On Friday, Games Workshop revealed the first rules details for the new Space Marine detachments that will arrive in their upcoming 11th edition codex. Unlike the army-wide detachments of Warhammer 40k 10th edition, the new detachments each provide a targeted set of buffs to a smaller portion of the army. But more than the rules, what interests me here is that Games Workshop now has an amazing tool for imbuing army building with more flavor, personalization, and storytelling – it just hasn’t quite realized how to do that properly yet.
One of GW’s stated ambitions for Warhammer 40k 11th edition is to imbue more atmosphere and narrative drama into the game. I think they’re on the right track. Between asymmetrical objectives that push armies to specific strategies, and more compelling terrain, 11th edition does a better job of distracting you from the fact you’re playing a game than 10th edition did. The new, more granular detachment system is part of this.
As revealed on WarCom on Friday, if you want to play a codex-compliant Chapter you’ll take the Gladius detachment, which provide buffs pretty evenly across the army list. If your army favors a different way of war, you’ll choose three other detachments from a selection of 14. Three of these, all mutually exclusive, support a particular philosophy of war, by buffing a specific Combat Doctrine. Then, if your Chapter favors one kind of unit over others, there are a variety of detachments to cater for them, including two mutually exclusive detachments for each of the three different classes of power armor.
It puts me in mind of the Chapter Traits system from 4th edition codex Space Marines – and that’s a comparison GW should welcome, if its goal is to imbue the game with a stronger sense of narrative. Chapter Traits were the first ever system for players to give rules to their own, custom Space Marine chapters.
First, you would choose how far your chapter diverged from the Codex Astartes – the more divergent you were, the more freedom you had when picking advantageous Chapter Traits, but the more drawbacks you had to take. Some traits and drawbacks were mutually exclusive – a chapter with the ‘Have Pride in your Colours’ drawback couldn’t also have the pro-infiltration ‘See, But Don’t Be Seen’ advantage. At most you’d pick two advantages, but these could radically alter how your army played.
On the macro level, Chapter Traits and Detachments fill the same role: they allow a player to build an army the way they want to, and give it a unique playstyle. But there are key differences between the two systems that mean I’m not declaring a new narrative golden age just yet.
One big difference is how they affect list construction. In 4th edition, armies were limited by the Force Organization chart. Each unit fit into one of five organization slots, and Fast Attack, Heavy Support, and Elite slots – the fun ones – were limited to just three units of any kind each. Chapter Traits that let you take units in additional slots oculd be transformational for army building. If you wanted to play a lot of dreadnoughts, you did it by taking ‘Heed the Ancients’ to run them in both Heavy Support and Elite Slots.
In 11th edition, the nearest equivalent to Heed the Ancients is Ironclad Champions, which is going to buff dreadnoughts. In fact, they may get used in very similar scenarios. Heed the Ancients was mandatory to take more than three dreadnoughts and useless if you took less; Ironclad Champions will be so good you can’t ignore it if you take more than three dreadnoughts, and a questionable use of a detachment slot if you don’t.
But while they’ll be used in similarly composed armies, they feel different. Heed the Ancients lets you do something unique; Ironclad Champions is simply the right choice. It feels like Heed the Ancients opens up list building options, and like Ironclad Champions is just an inevitable conclusion.
I emphasize the word feel here, because rules with identical outcomes can be perceived in extremely different ways. Armor saving throws feel like they give you agency during your opponent’s turn – mathematically, they don’t. Presentation matters, and that can exist even at the highest levels of rules organization.
Detachments are a universal system across all Warhammer 40k factions, albeit implemented differently in each case. That’s really good for accessibility and consistency – there are merits to this approach. In contrast, Chapter Traits were a Space Marine thing. They developed ideas from the similar, but more granular, Regimental Doctrines from the revised 3rd edition Imperial Guard codex. The medium is the message: the fact that the rules were bespoke carried with it the assumption that they were tailored to the needs of the faction and its identity, not driven by a more abstract concern like the rules design strategy for the edition.
The newly revealed rules for the Gravis Linebreaker Force and Gravis Siege Force show a similar abstraction. These are mutually exclusive detachments for models in Gravis power armor, one offensive, the other defensive. There’s bugger all explanation why one set of Gravis marines moves fast and the other is harder to kill – these are just rules the models get. There’s plenty of narrative justification that could be exploited: different sub-patterns of Gravis armor, a doctrinal schism in how the armor should be used, different geneseed reactions to Cawl’s novel armor types.
Chapter Traits were much simpler than Detachments, but they had a whole way to express story ideas that Detachments don’t: costs. Taking Traits meant taking Drawbacks that restricted your army building choices. In contrast, the only cost to taking a Detachment is the opportunity cost of not taking a different one.
Despite all of this nitpicking, the 11th edition detachments are moving in a promising direction. There are tools here for the design team to attach the lore of the game more closely to the rules, and empower players to feel more ownership of their armies. It just isn’t there yet. If you’ve got ideas for how the game could imbue more fluff into the detachment system, I’d love to hear in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
