Making ones own rules

In the grim darkness of the future there is only war...
and various other rules disputes.

Making ones own rules.

I think we have all done it at some point or another, sat down and thought "Man do the 40k writers actually play 40k?" I have on more than one occation, which lead to me like a million other players, "fixing the rules" to better fit things. Ive seen players decide to stack cover and armour saves (because why cant a space marine benefit from both the ruins and his power armour) Ive seen people limit the number of warp charges a player can generate, Ive seen bans on certain unbound lists. Basically we all think we can do better than GW.

Now in some cases I would agree with you. I think it makes sense to have both cover and armour. In fact you should be able to take cover, then armour, then invunerable saves, if you consider how these would actually function in reality. However, the main thing people forget is that, your 14 point space marine, has been costed based on his abilities in the current rules. If you change the rules, some things get better and some worse (look at 6th to 7th ed for a recent example).

People saw genestealers as a good grab for money in 5th ed, but they were over costed in 6th ed due to their loss of charging from outflank. This was a single rules change that "nerfed" the unit because it stayed the same cost but got worse. Now youre probably thinking well Duh, I know what nerfing is but the truth is, is that when you change the rules you change the value for points. 

If you reintroduce fleet as "run and charge" like we had in 5th, you might not think it is too broken. It might even make genestealers more viable. However the main problem is current codex writing takes into account what fleet does in the current rules and charges a unit a number of points equal to what that ability does.

For example Daemonettes were prices down from 14 points per model to 9 points per model at the cost of an attack and the changes to fleet. If you give them the old fleet for free, well you are just handing me free points.

Space marines are 14 points because their best save is 3+ or saving 2/3 shots. If you let them take armour and cover, then you are giving them the ability to stop more shots than their points calculations allowed for. As suddenly weird things happen, like space marines in cover being more resilient than terminators, and orks just feeling really bad about everyone else but them getting a second save.

Anyway the point is homebrew rules are neat to try, but I can almost guarantee they will benefit your army in some way more than they will benefit your opponent, and you end up carelessly changing rules to make the game better only to find out all youre doing is shifting a meta.

Anyway no list as of yet, still pretty tired from last night, we played a bunch of games trying to test out a friends new rule system. Ill just make a second post for it.