Parsimonious cook
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2020
- Messages
- 2,208
Well, the main thing I reacted to was the rails on top of the guns, for sights and stuff. I just never imagined 40k stuff had that. It was either this way or that way, stamped machine guns with no customization.
The W40K PnP games (like the aforementioned Dark Heresy, Only War, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch) have a ton of various tacticool weapon upgrades like red dot sights, range finders, foregrips, bipods etc, not to mention a fuckton of various custom munitions. A gun in 40K can be as pimped out as your stereotypical SF M4 (if the owner can afford all that, of course), so having rails and such makes sense.
There is of course the religious believe in not tampering with certain things lest the Machine Spirit might take offence, but with ordinary weapons this doesn’t amount to much (putting a scope and a foregrip on an autogun is not going to make anyone upset). Also quite a lot of people don’t really care and aren’t above jury-rigging all kinds of things if it helps them survive (IIRC the Only War rulebook talked about this in the Imperial Guard context quite a bit).
I guess that people had the impression that weapon customisation is not a thing in 40K due to the table top rules, which were always extremely simplistic (for fairly obvious reasons) in that regard (ie IG squad has two guys with a heavy weapon, one with special weapon a sargeant with pistol & chainsword and six guys with las guns, every weapons has the same stats), but customised weapons were always a thing in the Black Library books as well as in PnP, both of which can afford to take a more detailed look on how the setting works on a micro level.
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