Warhammer 40K: Stratagems Need A Change In The Next Edition
Love them or hate them Stratagems are a core mechanic of 9th edition Warhammer 40,000. But they need a few changes in the next edition.
I’ve had some ideas about how to change Stratagems before. I’ve talked about how I think they should be once per game options. I’ve even talked about how they could be changed to require a leadership check. And even if you don’t agree with those changes I do think that something still needs to happen with them in the next edition.
This One Big Change…
If I were in charge of the rules (which I’m not) I would push for one big change for Stratagems and it’s more of a fundamental change to the philosophy vs a mechanical change. What I’d like to see happen is that there would be more generic stratagems in the core rule book and fewer, more relative stratagems in the codexes.
There are a bunch of stratagems in the game that do the same basic thing for armies. A re-roll to hit here, a re-roll to saves there, a reduction in damage, etc. These stratagems show up time and time again and get used the most often. In fact, if you looked at just the stratagems that get used repeatedly in the armies you’d find a handful of them (probably 6-8 per army) while the armies have over 20+ stratagems in their books. I think we need to scrap those unused stratagems from the codexes to cut down on rules bloat, move the most used options to the core rules, and create some actual stratagems that provide the army with some unique choices (and keep those limited to around 6).
How About Some Example Stratagems From The Past?
But even with that, I think there are good ways to include some “unique choices” and some bad ways, too. Let’s look at some examples from the past.
Here’s a good example of a stratagem that adds some flavor to an army. This allows Blood Angels Jump Pack units to redeploy anywhere outside of 9″ of the enemy. It’s cheap, it’s simple, it’s flavorful and there isn’t really a chance of failure. This seems like a good way to check those boxes. It could be argued that this should just be a once per game special rule for Blood Angel Jump Pack units…but that’s another discussion. Moving on…
Now, let’s look at an example of a bad way to do this:
Is this stratagem flavorful? Absolutely. But it’s just bloat in the codex. This is a rule that shouldn’t be a stratagem as it feels like something that’s so niche that it’s only going to come up if the players basically setup the game to have both Space Wolves and Dark Angels around. Even then, they shouldn’t have to pay the 1 CP to use this — it should just happen.
These types of one-off, corner case stratagems need to go away and make room for rules we can use. In many ways the stratagem section in codexes feels like the design team got a “writing assignment” to come up with 20 stratagems per army and they just wrote some rules to fill out the assignment. There’s some good ideas in there. But there’s a lot of bloat that just…doesn’t matter.
Here’s another example of a stratagem that has to be setup to be used and still doesn’t feel worth the price of admission. This should have just been a special rule for the units and not cost the player a CP to use. And yeah, it’s an old example, but it illustrates my point pretty well.
As a player, I want choices. But I also want meaningful choices. I don’t want to see a two pages of rules that don’t matter when a quarter of the page is all that would have been needed. I hope GW moves the most obvious and most used stratagems to the core rules in some way and then cuts out all the bloat from the Stratagems in the codexes. Let’s clean-up those sections and make them useful instead of page-filler!
What do you think about stratagems in general? How would you make changes to them or do you like the system as is?
