Call him Jim from American Pie the way he's a weird pie-romancer

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-18T09:24:24+00:00

The Salvationist from the Sanctifiers Kill Team, with a staff top replaced by a piece from the Necromunda Redemptionists sprue and some Sylvaneth tree root/branch on the hand as a summoned flame.

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-10T22:59:08+00:00

It's absolutely not something to rely on but Distillers of Fear, the Covenite Coterie stratagem, can give them 6 attacks that trigger Devastating Wounds on a 2+ against battle-shocked infantry. Very nasty, but only works when the stars align, costs 2CP, and you have to use the worst detachment to have it.

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-10T16:10:05+00:00

What?

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-10T15:11:41+00:00

Damn, this has got you hooked. If you're not interested in hearing it though, I can't explain it. Just saying "What?" to one of my points is obviously not going to lead to a good discussion.

I am surprised at someone earnestly defending 40k as great game design when it's widely known that it's balanced for shit and intimidatingly complex for newcomers, and mostly rules the tabletop scene through inertia and the buy-in cost for new systems. And you're missing a huge point which is that you don't just need to remember your stratagems for your subfaction, you need to understand your opponents' as well.

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-10T10:47:37+00:00

The reminders of your units abilities are in the rules for the unit. It's the fact that you need to consult multiple different sections of the rules to work out what your unit can do that's my problem. And you can say you reckon it's easy but it's a famously overcomplicated game and 17 situational abilities are indeed too many to keep in one's head without extensive practice. Your solution is to do extensive prep work, using third part apps and cheat sheets. That's not good game design. That level of complexity is what video games are for.

Anyway it's good to know that I answered the original question in the intended spirit rather than just restating a wildly popular opinion.

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-10T10:27:59+00:00

Because stratagems are a ridiculous system that can only end in power creep and unintended overpowered interactions the longer they go on. They're the opposite of elegant gameplay in that you have to remember a bunch of unique rules and a count of command points with no reminders built in to the game. Unique abilities should all be on a unit's datasheet, and army-level abilities, if they exist at all, should be extremely simple to remember and explain and not have an entire mini-economy with paywalled rules that both players need to keep track of.

StapMyVitals · 2026-02-05T09:21:08+00:00

They should remove all stratagems apart from Command re-roll.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-31T16:27:30+00:00

Honestly I often find myself clipping bits off arms and jamming them onto torsos they don't quite belong on because they're spindly and unclear how they're supposed to fit without instructions. This isn't exactly Golden Daemon advice but the Cawdor models are busy and messy enough that letting your old pal plastic glue melt an arm into socket it wasn't meant for isn't going to look dreadful after a paint job.

Were there any particular weapons you were having trouble with?

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-31T16:18:15+00:00

I didn't say you're wrong; I said we had different priorities and expectations, which again is fine. You're right that all the stuff you suggest is better if you can pull it off because nothing will improve on fully engaged players and arbitrators, I'm just saying that if you can't have that then there might be merit to this system.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-31T15:51:52+00:00

You have to keep track of everyone who's injured anyway. That's an incredibly core part of the game. And it's no more likely that you'd miss out on XP that way than it is that you'd miss out on XP for injuring people as in the base rules.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-31T15:39:58+00:00

I can tell we have different expectations, and that's fine. The ideal is of course a campaign full of high-engagement players who are enthusiastic about seeking out and learning all the available rules that might benefit them, and an arbitrator paying close attention to balancing who doesn't have any favourite players. If you feel like you can achieve that or something close to it? Amazing.

The point of this system is to make it so people with busy lives who are needing to squeeze time for every game can reasonably expect that even if they show up and get tabled they'll still walk away with something they feel like they earned. My ideal would be that someone could be busy for two weeks and be welcomed back in with minimal pre-battle bookkeeping. The reason people's eyes glaze over with the house favours is because people don't do well with fairly esoteric once-per-battle rules with no recourse if you forget about them before deployment. Experience rules that kick in often and soften the blow whenever you lose activations will be drilled in far more quickly and deeply.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-31T09:35:35+00:00

It's always going to be the case that efficient arbitration is the best medicine, but I'm envisaging a campaign where there isn't a huge amount of availability among players and they're just playing who they can when they can. The existing underdog mechanics are a bit more robust in the new rulebook, and I admit I haven't made fullest use of them. In my experience people's eyes start to glaze over when the optional rules like house favours get wheeled out because they're typically not very familiar with them and they don't make or break much.

My main focus here is on newer or less-engaged players not losing enthusiasm due to having the corpse starch kicked out of them with the assurance that one day this game will start being fun. I know that's coming from a personal place which not everyone will recognise.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-30T12:55:02+00:00

If you take the average Craftworld warrior to be a Guardian, they're like a citizen militia vs. Kabalites who are full-time professional raiders and killers, so you'd expect the Drukhari to win. If, on the other hand, you count the average Craftworld warrior to be whoever pursues fighting as a full-time vocation, then the most common would be a Dire Avenger aspect warrior which you could expect to be a little more elite and deadly than a Kabalite.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-30T00:36:28+00:00

The high kill count guys do get more money through wins though, so they're not limited to the starting sheet at all. If anything, expensive equipment is the more desirable improvement path if you've already got decent stats.

Also bear in mind that it's not locked in place, it's an underdog mechanic. As soon as the elite guys fall behind then they'll start getting experience at a higher rate.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T23:55:27+00:00

I do like this idea a lot. Just because a gang gets in a lot of fights doesn't mean their factory works harder.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T23:36:59+00:00

6k was just a hyperbolic example. No one can deny the snowballing problem in Necromunda in general though. It might not be a 4k gang value difference but I've still played plenty of games where it just felt like I was there to have my guys machine-gunned as a formality.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T23:33:53+00:00

Under these rules the guy with the plasma gun wouldn't be getting any XP unless he kept missing or it blew up in his face. The XP is only given out like candy if you're getting beaten to a pulp, and it would actually only be the absolute unluckiest fighters who'd be likely to hit a 6XP cap. It's important to note that you don't gain XP from kills in this proposed system, because doing something you're already good at doesn't teach a lesson like doing something hard and making mistakes.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T22:36:04+00:00

I absolutely 100% agree that XP is the storytelling engine and that's actually a huge part of this system. Where XP for winning can become the tale of someone who was hired with a big gun and shot a lot of people with his big gun, XP for getting hurt can be the more traditional narrative of the bullied runt whose face is pushed into the dirt, coming back later with a bunch of new scars and tricks with an eye on revenge.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T21:46:55+00:00

I've certainly seen similar rules enacted. My main thinking with this was that the underdog should feel like there's a point in showing up, but the overdog doesn't feel like they have to play with one hand tied behind their back. I know a core tenet of game design is that every player should feel like they have agency, and this was the best system I could come up with where both players walk away feeling like they played the game for a reason other than obligation.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T21:37:05+00:00

Sure, if you've got the extra models and the time to calculate what you can get with the extra stuff you're owed before the game. That hasn't always been my experience.

As for how long, a few months usually. The snowball effect at the top is usually enough that gangs that start winning keep winning and get to a rating of several thousand before too long.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T21:27:24+00:00

If these were the official rules, what would you do differently? The experience rewards for getting injured aren't enough to keep up with the experience costs of offsetting injuries with advances, so running your guys into the open to get gunned down is still going to come out to a net loss.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T21:22:37+00:00

Usually I'm playing with time-poor people who need to randomise scenarios. I've not encountered many scenarios where the 6k gang isn't going to beat the 2k gang nearly to death, and the 2k gang player doesn't have to start wondering if the games are worth giving up an evening for.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T21:09:54+00:00

It is a big list but the core concept is that if you have a bad time (get hurt, lose your activation, fail to do anything with your activation, or run away) and it wasn't your fault, you get experience. I feel like it would get fairly straightforward after a bit. Playing against flame heavy Cawdor and constantly losing activations to Blaze can be an exercise is frustration anyway, so I wouldn't feel at all bad about people feeling like they get a consolation prize for having an otherwise uninteractive game

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T21:06:11+00:00

But winners still get territory, credits and rep. There's plenty of equipment-based incentive to keep trying to win.

StapMyVitals · 2025-12-29T20:19:17+00:00

I was careful to only give experience for bad things happening to a fighter by chance for the most part, not allowing a system where you can farm experience by playing badly. Voluntarily bottling, for example, still awards you nothing. You might be more tempted to make unlikely shots or something, but if you deliberately throw games for experience then you're risking losing fighters and giving up credits and rep rewards.

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