Extra Punctuation: Hating Warhammer 40k and Space Marine

[Siege_TF]

we're apparently still using the most basic of projectile weaponry as standard issue.

(Notice: this applies to basic troop weapons only). Orks use slug throwers, Marines use gyroguns, Guard use laser guns, Tau use plasma, Eldar use railguns, Necrons use gauss guns, Chaos uses magic.
So... you're an Ork then?

As for the Ultramarines themselves they're the bog standard for Marines, and the mascots for the franchise. It would have been far, far more interesting to play as Black Templars or Salamanders, the attitudes of which are quite different from the boys in blue, but they're not the mascots.

 

[E-Penguin]

I think you need to read a bit more about the universe before you slate it. You're approaching their ideals and logic from your own. Which doesn't make sense because their world/universe has never been like ours.

isn't really fair. [/quote]

The Warhammer 40k universe isn't actually taking place in the same universe as the original Wahammer, it's actually our own, 38,000 years (give or take) in the future.

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

/snip

You have to know how horribly, horribly unwieldy that is, you "might" make that work for a small scale skirmish game like warmachines/horde, but you can't honestly make me thing individually war gear per model is really fessable in say a imperial guard army. 1500pts-2500pts you do realize just how many models that is right.

And house rules fuck my club uses house rules just because they only play where the ass hats where Boring tourney rules only is your problem, not something wrong with the game it's self.

 

[Starik20X6]

As someone who works in a shop that sells 40K stuff, I can safely say that it's not only the space marines themselves but also the people who buy them are enormous emotionless husk-people, but while space marines are equipped with armour, guns and chainswords, these people are equipped with sweaty t-shirts, neckbeards and B.O.

 

[Fortesque]

First: Space Marines are meant to be emotionless. They are created to be killing machines, not to question authority, to follow orders and to die in battle. They have emotion bred out of them. What happened the last time emotion for in the way of a Space Marine? Oh, nothing really, just the Horus Heresy.

Second: The 40k Universe does have a shit load of back story. If you could be bothered to read, you would know that. The first 4 books of the Heresy are amazing. "Galaxy in Flames" is one of the best books I've ever read.

Third: Leave the Ultramarines alone. They are Space Marines! Everyone calls them vanilla marines or stock marines or complains they have no special thing about them. I've been playing Ultramarines for about 10yrs now, Ive made most of the chapter, and ive played Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Space Wolves. None of them have had the same feel. Frankly, they are all Heretics for not following the Codex Astartes and should be hunted down in my opinion. Ultramarines are Space Marines incarnate. They are what they should be. Pure, no taint in the geneseed.

EDIT: and they are called Ultramarines because, GASP!!, they are painted Ultra Marine Blue. Its an actual colour not something GW made up, they are the base blue marine paint scheme. Its no different to Black Templars being the base black scheme and Blood Angels being the base blood red scheme.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I'm a PC gamer but I could never get into Warhammer 40K. I play strategy games but Warhammer was always boring to me. The story especially. I don't understand what's so appealing about that universe. It's humans against orcs and then what? It's shallow but it's trying so hard to be something epic.

 

[Siege_TF]

It's not exactly that I want to make a tank out of a shampoo bottle, it's the spiritual shift in the game. In the early days it was all about expressing your creativity and improvised models were common.

Just last June for a hobby store tourney (not an official GW tourney) I spray painted one of my Gundam model kits silver, hot glued it to an old CD, put a Grey Knight between it's legs, posed the gundam the same way as the grey knight, and called it a Dreadknight.
The other tourney players LOVED it. Well, the majority of them did, there were a few smug-faced assholes who delighted in telling me I couldn't get away with it at an actual GW tourney, but that's as far as it went. People may act tough on the internet but IRL even if they don't really approve they'll not go so far as to start name-calling.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Rogue trader was all about individual characters. You rolled for the wargear of each model in your army, meaning effectively you had an army of random characters.

Random characters isn't the same thing though..

I'm not convinced that they're intentionally going for a more cartoony style, especially after taking into account the mostly excellent Dark Eldar re-release.

A fair point, I don't necessarily disagree. Although I do think even the new Dark Eldar models have a different thing going for them.

The models seem.. busier.. for want of a better word, and while I do think the DE range is now looking awesome compared to the malformed shit they had before, I don't think it's necessarily a good trend in general.

So between the terrible models, the insane pricing, and the win-at-all-costs player atmosphere, I've pretty much given up on the game.

Try the specialist games.

It's the only reason I bother with the company any more.

Of the games set in the 40k universe..

Battlefleet Gothic in particular is a phenomenally good game which keeps getting better now that it's in the hands of the specialist games community who keep producing new material. It's about giant spaceship-cathedrals shooting each other in space, so it even manages to be suitably campy.

Necromunda is extremely cheap to start up (you don't even need to buy scenery really, it's easy to improvise).

Inquisitor is just.. Inquisitor. It is absolutely insane, and I love it.

I haven't played Epic since I was tiny, it's probably the closest specialist games get to being 40k, both in terms of price and gameplay. Still, anyone playing it nowadays is going to be doing so for the right reasons, and it has giant skyscraper-sized robot fights.

And although it's not 40k, special mention to Blood Bowl. It is literally the best game Games Workshop ever made. They could make a special version of 40k where the box contains a full sized space marine who will hunt down and beat up all the people who were nasty to you in school and it would not come up to the knees of Blood Bowl.

What defines these games is generally a small but phenomenal community of players, a relatively small opening price tag (all the rules are free) and a much stronger spirit of fun. Heck, Inquisitor doesn't even have a points system.. I'm not kidding, you just throw a bunch of stuff together and see what happens.

 

[Slaanax]

The game was Kapt. Bloodflag and Mistah Nailbrain to make it a great game, but for me I love the money I spent on it being a huge fanboy. It's what I wanted a chance to smash stuff as a space marine, sadly wasn't as a blood angel, but still the game was missing the signature Orky humor of the DoW series.

 

[nothingspringstomind]

we're apparently still using the most basic of projectile weaponry as standard issue.

(Notice: this applies to basic troop weapons only). Orks use slug throwers, Marines use gyroguns, Guard use laser guns, Tau use plasma, Eldar use railguns, Necrons use gauss guns, Chaos uses magic.
So... you're an Ork then?

As for the Ultramarines themselves they're the bog standard for Marines, and the mascots for the franchise. It would have been far, far more interesting to play as Black Templars or Salamanders, the attitudes of which are quite different from the boys in blue, but they're not the mascots.

Lol, i was wondering how long it would be until i was corrected. I understand that the guns fire bullets that are about the size of my head (the ones i've seen the ultramarines use at least.) but from what i've seen of the mechanics it all looked pretty standard, just bigger.

I guess when i originally heard about 40K all those years ago, i assumed standard armament would have been something sleeker and less mechanical.

 

[Fortesque]

we're apparently still using the most basic of projectile weaponry as standard issue.

(Notice: this applies to basic troop weapons only). Orks use slug throwers, Marines use gyroguns, Guard use laser guns, Tau use plasma, Eldar use railguns, Necrons use gauss guns, Chaos uses magic.
So... you're an Ork then?

As for the Ultramarines themselves they're the bog standard for Marines, and the mascots for the franchise. It would have been far, far more interesting to play as Black Templars or Salamanders, the attitudes of which are quite different from the boys in blue, but they're not the mascots.

Lol, i was wondering how long it would be until i was corrected. I understand that the guns fire bullets that are about the size of my head (the ones i've seen the ultramarines use at least.) but from what i've seen of the mechanics it all looked pretty standard, just bigger.

I guess when i originally heard about 40K all those years ago, i assumed standard armament would have been something sleeker and less mechanical.

Eldar Shuriken Catapult
http://www.bitzbox.co.uk/images/eldar_guardians_weapon_team_shuriken_catapult_large.jpg

Tau Pulse Rifle or any Tau weapon for that matter
http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/6/5152/57622.jpg

Tyranid Venom Cannon or, again, any Tyranid weapon
http://bitzbarn.com/oscommerce/catalog/images/Venom_cannon.JPG

All sleek and not mechanical looking at all. Especially the Nids weapons.

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

To be fair some of the human weapons are fairly advanced but the whole design for human kit is intended to be big, boxy, and blocky.

 

[OtherSideofSky]

The 40k back story is absolutely fucking hilarious. It's basically exactly as juvenile and ridiculous as you're saying, it's just that reading about some of the truly insane shit the have in that universe is a great way to kill an afternoon laughing uproariously as you look through the wiki.

 

[ACman]

I has always bothered me that the 40k universe is essentially a massive fascist theocracy where any sort of departure from the dogma of the state is eliminated with extreme prejudice.

There's no one to side with. Space Marines are battle-crazed fanatics. Chaos is hell. Orks are well... orks. Tyranids are insectoid monsters. Eldar would exterminate mankind without a second thought if they could. Tau are space communists. Imperial Guard are part of the aforementioned fascist theocratic space empire. Cultists are either alien or chaos mad. Necrons are space-undead-robot-gods or some shit.

I always thought the emperor should be more like a space-pope. Then there could be multiple human kingdoms/federations/confederacies/compacts.

But no, any difference will be purged by a bunch of insane fanatical jihadist. Bah.

Um...that was the whole point? To get away from those Star Trek style utopian settings in a big way. One reason I absolutely hated the introduction of the Tau.

I never said that the alternatives should be like Trek. And I didn't say that you need to get away from having the empire. I just thought it would be more interesting and more human to have alternatives. So the empire are Space catholics and you could have a reformation producing space protestants who might offshoot and form space puritans and maybe you have a little corner of space orthodox and space jews with maybe some space muslims emerging later.

Each could be it's own federation/empire/kingdom whatever. Or each could have multiple kingdom/ empires/whatever.

The 40k universe as it stands is restrictive. Sure you've got many different types of people and world but they're all forced to follow the same awful religious dogma or apparently turn into chaos. The only people who seem to have any sort of freewill are inquisitors who do the torturing and extermination.

Edit: Spaaaaaaaacccccceeee!

 

[Normandyfoxtrot]

Their are actually breaks in the Inquisition and their church their just small and normally quite about it, their are inquisitors and members of the "chuch" that want to work with aliens or to reform the church entirely for example.

 

[HalfTangible]

I don't find it fair to compare the tabletop to chess anymore than i find it fair to compare chess to checkers, but that's an equally stupid thing to pick at.

It strikes me that you are largely unfamiliar with the 40K universe - the ultramarines are easily the most boring chapter because they are designed to be the cub scouts - the guys who follow every rule written, in large part because their primarch founder wrote half of them and approved the other half. (metaphorically speaking - i'm not sure if he actually wrote the codex astartes but i'm pretty sure it was his idea)

In a Blood Angels novel, you see some citizens recently liberated by a group of Space Marines. Some of the children create icons of their saviors, and one of the space marines tells her that what she is doing is wrong because there are no icons of the emperor.

The scene is meant to demonstrate the changing mindset of the planet's populace (long story, i'll spare you) but indirectly it also shows that the people have SOME time to themselves. An inquisitor in the same series has a romance with his servant (no, not a servitor, everybody - a regular human) whom he later kills.

There ARE things besides war in 40K, but the point of that subtitle is that there is no real peace. That fundamental idea - that war doesn't end - is what gives almost every tabletop game a place in canon. Even two necron armies duking it out is made plausible by the existence of multiple C'Tan gods.

To call 40K childish is... well, dumb. Really dumb. Why? A) The lore isn't really the point of the tabletop and isn't MEANT to be taken seriously anyway
B) Because it's not really an argument against the setting itself, just the people who partake in it, and immaturity is measured largely by how much you care about immaturity.

And comparing painting the miniatures to a coloring book? REALLY, Yahtzee? -_-

I WISH it was like a coloring book. Coloring books are CHEAP and EASY.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

To be honest Yahtzee, the games have never done the actual universe justice. If you go read Nemesis in the Horus Heresy series, you'll find that there is actually a lot of humour in there. That book was like watching a train-crash in slow motion if you knew anything about the universe and that made it awesome.

Also, AD&D and 40k aren't mutually exclusive. I've been playing AD&D for years and like reading 40k stuff.

 

[nothingspringstomind]

we're apparently still using the most basic of projectile weaponry as standard issue.

(Notice: this applies to basic troop weapons only). Orks use slug throwers, Marines use gyroguns, Guard use laser guns, Tau use plasma, Eldar use railguns, Necrons use gauss guns, Chaos uses magic.
So... you're an Ork then?

As for the Ultramarines themselves they're the bog standard for Marines, and the mascots for the franchise. It would have been far, far more interesting to play as Black Templars or Salamanders, the attitudes of which are quite different from the boys in blue, but they're not the mascots.

Lol, i was wondering how long it would be until i was corrected. I understand that the guns fire bullets that are about the size of my head (the ones i've seen the ultramarines use at least.) but from what i've seen of the mechanics it all looked pretty standard, just bigger.

I guess when i originally heard about 40K all those years ago, i assumed standard armament would have been something sleeker and less mechanical.

Eldar Shuriken Catapult
http://www.bitzbox.co.uk/images/eldar_guardians_weapon_team_shuriken_catapult_large.jpg

Tau Pulse Rifle or any Tau weapon for that matter
http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/6/5152/57622.jpg

Tyranid Venom Cannon or, again, any Tyranid weapon
http://bitzbarn.com/oscommerce/catalog/images/Venom_cannon.JPG

All sleek and not mechanical looking at all. Especially the Nids weapons.

Danke for the knowledge boost, but i was referring to the human weaponry, merely considering the technological avenues that we are currently pursuing led me to believe that, logically, weaponry that relied on ammunition would have become defunct for the human race by the year 40,000. I assumed that we'd have something like the Mass Effect games later showed; ergonomically similar to modern rifles (Due simply to human anatomy being what it is.) but using a more advanced method of projectiles or even energy weaponry that doesn't require mass manufacture of raw materials that the trillions of bullets fired would nessecitate.

Don't mean to troll if it seems that way, just explaining what i mean.