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I started gaming in 40k 2nd edition. By that time it was already clear that the focus was not just painting a cool looking army and then bringing it to the table. The focus seemed to be shifting toward figuring out what brutal special charachter you could bring to the table to wipe the floor with your enemy's army and basing your army around those units. I've never known a time when list-building wasn't a major focus of the hobby culture.

My question -especially aimed at those who were gaming in the 80's- is this…

When/how did mainstream SF/Fantasy gaming become so list-driven?

I realize that some gamers have probably always had such tendancies, but looking at Rogue Trader and early RPG's, there's an element of randomness in charachter and list generation and in many game-effects that would seem to stifle some of the list-building focus.

Nowdays, the list-building culture is clearly perptuated in the games themseleves, and especially in the deck-building focus of the Collectible Card Games that feed so many players into the popular wargaming systems, but I want to know how it came about.

Give me a SF/Fantasy gaming history lesson.

Note: Please don't make this a debate on WAAC vs Fun (whatever that means), or fluff vs spam, etc, etc. There are plenty of threads for that already. I'm interested in a bit of the history of SF/Fantasy gaming.

Edit/Request. If you don't mind, please include how long you've been gaming in your post.

I'd say somewhere around 4th or late 3rd for 40k. I'm not sure on the other systems.

MTG wasn't as strivingly competitive as it is now when i quit playing it in 2003.

About three hours after the first set of rules released, someone finished reading through them and started thinking about what the toughest roster they could assemble.

So with that, pretty much /end thread.

Back in my day...

Sorry, erm, anyway I started hanging out in a game store that sold GW back in 1993 or so. No one really played GW games except for Necromunda (when it came out), and other so-called specialist games, because it was so expensive to build an army that would win in 40k or Fantasy.

Note the important part... folks back then were worried about being able to buy enough of the expensive stuff to build a competitive list. I'm not sure which edition of 40k was out, but I remember folks getting really excited about the new release of the Sisters of Battle codex.

When we played Necromunda, it was all about having the competitive gang and building a competitive gang roster. Same with Blood Bowl. So I guess my experience, like yours Eilif, there has always been a focus on list building. But it was so we could try to beat the new combos that one particular guy was always inventing in his lists.

The major exception was Gorkamorka. There, it didn't matter what you brought in your mob because it was all going to crash/blow up/etc anyway. The goal was to die as spectacularly as possible... because of that game group. This was a subset of the competitive crowd from the store. But I guarantee if we got one of the competitive players it would have turned into trying to actually win, and we would have started trying to build competitive mobs.

It seems to me that if you have a competitive group around, then it becomes very obvious that list building is step one in being an effective general. If your group is more relaxed, then list building may not be as big of a focus. So, chicken or egg: does the group of players lead to list building focus, or does the game inherently cause list building emphasis? I think it is the group, and what is the goal that determines the "winner". But all it takes is one baby-seal-clubber to enter and folks will start list-smithing so they don't get beat down every game. Therefore, once this mentality enters the game group culture, you have to enter the arms race to continue to play.

I'm really curious about other long-timers experiences with game culture development over time.

Note this has nothing to do with WAAC vs. FAAP or any of the stupid dichotomous dysfunctional "Hurray for Our Side" bullgak that the internet seems to generate. We were always having fun and were all friends. You knew if you played that one guy you were in for a tough game, but that was a fun challenge. Then we all went out and drank beer, ate pizza, etc.

40k's RT had no structure, and hardly any guidelines as to who could use what.
WD added some, but it was the models themselves that pointed out what a model should use, kit-wise.

I don't remember seeing lists when I stopped playing 3 years or so later.
Can anyone say whether Chapter Approved (and other early books) had list-building rules?

Skinnereal wrote:40k's RT had no structure, and hardly any guidelines as to who could use what.
WD added some, but it was the models themselves that pointed out what a model should use, kit-wise.

I don't remember seeing lists when I stopped playing 3 years or so later.
Can anyone say whether Chapter Approved (and other early books) had list-building rules?

Chapter approved had awesome list rules. If im not mistaken those were the first Chaos Cult Marine rules. Lots of great list additions there.

Seems the same for me though I'm just a 2-decade TT gamer. Although admittedly, when i started I'm sure my group would have made people cry with all the rules misunderstandings. Shadow field on a Talos, yea that was me...

It's always been there sort of. I think with the popularity of the internet it has become more pronounced. Just from my recollection there were a few gaming milestones that contributed to the rise of the 'list-driven' mentality.

3rd ed.
Blood Angels
Eldar Craftworld codex

4th ed.
Rending rules
Vehicle rules

5th ed.
Wound allocation
Kill Points
AP 1
3++
IG and most codexes after that

Now those lists are not at all complete. They are just my quick take on the things that have majorly affected the game and have driven this 'list-driven' mentality.

The internet plays a big part in all this. Even throughout most of 3rd edition, people occasionally posted their overall tourney experiences and the limelight was solidly on the best looking armies. White Dwarf and a few websites would profile the looks of armies but almost never actually put out the army list itself. With the rise of blogs in the past few years and a mentality of "i want to be a 40k internet personality!! hurr!!", people who win post their lists and they are endlessly reposted on other blogs or forums. People who possess no creativity just copy/paste them into their own and try to duplicate the same results.

Ascalam wrote:I'd say somewhere around 4th or late 3rd for 40k. I'm not sure on the other systems.

MTG wasn't as strivingly competitive as it is now when i quit playing it in 2003.

Way off on this my friend. It was already in place for 3rd edition. But I would say it started in the late 80s and early 90s. There have always been army lists but before this a lot of fantasy and sci fi wargames were more of a mix of wargame and RPG. Many of them also came with scenarios to be played out with given sides.

brettz123 wrote: Many of them also came with scenarios to be played out with given sides.

I remember now, as there were Marine vs Ork scenarios in the back of RT.
There was a bit of escalation in it, IIRC.

Without someone/something maintaining balance or "fairness" the game falls apart. Lists simply replaced referees in the gaming system as the neutral 3rd party.

As far as GW is concerned, I would suggest that the release of Ravening Hordes, pre 3rd edition WFB, so about 1986 was the first armylists released.

Of coruse the fact that someone drew up a set of guideline for army selection would suggest that there was a need to attempt to more realistically define what should go in an army.

Once you get away from recreating historic battles and into fantasy there will inevitably be some dill weed who wants only Sorcerers mounted on war elephants an no infantry ergo the need for lists. They would then be the first to MinMax then as well.

I'm only 35 so what happened before then is all myth and mystery to me.

Ascalam wrote:I'd say somewhere around 4th or late 3rd for 40k. I'm not sure on the other systems.

MTG wasn't as strivingly competitive as it is now when i quit playing it in 2003.

Interesting observation. I wasn't connected to the MTG scene at all. My assumption was that hardcore listbuildng was in force since the 90's.

Gymnogyps wrote:Back in my day... Sorry, erm, anyway I started hanging out in a game store that sold GW back in 1993 or so....
....I'm not sure which edition of 40k was out, but I remember folks getting really excited about the new release of the Sisters of Battle codex

Sounds like you started up right as 2nd edition was coming out. That's when I found out about 40k. A friend lent me a RT Compendium and by the time I bought in it was 2nd ed. Sisters of battle came out in 2nd edition. I remember the release of the minis and articles in WD, though I don't recall if/when they got an official codex.

Gymnogyps wrote:...The major exception was Gorkamorka. There, it didn't matter what you brought in your mob because it was all going to crash/blow up/etc anyway. The goal was to die as spectacularly as possible... because of that game group. This was a subset of the competitive crowd from the store. But I guarantee if we got one of the competitive players it would have turned into trying to actually win, and we would have started trying to build competitive mobs.

I've only read Gorkamorka, but based on what I've heard it's such a delightfully random game that even a power-gamer would be subject to the orky laws of thermodynamics when playing.

Gymnogyps wrote:
So, chicken or egg: does the group of players lead to list building focus, or does the game inherently cause list building emphasis? I think it is the group, and what is the goal that determines the "winner"...

Tough one. I figure at this point the games and companies that promote them do push a list-building and combo-focused emphasis, but how much of that comes out in play is probably dependent on the people you are playing with.

Skinnereal wrote:
I don't remember seeing lists when I stopped playing 3 years or so later.
Can anyone say whether Chapter Approved (and other early books) had list-building rules?

I don't know about chapter approved, and my RT/2ndEd books are in the attic. Howver IIRC, RT, the RT Compilation and Compendium books (red and yellow books of compiled WD articles) and 2nd edition as a whole gave very wide range of listbuilding and force composition options. RT was extremely open. 2nd edition did enforce more wargear lists, but there were wargear cards, and the force composition requirements were merely very wide percentages that allowed a significant part of your force to be charachters and even units from other armies!

Skinnereal wrote:40k's RT had no structure, and hardly any guidelines as to who could use what.
WD added some, but it was the models themselves that pointed out what a model should use, kit-wise.

I posted this topic at another site frequented by many older gamers and one comment that came back about RT was that it was so open ended that folks didn't focus as much on list-building and power-combos. The idea being that it's when there are defined options that people are more likely to dive into those restrictions and find ways to min/max, spam, powergame, etc. It seems like a theory with merit. In my experiences with my gaming group, For over a year, we've been playing mostly games that are extremely open ended and would not be difficult to "break" yet no one's started power gaming yet.

Of course it's also true that in the RT era, there weren't nearly as many models to choose from, and if you're playing WYSIWYG, then that limits what kinds of forces you will build.

brettz123 wrote:

Ascalam wrote:I'd say somewhere around 4th or late 3rd for 40k. I'm not sure on the other systems.

MTG wasn't as strivingly competitive as it is now when i quit playing it in 2003.

Way off on this my friend. It was already in place for 3rd edition. But I would say it started in the late 80s and early 90s. There have always been army lists but before this a lot of fantasy and sci fi wargames were more of a mix of wargame and RPG. Many of them also came with scenarios to be played out with given sides.

The firdst 40K lists were either the Imperial Guard one released in White Dwarf circa #100-105 or as part of the chapter approved book released just after WH40K:RT.

They both followed the format set down in Warhammer Armies, an almost complete list of WHFB 3rd Ed armies in a single supplement. This was an awesome book with full army lists for the main power plus allies lists for smaller races. Great book!

The other thing is the slow disappearance of rigid comp at tournies in the past few years. Back in the 90's when GW had strict sportmanship and comp scoring, people simply couldn't bring as hard of lists as they do now. You still had codex creep and books that were more powerful than others but you could simply spam the same most effective unit in a book to the max (like MSU styles now) without a penalty. Nowadays, most lists seem to built on that premise.

notprop wrote:

Once you get away from recreating historic battles and into fantasy there will inevitably be some dill weed who wants only Sorcerers mounted on war elephants an no infantry ergo the need for lists. They would then be the first to MinMax then as well.

Exactly what I was thinking. As soon as you let people choose their own list/deck/character build, there's going to be people scrambling to figure out the most powerful combinations. Also, once you make the shift from fun pastime (recreating Napoleon's battles in someone's basement) to a competitive game (100 people playing to see who's best), people are bound to do whatever they can to get an edge. That's just the way it is.

As far back as I can remember, my friends and I have always tried to use our army books and codexes to outdo each other. Even when a friend and I split the cost of the big Rouge Trader book and started playing games with minis we already had on hand, we tried to put together armies (back then, armies were 15-20 models, lol) that would challenge each other. I don't really think games are more list driven now than they ever were before, at least in my experience.

warboss wrote:The internet plays a big part in all this. Even throughout most of 3rd edition, people occasionally posted their overall tourney experiences and the limelight was solidly on the best looking armies. White Dwarf and a few websites would profile the looks of armies but almost never actually put out the army list itself.

Excellent point. I hadn't thought of this, but when I discovered 40k stuff on the internet (just before 3rd edition) it seemed like it was all models, fluff and homebrew codicies. I don't recall any comp army lists and even tactics articles were more about tactics than unit combos.

brettz123 wrote: There have always been army lists but before this a lot of fantasy and sci fi wargames were more of a mix of wargame and RPG. Many of them also came with scenarios to be played out with given sides.

RanTheCid wrote:Without someone/something maintaining balance or "fairness" the game falls apart. Lists simply replaced referees in the gaming system as the neutral 3rd party.

notprop wrote:Once you get away from recreating historic battles and into fantasy ...the need for lists.

Without historical or fixed army lists, Game masters or set senarios are army lists an inescapable necessity? If they are, is an army-list building focus an inevetable result?

hungryp wrote:

notprop wrote:

Once you get away from recreating historic battles and into fantasy there will inevitably be some dill weed who wants only Sorcerers mounted on war elephants an no infantry ergo the need for lists. They would then be the first to MinMax then as well.

Exactly what I was thinking. As soon as you let people choose their own list/deck/character build, there's going to be people scrambling to figure out the most powerful combinations. Also, once you make the shift from fun pastime (recreating Napoleon's battles in someone's basement) to a competitive game (100 people playing to see who's best), people are bound to do whatever they can to get an edge. That's just the way it is.

A lot of the fun many gamers get from the game is figuring out what works and what doesn't. One of the main reasons I don't care for historical battles is because that aspect of the game is removed. I don't know if it makes somebody a dill weed if they want to Min/Max, as you say. The point of playing a game is to win and have fun doing it, even in historic battles, what would be the point of playing otherwise?

Bought my first WD back in about 1989, played regularly from about 1994 through to 2000/2001, then took a break until this year.

I would say the introduction of codexes as a concept was a major turning point, as that formalised what was and wasn't possible in a list, and for the first time gave each army a definitive structure to work in.

'Inspired' by Magic:TG's growing success, I think GW started consciously to try to introduce a formal, competitive element to their games, perhaps to try and emulate the global success that the CCG market (and Magic especially) enjoyed through touney play.

Ascalam wrote:I'd say somewhere around 4th or late 3rd for 40k. I'm not sure on the other systems.

MTG wasn't as strivingly competitive as it is now when i quit playing it in 2003.

MTG has been cut-throat competitive since the inception of the ProTour back in '96. I assume you entered the game late.

On Topic - 40K compared to other strategy games is not competitive IMO. It can't be because the core rules change to frequently. Sure a player can be competitive, but the game design does not take into account competition/tournament play. Again MTG being a perfect example. When they design new cards they are specifically taking into account how usable that card is in tournament play and/or booster draft.

I suggest anyone read JJ's Standard Bearer in this months White Dwarf in which he discusses 'dissociated game mechanics'. In a nut shell this is designing game rules based on an established story line VS. designing game rules based on how you want the game to play. See what I'm getting at?

The arrival of Armour Penetration Values (as opposed to Modifiers) in 3rd Edition had a major impact on 40K. The proliferation of Space Marines meant many lists were now focused on weapons that negated their 3+ armour save altogether.

oni wrote:

Ascalam wrote:
MTG wasn't as strivingly competitive as it is now when i quit playing it in 2003.

MTG has been cut-throat competitive since the inception of the ProTour back in '96

Amen to that...I started playing in '96 as well, and it was cut throat from the start.

When did gaming in general start getting cut throat though? No later than 1981. (The year Axis and Allies came out.) Axis and Allies is a game that (like WoW) has only one correct method of play. Anything else is always going to be less effective. The kind of mindset that these games engendered leaves us with the kind of players we all know and love (or want to choke). You know the kind. You probably have heard of at least one of these types. "You guys camp for the night by the river? Okay, you all die. Scrags eat your face in your sleep you idiots. Never camp by a river." If you've played WoW (or really any online game) then you know this kind of person all too well.

Those guys have always been around, (and I have some definite leanings towards that school of thought myself) but they/we tend more towards competitive play. Of course, that's just my take on it.

Eilif wrote:I started gaming in 40k 2nd edition. By that time it was already clear that the focus was not just painting a cool looking army and then bringing it to the table. The focus seemed to be shifting toward figuring out what brutal special charachter you could bring to the table to wipe the floor with your enemy's army and basing your army around those units. I've never known a time when list-building wasn't a major focus of the hobby culture.

My question -especially aimed at those who were gaming in the 80's- is this…

When/how did mainstream SF/Fantasy gaming become so list-driven?

I realize that some gamers have probably always had such tendancies, but looking at Rogue Trader and early RPG's, there's an element of randomness in charachter and list generation and in many game-effects that would seem to stifle some of the list-building focus.

Nowdays, the list-building culture is clearly perptuated in the games themseleves, and especially in the deck-building focus of the Collectible Card Games that feed so many players into the popular wargaming systems, but I want to know how it came about.

Give me a SF/Fantasy gaming history lesson.

Note: Please don't make this a debate on WAAC vs Fun (whatever that means), or fluff vs spam, etc, etc. There are plenty of threads for that already. I'm interested in a bit of the history of SF/Fantasy gaming.

Edit/Request. If you don't mind, please include how long you've been gaming in your post.

Started tword the end of 2d edition, then eveolved to a whole new game of suck in the 3d edition.

Eldar and the Space wolves were the main offenders, then it just ended up as 100 miles of bad road.

3d edition pushed Spastic army listing to a whole new level, based on it being unit driven, instead of just point values. Pushed characters into the final hit piece, and units themselves as just shooting shields for the character/ unit leaders.

4th edition has been off and on as opposed to the codex puke that came out and pretty much pushed some armies to the back burner, and others to exploitation, based on writeings by thier author/ champions.

Playtestings have been pretty off, and it is now to the point of pushing product, rather then an army list.

2nd ed. Space Wolf Terminators with Assault cannons and Cyclone missle launchers.

It started at least that far back.

Its inherent to the game. Any game that pits two players against one another on opposing sides rewards competitive behavior. No real fair way of fighting that given the current structure of the game rules.

The first book published lists for RT were in the Warhammer 40K Compendium (these were collections of WD articles).

It had IIRC

Harlequins, Squats, IG and Marines.

After that the Orks arrived over 3 books,

Waaargh the Orks
'Ere We Go
Freebooters

Think the Eldar (Guardians and the first Aspect Warriors) got published in the Companion, again a collection of WD articles.

Genestealer cults turned up in WD around the same time as the orks (WD 120 something?)

Grey Knights were in the Chaos books along with Daemons / CSM etc..

All this before 2nd edition, but people didn't really play to a list - the list just allowed them to play what they had.

When 40k was unbalanced and broken... everyone KNEW you could write a mega spam metallist that would brutalize opponents. But the imbalance was so great, people simply didn't tolerate it. There was no point in bringing a Nascar car to a soapbox derby as you knew who would win.

Because of this... people played more what they wanted to play based upon models and less what would rofflestomp opponents. The competative scene was what would 'win' within the arbitrary restrictive comp.

Now the rules and the imbalance has seriously tightened up. It is now more like racing a hybrid VS a V8. Both can reasonably get up to a decent speed, and while one has an edge or a disadvantage, the skill of the driver can actually be seen.

Now that the ruleset is perceived as more balanced and the extremes are less offensively unfair, people are all about METALISTS. Personally, it doesn't take a great deal of skill or effort to read a codex and quickly figure out the path of least resistance in a codex. We can all see what units are overpriced and underpriced. We can also see which units can work 'well' against MEQ.

Spam the underpriced units that work well against MEQ and you have a good list. It is really not more than a few minutes of crunching 7th grade math.

I feel that in our non-wargaming-time, which we have a lot more of these days, you just, you know, get thinking about how to structure army lists, what you'd like to play, etc. and you might even absent-mindedly begin jotting down squad combinations on a random scrap of paper, maybe even whole 3k pt armies!

skrulnik wrote:2nd ed. Space Wolf Terminators with Assault cannons and Cyclone missle launchers.

It started at least that far back.

That sounds about right.