Lore vs. Game

[wolfie65Participant 1238xp 1]

In the stories, background, lore, 1 Elf, Dwarf or slightly better Human is easily the equal or better of at least 5-10 Orcs, Goblins, Skeletons, Zombies or similar generic ‘bad guys’, heroes can take out 30, 40 or more without even breaking a sweat.

Which works great in books and movies, video games and even RPGs or skirmish games, where players control 1 character figure or maybe a small warband, while the DM, ‘game’ or console control unlimited numbers of generic, replaceable and recyclable enemies. When the dungoeneers kill a skeleton or five, the DM simply feeds those miniatures back into line at the rear or reaches into his army transport case for more.

In mass battle games, this becomes a problem, because Orc, Undead or other players of ‘evil horde’ type armies aren’t going to be very happy if they have to buy and paint 60, 80 or more figures just to have any chance whatsoever against 1 Elven hero with a super bow. No one would want to play Orcs, Undead, Skaven et. al.

Not too big of a deal for companies that only manufacture figures, which people may want to buy just for the cooolness of the sculpt, regardless of how useful or not they may be in a game, but quite the bugbear for those trying to sell rule sets.

Size of your average Dwarf army: 15 guys. Size of your average Orc army: 3000 guys….

Batch painting on a whole new level…..And how would you even fit that many onto a table you can reach the middle of ?

One guy I used to game with got around the issue by pretending that his army were the personal retinue of some local count or landowner and the battle we were fighting was just a small part of a much bigger battle going on off-table.

I get around it by scaling up in my head: Those 10 Elf Spearmen are actually 1000, those 5 Silver Helms 500. Opposing them are 20 (000) Orcs and 5 (000) boar riders.

How do you do it ?

[horati0nosebl0wer 19645xp 0]

A thought there might be that there could be less orcs as they are the elites of the horde. Makes sense if you look at a certain albino or warg riders of Tolkien’s making.

[limburger 21704xp 1]

I don’t want ‘super’ Orks in order to ‘explain’ why 1 ork can fight 1 elf when the lore says they should be mowing them down.

I want horde armies to feel like an actual potentially unstoppable horde if the bloody elves don’t use their brains.

Just because there are “thousands of ’em” that doesn’t mean that a player has to literally have thousands orks on the table.
A recycling mechanism (like the one that Gerry used for the zulu’s in his version of the battle for Rorke’s Drift) would solve that issue while keeping the game balanced.

Assymetric gameplay should be a feature, not something to be ignored in the name of  ‘balance’
Players need to learn that if they’re going to play faction X then they are not going to kill the opposing army (or even make a dent in them).

Things that happen in the lore should happen (or at least have a decent chance of occurring) in the average game.

A certain robotic enemy calmly re-assembling itself after it is ‘destroyed’ shouldn’t be a 1 in 6 chance. It should be the very essence of the danger that faction has, which means that the controlling player should be able to invoke it on his own without relying on pure luck. The opposing player should be shitting his pants and focus on objectives other than elimination in order to defeat such an opponent.

If a squad of spacemarines hasn’t wiped out at least twice their number in ‘lesser’ creatures they should be considered traitors.

A faction that isn’t allowed to be as in the lore should either be removed from the game (and the lore)  or rewritten from scratch.

Balance isn’t “faction A can win against faction B on average 50% of the time exactly (and vice versa)”
Balance is achieved when playing against the doctrine of your faction is guaranteed to make you lose the game … while playing according to the doctrine will still make you lose if you are fighting a faction that has developed the perfect counter doctrine”.

[wolfie65Participant 1238xp 0]

Super Orcs…reminds me of many games of the GW version of LotR : If you want to win, play Uruk-Hai…..

Space Marines should be able to kill many times their number of ‘lesser’ beasties, but are hampered by stat creep. When they were originally created for Rogue Trader , they were essentially the ‘humans’, while the Orks were, well, da Orkzes. No Imperial Guard (non-enhanced humans), no Chaos Marines, no Tyranids, etc.

Being the ‘basic humans’, a Space Marine isn’t really all that much better than an Empire halberdier in terms of stats, and there isn’t much wiggle room downwards fir insertion of actual basic humans (Guard) into the system, unless you want to put them on a par with Goblins or Snotlings. Or give the Snotlings stats in the minus numbers…..

At the other end of the scale  – upwards – you have the Space Marines as they probably should be: the Chaos version – better in most every way, never mind the fact that warp spasms or tentacles erupting from your innards must be rather painful and distracting.

With all those extra organs, decades of training and ceramite armor, a Space Marine who doesn’t have at least WS 5 , T 6 and 3 or 4  wounds should be reassigned to cleaning duties.

[limburger 21704xp 1]

I’d blame it on the simple fact that GW uses a standard D6 across the board for everything.
That does force you to invent a ton of ‘special skills’ and exceptions in order to make them different, because it would be too easy to make one faction effectively immortal gods while the other would be too squishy and incapable of being a threat.

Add to that a company that wants to sell models … and you get into a situation where the latest release gets to have ‘more power’ so they can tempt people into buying them. Followed by a set of tweaks/fixes to bring them down so the new batch of models can be sold …

(cynical ? yep … but it does explain the release/patch cycle for 40k/AoS  …)

As such I’d argue that the only games that can represent both elite level and crap troops are ones that use different dice types (D4 / D6 / D8 / D10 / D12 / D20) or something like a D10 or D20. This goes doubly so for games that have multiple races (= humans and non-humans/aliens).

[wolfie65Participant 1238xp 0]

Agree completely.

Space Marines have Ld 7 ? I thought they knew no fear ? If we go by the background, they should have at least Ld 9 or 10. If you then want to introduce races or factions of even higher quality, have them use d10s or 12s, such dice were available by the late 1970s, way before Warhammer.

[limburger 21704xp 0]

That’s why current edition spacemarines have a ‘know no fear’ special skill across the entire faction …

It’s why D6 rolls are such a bad choice for statistics, because there is so little wiggle room :

1. 1/6 : roll a 6 on a D6
2. 2/6 = 1/3 : roll 5+ on a D6
3. 3/6 = 50/50 : roll a 4+ on a D6
4. 4/6 = 2/3 : roll 3+ on a D6
5. 5/6 : roll 2+ on a D6

That’s it … (technically you have 6/6 as well)
The only extra wiggle room you get is by rolling a second die, which is probably why to hit and to wound are separate rolls in D6 systems …

After that you need modifiers to split across both rolls (modify either chance to hit or to wound) … and you need to be real careful as you go from ‘easy’  to ‘impossible’ with a mere +/-3 max modifier.

The only positive about D6’s is that they’re easier to buy, easy to roll (a failed roll is easier to judge) and produce (no complex moulds)

[piersParticipant 25489xp 1]

There has always been Imperial Guard in 40k, they came with Rogue Trader and had the basic human statline.

Space Marines in Rogue Trader were slightly better in WS/BS/S.

[limburger 21704xp 0]

true … and the only real difference was in armor (flak jackets with a 6+ save and the infamous lasguns).

I know that points wise you had to field a lot of imperial guard compared to spacemarines, but I’m not sure if they ever matched the lore in how they play. Especially when you consider that a 1000 spacemarines are all there are in a spacemarine chapter (post Horus era) while imperial guard regiments have thousands … (easily a 1:10 ratio ).

[wolfie65Participant 1238xp 0]

Well, that’s just the point: The only way you could possibly represent the rather massive differences between, for example, Space Marines and Imperial Guardsmen – which are NOT really reflected in the stat line – is in 6 mm or perhaps 10mm scale, because you would need to field at least 10 times more Guard than Marines, 100 times would probably be even closer to the background fluff.

Elven armies could then consist of a few dozen models or stands, easily bought and painted in a week or two, Orc armies would number in the thousands. Kill the piggy bank and break out the green spray paint…..

I recall quite a few Chaos armies – Warhammer in Easy Mode – that had lots of Warriors and Knights and Demons – but no Marauders. According to the fluff, Chaos Warriors are the CHOSEN FEW from among the Marauders, Chaos Knights the CHOSEN FEW from among the Warriors. Stat creep meets power gaming.

[limburger 21704xp 0]

Which is why I suggested that you need other means to represent those reserves while keeping the amount of models that are on the table to a sane number.

If you pick a scale like 6mm or 10mm then you get to the point where one player has too few things to do.

Those scales are great for anything that has vehicles in them though, because at ’28mm’ the vehicles can’t use their speed/movement to do anything and the weapons are seriously out of scale for infantry combat. Likewise the infantry need ridiculously powerful weapons to stop any tank-like construct …

[onlyonepinman 18060xp 1]

Sounds like you need to pick a new game…  Saga for example.  Although Oathmark adds a nice twist on this by allowing generals to recruit whatever they want into their armies rather than limiting armies to a single species.

Truthfully, the lore should back up the game and the game should replicate the lore – this is something GW in particular are absolutely terrible at.  Their lore is generally speaking quite fun, it’s not really my jam anymore but it’s brought me lots of good memories over the years.  But they it does suffer from constant one-upmanship, where everything has to be the biggest, toughest, scariest bad ass in the whole galaxy to the point where nothing really makes any sense.  Terminators vs Genestealers is a prime example of this (as per the old, sadly now deleted, FlashGitz animation).  Terminators are supposed to be able to survive the equivalents of ground zero nuclear blasts (or worse), climb out from underneath collapsed buildings requiring little more than a new lick of paint.  But put them up against genestealers and they may as well be wrapped in bog roll – it just doesn’t stack up.  Lore writers probably need to dial things back a little bit in that respect.

But, when the lore and the game are in synch, you are correct, this leads to some armies fielding hordes of models.  Lore could be rewritten such that things like Goblins weren’t so terminally awful in combat but would you want that?  However if army lists are designed correctly by the writers, there should be the option to field a range of units, from Goblin rabble, Orc soldiers (equivalent to a human) or some form of elite soldiery.  In that respect most armies SHOULD be roughly the same size regardless of whether they are Elves or Undead.  The option to field a horde should be there but you could just as easily field more elite units instead.

[odinsgrandsonParticipant 4288xp 0]

In game terms, one human can take out 20 orc. But also, 1 orc can take out 20 humans. A novel, video game or dungeon crawler is only following those heroic individuals.

This matches the lore pretty close- we have these big heroic characters that kill enemies in droves on both sides.

If you read the Iliad, some humans can easily kill thousands of humans- on both sides.

[ced1106Participant 6224xp 0]

> and even RPGs

Well, it’s not *that* good with RPG’s (: for the same reason. One guy in the party paints up six characters to advanced tabletop, while the DM is stuck with dozens of humanoids, not to mention NPC’s, huge monsters, and terrain! If you’re familiar with Reaper Bones plastic, one reason Reaper uses it is that a hill giant in Bones plastic is six bucks, while in metal it’s thirty. And not many DM’s are going to pay $180 for a hill giant encounter!

Not much of a miniatures wargamer here, but, from the orc and undead starter armies I’ve bought from Mantic, I got the impression that undead armies were larger, but not that much larger, and all armies had elite units (which typically had a higher price tag per model as well!)?

[wolfie65Participant 1238xp 0]

Well, in an RPG the DM may have to have a larger collection of minis than any of the players,  but not by a factor of x 100 , x 1000 or more. As Orcs or Skeletons die at the hands of the Elf with the bow, the Dwarf with the axe or the Barbarian with the brohdsoahd (…), he simply feeds them back into line at the rear, as only a few of them will be visible in the dungeon tunnel at a time anyway.

In a battle game, however, Legolas is surrounded by thousands of Orcs, thousands of Haradrim, several  dozen Mumakil – and he takes them all down while barely breaking a sweat…… How much was the (plastic) Oliphant by GW again ? 1 of them ? How much are they today on FlEabay ? And where would one play such a game, assuming you would be able to hire the entire town to help paint all those minis ? Certainly not on a table…..the backyard maybe, or a FEMA -Mart parking lot.

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