Army Wide Rule for Chaos Space Marines

[Askari]

Until then, to all who think the World Eaters and other Khornate warriors need to have cc buffs alone, I retort with this.

I hope you include yourself in that statement, seeing as you want to give them Counter-Attack

[Warmaster_John]

And as I recall, the Cannon of Khorne had infinite range! The six I had in Epic did quite well for me, too. There were a few other daemon engines that had a lot of guns as well, including one that had four barrage weapons. However, these were all crewed by Daemons, not World Eaters...

That said, it's your fandex, so make them how you like; I have always liked your work, so I'm sure it will be good no matter what. However, you will never convince me that Counter Attack is a better fit than Furious Charge. I'm Stubborn

[yabbadabba]

I can see why Counter Attack can help a close combat army adopt more shooting. I think if you were to do a Khorne Codex then you could mix this in to certain units types, however in a codex like this I would probably tend towards the more maniacal hand to hand combat monster stereotype.

[Son of Sanguinius]

I've given it more thought, and I'm beginning to agree. The codex would be better served if I tended toward making Khorne units assault oriented, especially if I don't restrict vehicles or support shooting like obliterators.

[Orthodox]

You can form an assault army, a shooting army, or a mix. This applies to many of the units in those armies as well. You can make a suitable assault or ranged unit out of a tactical squad or csm squad.

What is an assault army or a shooting army? This is a false dichotomy between irrelevant categories. There are different sets of rules for each of them, but they just refer to killing enemies. What matters is what they are used for like interception or filler.

:D

For me I think that without the building rules being more substantive in 40K the IWs true skills become unrepresentable;

Right, Iron Warriors' character has always been the places they like to fight in, and not anything about themselves, ostensibly. Buildings and cover saves and vague propensities for augmentation don't need to be the only thing Iron Warriors about, actually they are peripheral.

The longer description in Index Astartes isn't of Iron Warriors putting up buildings, it's everything after the words "complex fire plan." Regardless of where they are, the Iron Warriors behavior will concentrate on coordinated bombardment. Wherever they are on a tabletop, you can assume that they have chosen that place for a superior angle and to allow cross fire with other units. It's what they would do even if they were in totally natural terrain that also had no protective cover, they'd stand on places that gave them maximum view of their targets. So you say that if they are standing still, their shooting can defeat cover saves better.

Except that you don't. It matters how that rule is applied, what character or wargear upgrade confers this ability on the army. If named characters are somehow objectionable, and they aren't to me but I assume they are for these purposes, then you buy wargear for a Lord, and that serves as WYSIWYG for the army bonus. Signum might be nice, but it's somewhat ambiguous, so you say servo-arm, as that is precedented and more visual.

However, that seems like it's mostly line squads doing pioneer/sapper stuff, not a lord's instrument of authority. So instead of using a piece of hq wargear to unlock an abstracted, blanket army rule, it can be an upgrade for individual squads, and instead of saying that it makes them slightly better at something they were already doing, it provides the techmarines' bolster defences rule, since that describes the squad taking an action that units normally don't. It has added a whole activity to their character, which is preferable to not adding anything, as with the passive statements that their aim is better or they are made of metal. Upgrading squads individually with visible wargear is active, and the alternative passive voice undermines meaning; so really the authority over this isn't personal preference, it's the Chicago manual of style*.

It's like saying that preferred enemy (hq) makes it easier to buy a powerfist for hunting hq units. Actually, buying a powerfist makes it easier to buy a powerfist for hunting hq units. The powerfist allows the unit an action it couldn't ordinarily perform, a servo-arm with bolster defences allows the unit an action it couldn't already perform. However, giving a unit access to tank hunters, stealth, bionics, and cover-degrading fire, even all at once, doesn't allow them to lay down a precisely-coordinated, long-range bombardment if they are identical to the 4e chaos space marines who get a single autocannon per ten models.

So, I started out suggesting an army-wide rule. While trying to make it work better, I found that army-wide rules are excessively generalized. It's not a derailment, it's a natural development. There is a new derailment-edit at the end of a previous post, though. I'm totally on board with army-wide rules, until they start getting in the way of the original goal. If you're actually trying, you end up with something new, instead of mix-and-matching. Combat squads are a fine army-wide rule that make armies that have it do completely different things from armies that don't.

*I don't actually care about the chicago manual of style/ideals of clarity in writing.

If Black Legion have distinct behaviors, they are for scoring units. In most armies, a cult unit shouldn't necessarily be scoring, since they have given over their entire souls to their religion, and are only temporarily and temporally affiliated with any master outside their cult. If a particular lord is well-resourced and has larger or better integrated army, cult units might be more reliable and more strongly under his influence, the way Black Legion berzerkers or noise marines are better integrated into their legion than the mercenary versions that lords of other undivided warbands would be obliged to use. If a lord has terminator armor, he is probably a big enough deal to bully some cult marines into behaving themselves. Luckily, the black legion love to put their lords in terminator armor, "waiting at the head of his terminator elite," so armies led by terminator lords can allow their auxilliary cults to be troops, instead of just the main, lord-aligned units.

My intent is to work within the system and limit unique rules as much as I can.

What's unique though? The USRs were mostly borrowed or standardized from pre-existing versions. Especially under the chapter-tactics model, which doesn't give potentially-confused names to its different iterations like vulkan-tactics and khan-tactics, there is no preference for using a special rule over adapting a known mechanism. True-grit and rending required standardization, since they were referred to by multiple codexes with multiple versions under those same names. Vulkan tactics, which is not a USR, can never have that problem since it doesn't actually have a name. So yeah, you can say that the base combat tactics analog is that all squads have something like a company standard that can backfire, and if you never actually refer to the term company standard, you've circumvented any considerations for USRs, especially since the +1 static rez is pretty well play tested in loyalist command squads.

Slaanesh seems too weak, too. Assuming you're sticking with Noise Marines, fleet does them little good as they are short ranged shooters. And most already have frag grenades, though Def grenades are good for them. I think this one is going to be tricky. Maybe Fearless? Acute senses, to represent their "expanded" consciousness?

I think slaanesh is straight forward: they have combat drugs, and if they don't use them in a given turn they take a wound with no saves. You pick abilities from... fleet, nerve-steadying +1 bs, FnP, and +1 attack. Roll a d6, and if it's less than or equal to the number of abilities, the unit takes that many wounds with no armor saves.

Wait, is this for non-cult units? Non-cult units with god bonuses focus on the chaos gods and distract from the personalities of the marines/legions themselves. Non-cult characters or chosen could take a signature weapon like a pandemic staff to indicate alignment, but otherwise I don't think gods give out their marks for anything less than full devotion. Marks are cattle brands, really, they aren't something the marines choose to have, they are something the god brands you with when you go too far down that path. Maybe units can take combat drugs without being forced to use them every turn, force weapons or khornate chainaxes, but non-cult god bonuses are sort of horrible. *non-rubric tzeentchian units are not a case for god-icons, they are a case for units with variable stats, teleportation, etc.

[Son of Sanguinius]

This is another alternative:

The following rule would be the an army wide rule for the Codex, to be replaced by other equivalent singular rules to represent other Legions or by Marks.

Death to the False Emperor!
In the ages since the Horus Heresy, Abaddon has instilled a ferocious sense of righteous vengeance in his followers, such that nothing short of the Emperor's total destruction will sate their fury. They have taken the relentless, shock assault tactics of Horus Lupercal and reforged them with the wrath of betrayal.
A unit with this rule may launch an assault in the same turn that it fired Rapid Fire weapons. If the unit has the Relentless special rule, it also has the Counter-Attack special rule.


Reasoning: I want to portray the aggressive, brutal tactics of the Black Legion with this rule. In essence, what I'm doing is allowing CSM players to use bolter units in the same fashion that Ork players use shoota units. I didn't want the rule to be useless for those units who benefit from Relentless already, so I threw in counter-attack. I'm hoping this rule adds some punch to CSM and Chosen, without trying to pull focus away from assault. Thoughts?

[Orthodox]

This is another alternative:

The following rule would be the an army wide rule for the Codex, to be replaced by other equivalent singular rules to represent other Legions or by Marks.

Death to the False Emperor!
In the ages since the Horus Heresy, Abaddon has instilled a ferocious sense of righteous vengeance in his followers, such that nothing short of the Emperor's total destruction will sate their fury. They have taken the relentless, shock assault tactics of Horus Lupercal and reforged them with the wrath of betrayal.
A unit with this rule may launch an assault in the same turn that it fired Rapid Fire weapons. If the unit has the Relentless special rule, it also has the Counter-Attack special rule.


Reasoning: I want to portray the aggressive, brutal tactics of the Black Legion with this rule. In essence, what I'm doing is allowing CSM players to use bolter units in the same fashion that Ork players use shoota units. I didn't want the rule to be useless for those units who benefit from Relentless already, so I threw in counter-attack. I'm hoping this rule adds some punch to CSM and Chosen, without trying to pull focus away from assault. Thoughts?

Thoughts are what they appear genuinely to be. I'm encouraged. This isn't even to be flippant; selecting a-la-carte from things Alessio Cavatore pasted into the fifth edition rulebook doesn't feel like thinking, so this is meatier than USR combinations. A sudden charge after shooting is a distinct behavior.

It just depends on how useful the weapon options are whether the squads just hustle forward to get that big charge, or they prioritize softening at range before springing that trap. Since the Legion's MO is progressively intensifying encounters, squads might need multiple heavy weapons so they use the rapid fire and charge rule as a coup de grace instead of a single-minded berzerker tactic.








Oh, here's a related thought: If a unit does not move in order to fire heavy or rapid fire weapons, it may make an assault move of twelve inches, regardless of having fired. That way, it's not about running pell-mell out of a rhino, but involves moving to midfield where they can take good positions that enemies will have to approach.

[blackcherry]

That second suggestion sounds good in theory Orthodox, but by allowing a unit to shoot its weapons and then assault 12 inches will probably lead to the 'zerker rush you are afraid of.

Or even worse, huddling down in cover and just blasting away at the opponent till they come within the 12 inch range. Which is distinctly not what the black legion are about.

Iron Warriors mind...