Anybody here play Warhammer 40k?(the table minigame not pc)

TheGM

TheGM

The voice of reason
Me and my brother have been looking into playing Warhammer 40k.

We have a Games-Workshop right down the street too. It i just that we both want to get familiar with the rules and play styles before we make the purchase the starter kit and what not. is there a place on the net that has a better explanation then "you roll some dice"

and now a I just realised I have been here for almost a year and this is my first topic.
 
You can buy rulebooks at hobby stores.
But I'm telling you this now, Warhammer and its variations are wargames for babies.
 
those rule books cost $30 bucks. and have 1000 stats pages.

I don't need stat pages. I don't even need an advance rule set. I would just like to know what the hell you do with it before I plop $120+ on something I know like 3 things about.

1: starcraft ripped it off.
2: Gears of War ripped it off.
3: ok 2 things.

Hell I don't even want web page.

I'll rephrase the question.

"hey anybody here play Warhammer 40k? If so what the hell do you do in it?"
 
If you have a GW store down the street, why not just go in there and watch a game? There's probably no better way to find out whether this is something for you or not. Except the people playing might be 12 years old and/or smell extremely bad.

You spend an hour or two selecting troops, and armament, that will be most effective against your opponent, and hopefully will not give you any glaring weaknesses like complete incapability of ranged attacks etc.

Victory conditions are assigned, usually by rolling in some tables. An example is take and hold, one or both armies have the objective to occupy a piece of terrain and have no enemy units within 6" at the end of the last turn.

Then, you set up your armies at opposite ends of a table with terrain on it. This of course depends heavily on the mission/victory conditions. Also, different units need to take advantage of the terrain and field of fires in different ways.

When the battle starts you move your troops/tanks around, key to victory is frequently to get your troops to do what they do best while denying the enemies troops to do what they do best. Fore example, get your best assault troops into melee with his heavy weapons while shooting his assaulting forces to bits. Easier said than done most of the time. Who hits, who gets wounded, whose armor saves him from being killed, what squad decides to flee after taking casualties etc are things determined by rolling dice.

Most battles end after 4-6 or so turns. The winner is sometimes determined through victory points, that are based on how many and how expensive troops you killed and some other things depending on the mission. For example destroying a bunker could give you a big bonus to victory points.
 
Man, man, man... lately I'm becoming extremely interested in this non-computer roleplaying/turnbased stuff myself. A friend and I even bought a Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Starter Set just to check things out. D&D games aren't much fun with two, though.

As a total loner, though, and as an afficionado of everything written, I've developed quite a taste for roleplaying books. I grew up with CYOA books and lately I started to crave for more of those, stuff on a more mature level, I wasn't even sure if they existed. But they do. I literally devoured the four Freeway Warrior books written by Joe Dever, for instance, which are a must for every true Fallout fan. They are also available for free on the interweb (with the approval of the author).
Actually, a whole lot of CYOA books are available for free on the interweb and often with the approval of their respective authors.

I've started working on my own CYOA book, but it's in Dutch and it's aimed at teenagers rather than adults. It's a very interesting literary form, actually. It was already known in antiquity, had a certain réveille during surrealism and dadaism, and was still practised by the group Oulipo in France as a promising literary form during the previous century. In fact, I think that popularizing the form with the cheap, half-arsed CYOA books that were common during the eighties caused the form to somewhat lose a lot of its serious appeal.

Time to change that. 8-)

Anyway: I don't want to derail this thread, so move along, people, move along.
 
You can always ask one of the staff to play a tutorial game with you. That's how I first learnt about the rules back in the day.

"hey anybody here play Warhammer 40k? If so what the hell do you do in it?"
Roll a lot of dice and then blame everyone else when you keep rolling ones.
 
Too long ago for me. Plus I was a Warhammer and Epic (not Epic 40K, the old Epic) player.

I actually stopped playing when a Games Workshop came to town. Before that we'd game in a friendly little store, GW was basically corporate assholeism personified by comparison. So I stopped.

But yeah just ask for a tutorial.
 
i played 40k for a while

it costs a shitload of money when you start talking about 1500-3000 point armies

even worse if you are tyranid/orc

i was primarily space marines cuz i was a nub

and i did quite well in 1500-2500, but in 1000 and 3000 pt fights i usually got my ass handed to me for some reason.


its a LOT of die rolling. i remember that in the average turn i would roll a total of around 30-60 d6's. and depending on your army, i knew guys who were rolling 100+ in a turn. i would reccomend getting at least 10 d6's as it will speed things up a lot.
 
Used to play 40k back in 97. It was cool at the time but it cost my parents a shitloaaaad of money. Fortunately, since I played Orcs, my army was cheaper than that of my friends who played Chaos, Tyrannids and Eldars.
On thing I loved was the awesome background that Games Workshop provided with the rulebooks and with the Codex that you could buy for each race.
The Tyrannids and Chaos backgrounds were sooo cool !

However I stopped playing these when I realised how cheaper role playing games were and how cool they were.

Started with DeadLands, a cool spaghetti-western RPG with Steampunk elements and ZOMBIES !
 
Thanks for the answers. this is the only one that is bugging me. is there a ass load of damage modifiers? like fire, plasma, melee. or is juts this guy(Marine with gun, Marine with sword) does this much based on the die and that is it?
 
It's not that type of game, really...
There ARE damage modifiers.

If you like fast paced games, you could look into Necromunda ( also by GW ) instead ? Never played it myself but heard that it was a much faster game than 40k.
 
As a kid I wanted to play tabletop W40k.

Then I saw the price for paintbrush for the figures. And then I saw the price for a single figure.

Though I often borrowed the Codexes from a friend, just to have a read.
 
TheGM said:
Thanks for the answers. this is the only one that is bugging me. is there a ass load of damage modifiers? like fire, plasma, melee. or is juts this guy(Marine with gun, Marine with sword) does this much based on the die and that is it?
Click to expand...

Not really any modifiers per se. A plasma rifle just does more damage than, say, a lasgun.

All weapons work using a strength and armour piercing stat. The more expensive or rare the weapon the higher the strength (STR) and lower the armour piercing (AP). Strength determines whether you've wounded the enemy and AP determines if you bypass the armour and instantly kill the enemy instead of the other player rolling a saving throw.
A powerfull weapon like a meltagun has STR 8 and AP 1 (the max armour save you can get is 2+) while a crappy gun like a lasgun has STR 3 (I think) and can't actually pierce armour.

Though you get guns with special rules such as flamethrowers being able to hit anything under the flame template automatically and rocket launchers using a blast template (fancy word for plastic disk) but those are more special effects rather than damage modifiers.

Can probably give more in depth detail tommorow when I can find my codexs.
 
So it would be like Base Unit strength + Weapon stats used as damage with the die roll decideing what effects happen. ok thanks.

See this is why I asked. so I would know....sounding a lil like Yogi berra now.
 
Combat basically goes like this (if they haven't changed the rules):

Shooting

Roll to hit:
Your chance to hit is determined by your ballistic skill when shooting. BS 3 gives you 4+ to hit, BS of 4 gives you 3+ to hit, BS 5 = 2+ to hit, which is the maximum.
This chance is never modified, even by cover. It used to be but they cut down on the modifiers, because there were a shitload of them. Instead, cover gives you an "invounerable" save, of either 5+ or 6+ which in effect can't be penetrated, you always get it.

Roll to wound:
All hits have a chance to wound. This is determined by comparing the Strength of the weapon with the Toughness of the target. For example a space marine Boltgun has a Strength of 4 and an Ork has a Toughness of 3. This gives you 3+ to wound. Equal S and T gives 4+ to wound, if S is less than T you get 5+ or 6+ depending on the difference. If T is 4 more than S I think you can't wound.

Save wounds:
If the target has armor, it can try to save any wounds. Space Marines have Power Armor, which confers a 3+ save (very good). Few weapons have low enough AP stat (3 or less) to ignore Power Armor, so most often the marines can try to save and 66% will be saved.
Lower quality troops may have a 5+ save, and would save about 33% of thw wounds. However, many medium quality weapons like the previously mentioned Boltgun have an AP stat of 5, thus ignoring the armor. All wounds would kill, unless the troops are in cover. It is therefore a lot more important to keep your imperial guard troops in cover than you marines for example, since marines have a better save than the cover save anyway.

Melee:
In Melee you roll to hit slightly differently. Troops with higher Initiative strike first. You compare Weapon Skill of attacker and defender. If the attacker has a higher weapon skill than the target he hits on 3+, equal or less 4+. In extreme cases i think it can go to 2+ and 5 or 6+, can't remember.
Roll to wound using the models Strength versus targets toughness. Melee weapons don't have a strength of their own but use the models strength. Some melee weapons may increase strength or automatically pierce any armor.

All rolls are made at the same time, you don't roll for one model at a time, unless one model has a heavy weapon like a rocket launcher and the rest have boltguns for example. There are also rules for how you remove casualties etc...

Maybe more information than you were looking for, but hope it helps. I'd recommend buying a LOT of D6... You can get upwards to 50 dice for perhaps $6-7 I think, compared to the cost of models this is a fart in space.
 
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