Hi guys I've been really squandering on this post for a about an 1hr and a half now, and am.... just pondering on how to make a decent game out of 6th edition.
I've been trying to get around to my LGS every saturday and the games (and while I know my store doesnt speak for everyones),
seem much more.... decisive earlier in game. It seems like whenever you see a match there's always a really
hard core death star unit or list of some kind on each side of the field. (which is fine) however, they seem so strong it becomes in a sense like
the one which out-performs the primaris death star unit on the otherside generally wins the game. Say for example: A full man squad of TWC and WL against a Necron flier list.
Generally they crash in to each other and the TWC wrecks all the necron squads and the fliers wreck all the sw squads and really, who's ever unit
does more carnage or dies first generally wins the match, which in case comes down to the first turn; when one army shoots up the other armies death star unit
and that army generally wins ( not always but, i say generally because a deathstar unit usually consist of being a heavy point unit) and without it to really quickly dispose of
your opponents units as they would you, well.... your'e screwed. and the point I guess I'm trying to make out here is; whether
It's us as players fault for taking units like these in our list, or the games general push to us having to do so other wise, if we don't bring our hardcore units and your oponent does well then; they wreck your army and the game is pretty just....ehhh straight foward yes, your'e going to win as "I have no unit to oppose such a unit- you win"

Best example being of a ( Real account of a 1500 point all comers list of deepstriking grey knights today, which take down 2 and a half entire long fang units in one turn and essentially seal the deal in one turn as there is no possible counter to what has just happened. for all the opponent had left were:
3 grey hunter units one of which had a rune priest but chose to outflank so wasn't on the field yet, and the 2 grey hunter units which were on the field, are totallly out randed to an 24"
shooting brigade gk ss and one combat squad of intercepts which could essentially take out half or more of there squad each turn) (and let me remind you this is just the top of turn 2)
who's gonna win, I wonder... I mean 3 long fang units is potentially good in all cases and reasonably competitive list, but then they come up against a ds force which leaves them completely worthless
and pointless to have even put on the board as they were generally sent back to the case upon being put on the board literally, seeing it took about what... 2 minutes for turn one and bottom of turn 2 to go by.... >.>

So pretty much in reference to the question, how do you all go about making for an interesting game? Do you, when you coming to face an opponent agree to terms of playing ... list which are foresay.....I don't know ummm.... fluffy? or house rule based which states things like you (can't take units over a certain amount of points to keep it relatively casual and not easy to kill but, not hard to kill, either , or no flier units for the purposes of this game or something, which can spice up the game to make it so that the game isn't boring and relatively decisive

How do you have an alright game in 6th? You buy buy buy!

fishy bob wrote:
How do you have an alright game in 6th? You buy buy buy!

Wow... that helped the thread...

Anyways, the best thing you can do is have a semi-flexible list and have fun. It sounds like you are playing against some serious players, maybe try and scope out some newer players.

Don`t whine on Dakka about it, and bring a felxibel list as the man above me stated. And always remember to have fun

Don't take it so seriously anymore.

Seriously.

You can have the most competitive list in the game, and be screwed over by a series of bad charge rolls, or have 5 psykers and roll all useless powers (happened to me). Alternatively, you might pull off a 12" charge that takes your opponent by surprise, and breaks his battle line (happened to me) or you luckily got 2 enfeeble psykers and a hemmorage psyker in the right place to wipe out a tactical squad off an objective with hilarious efficiency.

6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

That's why i love Tau.

Games swing back and forth, and its hrd to tell who is even on the lead, let alone a decisive early victory.


Best way to avoid this thing is make your list in a spread out manner, so that virtually nothing, not even a deepstrike deathstar, can remove you from the game in a single act.

Your list is in trouble in case enemy deep-strikes? set up in an anti-deep-strike formations. deep into terrain where deep strikes are harder, set up units in defensive formations that uses sacrificial units to block the path to essential ones, split your forces in areas that they cover for each other, but cannot be mutli-assualted.

You KNOW his list, you KNOW what he is capable of, deploy accordingly.

If you deploy in simple battle lines against deep strike, its your fault for failing, you just employed the wrong tactics.

 -Loki- wrote:
6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

Which is exactly why a good game requires that you choose your opponents with care. Choose the guys that like to have a beer, laugh at your (and their own) bad dice rolls and treat the game as an excuse to relax in good company.

Anyone who thinks winning is the fun part of the game and brings deathstars, optimized ally combos or flying circuses can go play with himself or others of his sort. Especially if he also spends an inordinate amount of time on measuring everything and points out rules you missed only when that works to his advantage.

How I have an enjoyable game in 6th.

That whole bit about alternate terrain deployment. Yeah, scrub that out.

Double force orgs at 2000 points. Yup, ignore that too. If we're playing 2500 points, you can bring it up then.

That allies matrix table thing? Sure, if we're playing some special scenario, otherwise, it doesn't exist.

It tends to work.

 Compel wrote:
How I have an enjoyable game in 6th.

That whole bit about alternate terrain deployment. Yeah, scrub that out.

Double force orgs at 2000 points. Yup, ignore that too. If we're playing 2500 points, you can bring it up then.

That allies matrix table thing? Sure, if we're playing some special scenario, otherwise, it doesn't exist.

It tends to work.

Alternate terrain tends to allow one person all the good stuff on his side and the other a few shrubs depending who gets to place them 1st, so i agree.

Dub FOC, totally agree, this is so far open to abuse it isnt even a joke.

Allies matrx, Totally disagree and agree at the same time, I dont abuse it, I use it to fit in a StormRAVEN into my Ravenwing army, or to get some real deamons into my Chaos army, the part i agree with you on..... Nob bikers in a GK army, GK in a Cron army... well you get the idea lol.

But all in all I agree with what you have said, these 3 things can cause alot of tention (cries of cheese, cries of taking 12 vendetta sqaud..errr imagine it etc), so if the oponent agrees and you are both fine with it, just remove the problem before it starts, mind you, this should be done for all 40k games before they start anyway to avoid issues and confusion

Narrative. Make it themed if you're that way inclined. Go for the "obligatory units" idea, or build each other's army lists, or something like that.

I also support the "bro game" style - that is, pretzels and kegstands.

Do not play with buyable terrain pieces, do not use the alternate terrain placement rules, do not use allies, do not use double FOC.

Don't play like a WAAC donkey-cave, make friendly lists. Drink alcohol. Enjoy yourself

I'm a bit mixed on the whole buyable terrain pieces thing. Admittedly, that may be because I bought most of them cause I love planetstrike.

The only potential arguments I've come across are the people who, as a joke, talk about taking the Fortress of Redemption and indirect artillery army of heck.

 -Loki- wrote:
Don't take it so seriously anymore.

Seriously.

You can have the most competitive list in the game, and be screwed over by a series of bad charge rolls, or have 5 psykers and roll all useless powers (happened to me). Alternatively, you might pull off a 12" charge that takes your opponent by surprise, and breaks his battle line (happened to me) or you luckily got 2 enfeeble psykers and a hemmorage psyker in the right place to wipe out a tactical squad off an objective with hilarious efficiency.

So in other words, give up any expectation of enjoying a challenging game; that's now the wrong sort of fun.

-Loki- wrote:6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

I think the whole "beer and pretzels" routine is just to take the edge off the annoyance of randomness screwing your chance of winning via tactics. It's not about depth of play, it's about remembering the game is just a game and sometimes bad luck can bring about disaster through no fault of your own. The beer takes the edge off and the pretzels keep you doing something with your mouth other than cursing at the top of your lungs. To sum up, it helps to alleviate rage-quitting.

I have decent games by playing decent folks with decent lists.

My friends and I collect the things we are interested in as opposed to things that perform well.

My Ork army is full of fun units and lacks any kind of synergy.

My friends Daemons are as many large models as he can take.

Another friend collected a DE army only because he got a fantastic deal on old metal wyches (some of his favorite models).

Find people who play for fun (and can back that claim with their lists and collections) and you will find you'll have alot more fun.

Thanks for the responses everyone

6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

have you played against air cav or necron scythwing lately ?

I had it easy . I played IG in the 5th , so my army was good to begin with and the flyer changes only made my already low cost skimers even better. I did have to switch melta vets to plasma vets , but I had those back from 3ed , so again lucky . To have fun in 6th you need a good army and buy all the stuff that makes armies better in 6th . Playing bad or medicore armies at the start of a edition is too frustrating to be worth the money and time invested in to the hobby .

Thanks for the responses everyone, and if I came off as whiny... ehh i presume I did. sorry about that.
One thing that got me thinking is that....
the list wasn't even all that....competitive. it was just 2 standard gkss a unit of purifers a storm raven but seeing that the SW player had ADL it seemed to counter balance, (took off a hp the turn it came in ), some interceptors with an inquisitor as a commander....and well i guess the one op bastard callidus assassin. So the list wasn't necessarily OP, it had that really one nasty assassin, but by all means its not like the assassin is god. A typical shooting phase kills him the next turn...So like is it in a sense his fault for doing what he did as..... why would he engage in a shooting contest against LFs? which had a squad full of plasma cannons for one and 2 full missile launchers for the others.
And to add to that what we be the fun of a shooting contest across the board in which nobody is moving?
Anyone could sit up against a mirror and look at them selves throw dice and play a game against themselves in the same way.
I keep referring to this game because its the freshest game I've seen from my own experience... so I understand not all games are like this but, at that....
raises the question,,,,,are the codex's giving us units that are in general, too strong in the first place?( be it weapon combo or just special rules) in which the responses to a certain style of play is to succumb to; in this case deepstriking or be shot off the board trying to footslog all the way down to the other side?
I say this as generally a sw player likes to take you know at least one squad of LF' as that's what they are generally known for, but at just 150pts still able to dish out like 500 points of possible punishment per game blowing up tanks and eradicating units of space marines. Is it our fault for playing our most popular units?
The gk player is running 2 STANDARD troop choices but, with the rules it allows them to pfff.. come in and generally take down entire units unless they go to ground.

So what can be done to make an average competitive game ... I guess more fair without it being completely boring?
For part of the fun of the game comes from not knowing exactly what your opponent has, " By helping him "make' a list' and being able to counter it.
but another aspect of the game is having a somewhat average competitive list so as to bring excitement and somewhat adrenaline when playing the game.

Makumba wrote:

6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

have you played against air cav or necron scythwing lately ?

I had it easy . I played IG in the 5th , so my army was good to begin with and the flyer changes only made my already low cost skimers even better. I did have to switch melta vets to plasma vets , but I had those back from 3ed , so again lucky . To have fun in 6th you need a good army and buy all the stuff that makes armies better in 6th . Playing bad or medicore armies at the start of a edition is too frustrating to be worth the money and time invested in to the hobby .

But thats not having fun. That's competative play.

You restructured your list to face the new changes. Had you and your friends been playing just for fun then you wouldn't have to run out and buy new units.

If I wanted my army to be any good I'd have to spend $75 on lootas and hundreds on bike models.

Hell, my ork army has 11 boyz! That's it! I wanted to take as many different units as possible for the seer fun of painting it all. I may get crushed in games but at least they look beautiful while dying.

Too me, the Orks make great saturday morning villians. My marine opponents should smash my army. It fits not only the 40k fluff but it also fits the fluff of my own army (a simple refueling outpost for Speedfreeks).

English Assassin wrote:
No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

Nerds like to relax too, you know. I can't mention the number of times I've been mashed playing 40k in my friend's basement. But I still knew the rulebook/codex word for word (ish).

Sigvatr wrote:Do not play with buyable terrain pieces, do not use the alternate terrain placement rules, do not use allies, do not use double FOC.

I think what you meant was "Come up with your own house rules". Banning buyable terrain peices is a huge nerf to many army's only source of Anti-Aircraft, allies are very underwealming from a power point of view, though very cool fluff-wise. And the double FOC really isn't an issue. I mean, you know if your opponent gets to double his FOC...you can too?

 Testify wrote:

English Assassin wrote:
No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

Nerds like to relax too, you know. I can't mention the number of times I've been mashed playing 40k in my friend's basement. But I still knew the rulebook/codex word for word (ish).

Well, now you've got an edition in which intoxication won't notably affect your chances of victory! Lucky you! But try to understand that's not what everybody wants from 40k.

 English Assassin wrote:

 Testify wrote:

English Assassin wrote:
No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

Nerds like to relax too, you know. I can't mention the number of times I've been mashed playing 40k in my friend's basement. But I still knew the rulebook/codex word for word (ish).

Well, now you've got an edition in which intoxication won't notably affect your chances of victory! Lucky you! But try to understand that's not what everybody wants from 40k.

Speak for yourself, I have no problems beating my friends without running some dickish WAAC list.

Start a garage/basement league with the people you like to play against.

Make it a campaign with some house rules to cut back on min/maxing, like no special character HQs unless its a certain points amount, no allies unless its over 2K points, that sort of thing.

 Testify wrote:

I think what you meant was "Come up with your own house rules". Banning buyable terrain peices is a huge nerf to many army's only source of Anti-Aircraft, allies are very underwealming from a power point of view, though very cool fluff-wise. And the double FOC really isn't an issue. I mean, you know if your opponent gets to double his FOC...you can too?

About the forts, granted. Only allow ADL and the Bastion then. FoR and Skyshield are too easy to abuse.

The double FOC point of yours is far too short-sighted. I'd agree with you if all armies had equally strong possibilities of using the FOC. That's not the case, however. Furthermore, double FOC isn't going to balance anything out, it's your one-way path to WAAC lists and maximum cheese in an army list.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Testify wrote:

I think what you meant was "Come up with your own house rules". Banning buyable terrain peices is a huge nerf to many army's only source of Anti-Aircraft, allies are very underwealming from a power point of view, though very cool fluff-wise. And the double FOC really isn't an issue. I mean, you know if your opponent gets to double his FOC...you can too?

About the forts, granted. Only allow ADL and the Bastion then. FoR and Skyshield are too easy to abuse.

The double FOC point of yours is far too short-sighted. I'd agree with you if all armies had equally strong possibilities of using the FOC. That's not the case, however. Furthermore, double FOC isn't going to balance anything out, it's your one-way path to WAAC lists and maximum cheese in an army list.

Well it's true it lets a guard player take 6 russes, it also lets a marine player take 6 drop-podding sternguard.

Either you can't counter one FOC - in which case, you'd struggle anyway. Or you can counter it, and it's simply a matter of taking more of what works. What example would you give as a "WAAC" double FOC exploit?

 Testify wrote:

 English Assassin wrote:

 Testify wrote:

English Assassin wrote:
No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

Nerds like to relax too, you know. I can't mention the number of times I've been mashed playing 40k in my friend's basement. But I still knew the rulebook/codex word for word (ish).

Well, now you've got an edition in which intoxication won't notably affect your chances of victory! Lucky you! But try to understand that's not what everybody wants from 40k.

Speak for yourself, I have no problems beating my friends without running some dickish WAAC list.

Oh look, somebody who can't tell the difference between enjoying a competitive challenge and "bringing a dickish WAAC list".

 DeffDred wrote:

Makumba wrote:

6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

have you played against air cav or necron scythwing lately ?

I had it easy . I played IG in the 5th , so my army was good to begin with and the flyer changes only made my already low cost skimers even better. I did have to switch melta vets to plasma vets , but I had those back from 3ed , so again lucky . To have fun in 6th you need a good army and buy all the stuff that makes armies better in 6th . Playing bad or medicore armies at the start of a edition is too frustrating to be worth the money and time invested in to the hobby .

But thats not having fun. That's competative play.

Oh look, somebody else who can't comprehend the notion that a competitive game can be fun.

Oh look, people who think witty comebacks over the internet is going to help anyone get anywhere ever. Seriously. Drop it.



I agree with many of the above comments. Try starting a basement/garage campaign with your own house rules. I've recently done just that with a few people over at my FLGs. Like-Minded people who just wanted a friendly game where they could have fun.

 English Assassin wrote:

Oh look, somebody else who can't comprehend the notion that a competitive game can be fun.

That's an assumption.

When you assume you make an ass of you and me.

I can comprehend such a notion. You can't seem to comprehend that there is infact a difference between competetive play and "fun" play.

I agree with english assassin. The competitive side is a lot of fun. I don't run super competitive lists.i usually buy cool looking models but there is no fun in running lists which usually lose. Its good to play friendly games with jokey people but it is no fun getting crushed from the start.

Pray to Bro-sideon god of the Bro-cean for some better bros to play with. Bro.

I'm not a competitive player and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with competitive play, some people find that more fun. My suggestion though is that if you want a game that isn't decided in the first 1 or 2 turns then you'd be better aiming for a friendly kind of game with bro's.

If you want to continue playing competitively though then possibly find a less serious group or find people who are capable of being both fun/nice to play with and competitive. (Not saying all competitive people aren't fun/nice, it's just I've met quite a few who were neither nice to people or fun.)

 Rysaer wrote:
Pray to Bro-sideon god of the Bro-cean for some better bros to play with. Bro.

I give this post five keg-stands out of seven.

 liquidjoshi wrote:
I give this post five keg-stands out of seven.

I do what I can in the name of the imperium, broses and broseph, and all bros everywhere.

Failing that drunken entertainment is as good a reason as any.

Dezstiny wrote:
I've been trying to get around to my LGS every saturday and the games (and while I know my store doesnt speak for everyones),
seem much more.... decisive earlier in game. It seems like whenever you see a match there's always a really
hard core death star unit or list of some kind on each side of the field. (which is fine) however, they seem so strong it becomes in a sense like
the one which out-performs the primaris death star unit on the otherside generally wins the game.

So far, from what I've seen, 6th has plenty of close games. I have mostly close games nowadays. The mismatches mostly are when one guy has a list that's much better suited to the new edition,. Either because he bothered to update and the other guy didn't, or because one guy just happens to be using units which got better or substantially worse in the new rules, and has lucked into either a stronger or weaker army compared to his opponent, where before they were pretty well balanced, because they had been playing 5th for a few years, and adjusted in the past into fairly good equilibrium. There are also mismatches when one guy understands the new rules a lot better than the other guy, so one player is making relatively basic tactical errors because they don't really understand the rules yet. Heck, I've played 23 games so far and am still figuring things out, experimenting and testing combinations with my Blood Angels.

Dezstiny wrote:
Hi guys I've been really squandering on this post for a about an 1hr and a half now, and am.... just pondering on how to make a decent game out of 6th edition.

It's a more than decent game. A few tweaks help, though.

1. Using the "narrative terrain" system (ie: make a fair and attractive table, with some LOS blocking stuff toward the middle of the table; around here we mostly have a neutral third party do this) instead of using alternating placement.
2. I recommend roll first and then pick a chart for Warlord traits. Less chance of getting something useless.
3. Definitely use Mysterious Objectives. They're fun, create an incentive to move Troops to grab them before the end of the game, and create useful things to fight over.
4. If you have an odd number of objectives, make a rule that the first one is placed in the center of the table.

I got a few ideas for you.
My friend PrometheusZero (dakka name) and I often plan army lists together the night before the game and get a bit of extra enjoyment out of the game that way. We tend to have an impartial third party to set up the terrain too Mannahnin and this usually works perfectly. I always try to set up a nice themed battlefield when it's my turn to set up and spectate. To be fair if there is only two of us we just stick a bunch of terrain pieces on the table and shuffle them around a bit until we're both happy with it.
Also just play objective based games. Our first three games of 6th edition were all that kill points scenario and we got bored of it. So now we always re-roll that result and have now played all six of the scenarios in the core rulebook.
We even played that Broken Alliance mission (3 player game) from the 5th edition rulebook using the 6th edition rules today and that was really fun. So I suggest playing 3 or 4 player games where it's every man for himself rather than allies.
And in a doubles game we played (while drinking whiskey) just after christmas last year (5th edition) we all set up in one corner of the table and then randomly determined who would be sided with who rather than deciding beforehand. That was a really fun game and I'd recommend trying that.
Anyway sorry to ramble on. lol
Enjoy yr games.

How do I have an enjoyable game of 6th? It sounds snobby, but the truth is that I have found that the best way to have fun in this hobby is to be EXTREMELY selective about who I will play with.

I won't play with randoms or people who live at the LGS or WAAC types. Period. I have a small group of people that I have met over the years that are on the same wavelength as I am about HAVING FUN and telling a story.

It means I don't get to play very often. But, quality over quantity in my book.

English Assassin wrote:
No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

So true it was worth repeating.


We've tweaked the terrain setup to the following, with good results:

1) set up terrain, however you and your opponent want. Feel free to alternate placement like in the rules if it floats your boat.
2) Roll the mission and deployment type.

3) Roll off. Winner gets to pick either: Choose table side, or Choose to deploy and go first.

(This is kind of like the coin toss in American Football. You either get to pick to kick or receive the ball, or you get to decide which side of the field you defend.)

4) Player who is deploying first does so, and then the other, and play continues normally.


We've found that doing this not only prevents the terrain from being set up too biased to either side, as both players have a chance to end up there, but it also has a balancing effect, in that if the terrain does end up being biased, it is unlikely that the player who gets the better side will also get to go first.

 English Assassin wrote:
So in other words, give up any expectation of enjoying a challenging game; that's now the wrong sort of fun.

Basically, yes.

You wanted another answer? Sorry.

6th edition can be won by a dickish WAAC list. The example of scythwing earlier is a good one. But it's still all dependent on dice rolls - moreso than ever. Trying to play it at tournament level is going to end in tears unless you accept the fact that you're just going to have to live with things like failing a charge due to a bad dice roll, your opponent getting a better warlord trait or getting no useful psychic powers if you want to keep playing this edition.

 English Assassin wrote:
No, the epitome of a beer and pretzels game would be something like Fluxx or Munchkin; games which are cheap to buy, simple to learn (particularly for non-gamers) and quick to play. A game with a 400-page rulebook, requiring hundreds of pounds minimum investment to involve yourself, and hours to play (to say nothing of the time invested painting) that offers nothing more than a "beer and pretzels" depth of play has failed badly.

Cool, some casual games do it better. I retract 'epitome'.

That doesn't change the fact that 6th edition is made as a beer and pretzels game, not a serious competitive game. The designers outright stated this at that devlopers day thing.

 -Loki- wrote:

That doesn't change the fact that 6th edition is made as a beer and pretzels game, not a serious competitive game. The designers outright stated this at that devlopers day thing.

Just because the designers stated a goal does not mean they met it, or even that it was a reasonable goal to set.

It strikes me that it's an unrealistic goal to craft a game that will see players investing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in pieces and spending hundreds of hours painting these parts, only to expect those players to have no vested interest in actually winning the game. I guess there must be some masochistic people who enjoy pulling their pieces off the board after "hilarious" and "cinematic" dice rolls, but my experience is that most people want to win the games they play and want the results of those games to be based on what they choose to do, not random events.

Beer, pretzels, and chillaxing OR competitive contests of skill, tactics, and strategy? You people are all silly.

You play a good game of sixth by picking an army you love, crafting a force you love, learning how to tweak and play that list until it doesn't matter how cheesy the internet says the enemy's is, then you get some friends, some beer+pretzels AND stuff your brains with strategy-thought and whatnot. Then you and your opponent give it your all and learn something from it. Beer, pretzels, and competition are needed in equal measure. Beer perhaps a touch more.

It's come up once or twice but my opinion on how to have an enjoyable game of 40k is simple.

"Find people who want the same out of the game as you"

You want to carefully sculpt your army, tweaking and honing it to a fine edge, rotating in whatever troops bring optimum performance, find folks doing the same.

You want to run a fluff driven list, play naturally unbalanced scenarios and generally put that whole "winning/losing" thing in the back seat, find folks who want the same.

Want something in the grey area between or like to do both on different nights? Those folks are out there too, or you can be the bridge between the competitive and fluff worlds

Personally I play to the best of my ability but I do it with what would probably be considered a sub par list by tournement standards. However because we all wanted the same thing all those armies were "competitive" for the local meta because no-one was running a "tourney" list, we all took the troops we thought were cool. This isn't to say we ignored our armies weaknesses, and some of our troop choices were the squads you might see in a hard list but the armies all hovered in the same tier.

Thats just my take on it, both of the core camps have their fanatics and can't "get" the other, it's about how they approach the game. Look for the folks who share *your* vision and you can't go far wrong. It means occasionally turning round and declining a game because the list/setup is too comp/fluffy then thats the sacrifice you may need to make.

DeffDred wrote:But thats not having fun. That's competative play.

DeffDred wrote:

 English Assassin wrote:

Oh look, somebody else who can't comprehend the notion that a competitive game can be fun.

That's an assumption.

If you think that my conclusion was an unwarranted assumption from your statement, you really need to work on expressing yourself more clearly.

DeffDred wrote:I can comprehend such a notion. You can't seem to comprehend that there is infact a difference between competetive play and "fun" play.

Try, just try to get your head around the notion that while you might not do so, a good number of other people get their "fun" from a game that's a meaningful contest, and resent not only GW's diminution of that meaningful competition for the sake of "forging a narrative", but the attitude of "casual" players who insist that theirs is the only "right sort of fun".

We play the actual game?

Regardless we do have some fanciful campaigns and different scenario's from time to time, to add some flavor. (We also add some RPG stats and abilities into the mix, for leveling up IC's)

I do exactly what I've been doing since 4th. I play with armies I like against people I like. Hasn't failed me yet.

What do I do?

I agree on a point total with my opponent. All rules in the 6E book are legal. I've played 30-40 games of 6E so far and have yet to have one that wasn't fun. I don't personally use allies because I can't find a way to fit them into my army (Daemons) without watering down what I love about how they play. But I don't care if people I'm playing want to use them. The same with doubled FOC.

 English Assassin wrote:
Try, just try to get your head around the notion that while you might not do so, a good number of other people get their "fun" from a game that's a meaningful contest, and resent not only GW's diminution of that meaningful competition for the sake of "forging a narrative", but the attitude of "casual" players who insist that theirs is the only "right sort of fun".

Try, just, try to get off your high horse and wrap your head around the idea that a game of playing with plastic men is hardly a meaningful contest.

At no point did I claim that I play using the "right sort of fun". I said there's a difference between "fun" and competition. And fun was in quotations.

If you think that my conclusion was an unwarranted assumption from your statement, you really need to work on expressing yourself more clearly.

I thought I was pretty straight to the point. Guess you couldn't "wrap your head around it".

 DeffDred wrote:

 English Assassin wrote:
Try, just try to get your head around the notion that while you might not do so, a good number of other people get their "fun" from a game that's a meaningful contest, and resent not only GW's diminution of that meaningful competition for the sake of "forging a narrative", but the attitude of "casual" players who insist that theirs is the only "right sort of fun".

Try, just, try to get off your high horse and wrap your head around the idea that a game of playing with plastic men is hardly a meaningful contest.

In the same way playing with wooden chesspieces can;t be a meaningful comtest, right? Or little stones in Go, or cards with pictures on..? What the flying feth do you think the pieces a game uses has to do with tactical competition?

 DeffDred wrote:
At no point did I claim that I play using the "right sort of fun". I said there's a difference between "fun" and competition. And fun was in quotations.

What you said was: "But thats not having fun. That's competative play.". you're insisting that the two are mutually-exclusive. We all understand that you don't enjoy competition; it continues to baffle me that you just can't understand that for others, it is the competition that is fun. But then you claim to believe that aliens built the pyramids, so I suppose I'm expecting a bit much from you.

 English Assassin wrote:

 DeffDred wrote:

 English Assassin wrote:
Try, just try to get your head around the notion that while you might not do so, a good number of other people get their "fun" from a game that's a meaningful contest, and resent not only GW's diminution of that meaningful competition for the sake of "forging a narrative", but the attitude of "casual" players who insist that theirs is the only "right sort of fun".

Try, just, try to get off your high horse and wrap your head around the idea that a game of playing with plastic men is hardly a meaningful contest.

In the same way playing with wooden chesspieces can;t be a meaningful comtest, right? Or little stones in Go, or cards with pictures on..? What the flying feth do you think the pieces a game uses has to do with tactical competition?

 DeffDred wrote:
At no point did I claim that I play using the "right sort of fun". I said there's a difference between "fun" and competition. And fun was in quotations.

What you said was: "But thats not having fun. That's competative play.". you're insisting that the two are mutually-exclusive. We all understand that you don't enjoy competition; it continues to baffle me that you just can't understand that for others, it is the competition that is fun. But then you claim to believe that aliens built the pyramids, so I suppose I'm expecting a bit much from you.

Actually I believe man built the pyramids, just with help from something greater. But that's something else entirely. Also it's a bit rude of you to attack my beliefs.

But since you want to make this personal (man, you're easy to offend) I'll just toss you in the ignore bin so this doesn't come up between us again.

Given that you've been deliberately obtuse in all of your responses in this thread thus far; quelle différence?

How do I have fun in games of 6th?

1. I do not play games against English Assassins's....

2. I play an army for humor's sake.. If I win Yay... If I lose it doesn't really matter.. Wanna play another?

It seems that 6th has become hinged upon moments in the game and the whole challenge thing adds a new depth to the game.

 DeffDred wrote:

 English Assassin wrote:

 DeffDred wrote:

 English Assassin wrote:
Try, just try to get your head around the notion that while you might not do so, a good number of other people get their "fun" from a game that's a meaningful contest, and resent not only GW's diminution of that meaningful competition for the sake of "forging a narrative", but the attitude of "casual" players who insist that theirs is the only "right sort of fun".

Try, just, try to get off your high horse and wrap your head around the idea that a game of playing with plastic men is hardly a meaningful contest.

In the same way playing with wooden chesspieces can;t be a meaningful comtest, right? Or little stones in Go, or cards with pictures on..? What the flying feth do you think the pieces a game uses has to do with tactical competition?

 DeffDred wrote:
At no point did I claim that I play using the "right sort of fun". I said there's a difference between "fun" and competition. And fun was in quotations.

What you said was: "But thats not having fun. That's competative play.". you're insisting that the two are mutually-exclusive. We all understand that you don't enjoy competition; it continues to baffle me that you just can't understand that for others, it is the competition that is fun. But then you claim to believe that aliens built the pyramids, so I suppose I'm expecting a bit much from you.

Actually I believe man built the pyramids, just with help from something greater. But that's something else entirely. Also it's a bit rude of you to attack my beliefs.

But since you want to make this personal (man, you're easy to offend) I'll just toss you in the ignore bin so this doesn't come up between us
again.

As to the above:

Casual play can be fun

Competitive play can be fun.

Casual play can be competitive.

Competitive play can be casual.... (E=MC2)

It all depends on how tight ya bunghole is.,.. And how desperate you are to win at army mens... pew pew...

Truthfully though no competitive game on the planet has a notation in the rulebook about "house rules" or "agree with opponent" or "have fun"
Which has been there since 3rd...

And chess is a meaningful challenge... Because it does not require an FAQ or a subscription to a magazine to understand a constantly changing ruleset.. I'm pretty sure I can go play some random dude in Japan or Zimbabwe in a game of chess without needing to establish "house rules"

That's how you define a Competitive game.

I've seen some of those pro chess tournaments.. Doesn't look like they having much fun to me... IMO

So firstly, OP, you are certainly not alone when you say that games in 6th ed tend to be determined very quickly. 6th ed missions (including the addition of secondaries), make it very obvious to tell who is walking away with the game after turn 2, and all of the rules that make things die faster, especially to shooting, combined with said missions things and the now serious problems with assault makes it very, VERY difficult to pull things off later on.

40k is now much more of playing a couple of turns and the winner mops up, at least compared to previous editions where it was a lot easier to at least threaten a draw late into the game. Put another way, if you're looking for a game that provides you a few hours of challenge (things are tough but with luck and creativity you can overcome problems), that appears to rather be gone now. So, what do you do?

-Loki- wrote:6th edition is the epitome of 'beer and pretzels' play, and as that suggest, it works best when having a beer with friends and not taking the game so seriously.

-Loki- 4 wrote:

English Assassin wrote:So in other words, give up any expectation of enjoying a challenging game; that's now the wrong sort of fun.

Basically, yes.

You really can't take 40k as a serious competitive exercise. It's a dice game. Whatever pretense of seriousness people were bringing to the game in 5h is now even more challenged in 6th, and a few years of Matt Ward writing codices.

If you want a serious strategy game, go play chess or something. The only way you will survive 40k with your sanity in tact is to abandon any seriousness about it.

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:How do I have an enjoyable game of 6th? It sounds snobby, but the truth is that I have found that the best way to have fun in this hobby is to be EXTREMELY selective about who I will play with.

Unfortunately, I've also found this to be true.

There are certain kinds of lists that create boring games. Said lists almost universally got stronger in 6th. More competitive people, therefore, are now bringing lists that are more awful to play against (win or lose). In 5th, there were things you could bring to the table to force more interesting stuff, like bringing an assault army, or bring a foot horde, or whatever, but most of those antidotes have been killed off by 6th ed rules.

As such, I'm afraid I really have to agree here. In the end, if your opponent is hell-bent on bringing a boring list and playing a tedious game, there's not much you can do to stop them other than not to play them.

When 6th ed game out, there were a few rules that I had come to the conclusion that would not create WAAC and TFG behavior, but it would rather reveal this kind of character, as it stripped away constraints on abuse. It turns out that more or less the entirety of 6th ed is that way. All you'll probably need to do is to read a person's army list to figure out if there's any serious chance of anything interesting happening, as the kind of person you're not going to want to play against will make their attitude towards the game pretty clear by the time you read their list.

I'm also more inclined to take 40k as a "Beer and Pretzels" kind of game. I've played a few times in 6th, but so far it's been fun! The only problem now is that 6th Ed. games take much longer than 5th, but I blame this on the fact that my friends and I haven't mastered the rules yet and we're still figuring things out (me more so, as I've only been playing 40k for a year).

My 40k friends are drifting from 6th Ed. however. They've been in the game far longer than I have and don't see as much fun in it anymore. They're frustrated by how long the games are due to all the randomness and the tedious new missions in 6th.

The 40k crowd in our small city is fairly small, so having my friends not wanting to play so much is pretty disheartening. I'm still having fun with 6th however, so I'll keep playing. I make it worth my time by just having fun with the game and not taking it so seriously.

Redbeard wrote: I guess there must be some masochistic people who enjoy pulling their pieces off the board after "hilarious" and "cinematic" dice rolls

Guilty

Redbeard wrote:but my experience is that most people want to win the games they play and want the results of those games to be based on what they choose to do, not random events.

Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

I seem to be in the minority on this, but I find 6e games to play faster and easier.

I do agree the most reliable way to have fun is play with like minded people.

 Ailaros wrote:
You really can't take 40k as a serious competitive exercise. It's a dice game. Whatever pretense of seriousness people were bringing to the game in 5h is now even more challenged in 6th, and a few years of Matt Ward writing codices.

If you want a serious strategy game, go play chess or something. The only way you will survive 40k with your sanity in tact is to abandon any seriousness about it.

You've made this witless assertion before, and both your comparison with chess and your insistence that the presence of a random element precludes meaningful tactical competition are still a load of cobblers. I'm just going to quote what I said in reply last time you came out with it. Try reading this time, rather than blithely ignoring everything that doesn't suit your outlook.

English Assassin wrote:This, to be brutally frank, is nonsense. Ignoring the obvious fact that 40k is a tactical game anyway, which renders comparisons with games of abstract strategy like chess futile, the presence of an element of randomness does not preclude player skill from being the dominant factor. Obviously, this being 40k, the horrible lack of balance between army lists is also a significant factor, and indeed one which in particular cases overshadows player skill. However, a game does not need to be an abstract one of perfect information, like Chess (or Go, or Blokus) with no random component to still rely predominantly on player skill. If you don't believe me, next time you play 40k, use a scatter dice to move your units, and to chose their targets, and see how well you do. For that matter, poker, by your rationale, should be a matter of nothing but luck, and yet professional players continue to take the shirts off the backs of rubes who believe just that.

Moreover, you are wilfully ignoring the fact that not only are probabilities on a number of d6 laughably easy to compute in one's head, but that most of the time in 40k, the players will be rolling buckets of dice which - following the Law of large numbers - will pertain towards the average. This doesn't mean that startling failures or successes (Black swan events, if you want the mathematicians' term) are impossible, nor that they will not affect the game's outcome to some degree, but nonetheless most of the time, the numbers of dice rolled are sufficiently large that their results will match prediction to within an acceptable margin of error.

English Ass wrote:In the same way playing with wooden chesspieces can;t be a meaningful comtest, right? Or little stones in Go, or cards with pictures on..? What the flying feth do you think the pieces a game uses has to do with tactical competition?

You yourself created the parallel between Warhammer and Chess.




Edit : What the feth is Go?

 Big'Uns wrote:

English Ass wrote:In the same way playing with wooden chesspieces can;t be a meaningful comtest, right? Or little stones in Go, or cards with pictures on..? What the flying feth do you think the pieces a game uses has to do with tactical competition?

You yourself created the parallel between Warhammer and Chess.

In an entirely different context.

Big'Uns wrote:Edit : What the feth is Go?

Let me Google that for you...

English Ass wrote:In an entirely different context.

Um.... No... You directly compared warhammer to chess as a tactical game... Somehow you threw poker in there too. Cause yeah we didn't see a playmate come in third in last years 1,000,000 invite after never having played before.. British people play poker? Huh...



Edit: What the feth is google?

 Big'Uns wrote:

English Ass wrote:In an entirely different context.

Um.... No... You directly compared warhammer to chess as a tactical game.

No, I brought up chess to point out that playing pieces were irrelevant to the depth of a game, and poker to demonstrate that randomness and skill are not mutually exclusive. Do try to keep up.

Also, did you have a point to make or are you just here to get back at those rascally lobsterbacks?

 Ailaros wrote:

When 6th ed game out, there were a few rules that I had come to the conclusion that would not create WAAC and TFG behavior, but it would rather reveal this kind of character, as it stripped away constraints on abuse. It turns out that more or less the entirety of 6th ed is that way. All you'll probably need to do is to read a person's army list to figure out if there's any serious chance of anything interesting happening, as the kind of person you're not going to want to play against will make their attitude towards the game pretty clear by the time you read their list.

Dead on. I found that this was true really in any edition of the game, but it's particularly true now. 6th ed is so spectacularly "breakable" that it really is up to the community to police itself. You really only need to know what kind of list someone is taking to see where their head is at. If I see someone with a flying circus Necron list teamed up with some really implausible ally like Blood Angels for CC punch, then I know it's not someone who is on the same wavelength as I am and that it's just not going to be fun.

I've got a core group of about four or five guys that I can play fun games with. Problem is, it seems that most people who take the same laid-back approach to the game that I do tend to have busy schedules filled with activities and obligations outside of wargaming. I can always get a game in with a random at the LGS, but I find that the WAAC mentality seems to increase commensurate with the amount of time one spends in said LGS... hence, games with them tend not to be very much fun for me.

 English Touchhole wrote:

 Big'Uns wrote:

English Ass wrote:In an entirely different context.

Um.... No... You directly compared warhammer to chess as a tactical game.

No, I brought up chess to point out that playing pieces were irrelevant to the depth of a game, and poker to demonstrate that randomness and skill are not mutually exclusive. Do try to keep up.

Also, did you have a point to make or are you just here to get back at those rascally lobsterbacks?

My point is.... And I'll try to type real slow for you... Warhammer... is...not...a....competetive.....game.... I understand if you have low self-esteem probably no good at contact sports or had a bully or something.. If you need to convince yourself that a game of chance is competitive to keep from admitting to yourself that you play with with little plastic men for absolutely no reason than to go, pew...pew..pew... To call it "tactics" however is blasphemous.... Oh wait.. That's right you guys wear red in the woods and stand shoulder to shoulder.. Nevermind..



Edit: What the feth is a Lobsterback?

 Ailaros wrote:
When 6th ed game out, there were a few rules that I had come to the conclusion that would not create WAAC and TFG behavior, but it would rather reveal this kind of character, as it stripped away constraints on abuse. It turns out that more or less the entirety of 6th ed is that way. All you'll probably need to do is to read a person's army list to figure out if there's any serious chance of anything interesting happening, as the kind of person you're not going to want to play against will make their attitude towards the game pretty clear by the time you read their list.

Yeah, except by your previous comments there's an absurdly huge range of lists that count as WAAC and TFG behavior:

Gunline armies are of course TFG armies, even when they're fluffy armies like a foot IG gunline, because they're too good against assault armies that don't bother to bring any shooting or any movement beyond walking 6" across the table each turn.

Flyer-heavy armies are TFG armies, even when they're fluffy armies like Elysian drop troops, because they're too good against armies that don't bring AA and/or objective holders that can laugh at flyers.

Anyone who plays Tau is TFG because the Tau want to keep you from assaulting, and it's not fun for assault players if they don't get to assault. Oh, and most Eldar armies are probably in this category too.

Midrange shooting armies like Draigowing are TFG armies because they can walk backwards at the same speed as an assault army (at least a bad assault army with no mobility) and deny assault until they've shot the assault army to death.


In short, calling something TFG or WAAC really loses its impact when it seems to apply to everything outside of "the exact army I want to play and play against". The simplest answer is that 40k just isn't the game for you, and you should quit and find a better one. You're never going to be happy unless you're playing against a clone of yourself, so why keep trying?

How i have fun kill a termi in cc with a squad of fw ;p. But ye go in expectin to kill all ur men in blood filled warfare ^.^ de just minis you put em back on the table at the end of te game no harm in losin

I have enjoyed every single game I have played in 6th edition. I have been doing pretty well and losing close games. In 5th I played against BA spam, IG, parking lots, and GK Purifier spam. That stuff is over. I add in some TH/SS termies to my double executioner russ IG army, or add in some thunderwolf cavalry to my Tau list, its pure awesome. I also have had some really horrific dice rolling in the past, I mean really god awful an with prescience I am able to neutralize that a bit.

In short I love 6th edition.

Try to find some like minded players that if they were to lose, won't hate rage. Hard to do at the LGS but possible.

That's right you guys wear red in the woods and stand shoulder to shoulder.

Hilarious as warfare was back in the day I would like to weigh in on this little textual firestorm and point out that anachronisms aren't exactly fair points.

Now then, I don't think that anyone is trying to insinuate that Warhammer 40k (or most, if any, similar tabletop wargames) is on the same competitive/tactical/etc. level as Chess, Football, Yankball, or what have you. I'm finding the lot of you to be nasty, angry internet people, but I think that our dear friend from the Officio Assassinorum has had his original points taken greatly out of context. This'll probably backfire horribly, but I'm going to try to weigh in here and see if I can't get you folks from squabbling like Lootas over an Assault Cannon.

Point one, and I've already stated it, I don't think any of us here are really trying to equate 40k with Chess on a competitive level. On that note, even if Chess or a similarly mainstream competitive activity is, well, competitive it doesn't mean that it can't also be a perfectly good activity to partake in casually, also. With heavily personalised armies and terrain coupled with lots of background story, Warhammer 40k presents a greater opportunity for a narrative, story-telling, friendly game than Chess does. That being said, it IS a game where one force tries to beat another force. I would say that is an inherently competitive aspect; not necessarily die-hard competitive by any means, but I think it's safe to say that often someone plays a game of 40k hoping to win.

Furthermore, 40k tournaments tend to occur wherever 40k is sold, from my experience. People want to practice and compete in these tournaments, and as such are likely to play games with an army designed to improve their chances--a 'competitive' army. Sure, it is not like Chess where there is a proper, consistent counter to everything, but at the very least one can build their army in a way that improves the chances of success as much as possible. Fun games and competitive games are not mutually exclusive. Anyone keeping up with the new edition, be they casual or competitive, has the 6th edition material to work with and casual and competitive play styles will adapt accordingly, if not in different ways. Which way is 'right' simply depends on what the player hopes to get out of the game.




Edit: On a side note, I'm having much better assaults with my DE since sixth edition rolled around. Go figure.

Likan Wolfsheim wrote:

Edit: On a side note, I'm having much better assaults with my DE since sixth edition rolled around. Go figure.

Funny, I think I've only bee able to make 1/4th of my assaults since this edition came out... Granted I've only been able to get 3 or so games in... I'm trying to say I have bad luck.

Big'Uns wrote:Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Perhaps some Vegas people could explain this, but my understanding is that craps is not a highly skill-based game. Some gamblers prefer this, as they can get sloppy drunk and still win.

On the other hand, Blackjack, still a game with random elements, is a game of skill. A good player can push the odds in their favour, and a really good player (one who knows how to count cards) is deemed to have too much of an edge over the house to allow them to play.

People keep making the mistake that simply because there are dice in a game, the outcome must be random. When the same people keep winning large tournaments, year after year, there's some pretty conclusive evidence that shows that, in spite of the fact that there are dice involved, there are skills that can be mastered and these skills will result in games being won, or lost, accordingly.

What people don't like about 6th ed is that there are now too many cases where singular dice rolls have too great an impact on whether a game is won or lost. And so I shall return to the blackjack example for why this bothers people.

An average blackjack player can play one hand for all their money and expect to win or lose based on that one hand just as much as if they spread their play over multiple hands. A good blackjack player, however, would never put down all their money on one hand, because it's not one random event that they're basing their win/loss ratio on, it's that they expect to push the odds in their favour over time. If a good blackjack player were forced to put their entire bankroll on one hand, they'd do no better than the average player.

The good players don't want to play a game where their win/loss ratio is based on luck, if they did, they'd be at the craps or roulette table. They're playing blackjack because they want their skill to matter.

It's the same with 40k. Except that the difference between 5th and 6th is that there are more events that can swing a game on a single roll now than there were before. When a player loses half their squad leaders and characters due to a mysterious terrain effect, when the board ends up 50% empty due to crappy terrain density rolls, or when one player is able to score an extra 3 victory points due to a warlord trait, these push the game more towards the random and away from the skill.

Combine this with the fact that a game takes 2+ hours to play, and one of these random rolls early in the game can waste both player's time. We've all seen the threads where someone posts "my opponent quit just because I rolled X" . Well, that's how this works out. So, then we hear the solution, "if you get one of those things, just re-roll it" - well, if we're going to just throw out any result we don't like, why bother rolling in the first place?

Someone summed this up pretty well somewhere else. Paraphrasing, and I don't know who, they said the reason for putting more random events into a game is so that little brother has a chance of beating big brother on family game night. Candyland is a perfect example - it's all luck, there are no choices, and consequently, 4-year-old Timmy will win just as often as 12-year old Jake or 38-year-old Dad. But most people get sick of Candyland by the time they're five, and only play it to humour Timmy.

That's how I view the random crap they added to 6th ed. It gives crappy players a chance to beat good players. Maybe GW was too tired of having people quit when they never won games, so they figured, rather than actually balance the armies, they'd just toss in random chances so that bad armies could still win occasionally.

I certainly agree, blackjack is an excellent analogy for the type of game that 40k is. Over hundreds of games, a person with a little bit more skill will probably win a game or two more than a person with a little less skill, certainly.

In the case of 40k, though, sample sizes are way, WAY too small to see the effect of skill from relatively close-in-skill opponents. You only need to win roughly 4 games in a row to win a tournament. That's much to coarse to see small differences in player skill. Indeed, most people will never play a hundred games against a single opponent, and even then, those extra few wins could very likely be missed.

The fact that the only transmission system for player skill (outside of the movement phase and target prioritization) is through randomness does not fully invalidate player skill by any means. Every time that you need to roll dice to see if your plans succeed, though, it's a dice game, and it's the specific random events that determine the ultimate outcome of the game. As not all random events are equally important, really it revolves around a small number of random events for every game.

To think about it another way, a game of 40k is like playing blackjack against someone best two out of three. There is certainly player skill in knowing the odds, but it's still more or less the actual cards that come up in the games that determine the winner of that set. Over many, many sets, the skill difference will become apparent, but over a single game, or even over a few games, the coarsness of the system makes a mockery of any ability to determine which player is more skilled simply by looking at the outcomes of the game.

I've enjoyed 6th ed immensely and I'm what you might call a casual competitive gamer. I like to win, and enjoy the competition, but part of the fun for me is losing, and figuring out what I can do better. I haven't won a game against Necrons since 6th came out. But now I have a plan... and it might even work!
but what we do is bring whatever we find fun. Admittedly I told him that if he brings his flying circus against my space wolves all ML get flakk missiles.
We also set up the terrain together, before either of us know what side, what mission ect. We actually have one terrain piece (a home-built watchtower) that 9/10 games ends up in the middle of the table. It's become tradition that one of us puts it there, usually the person with more objectives.
And above all we just play for fun. Win or lose it's fun because we choose to make it so. TBH other than a few things that I have issue with I'm a bigger fan of 6th than 5th. Hope this rambling post helps

Except that's not really true. 40k games tend to roll enough dice that it's fair to assume average results, and skill gives a meaingful advantage. When your tactical squad is rolling 20 dice for shooting the difference between an average 13 hits and a slightly above average 15 hits is less important than, say, having a good plan to win the mission objectives and knowing which target needs to receive those 13-15 hits to maximize your chances of success. And then there's the question of how you react to the rare event when the dice do something far outside the average. A good player can adjust their plans to handle it, a bad player will lose and blame the dice. And of course there's the entire subject of metagame analysis and list construction, where there are absolutely no random elements and it's entirely a question of player skill.

End result: skill is very much a part of 40k and there's a good reason why the same people tend to win tournaments.


The reason a lot of people hate the new random elements in 6th is that they entirely ignore the "lots of dice" rule and give a table of equally likely outcomes with wildly different results. It entirely removes the ability to make meaningful strategic plans around the tables in the same way that you can plan on a unit doing an average of X wounds and form a strategy for it. There's no strategy to picking warlord traits, for example, you just roll on the table and hope that you get a better one than your opponent.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, when you start banning entire strategies (like calling anyone who plays a gunline army TFG) of course the game becomes random. How can the movement phase possibly involve player skill when there is only one acceptable direction and distance to move (towards the enemy, full distance) and doing anything less is "abhorrent behavior" that ruins your opponent's fun by denying them the ability to assault you. So naturally when the only acceptable strategy is "meet in midfield and let's see who rolls better" you're going to feel that the entire game is based on random chance. Meanwhile those of us sociopaths who use alternative strategies will continue to think otherwise.

Big'Uns wrote: Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Redbeard wrote:Perhaps some Vegas people could explain this, but my understanding is that craps is not a highly skill-based game. Some gamblers prefer this, as they can get sloppy drunk and still win.

Edit: (Sarcasm) Craps is not a game of skill. Gambling and hashing bets is. Akin to slots being skill.

Rebeard wrote:On the other hand, Blackjack, still a game with random elements, is a game of skill. A good player can push the odds in their favour, and a really good player (one who knows how to count cards) is deemed to have too much of an edge over [u]the house[/uto allow them to play.

You said it... Players Vs. House.. Not Player Vs. Player.

House ALWAYS wins BTW.. They win in the event of a tie.. 57%

Redbeard wrote:Candyland is a perfect example - it's all luck, there are no choices, and consequently, 4-year-old Timmy will win just as often as 12-year old Jake or 38-year-old Dad. But most people get sick of Candyland by the time they're five, and only play it to humour Timmy.

Candyland is a much better example to parallel Warhammer.


Poker IS a competitive sport with a random element, rather than known, static elements.

Why?

Players start out with the exact same chances with the same 52 cards dealt at random. You cannot go out and purchase a deck that is all face cards. You are not playing apples to oranges. When you sit down to a poker game, probability states that you have the EXCACT same chance of drawing a royal flush as your opponent does. Now with that apple-apple comparison, it is a game of smart betting and bluffs.

Now if you and your opponent could change the layout of your deck of cards without many guidlines and the possibility of a 10year gap between the manufacture of cards and the evolution of the rules associated with them ( Duke of Octogons? WTF?) it would no longer be competitivethat's now in the realm of "fun". It may require skill. Without a doubt. But not competitive in any stretch. Name an olympic sport where you have an option of equipment.

Big'Uns wrote:That's right you guys wear red in the woods and stand shoulder to shoulder.

I was simply recognizing English Assassin's hereditary and genetic inablity to recognize what a "tactic" is. I was not comparing this to warhammer at all.

I kinda wish you had quoted the rest of that.

Likan Wolfsheim wrote:Hilarious as warfare was back in the day I would like to weigh in on this little textual firestorm and point out that anachronisms aren't exactly fair points. Now then, I don't think that anyone is trying to insinuate that Warhammer 40k (or most, if any, similar tabletop wargames) is on the same competitive/tactical/etc. level as Chess, Football, Yankball, or what have you. I'm finding the lot of you to be nasty, angry internet people,

The only way you could deem a game of warhammer to be competitive, Is to have two armies with the same lists, same points and same rules.
For the record: I didn't say anything about warhammer not requiring skill.. However in my experience, it's usually whoever makes the fewest mistakes. Or one army just generally outclasses the other.

 Big'Uns wrote:
But not competitive in any stretch. Name an olympic sport where you have an option of equipment.

Err, every single competitive sport ever? You do realize that we spend obscene amounts of money on developing slight improvements in equipment for athletes, right? And that the intent of that research is absolutely to gain an advantage over the competition through superior equipment?

The only way you could deem a game of warhammer to be competitive, Is to have two armies with the same lists, same points and same rules.
For the record: I didn't say anything about warhammer not requiring skill.. However in my experience, it's usually whoever makes the fewest mistakes. Or one army just generally outclasses the other.

Except that metagame analysis and list creation are part of the competition.

I think that 'competitive' has a much broader meaning than what's being used here:

From Merriam-Webster, for us Yanks:
Competitive:

: 1: relating to, characterized by, or based on competition <competitive sports>

Competition:

1: The act or process of competing : rivalry:

Compete:

1: to strive consciously or unconsciously for an objective (as position, profit, or a prize) : be in a state of rivalry <competing teams> <companies competing for customers>

From the Oxford Dictionary:
Competitive:

1) of, relating to, or characterized by competition: a competitive sport

Competition:

the activity or condition of competing: there is fierce competition between banks

Compete:

strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same: universities are competing for applicants

Neither dictionary necessitates that competing parties need to be on equal footing or equally equipped. Maybe 40k isn't nearly as big as sports and the like, but I'm fairly certain that by definition a game of 40k is inherently competitive. It has nothing to do with with a level playing field or same equipment. Presumably, barring certain story-telling scenarios, two people who meet for a game of 40k intend to strive to win the game. The game is won by defeating the enemy. How cutthroat and how balanced the game is is beside the point.

Edit: Granted, I would be inclined to believe that more-or-less 'most' people who play 40k do so for fun above all else.

 Redbeard wrote:

Big'Uns wrote:Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Waaaah waaaaah waaaaahhh TL;DR

That's how I view the random crap they added to 6th ed. It gives crappy players a chance to beat good players. Maybe GW was too tired of having people quit when they never won games, so they figured, rather than actually balance the armies, they'd just toss in random chances so that bad armies could still win occasionally.

Then. Just. Quit.

I just gave up on 6th edition altogether. If the game's not fun, I really have no business playing it. I enjoy competition and a tactically engaging game. 6th edition does not provide that.

I'll just sit on the bench until 7th comes out. I can only hope that it's not so bad. Either way, I might actually get my Infinity armies painted.

 Big'Uns wrote:
My point is.... And I'll try to type real slow for you... Warhammer... is...not...a....competetive.....game...

Don't let your failure to understand how to play this game well delude you into thinking it impossible to do so.

As for the rest... just grow up.

 English Assassin wrote:

 Big'Uns wrote:
My point is.... And I'll try to type real slow for you... Warhammer... is...not...a....competetive.....game...

Don't let your failure to understand how to play this game well delude you into thinking it impossible to do so.

As for the rest... just grow up.

Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively, and I completely agree with him (even if I don't think he made his point in the nicest way possible). I will absolutely smash you in a competitive game, but that doesn't mean that I think the game is most fun that way or that it is ideally designed for it. It's clearly not.

Don't assume that all of us "fluff bunnies" can't play the game "well" or that we don't know how to win.

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:

Big'Uns wrote:Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Waaaah waaaaah waaaaahhh TL;DR

That's how I view the random crap they added to 6th ed. It gives crappy players a chance to beat good players. Maybe GW was too tired of having people quit when they never won games, so they figured, rather than actually balance the armies, they'd just toss in random chances so that bad armies could still win occasionally.

Then. Just. Quit.

Wow, it's been a while since I've seen anyone quite so blatantly disrespectful to a mod. Sadly, only about 2 or 3 minutes since someone's been that rude to another poster.

Just because you don't understand an argument, doesn't mean that the facts go away when you don't like them. The fact is, 6th brought in an inordinate amount of padding to cover imbalanced rulesets. Random terrain, random psychic powers, random objectives, random warlord traits, random jetpack movement and random charges coupled with allies and bought fortifications have upset many a notion of balance and strategy in this game.

Random charge alone wrecks havoc on balancing assault. Now units have an even larger potential threat range than ever and they also have the chance and distince possibility of failure on what was once accountable. Now you can claim that any CC unit is not OP because there is the very real chance that they won't make that 6 inch charge and have to suffer another round of shooting in addition to overwatch. Meanwhile, people are also making those charges that should NEVER happen. I think we can all name that guy whose dice must be rigged because luck shines on him with the grace of God and he's in heaven because he's making 10 inch charges in pinch situations snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This just creates a lack of safety zone where there once was. Before the safe distance from any basic infantry unit was over 12". Now the safety distance is over 18" because you never know. You just don't. And that is the main problem with this edition they cooked up is you never know. You won't know how good your army will be until you've set up the board and rolled everything out for your army. You don't know if the movement you're making to assault in a later phase will work out spectacularly or fail miserably based on dice. As wargamers we have made concessions with dice to decide combat actions, we don't like dice to decide our tactical actions. As someone said before, warhammer generally falls to the law of large numbers for combat, but 2d6 falls to a bellcurve of single possibilities for an entire unit's actions.

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:

Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively, and I completely agree with him (even if I don't think he made his point in the nicest way possible). I will absolutely smash you in a competitive game, but that doesn't mean that I think the game is most fun that way or that it is ideally designed for it. It's clearly not.

Don't assume that all of us "fluff bunnies" can't play the game "well" or that we don't know how to win.

Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively,

Hi. You sound like a fun guy to be around.

Is that how you introduce yourself normally? You must be good wth the wimins...

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:Don't assume that all of us "fluff bunnies" can't play the game "well" or that we don't know how to win.

You da best at army mens in L.A.? That must get you mad street cred yo..

Likan Wolfsheim wrote:I think that 'competitive' has a much broader meaning than what's being used here:

From Merriam-Webster, for us Yanks:

When you bust out the dictionary to attack the definition of a word being used during an argument, you don't have much of an argument.

Get out the Thesaurus instead.

Big'Uns wrote: But not competitive in any stretch. Name an olympic sport where you have an option of equipment.

Peregrine wrote:Err, every single competitive sport ever? You do realize that we spend obscene amounts of money on developing slight improvements in equipment for athletes, right? And that the intent of that research is absolutely to gain an advantage over the competition through superior equipment?

I hope you mean training equipment. There are very specific guidlines as to what can be taken during competitition. Even in your neck of the woods, NASCAR cars can only weigh so much. They can only be of a certain size.. etc.. Any loopholes discovered in competitive sport that are exploited are usually summarily closed and the parties involved are considered to be bad sportsman..the competitive side of warhammer is just that, nothing more than the exploitation of loopholes and non-disclosure.

Laymens : Bad sportsmanship

I start game of army mens.
I hurl insults at opponent until he quits.
I win at army mens.

I must be skilled player of competitive game.

We all know how absolutely crucial it is for to win.

Ailaros wrote:I certainly agree, blackjack is an excellent analogy for the type of game that 40k is. Over hundreds of games, a person with a little bit more skill will probably win a game or two more than a person with a little less skill, certainly.

You're reading the analogy wrong though. You're comparing a game of blackjack to a game of 40k. That's incorrect. You should be comparing a game of blackjack to an event in 40k - say, a shooting phase. A game of 40k is more akin to a few hours of blackjack, in which a good player can actually beat the house often enough to make it worth playing.

A good player can get more out of their shooting phase than a poor player, because in spite of the vagaries of dice, they will make better choices. That doesn't mean that every time a good player shoots the dice will work for them, or that the poor player cannot succeed when the dice come up in their favour.

In the case of 40k, though, sample sizes are way, WAY too small to see the effect of skill from relatively close-in-skill opponents. You only need to win roughly 4 games in a row to win a tournament. That's much to coarse to see small differences in player skill. Indeed, most people will never play a hundred games against a single opponent, and even then, those extra few wins could very likely be missed.

And yet, the same people win tournament after tournament. When your theory does not adequately describe the experimental results, you need to adjust your theory.

To think about it another way, a game of 40k is like playing blackjack against someone best two out of three. There is certainly player skill in knowing the odds, but it's still more or less the actual cards that come up in the games that determine the winner of that set. Over many, many sets, the skill difference will become apparent, but over a single game, or even over a few games, the coarsness of the system makes a mockery of any ability to determine which player is more skilled simply by looking at the outcomes of the game.

Again, you're comparing incorrectly. There are 3 phases per turn, and a minimum of 10 turns in the game. Add deployments to the equation, and a more realistic comparison would be which player had a better return (against the same dealer) out of 30-40 hands played. I'd side with the skilled player every time.

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:Then. Just. Quit.

So, your suggestion is that if someone doesn't like something, rather than making tweaks so that they can like it, they should just quit. How... mature. I don't see this approach doing much for the long-term survival of any hobby.

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:
Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively

Ooooh, decorated local player. Makeup? Put lipstick on a pig and it's still...

We don't bother decorating local players in Chicago. If you're good, you'll be decorated on the national or even international scene. (Alan B, for example, won both WargamesCon and the singles portion of the ETC)

Hi all,
FIRST, define what you mean by decent game?

If you want a well defined rule set suitable for tactical gamepaly. 40K 6th is NOT for you!

If you want to be able to measure your ability to compete in a meaningfull way.40K 6th is not for you!

If you want to be able to play a game without having JARRING conterintiutive gameplay.40k 6th is not for you.

IF you want to buy lots of GW product, pretend tons of randomness is 'fun' and make up 'house rules' to get the game play you want to have 'fun'.
40k 6th may be for you ...BUT why pay for a rule set you dont like as is?

In short if you like inspiration to buy GW minatures, but not actualy use the 40k 6th ed rules to play a game as written.
Then you MAY get a decent game of 40k from the 6th ed rules , IF you put lots of effort in...

I would rather spend my time and effort on something that delivers more in return...

"If you just want to play with 50-60 toy soldiers and a bunch of tanks with a few mates and some cider"... 40k 6th may still be for you.

@Lanrack

Sorry about not making it clear enough =O
what I meant was a decent game, in the sense that both opposing players have a (closest) equal chance to beating or even better in my opinion , tieing the other person in times of dire bad roles and such, without the huge influence of army list, in a little bit addition to terrain setup and house rules like some others have suggested and I have taken into account =)

*IN ADDITION little side note
Can't we all get along here and try and come up with ideas to help out the game
rather than pumbling each other into the ground over stupid cuting and pasting of
things said in prior post? xD

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:
Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively

Quoted Redangel:
Ooooh, decorated local player. Makeup? Put lipstick on a pig and it's still...

We don't bother decorating local players in Chicago. If you're good, you'll be decorated on the national or even international scene. (Alan B, for example, won both WargamesCon and the singles portion of the ETC)

Peregrine wrote:40k games tend to roll enough dice that it's fair to assume average results, and skill gives a meaingful advantage.

That is WAY not true.

The law of large numbers only exists for LARGE numbers. A few dozen die rolls is not large. Furthermore, not all die rolls are equally important. Narrow the scope down to the few events in a game that really, really matter, and now you're probably rolling a number of dice that can be counted on two hands.

You're trying to apply the law of large numbers to a relatively miniscule data set.

Redbeard wrote:And yet, the same people win tournament after tournament. When your theory does not adequately describe the experimental results

Yeah it does. People who win tournaments are lucky.

I've seen with my own eyes extreme luck happen to a single person over the course of several games. On many occasions. Given that you don't need extreme luck to win a game of 40k (you just need to have slightly better than your opponent), it is very, very well within the realm of reason that a single person has been mildly lucky over the course of a few dozen games.

40k is a game where you play odds. Better player skill means playing odds smarter. Who wins any given game is therefore the results of the actual specific instances of odds in any given game. Over the course of a tiny number of games each with a small number of odds events, it is therefore the results of the odds (the die rolls) that are what determine the outcome of the game and thus the tournament.

Unless your opponent always plays really awful odds, of course, but I think it's safe to say that people who fundamentally understand how the game works are unlikely to win tournaments (as they would need extremely good luck, rather than just mildly good luck).

 Ailaros wrote:

Peregrine wrote:40k games tend to roll enough dice that it's fair to assume average results, and skill gives a meaingful advantage.

That is WAY not true.

The law of large numbers only exists for LARGE numbers. A few dozen die rolls is not large. Furthermore, not all die rolls are equally important. Narrow the scope down to the few events in a game that really, really matter, and now you're probably rolling a number of dice that can be counted on two hands.

Yay!! Finally someone who is good at maths...

Lightcavalier wrote:
Really, you want to bring that up. The majority of us only have our local scene as a standard of comparison. As an example. There are not true national events in Canada, and for some reason we do not have an ETC team.

The nearest "major" 40k event to me is a 10 hour drive away on a good day. And where I live, most people dont have the money to be driving 10 hours to go play toy soldiers for a day and a half.
So you know what, lay off the guy. If he does well in his own setting, then its conceivable that he could do well in a larger scale. But saying that someone isnt credentialed because they, essentially, dont live near/attend any of the very large 40k events (which are localized to roughly 4 parts of the United States, as far as I can tell) is ridiculous.

Okay, let me spell this out so that you understand what I was really getting at.

There are a lot of people posting on this forum who do actually know each other from larger events. It's not about having the money or time to go there, it's about knowing each other. And, what's more, even if we don't know each other on sight, we recognize each other's names when we see them winning event after event.

So, when someone anonymously posts on the internet that I should just quit the game because I posted a critique of the 6th ed rules, I'm going to get a little short with him. And when he then goes on to say that he's a well decorated local player as a justification for his rudeness, well, according to who? One of my favourite quotes is from Margaret Thatcher, "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

I'm not picking on anonymous internet guy because he's a local player, I'm picking on him because he's bragging about being a great "local player" on an international forum where many of the best players in the world participate without needing to toot their own horns in the same way, and he's doing it to justify his obnoxious comments, or did you miss those?

Someone who needs to brag about being a great local player probably isn't...

If the whole of Chicago acts the way you are in this thread, you know what I'm not doing next time im in town?

Well, since you already stated that you don't have the money to travel and play toy soldiers, my guess is that you wouldn't be playing toy soldiers...

I know not everyone is looking for the same thing out of a game, but it seems like some here are ascribing malice on the part of GW as the cause of their dislike, instead of a simple case of different expectations/goals on behalf of the design team.

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't think GW has any malice, at all. I simply think that their rules design team is either completely befuddled by modern game design concepts, or ridiculously hamstrung by the needs of their sales teams. They continually miss the ball when it comes to balancing their factions. They're not willing to invest in actual game designers, preferring, instead, to internally promote translators and interns into design positions. You know there are college degrees in game design available these days...

Plenty of other game companies have proven that you can have a tightly defined ruleset and well-balanced mechanics and still appeal to casual gamers. GW, alone, seems to believe that if they tighten anything up, evil competitive people will abuse their rules and chase away casual players, not realizing that it's actually the imbalances that the competitive players recognize and abuse, and that hurt the casual player.

In an ideal world, a casual player could pick an army based on the fluff they liked and the models they wanted to paint and field a reasonable force. GW cannot make this happen. So when a newbie decides to play Tau because the models are cool, and proceeds to lose ten games in a row before quitting in frustration, it's not the competitive players who suffer.

And 6th ed was an opportunity to address some of these issues, and it was a missed one. Because, rather than actually address the flaws in the game, they decided to throw more random events in, so that Tau newbies could chance into a victory every once in a while. In the process, they crafted some of the worst gaming rules I've seen in over twenty years, resulting in a game where even laying out the terrain is turned into an antagonistic event (unless you create a house rule to deal with it), and hope that people whining about "TFG" will fix the problem. What they need to do is hire some of those TFGs and have them find these problems during playtesting, but that would actually involve playTESTING instead of PLAYtesting.

Ailaros wrote:

Redbeard wrote:And yet, the same people win tournament after tournament. When your theory does not adequately describe the experimental results

Yeah it does. People who win tournaments are lucky.

Well, I guess that's that then. Some people are simply charmed. They win tournament after tournament all due to being lucky. If only there was some way these individuals could channel their luck into something more lucrative than toy soldiers.

Seriously?

 Ailaros wrote:
The law of large numbers only exists for LARGE numbers.

Not true at all. While the outcome will not exactly converge on the mathematical average, it still comes pretty close. For example, let's consider a tactical squad shooting outside rapid fire range (10 shots, average 7 hits):

You have an 20% chance of less 6 hits, and a 10% chance of getting more than 8 hits. So you have a 70% chance of getting between 6-8 hits, which is pretty close to the average.

You have about a 2% chance of getting 3 or less hits or all 10 hits, which safely puts the extreme good and bad results into the "not very likely" category.


And once you consider the same squad shooting multiple times in a game, and then all of the games you play with a given list, you'll find that the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of your average results being pretty close to the mathematical average. Not exactly the average, of course, but close enough that the difference doesn't have much effect on your strategic choices or chances of winning.

Narrow the scope down to the few events in a game that really, really matter, and now you're probably rolling a number of dice that can be counted on two hands.

Exactly. This is why 6th edition's random factors are so stupid, because they involve single die rolls on completely unpredictable tables. It removes the predictable average outcomes of the rest of the game and replaces it with "on a 4+ you win".

40k is a game where you play odds. Better player skill means playing odds smarter. Who wins any given game is therefore the results of the actual specific instances of odds in any given game. Over the course of a tiny number of games each with a small number of odds events, it is therefore the results of the odds (the die rolls) that are what determine the outcome of the game and thus the tournament.

Exactly. 40k is a game where you play the odds, and enough dice are involved that you CAN play the odds and expect to succeed, on average. That's where player skill comes in: knowing what the odds are, and how to choose your movement/shooting targets/etc to pick the best way to roll dice. The same people tend to win tournaments because they're better at this, not because they have magical dice that always favor them.

And, like I said, you'll find a lot more room for player skill when you stop whining about WAAC and TFG. After all, it takes a lot of the skill out of the movement phase (for example) when moving anywhere but directly at the enemy is "abhorrent behavior" and you're a sociopath if you move to stay out of assault range and deny your opponent the fun of assaulting. When the only strategy is "move closer and throw dice" of course the game becomes about who is better with the dice.

Redbeard wrote:Some people are simply charmed. They win tournament after tournament all due to being lucky. If only there was some way these individuals could channel their luck into something more lucrative than toy soldiers.

Seriously?

Seriously. Of course, I would note that winning tournaments in 40k is no clear sign for success in other things. Other things in life are generally less plagued by uncontrollable variables, and just because someone is lucky at one thing doesn't make them lucky in another.

The transmission system for player skill in 40k (in most places) is through die rolls. Player skill is thus playing odds. Furthermore, the winner of any given event, and thus the aggregation of events (a game, or a tournament), is thus determined by the actual results of individual die rolls.

I've heard a lot of hate and wounded pride over the above set of statements, but without a different, better way of defining player skill and the way by which it transmits into the results of events, I really can't see a different, better way of looking at 40k in general, and thus a few handfuls of games in specific.

Peregrine wrote:While the outcome will not exactly converge on the mathematical average, it still comes pretty close.

Then you and your gaming group have very different luck than anything I've experienced. Outliers are much more common where I'm from.

For example, I've had the initiative seized on me in the last three games I've played (wherein I also got first turn). Recently, I had a 3x plasma vet squad take down an AV13 unwounded necron chariot with OVERWATCH. In the last game I played, my opponent rolled snakeyes for difficult terrain, recieved a "run" order on his guardsmen, and then rolled 3 more 1's, preventing him from getting onto an objective only 6" away. Twice in a row now, I've had a vehicle explode 6" from their first penetrating hit of the game (by Ap4 weapons no less). Last game I had 12 remaining conscripts throw down 8 hits for 6 wounds with their lasguns in a single round of shooting, which, thanks to wound allocation, left a squad out of charge range.

This is just SOME of the wonky stuff that's happened in just the last TWO GAMES. If you read my battle reports, you'll see that it is, in fact, very possible to have very rare events happen with surprising frequency. That's because the frequency is calculated based on an infinite number of events, not on the small number of them I've had over my years of playing 40k.

If you and your opponents are all relatively luck neutral (as in, things generally happen according to the statistical norm), then I envy you. I only wish the same were true for me.

I need to laugh.

 Ailaros wrote:
Furthermore, the winner of any given event, and thus the aggregation of events (a game, or a tournament), is thus determined by the actual results of individual die rolls.

Except that's not true. Let's just simplify it and say that all rolls are a 4+:

If luck is the dominant factor the tournament winners should be random. The deciding factor should be who rolls more 4+s, which is an entirely random factor. Player skill in choosing which 4+ rolls to attempt will of course swing things a bit and maybe the best players will win a bit more frequently, but there should be very little consistency in tournament winners.

If player skill is the dominant factor the tournament winners (and high-place finishes) should be consistent. The deciding factor should be who is better at choosing which 4+ rolls to attempt, and the actual rolls should involve enough dice over the course of a tournament that they become predictable and equal for all players. Exceptional luck will of course swing things a bit and occasionally the best players will lose when they "shouldn't", but there should be a lot of consistency in who wins.


Now if we look at the results of competitive 40k we see the same "best" players winning over and over again. The same people consistently win tournaments (or finish close to the top), and they even more consistently win in non-tournament games. So, either you have to claim some kind of superstitious belief about "luck" (which any casino owner will tell you is pure stupidity) that allows these players to continue to roll significantly above average even over long periods of time, or you have to accept that 40k is based on skill, not luck.

Finally, you're also ignoring the entirely non-random aspects of the game: metagame analysis, list construction, most movement, target priority, etc. All of them make a huge difference in who wins, and none of them involve rolling dice.

Then you and your gaming group have very different luck than anything I've experienced. Outliers are much more common where I'm from.

Or you're just having a problem with confirmation bias and forgetting all of the (much more common) times where the dice were just boring and average while remembering the spectacular rare event where they weren't. And you're also taking single events out of context. Obviously you'll see better or worse rolling in specific cases, but that usually averages out over an entire game and the winner is decided by skill, not just a string of good rolls.

If you don't believe it, how about this: next time you play a game, record the value of every single die you and your opponent roll and total it up at the end, for each player. Tell us the final outcome of the game, and how many of each number each player rolled. Oh, and be sure to use the same dice for each player, to rule out manufacturing issues in the dice favoring one player.

Peregrine wrote:If luck is the dominant factor the tournament winners should be random. there should be very little consistency in tournament winners.

This would only be true over an infinite number of tournaments.

For a tiny number of tournaments, there is absolutely no guarantee that this is true.

Peregrine wrote: the actual rolls should involve enough dice over the course of a tournament that they become predictable and equal for all players.

Once again, not true. You're talking about a very tiny number of die rolls compared to infinite. Seriously, the law of large numbers only works in the case of very, very large numbers.

Peregrine wrote:So, either you have to claim some kind of superstitious belief about "luck" (which any casino owner will tell you is pure stupidity) that allows these players to continue to roll significantly above average even over long periods of time, or you have to accept that 40k is based on skill, not luck.

Over short periods of time, yes.

Casinos operate in the world of large numbers. Tens of millions of dollars per day. Trillions of individual instances of chance. Every day. For a casino, they can talk about random chances with a fair degree of certainty.

But we're down in the realm of tiny numbers. I really don't understand why you don't believe in the existence of luck at this level of scope.

Peregrine wrote:Finally, you're also ignoring the entirely non-random aspects of the game: metagame analysis, list construction, most movement, target priority, etc. All of them make a huge difference in who wins, and none of them involve rolling dice.

I am. The reason why is because there are limits to these things. Limits that are really easy to hit (I mean, really, how hard is it to copy a netlist, etc.). Once these things become roughly equal between two different players, it becomes a control variable, and can be safely ignored.

Peregrine wrote:

Then you and your gaming group have very different luck than anything I've experienced. Outliers are much more common where I'm from.

Or you're just having a problem with confirmation bias

I hereby present to you my entire battle report archive. Yes, it's not completely documented, but there is a LOT of data here. One of the reasons why I've been doing this all these years is precisely so that when someone comes by and claims confirmation bias, I can present them with a huge amount of actual data.

If you can't find obvious trends in the die rolling and its impact in these games, then you must have an unshakable faith in the absence of the existence of luck.

 Ailaros wrote:
This would only be true over an infinite number of tournaments.

For a tiny number of tournaments, there is absolutely no guarantee that this is true.

You'd need an infinite number of tournaments to guarantee that skill was dominant over luck.

You don't need that many tournaments for the plausibility of the same people doing consistently doing well in tournaments by sheer luck to decline to the point where the more likely explanation is that they're just better players.

Once again, not true. You're talking about a very tiny number of die rolls compared to infinite. Seriously, the law of large numbers only works in the case of very, very large numbers.

And wrong again. The law of large numbers only guarantees that the results will converge on the exact average for very, very large numbers. For much smaller numbers the results will almost certainly be within a reasonable margin of the exact average, close enough that outliers can be ignored and the majority of events in the game will be fairly close to average.

But we're down in the realm of tiny numbers. I really don't understand why you don't believe in the existence of luck at this level of scope.

I believe in the existence of luck at small levels.

I do NOT believe that some people are simply blessed with amazing luck that goes way beyond the limit of plausibility. Even a single game of 40k involves enough rolls for the average results of MOST games to be fairly close to the mathematical average. It's a small enough number that exceptional cases will happen, but they're just that: exceptional. In other words, not frequent enough for a player to consistently do well in tournaments just by having games like that.


PS: you don't need millions of events to get the average to converge within a reasonable margin of the mathematical average. A skilled poker or blackjack player can expect to play for a night and consistently make a profit, while a "skilled" lottery player can not.

I am. The reason why is because there are limits to these things. Limits that are really easy to hit (I mean, really, how hard is it to copy a netlist, etc.). Once these things become roughly equal between two different players, it becomes a control variable, and can be safely ignored.

Err, no, those are not easy limits to hit. And no, you can't just get a netlist and expect to win. Successful tournament players may tend to use popular archetypes (after all, they were popular for a reason), but the people that win are the ones who understand the game well enough to analyze the specific tournament's rules and expected metagame and fine-tune the "netlist" to best suit that particular player and event.

Then again, you're the one who called people TFG sociopaths for playing a gunline army in 6th, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you'd ignore the skill part of army list construction.

I hereby present to you my entire battle report archive. Yes, it's not completely documented, but there is a LOT of data here. One of the reasons why I've been doing this all these years is precisely so that when someone comes by and claims confirmation bias, I can present them with a huge amount of actual data.

I just looked at a couple reports, but I don't see any useful data in there. You've highlighted certain memorable events, but you haven't compiled an exact count of each player's rolls. Of course if you're doing it that way you're going to find a lot of exceptional events, because you only include details and discussion of the events that are more interesting than "my infantry squad fired lasguns and did an average amount of wounds, then my opponent failed an average amount of saves". That's textbook confirmation bias.

Also, if you're so certain that it's entirely about luck and not skill, why the hell do you bother playing the game? Why not just roll a die, and on a 4+ you win? Or why not play a different game where you're actually playing the game, and not just writing down the results of the random number generator?