The Gaming Den

Koumei wrote:In the lore, a lasgun can cut a man in half with ease, has effectively unlimited ammunition and has the range of a modern military rifle as opposed to "you might be able to throw the gun this far". And is quicker to use than swinging a weapon, obviously. The lore supports "These guys are slowly stomping towards us, we'll fire the guns from all the way over here" as being a viable tactic, unless the author is currently masturbating to Space Marines, in which case you'll recall that one Terminator survived getting stepped on by an Emperor Titan.

First; The lore for 40k, like all other games-workshop lore is ALWAYS written so that whatever faction is currently center stage is 80s movie badass. In don't doubt that Dan Abenett has written stuff where Gaunt and his guys use lasguns in a way that makes them uber weapons. However, in most of the fiction for 40K lasguns suck. They actually run out of ammo ALL THE TIME. One imperial guard book discusses the fact that guard in trench warefare situations will keep fires going to bake the battery packs to recharge them. Additionally, lasguns actually supposed to have crappy range because their power disspates to quickly. Finally, there is lore that says that the reason the Orks still use mostly oversized kenetic weapons is because the lasgun is hard to shoot becuase it always goes perfectly straight meaning that the natural human(oid) tendancy to try and correct for enviromental factors makes it needlessly complicated.

I concur that the logic of some of those points is marginal at best. However it is the lore that they have.

Basically, the lore for the lasgun is supposed to make it into the K98 or the Enfield rifle. The eldar shuriken catapult is the MP40. To keep with german guns the boltgun is the Stg44.

As for the stuff about a terminator being stepped on by a titan, remember what I said about whoever is center stage being the most badass. The lore for terminator armor is that it predates the imperium. It is the armor that humanity developed in the age when it dominated technology and didn't fear it. Its also what you have to put your body into if you want to teleport because otherwise you would be completely destroyed (note that while this is lore it is also subject to the this only applies to people not being badass right now rule).

I'll accept that Space Marines want to be in close combat with Imperial Guard type punks, who are 100% unable to hurt them with knives and crap (and probably can't hurt them with chainswords and shouldn't have power weapons). Whereas they can crush infantry beneath their boots in a very literal sense. However by the same token, infantry have guns that can hurt them (and in return, their guns actually make infantry explode).

The space marines are actually supposed to be an armored spearhead. There are not supposed to be any space marines that do not jump out of an armored vehicle, off a spaceship, or teleport straight into combat. However, even for that, the lore is that space marine armor has exactly 0 shits to give lasguns, or ork shootas. Eldar are basically at the same point. Their warrior caste guys wear armor that lets them ignore lasers.

Now, in the game how effective at killing space mariens are lasguns? Well, its really freaking easy to figure that out. Guard hit with half their ranged attacks, 1/3 of their ranged attacks will wound a space marine and 1/3 of those will result in a kill. So in a squad of 10 guys shooting at marines you will get 5 hits, 1-2 wounds, and should get about .6 kills a turn.

Honestly, one thing that it generally takes people a while to figure out is that the space marines are actually better when shooting there weapons, even at guard, because they are just using a better weapon. The countervolley by 10 marines will be 6 hits/4 wounds/4 kills.

So while the lore for hte space marines is that when subuding a planet with about standard imperial level tech they should drive up in a rhino right next to the guard, jump into their fortification, and beat them in close quaters fighting, the game rules actually support the space marines as the masters of very short range firefights where they deny 80% of the games factions their armor save.

souran wrote:First; The lore for 40k, like all other games-workshop lore is ALWAYS written so that whatever faction is currently center stage is 80s movie badass.

Unless you're Tyranids, then you keep losing even in your own codex. We're a huge threat to the entire galaxy... that never wins a single engagement!

Previn wrote:

souran wrote:First; The lore for 40k, like all other games-workshop lore is ALWAYS written so that whatever faction is currently center stage is 80s movie badass.

Unless you're Tyranids, then you keep losing even in your own codex. We're a huge threat to the entire galaxy... that never wins a single engagement!

Thats in part because all Tyranid lore, even the lore in their own book, is written from the perspective of the other factions. Although one of their codexes had a lore piece by an Eldar that talked about how the end of universe would be a battle between the Orks and the Nids, they described it as an in-operable cancer (orks) battling an all consuming palgue (nids)

Also, because 40k has a "status-quo-is-god" backdrop, the evil factions generally do have to go back to their various castle-greyskulls and plot again even at the end of their own lore pieces.

Possibly relevant, definitely interesting: Even during the early Napoleonic wars when mobile columnar tactics were at their high point against static linear tactics, more melee infantry casualties were caused by point-blank musket fire than by bayonets. In actual melees, one side or the other would normally break on contact.

In other words, in a setting-plausible 40k battle, most of the casualties in melee would be caused with Assault and Pistol weaponry.

Laertes wrote:Possibly relevant, definitely interesting: Even during the early Napoleonic wars when mobile columnar tactics were at their high point against static linear tactics, more melee infantry casualties were caused by point-blank musket fire than by bayonets. In actual melees, one side or the other would normally break on contact.

In other words, in a setting-plausible 40k battle, most of the casualties in melee would be caused with Assault and Pistol weaponry.

Epic 40k has a truely stunningly good ruleset. It has infinatry fight by having at least one stand assault a position and fight what is nominally a melee while other stands within 15cm support the firefight. Casualties are inflicted on stands in the melee first, then away from that and a lot of what your firing does is supress enemy stands making them unable to respond.

This simple representation is amazingly good at representing how infantry works in a post WW1 battlefield. To bad the GW games with good rules are not supported.

Epic 40k has a truely stunningly good ruleset. It has infinatry fight by having at least one stand assault a position and fight what is nominally a melee while other stands within 15cm support the firefight. Casualties are inflicted on stands in the melee first, then away from that and a lot of what your firing does is supress enemy stands making them unable to respond.

This simple representation is amazingly good at representing how infantry works in a post WW1 battlefield. To bad the GW games with good rules are not supported.

I loved Epic. I still have boxes of Imperial Guard and Ork stands somewhere. It's a great game that plays fantastically; however, it's not marketable to small children, which means GW isn't interested.

souran wrote:

Previn wrote:

souran wrote:First; The lore for 40k, like all other games-workshop lore is ALWAYS written so that whatever faction is currently center stage is 80s movie badass.

Unless you're Tyranids, then you keep losing even in your own codex. We're a huge threat to the entire galaxy... that never wins a single engagement!

Thats in part because all Tyranid lore, even the lore in their own book, is written from the perspective of the other factions. Although one of their codexes had a lore piece by an Eldar that talked about how the end of universe would be a battle between the Orks and the Nids, they described it as an in-operable cancer (orks) battling an all consuming palgue (nids)

Also, because 40k has a "status-quo-is-god" backdrop, the evil factions generally do have to go back to their various castle-greyskulls and plot again even at the end of their own lore pieces.

As you point out, the story doesn't move forward. The 'nids could have won basically every engagement in their codex (except for the Tau engagement) and everything would be exactly the same with the exception that the 'Nids would seem like a threat in lore. Even if they're a total joke on table.

Previn wrote: As you point out, the story doesn't move forward. The 'nids could have won basically every engagement in their codex (except for the Tau engagement) and everything would be exactly the same with the exception that the 'Nids would seem like a threat in lore. Even if they're a total joke on table.

The major Nid stories that tend to appear again and again in their codex are

1: Nids vs. Ultra Marines where they destroy 3 planets in Ultramar sector, get access to space marine DNA, and are stopped at the gates Mcgragge by the Ultramarine chaper master in a battle that wipes out their first company.

2: Nids vs. Eldar where they destroy a craftworld and its supporting feral eldar wrolds so badly that it is forced to know fight with its ghost soldiers and had to accept their elf-space-pirate prince back into the fold.

Both stories are presented the same way most of the "bad-guy" fiction is where the nids win every engagment right until the moment when they would do something setting changing (destroy ultramarine homeword/wipe out eldar craftworld) and then the "good-guy" factions win at the last minute.

Now a lot of their other fluff pieces tend to be things like disection reports, which don't do quite as good a job at making the nids seem as "always victorious" as the fluff for the other factions.

Generally the flavor of the Nid fluff is that they have already won, that its just a matter of time before they consume everything.

In the Deathstalker books, there were energy and melee weapons becuase of DECLINE in technology.

The tech curve had moved to the point where laser guns were in all ways better than kinetic / chemical propelled weapons, so everybody used lasers. Then, everything goes to shit, empire starts to fall, and we can't make that level of energy weapon anymore - but it reigned for so long that nobody really considered bullets viable anymore.

In any event, the tech level presented in the books for personal weapons was essentially las-flintlocks. One shot, then a long recharge before the weapon was capable of firing again. So, for the time between shots you went to melee (because macguffin-edge swords can cut through the body armor of the day).

Lasers that could be used as deadly weapons are hugely energy-intensive. It's far more efficient to shoot people with projectiles instead.

And a knife would be a lot more suitable for killing people on a realistic space station or ship than a laser gun would be. You wouldn't want anything that could damage the construction you're in. Most guns would be too risky, and a laser weapon would be right out. The recoil from a gun would be dangerous in zero-G.

In the John Carter of Mars series, people used swords out of honour. It was a de facto cultural trait for the entire planet; you only fight your opponent with the same weapons they have. You only use a gun if they have a gun, if they don't have a melee weapon or gun, then you use your fists.

virgil wrote:In the John Carter of Mars series, people used swords out of honour. It was a de facto cultural trait for the entire planet; you only fight your opponent with the same weapons they have. You only use a gun if they have a gun, if they don't have a melee weapon or gun, then you use your fists.

John Cater has a number of reasons why people use swords in space. One of which is that the pellet guns are not super great and have a number of weaknesses including how easy it is to destroy your bullets. Further, burrows wrote the early barsoom stuff at a time when the bolt action was just beggining to replace the lever action as the primary loading technology in rifles and semi-automatic pistols were still really new. Now that those stories are 100 years old the weapons in them seem pratically antiquated when at the time they appeared almost like star wars blasters. Also, John Carter used a sword because he is freaking hercules on mars because gravity.

Flash Gordon, however, has no real reason for using a sword other than "swords are cool."

I wonder where the "squad leader uses a sword and pistol, ordinary squaddies use long weapons" trope comes from?

Laertes wrote:I wonder where the "squad leader uses a sword and pistol, ordinary squaddies use long weapons" trope comes from?

Real-life military officers.

Edit - In case that wasn't your actual question... Officers usually were mounted while their infantry were not. Having a saber and fighting from horseback sometimes made sense. A pistol could also be used from horseback in the way a 6' rifle couldn't be. Having a sword also served as an indicator of rank, and it could be used for display purposes when giving orders.

You watch a civil war movie like 'Glory' (or pretty much any other) and you'll see Matthew Broderick (or whoever is playing Pickett) using his sword as part of giving orders, such as to advance. Considering the noise that firearms makes, visual cues to orders were as important as audible cues - drums aren't easy to follow when you've been deafened by an exploding cannonball.

Edit 2 - And here's a wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_pistol

Laertes wrote:

Epic 40k has a truely stunningly good ruleset. It has infinatry fight by having at least one stand assault a position and fight what is nominally a melee while other stands within 15cm support the firefight. Casualties are inflicted on stands in the melee first, then away from that and a lot of what your firing does is supress enemy stands making them unable to respond.

This simple representation is amazingly good at representing how infantry works in a post WW1 battlefield. To bad the GW games with good rules are not supported.

I loved Epic. I still have boxes of Imperial Guard and Ork stands somewhere. It's a great game that plays fantastically; however, it's not marketable to small children, which means GW isn't interested.

Which version of Epic is best? Could it be reskinned to just use 28mm minis?

Laertes wrote:I wonder where the "squad leader uses a sword and pistol, ordinary squaddies use long weapons" trope comes from?

I'm not sure; the idea that regular dudes use a rifle or musket while officers get a sword and pistol dates back to at least Napoleonic times; I don't know how much farther back the distinction dates to.

deaddmwalking wrote:Real-life military officers.

GreatGreyShrike wrote:I'm not sure; the idea that regular dudes use a rifle or musket while officers get a sword and pistol dates back to at least Napoleonic times; I don't know how much farther back the distinction dates to.

My apologies. I expressed it poorly.

The guy commanding the platoon has always carried an officer's weapons, and that's because he isn't meant to be fighting, he's meant to be coordinating and communicating and suchlike. In the old South African army, there used to be a standing policy whereby any field officer caught with a rifle in the field would be disarmed on the spot because "that's not your job." I can understand that trope. It makes sense to have the commander disarmed apart from possibly a pistol for last-ditch self-defence.

However, the trope where the guy leading the squad has them, and he's not distracted by commanding the battle but is just the heroic inspirational badass who kills all the dudes, is a thing I find much weirder and was asking about.

Thinking about it, it might be a class-based thing, where a sword is a nobleman's weapon and we expect our heroes to be noblemen rather than just another commoner with a pike/musket/rifle/lasgun (even if we ourselves are commoners rather than noblemen.) Alternatively, it might be because making models with two-handed weapons tends to cover their body whereas two single-handed weapons leaves the body open, thus making pretty models and cool poses easy.

Ogrebattle wrote:Which version of Epic is best? Could it be reskinned to just use 28mm minis?

I liked Epic 40k because it's very fast and abstracted, which I like. However, people who like games to be more crunchy and flavourful and baroque will tell you that Epic Armageddon is better.

Epic is designed to be played on a table 1 - 2m on a side, which scales up to about 20 feet on a side in 28mm terms. This makes it difficult to play with 40k miniatures.

If you're just into it for the game rather than the minis, Epic does play fantastically well with cardboard chits.

Laertes wrote:I wonder where the "squad leader uses a sword and pistol, ordinary squaddies use long weapons" trope comes from?

Really quite a bit of this originates with the new model army and time of Marlbrough, becomming more and more formalized as time goes on till it reaches a pinnicle in the napoleonic wars. Then after that the sword part of the sword and pistol is slowly phased out for officers till the second world war.

As firearms become the dominant weapon the battlefield getting people the importance of low level officers and non-commissioned officers increased. Sergeants were often given spears or halberds which they would litterally use to dress a frontage and establish a line where the first rank of shooters would stand. Officers rode to battle but even in the 17th century you wouldn't normally expect the low officers to stay mounted. The job of the low officers is to recieve orders from messangers and direct their command, while sargents direct the action and make sure they remain an effective fighting force.

And while your highschool may have taught you that all that marching in lines and bright colored uniforms and stuff were terribly stupid, it was actually amazingly smart and brutally effective.

Anyway, non-cavalry officers swords by the napoleonic era were as much about having a pointing tool and authority symbol as they were about combat. As for having a pistol, there are several reasons for that too. First is that if your directing the action you shouldn't be fighting unless the action is right on top of you, in which case a pistol is more effective than a long arm anyway. Second, pistols and carbines were the common firearms of mounted troops.

Thirdly, the Brits, French and Prussians all decided that pistols were the weapons both OF and TO STOP mutineers, deserters, and cowards. So again officers got pistols because pistols beat fists and knives. The Brits hung on to this mentality until at least the middle of the second world war.

And finally, as a trope there are a small number of fighting forces that have reversed this. The U.S. Marines "everyman is a rifleman" mentality was turned into a rule that everybody major and below has to carry at least an m4 as their primary service weapon.

OgreBattle wrote:Which version of Epic is best? Could it be reskinned to just use 28mm minis?

The real issue with re-skinning 40K mini's as epic minis is that you need a lot more vehicles for epic than you do with 40k. Even if you just didn't play with titans (not a bad thing at all), a formation in epic generally includes 3 of whatever vehicle you are fielding while buying even 1 of those in regular size can be expensive becuase it could be the centerpiece of your force.

Also, you would probably have a hard time finding epic players.

I tend to really like Epic Armageddon, its good compromise between the Epic 40k and the previous versions of Epic (called space marine) in terms of crunch. Also, its air war rules are just better. The biggest issue with epic armageddon is that only space marine/guard/ork and eldar factions were ever written for it.

souran wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:Which version of Epic is best? Could it be reskinned to just use 28mm minis?

The real issue with re-skinning 40K mini's as epic minis is that you need a lot more vehicles for epic than you do with 40k. Even if you just didn't play with titans (not a bad thing at all), a formation in epic generally includes 3 of whatever vehicle you are fielding while buying even 1 of those in regular size can be expensive becuase it could be the centerpiece of your force.

What I mean is taking the rules set and adopting them to the quantity of miniatures 40k is already at.

So rules for a squad of space marines would = 1 28mm marine
Rules for a vehicle = 1 28mm bike, perhaps a squad of terminators
Rules for a titan = 1 28mm scale landraider

OgreBattle wrote:

souran wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:Which version of Epic is best? Could it be reskinned to just use 28mm minis?

The real issue with re-skinning 40K mini's as epic minis is that you need a lot more vehicles for epic than you do with 40k. Even if you just didn't play with titans (not a bad thing at all), a formation in epic generally includes 3 of whatever vehicle you are fielding while buying even 1 of those in regular size can be expensive becuase it could be the centerpiece of your force.

What I mean is taking the rules set and adopting them to the quantity of miniatures 40k is already at.

So rules for a squad of space marines would = 1 28mm marine
Rules for a vehicle = 1 28mm bike, perhaps a squad of terminators
Rules for a titan = 1 28mm scale landraider

I can't think of a way of doing that which wouldn't suck. The rules for Epic are all about sweeping movements and large-scale engagements. A single assault covers an entire game of 40k, and individual detachments are 40k-army sized. Therefore, it isn't so much "my lascannon rolls to shoot your Leman Russ" but "my hundred-plus guys with balanced and varied weaponry roll to shoot and then bayonet your similarly sized group, who are simultaneously doing it back to them." Terrain is similarly abstracted; you don't say "here's a tree" or "here's a wall" but rather "here's an area of woodland" and "here's an urban area." Weapons are short range relative to movement distances (like, usually shorter than a single turn's movement), and troops cluster together for C&C purposes far more than would look good with 40k models. Long range fire is about suppression as much or more than effect. And so forth.

In order to make it work, you'd basically just be going "this space marine represents a stand of marines", at which point you're like those napoleonic gamers who use a single soldier on a cardboard base to represent a regiment. Which isn't a bad thing, but isn't so much reskinned 40k as just playing with weirdly-scaled counters.

OgreBattle wrote: What I mean is taking the rules set and adopting them to the quantity of miniatures 40k is already at.

So rules for a squad of space marines would = 1 28mm marine
Rules for a vehicle = 1 28mm bike, perhaps a squad of terminators
Rules for a titan = 1 28mm scale landraider

I understood what you are saying. The size issue is one thing, the scale of the stands in epic and the size of various things means that a smaller table is a larger battlespace. However, even that coudl be solved by shrinking movement ranges.

The real issue in this is COST. A package of 3 space marine bikers costs $40. A single unit in epic would consist of 3 stands of space marine bikers. So 1 box = about 1 unit.

However, in regular 40k a space marine army might have at most 2 squads of bikes each made up of 5 bikes. So $120 dollars worth of models.

However, in epic, you would be likely to have 12-15 stands of bikes, or about 250$ worth of models using 28mm ones.

Its worse for larger vehicles, vehicles activate in squadrons of up to 3 vehicles but can move a lot more independantly than infantry or cavalry. Even if you did 1 vehicle = 1 vehicle squadron, in 40K you are likely to have 1 tank and 1 transport in a reasonable sized army. In Epic you are going to have like 5-8 vehicle squadrons and possibly 1 rihno for every 3 space marine stands.

Its a larger scale game, you could probably go the other way with only minimal difficulty, but trying to use the 28mm guys to play a 15mm game will be super expensive.

The trick is to have a reason. For example, there was one setting where spaceships are super-fragile and running around with guns would kill everyone in the ship and irreparably harm the ship.

It really could be as simple as "we have armor that resists bullets super well and blades really badly" without having to go full Dune force-shields.

K wrote:It really could be as simple as "we have armor that resists bullets super well and blades really badly" without having to go full Dune force-shields.

But then why would they wear that armor? If guns are abandoned as useless, and blades are the dominant weapon, there's no point to wearing that armor that's only useful against guns. They'd ditch that armor and find something that turns swords and knives.

I'd expect a mix of armor types or fusional armors, and a wide range of used weapons including both guns and blades, in such a scenario. To explain why guns aren't used at all, you'd need to do more than that.

Occluded Sun wrote:I'd ditch that armor and find something that turns swords and knives.

There is no reason to believe that the best and cheapest armor can't be strong against bullets and weak against swords and knives to the point of being only as good as all the alternative armors. This is sci-fi armor and you can just say shit like "Space Marine armor is only as good as steel or kevlar against blades, but it offers an absurd amount of protection from guns. Sadly, we don't have a similar material for blades."