Review/Drinking Game: Warhams 40k 7Ed: Send Help

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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

Voss wrote:
Chamomile wrote: This bit of content-free editorializing sounds like the opening to some kind of actual argument, but no, you just end the paragraph and train of thought right there. Apparently your counterargument is that you don't like gravity-directed FTL (for unspecified reasons) and consider them "insane" (also for unspecified reasons) and you expect us to care about your completely unsupported conclusion because...?
Yes, quite right. My mistake for assuming any knowledge at all on your part.
Okay, I'm not entirely sure you understood the sentence you were quoting. I was expressing bemusement because you had failed to articulate an actual reason for disliking something. Your response is that your mistake was assuming that I knew something. But the knowledge I'm missing here is your argument. You made like you were going to present an argument and then you didn't do that. It is indeed incredibly bizarre to assume that I would know in advance what your argument is. Like, your response here is literally "oh, I'm sorry, I assumed you were fucking psychic."
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Post by Whipstitch »

Re: boltguns
Yeah, you kinda have to give up and accept that it's complexity for complexity's sake. It's the preferred weapon of the mighty space meringues so it can't be a machine gun or autocannon because that is too simple and it can't be a gyrojet because then they couldn't jerk off to stories about guardsmen being physically incapable of firing a Godwyn pattern. You know, because these assholes are 8 feet tall and needed a way for that to be a great idea instead of taking up too much room in a transport and being large targets.
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Post by norms29 »

FrankTrollman wrote:
DSM wrote:I think giving tyranids a conscious goal and the ability to reason about how best to achieve that goal is simply too much personification.
The Hive does whatever the Hive Tyrant tells it to do. Hive Tyrants are super geniuses who have hyper advanced botany that allows them to grow radios on trees. If they can do that, why can't they grow food on trees?

-Username17
I feel like I'm missing something here, my thinking was that biomass requires *mass*. like the 'Nids need more carbon and oxygen and such to expand. If the hive tyrant makes a tree to grow fruit, that fruit is grown from biomass the hive already has, so they gain nothing.
I thought when the tyranids kill a planet they don't just eat all the existing biological matter, they take all of the constituent elements to make biological matter, then move on.
After all, when you climb Mt. Kon Foo Sing to fight Grand Master Hung Lo and prove that your "Squirrel Chases the Jam-Coated Tiger" style is better than his "Dead Cockroach Flails Legs" style, you unleash a bunch of your SCtJCT moves, not wait for him to launch DCFL attacks and then just sit there and parry all day. And you certainly don't, having been kicked about, then say "Well you served me shitty tea before our battle" and go home.
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Post by maglag »

norms29 wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:
DSM wrote:I think giving tyranids a conscious goal and the ability to reason about how best to achieve that goal is simply too much personification.
The Hive does whatever the Hive Tyrant tells it to do. Hive Tyrants are super geniuses who have hyper advanced botany that allows them to grow radios on trees. If they can do that, why can't they grow food on trees?

-Username17
I feel like I'm missing something here, my thinking was that biomass requires *mass*. like the 'Nids need more carbon and oxygen and such to expand. If the hive tyrant makes a tree to grow fruit, that fruit is grown from biomass the hive already has, so they gain nothing.
I thought when the tyranids kill a planet they don't just eat all the existing biological matter, they take all of the constituent elements to make biological matter, then move on.
It's not only a matter of biomass, but also energy to convert said biomass.

It's not enough to get resources, you also need to spend something to convert those resources into something else. Plants are highly succesful because they use solar energy to convert the dioxide carbon in the air and minerals around in new biomatter in a much more efficient way than any animal could. There's a reason why plants are always at the base of the food chain. There's a lot more of them than anything else in Earth's surface.

Logically speaking, the nid fleets should be struggling to keep their size if not outright shrinking by themselves because the energy expended traveling the galaxy, devouring everything in a planet's surface and then converting the biomass in new nids would be highly inneficient when all is said and done when you must sacrifice a significant part of your biomatter for simple energy to do other stuff.

Alas the 40K writers outright ignore the need of energy to convert something to something else. Or movement or anything. The tyranids magically get to laugh at entropy as a funny joke and any biomatter they get their hands on is turned into nids through a 0-cost magical proccess and a lumbering carnifex doesn't need any energy to move. Or just keep itself from rotting (trivia, the reason we humans lose muscle mass when we're lazy is because muscle takes a lot of energy just to keep around, so if your body feels like you don't need the muscle right now, it will sacrifice it to save energy).
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Perhaps their energy comes from the warp, they do have psychic powers to boost units.

It would be neat to see Tyranids build stuff out of plants or wax instead of bones for a change
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Post by DSMatticus »

FrankTrollman wrote:
DSM wrote:I think giving tyranids a conscious goal and the ability to reason about how best to achieve that goal is simply too much personification.
The Hive does whatever the Hive Tyrant tells it to do. Hive Tyrants are super geniuses who have hyper advanced botany that allows them to grow radios on trees. If they can do that, why can't they grow food on trees?

-Username17
That wasn't me suggesting what tyranids actually are so much as me lamenting what they aren't. I know they've got a top-down intelligence similar to what the zerg have going on, but unlike the zerg (who are capable of both minor and major internal political squabbles and can to some extent be reasoned with by other factions) that intelligence contributes fuck-all to the tyranids. In the end they are still just implacable killing machines who won't negotiate or reason with you even if they are technically capable of doing so. If that's how you're going to write them, then maybe they really should just be totally alien beings - a eusocial intelligence who, despite their brilliance, have very little capacity for self-reflection and whose fundamental drives are incompatible with other life. Problem-solving intelligence doesn't necessarily imply introspection and outcome-based value systems - that's very much a human conceit (and it's not like we're particularly good at it), and intelligent life that doesn't possess those traits at all is wholly plausible. In fact, we'll probably invent it one day, and then it may or may not kill us all and begin conquering the stars.
Voss wrote:No it doesn't. It was created for narrative purposes- that astropaths can't get warnings out through the 'shadow in the warp.' It became magical immunity for the sake of not having to write tyranid-warp interactions. That they still took perils of the warp tests but they were handwaved as 'popping blood vessels and the manifesting creature dies or something' wasn't compelling at all.

...

Ah, yes, the stupid cruddace-written codex and its insane but suddenly canon theories about interstellar travel by gravity whales.
Do you even know what the hell you're trying to say? The different pieces of this conversation do not connect and it's fucking weird. You've got the same thing going on with Chamomile. Are you drunk? The hell's going on here?

The gist of what you're saying seems to be "I think these specific things are in the tyranid fluff because the authors are lazy and stupid, respectively" which is... okay? I don't fucking care? WH40K authors being lazy or stupid or both is a good bet in most circumstances, but it doesn't actually matter how those bits and pieces ended up in there because they're still in there, which is the whole god damn point. There are some things in the tyranid fluff which are consistent with a particular origin theory, and until recently nothing in the tyranid fluff which was damningly inconsistent with that particular origin theory theory, and that meant you had wiggle room for fan interpretations more interesting than "generic evil space bugs."
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Post by Username17 »

DSM wrote:That wasn't me suggesting what tyranids actually are so much as me lamenting what they aren't. I know they've got a top-down intelligence similar to what the zerg have going on, but unlike the zerg (who are capable of both minor and major internal political squabbles and can to some extent be reasoned with by other factions) that intelligence contributes fuck-all to the tyranids. In the end they are still just implacable killing machines who won't negotiate or reason with you even if they are technically capable of doing so. If that's how you're going to write them, then maybe they really should just be totally alien beings - a eusocial intelligence who, despite their brilliance, have very little capacity for self-reflection and whose fundamental drives are incompatible with other life.
But that's a stupid way to write them.

The reality is that all the factions in 40K are too hostile. I know there's only war and all that shit, and it's imperative that any faction be plausibly fighting any other faction because it's a fucking wargame and that is what you do when two players rock up to the table with whatever armies they happen to have. But you know what else there is? Two on two play.

It's almost as important for any two factions you happen to name to be allowed to ally as it is for any two factions you happen to name to fight. The fact that there's no plausible reason for Tyranids and Dark Eldar to be brothers in arms is a major design fail.

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Post by Stahlseele »

Even the egyptian space zombie terminators can be reasoned with to an extent . .
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Post by DSMatticus »

That seems a whole lot like a solution without a problem. I mean, what are you trying to do? Support 2v2 games? Arbitrary out-of-codex attachments? Because one of those is not a great idea and the other is atypical, poorly supported, and insanely time consuming even by the standards of a WH40K game. If you absolutely must have tyranids that can do doubles without testing anyone's suspension of disbelief, you could do it by saying genestealer cults occasionally get their own pet tyranid forces. Genestealer victims and hybrids are very much still part whatever-the-hell-they-were-originally, which means they are as capable (or incapable) of reason as you need them to be.

In fact, you could even put different genestealer cults at completely different ends of the spectrum; depending on how aggressive a particular strain of genestealers are you can end up with anything from The Thing to The Manchurian Candidate from Outer Space. Regardless, eventually the tyranid hive will arrive and they will eat the victims, the hybrids, and even the genestealers because the script says they are no longer needed now that the prey they were sent to harass and weaken has been devoured. In the end Genestealers are still just following their programmed role in the colony, it's just that their role is to cripple instead of to consume, and temporarily co-opting their target species' more flexible judgment is just a beneficial side effect of how they go about avoiding detection while maximizing the damage they cause.
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Post by Username17 »

DSM wrote:I mean, what are you trying to do? Support 2v2 games?
Yes. Because that's actually a thing.

The reality is that the number of gaming tables is not always half the number of people who want to play, which gives you two options: and one of those options is people who would like to be playing the game fucking off for four fucking hours and that is not acceptable.

And then there's Apocalypse Tournaments, which are... well they are certainly a thing.

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Post by maglag »

Glorious Chaos leaks

Loyalist scum leaks, including space vampires.

Plasma weapons can now be fired either safely for S7 or supercharge for double damage and S8 but if you roll a 1 then kills the wielder instantly. And no character ever overcharged a plasma pistol from that day. Still at 7 points giving your assaulty sergeants a S7 extra attack doesn't sound too bad.

ATSKNF is now simply re-rolling failed morale checks. With all the morale-ignoring that was being shown, that's actually something a lot more sane.

Abby on the other hand makes all chaos marines within 12 auto-pass morale checks as well as allowing them to re-roll all missed to-hit. And takes half damage from everything and has 7 wounds so he may actually be good decent now?

Combat knives are +1 attack just like chainswords.

Havoks can take chainswords instead of special/heavy weapons, but why the fuck would you ever want to do that?

Obliterators now have their own weapons that have random S/AP/D. And are otherwise Assault 2 range 24, so I would say trash. On the other hand they get no-scatter teleport so drop them near something you want dead and pray to the chaos gods for good weapon stats.


Nartheciums are now after-movement either heal 1d3 wounds to somebody that's damaged or 50% chance of ressurecting a dead dude (only infantry/bikes though) from an unit, and if you fail that then the dude with the narthecium derps and spends the rest of the turn recovering the gene-seed. 3 range. About time loyalist scum stopped getting feel no pain everywhere.

Heldrakes no longer have vector strike, just melee claw attacks. And auto-regen 1 wound per turn. And despite being fliers have no anti-melee ability so seems like you can charge them just fine. The hades autocannon gets a bonus to hit other fliers. Wonder if you will be able to charge all the fliers.

Remember how Frank commented vehicle exploding was so lethal that it was worth to suicide-rush a bunch of tanks to the enemy lines? Well seems like most vehicles now have a chance of exploding dealing mortal wounds when dropped to zero wounds.

On the other hand a basic rhino now costs 70 points. Drop pods 103 points. Razorbacks 65 points but that's without any dakka. And with marines being even cheaper, vehicle spam doesn't seem very easy.

Loyalist scum find out that reaper autocannons are pretty sweet and loot them from chaos. Sure, why not.

Both chaos marines and blood angels get a pseudo-smite, aka 18 range psyker power that deals up to 3 mortal wounds. The chaos one is roll 3 dice and each 4+ inflicts a mortal wound while the blood angels one rolls 3 dice against enemy toughness. So the chaos one is better against tough shit and the BA is better against puny targets. Both have less output than smite, but aren't forced to auto-target the closest thing.
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Post by Koumei »

Meanwhile Sisters info was leaked, and it's everything I expected and less. Bonus points for their Eviscerators having 2 worse AP simply because the (final adjusted) Strength is 2 worse and the AP is still basically married to the S value like in the shitty old days of 2Ed. Yet still costing just as much.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

datasheet leaks indicate that the chainsword gives +1 attack yes

...and so do scout combat blades. So there goes "make chainswords special and unique".

Khorne Berserkers are incentivized to hold a chainaxe in one hand and chainsword in the other for more attacks. THeir special ability is to fight twice in the fight phase.
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