I want to point out that my beautiful thread got filled up with awful animes while I was on vacation and I'm not happy about it.New end times baseless speculation: the admech finds a new, better fuel source for the astronomicon: animes and the 'people' who post them.

Umm, if this is about my post on Lolicron and Lofn, then I'm sorry. But just so you know, they really do feature in my big-eyes anime version of The End Times. XP

I rather take Robin's point of view about conversations. When I think of all the threads I've started, the ones that stayed on topic usually died in about twenty posts or less, and that was that. Then they fell into the endless abyss of pages beyond the first page and became lost. True, I'd get annoyed when my precious topics got derailed, but if it's a choice between thread death and off-topic tangents, I'd rather keep talking with all of my fellow 40fanatics.

I'd rather let a finished post die and keep talking with my fellow 40fanatics on new threads about relevant and interesting topics than have an otherwise interesting thread derailed by people's BS. I don't know how many interesting topics I've come in late on only to find it's been derailed by someone's self-absorbed attempt to make a meaningless point. I'm sure there are forums for all the other things people like to talk about.

Thanks to Nimsim's foresight that shouldn't be as much of a problem anymore (fingers crossed).

Evidence? Im genuinely intersted in it lynata.

In regards to the Roman/British Empire, or the social issues stuff?

Quick off-topic question for Lynata ...

A short while back there was a link in your signature to some kind of countdown. Now it's gone, and I'm curious what it was counting down to.

Ok.

We need to burn more Heretics.

*Grabs Combi-Flamer*

Now, WHO IS WITH ME!?

Ok.

Gah! I had seen the post, was dead-set on answering it, then it slipped my mind as I scrolled further down to check for more stuff to reply to. My apologies, my mind is a mess sometimes.

But it wasn't anything special, just the countdown to the launch of Elite Dangerous which I as a fan of the 1980s original have been eagerly awaiting. Someone made that cool little countdown thingie and I thought I'd participate in hyping it a little, but also to express my own anticipation/eagerness.

On a sidenote, its version of hyperspace is called witchspace , and as your ship is hurled towards some distant sun you hear something that is best described as whispers ... so it's not entirely unsuitable for a 40k site either.

Here's a video if you want to check out an entire jump sequence.

Ok.

Gah! I had seen the post, was dead-set on answering it, then it slipped my mind as I scrolled further down to check for more stuff to reply to. My apologies, my mind is a mess sometimes.

No worries. I figured that was the case.

Anyway, that is a very cool-looking game. If only I had the time.

Tough crowd.

Sigh, gotta say Nimsim, I'm starting to understand how you feel. One of my threads has turned into a borderline flame war filled with essays on the viability of the imperial government in the real world. Pages of ridiculously long paragraphs that I don't even want to bother reading.

I'm okay with off-topic subjects, when they're friendly. But these arguments are slowly turning into acid. It's such a turn-off.

Sigh, gotta say Nimsim, I'm starting to understand how you feel. One of my threads has turned into a borderline flame war filled with essays on the viability of the imperial government in the real world. Pages of ridiculously long paragraphs that I don't even want to bother reading.

I'm okay with off-topic subjects, when they're friendly. But these arguments are slowly turning into acid. It's such a turn-off.

I don't think its wether or not the subject is on or off topic, its the way people respond to it.

But you are correct: we gotta keep it friendly.

Concerning said thread: i think we all know who's to blame here...

And I'm usually not a fan of texwalls at the best of times.

Well, here's to hoping it clears up.

So seriously, I'm the only one here who knows of the 1960s show COMBAT! (the ! is always in the title). The Black&White (colour last season) WW2 drama that can (and should!) serve as any basis for a guardsmen player or any Only War Squad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JDfHxzARU4

Hills are for Heroes; surely the best episode of the serie (2 parter too!) bit of an anti-war feel to it, but still good- and directed by Vic Morrow, AKA Sgt. Saunders!

You can find pretty must all of the series on youtube.

you're welcome.

Sigh, gotta say Nimsim, I'm starting to understand how you feel. One of my threads has turned into a borderline flame war filled with essays on the viability of the imperial government in the real world. Pages of ridiculously long paragraphs that I don't even want to bother reading.

I'm okay with off-topic subjects, when they're friendly. But these arguments are slowly turning into acid. It's such a turn-off.

Did you add a link to this thread and suggest they continue it over here? That's basically the idea of this and hopefully will allow your thread to get back on topic or at least die in peace.

I think I'm done with 40k RPG's for a loooong time. Fatigue has set in with their constant rehash of books, editions, and other stuff. It takes so long to get a new book for each setting and they all add relatively the same things with so little in the way of new content or interesting stuff. I can barely raise more than some minor apathy for what the 40k line has become. It all feels like their B and C level of work. Even the books physical construction is less and less sound.

I'll come back in 5+ years and see if anything has changed. As of this moment I'm packing up my 40k rpg collection and sticking it into long term storage barring the core books.

What was once the glory of RPG's everywhere has become as burdened, bloated, and inept as the administratum

can be.

With the 5th Edition, pathfinder, Star Wars, and the cypher system all on the up 40k is hitting a big slump. I guess nothing lasts forever .

It's the way of all rpg's that last a while. (D&D, Owod) Hell, White wolf even flatout destroyed the world of darkness in the meta plot and then started over fresh a few years later.

My guess is that even the designers in the end go:

Designer: "No. Just No. No more. I'm done! Just let it die. If I have to write one more line about the imperium then I'll scream! It's an RPG! Why can't they make up their own content? They gotta use their imaginations right? Bloody geeks i'll sh-"

Manager: "Bob, do you need to take a break?"

Designer: "YES."

I think I'm done with 40k RPG's for a loooong time. Fatigue has set in with their constant rehash of books, editions, and other stuff. It takes so long to get a new book for each setting and they all add relatively the same things with so little in the way of new content or interesting stuff.

Truth be told, I find it a lot more fun to not rely on official supplements and instead get creative on your own. Aside from creating content based on your personal preferences, you are also independent of rehashes, codex creep and other forms of artificial bloating. In my experience, the best books of any RPG are the core rulebook and the player's guide - after that, games very often tend to develop the very same symptoms you described.

A lot of people seem to believe that a large number of supplements is what keeps an RPG alive, as if it was some sort of rejuvenation treatment. I disagree. To me, the more material* is churned out, the more it starts to feel like a facelift - and one of the creepy "uncanny valley" sorts, where a woman in her fifties thinks that tightening her skin will make her look young again, and then ends up looking like some sort of porcelain zombie.

The choice rests with you! 40k is such an extensive setting that there is sooo much stuff you could build into your campaigns, or build entire campaigns from. All you need to do is "translate" it into your preferred ruleset. Hell, you can even go and re-write the ruleset as you think it ought to look like. This is the one big advantage of pen&paper RPGs over videogames.

... now excuse me whilst I go back to working on a little something Ramellan and I have been fiddling with ...

*: excepting setting books or premade adventures, I suppose, as these are always easy to "plug in" without adding anything you'd have to keep track of, or messing with something that already existed

I'm with Lynata. Believing that in order for an RPG to be vibrant, the publisher must crank out new material every six months is simply buying into the publisher's Kool-aid! Supplements don't keep a game alive, you do! Why do you think there are people still playing 2nd ed. D&D? Because they are still enjoying it!

Warhammer 40k RPG. Spend hours upon hours of work to plan a session and more for an over arching plot. Needs some note keeping post session. Need to practically write and homebrew a dictionary worth of content. I should get paid for the amount of work I need to do to keep a 40k game running.

Numenera at most plan for an hour, though I've run entire sessions never planning anything at all. Post session maybe 10-20 minutes of note keeping to see where the semi-freeform story takes us and so I can remember. Numenera I can make a new enemy in about 20 seconds tops. Maybe a few minutes for a more memorable one.

5th Edition follows a similar quick flow the 40k RPG's can never hope to ever match. I want to play the game, tell a story, and not have combat bog down into affairs that can sometimes take longer than an entire table top match. I can play my Tau army for that kind of in depth fighting. It's just so redundant of an rpg now that I have access to my own tabletop army. Hell I could run a lot of games easier in the cypher system (Numenera).

The fights take forever. I could play the more in depth and balanced table top for fights if I want them. So if I want to run a story rpg it's a big hindrance and terrible at that. I was far more into it when it was the only way for me to get 40k.

I was far more into it when it was the only way for me to get 40k.

I think you've stated the real problem right there! The 40k RPG is IMO no better or worse than any other RPG I've played in terms of preparation. Like others, there are tools out there that make it easier to prep. I have spent month's developing campaigns for D&D (Various editions). The 40k RPG's are no different. It just depends on how detailed you want your story to be! You want to kick the door in, kill the Heretic and loot his gear? go for it! If I want a "Game of thrones" style D&D game with loads of court intrigues and overarching wars worthy of "Lord of the rings" I can do that too!

With the 5th Edition, pathfinder, Star Wars, and the cypher system all on the up 40k is hitting a big slump. I guess nothing lasts forever .

DH2nd has been out for nearly half a year and has only dropped to #14 on DriveThruRPG's best sellers. I don't know that I'd call that a 'slump'.

It sounds like you were hoping for something more 'narrativist', which seems to be the root of a lot of complaints which have been made against the system; so you're definitely not alone. That's just a fundamental problems with P&P RPG's: different people want different things out of them, so it's practically impossible to please everyone .

I was far more into it when it was the only way for me to get 40k.

I think you've stated the real problem right there! The 40k RPG is IMO no better or worse than any other RPG I've played in terms of preparation. Like others, there are tools out there that make it easier to prep. I have spent month's developing campaigns for D&D (Various editions). The 40k RPG's are no different. It just depends on how detailed you want your story to be! You want to kick the door in, kill the Heretic and loot his gear? go for it! If I want a "Game of thrones" style D&D game with loads of court intrigues and overarching wars worthy of "Lord of the rings" I can do that too!

Our GM once ran a short game of paranoia- without dice or pretty much anything (he was wearing pants!).

He goes" ok tell me what your characters do, if it sounds good it works, otherwise it doesn't or it doesn't work the way you intended."

Now Paranoia is probably the only RPG in wich you can pull that off.

I was far more into it when it was the only way for me to get 40k.

I think you've stated the real problem right there! The 40k RPG is IMO no better or worse than any other RPG I've played in terms of preparation. Like others, there are tools out there that make it easier to prep. I have spent month's developing campaigns for D&D (Various editions). The 40k RPG's are no different. It just depends on how detailed you want your story to be! You want to kick the door in, kill the Heretic and loot his gear? go for it! If I want a "Game of thrones" style D&D game with loads of court intrigues and overarching wars worthy of "Lord of the rings" I can do that too!

You should play the FFG Star Wars system. It was a real eye-opener when I realized I could get away with doing zero prep. 40k is a real bear on GM side, but EotE? It's GMing on easy mode.

Yeah, there are lots of systems that allow you to do very low prep and still end up with a lot of intrigue or interesting things happening. Stuff like Apocalypse World/Dungeon World are set up to where the GM is given a set of "moves" or actions he can take that all end up being thematic and moving the story along, while the players also have access to actions that work within that theme. They also encourage players and GM to generate setting on the fly, but to then keep track of all of this as campaigns progress so that all of the prep work is done in the first few sessions and the GM just has to follow the hooks provided by his or her players.

Also, it's possible to do anything you want in any rpg, because in the end you're defaulting to your ability to improvise/whatever method of random number generation the system gives you. That doesn't mean that every system is good at doing anything, or at least that every system is equally good at everything. The strength of 40K games is their setting, which lends itself to action, politics, comedy, grimness, and other things. It's a fun setting to make up ridiculous metaplots and have players use extensive fluff knowledge (I assume; I've never been in a game like that), AND a fun setting to just make things up and introduce a few basic ideas to hang the game on (grimdarkness, space inquisition, funny aliens). The rules for this game are pretty much boilerplate early 2000s D&D 3.5 game design, with most of the design focus being on gearing up (guns, talents, and abilities) for combat.

It's interesting to me to see people touting D&D 5th or Numenera as drastically simpler or improved systems over this, though. I see them as basically just being further rehashes of 3rd edition D&D, at least as far as actual implementation goes. Like, they have some cool ideas for things, but in the end, they're still following the basic "here's your list of stats, your list of skills, your list of feats, and your overpowered magic users." A crunchy warhammer could be interesting. I know the Iron Heroes rpg for Warmachine basically just uses the same rules as the tabletop game; maybe 40k rpg could do something similar. The issue would still come up that a big part of the game is intended to be investigation and social interaction, and the rules fail to really do anything with that. Follow the crunch, and you'll see how a game is actually intended to be played. Everything outside of that is more to do with the players and GM.

As a quick example, take the All Outta Bubblegum rpg. http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2h7ezh/saving_all_outta_bubblegum/

You start with 8 pieces of bubblegum. Any time you do something that "kicks ass," you roll a d10 and try to roll over the amount of bubblegum you have. If you do something that isn't kicking ass, you try to roll under. If you fail a roll to kickass, you lose 1 bubblegum. If you run out of bubblegum, you become unable to do anything that isn't kicking ass.

The rules for this game are incredibly simple, but they right away tell you exact how you're expected to play the game. The game wants you to slowly run out of bubblegum by trying to do things the normal way while also coming up with ridiculous ways to accomplish normal tasks in a kickass way. This culminates in all of the players doing things like kung fu-ing their way through a post office, juggling their daily groceries as they collect them while riding a unicycle, etc. I know exactly what this game wants me to do.

Compare that to Dark Heresy, which is telling me to pore over a list of skills and talents, deciding which are important and then trying to minmax my way to having the best odds of success constantly, followed by carefully picking out weapons and armor and choosing from dozens of actions during tactical combat (or getting bored/fatigued and just choosing basic attack over and over). There's nothing in the rules that really encourage me to be rooting out conspiracies or engaging in over the top combat. All of that is basically left to the GM to do. The biggest meta-mechanic I can point out with Dark Heresy is that the terrible dice probability forces players to super plan out actions and cautiously take the biggest bonuses to rolls that they can, which sort of makes them play like a bunch of paranoid batmen. That usually seems to just irritate the GM into forcing them to make rolls they suck at, though.

So yeah, I guess I'm saying that the system of a game does matter a lot, and that it can add a lot to how a game is played.

So yeah, I guess I'm saying that the system of a game does matter a lot, and that it can add a lot to how a game is played.

First off, nice, well-thought out post Nimsim. You make alot of great points on the subject.

I disagree with this above statement a little bit though. The way I see it, it more boils down to the players themselves, and whether or not they see mechanically heavy systems to be constraining or focusing elements to the game. Players who enjoy a system that's written in a way to cover most actions generally see a 'crunch-heavy' system as a framework that shapes their possibilities. Others see it as constraining, disallowing their concepts or actions on a mechanical level that doesn't match their expectations.

I think it's this element that ultimately makes it or breaks for everyone. I personally have to be Gamgee and CPS' polar opposite. I see simple games to be a tremendous waste of time and ultimately unfilling. For me, If I want simple, I'd play a board game, CCG, or something in a similar vein. I thoroughly enjoy prepatory work for my sessions, and get enjoyment when my players find ways to exploit my plotholes in ways I cannot foresee, forcing me to improvise on the spot after a good laugh or a bewildered moment. It's all part of the allure for me.

Ultimately, YMMV, and I hope everyone finds something they really enjoy.

I was far more into it when it was the only way for me to get 40k.

I think you've stated the real problem right there! The 40k RPG is IMO no better or worse than any other RPG I've played in terms of preparation. Like others, there are tools out there that make it easier to prep. I have spent month's developing campaigns for D&D (Various editions). The 40k RPG's are no different. It just depends on how detailed you want your story to be! You want to kick the door in, kill the Heretic and loot his gear? go for it! If I want a "Game of thrones" style D&D game with loads of court intrigues and overarching wars worthy of "Lord of the rings" I can do that too!

You should play the FFG Star Wars system. It was a real eye-opener when I realized I could get away with doing zero prep. 40k is a real bear on GM side, but EotE? It's GMing on easy mode.

So why exactly does it take more for a 40k game to prep than, for example Star Wars EotE?

I'd say it has more to do with the seriousness of the setting, the lore, etc? Not so much the system.

It's interesting to me to see people touting D&D 5th or Numenera as drastically simpler or improved systems over this, though. I see them as basically just being further rehashes of 3rd edition D&D, at least as far as actual implementation goes. Like, they have some cool ideas for things, but in the end, they're still following the basic "here's your list of stats, your list of skills, your list of feats, and your overpowered magic users."

For "drastically simpler", I'd recommend that people take a look at Green Ronin's AGE ruleset, as used in their Dragon Age RPG. It still follows the aforementioned basics, but does so in a way that aims to simplify whilst still allowing the potential for a high amount of custom detail. In a way, it's sort of "back to the roots" of the very first RPGs, before subsequent editions and rulesets began to clutter everything up with 20-page-lists of combat actions and talents, which is generally touted as progress, but which I've personally come to regard as cumbersome during the previous couple years as it just got worse and worse - as if games went right past the sweet spot and just kept on going into the opposite extreme.

All Outta Bubblegum sounds hilarious - I applaud the fact that someone actually went and crafted a game around a cliché 80s action movie line. That being said, as is pointed out in the reddit, its rules lend themselves only to an evening of crazy drunken fun rather than elaborate settings or conspiracies. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I would say Dark Heresy should be notably easier to rig for either the conspiracies or over the top combat (see the Deathwatch "One on One vs a Bloodthirster" thread), as opposed to All Outta Bubblegum for anything but mad shenanigans.

I'd say it has to do with the players and their idea of the setting. Both 40k as well as Star Wars can be played serious or not, and the background is about equally expansive - so how much time you need for preparation is likely a result out of what you actually want to do there. You could set up an Underhive Zombie Apocalypse game in 40k or a Star Wars military mission within 20 minutes, just like you could spend hours of prep for an extensive campaign about uncovering a conspiracy amongst supposed allies in both.

Few rulesets actually support political wrangling and conspiracies with anything but the most basic mechanics, though. If you want that, the best I could think of would be the Song of Ice and Fire RPG.

So why exactly does it take more for a 40k game to prep than, for example Star Wars EotE?

I'd say it has more to do with the seriousness of the setting, the lore, etc? Not so much the system.

In GMing a 40k game, the NPC stat blocks aren't really complete. You have to either memorize what all of the talents do, or look them when you need them (and f that). Designing a balanced encounter is 100% an art that if you aren't an expert in the system will result in easy, boring encouters or party wipes. You also have to do a lot of figuring to do a fair roll, but the rolls themselves aren't that interesting, being 90% of the time binary pass/fail. Oh, and combat? Rolling 5 separate rolls for one attack is inexcusable in 2015 (hit, dodge/parry, damage, forcefields, burning/not-burning, etc.). It's not an easy system to run.

On the other hand, simply rolling the dice in EotE yields interesting results. Because of the narrative dice system, interesting things just happen, evolving the story as you play. Because of the way the dicepools work, you can look at an NPC profile and know how challenging they will be for you party and you don't need to cross-reference anything in the rulebook. And probably my favorite feature of the system is that an attacker's stats and bonuses and the targets skills and defenses are all taken into account in one roll. One roll that, guaranteed, something interesting will come out of.

That said, EotE, run that way, is almost 100% improv. If you're not great at that, or if you actually really enjoy putting hours of prep work into a session and poring over the rules, maybe that's not a selling point for you. I personally found the homework tedious.

And the lore has nothing to do with any of this. Nobody in my group is really that into SW (myself included), but we all enjoyed the system far more than the 40k system.