Fluff and Crunch: Or, Why Stories Matter to Our Games

The Intersection of Fluff and Crunch: Or, Why Stories Matter to Our Games

Miniatures game systems are composed of two major parts. The fluff; which is the storyline, the character biographies, and even the aesthetic design of the models, and the Crunch; the actual rules of the game. On the internet, especially around some of the more tournament centred blogs, we tend to forget the importance of fluff is to at all levels of play.

Stop for a moment and consider the miniature games you play. Do you play Warhammer 40k or WarmaHordes? Infinity or Malifaux? Kings of War or Warhammer? Within those games why did you choose the faction that you did, especially the first one you chose, before you knew the system all that well.

For myself my first game was 40k, and my first faction was Necrons. I chose Necrons because I loved the Terminator-style look of them mixed with the undead army reborn theme of the fluff. Later on I expanded to Tyranids in 4th edition because they looked awesome, but also because the lack of any form of customization in the Necron force was getting repetitive, and the Tyranid 4th ed book had a smorgasbord of options for almost every single unit.

Now this may just be my friends and I, but, I suspect this is the pattern for most wargamers. It's why we play miniature games instead of, say, chess (well, one of the reasons). You start out with an army that you choose for aesthetic or story reasons, and then if you stay invested in the game you tend to expand towards armies that have a play style you're more interested in.

It's a Guide for New Players.

For new players, who haven't had a chance to get familiar with the rules yet (especially the myriad special and unit rules), the fluff should serve as a guide for what they want. When a new player reads through their book, full of stories and unit biographies, they should be able to choose units based on how their described. If a unit is described in the fluff as stealthy and striking from the shadows then it should probably have rules that represent that (in 40k Stealth and Infiltrate at a minimum). If the unit is described as being vicious in close combat in all of it's stories it should probably, y'know, be at least decently deadly in combat. Probably it should not constantly get torn to shreds by even the simplest opposition. **cough** Howling Banshees **cough**

Now not only should the fluff be an accurate guide but...

The Coolest Rules Come Out of the Fluff.

One of the biggest loses I think Necrons took when their ancient Codex was finally updated was the loss of Phase Out. In their original form the Necrons were like ghosts (really, really durable ghosts), silently appearing, causing untold havoc, and then fading away in a burst of emerald light. The few Necrons who did fallen in battle would often spontaneously repair themselves, as if the damage didn't even matter.

To represent this on the table top the 3rd Edition Necron Codex had a number of cheeky shenanigans that allowed them to zip around the battlefield. Several of their units could Deep strike. Once the army was deployed on the board the Veil of Darkness, and the Monolith Portal could teleport them around even more, most frustratingly for opponents even if they were locked in combat. In addition they had the infamous We'll Be Back special rule that allowed dead models to return to battle (essentially Reanimation Protocols but better, 4+ instead of 5+, yet worse at the same time as it was cumbersome as all hell with an abundance of caveats and weird circumstances). Even better these rules often interacted; a unit that used a Monolith Portal could re-roll failed We'll Be Back rolls from that turn.

The flip side was that the Necrons never fought to extinction. If they took enough causalities the remaining army would simply teleport home, or Phase Out as it was called, disappearing from the battlefield to fight again another day (and granting an automatic victory to their opponent). Now by the tail end of 5th Edition, when the army finally got updated, the rules certainly needed updating (We'll Be Back was extremely cumbersome, and Phase Out no longer worked as intended anymore), but the wholesale removing of Phase Out, instead of revamping it, was unfortunate.

There are a plethora of great examples of amazing, fluffy, rules left today. The new Chapter Tactics for Space Marines are incredible, allowing you to tailor nearly your entire army towards your favourite Chapter from the Black Library novels. Supporting Fire with Tau. Or everyone's favourite fluff based rule Waaagh!!! Heck the entire Ork Codex is a smorgasbord of wicked fluffy rules.

You see the fluff influences how the designers build the armies, and is what gives us such a diversity of armies and play styles. It is instrumental to crafting a varied and interesting game. As opposed to a game of really complicated chess.

Which leads me to my last point...

Without it We're Just Doing Recreational Math.

Let's be real honest for a minute; without the context that the fluff and stories provide we'd just be showing up at our friendly local gaming store, or getting together in each others basements, and doing a bunch of extremely repetitive probability experiments.

So the next time you are building a list, and decide to take Terminators, or a Carnivean, instead of 'Melee Unit 5', or Firewarriors instead of 'Ranged Unit 2', you should probably mutter a quick prayer to the Dice Gods in thanks for the fluff.

The Good, the Bad, and Ugly: Flayed Ones

   This series, titled 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' is going to examine the things various companies do extremely well, extremely poorly, or have just done weirdly, from not just a gameplay standpoint but from fluff and design standpoints as well. I'll mostly be focusing on Games Workshop for the start, as I'm most familiar with Warhammer and 40k, but I'm be expanding as I get more games in with other systems.

   Today we'll be looking at Flayed Ones from Codex: Necrons. Flayed Ones were originally from the 3rd Edition Necron Codex, and were updated for their 5th Edition Codex. It's their 5th Edition version we'll be taking a look at today.

   I'm not sure how to put this politely, so I'll just blurt it out: Flayed Ones are a trainwreck. They barely function on any level.

Their Fluff:

   First off the Flayed One fluff is pretty simple. They're insane. That's, uh, pretty much it. When the Necrons turned on the C'tan, and broke them, one of them was destroyed instead, and in its dieing moments cursed all the Necrons with a slow erosion of their sanity. The Flayed Ones are the most insane of the Necrons. They desperately crave eating flesh (that they can't actually consume, they just sort of gum it I guess?), because crazy, and they live in a pocket dimension of horrors, because crazy.

   Now honestly, by the standards, of 40k, this isn't that bad. What drives me up the wall about it is that, a few months before the new Codex dropped the Black Library released the novel Fall of Damnos, by Nick Kyme. In it there are not only Flayed Ones, but a Flayed Lord, and you see some of the story through his twisted eyes. In the Damnos version the Flayed Ones are still insane, but it is the insanity of desperately craving their old bodies. They literally miss being flesh and blood living beings so badly it breaks them. They carve the flesh off their enemies and wear it in a desperate attempt to regain something they lost, but it's never good enough, it never sates them.

   Not only do I, personally, find this much more compelling, but it also gives them reasons and motives, fleshes them out (sorry, I couldn't resist) into more than just generic boogeymen, of which there are far too many in of in the 40k universe.

Their Crunch:

   Sadly, the rules for Flayed Ones are even worse than their generic "rar, I'm crazy" fluff would suggest. They start with the same statline as a Warrior (a Necron Warrior, not a Tyranid Warrior) and cost the same. They lose their gun (and ballistics skill but that hardly matters without a gun), the incredible Gauss Flayer, for an extra 2 Attacks (for a total of 3), and the Deep Strike and Infiltrate rules and they are Elites choices instead of Troops.

   They also lose a few other important things that aren't as noticeable up front. They don't have access to any dedicated transports, and they can't be assigned a member of a Royal Court.

   All in all... these, well, they actually aren't very good trades. You see without being Troops, and therefore scoring units, Flayed Ones have only one purpose: killing the pants off the enemy. This is not a job they are actually any good at. They have no Power Weapons, not even on a character since you can't attach a Royal Court member, no Rending, no way to punch through armour of any kind. Which means they are utterly relying on just being able to pour a bucket of dice onto the table (admittedly having the option to take 20 of them in a pack helps this).

   In addition they also don't have assault grenades, which actually is less of a big deal since they're only Initiative 2 anyways. They also have average weapons skill and

   All together this means that the Flayed Ones target of choice is theoretically backfield units, heavy weapons squads, objective campers, etc. Weak chaff. Unfortunately, for you and the flayed Ones themselves, they don't have any way to target these units. They aren't fast, and they aren't durable. Now you can Infiltrate them, or Deep Strike them, but since they have no shooting attack, and can't charge after either, it means they must spend a turn just standing their. They aren't durable enough to just stand there. With a Marines toughness but an Armour Save of 4+ they can't absorb much shooting. Worse, when they do finally get to charge their abysmal Initiative and lack of grenades means they will almost always strike last (assuming the enemy didn't counter-charge them on their own turn that is).

   When you put this all together, after getting shot for at least one turn, taking Overwatch, and then taking causalities from the enemy striking first in combat your unit that relies on dumping a buttload off attacks... well they won't have the models left to actually do that. Once in awhile you might get lucky, but you can reliably expect your Flayed One unit to fail to perform its job of harassing the enemies backfield.

So what else can they do?

   Not much. Again, which is as frustrating to write as it is for you to read. They're too expensive to use as bubblewrap, they don't have Fearless or powerful enough weapons to be able to go toe-to-toe with a real elite close combat unit, which means they fail at any sort of counter-charge responsibility, and they aren't fast enough to actually keep up with any of the good Necron combat units, like Wraiths. 

   In short, Flayed Ones are a mediocre unit, at best, with no real role to play in a Necron army.

Fluff to the rescue!

   Weirdly the solutions to these problems are right there in the fluff. Flayed Ones are quick, cowardly creatures, striking from the shadows against already weakened foes, retreating from stronger. They wink in and out of their own dimension, evading pursuit. Why wasn't this reflected in the fluff? 

Couldn't they have gotten Shrouded, or at least Stealth to help weather that first turn of shooting and Overwatch? They are literally, pg. 23 of the new Codex, described as "twisting aside and melting into the shadows" to avoid getting caught in some crossfire. How is that not the Shrouded rule?

How about a higher Initiative to put them on better terms against enemies (I know that Mat Ward was obsessed with having a theme to his stats, ALL the Necron units have Ini 2 except the dang C'tan, but that's a rant for another day). 

What about the Shred special rule to at least get the most out of the attacks they do get after being hammered by shooting? Lightning Claws have it, why not a creature that shreds things to eat them for a living?

 

You could balance any buffs by dropping their Leadership down to 7 or 8, they are supposed to be cowardly after all.

Now I'm not saying any, or all, of these changes would totally fix them, that's not the point of this series, what I'm trying to illustrate is that if Games Workshop had simply followed the outline they'd already written in their own fluff, they'd have a better unit right now.

Why does this matter?

   Well for us, as players, it's just nice for us to be able to happily use any model in our collection without feeling handicapped. For a company though, especially one that prides itself on being a 'model company' first and foremost, shouldn't they want to sell lots of every kit? The Flayed Ones even got a new, freshly designed and expensive, Finecast box that you'd think they'd want to make some money on. Providing us a lackluster unit that no one wants to buy is not just bad design, it's bad business.

   People buy models for one of three reasons; 

- The model is super cool, so they just want to own or paint it.

- The fluff for the models are really fun, and inspire people to make themed armies (like Thousand Sons despite sucking for like three editions).

- The units are just really useful in game, so lots of people buy them to be competitive (take Riptides, or Nightscythes on the overpowered side of things, but also think of how many people bought box after box of Termagants or Chaos Cultists or the lowly Imperial Guard infantryman).

Now number one is down to personal preference, although I like the old metal Flayed Ones better visually (i also like the old metal Wraiths better, so I might just be weird). Numbers two and three though, are resounding failures with Flayed Ones. They don't have interesting enough fluff to make a themed army, or to get people excited enough to at least want one unit in there no matter what, and their rules actively punish you for taking them in a competitive list (and lets face it, tournament players buy way more product then just regular hobbiests).

Bad design, bad business.

P.S. On a design related note it really annoys me that the 3rd Edition Flayed Ones had a rule called Terrifying Visage that was functionally identical to the new Fear rule, and yet they weren't given Fear, and had Terrifying Visage just... taken away. Say what?