N1SB

After comparing it to Mobile/Live Service games, I've been thinking about what Brother Maritn said, too: I've played other miniatures games, like Kingdom Death and Gloomhaven, that are cooperative; we play against a monster deck. Even then, learning that monster deck is part of the game. In Kingdom Death, you have a monster, let's say a demonic goat you're playing against, and you draw from (what it calls) its A.I. deck. 1 card would say it rams you with its horns, 1 kicks with a hind leg. During the fight, you can cut off its horns, cripple its legs...and you would remove THOSE cards from the game, they can't be shuffled back in. That's actually kinda cool! We're playing against a deck, but it fits the narrative/theme/events of that monster fight. In 40k 11th ed (and 7th ed Maelstrom of War), the deck doesn't match the narrative...the narrative is forced to fit the deck. It's like the cart leading the horse, when you guys said things like taking a unit of Grots or Kroot for the sake of an objective card. It feels like things are backwards, it's not even the cards' fault, nor other players' who are just playing the game as designed. Y'know? Like that's more than I'm iffy about this 1 game mechanic, it's like the system's running backwards.

Brother Idaho's right about video game development costs, from both an insider and outsider view, so I'll just fill in some jigsaw pieces. As an insider, I started out in the dot-com era as a website designer for a browser-based game. Before then, it was breakout indie games that defined the industry: Ultima, Sim City, Doom were all developed practically in a basement. It was around that time the focus was shifting towards those big blockbuster AAA projects you mentioned. As an outsider, among economist circles, that AAA drive broke like one of the "rules" in their field: production costs are SUPPOSED to go down as technology advances. Like PCs, mobile phones, 3D printers used to be luxuries, but now everyone's got them. Video games are now cited as the example that disproves the theory. Before 2000, you'd game for a little over $1 million. Star Wars: the Old Republic and later Final Fantasy games famously cost $200 million. (So give you an example, you could go to iD software, maker of Quake, and license the Quake engine. It'd be $250k to $500k upfront, then 10% to 15% royalties. So you'd get a team for maybe $500k over a year or two, iD would help you, now you got one of those many Quake engine games that were popular in the late '90s early '00s.) Because as technology advanced, so do expectations for video games. Graphics got better, now we need actors to do motion capture, then Hollywood stars like Martin Sheen for Mass Effect, Kevin Spacey for Call of Duty, Norman Reedus and Mads Mikelsen for Death Stranding, etc. Or VR or the Metavverse. It became an arms race. It was those costs that lead to all these special limited editions, microtransactions, etc., just trying to make up that gap. I know you mentioned 6 months of release as y'know off-handedly, but about a decade ago when I was still in big tech it was 3 months; that was the shelf-life of a game. Now, it's closer to 1 month. Too many stories to tell, so I'll cut myself off here with a hopeful note: Baldur's Gate 3 and Expedition 33 are reviving that indie breakout era. If you're suggesting GW is Keeping Up With the Joneses with video games, it might not be video games, but Magic: the Gathering. So for a long time, the toy conglomerate Hasbro that owns Wizards of the Coast that make M:tG kept their exact sales figure a secret. There was this female UBS analyst who was considered the leading expert on that, and she estimated M:tG annual revenue was around $1 billion (and Dungeons & Dragons at $100 million). A few months ago, at the tail end of basically an appendix in Hasbro's quarterly report, they off-handedly dropped this: GW's record revenue is around £660 million, which is $900 million, it's now a FTSE 100 i.e. top tier UK company. M:tG is almost double that, $1.72 BILLion, even more than expected...and notice this is "supplementary" info they added as a footnote. Consider a Friendly Local Gaming Store. You don't have to look outside for what GW is constantly compared to, like the Game Stop next door. You just take your 40k purchase to the till, where it's a glass counter with all M:tG blisters, their rare cards in little cases, all the other Collectible Card Games. The phone call is coming from within the house. However, if you are a dad trying to get your kids off of screens, the video game thing is a real issue. But M:tG, whew, next level.

You guys just made me realise my issue with 11th. I can't speak for others, especially since YOU put it better than I could: TELL ME IF you feel the same please: 11th ed is LIKE a Mobile Game/Live Service Video Game version of 40k. If you ever played a mobile game/live service video game (including PC, etc.), it's like a constant stream of little tasks. Here's your daily x number of tasks for rewards, there's a multiplayer event happening RIGHT NOW do you want to fast travel there Y/N? There's no rhyme or reason to these chores, it's just do them to check a box. Then other players exist only as part of those tasks (destroy A tank). There is as much narrative/lore/story as there is for a theme park ride. Now I honestly see a real mistake by GW. It's the same Wizards of the Coast had with 4th ed Dungeons & Dragons. "Modern" is exactly it, WotC tried to "modernise" D&D by incorporating Massively Multiplayer Online Game elements OF THAT time. Certain classes were "Strikers" in the same way a MMO would say "DPS" (Damage Per Second). EVERYthing was standardised as an "Encounter", a roleplay conversation has the same mechanics as combat. D&D 4th ed was the past. 40k 11th ed is NOT that, but it's today's modern take of the same issues, now with mobile/live service games. (As I typed that out, Dawn of War 3 did something like that but way worse, becoming a MOBA. 11th ed's not that bad.) +++++ A note, we actually had Maelstrom of War in 6th ed. 11th ed's objective cards I noticed were better. So it's not a totally new issue. Sorry I didn't compile a list, but I agree with yours. I hadn't thought much about it until now, but I reckon it's the overall framework.

The winningest player in my local Warhammer Store uses Chessex dice. He doesn't want anyone to take away from his victories by saying he uses janky dice.

I rolled 16 dice x 50 times, in fact it was before the forum upgrade so we had to upload our images and link to them, so thankfully I got a copy here: To contrast, I watched old Forgeworld (so not technically "Citadel" GW if you know what I mean) Blood Angel dice. They literally rolled 1s half the time, which was the Blood Angel insignia. My friends were playing, I was hanging out and watching and drinking, it got to a point where I could call out how many 1s he was going to roll. Srsly, it's worth going through this exercise. Play a podcast in the background and try rolling your fancy dice, just record numbers, it's quite fast. The only "clever trick" I used was I had that column adding up all the 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s to make sure it was how many dice I had, just to check I didn't "miss" any in tallying. The other thing to watch out for is you MAY have a strange run where certain numbers come up, don't let that sway you. Note early on, I rolled a ridiculous number of 1s. I thought it confirmed the belief that GW's generic/free white dice rolled more 1s. But when I tallied everything, I actually rolled more 6s. I had had observer bias

I do NOT buy them, but everyone else in my local Warhammer Store does, and I do NOT like them for 1 reason. In addition to what you said (waste of money, hard to read), my problem is what Indy Techwisp said, they definitely SKEW towards certain numbers. And it's not like they always roll 6s even though that's usually the side with the big image so it's the lightest side. They'll statistically roll more like 4s and 5s or something (or 1s and 2s). That's the 1 reason. Dice are supposed to be random number generators, and they're not random. They are bad tools. It's not just the big symbol on the 6 face or something. The swirls you see in them probably distort their weight distribution. INB4 the generic GW white dice roll more 1s. I've tested them. They roll slightly more 1s AND 6s in equal amounts, like they're fair Instead, I painted my tape measure red and put a Mechanicus Cog on it. That does not affect its measuring abilities, remains a good tool. EDIT - hang on, I'm being hypocritical again, I bought the rubbery Squig Dice. Trust me when I say there's no skew really, they bounce so much and are so random that they actually DO work as good random number generators, but it's such a hassle chasing after your dice bouncing off the table, they're also bad tools.

Brother Phandaal, Brother Kenzaburo, we may not actually be disagreeing. If price goes up by 5%, KPIs/sales targets/quotas/etc. go up AT LEAST THAT SAME 5% for us (if not more). So any upside from a price increase becomes a wash, and now we just gave the customer something to push back on. 1 time our gaming division had some collector's edition at a higher price counted for their target, that was sweet. HOWEVER, a salesperson or marketing professional DOES want to move to higher priced, more premium products. I got into a role out of MBA and there was like this 20-year veteran with the same title, but his product was a suite of software all enterprises must own, AND is always adding more pieces. This guy never wants to move. Are you me? When we increase price, WE pay the price. More pushback, more work, deals take longer, deals broken. We had to disguise price hikes by soft-bundling stuff so it's much higher value, using marketing dollars, it was so cheesy. THAT SAID, there's this detail, 3 letters... B2B. Business-to-business, they don't buy units of a thing, they usually have a contract/agreement/solution. Like selling software to a company with 12,000 information workers, we sell "volume licensing" for like...10,000 PCs. Turn a blind eye, "Huge employee churn here, lots of lay offs," actually another way to hid price increases. Both Brother Kenzaburo and I are saying the EXACT same as you, customers asking is it still worth it, can we say no, what to negotiate...everything we do is to get people to say "yes", "yes", "yes" AND "yes." All it takes is 1 "no" to sink a deal. A price change absolutely can reset the process back to step 0: do we even want this. What you just said is exactly what we meant, put more eloquent-like. None of us were talking moral outrage, just the cold calculus of capitalism. And once again I realised Warhammer has taught me all the life lessons I ever needed: Selling is HOLDING an Objective In Warhammer, it's easier to capture an Objective than hold it. Harlequins, Purestrain Genestealers, etc. rush in, can wipe off whatever Space Marine Scouts you had Infiltrated on it during Deployment. New players only think about TAKING the Objective, not getting shot up after, they don't think that far. Thus it is with selling. Taking the Objective is what people think of, a smooth talker, marketing hype. HOLDING is more sophisticated. A price hike is like your opponent just conjuring up a free Daemon unit (7th ed Formation did this) to attack the Objective you just took. This is a better analogy than how I was taught by an older sales guy, which was "it's easy to get a fish to bite, it's harder to reel it in." BACK ON TOPIC: Pile of Shame I actually have something important to mention, I think. I was looking at my pile of shame. It's so ancient, some still have that circular sticker with letters on them. For those that weren't around, GW stores didn't put actual price stickers on the minis because prices went up so frequently. You had to look up the letter on a chart on the wall, THAT's the price. Minis were still metal then. That's like me having a conversation with my young self, you know you self-reflect, see if the child you were would be proud of he would become? He was like, "Whatchu complaining for, it's ALWAYS been like this, stupid!" Maybe the circular letter stickers kinda make sense now...oh man that's a horrible thought. HEY you guys were mentioning GW prices NEW products higher so they don't have to increase prices on old ones? In 2016: So back in 2016...BEFORE Primaris...new releases were approximately 30% of sales. Now let's look at more recently, in 2020: GW was explaining Covid's impact on their (core) gross margin, but you see how new releases are closer to 40%? There's more and more new releases that they could "hide" a higher price on. If we assume that trend has continued...I bet it has, there's actually more new stuff that could be priced higher SO THAT they didn't have to do a pricing update on existing products. So it's like they even maxed out on new products to price higher. YEAH, EXACTLY, Brother Valkyrion, thank you, that! I still feel GW has a built-in buffer, but they also never talked about energy prices, that's why I'm still putting them ON WATCH! But the whole thing is a big pile of shame. Not just GW, but the fact I can see there will be all sorts of added costs, for everyone.

Brother Ulfast, you can make this. Fulgrim in a Necron list, Necrons have Blackstone and anti-Warp tech. Fulgrim could be represented by a Transcendant C'tan. If there's 1 dude who can finagle his way with something like Necrons, it's actually him; he had grown up on Chemos, a corporate world, worked his way up to be their equivalent of the global CEO, he can maneuver between Necron High Lords to get an actual army to fight Chaos.

Thanks for this thread. I've been thinking about this, too. 1st principles, back to fundamentals. The Correct Answer From GW's Perspective "Warhammer is drawn from many sources, not just one," was the original 40k writer Rick Priestley's official line. Remember the original Chapters and Legions were more like samples when it started; we were SUPPOSED to all make our own custom Chapters, Ultramarines, both Angels, Space Wolves had existed but were really only "pushed" later on. If anything, the 1st Chapter to get special rules afaik was the Mentors (Legion they were called back then). But the past doesn't matter as much as GW's ongoing mission, to sell more minis, right? "You imagine Space Marines THIS way? Great, buy 1 army of Marines and paint them thus. Oh, you have a different idea of Marines being THAT way. Buy ANOTHER Marine army and paint them THAT way." Then everyone crossed the Primaris Rubicon and had to buy again. Everyone's been agreeable, but in case it comes up, GW's official line would be ALL views are legit, if only for that reason. We Veterans of the Long War A modernised version of old 1st ed art from Rogue Trader you know. RENEGADE Marines, not Chaos or Hereticus, right? When you asked "what are Space Marines to ME", I kinda go back to this image, BUT that is JUST us Veterans of the Long War. It was really Bolter & Chainsword that brought me to the Horus Heresy game. I had read the early HH novels, knew the Age of Darkness existed, but saw it as a fancier version of 40k with resin miniatures. It was after 7th ed introduced those big Formation rules that forced you to bulk buy & paint kinda pre-made armies that pushed me to 30k. It was when I was reading the early Black Books for the 1st time with that all that info crystalised into an epiphany... The Great Crusaders After the HH novels, particularly Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, I think we all agree Astartes were designed for the Great Crusade. What I said before, rules-wise, 30k Marines were closer to 40k Chaos Space Marines than 40k Loyalists (aside from Black Templars). They ran 20-man instead of 10-man Squads that can't split into 5-man units or carry a Special Weapon and/or Heavy Weapon. At THAT time, they were Legionnaires, whereas after the Codex, they DID become Special Forces. Then consider how good Marines are at killing humans like Guardsmen. The Bolters pierce most Guardmen armour, then their higher Strength and Weapon Skill cut them down in melee. It's as if they were optimised to kill humans rather than xenos almost! It's one thing to know, another to feel, and I felt that's EXACTLY what their initial design was for. In 40k, Space Marines ARE humanity's defenders. In 30k, Legionnaires HAD been humanity's conquerors. I'm so dumb. For like 5, 6 editions, I thought the Chaos Legions fighting the Imperium were like the opposite of Space Marines, even though the original writers kept reminding us they were the actual "titans of old" that had fought alongside the Emperor. But Marines conquering human worlds...that's what they were meant for BY DESIGN. Chaos Space Marines are a corruption by Chaos, but they're also the CLASSIC Space Marines, the original, the vintage. Brother Adeptekon is 100% right in invoking Guilliman. He wrote the Codex Astartes which broke up Legionnaires into Special Forces, and he DID muster not 10k, but tens of thousands of Marines for the Indomitus Crusade, the Unnumbered Sons numbered 20k+ at the end. Even the guy who broke up the Legions fell back...to commanding a Legion. (It happened in Dark Imperium and it was hilarious, he even had a politically prepared answer when someone asked.) In the HH novels, the "last" Loyalist Luna Wolf doubted this great Imperial project to save humanity by conquering humanity. He actually turned to the man who would later found the Inquisition for, if not spiritual, then philosophical advice, whom I'll paraphrase, "If you find a panicked drowning child, would you save him as he fought you out of fear?" And in the case of the Great Crusaders, the Marine equivalent of chivalry served their purpose. They were bringing human worlds into the Imperium, not destroy them. A sense of honour, but also the livery and pageantry were meant to impress the Imperial Truth upon them to bring them into Imperial Compliance. If not...the XIIth/World Eaters were there. If you look back at that image above, they've got weird individualised livery. I might honestly paint up Marines like their Bretonnian Knights of the Old World, each one an individual, and use Black Templar rules. Man, actually, this is a really good idea, maybe use a combination of Dark Angel and Black Templar models. (You know what'd be hilarious? If I used epic-scale Marines from Legions Imperialis and glued them on their helmets.) Really good conversation. I didn't really think this through until you guys raised all those points. I now know my take.

Excellent, depict life between battles. From what you described, it's a long way off, but it's good back-of-mind processing. I only mentioned Call of Cthulhu because there's a lot of parallels with Dark Heresy specifically. Cthulhu calls player characters "investigators" (rather than "adventurers"), while Dark Heresy calls them "Inquisition acolytes" and so on. Sure, they both have a percentage system, but more importantly, notice how many investigative skills there are in Dark Heresy. You see what I'm getting at. In what you described, it looks like it's about all the reconnaissance work before and/or the recovery work after a 40k battle.

"(Normal) 40k is about how people die. Dark Heresy is about how they live." - my GM I played 2 near year-long campaigns of Dark Heresy mixed with Only War, and 1 of Wrath & Glory, but the above comment from my GM (also a frequent local 40k tourney winner at the time), which he casually dropped during dinner 1 time, is actually the epitome of Dark Heresy specifically. Dark Heresy is best at the brutal slice of life in 40k. What that means is combat-lite, exploration-heavy, not just roleplay but LIFE-heavy, is what we liked in Dark Heresy. Learnings from 1st Dark Heresy campaign I was literally that block of adamantium, and even as a Techpriest, combat was dull, I can't imagine how boring it was for the others. MAKING an uber character was fun...but again it was about the exploration-heavy, life-heavy stuff. His background was Hive Ganger, so we were figuring out how he managed to leave to be part of the campaign. Just exploring the lore with the GM, we 2 Long War Veterans concluded: the only ways out of a Hive was as a Guardsmen, a can of corpsestarch, or getting noticed by the Mechanicus. A Hive, their whole world, IS a mechanical construct, so my character juryrigged something that caught the eye of the Cog. The combat rules and upgrades are definitely there. Our party included a former member of the British Territorial Army (he'd simplify it as "Dad's Army"...which then confused our Canadian and American players). He was great, he was trained in tactics and stuff, and even then he excelled at what he imagined as the day-to-day of a Guardsmen. Setting up camp, deciding what items to carry as every ounce of weight was a cost, it was the NON-combat stuff outside of battle that was most interesting. So I had a very combat-oriented character, played with a former soldier, we both found the exploration and life in 40k more interesting. Enjoying the 2nd Dark Heresy campaign After that 1st campaign, I brought my "power level" down to be more in-line with others. It's as the others said, felt too unfair. I played a young Priest, not Techpriest. The GM had this plan she would eventually join the Adeptus Sororitas. I wanted to play female Nacho Libre instead. She had a faraway shrine that served as an orphanage filled with los ninos, and they had exactly ONE homesteader rifle with ONE clip of ammo, issued by the Ecclesiarchy centuries ago. We decided that would be treated as sacred, like relics, so each bullet is on the altar like holy items, never to be fired. Thus this shrine invented a whole martial arts around a gunstock warclub. The rest of the party continued playing their characters, but just playing life out in the Ecclesiarchy I think fascinated everyone. Gone was all the combat advantages I had as a Techpriest, and it was more fun because it's not about combat, it's about life in 40k. The absolute highlight of the campaign was the GM wanted to RP a flashback that was a late-game plot twist, that the shrine/orphanage was actually a front for Radical Inquisitors. The orphans were a secret genetics project even my character didn't know about. My character would've been raised in this orphanage herself, and without working out what we were going to say, we just played out the flashback as a quick back & forth. My character was a child, sweeping the cloister, when the old Priest that raised her sat her down: "One day, someone bearing a symbol that looks like...this," he drew the =][= symbol in the dirt with the broom handle, "will come. You must do everything he says. Do you understand?" "No, Padre." Intelligence was my character's dumpstat. Everyone laughed. "But will you obey?" My GM knew me better than I did myself, thus was unflapped. "Yes, Padre." "PERFECT." Everyone laughed even harder. The Imperium values obedience, not intelligence, in fact, blind obedience from a lack of intelligence was best. If I were to run a Dark Heresy campaign I'd use Dark Heresy rules. I'd encourage players to build investigation heavy characters, there would be combat, but lightly. Then I'd secretly be using a really good Call of Cthulhu that the players never came across and repurpose it for 40k. Like instead of a Cthulhu cult, it'd be Nurgle or Tzeentch or whatever. It'd be a Lovecraftian horror version of 40k, without having Insanity points per se. The goal is neither 40k nor Cthulhu, but that creepy gloominess in grimdark. I'm guessing your players won't be as read up on 40k background as you. You need not explain, just explore, with them, like that conversation with Padre. People get their information from LoreTube, but those focus on superhero moments between Primarchs. Quiet moments in 40k like that are precious if only because they're so rare.

As our own B&C Frater, ADB, wrote a novel about a Chapter serf in Spear of the Emperor, just wanted to add to the vehicles point. In that book, 3 Chapter serfs operated in battle from inside a Damocles Rhino (HQ). They served the Mentors. This is non-spoiler, just sharing how they operated. They would use the Damocles Rhino's sensor arrays and scanners and wotnot to scope out the field and feed info on targets to the Marine they were attached to. To lighten the load (and wallet) on conversions a bit, this Marine vehicles route might be a fun and (depending on Detachment rules) a strategically-themed army. Like I'd listen to our Frateri and go with Imperial Agents to represent the serfs on foot, but then with Marine vehicles...maybe with the equivalent of Learner's Permits. So imagine you got your Arbites models, a few squads for Objectives, then all the other serfs...INSIDE vehicles. Easier to get to tabletop.

Thanks for clearing this up. My YouTube algorithm blew up with this from multiple content creators. I think there's some audience capture/playing to the crowd where they want to suggest the return of Dorn. You guys provided a reality check, after reading your points, that is super-necessary. Way to set the record straight. Because I remember from previous short stories and books, Trazyn is an otaku; he adores all these cultures he collects, even speaks languages like Low Gothic, but he doesn't quite understand them. He didn't know a plasma gun could overheat. He thought he could fast-talk some Sororitas in his collection by pretending to be a Servitor. Nuances like Rogal Dorn's nickname being the Praetorian amongst his Brothers WOULD be EXACTLY the type of thing to slip by Trazyn. NOW the flip-side. I do believe GW is starting to TRY to play to the crowd. The hype created might drive GW to manifest Dorn's return canon like this.

I think that's actually the right word. I almost called tariffs "illegal, immoral and fattening".

So that was the Half-Year, GW was reacting to the US tariffs, which were struck down by their supreme court. By the Full-Year: You're right in that it went even beyond what they normally to, to 71.1%. GW is in the process of reclaiming tariffs, but imho DO believe they'll be re-instated, as do I because it's to prevent "transshipping" or countries like China getting around tariffs meant for them by going through the UK, for example. In the past, GW has gone even further up than that, but it's a blip, like they'll just let it settle a little below 70%. I've seen that too, like people saying how dare a certain company raise its prices when everything else in the world are getting more expensive. It's like they forget such a company operates in the same world we all live in, so its costs are going up along with ours. It's as if products are made in the Impossible City in the Webway that's in a different dimension. It's VERY possible GW already sees increases in, say, carriage i.e. transport costs because of fuel prices, so THAT's what I'd scrutinise next report. And to your point, I've always wondered why energy costs for manufacturing isn't listed here. Materials, like plastic, have. It's an odd duck. There's also an exec in charge of exactly this chart now, too. That position was added a year ago, I think. No sales or even marketing exec wants prices to increase. It's not just bad press or upsetting customers, it's that it's a deal breaker, you already expect a sales, you change anything, a customer can pull out. We hate it when some guy in finance is strategising by spreadsheet and screws up our deal. And I think it's this new position here. Man, whoever that exec is in charge of "core gross margin", he's got some juicy kompromat on other GW execs, Brother.