AICN TABLETOP: Massawyrm HAS played Warhammer 40,000 5E!!

Hola all. Massawyrm here. Well, for 40k fans the big week is finally here. It’s time to say goodbye to 4th edition and begin battling for the 41st millennium with 5th edition rules. Now there’s a lot to be said about 40k players and the community, and as a whole the 40k community has earned itself a rough reputation. But you gotta give it to them when it comes to edition changes. I’ve never seen so smooth, even keel and even electric a response from the fan community over an edition swap on a game this large. While there has certainly been a fair share of groans and rants, the bulk of it has been brushed aside and ignored completely overwhelmed by a wave of unbridled enthusiasm. It’s a stark contrast to the muck and mire of the Dungeons and Dragons changeover just last month. Hell, all I did was write a review saying I enjoyed it and I had to endure months of nasty letters and people pulling me aside in the game store to tell me “how it’s REALLY gonna be”. Not 40k players. They’re excited. They can’t wait. And despite the last rule change occurring just about 4 years ago, it has been embraced as a stark improvement to the game and an exciting alteration to the gaming landscape as a whole. Old ignored units are viable again, overpowered armies and units have felt the pinch of a gentle nerfing and there’s a new emphasis on running large units of base troops rather than just the super cool elites and destructive heavies. The days of min/maxing your armies with the bare minimum amount of troop level units are over, and what that’s done to the field is fantastic. I’ve read the rulebook cover to cover and gotten the chance to play a number of games this last week and I am having a hell of a great time with it. The game is faster, bloodier and the new victory conditions have substantially changed the way you’ll play. Kill Points are the big drastic change that will cause most heads to turn. No longer do you tally up the worth of a unit afterwards, add all the points together and then compare totals. Now you just count how many units were completely wiped out. If someone is still alive, not only do you not get any credit for the unit, but if it’s a troop it still can count as a scoring unit. These changes not only change the way people are building their armies – but the way they fight with those armies. 4Th edition was often about man on man coverage, if you will. My unit of tactical marines will try and take out that unit of Fire warriors while my dreadnaught tries to tear apart that hammerhead. Now it’s about trying to beat down a unit until it is dead before moving onto the next one…all WHILE trying to prevent your opponent from doing the same. The way you move, hold position and defend objectives is all going to be different after your first game of 5E. Of course not everyone is entirely thrilled with the ruleset – notably tournament organizers. You see, GW has taken a large step towards re-envisioning the play environment. They’ve moved away from complicated but precise tournament friendly rules towards more intuitive but murky funplay friendly rules. The Line of Sight (LOS) rules alone are causing fits among people who put everything together at gamestores and hobby clubs. 5E reintroduces true LOS to the game, meaning that if you look from your minis vantage point you can see exactly what you can see. There’s no more complicated cover rules or height variations. If you can see that Chaos marine poking his head out the window across the board, then you can fire at it. The notion of being deep inside 6” of cover is now a relic. Long range weapons got a big boon with this, but so did models that are kneeling, lying down or otherwise lower to the ground than a normal model of its type. And that’s leading to worries about player cheese. Let’s face it, the reason 40k players have the reputation they do is not because of the community, but because of the over competitive douchenozzles who bend, break or shatter the conventions of fair play just to get a leg up for the free shit GW gives out for every sanctioned tournament. And if there’s a way to squeeze an extra ounce of advantage out of the game, these fuckwit asshats will take it. We’re all waiting for the first tourney pictures to surface of entire units modeled to be belly crawling across the field just to take full advantage of any low terrain. One of my FLGS’s - Battleforge Games – has already instituted a fair play doctrine in which a player can call a ref over for a ruling on the validity of an army’s height. If it’s found that the player is clearly trying to take unfair advantage of the LOS rules (with low-rider Rhinos, low flying skimmers or kneeling or crawling marines) they’ll take a big point deduction for the round. I’m hoping this kind of structure makes its way around as it really is the one sticking point that will sour organizers (hell, and players) on 40k events. If you haven’t checked out the rules yet (due to lack of a nearby partner store or whatever) this weekend is the big reveal. There’s a lot of great fluff in the book (including hints about the Emperor’s possible demise) and they’ve incorporated a bunch of the city fight info to allow the use of functional terrain (terrain you do more than just hide behind.) There’s even some sweet terrain in there used in many of the examples – a base and landing pad – that are rumored to be the next GW Terrain kits (pleasepleaseplease be true.) So when I first started writing this column, there was one group of guys I wanted to get in touch with. If you’ve played 40K for a while then odds are you’ve read Bell of Lost Souls. It’s a fan run website based out of Austin that I’ve been reading for some time. Every time I talk with someone in the GW hierarchy and ask them a direct question about what’s coming up, they give a clever dodge, get really quiet, then sheepishly, almost under their breath say “I’d go look at BoLS. What they’ve got is pretty accurate.” Getting to know the guys I see them going through a lot of the same things I saw here at early AICN. Cryptic e-mails, clandestine packages with photocopies of things no one is supposed to have, mysterious links to photos that vanish as soon as the guys have downloaded them. And it’s all because the people that get these tidbits want to share it with the people that love 40k as much as they do. And MAN do these mother fuckers love it. They live and breathe it. So for those of you unfamiliar with him, I’d like to introduce you to bigred – the man who handily whooped the everliving shit out of my precious Blood Angels the other night with his fruity little Eldar in a 10 to 6 kill point stomping in an Annihilation match. And while I claim a moral victory for having taken down his Avatar and two Wraith Lords in the single sickest Assault I’ve ever witnessed, I had to sacrifice Dante, Corbulo, a 6 man Death Company and my Honor Guard to do it. Only my Death Company Venerable Dreadnaught survived the melee…if you call immobilizing a weaponless Dreadnaught survival (no 11th Kill Point for you, sucker!) The guy knows his stuff and I’m proud not only to have him feeding us the occasional bit of intel, but to be able to have him as an opponent. Despite getting schooled something ugly, I loved every moment of the game. And there’s a lot to be said for both a game and a player when you feel awesome about losing. So here’s bigred.

Warhammer 40k Roundup –June 2008

Thoughts on 5th Edition

Like many of you, our local game store got in a 5th Edition preview copy and what a time we have had! The Bell of Lost Souls crew have rolled out some of our favorite toys and put the new rules through the ringer. I figured you all might want to hear some of our impressions after seeing and playing several games. 1) Maneuvering: The movement phase is now a real challenge. Learning to maneuver firing units to minimize blocking friendlies will maximize your firepower, while presenting as many blocking units to your opponent (including his own troops) will minimize his. This is a key skill which must be learned. We are going to have to force ourselves to relearn how to move units to give the enemy as few 4+ cover saves as possible while maximizing your own armies 4+ saves. It’s a delicate dance and is much trickier than it seems. Right on up there in this department are tall units blazing away over slightly shorter ones (such as fire support dreadnoughts firing over rhinos they are advancing behind), as well as the tricks that you can pull off with any unit which can move in the assault phase like Eldar jetbikes, and tau jetpacks. Running with key units at the end of your armies firing phase can also help. 2) True Line of Sight: This one is easy to learn but hard to master. You get used to it after only a few games, but boy are most playgroups going to need to do a "terrain week" pretty soon. Most tables I've seen have way too little full line of sight blocking terrain to give vehicles something to get obscured behind, and a way to much sparse area terrain that now doesn't block line of sight. The results are tons of cover saves for infantry, and dead vehicles. I predict a tidal-wave of tall hill, solid impassible forest/hedges, and monolithic buildings in the near future. 3) Cover Saves: These are everywhere now, and as such, have given a huge boost to anything that can ignore them. Things such as crack shot, template weapons and the like are vastly improved. Tau air bursting flechettes, heavy flamers, and the like are to be feared. I would like to make a special note of the IG Hellhound which is the new bane of the open/area terrain tabletop. It only takes one game of a Hellhound firing through multiple forests to incinerate groups of Aspect Warriors on the far side with no cover saves allowed before folks start working on solid walls and other such impassible cover. 4) Speed: The game is much more freewheeling now, with “run” giving lots of units a new lease on life. Many dog slow units which had to plod across the table or were useless if caught out of position like Striking Scorpions, IG Heavy Weapon Teams, and even Ogryns can now get in there much faster and reposition with minimal loss of time. 5) Assaults: Fast, brutal, and deadly as all get out. Dedicated high quality assault units such as Assault terminators, banshees and the like will routinely completely destroy their target units and sweep them with huge negative leadership modifiers (we saw several -8 leadership tests last game). The trick is not getting key units into assault (which is easy), but to hit an area of the enemy army en masse so they cannot effectively recover and blow the assault force away as it is caught in the open. Unsupported assaults are short lived and doomed to failure. 6) Missions: The new scoring units status really shines a light on Troops. Their ability to contest down to the last model is spectacular, and lots of maligned units such as guardian jetbikes, full sized IG infantry platoons and the like are now worth their weight in gold. Secondarily the flanking ability gained by any infiltrator or scout unit turns a lot of average units such as sentinels and war walkers into much more flexible and threatening foes. All in all 5th Edition is an absolute blast. You will have a great time rediscovering your armies, opponents, and building completely new armylists that would never have worked in 4th. Happy Gaming! The regular hard cover 5th Edition rulebook is due out in July, with a retail price of $49.99.

The 5th Edition Boxed Set “Battle for Black Reach”

The new boxed starter, due out in September of this year, will include the ever popular “mini-rulebook”, dice, measuring sticks and a ton of miniatures including: 1– Space Marine Commander 1– Space Marine Tactical Squad (10 models) 1– Space Marine Terminator Squad (5 models) 1– Space Marine Dreadnought AND THAT’S NOT ALL! The set will also include: 1– Ork Warboss 2– Ork Boyz Mobs (20 models total) 1– Ork Nob Mob (5 models) 3– Death Koptas The retail price on this boxed set will be a $59.99 A quick analysis of the retail value of this set is valued at @$250 bucks, and that’s not even counting 3 Death Koptas, the “mini-rulebook”, or the dice. As you can see from the picture of the Plastic Dreadnought, Games Workshop has really raised the quality bar for their quick-assembly boxed set plastics, which are now very difficult to differentiate from their fully detailed plastic kits.

Rumors of Powered Armor: Codex Space Marines is coming…

Hot on the heels of 5th Edition, GW is rumored to have Codex: Space Marines wrapped up and all ready to go for this Fall. A short list of just a few of the upcoming goodies for all the Imperial Loyalists include: The Land Raider Redeemer: A new variant of every marine’s favorite main battle tank with flamethrower sponsons and assault cannons on the front cupola. Master of the Forge and updated Techmarines: These new choices will come armed with a new selection of rare and exotic ranged weapons from way back in the days of 1st Edition, such as the Conversion Beamer and the new Thunderfire cannon. Plastic Drop-pods: At long last the wait will be over. No more using Styrofoam cups and coffee cans to ruin the feel of our tabletop battles. A fully detailed plastic drop-pod is coming with doors that open and a fully detailed interior. That’s it for now kids, I’ll catch up with you next month. -bigred Bell of lost souls www.belloflostsouls.blogspot.com


bigred promises to be back next month with a rundown and consilidation of all the Space marine codex rumors and the September spearhead release. Looking forward to it! Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. Massawyrm Got something for the Wyrm? Mail it here.