IST 605: Warhammer 40K (Tabletop RPG)

The following are the bare essentials needed to play Warhammer 

• The Core Rules
• Tape measure- In Warhammer 40K, movement and weapon range are measured in inches, so any tape measure that measures in inches will do.
• Dice- Warhammer 40K uses six-sided dice to resolve anything from advancing to shooting, fighting, and casting psychic powers. You will need a lot of them to play. You can get by with 20-30 of them if you don’t have an army with a high model count, but having approximately 100 of them around won’t hurt. It can also be a good idea to have a few in different colors.
• A Gaming board or scenery- Warhammer 40,000 can be played on any flat surface, but scenery and terrain play a big part in the game if you use the full rules, so any scale-appropriate scenery will do. Games Workshop has plenty of scenery packs you can buy, such as the Battlezone: Manufactorum—Vertigus, but for your first games, you can also get by with soda cans and LEGO bricks on a dinner table.

Starter Sets 

• The Introductory Set contains 16 miniatures, 5 for a Space Marine army and 11 for a Tyranid Army. The rules in this set are incomplete, but it will teach the most basic rules and also comes with some paint and plastic cutters! All the models in this set are push-fit, so you don’t need glue to assemble them. The set also provides a range ruler and six dice to play immediately.

• The Starter Set adds two characters and a couple of units, bringing the total number of miniatures in the box to 38. It also comes with handy reference sheets for all the units, more dice, and an extra ruler for ease of entry into the game.

• The Ultimate Starter Set adds the full rules (but not the actual core book) and a set of plastic scenery to the mix.

Missions

Before you start a game, you have to choose a Mission that describes how the battlefield is set up, what your objectives are, and how to deploy your armies. There are missions available in the core book and in many other publications from Games Workshop. For your first game, the Only War mission in the core book is a good place to start. In that mission, you can either win by destroying the opponent’s army or by scoring victory points by having certain units close to objective markers or slaying the enemy Warlord – which is about as simple as a mission gets. Remember that, to secure objective “markers” on the battlefield, units have to have the special rule “Objective Secured,” so always check datasheets for this when building your army. Many Troop units have it, and detachments can affect it as well.

The Battlefield

The size of the battlefield is generally determined by the size of your armies, and you can look this up in the core book.

In addition to the size of the battlefield and the deployment rules from your mission, you need to set up some terrain as well. As mentioned earlier in this article, this can be basically anything that helps give your battlefield some depth and block line of sight so that units can hide from enemy shooting, but there is an extra layer of complexity to this: Different types of terrain, such as hills, buildings and so on, interact with the game’s rules in different ways, which adds quite a bit of tactical depth to the game.

The core book has rules for all kinds of common terrain, and some codexes have rules for terrain specific to the army of that codex (which can be included in detachments as Fortifications).

You can buy Games Workshop terrain. While it looks cool, it is definitely on the expensive side of things.

Battle Rounds, Turns and Phases in 40k

The game is divided into turns and phases:

A Battle Round consists of a turn for each player.

A Turn is divided into 5 phases. There is a lot to each of them, but it is all detailed in the free downloadable rules. Here’s a very brief rundown of each of them with the most important information a new player needs to know, but if you wish to know about each phase in detail, see here:

1. The Command Phase: This is where you gain Command Points and roll for battle-shock tests.
2. The Movement Phase: This is where all of your units can use their Move characteristic to move across the battlefield, and Advance (add the value of an extra dice roll to their movement). If they advance, they can’t shoot or charge later. Units with multiple models have to move in such a way that models stay within 2 inches of each other (it’s a little more complicated than that, but knowing just this will help you visualize how close your models have to stand to each other)
3. The Shooting Phase: This is where your shooting units get to attack at range. See the section below to see how it works. There are many special rules on weapons and various modifiers that affect this phase, but all the common rules are detailed in the core book.
4. The Charge Phase: In the charge phase, units that didn’t advance or shoot get to see if they can charge into melee range of enemy units.
5. The Fight Phase: In the Fight Phase, units fight in close combat, but there are a few twists: not only the units of the player whose turn it is, but all units in close combat range get to fight in this phase. Units that charged in the previous phase get to fight first.

After all of these phases have been resolved, another turn begins.

Rolling dice: To hit, to wound, save rolls

Rolling six-sided dice solves all sorts of problems in Warhammer 40k: When you want your units to move fast in the Movement phase, you roll a dice and add its value in inches to the unit’s movement. When you want to cast a psychic power, you roll dice. When you want to see if any of your models flee, you roll dice, and so on.

However, there are three dice rolls in particular that you have to know about, since they happen almost every time something tries to do damage to something else:

• The Hit Roll: when you attack anything in close combat or at range, you roll a die and try to roll equal to or higher than your Weapon Skill (for close combat) or Ballistics Skill (for ranged combat). Many circumstances can modify what you have to roll here, such as bonuses from nearby friendly characters, your enemy being in cover and so on, but apart from that, it’s a simple roll to calculate.
• The Wound Roll: If you hit an enemy target, you roll to see if you wound it. This is done by comparing the Strength of your model (in close combat) or of your weapon (in ranged combat) to the Toughness of the enemy target. If both are equal, you wound on a dice roll of 4. If your Strength is higher than the enemy’s Toughness, you wound on a 3, and if it’s the reverse you wound on a 5, and so on.
• The Save Roll: If an enemy succeeds in wounding you, you can roll a dice to see if your can roll higher than your model’s Save characteristic. If you do, you don’t take any damage from that attack. If the enemy’s weapon had Armor Penetration, you have to subtract the value of that from any save roll you make, so it’s harder for you to roll high enough to avoid damage. Some units and characters also have an Invulnerable save, which they can choose to roll for their save roll. An Invulnerable save can’t be modified by Armour Penetration.

Once you’ve memorized how to make each of these rolls, keeping track of a Warhammer 40,000 game becomes much easier.

The Three Ways to Play

Like most of Games Workshop’s games, Warhammer 40,000 is split up into three different ways to play:

• Open Play basically lets you play the game with whatever combination of 40k units you want, in any way you want. This is a great place to start since you can play the game with what you happen to have.
• Matched Play is the balanced, competitive mode of the game, where the Points system is used for army creation. This format is also used for most tournaments you’ll encounter at game stores and clubs. The core book includes many missions for this mode of play.
• Narrative Play is a broad term for games of Warhammer 40,000, where telling a great story is the focus. In the most recent edition of the game, Narrative Play is also the home of one of the most awesome aspects of Warhammer 40,000: The Crusade System. This is a flexible campaign system where your army grows and gains experience from battle to battle, with multiple ways of enhancing and customizing your units as the campaign progresses. Like the campaigns in Warcry, your progress is personal, so you can play against any opponent and still progress in your own Crusade campaign through the results of that battle. This means you can play a campaign even if you can’t muster a dedicated group of players to play every week, for example. The rules for playing a Crusade army are in the core book, but dedicated Crusade rules for each army can be found in Codexes and campaign books.