Warhammer 40k Tabletop Thread XLIV - "Take a Shot of Paint Water"

[Cheesegear]

I like the idea that you'd look at something that gets really into the weeds of like, the Great Man theory of history, and whether at a big enough scale the actions of individuals can meaningfully change the future, and decide that that's what makes Warhammer 40K stupid.

Not necessarily.
It's a question of knowledge. Knowledge changes everything. If you know what's going to happen next, and you can tell the right people, and if you can tell enough of the right people, could things be changed?
Of course.

Not the Tolkien fantasy races in spaaaace, not the galaxy-spanning empire whose main use for its kilometre-long FTL ships is to ferry people to the surface of planets so they can reenact WW1 or have chainsaw sword fights, not the literal wizards.

As if absurdity counters the need for consistency?

"If you can suspend your disbelief for absurdity, why not inconsistency?"

Is that your question?

This can't be *the* darkest timeline because its got Ultramarines in it.

40K is satire, after all.

Another is that we're just playing the odds and they just haven't paid out so far. No one has time travelled and improved something yet; in-universe because it needs the right person in the right place at the right time, and in Real World because an author hasn't bothered to write that story yet (Unless you maybe count The First Heretic).

GW stock falls,
40K Grognards are mad,
New Kits aren't selling,
...Someone has to go back and prevent Primaris Marines,
...Undo Cawl,
...We need Firstborn back,
...We need #Old40K
...We need...Matt Ward!

Or setting defining. Definitely the 3rd Edition-flavour of ultra grimdark and very nihilistic, but... I know more than one person who says that's their favourite edition of 40k.

Rules? Or the narrative?

Codex: Armageddon and Codex: Eye of Terror, all of the Index Astartes...Those were neat.

Suggestions welcome.

None right now. ((thumbs up))

There are degrees of 'stupid' and I think a lot of the disagreement is due to some people having a lower tolerance than others.

We've had the discussion a few times where people don't understand the difference between silliness, absurdity and satire. And how all three just seem to be synonyms both for each other, and also a synonym for comedy for a lot of people.

Orks are a humanoid fungus that reproduce via spores.
That's silly. Haha. Wait. If Orks reproduce via spores couldn't they turn up anywhere? Couldn't you have repeat infestations? Wouldn't that cause a lot of problems for other races? Fungus spores aren't a joke, Jim.
Yes.

Orks' economy works via their teeth. Which grow back.
That's silly. Haha. Wait. If Orks' economy is based on their teeth, wouldn't some Orks purposefully knock their own teeth out? Could some Orks just be, well, genetically advantaged to have more and/or better teeth? Could a Mad Dok inject an Ork with a serum that causes teeth growth?
Yes.

The Waaagh! Field means that anything an Ork believes is true, becomes true.
Well that's stupid. It effectively means that on some scale that means that an Ork can do literally anything if they simply believe they can. If you think about this at all for more than four seconds, Orks are locally omnipotent. If you lean into this idea even a little bit, if one Ork is even a little bit clever, and they know this, wouldn't every story involving Orks, break?
Oh nooo we didn't think this through. We tried to make a fun meme but ended up breaking things.

The Waaagh! Field is a protective shield against the corruption of the Warp; And also functions as a low-level empathic field. So that if one Ork believes that Red Ones Go Fasta!, the empathic field allows them to very easily convince another Ork that Red Ones Go Fasta! However, this does not make it true. But it can become memetically true, an Ork urban myth. It also means that if a very strong Ork can foundationally believe that they are the prophet of Gods, that Very Strong Ork probably doesn't even need to actually say anything at all. Orks will flock from literally the other side of the Galaxy towards that Very Strong Ork without even knowing why. They'll just do it. Because the Waaagh! Field is drawing them.
That's absurd! ...But I see the logic. Is this why Orks can travel through the Warp without Gellar Fields?
Yes.

Some Orks are genetically richer (remember the teeth?), and this means that their entire clan has better stuff, and ultimately believes that their clan is the best clan, and because of that empathic field, it kind of just...Becomes true.
Very good. Very satire. Well done.
We're pretty proud of that one, yes.

Orks get stronger the more they fight. Orks get stronger the more Orks are around them because of the Waaagh! Field and empathy.
Haha. That's silly. Wouldn't that mean that it would benefit Orks to be in large groups, all of the time, and also fight, all of the time?
Correct.

If you can get from point A to point B faster than the speed of light, then you can violate causality.

So what you're saying is that Warp travel is one of the things in 40K that's stupid if you think about it for more than four seconds.

I think 40K has always been very clear that it's a setting where humanity went down the wrong leg of the trousers of time tens of thousands of years ago, and has no way back.

Master of Mankind straight up says that the truth is; The game was rigged from the start.
The game was over when The Emperor found the monolith. The game was over before the Emperor found the monolith because the monolith was already there to be found.

While I can't say for certain that I disagree with any of that, I still come back to my old standby - there is NOTHING in 40k that couldn't have been solved by beating Erebus to death with the ragged end of Kor Phaeron's spinal column back in, say, M30.8.

Personally I think the Aeldari hedonism'ing their way into birthing a God and tearing open a gaping hole in space, probably caused something to happen that might not be solved by beating Erebus to death.

the end of the possible happy endings for humanity is the Dark Age of Technology.

There is no happy ending for Humanity, and all the problems caused in the narrative are caused because The Emperor is trying to find one, and can't, because it's simply not there.
Orks
Tyranids
Necrons
Chaos, inevitably.
...Eventually, Humanity loses. It just does. The Emperor is not willing to accept that.

The end justifies the means...Except the end The Emperor wants isn't possible, so that just means that the means are...Bad and lead nowhere.

The interesting argument to me would be: what if there are no pivotal moments?

If you time travel to the past, can you change the past? If yes, you have free will and there are no pivotal moments.
We...Agree? I think?

The idea that you'd assume it's settled and that Great Men really do decide the course of history as part of this particular chain of reasoning

As I said earlier; Knowledge can change the course of history. Once you know something, you can't un-know it (I mean, you can, but it's a whole thing...). Once enough people know something, they can't un-know it.

when you're trying to decide what's too silly for you in the game where space orcs with mushroom wigs fight Victorian redcoats with laser guns... it seems very back-to-front to me.

I have no problems with silliness.
I have no problems with absurdity - it's the whole point of the setting!
I can even understand satire with the wrinkles in my brain!

...I have problems with inconsistency, and the things that cause it.

[LCP]

As if absurdity counters the need for consistency?

"If you can suspend your disbelief for absurdity, why not inconsistency?"

Is that your question?

No. I wasn't really asking a question, I was making a point - but if you want me to expand that point, it's that the point of suspending disbelief is to ignore inconsistencies, not absurdity.

Absurdity is not unrealistic. It happens in the real world all the time. It can be funny, or sad, or anything in between. The way my uncle's dog sings along when you play the piano at their house is absurd. The way that a politician ends up repeating exactly the same phrase over and over in an interview because they don't want to directly answer a question is absurd. The things kids come out with every day are absurd. It doesn't mean any of them aren't real.

40K's absurdity isn't a mistake or a plot hole, it's a narrative choice - but because they've made that choice, they've included tons of stuff that is not self-consistent. In order to portray that entertaining absurdity, they've created a fictional world where everything from the physics to the logistics just doesn't stack up. I'm not even going to bother getting into examples because I think that would be an insult to your intelligence - you know how numberless the examples are.

I don't think this should be seen as a problem, because this is a story, not a simulation. Approaching a story as something where you ought to check the authors' homework for mistakes is joyless and pointless - the vast majority of stories are not intended as watertight models of an alternative reality, they are intended to communicate something. The only time that such a mistake matters is if it gets in the way of that communication by taking you out of the story.

So my point is, if you can already suspend your disbelief to the point that you don't think that a society like the Imperium should immediately collapse - where you think that like, 40K hive cities could really work, where you think that 10km-long space cathedrals ferrying people to fight ground wars with swords could really be a feasible way to control a galactic empire, where you take it for granted that tyranid hive fleets are somehow beating the 2nd law of thermodynamics - but you take issue with an inconsistency that is true of every piece of FTL fiction ever written - then you're reading the wrong book. There is hard sci-fi out there that avoids this level of inconsistency, it's generally much drier. But 40K sailed past that mark at the outset, because that level of self-consistency was never what they were trying to communicate.

It's why 40K is so full of references to other genres, other eras of history, and mythology - it's a cool, spacey, gothic coat of paint over recognisable stories, even if those stories don't actually hang together when transplanted into space in the far future. You can enjoy it for what it is, or you can pick it apart - in which case it falls into dust at the slightest touch, and I think the authors' reaction to that would be a shrug and a 'what did you expect?'. It's like going to the opera and asking why they're all being so melodramatic.

So what you're saying is that Warp travel is one of the things in 40K that's stupid if you think about it for more than four seconds.

No. I'm saying all FTL travel in any fiction creates this problem. The choices of the 40K writers in how they dressed up their version of FTL are neither here nor there. If you want to enjoy science fiction about people crossing the galaxy without taking hundreds or thousands of years to do it, then the potential time travel is an 'inconsistency' you're going to have to live with. You can go get a job in a patent office in Bern and start working on your own theory of relativity, or you can just roll with it, 'cos it's a story, and 'we don't know how this works' can be fun and interesting too.

If you time travel to the past, can you change the past? If yes, you have free will and there are no pivotal moments.
We...Agree? I think?

No, you haven't understood my point.

If I'm standing on train tracks, and I see a train coming, I have a choice to move or not. If I choose not to, the fact that I can't stop the train doesn't mean I don't have free will.

If I jump in a fast-flowing river, I can swim with the current or against it, I'll still always move in the same direction. That doesn't mean I don't have free will.

The point (which I already wrote a lot on and linked you an article for, I'm kinda disappointed you didn't even seem to try to understand it) that having free will and being historically consequential are two entirely separate things. If you believe in free will then you believe that every single person on this planet has it; I bet you don't believe that every single person on the planet is consequential. The question then arises - at enough scale, is any one person consequential, or is history ultimately driven by big, statistical forces? Did Rome really fall because of the choices of individual emperors and their enemies, or were they just the people in that place, at that time, when the climactic and social conditions were driving inevitably towards that outcome? Their choices almost definitely affected how it happened, but could they have changed that it happened? That has no bearing on whether they have free will, it just revolves around how much influence one human can ever have over the history of millions.

[Cheesegear]

Absurdity is not unrealistic.

As I said in the previous thread; Brave New World was once considered absurdist satire. And yet here we are.

Robocop and Starship Troopers (both have the same director) are absurd. And yet...

40K's absurdity isn't a mistake or a plot hole, it's a narrative choice - but because they've made that choice, they've included tons of stuff that is not self-consistent. In order to portray that entertaining absurdity, they've created a fictional world where everything from the physics to the logistics just doesn't stack up.

If the physics or logistics don't stack up, it's still interesting to me to explore that. And, once you know how things can be broken...Does it matter?

For example;
I state that traveling backwards in time has the potential to break everything, because there are lots of major events in the timeline that very easily could be prevented - or at the very least changed - with foreknowledge. And there is at least one major faction (Space Marines) in the setting who would or could be motivated to do so.

The response is that time-travel is a closed loop. If you travel back in time it's because you were supposed to, if you try to change something you instead cause it (classic trope), and you go back to the future with a fun story about that one time you went to the past. Because if events play out differently, you would never have gone back to change them. Therefore paradox. I understand. I've read at least three hard sci-fi books. Three!

Does that matter? ...Yes. Because ultimately the vast majority of 40K is Heroic Fiction (Great Men, if you will), and the entire genre breaks (for me at least), if I'm to accept the possibility that the people I'm reading about, don't actually have free will. Every time I consume a media that deals with time travel, I immediately ask about free will, and what that means.

I'm not saying "Hive Worlds don't work as written. They can't work as written."

I'm saying "Every. Single. Story. Feels Broken. Even the ones that don't take place on Hive Worlds."

Now, of course I can concede that some people don't believe in free will, and that we are simply a product of our circumstances, not our actions...But that's a conversation for a different thread that I don't think would even be allowed on this forum.

Back to the Future is an incredibly popular franchise, and if the time-travel paradox were to happen; Well Marty theoretically just fades out. If Marty changes the past...He just fizzles out and the timeline just continues. Of course we know that that doesn't make sense, because if Marty changes the past then how can he go back to change the past if he doesn't exist? Uhh...Back to the Future runtime ~2 hours. Yeah look we can't answer that.

In my opinion, 40K "got serious" in 4th Ed.; 2004 (Well ****, I didn't realise it's been exactly 20 years since 4th Ed., but there you go). There's a lot more...Space...In 40K to deal with these kinds of issues. 40K isn't a two-hour movie that you watch for a bit and leave. Hell, there are 40K lore videos on YouTube with a longer runtime than the original BttF. 40K has had a lot of time and a lot of space.

The only time that such a mistake matters is if it gets in the way of that communication by taking you out of the story.

...Such as telling me that it's possible that heroes don't have free will. Because the mere existence of time travel and causality says that they don't.

where you take it for granted that tyranid hive fleets are somehow beating the 2nd law of thermodynamics

Well now that you mention it...

If I'm standing on train tracks, and I see a train coming, I have a choice to move or not. If I choose not to, the fact that I can't stop the train doesn't mean I don't have free will.

Agreed.

If you believe in free will then you believe that every single person on this planet has it; I bet you don't believe that every single person on the planet is consequential. The question then arises - at enough scale, is any one person consequential, or is history ultimately driven by big, statistical forces?

As I said, when we're talking about 40K, when I hear of time travel to the past it's always "Some random Company no-one cares about on a planet that's never been mentioned before and something, something, everybody died and no future materials were ever recovered. The end."

I'm saying, specifically, three Ultramarine Companies on a Battle Barge, which is approximately 300 Primaris Marines, with auxilliary staff and ship's crew, and maybe a named Character (let's go with Sicarius) arrive shortly before the Fall of Cadia from the future, with full knowledge of how it plays out. They are even fully aware of how and why Phalanx arrives too late to really save the day.

What do? Can the Ultramarines prevent the Dark Imperium? Three Companies plus staff should be consequential, IMO... If they can't, I, personally, think that that's really lame due to what I consider good storytelling in either the genres of Heroic or Military Fiction*. It's fine as a Sci-Fi story because time-travel paradox. I understand causality and how you can't break it and that's hard sci-fi and good. Fine.
*The reason I specified genre(s) is because it does matter.

I guess at the end of the day if GW ever wants to undo the Fall of Cadia (or more specifically undo Cawl and the removal of Firstborn); They have an out, and they can have my idea. Do a time-travel and just fix it.

[LCP]

You're still missing my point, that you can have fixed historical outcomes and individual free will and they can be completely compatible. I'm not going to type it out again, I'll just invite you to go back and properly read what I wrote before.

If your complaint about this kind of story is not that individuals don't have free will, but that the Fate of the World should be Shaped by Great Heroes... then your problem is not with free will. Your problem is a much narrower, ideological one. And again, there are other works of fiction that cater explicitly to that ideology... but they are really bad, I'm not going to recommend them the same way I was recommending hard sci-fi. It's very much not a universal feature of 'heroic fiction' - if you go right back to e.g. the Iliad, literature is full of stories of very heroic heroes being unable to escape destiny.

I'm saying, specifically, three Ultramarine Companies on a Battle Barge, which is approximately 300 Primaris Marines, with auxilliary staff and ship's crew, and maybe a named Character (let's go with Sicarius) arrive shortly before the Fall of Cadia from the future, with full knowledge of how it plays out. They are even fully aware of how and why Phalanx arrives too late to really save the day.

What do? Can the Ultramarines prevent the Dark Imperium? Three Companies plus staff should be consequential,

OK, cool. They do that, they win, medals all round. 100 years, 1,000 years later, whenever, Cadia falls anyway. Because it was always going to fall, because Chaos is entropy, because the Imperium had to get lucky every time but Chaos only had to get lucky once, and had eternity to try. Because if something is under constant pressure it will eventually fail. And your time travellers have no knowledge of how to save the day this time, because this time it's going to be one of the infinite number of different ways that the same outcome can happen.

Your time-travelling heroes have free will. They change the details of the history. Their choices matter hugely to the individuals around them. But they can't change the ultimate arc of history, any more than I can stop the tide coming in by choosing where I stand on the beach. They are 300 guys with guns and this is a history of trillions of people, over thousands of years, over a galaxy 100 light years wide. It's just a question of scale, not causality. To stop something at that scale happening you have to unpick it at that scale, which is not something you can do with a countable number of interventions from a countable number of people.

If you find that disheartening, that's fine, but that doesn't mean it's inconsistent, or that the story has no meaning. If you think that the details of your life don't matter, that the impacts you have on individuals around you are irrelevant compared to being able to permanently change the course of the future... that seems to me like a much sadder world view than any time travel story. 'Cos you know, there's only one way anything and everything ends, eventually - and no-one's free will is going to change that either.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

I guess at the end of the day if GW ever wants to undo the Fall of Cadia (or more specifically undo Cawl and the removal of Firstborn); They have an out, and they can have my idea. Do a time-travel and just fix it.

Perhaps not even that is required - maybe there's something hidden in the primaris work that causes them to fail or go rogue or something, or it turns out that Cawl's actually been corrupted by Vashtor and all the primaris are now loyal to them as their own faction, but the high lords suddenly remember that they've got the best part of 10,000 years worth of samples of tithed geneseed from most of the chapters just sat around doing nothing.

[Artanis]

I'm not as much of a subject matter expert as some others here, but doesn't backwards time travel in 40K generally involve the Warp? Where the Chaos Gods live?

Seems to me like if somebody was in the process of travelling back in time to do something that the Chaos Gods didn't like, then wouldn't the Chaos Gods just...y'know...not let them travel back in time?


Like the example of 300 Ultramarines. They go into the Warp, start travelling back in time to Cadia, and either the Chaos Gods let them because they won't stop Cadia from falling (and the Chaos Gods get rid of an extra 300 Ultramarines in the process); or the Ultramarines *would* save Cadia and the Chaos Gods just don't let them go back in time in the first place?

So it seems to me like everybody who goes backwards in time could absolutely still have free will, but are only allowed to time-travel in the first place because they're too inconsequential for that free will to affect anything meaningful. Anybody who could do something useful with however many years' worth of foreknowledge just....gets stopped from going back in time by the four mega-entities that run the time machine itself?

[Gwynchan'rGwyll]

I mean, this whole conversation is on a shaky premise. Yes, a powerful or influential force sent back in time might be able to change the course of history. But how slim are the chances of a powerful enough or influential enough force being sent back to the right time and in the right place where they can actually exercise their power and influence effectually? Most warp travel isn't entire companies of Space Marines. Most warp travel doesn't have a single space marine. Putting aside narrative imperative (thank you Pratchett), if a ship is sent back in time (which I think we can agree is a preposterously rare event), it's most likely to be a random supply ship. If a ship with any influence or power is sent back in time, it's likely an Imperial Navy ship or a troop transport; how much power and influence can such actors really exert over the past?

So really, the question of "why haven't 300 space marines accidentally found themselves back in time and been able to prevent Cadia" is two-pronged.
(1) Probability: it's just improbable.
(2) Narrative: nobody wants to write that.

Unless I'm unaware of some actual case where what I thought was a hypothetical actually happened in which case feel free to correct me.

[Wraith]

I'm not as much of a subject matter expert as some others here, but doesn't backwards time travel in 40K generally involve the Warp? Where the Chaos Gods live?

Seems to me like if somebody was in the process of travelling back in time to do something that the Chaos Gods didn't like, then wouldn't the Chaos Gods just...y'know...not let them travel back in time?

The Chaos Gods are definitely inevitable, but they're very rarely shown to be omnipotent or infallible and they occasionally set events in motion that don't work out as well as they might - if they could do that, Chaos would never lose anything, I guess? Or (more likely) one of them will do something specifically to spite the others - sending 300 Ultramarines back in time to mess up Mortarion would be just fine by Slaanesh.

If nothing else, there are other ways to travel through time as well, rare as they are. The Necrons pre-date the rise of the Chaos powers, their technology is not at all warp-based and they can time travel. It's also possible that it could happen via the webway - that was built by the Old Ones who were technologically superior to the Necrontyr - which at least theoretically implies that the Aeldari might have access to it, somewhere.

And, going back full circle, there's practically nothing that enough Orks can't do, either with their wacky, one-of-a-kind tech or by all thinking about it really hard. I'm not even being facetious, I'm genuinely on board for that to happen. Turns out The Beast was just Nazdreg Urdgrub after having been around the continuum a few times.

[Grim Portent]

The Chaos Gods are definitely inevitable, but they're very rarely shown to be omnipotent or infallible and they occasionally set events in motion that don't work out as well as they might - if they could do that, Chaos would never lose anything, I guess? Or (more likely) one of them will do something specifically to spite the others - sending 300 Ultramarines back in time to mess up Mortarion would be just fine by Slaanesh.

If nothing else, there are other ways to travel through time as well, rare as they are. The Necrons pre-date the rise of the Chaos powers, their technology is not at all warp-based and they can time travel. It's also possible that it could happen via the webway - that was built by the Old Ones who were technologically superior to the Necrontyr - which at least theoretically implies that the Aeldari might have access to it, somewhere.

And, going back full circle, there's practically nothing that enough Orks can't do, either with their wacky, one-of-a-kind tech or by all thinking about it really hard. I'm not even being facetious, I'm genuinely on board for that to happen. Turns out The Beast was just Nazdreg Urdgrub after having been around the continuum a few times.

I think interpreting the Chaos Gods as omnipotent and omnipresent but not in concert is the most reasonable interpretation of some of the things they've done. Khorne in particular has done world destroying stuff on a whim a couple of times, like beheading all soldiers on a planet (implied to be an Imperial planet) simultanenously because they signed a peace treaty to end a long standing civil war. Wasn't even in a Warp Storm, he just got mad that they made peace and claimed the heads he considered his by right. The universe is their plaything, and the current state is the form of competition they find the most fun at the moment, when they get bored they'll pull out all the stops for a big grand finale and then leave to find something else to do. They're basically us, horrifying beings from outside reality tormenting the mortals and daemons of 40k for out amusement, but abiding by 'rules' that make it more fun.

Like yes, the Chaos Gods could probably send all the forces of the Traitor Legions and an army of daemons back to the bronze age Earth and kill the Emperor when he was singularly vulnerable, but why would they want to? Even if they wanted to, would they all agree on how to do it? Even if they all agreed on the how, would they agree on the outcome?

[Saambell]

I mean, the number one story I remember of time travel in 40k was in the Ork 3rd/4th edition codex where a Ork warboss travels back in time, finds himself, and kills his past version to have a second copy of his favourite gun. It notes the "resulting confusion" stops the Waugh, but does not mention if there was like some Paradox stuff that was a local issue, or just Orks meeting themselves and fighting each other. Another story was a Planet having a Nurgle CSM ship appear near them, so they called to the nearest Space Marine chapter, which sent a ship that way. On the way through the warp they get sent through a Nurgle part of the warp and come out in their past covered in Nurgle ooze, which is what caused the Planet to call for help. So they were the very ship that they were called to come fight.

On the topic of free will, a whole bit in the Horus Heresy was a Daemon telling Sanguinius exactly when and where he would die, trying to mentally defeat him. Sanguinius however was like "So you are telling me that I literally can't die in any other situation?" and the Daemon immediately knew it had made a mistake. Sanguinius then went and charged a Warlord Titan with a spear. And won. So yes, there's hard set in stone fates in the 40k setting. But there can still be heroes who use this knowledge to do good, or as close to good as they think they can.

[Wraith]

Like yes, the Chaos Gods could probably send all the forces of the Traitor Legions and an army of daemons back to the bronze age Earth and kill the Emperor when he was singularly vulnerable, but why would they want to? Even if they wanted to, would they all agree on how to do it? Even if they all agreed on the how, would they agree on the outcome?

This is a point brought up a few times in some of the stories. The worst thing that Chaos could have done is win the Heresy - with the Emperor dead and his forces sundered, the next inevitable outcome is that within a few hundred years, the Traitors exterminate 99% of humanity and then each other. The warp goes quiet, the Chaos Gods fade away, and the galaxy goes quiet long enough for the 1% to start rebuilding in relative peace.

With the Heresy lost, Chaos unites against a common foe of nearly equal strength, and spends the next 10,000... 15,0000.... 40,000 years slowly grinding themselves away and feeding the gods for just as long.

On the topic of free will, a whole bit in the Horus Heresy was a Daemon telling Sanguinius exactly when and where he would die, trying to mentally defeat him. Sanguinius however was like "So you are telling me that I literally can't die in any other situation?" and the Daemon immediately knew it had made a mistake. Sanguinius then went and charged a Warlord Titan with a spear. And won. So yes, there's hard set in stone fates in the 40k setting. But there can still be heroes who use this knowledge to do good, or as close to good as they think they can.

This is a key reason as to why Sanguinius fights Horus in the first place. Spoiled because the specifics are in a fairly recent book:

Spoiler

Show

He realises that if he fights Horus, he's going to die. That's set in stone. But he still has a choice - if he goes and fights Horus right now at the height of the Heresy, then that leaves time for the Emperor to do something afterwards that wins the war. But if Sanguinious runs and hides, then it's logical that Horus must win the war and defeat the Emperor - if he doesn't, how could he then chase down and kill Sanguinious later, which also must happen?

Sanguinious had to die by Horus' hand. The when and the where were Sanguinious' free-will choice, and he took the heroic option to give a chance at a better outcome for others in his passing. This is the "good" timeline, spoiled only by the Emperor's inability to capitalise on the situation and thus plunge the galaxy into an Even Worse timeline.

[Lord Torath]

This reminds me of Therkla's second fight with Kohaku in Spoiler Alert.

[Cheesegear]

You're still missing my point, that you can have fixed historical outcomes and individual free will and they can be completely compatible.

But my point is; "Free Will + Time Travel to the Past = No Fixed Outcomes."

If time moves forward - and only forward - we can only make choices based on the knowledge we have.

If we could go back to the past, with new knowledge, hypothetically, we could change the past.
"If you could live in any time period, when would you live?" ...That hypothetical which gets asked all the time, assumes you would live in the past with the knowledge you have now. You can change a lot.

In hard sci-fi? No. You would hit the time-traveller's paradox. You can't go back to the past to change things if there's no past to change.

In soft-as-jelly sci-fi? So soft it borders on fantasy, rather than sci-fi. You can change anything you want.
Time-travel in 40K is seemingly random. Anyone could go back to any point in time, at any time. That means anyone can time-travel. Why not someone who matters? It's very...Convenient...That no-one who matters has time-travelled. They might actually change something.

Your time-travelling heroes have free will. They change the details of the history. Their choices matter hugely to the individuals around them. But they can't change the ultimate arc of history

I partially agree.
But that is also so...Boring?

Why am I reading half a dozen books about this guy called Uriel Ventris, when I know individuals don't matter? Ciaphas Cain is "Just Some Guy", I guess. Remember that time Fischig shot Eisenhorn's knees out, so Eisenhorn had Fischig possessed by Cherubael? Just kidding none of that matters. Why even read?

"...And then somebody in Sven Bloodhowl's strike team blew up the shield generator which allowed Phalanx to fire upon The Will of Eternity. The end."

...I mean. That's one way to write it - and in fact, that's the way it basically was written. But it's so...Boring. At least Sven Bloodhowl gets a specific name-drop. That's...Something.

They are 300 guys with guns...

...Said arms and armour are from the future, and those 300 guys have foreknowledge of all the events that play out, and when and where ships and people are going to be, and they have a very strong motivation to prevent the Dark Imperium.

and this is a history of trillions of people, over thousands of years, over a galaxy 100 light years wide. It's just a question of scale, not causality.

So if Cadia doesn't blow up, the Pylons aren't destroyed. If the Pylons aren't destroyed. If the pylons aren't destroyed then the Eye of Terror doesn't get bigger. If the Eye of Terror doesn't get bigger, the Great Rift doesn't open.

Of course it's about causality. The Aeldari have an entire vocation and civilisation plan based on causality, and how and where and when to set up those dominos. The problem is that Humanity keeps flipping the table because Humanity doesn't want to play dominos - it wants to play speedchess with Chaos. ...I could write a whole story on that analogy.

Perhaps not even that is required - maybe there's something hidden in the primaris work that causes them to fail or go rogue or something, or it turns out that Cawl's actually been corrupted by Vashtor...

Well, turns out you're basically correct already.

It's strongly hinted at that the Primaris Marines - at least the original Awakened - had some sort of hypno-indoctrination that ultimately made them loyal to Cawl. The Dark Angels found it deeply disturbing.
Cawl is basically an AI at this point - but he said he's not an AI, so that's fine. We can trust the AI when it tells us it's not an AI.

...That storyline appears to have been dropped in 10th Ed.

Seems to me like if somebody was in the process of travelling back in time to do something that the Chaos Gods didn't like, then wouldn't the Chaos Gods just...y'know...not let them travel back in time?
[...]
So it seems to me like everybody who goes backwards in time could absolutely still have free will, but are only allowed to time-travel in the first place because they're too inconsequential for that free will to affect anything meaningful.

Again; I'm willing to accept that. But that's lame and I hate it.

I mean, this whole conversation is on a shaky premise. Yes, a powerful or influential force sent back in time might be able to change the course of history. But how slim are the chances of a powerful enough or influential enough force being sent back to the right time and in the right place where they can actually exercise their power and influence effectually?

It just has to happen once.

If nothing else, there are other ways to travel through time as well, rare as they are. The Necrons pre-date the rise of the Chaos powers, their technology is not at all warp-based and they can time travel.

Which either says:
a) Necrons can't change anything even with access to time-travel. Or,
b) The Dark Imperium is actually the good ending that the Necrons temporally engineered...But I thought the Necrons built the Pylons, and they're fully aware of Chaos - The Anathema - and Necrons have just as much reason to not like Chaos as anyone else, but they still allowed Cadia to Fall and- Go to [A], I guess?

...Wherever he is, I hope Creed is okay.

[LCP]

But my point is; "Free Will + Time Travel to the Past = No Fixed Outcomes."

If time moves forward - and only forward - we can only make choices based on the knowledge we have.

You still haven't understood the point.

Assume free will. You travel to the past. It should be trivially obvious that there are still things you can't stop.

• You can't stop the formation of stars and planets. That is a fixed outcome because of the laws of gravity. You could jump into each condensing cloud of gas and wave your arms around real hard, but they would just keep condensing somewhere else. This is how things go once you start the universe running.
• You probably can't stop the evolution of life on land. You can go back and shoot the first fish to crawl out of the sea, but another fish, or worm, or something, is eventually going to evolve the same trick, over and over, until you get tired of stopping it. Because the ocean is full of life and the land is just up there waiting. That's probably a fixed outcome because of the laws of evolution. This is how things go once you start biological life running.

So the interesting question that a time travel story raises is, what in history could change, and what was always going to happen?

• Can you stop WW1 if you save Archduke Ferdinand? Was that the cause, or is it the case that 200 years of European imperial expansion had created the conditions for war, and it was unavoidably going to happen as soon as a pretext came along? Get rid of one, and another will come along in time.
• Can you stop the Russian Revolution if you kill Lenin? Did Lenin make it happen, or was he just the leader that put himself at the head of a revolution brought about by the unsustainable conditions that 70 million people were living in? If they didn't have Lenin would they have found someone else?

That's not a question with a definite answer - that's what makes it interesting - but demanding that an author commits to your preferred answer for their story not to be 'stupid' is wild. And none of it means that you don't have free will - it just means you're not omnipotent.

In the context of 40K - can you save Cadia if you stop the Nth Black Crusade? Or does that just delay its fall until Black Crusade no. M > N? There is not just 1 way and 1 day the pylons can be destroyed. What's limiting Chaos' number of attempts?

The Aeldari have an entire vocation and civilisation plan based on causality, and how and where and when to set up those dominos.

Cool... could they stop the Fall? Do they seem in control right now? If your thesis in the 40K present-day is that their precognition isn't enough to fight the momentum of the much more numerous and widespread homo sapiens, isn't that almost the exact same point I've been making? 'Humanity' in 40K isn't an individual, it's a population of trillions.

Fun fact about causality in relativity, the transfer of information faster than light breaks causality just as much as the transfer of matter. If time travel breaks your suspension of disbelief, divination should just as much.

Why am I reading half a dozen books about this guy called Uriel Ventris, when I know individuals don't matter?

IDK... why are you sitting through Romeo & Juliet when you're told at the beginning that these two star-crossed lovers will take their lives? Why are you reading about this guy Achilles when you know the Fates have determined he's not coming home from Troy? If you don't appreciate that kind of story, it doesn't mean it's stupid.

Particularly in the context of living in the 2020s, I personally think that stories of how characters give meaning to their own lives while living in a doomed world they are powerless to save are just as interesting as stories about how characters find a way to Win.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

I think interpreting the Chaos Gods as omnipotent and omnipresent but not in concert is the most reasonable interpretation of some of the things they've done. Khorne in particular has done world destroying stuff on a whim a couple of times, like beheading all soldiers on a planet (implied to be an Imperial planet) simultanenously because they signed a peace treaty to end a long standing civil war. Wasn't even in a Warp Storm, he just got mad that they made peace and claimed the heads he considered his by right. The universe is their plaything, and the current state is the form of competition they find the most fun at the moment, when they get bored they'll pull out all the stops for a big grand finale and then leave to find something else to do. They're basically us, horrifying beings from outside reality tormenting the mortals and daemons of 40k for out amusement, but abiding by 'rules' that make it more fun.

It's also been said that Tzeentch's end goal to all of its' plots is only to have yet more plots, and then more plots beyond them. An endless infinite of manipulation and planning. And if that means effectively save-scumming reality to set up some new plot, or for, say, Khorne to have more blood to spill, then that's what'll happen.

[Grim Portent]

But my point is; "Free Will + Time Travel to the Past = No Fixed Outcomes."

If time moves forward - and only forward - we can only make choices based on the knowledge we have.

If we could go back to the past, with new knowledge, hypothetically, we could change the past.
"If you could live in any time period, when would you live?" ...That hypothetical which gets asked all the time, assumes you would live in the past with the knowledge you have now. You can change a lot.

In hard sci-fi? No. You would hit the time-traveller's paradox. You can't go back to the past to change things if there's no past to change.

In soft-as-jelly sci-fi? So soft it borders on fantasy, rather than sci-fi. You can change anything you want.
Time-travel in 40K is seemingly random. Anyone could go back to any point in time, at any time. That means anyone can time-travel. Why not someone who matters? It's very...Convenient...That no-one who matters has time-travelled. They might actually change something.

In a setting confirmed to have time travel, isn't it reasonable to assume the timeline already incorporates any efforts by time travellers to change the present? You can't change the past, because you are already part of it and time travel is generally a one off thing, you don't get a second go,* and even if you did that second go is also already part of the timeline.

*Unless you're Abaddon that one time he went to a daemon world where time flows backwards.

[Cheesegear]

Assume free will. You travel to the past. It should be trivially obvious that there are still things you can't stop.

That's why in my hypothetical, and GW's own situations, involve whole starships. Or, perhaps a further question might be; How many people would it take to stop an event?

Your line of reasoning says that things will always slouch towards Bethlehem. No matter what you do; The Beast is born. The epoch always happens. Which I guess in some way the reasoning behind what The Emperor does. I know it's 2024 and no-one wants to empathise with The Emperor, but that's it.

That's not a question with a definite answer - that's what makes it interesting - but demanding that an author commits to your preferred answer for their story not to be 'stupid' is wild.

Time travel that is both random and open (as in, it ignores paradoxes), is stupid. And so far I've got two answers:
- It's not random. The Chaos Gods chooses who and who doesn't time travel.
- It's not open. Time-travel is a closed loop.
I don't like either of those justifications because that's not what we've seen.

The only satisfactory answer I've seen so far is:
- Beings are travelling back and forth through time with intent (e.g; Necrons) and the Fall of Cadia and the ensuing Great Rift, is in fact, a desired outcome compared to other realities. An interesting story from the Necrons' point of view might ask why that is the case. What other futures have the Aeldari seen, what other futures have the Necrons been to, where the Fall of Cadia leads to the "good end"? Time travelers are totally using their free will to engineer the Fall of Cadia...And that's wild.

- Beings are travelling back and forth through time, with or without intent, but the only people who do it, are somehow always just ineffectual - up to and including the Necrons. Which, if that is the real answer; It's ****ing lame in the context of Heroic Fiction.

In the context of 40K - can you save Cadia if you stop the Nth Black Crusade?

How many times can any (effective) group randomly travel through time?

IDK... why are you sitting through Romeo & Juliet when you're told at the beginning that these two star-crossed lovers will take their lives? Why are you reading about this guy Achilles when you know the Fates have determined he's not coming home from Troy? If you don't appreciate that kind of story, it doesn't mean it's stupid.

That's literally why spoiler alerts exist.

Particularly in the context of living in the 2020s, I personally think that stories of how characters give meaning to their own lives while living in a doomed world they are powerless to save are just as interesting as stories about how characters find a way to Win.

On that we certainly agree.

[LCP]

That's why in my hypothetical, and GW's own situations, involve whole starships. Or, perhaps a further question might be; How many people would it take to stop an event?

On the scale of the galaxy, starships are specks. On the scale of trillions, one or ten or a hundred time travellers is as near to zero as makes no difference.

How many times can any (effective) group randomly travel through time?

I feel like you haven't quite thought through the maths of what random means in this context.

If time travel is rare and random, then let's call the chance that a group capable of effecting change gets randomly transported to the time and place they need to be to effect that change P1. P1 is small, because as we've established, time travel is rare, groups capable of effecting change are a minority, and the window of time and space they need to land in to effect that change is vanishingly small compared to all the other times and places they could randomly arrive. Nevertheless, P1 > 0.

If the event they are trying to avert is going to keep trying to happen, with a probability P2, then what is the probability that they can fix it this way every time? It's P1^N, where N is the number of times they have to intervene. Meanwhile, the chance that the event doesn't eventually happen without their intervention is (1-P2)^N. Both of these probabilities get exponentially smaller as N gets larger. As N -> infinity, they go to zero.

Your problem only arises if P1 = 1 - i.e. if time travel is not random and rare, but people can do it at will.

In the most 40K terms possible, you're asking 'why doesn't the galaxy just roll a 6'.

That's literally why spoiler alerts exist.

That is... not what those things are. The concept of fate and prophecy and predestination in literature don't boil down to a 21st century consumerist catchphrase for not spoiling the ending of a movie.

[Wraith]

- Beings are travelling back and forth through time, with or without intent, but the only people who do it, are somehow always just ineffectual - up to and including the Necrons. Which, if that is the real answer; It's ****ing lame in the context of Heroic Fiction.

You seem to be working from the premise that the Necrons give a damn about anyone else in the universe, and that if their intent must be to intervene in the affairs of humanity then they must have have failed at it?

Honestly, I think it far, far more interesting that Necrons don't care and what they're actually doing, makes sense to them but is inscrutable to everyone else. After all; why go to all the effort of travelling back in time and stabbing one black-armoured chimpanzee in the face, just to please some other chimpanzees in different colours? That situation will probably sort itself out in a millennia or three, it's not worth getting our hands dirty while we have actually important things to be doing in our own, unrelated spheres of influence.

I appreciate that this could easily fall into the category of Mary Sue - the Necrons are weird and mysterious *spooky hand-gestures* so no one has to actually explain what it is they're doing all the time, we just have to assume that it's working out for them and they'd be doing something different if it weren't.... But it's a trope, and all tropes are neutral until used in a bad way.

Humanity's plight is only the centre of the universe because we are humanity. Quite a lot of the 40k universe isn't humanity though, and their lives don't always revolve around what we want.

The point is, it's a subsidiary of Hanlon's Razor - instead of "don't assume malice when incompetence is a reasonable explanation", it's more like "don't assume incompetence when apathy also works".

Other races have their own similarly selfish reasons. Chaos doesn't do it because Chaos has a vested interest in screwing itself over for as long as possible. Orks don't want to do it, because why would they want LESS fights to happen? Tau are probably trying it as we speak, but lack of access to psykers is stalling them. Tyranids... make their own arrangements.

On the scale of the galaxy, starships are specks. On the scale of trillions, one or ten or a hundred time travellers is as near to zero as makes no difference.

I think I've said this before about the Aeldari. They have super-technology and can literally see into the future, how on earth do they ever lose?

Answer: Because there's one one-millionth as many of them as there are the next least populous race, with the possible exception of Tau. Just because you know how to fix everything, doesn't mean you have the resources to guarantee that you're able to do that.

What would it take for one person to overturn the entire status quo of the galaxy in one event? The God-Emperor tried, his best attempt took the better part of ~300 years and he still didn't make it more than a toe's depth into Segmentum Pacificus. Making the attempt doesn't make a bad story, failing to succeed doesn't make a bad story, even assuming that success is the intended goal of the narrative. Which, GW has so far demonstrated, it isn't.

[Grim Portent]

With the Eldar they also don't actually have perfect foresight, their visions are slightly clearer than those of human psykers, but still not perfect. Probably less good than most Tzeentchian daemons really. The only person to canonically have near perfect foresight* is Kairos Fateweaver, and even he messes it up a lot.

When a disaster strikes the Eldar it's not always because they have foreseen that this sacrifice now will prevent a worse one later, sometimes they just didn't have all the pieces of prophecy they needed. The future is described as variable, branching into various threads and prophecy often skips steps in how one branch leads to another. Sometimes even with all the pieces they just misinterpret things, sometimes they are just too unable to set things the way they want even with perfect information because their morale breaks at a critical moment, or a shot is missed despite their best efforts, stuff just screws them over sometimes because they aren't in control of fate no matter how much they try.

People often seem to interpret seeing the future in fiction as a 100% guaranteed thing, that you get perfect knowledge of what you have seen and how to bring it about regardless of other actors. Its not the case in the vast majority of portrayals, its usually vague and unclear and constantly moving, and in 40k it takes years of focused divination and minor actions to narrow down the possible future of even quite a small thing. Seeing that a calamity will unfold is easy,knowing vaguely when and where is harder, knowing what that calamity will be is harder still, so on and so forth. Acting on that prophecy doesn't necessarily get easier the more you know, because you aren't omnipotent. Prophecies are often made millenia before they come to pass, and are so vague as to be useless.


*Which is strange since the gods are atemporal beings, they exist simultaneously in the present and future relative to the mortal world, so they should know the future already. Eh, chalk it up to inconsistent writing.

[Cheesegear]

You seem to be working from the premise that the Necrons give a damn about anyone else in the universe, and that if their intent must be to intervene in the affairs of humanity then they must have have failed at it?

Presumably because of the Cadian Pylons - as well as all the other Pylons in the Galaxy that Abaddon spent the first 12 Crusades destroying - as well as the Pariah gene, as well as the eponymous Pariah Nexus itself; Necrons appear to have a vested interest in preventing the spread of the Warp. ...The Great Rift has to have set them back in...Whatever they're doing.

That situation will probably sort itself out in a millennia or three

Battle of Sotha (Pharos) happens in early M.31. Earliest recorded sightings of Tyranids are M.35 or M.34.

3000 years? ...I guess. By M.45 the Tyranids will have stripped the Galaxy of all life and moved on? Sounds right.

I think I've said this before about the Aeldari. They have super-technology and can literally see into the future, how on earth do they ever lose?

Same way The Emperor keeps losing. Other people.

Eldrad: Could Humanity stop Humanity'ing for five seconds!? We might be able to beat Chaos.
Humanity: ...Xenos are cringe. We just invented using Chaos to beat Chaos.
Eldrad: ...Oh FFS. That's not how that works.

[Mordar]

The only satisfactory answer I've seen so far is:
- Beings are travelling back and forth through time with intent (e.g; Necrons) and the Fall of Cadia and the ensuing Great Rift, is in fact, a desired outcome compared to other realities. An interesting story from the Necrons' point of view might ask why that is the case. What other futures have the Aeldari seen, what other futures have the Necrons been to, where the Fall of Cadia leads to the "good end"? Time travelers are totally using their free will to engineer the Fall of Cadia...And that's wild.

- Beings are travelling back and forth through time, with or without intent, but the only people who do it, are somehow always just ineffectual - up to and including the Necrons. Which, if that is the real answer; It's ****ing lame in the context of Heroic Fiction.

Can't there be a 1(b) - Beings are traveling back and forth through time with intent. Sometimes they are on Side A, sometimes they are on Side B. If Plan A works, it makes a Outcome A happens. If Plan B works, Outcome B happens. 40K "history" as we know it is a collection of Outcomes A and B. And sometimes Outcome Y.

There's a great Twilight Zone (well, obviously a lot more than one) where Hicktown Gambler has a friend who can cause a short jump in time (at cost to the friend of pain, maybe injury). Hicktown rakes in the loot, getting more and more greedy. Gets into the "Big Game" with Vegaslord Gambler. Things move like normal, Hicktown gets the big chance to use his friend to get the big final pot. Friend does the time thing, again with pain and injury. Hicktown still loses the hand. Vegaslord (paraphrase) says "You think you're the only one with a friend that can change time?"

- M

[Renegade Paladin]

Meanwhile in news of the actual game, GW previewed the next mission pack today. Notably, a lot of the mission rules and secondaries interact with/must be scored by Battleline units, so lists like the one I just reviewed for this weekend's tournament won't do too well. Gambits are replaced by secret missions, which are as the name implies hidden from your opponent. There's also no random draw; if you're behind you get to just pick one.

[Cheesegear]

Notably, a lot of the mission rules and secondaries interact with/must be scored by Battleline units...

About ****ing time.
I'm mad that it took this long.