a very technical legalese style which most of us find unintuitive, and which requires you to look up three different things to find the complete answer to a question. This doesn't come up all the time, but frequently enough to be noticeable.
10th edition brought enough quality of life improvements that we soldiered on, but the frequency of our games dropped. Games weren't as tiring as 9th ones had been, but the fixed nature of datasheets means there was also less creative freedom, and so people were less invested.
Then 11th edition arrived. Again, a number of very clever core rules refinements came with it, and I was cautiously optimistic. But the thing is, the thing is, that there came a point, as I read through the rules, that I realised: when I imagine playing a game of this, I just feel tired.
It turned out pretty much everyone else felt the same way.
Despite having played 40K since 2nd edition, I find the rules genuinely hard to understand. They're written like computer code: the outcomes are often correct, but you have to derive them. Take the movement rules for example. Technically speaking, a vehicle can move up and over a vertical wall. This sounds like madness until you realise that in practical terms, a vehicle will almost never be able to do this because the movement cost would prevent them completing that movement. Right outcome, unhinged journey. Conclusions are not generally something one has to derive in other wargames old and new. It takes less ink to write rules requiring a derivation, but it means the player has to spend more time figuring it out, which makes an efficient rule feel clunky. The fact that TabletopBattles.com consider it worth writing articles explaining the rules is in and of itself an indication that the rulebooks don't do all the explaining themselves.
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| A helpful graph to explain why making your game too complex might result in people doing heretical things such as playing other games. |
The Perpetual Open Beta
Warhammer 40K gets a new edition every three years it seems, and while one might feel that's a new thing, here is a chronology:
1st edition (1987) lasted 6 years until...
2nd edition (1993) lasted 5 years until...
3rd edition (1998) lasted 6 years until...
4th edition (2004) lasted 4 years until...
5th edition (2008) lasted 4 years until...
6th edition (2012) lasted 2 years until...
7th edition (2014) lasted 3 years until...
8th edition (2017) lasted 3 years until...
9th edition (2020) lasted 3 years until...
10th edition (2023) lasted 3 years until...
11th edition (2026).
So the modern timescale is more or less what we've been doing for 20 years. The other big change of course was the massively increased speed of releasing codexes, which meant that some unfortunate factions (hi, Drukhari) didn't skip whole editions. Surely that's a good thing?
Kind of.
The problem with a three year cycle is that this is how long it seems to take to do the full spread of codexes. By the time everyone's got their stuff, it's time to begin again, so there's never a time when the game feels finished. It can't take even a year or so to just be. Given the breakneck pace at which the studio have to produce new codexes, these rules are apparently not given enough development time to avoid needing day one patches, like a rushed video game.
And so, the prospect of another three years of waiting for the company to finish something, knowing that they'll bin it as soon as they do, makes the whole thing feel a bit futile. You can either ignore the whole thing until they've finished it, and play the final version of each edition for three years while the rest of the world is playing the new thing, or you can join everyone else in the perpetual open beta.
Personally, I'd quite like a mostly-finished product. Maybe I'm turning into an old fart. Maybe this desire for consistency is a flavour of weakness. But the outcome is this: the players I know are tired by the idea of another there years of churn, but there's no one prior edition to call home, and disconnecting from the game being played by the wider hobby community feels sad in some way.
I don't yet know exactly where we'll land. There's no single other game system all of us are keen to play. There is a desire to play with our 40K armies, just with something easier to read, easier to remember, and more likely to facilitate narrative play. The Grimdark Future ruleset is a much smoother ride, but it isn't quite written for the same scale of warfare, and for some reason doesn't juice most of us. To be fair, 11th edition has done a great job of producing a less visually derelict iteration of a tournament game, but that means nothing to us non-tournament players, and I'm really not keen to engage in a game in which firing the guns on a unit of Killa Kans involves five separate special rules (yes really), none of which were actually needed to evoke what a Killa Kan or its guns represent.
I've got some ideas of what I'll do. Those ideas will take a lot of work, and only time will tell if they bear fruit. But really, in an ideal world, what I'd love is an edition of 40K that releases the core rules and all the codexes in one hit, and then keeps it that way for five or six years, perhaps with a bi-annual balance update to address any issues. I can't see that happening any time soon, so I guess we'll just have to sort ourselves out, and hopefully arrive at something that'll keep us building 40K armies for years to come.
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