WHAT IS NARRATIVE PLAY? Tabletop Skirmish Games 

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Trazyn popping up on “Choose your favorite model”… man, you really got me. That’s my favourite model

There are historical board games, war games, that seek to represent battles where the opponents were severely mismatched. Literally, one side has no chance at all of actually ‘winning’ the battle. What these games often did was create victory conditions that just required the weaker side to hold out longer and/or inflict more damage to the stronger side than actually occurred in the historical battle. So, with your Catachan detachment, maybe create a scenario with a rolling map, with waves of say, Tyranids, entering every turn. The Catachans are going to get worn down eventually, but victory is determined by how many map boards they penetrate before being wiped out. So a decisive Tyranid victory would be stopping the Guard on the first board, a tactical victory would be if the Catachans made it to the second board and so on, with the Catachans winning decisively by making it to the sixth board.

My thing that I love (that my group hates because they chase the meta) is scenarios. I.e none standard objectives. There is a squad in the top left of the board that you need to push to and free from captivity. Or you need to move a convoy across the board to the opposite corner to escape an ambush. Or starting a convoy in the middle and it gets ambushed from both sides.

The one type of game I really wanna play and the one type of game I never can seem to find in my area.

I would also recommend 3 3.5 or 4th edition for narrative 40k play. Loads of flexibility and unique units and charachters

Great topic really enjoyed this. I don't enjoy chasing the meta!

I love writing lore for my war bands I just hate the hate my Trazyn war and gets cause it’s based on the short story and has non Necron units in the warband

You could use fog which reduces range which fighting tyranids it would be like an action horror movie sounds fun

I'm in the process of naming every one of my unnamed models from my Night Lords, Sisters, and night goblin armies so in a way they are all narrative LoL. Seriously though I would like to see more options for creating crazy narrative armies without penalty. It just makes sense to me that my vampire lord could dominate the will of a bunch of goblins to carry out his biding, or my chaos Lord of my Night Lords could earn the respect of a bunch of Orks because he's the biggest and meanest umie they have ever seen. Even Skarsnik worked with the ratties when it suited his machinations .

So I've been finding your videos more and more intriguing. The one on solo play I actually watched twice. I think we have very similar approaches to gaming (Though I may be a little bit more strongly opinionated and far less inoffensive in stating my opinion as you are). To me Narrative play is the only kind of play I'm interested in with any of GWs games. I personally have very strong opinions on how they're fairly terrible as competitive games, but I'll spare you from them here. I will say that I believe the strength of these games lies in their narrative with the vast amounts of lore and well defined imagery they have. One thing I will bring up with regard to this video, which you mentioned at 12:05, having comets rain down on the battlefield and do D3 damage to units in a certain sector. So this is something I've found annoying with a lot of Games Workshop's approach to narrative gaming. It seems they conflate narrative with 'random stuff happening'. While I do believe there's scope, I think it gets taken way too far and then they don't really do much else. I remember a game they brought out ages back called "Dreadfleet". It was a sailing game that most people were hoping would be a remake of the old Man'o'war. The pieces were gorgeous and thematic. The 'ocean' was a beautiful piece of cloth that looked like an ancient map come to life. They had everything they needed for a fantastic game, but their concept of gameplay was "Let's make everything random! People will love it!" I remember random rains of hailstones/frogs/dachshunds and tons of other 'random events' happening every turn to the point. Even the different card sizes seemed to be totally random. It felt like your role as a player was inconsequential and pretty much just there to perform the mechanical aspects of rolling the dice. Now don't get me wrong, random events have a place in narrative where they function as essentially writing prompts and twists to react to but the strength of a game is that it's a story with player agency. GW tends to forget the player agency part and seem to try and make games that keep the dice interested. Being able to affect the story as a player is where it's at. We really need both. This is why Path To Glory/Crusade are so great. You get to take a fledgling force that you designed, and guide them through the random events that occur. You have some agency in how they develop and respond to casualties, injuries and promotions. Not as MUCH agency as I'd like, but some. Narrative also doesn't have to be completely without challenge. I love the idea of putting myself in the role of choosing whether Frank or Pete would be the best soldier for the job in the upcoming mission, pulling off daring flanking maneuvers (for which there is little real scope or reward in the game) and seeing my choice of equipment pay off in the mission. Scope for the player to make meaningful decisions and see the effects of those decisions drives engagement massively. Ideally I would play more solo/coop games (and I would LOVE a coop Kill Team game) because I enjoy collaborating with friends on actions rather than trying to outmaneuver them. I thoroughly enjoyed Blackstone Fortress for this aspect. Anyway, you have my interest and now I'll be joining your Patreon and Discord to talk your ear off about game design and potentially my ideas for software to GM and guide narrative solo/coop games. You may regret this. I'm sorry. (Oh, and apologies for the wall of text comment)

This is where in my opinion the hobby has gone wrong (I understand why) it all used to be about narrative events “back in the day” and the game was focussed around creating stories and narrative battles....

Homebrew is always a good experience and that's what makes these types of games so special not just 40k but the table top gaming in general.