40K Editorial: Keep Calm and Roll Dice
Many years ago, perhaps even before some of us were playing 40K, there was the emergence of Nidzilla. One of the first no fun, easy button armies of its day. Time passed and Nidzilla gave way to Wave Serpent Spam (the original) followed by Nob Bikers, Venom spam, Razor spam, Wolf Pod Spam, Paladin Death Stars, The Breakfast Brigade, and many others along the way. The new non-interactive boogie man on the block is the 2+ save toting combo star unit. Chicken little has certainly had many opportunities to say those magical words in the past and is taking a deep breath even as I write this. But this too shall pass.
The morale of the above story is that GW is a crazy train, and many of us have been down this road many times before. GW makes some crazy unit(s), the meta is unbalanced and then something else is released. People learn to adapt and the meta moves on.
The symptom is perceived unbalanced units. The disease is some players believe competitive list building is about making the game as non interactive as possible or win by default condition. Take a second look at the list of armies presented above, most if not all of the were based on the premise that I have a hammer you can’t stop and my plan is to beat you with it until you concede. But times change, and more importantly the game does too.
I have spent the better part of the last decade contributing to rules councils and a guiding principle has always been to play the game as close to the rules as possible. There have been years worth of spirited debate on the subject. Though nothing quite stirred the hornets nest of the vocal minority like a perceived “rules change”. The accusations than surfaced of they are making their own version of 40K not playing the real version. While I never took such accusations personally, I always wished people could hear those spirited debates between what amounted to decades of 40K experience having legitimate disagreements about how to rule in sometimes impossible situations.
The one constant from GW is this, they have always advertised themselves as a MODEL company that happens to make games for their models. Look at how they present themselves to the world, “We have a simple strategy at Games Workshop. We make the best fantasy miniatures in the world and sell them globally at a profit and we intend to do this forever” (http://investor.games-workshop.com/our-business-model/). Everything GW does is designed to sell models. This includes churning the meta of the game to induce players to update their collections. So keep calm, right around the corner is the next change that will move the meta(I’m looking at you Escalation). Perhaps Vitamin D is the cure for the common 2+ save.
Keep Calm and roll dice.
