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I haven't posted much 40K stuff here lately because I'm kind of burned out on the game itself. Not the setting, not the novels, not even painting the miniatures. I've actually run a training game a few weeks back for some new players and probably will again soon so it's not strictly a lack of playing the game but ... man I am tired of the Edition Treadmill.
GW releases a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 every 3 years. This has been their policy for15+ years now so it's not like it is new but as a player it is relentless. Now Age of Sigmar is on the same cycle and there is a chance they pull some of their other games into the vortex as well. The Old World is too new to tell how it will go but Horus Heresy is getting a new edition this summer. It looks like it's mostly an update of the existing 40k 7th style ruleset but we won't know for sure until it gets closer. Kill Team is on a similar cycle as it just got a new edition too.
I get why they do this - their business model depends on it. Much like RPGs releasing a new edition typically jump starts sales and is seen as an remedy when things slow down. GW gets a big income bump when a new edition of 40K is released. I'm sure AoS gives a similar, if smaller, effect. The problem for me - beyond the basic expense of doing that every three years - is that they also want to sell a new set of army books alongside that new edition. These are hardcover books and priced similarly to a typical RPG rulebook, so 50-60$ officially. A new starter box set with a rulebook and a bunch of miniatures will cost 150-200$ typically. If you only have say, two armies, you might be looking at 300-ish dollars to move to a new edition and if you just want the rulebook outside of a new box then it might only be 150-200. Now they have started selling card packs with the stats one needs to run each army and those are another 30-50 so you can certainly spend more.
Then you get to people like me who have way too many armies.
- Marines (multiple armies - Crimson Fists, Imperial Fists, Others)
- Blood Angels
- Dark Angels
- Black Templars
- Orks
- Eldar
- Harlequins
- Chaos Marines (Iron Warriors)
- Death Guard
- World Eaters
- Chaos Daemons
- Imperial Guard
- Dark Eldar
- Tyranids
- Necrons
- Grey Knights
- Custodes
- Tau
- Imperial Knights
- Chaos Knights
Every one of those bullet points has been a separate codex at some point though Harlies have been folded back into the Eldar book at this point and Daemons look like they are losing their standalone codex and just joining the individual chaos legion books. Just taking the list above as an example as-is I would need to buy -twenty- separate books to run all of the armies I have sitting on the shelves. That's $1000 worth of rulebooks just to play! That's not even counting buying any new miniatures for those armies or, god forbid, starting a new one! I could spend another 600+ if I wanted to get the cards for each one.
It's just untenable.
To add insult to injury some of these books won't release until the end of the edition cycle. In the past edition Imperial Guard and World Eaters released less than 6 months before the new edition came out. Which means those players spent most of the edition limping along on either old codexes that were "compatible" with the new edition - the actual functionality of this varies widely by army and by edition - or on an "Index" which released when the edition was new as a get-you-by codex. The Index stuff is usually free so there is that at least.
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| Not kidding ... |
On top of this GW - largely in response to the tournament scene - has started doing quarterly updates of the rules and point costs, alongside the inevitable errata that comes out following the release of each army book to fix things they left out, broke, or just want to change. That means that the rules are in a constant state of flux even during the life of edition. They constantly over-adjust and over- and under-tune the rules for various units and at the same time change the point values for multiple units so you can't even maintain a single, stable army for one edition. Sure, we'd all hate for them to just ignore some broken rules or point values for years at a time but it's become a constant state of change and I don't think anyone was asking for that either.
At some point, knowing all of this - because most of it isn't new - we have only ourselves to blame. I'm not playing in tournaments so why should I care about these minute adjustments? If they gave out rules for every army for free in the form of an index at the beginning of the edition why should I rush to buy codexes? Well ... for this edition I decided to stop.
Part of it was the cost as it's just stupid at this point to try and keep up to date on all of them. Part of it was the realization some time back that I don't play frequently enough to get in multiple games with every army I own over the course of an edition these days. So my thinking now is to pick up a couple of the main books for me - Space Marines, Orks, Chaos, and whichever other ones come out fairly early in the edition so I have those available but otherwise I am in no rush to spend on these things. The index rules will work just fine for the 2 or 3 games I play with most of them before the whole thing gets turned upside down again anyway. I'll just spend my time learning a few armies for Edition X and playing those and not worry too much about the others.
So my training game was Marines vs. Orks and my next one probably will be as well. I have bought about ten army books for this edition and if someone wants to get into one of those that's cool but for the others we will likely use the index option.
This all gets compounded even more when you consider their other games follow a similar model. I have multiple Age of Sigmar armies, multiple Old Word armies, multiple Kill Teams ... I've managed to hold Blood Bowl to just the starting two from years ago so I have some sanity there at least.
Despite my general discontent with the state of the game I am still painting - I may finally finish the last of my old-school 1E/2E Goffs this year. I doubt that side of things will ever completely go away.
That's enough rambling. Limited activity will continue and maybe the state of things will change down the road.
