My friend bought the Only War Beta and we ran a session with it and I must say I am impressed with the system. However, during the game I was reminded of an idea I had way back for Deathwatch. That idea was full weapon customization. Now at the time we agreed space marines were highly unlikely to just begin swapping out parts for their bolters, but for guardsman I could see this happening.

When I say full weapon customization I mean breaking the weapon down completely and offering upgrades for every slot. This would mean full customization on scopes, barrels, gas system/charge type, grips/under-barrel weapons, side rail upgrades such as heartbeat sensors, aiming lasers, and lenses, different stock types, trigger controls, magazines, grips, and pretty much any other part that could be thought up. Upgrades wouldn't really be anything drastic, perhaps a different barrel type might increase damage by +1, and a grip provided a minor +2 to BS, but I like the idea of full customization to be there. So does this seem like something a guardsman would do? Would it even be possible for them to acquire all these aftermarket parts? In general, does the community see this as a valid idea? Thanks in advance.

As a side note I wanted to point out that I have seen the Weapon Upgrade page, where many of the mentioned upgrades are there. I wanted to focus more on what was not there and think about what could be added. I love variety in weapons.

I think the issue with this is that for the most part, a guardsmans gear is more valuable than his own life. The munitorum is not going to let every tom, **** and harry modify their trusty M36 Lasgun to their own needs for a number of reasons, some of which are:

• Standardised gear means supplies and replacements are very easy.
• Unsanctioned weapon modifications will deviate a squads performance from what is expected.
• A trooper might well bring a personal sidearm for backup, but their standard issue gear is a loan to them from the Emperor himself and it must be returned in the same state it was issued!

Now these issues will begin to be waived a bit as a unit gains veterancy, to the point where the unit will almost stop being supported by the munitorum and their standard issue gear, and be tolerated in their looting and modifying of gear. Even then however it is going to be a rare unit or even trooper that completely breaks down their weapon into every single component and modifies them that much.

It's a fine line to walk between modularity and standardisation, but with Only War being the focus on squad level military action, i feel it's better not to delve too deeply into weapon modifications. These aren't glory hogging Rogue Traders or elite Inquisitorial Acolytes after all!

I have to agree there.

Not to mention the Techpriest is going to have a few new servitors if they're not too careful.

I would wait until the book is completely out before thinking up how in-depth it will be for the customization.

Weapon customisation is a big (and cool!) part of, well, video games, but Real Actual Soldiers do it to, what with sights, grenade launchers, foregrips etc. Look, we all know how this works. I personally loved Army of Two purely because of the option to 'Pimp' you weapons - have

So it would be nice if we could somehow make this work in 40k. Because there is really no excuse for fantasy soldiers being less cool than real soldiers.

Maybe so long as the weapons are assembled from approved parts in approved rituals it is okay. Maybe the configurations assembled are determined by examining the entrails of a grox slaughtered on a particular day. Or something.

One word: RAILS.

Too useful now, too useful for even a fanciful future to ignore.

Never_ending said:

I would agree with this. It could be the case that FFG decides to introduce a system similar to the one you propose, if not, once you have the full book you can make a more balanced set of house rules for it.

As for the fluff, if you're on the front line for months on end (maybe even years. I know that's unlikely for a guardsman but still.) your surival is going to be slightly more important than the tech adept breathing down your neck (or mechanically wheezing). Plus if your commisar happens to take a slug to the head, well, he isn't going to mind a little bit of a deviation from the standard field kit

i see this varying greatly from unit to unit. if you have a new unit of hive scum they will have a standard kit. if you have a unit like the first born, rich families that sent custom equipment and uncles and aunts that hand down weapons made thousands of years ago then you might see a lot of customization.

the other side of that would be a penal/feral/fudeal world regiment. many of these bring their own weapons or are given junk weapons or what they can scavenge.

the local arbiters needed room so they cleaned out the evidence lockers full of confiscated drugs and weapons. they donate them to outfiting a new penal legion. everything from gang boss personal bolters to pickpocket boot knives. none of it is standard, but who cares they are fodder.

the feral worlders from a desert planet ride giant lizards using bone bows, while another feral world regiment from a frozen planet use stone headed clubs and spears.

a fudeal regiment of knights from a Agri type world rides armored triceratop type creatures and carry lances made out of local super strong and sharp stone, while another that was settled on a desert planet resemble 10th century arabic calvery.

your standard type regiments, being outfited by the imperium or admec won't have much variation. others that are either primative, cannon fodder, high born, one backed by a powerful entity (a rogue trader or the church for example), a generational unit, one that is a specilist unit, or one that raised itself (drususian missionaries flocking to a battle front with whatever weapons they can lay hands on). anything where standard doesn't quite fit.

+++++One word: RAILS.

Slightly more seriously, a well accessorised firearm can look dead good.

In closing, there have been great advances in the art and science of 'looking cool while shooting things' in recent years, and Warhammer 40k must move to keep up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h94E_N0o9uo

There already is a certain amount of customisation you can get done to your weapons, but as others have said, anything more than minor modifications (not including adding laser sights or a scope) are punishable in the Imperial Guard, because your weapon is not your own, it belongs to the Imperium, and since it will be passed on to someone else when you are inevitably killed, it needs to be kept as standard as possible so that everyone trained in using such a weapon can just pick it up and use it, without having to relearn just how this one weapon works.

Well in general, Guardsmen are the Generic minimum wage expendables of the Imperium so most will probably be slaughtered before they can make any real modifications. However, there is a possibility that a guardsman who survives a few skirmishes can trade credits or supplies to get a few minor upgrades, but he probably wouldn't go all out at once with the modifications. They most likely would purchase more upgrades bit by bit as time went on, since it often takes time for a lowly guardsmen to gather something to trade for the attachments. And usually the more sophisticated upgrades are reserved for more experienced and valued soldiers like the stormtroopers and officers. As well, modifications would probably vary in availability depending upon what kind of regiment you are in. A Valhallan would probably not really be able to find certain attachments that are best suited for jungle warfare like certain types of red dot sights or scopes etc.

Accessories have really only become a thing in, what, the last ten years?

I think if you were designing a setting now, customisation would be a big part of it. So I think we should work hard to ensure that it can be incorporated in to Warhammer 40k.

Warhammer 40k =/= the modern day

Try to think of the setting as being set in WW1, with the strict hierarchy, rules, and standardised equipment that were dominant during that war, and you're closer to what the Imperial Guard is in 40k.

MILLANDSON said:

I don't think that matters.

And when it is is up for debate. Catachans are still fighting the Vietnam war, and the Cadians are supposed to be more 'Modern'.

The Guard is pretty much any gun based army ever you think is cool, and it ought to go up to ultra-modern.

And it is supposed to be the far future as well as being the past. A mix of anachronistic elements would be very in keeping with the setting.

And this stuff is cool. We should use it.

The Imperium also embodies gross incompetence. You could have a piece of kit should would greatly increase troop performance and have requests for it denied because it's not in the proper index for gear that may be requestioned.

Indomitable Wrath said:

Actually, while the tabletop certainly makes them feel that way, the Guard is actually fairly well trained, and technically decently equipped. There's actually more problems with their doctrines [a lot of "MEATGRINDER IS BEST GRINDER" commands] than their supply chain. Its certainly vast enough that errors happen a lot, but that's more because there's that much more people and errors to be made; its probably pretty standard, or even a little below what our bureaucracies manage to pull off.

Many planetary regiments are taken from the better parts of their PDF. Its the latter that are the minimum-wage mallcops of the galaxy. For every planet where the Imperial Guard was just a way to bide for time till titans or astartes made it there, there was a PDF or even some Arbites that got seriously reamed to bide for time till the IG got there.

An Imperial Guardsman has absolutely no clue whatsoever as to how his weapons even work. Starting to pick them apart is practically tech-heresy.

It doesn't take much understanding to assemble a gun from a kit of parts. We could even suggest that the parts use future science tech to bond together without tools.

And we can also introduce problems - parts can be misaligned, mounted backwards or just useless or massively inappropriate (so everyone carries a heavy module on the end of their rifle that no one remembers was a sonar pinger that was useful three hundred years ago when the regiment was fighting on a pitch dark world. It was supposed to interface with a special pair of goggles, all of which have long since been returned to stores).

Plus we can stick accessory rails on everything, from helmets to chairs to underwear to books so everything can be accessorised. For instance, they make this mug fitted with rails to allow the attachment of handles:-

You could say that, but I doubt you could make it stick. Human technology is a thing of nuts and bolts, not parts that auto bond to each other.

And that mug is beyond ridiculous

So I would suggest not going all out at once with the customization if you're going for a realistic approach to your campaigns.

Why say realistic?

You pretty much won't see a first world soldier these days without at least an optical sight attached to their rifle, and probably a vertical foregrip and some kinda illumination device.

b

Even we Brits are getting in on the action - the latest incarnation of the SA80 comes with a rail-equipped front end for mounting accessories.

You keep on, however, assuming that the Imperial Guard is operated and trained as a modern day 1st world fighting force, when they are closer to WW1/2 than anything else.

Do you see modern day infantry being thrown in their thousands against enemy fortifications and trenches under hails of artillery and machine gun fire?

Yeah, frankly. You probably would see that if you had nations throwing million strong armies around like they did in WW2.

The methodologies of warfare in 40K aren't so outdated, they're just based on a form of warfare that has fallen out of style (again, not outdated). That of the "Total War", as in the total economic and industrial mobilization of a nation-state toward a military footing. The main reason this has fallen out of favour is in part due to the powers that be not liking that much unconsolidated military power floating around (hence the so-called Military Industrial Complex), and the fact that half of Europe got blown up the last time the nations of the world switched over to a Total War footing. But were you to see tanks rolling out in the thousands, where the opposing sides don't have a 30-40+ year technological gap between them, then yes you could certainly see great big giant battles taking place, where men charge fortified positions and are cut down by the hundreds.

Another factor is that modern warfare relies heavily in modern infrastructure. "Why don't they just bomb it?" isn't such a cute response when you realise that US air power is so punishing and far-reaching because they have air bases practically everywhere in the world. Whereas when dealing with, say, Catachan, only someone holding orbital superiority (and leaving those ships on station to act as a base) would be able to launch air sorties against the enemy. Suddenly that whole war becomes a horrible, attrition filled meatgrinder because you're lacking in an essential element in the way war is conducted in modern times.

The Imperium is fighting a thousand wars at once all accross the galaxy, they can't afford to strike with overwhelming force everywhere (again, a common trend of the US at war, who pretty much sets the example for how modern warfare is waged). So yeah, a theatre commander may find himself with just enough men and equipment to attain victory if things don't go entirely **** up too often on the battlefield. They can't always use an entire Army Corps to roll over a single division, or reduce an enemy's army to slag and ash with non-stop airstrikes. It's easy to turn up your nose and sniff, and pooh-pooh the Imperium and the way it wages war, when you look at things in their most simple terms. Sometimes they just don't have the necessary resources alloted and available for use on the battlefield. Sometimes they're fighting on a planet that's only been rediscovered in the last 1,000 years, and spent half of that as a fuedal society? So if you don't have an air assets and have to assault a fortified position, just what do you do? Well, you get the men to lace up their boots and get ready for an assault, just as soon as the artillery are done softening them up.

But cutting right back to the chase, the way the Imperium wages war in 40K isn't so much outdated compared to modern warfare (which is rather low intensity, the bloodiness of recent wars aside), just that it uses methods that aren't fashionable anymore.

(And for an example relevant to how things could get WW2 bloody in modern times.. years back a friend, and retired US Army NCO, once said of the possibility of war with N. Korea, that it would never happen. Because the 38th Parrallel is so heavily fortified, in pretty mountainous terrain, with hidden artillery emplacements aimed at Seoul, that it'd be such a "Stemwinding *****" to fight through the American public would never tolerate the casualty numbers coming out of there. Take that anecdote for what you will.)

Edit: getting more on topic a bit, while I don't think the Imperium fights war as primitively as many believe, I doubt the Imperial Guard gives much leeway for personal customization of a soldier's personal kit. They go for mass production, because they half to. When you have armies so big that you don't even have the slightest clue how many are operating on even the Sector level, let alone Segmentum and Galactic, standardization is going to be a very very big deal for the logistics side of things (consider that the Lasgun is standard issue probably mainly because it's incredibly easy to keep stocked with ammo).

Everyone in the Guard gets body armour, so it isn't like they don't get ANYTHING.

The thing to remember is that the setting is devised almost entirely for the products to sell. And the setting is thus designed to enable the various unique armies available. If you like mecha and more anime designs you have the Tau, if you like huge armour and crazy powerful weaponry you have the Marines, if you like elves in space you have Eldar, if you like dwarves in space you had(!) Squats, if you like gribbly aliens you have Tyranids, if you like robots you have Necrons and if you just like footslogging humans you have the Guard.

As such the Guard will never get given stuff that really steps on the toes of any other army as it makes it harder to sell product that way. Guard don't have lots of mecha (they have just the sentinel), or elves or dwarves or whatever, but hey - they get abhumans, one of the largest variety of man portable weapons and armoured units, a massive array of fully fleshed out regiments and worlds to draw on when making your army and above all else pathos - the ability to feel some emotional link with your little model soldiers because they are human, just like you. And that link is played upon by throwing those little humans up against all manner of monstrous, overpowered and downright scary threats. Those little humans get a basic rifle, armour and survival gear, basic training and are then thrown into the galaxy spanning war of the 41st millenium in their tens of millions.

Think about it from the point of view of your average guardsman. As a green recruit, you are rubbish and only as good as your commanding officer and the men at your sides. Its only after you gain experience and show competency with special tactics and gear that you are likely to be promoted to something above basic footslogger, and even then you are still at the whims of your commanders and the archaic supply chains the Imperium uses. So what if John Doe has survived 3 months against the orks and got over 100 kills to his name, it'll be several more campaigns untill he is recognized as a veteran and moved into a unit where he can either beg, scavenge or steal something more than his basic gear. In game terms this is entirely covered by the fact that as you gain XP and your campaign progresses, you get access to better gear and training options. I really don't think the issue needs adressing for starting characters. And you can always persuade your group of players to roll up Well Provisioned characters from a High Born world, this will give them enough resources to upgrade the craftsmanship of their weapons and get more weapon upgrades and gear, but these should be the exception through their back story and not the norm for the Guard in general.