Hard Truths About 40k You Don’t Want To Hear
Pimpcron is back at the podium and preaching grimdark fans.
***TRIGGER WARNING***
+++Readers with sensitive emotional composition should turn away now. Things are gonna get ugly.+++
Hello (soon to be ex-) friends! Buckle up, things are going to be uncomfortable.
Sisters of Battle Suck
I know you just Macaulay Culkin-ed and probably can’t catch your breath. I’ll wait. Okay, let me get something straight first, I love the idea of SoB and would be the first to jump on a plastic Sisters army. But they suck. They cost the same as a Space Marine, but have Guardsmen stats and really don’t have a role in the 40k tabletop game. And they’re stuck in a weird situation because it is extremely hard to make them unique at this point.
You can’t make them tougher, or they’d be marines. You can’t make them weaker armor or they’d be Guard. The only thing you could do with them to make them unique would be give them special abilities like a list of choices that can each be used once per game … but then they’d be Skitarii. Or you could give them army-wide rules based around buffs that characters give them … but then they’d be Cult Mechanicus.
The truth is, GW has already painted the Sisters into a corner rules-wise with no real identity and have admitted that they don’t know what to do with them. Of course, you could always give them cool new models and with neat rules to give them a different feel, but the core of their rules at the moment are pretty weak. It will take some serious rules-trickery to get them out of the friend zone with this wargame.
Most of You Are Wasting Paint And Time
I know all of us are proud of our painting and many people seem to brag about spending seven hours on model, but honestly it’s probably a waste of your time and money. Unless you are aspiring to be a Golden Demon award-winner, your seven different layers of color, two washes, and four different brushes you use achieve the same outcome as a base color, wash, and highlight. If you enjoy painting for painting’s sake then do what makes you happy, but so many people I’ve seen agonize over their painting, spend hours and upon hours per model and then get frustrated that 95% of their army is unpainted. In most cases, a nice quick paint job with clean lines, a wash and a single highlight looks just as good as Mr. McThousandCoats.
Hordes Always Have An Advantage
As far as game mechanics go, the more times you get to roll for something, the more likely you will pass. Point for point, units that get to roll more dice for shooting, attacks, or saves have a serious advantage over “better” units. While a unit such as Grots have armor save and leadership issues, those can be mitigated by use of cover, or an Independent Character joining them. But you can get 40 Grots for 1 Carnifex, points-wise and that means ten times the ablative wounds with almost no draw backs if you counter their leadership and armor issues. I mean, 30 Grots going to ground in a Ruin on an objective is something that is hard to remove.
And what about buffs from Psychic powers? Throw Feel No Pain on a Carnifex, and ya get one 5+ FNP. Throw it on a unit of Gaunts and the effect is multiplied 20 x times over. Or what about Fearless? 20 Cultists is a heck of a lot sturdier with a fearless Chaos Lord attached; and guess how just gained 20 ablative wounds from shooting?
As many little circumstances as you may try to pull up, nothing is perfect and obviously swarms aren’t the end-all be-all. But they will always have an advantage over smaller, more expensive units if you can mitigate their issues. Remember kids: more dice = more chances to win.
Squats Were A Terrible Idea
Uh-oh. A couple people passed out, but it’s true and you know it. It’s not the idea of Squats that’s bad, their idea of Squats was bad. They were just basically obese Guardsmen. This is another army they have admitted they didn’t know what to do with, so they got canned. They were trying to be cute and funny with these roly-poly little goofballs, but that isn’t very fitting with the whole Grimdark atmosphere. They could have went a million different directions with these guys, from enhanced by cybernetics, to an army of crazy armored vehicles and walkers. But no, they went with a whole army of Danny DeVitos with lasguns and attitudes that seem far too jolly given their appearance.
Research shows that 10% of you have done this already if you’ve made it this far into the article.
You Don’t Actually Know The Rules To This Game
You might think you know how to play, but there’s at least a dozen key mistakes in any person’s knowledge base about this game. You’re not as well-versed in this game as you think, and all it takes is playing someone new to find out.
I’ve been playing 40k for almost a decade at this point, and we still have to consult the rulebook at least once per club meeting. It’s like the blind leading the blind here. I have played 40k with innumerable amounts of other players from all over the country and I’ve never met anyone who actually knew all of the rules. I mean, most of us have a functioning set of rules we know, while we just fudge the rest of it.
I’m often too lazy/don’t care enough to look up some strange rule for a specific situation and just say “do what you want, but it applied to both of us this game”. In a casual game with a friend, I’d rather be throwing dice than with my nose buried in a book, so as long as it makes sense, and we both get to do it I don’t care how we play.
~Did I miss any Hard Truths about 40K?
