Goatboy’s 40k Thoughts – Randomly Charging!
Goatboy here again and today we are going chat about the so called bane of “competitive” players – the random charge length.
I for one believe that you just play the game expecting to roll at least a 6 on the distance. I try to stay positive even in the face of a sea of snake eyes. So with that in mind – let me say that the random charge length is no different then what we have played with in 5th edition.
Here me out – I was chatting with JWolf the other day (shirt ideas, trophy ideas, and whatever nonsense I want to think about with IG/Orks) and we got onto the subject of random charge lengths. We both came to the idea we have been almost always playing with random charges. Here’s a question for you folks – When was the last time you didn’t have to run through a broken tank, Sanctuary, or just some random bush a TO decides is enough for terrain on the table top? In fact we only had the hope to charge 6 inches instead of the 7+ we might be seeing a lot of the time.
So this whole general groan of losing the idea of a flat charge range is kind of bunk as most players I throw around with locally were sneaky enough to ALWAYS made sure my Assault units had to roll at least a 5 on two dice to get into fun happy range. I always considered this game to be a random game as I would have multiple games where everything was a 4+ and then had games where I could barely get a 3 on my 20+ dice rolls for a turn. It seems to me that a lot of the belly aching jus comes from the so called idea that this game is just a strict formula that you just need to crack to break the stock market and make billions in the underpants trade.
Let’s look at a unit that has fleet. It’s assault move was basically 1d6 + pick the highest of 2d6. If you were getting to a unit out in the open then your opponent was doing something wrong. So in reality the ability to reroll any of the 2d6 with a fleet roll comes out to pretty close to the same thing. I am sure my math is wrong and I will get a lovely rain of comments stating as such – but in a game where you don’t roll the true amount of dice to create the true average then you can’t hope for your math to come out correctly all the time.
I don’t know about you, but the excitement of trying to truly bait your opponent into a charge is one of the reasons why I like the random charge length. Do you have 8 inches? Do I push for the 8 inches to get more peope in range to rapid fire or do I do the safe thing and keep it at 10? These type of decisions makes for a very interesting game as you constantly try to play your opponent on all levels of the playing field.
As I played 5th I came to the conclusion that this game is random and that any “skill” I had came down to making correct decisions during most of my game. Yes you can say your dice rolls would affect those decisions but really when have they not affected what you did during any of these editions? Rolling a crap ton of one’s will only get you so far in this game.
So where does this all end? Look – 6th edition is not 5th edition. It is a “new” game that Games Workshop gave us that we can play with our older models. It is like they created a game system that allows us to play the last edition’s games, plus 2 or 3 other game system’s games. Sure I think within the next year will come to a better conclusion what the Indy GT Circuit’s rules needs to be. I think the core rules will stay with just tweaks to what the “missions” need to be during any given game. In fact I really like some of the randomness in the Warlord, objective, and mysterious terrain aspects. The only thing that sucks is that trees cost a lot of money to get and having that many for an event (let alone my own house) is a pain in the butt. Hmm, any of you got any ideas for cheap to make “sci-fi” forests?
Right now I am just trying to get more games in, figure out my Feast of Blades list, and hoping that my Chaos Space Marine book at least makes me smile when I crack it open and try to figure out what the hell a Hell Brute really is. Plus there is a mechanical flying dragon that chomps on other flyers and that sounds wicked awesome.
Goatboy out!
