So in my club, we have a big crowd of Age of Sigmar players who come from a previous club that was only focused on hardcore competitive play in Age of Sigmar (specifically that). Their previous club died because of internal conflicts but also the fact they had trouble recruiting new players - because they were not interested in anything other than hardcore competitive play of AoS (meaning no campaign, no other format than 2000 points with last season of war rules, no interest in playing special scenarios / lists than the standard ones used in tournaments, and so on).

They come along more or less well with the rest of the club (that is open to all kinds of games, not just GW ones) and some are receptive to other games or ways to play, but their core is still mindlocked on AoS. So they mostly play with each other in their small internal group.

It's difficult not to notice there is a focus on competitive scene from main miniature game companies, GW being obviously one of the most famous but there are as well Para Bellum, Privateer Press and Mantic Games to speak just of them. GW in particular tend to be much more receptive on that matter with FAQ and erratas coming out more often than a few years ago, sometimes at a pace that is considered overwhelming by casual players and fans of other ways to play.

This honestly leads me to think more and more : is focusing on the competitive scene really good for the survivability of a game and even a community in long term, even nowadays ? Or is it more a question of ideology from game designers who come more often from the tournament scene than before ?

I'm asking myself that because of the history of above AoS tournament players in my club ; they are indeed a constant crew who play regularly, but they are mostly the same people and there's not many new players in their group nor do they attract new players that much to play with them. They're usually the same blokes playing with each other and attending the same local / country tournaments. Moreover, recently, we started an AoS campaign that is "new player friendly", for we are starting with small armies that grow up as the week pass on, and we had some of those tournament players participating - which is welland all, but...they did come with optimized armies and were playing with their "tournament setting" behavior. So of course, when some of them met some newcomer armies that were, let's say not really that optimized...the games were quite fast and not really fun for the newcomer.

As persons, all of them were friendly and honestly genuine in their joy to play with new people, but they didn't get the purpose of the campaign at first. So it led for some newcomers not to come back for the next week.

I'm not really throwing the stone at them, to be clear. They were simply playing the way they always played with each other, and in their mind, tournament play IS the best way to enjoy AoS. So to them, there's a specific way to play the different factions and TBH they're very open to teach newcomer how to build their list in the best way possible and all. But that doesn't lead to especially fun games.

It made me remember the time of when Warmachine was considered "the best game around" compared to 40k and Battle, because of its very "tight written rules" and "competition mentality by default". And the famous "page 5", of course. Nowadays, Warmachine is a shadow of its former past, nowhere close to the top game sales. And there's the tragic story of Guild Ball who was full focused on competitive play and finally shut down with a note blaming their failure on the very choice of focusing on competitive play.

When I talk with the AoS hardcore tournament crowd in my club, I realize they almost focus all their free time in that - in a way close to Esport, because they're training with their list to be the most familiar, keep up to date with the last FAQs / erratas and the current meta and carefully plan their purchases so that everything is ready for the next trendy tournament. It sounded like a second job in more than one way, and I even had some of them who were saying they felt a bit "burnt out" sometimes because of the pace GW recently put on new rules / erratas / season of war. They sure are busy.

But from a newcomer perspective, when they understand all that, it's not really that appealing. Not only it's an expensive hobby, but it's very time consuming...and the question can be asked to know where's the fun when it becomes somewhat of an obligation. I talked a bit with some newcomers who weren't interested to keep going after that meeting with the AoS competitive scene...most of them just say it's just not fun, it's not a game anymore. They were also saying they were repelled by the huge amount of "game data" to absorb just to be up to date with all the seasons of war, erratas, FAQs or even points that are not "valid anymore" sometimes as soon as the book is actually out.

Even from sales perspective, I'm not that sure focusing on competitive play really boost them that much. Maybe some shop owners can tell their feeling about it ?

So in the end, what's the real impact of a too big focus on competitive play on our game communities ? Is it positive or negative on long term ? What happens when the competitive scene repel the "casual players" by trying to impose their way to play as the only worthy one to play (well, I guess we already know that with the experience of Guild Ball and Warmachine) ? I guess it's a question of perspective...and also game ideology, depending on what you think is the best way to play a game (narration vs optimization, balance vs special scenarios, points vs historical lists, and so on). But I'm interested to see what's the situation in your own club or, maybe if I'm lucky, perspective from game designers who lurk on this forum on that matter. Do you feel that focus is more or less palatable amongst the game companies you're following ? Is is too much or actually relevant ? What leads to that from a game designer's perspective ?

I think there's a few layers to this to unravel and a simple "is tournament play good or bad" is too broad a concept to really appreciate the elements within.


1) The company end of the game. I'm going to say flat out that if the company focuses on tournament play from an angle of ensuring that armies are well balanced against each other and have good internal balance so that each army has more than one viable competitive build - then it is an all round GOOD thing no matter how you play the game.

Tight rules that are well written with flat balance so that any well build army can face off well against another is a good thing for competitive, casual, custom or whatever kind of play the players want.


The BAD kind of competitive play focus is where the parent company produces poor rules that might favour one army above others; which might only have one viable build within armies and which might hyper focus on new stock over older models. These are the bad things for both competitive play AND the casual player.


2) The company end of marketing and material. This is a second part of the coin. If the company only promotes, only talks about and only features material for competitive games then that can again lead the market. Even though you can do whatever you want; its undeniable that the marketing and advertising and material the parent company makes; guides and influences the expectations and desires of the community at a large scale.

Sometimes there can be issues though - eg GW does put out a good many non-competitive focused elements and yet uptake is trickier it seems.


3) The local players. This is a big one - in fact nay I'd say its the make or break. You can have hyper competitive players who are welcoming to newbies. Who ease them into the game; teach them; guide them and help them learn.

You can also have seal clubbers and cliques (and many won't realise they are doing it) who will drive newbies away.

You can also have people who just don't know how to tone down their game or welcome new poeple or teach them how to play.


4) Group size. In general the larger the group the greater the potential spread of skill levels and skills within the group. Therefore bigger groups have a potential to be more welcoming to a broader range of players. Smaller groups (and sadly a LOT of wargame groups are smaller) are often much more polarized. Especially as you get older and its often the most keen who are left playing - who even if they aren't high skill they've been playing for years and have cobbled together some skill and tricks.




My personal view is that competitive play is a good thing for a firm to focus on in terms of producing a balanced good solid gameplay system. Build the core game for the competitive scene with those positive aspects I outlined above.

From there you've a solid set of rules that can be adapted - be it for competitive games or narrative ones. It's a lot easier to do fun stuff like sieges or last-chance stands or campaigns when you've solid rules where you can trust them to work a certain way - thus also work a certain way if you tweak them or mess things up.

Play wise a lot of this can be improved by the parent company devoting resorces and marketing toward community building elements. Eg look at GW pushing games like Killteam as their own game and format. KT has been around for ages, but it was a tack-on in the rules - making it its own product line and focus means that its now a format people play purely for its own thing; not just as the intro game whilst you were building up.

Thanks for giving your view !

I do agree player behaviour as persons is a big factor at a local level, especially for first experiences. If you play someone who's not friendly and / or behave badly, it will always have a bad impact on your own enjoyment, no matter what the game is.

But the topic I'd like to talk about isn't really about that - the players at my club are friendly and always happy to help, but in their own specific way to play the game - which is competitive play. I do believe the way you play and see games play a big role as well outside of your own behaviour as people - and how it is presented by the game company / online competitive community has an influence on that, I think.

That's why I'm more focusing on your 1st point here, if you don't mind. This point in particular :

Tight rules that are well written with flat balance so that any well build army can face off well against another is a good thing for competitive, casual, custom or whatever kind of play the players want.

Actually, tightly written rules are really boring to read. If you want to make it as clear as possible, and try to remove all uncertainty or personnal interpretation while covering all the cases it could occurr in game...it tends to be repetitive and bland at best, repelling at worse.

I think that's not a good thing in itself for the appeal of a game in general, because if it's not appealing to read, people will just not bother. Why wanting to invest in a game that looks like it's boring just by seeing how the rules are written ? It's especially true if the game is quite complex (like multiple tables to hit, wound, and so on) and has a lot of pages just for basic rules.

I admit, I have quite a lot of years sunk in way too many games. I have read a lot of game systems, from the first GW games with background text bits mixed with rules in different sections to the tight rules with sub-sub-sections to sub-sections that look as fun to read as law articles. Complexity of the game is a crucial part here : the more rules you have, the more difficult it is to cover all cases happening in game and the more pages you need to write if you really want to be tight.

From a new player's perspective, it's the first obstacle to get over : get the rules enough to play. And the fun can already be assessed there - there ARE rule systems that are written to be fun to read...but competitive tight sets are definitely not part of them. If the new player doesn't have fun in reading the rules already, he may simply give up at this step.

I'm not that sure it's such a good thing in itself for the building of a gaming community. It is certainly good for a very specific competitive scene, but such rules aren't needed to be written that way for casual or narrative play at all. On the opposite, they tend to be in the way of such plays.

The BAD kind of competitive play focus is where the parent company produces poor rules that might favour one army above others; which might only have one viable build within armies and which might hyper focus on new stock over older models. These are the bad things for both competitive play AND the casual player.

That point, I tend to disagree mainly because it only applies if you think the competitive player and the casual / narrative player give the same importance to rules in comparison to their own game objectives. I already find myself not in that case, especially when I play narrative focused games like Rangers of Shadow Deep where players play more against the game rather than against each other, in which case having an overpowered / underpowered side may be actually the point : rules in such games are more a guidance to lead to an interesting story rather the immovable truth all players must agree to make their game work. In a narrative game, if rules get in the way of the fun / story, players can just agree to ignore it - because it leads to a much better outcome for all parties involved. And if a specific rule is not clear or not tightly written, the players interpret the best way according to the game they're playing or simply roll a die to decide. It doesn't need to be tightly written or perfectly balanced in all situations.

If the company only promotes, only talks about and only features material for competitive games then that can again lead the market. Even though you can do whatever you want; its undeniable that the marketing and advertising and material the parent company makes; guides and influences the expectations and desires of the community at a large scale.

Very obviously, but I wonder if, in reality, having that big of a focus on a specific way to play is not more closing the market to more opportunities of sales rather than anything else.

This seems to be the question of the moment. I think we've hit a new era of gaming, whether we're talking tabletop or eSports, where a lot of the ideals of the 2010's are finding their long term consequences. It's an era in which the power to distribute changes became trivial enough that it felt likes games could be perfected and that gaming could be the same kind of event as traditional sports. We've seen a pretty sharp downturn in that trend leading up to the pandemic, which kind of reset the field going forward.

I think we've mostly learned that competitive ideals are good, they just come at a cost you have to account for. Balance patches are good, even great for a game, but they don't "fix" it. There's actually a great discussion going on right now in the Fighting Game Community due to the way the latest Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat have been patched. I could write several paragraphs on this alone (and might later) but its well worth looking into.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that patching is no replacement for getting it right the first time. Nerfs can be necessary but also take something someone loves out of the game. Changing points fundamentally breaks small collections. Making the game more fair has to keep what makes the game fun to begin with.

I think similarly, companies have learned that they don't really need to support competitive play. If the game is good, competitive people will run tournaments just fine on their own. The big modern lesson seems to be that scenarios need to be built into the core gameplay and not a tournament add on. If its fun for "standard" games it should be fun in a tournament. By the same token, its important to recognize that some things the competitive crowd gets upset is out of their control is part of the fun. When people love your game, be very careful when removing any aspect of it.

As for the players themselves? I think you're often left making the best of what you have to work with. It's absolutely vital that a game remain welcoming to new players, the challenge is making approachable games fun for veterans. It's a challenge big games have yet to truly solve while a lot of modern games get around it by simply not being much bigger than a demo to begin with.

I guess where I'm going with all of this is that overall, competitive players are a sign of a game worth playing more than something that needs to be catered to. The important thing is to ensure the game remains worth playing and not to lose sight of what attracted people to the game in the first place.

Sarouan wrote:

That point, I tend to disagree mainly because it only applies if you think the competitive player and the casual / narrative player give the same importance to rules in comparison to their own game objectives. I already find myself not in that case, especially when I play narrative focused games like Rangers of Shadow Deep where players play more against the game rather than against each other, in which case having an overpowered / underpowered side may be actually the point : rules in such games are more a guidance to lead to an interesting story rather the immovable truth all players must agree to make their game work. In a narrative game, if rules get in the way of the fun / story, players can just agree to ignore it - because it leads to a much better outcome for all parties involved. And if a specific rule is not clear or not tightly written, the players interpret the best way according to the game they're playing or simply roll a die to decide. It doesn't need to be tightly written or perfectly balanced in all situations.

Here's the thing though. If you have a really well balanced rules system so that two decently designed armies with equal points are evenly matched then you can build a narrative game where one side has 50% more in points/units than the other and have a good idea how it will impact the gameplay. In fact you can more easily predict how the game will go and thus how much you can add before it might become woefully unfun/fair. With a tightly designed system you can play with it and mess around much much more easily. Even the parent firm can mess around with it a lot more and creative narrative events and such.

If one faction is just outright better then it hurts casual and competitive play because whoever plays that faction has an unfair advantage outside of their own skill. Casual that's bad, competitive its bad. Especially in wargames because wargamers aren't going to change armies on the fly - even competitive people don't like it as much and will often use secondhand to make rapid army swaps (so it doesn't benefit the parent company that much in all truth).

For me its like establishing the foundations of a building. If the foundations are lopsided and poor then no matter what you build on top - be it a house or a castle - is going to inherit those weaknesses and magnify them. However if the foundations are level, solid, well build then you can build whatever you want ontop and it will be sound and stand tall and firm and last.





The other thing you seem to touch on is wording. My view on that is that has nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with what surrounds them.
GW goes nuts trying to make each unit "flavourful" by giving them loads of different named abilities and traits- even if the vast majority are the same thing (eg +1 save etc...). This makes the game sound fluffy and fun at a glance till you have to learn it then you find you're always dipping back to hte books over and over for those little changes.
In my view a narrative/casual gamer wants rules that are easy to learn - even more so than competitive players. Rules that are clearly written; use simple unified terminology; have similar structures and which are balanced. Heck just having good balance is a huge thing for casual players because it frees them up to build more varied armies without being penalised. Unbalanced means that there's always an ideal single approach and if you're not buliding that you might be woefully underpowered compared to your opponent.

What you can do to make the game more fun is build more lore and story around the units. A page with stats is good, but in the end its always going to be about the numbers. You can so easily build stories, lore, adventures, narrative elements as part of a book (Eg codex style) around the army. That's the engaging hook for the narrative and casual player. Those are separate from the stats, but they engage on the level of visual and imagination.
Trying to mix the two can work here and there and I'm all for named abilities; but have too many and you simply bog the player down with endless terminology that's different for each unit. It then becomes hard to focus on the flavour of the model when you're always having to look it up only to find that "Drazzors Uber Spear Thrusting Charge" is "oh its just a +1 on charge attacks". Suddenly its less uber and amazing and just a chore.

But you can write a short few paragraphs on Drazzor's amazing prowess in battle; about a massive charge led by them etc...

Simple answer - go ask Privateer Press. They started focusing almost exclusively on competitive play for warmachine, and the company and game started tanking when prior to that they were the big up and comer on the scene and continued to decline until recently when they rewrote the rules to lower the skill curve and make the game play a bit more casually and started promoting more narrative and non-competitive content.

Everything you described is basically what the warmachine community has been like since around 2016 I would say. The competitive players gatekept all the newcomers coming in ("hey, you want a game? 25 points!? no sorry I only play 75 point steamroller, maybe another time") or seal-clubbed ("oh man, you made a mistake, thats caster kill on turn 2 - better luck next time - play like you got a pair!") all the new and casual players out of the community, and their style of play was not conducive towards recruiting new blood in (would you want to get into a game when your minimum buy in to play the game at all is going to be $350-500, and when you do play the game your opponents are so much more skilled than you that the majority of your games end before you've really even started playing?). Until about a year ago, the majority of the people playing Warmachine today were the same people playing it in 2016 - there are a lot of people that stopped playing in that timeframe, but not a lot of people who started playing. And that mostly came down to the competitive bent in the community.

I largely agree with Overread.

Focussing on competitive play is a good way to gather feedback. Actual, verifiable feedback. Not random letters written in which read akin to…

“Dear GW.

Rock is OP. Paper fine. Love and Hugs, Scissors”.

For those like myself with a love for the narrative? A tighter rules set doesn’t change that. At all.

I can still create deliberate unbalanced scenarios, because the narrative can sometimes demand a force faces an unwinnable situation, where the name of the game is “take as many of those bar steward with you as you can”. Just as a final mega battle should have the potential to become a truly Pyrrhic victory.

The rules being tweaked and FAQ’s and Erratad regularly helps everyone. Especially if it removes weird Tournament Pack additions which folk might insist on, regardless of whether their opponent has seen them before, let alone might render their army selection illegal.

From OP’s post, it seems the problem here is a group of new players perhaps being overly insistent that all games be played to their standard.

That’s not a flaw of the rules. That a failure in communication. Importantly, neither side is Objectively In The Right. Just like….talk to each other, my dude. Even if it’s “one game with your extra rules, one game without”.

There is a detente waiting to be arrived at.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Simple answer - go ask Privateer Press. They started focusing almost exclusively on competitive play for warmachine, and the company and game started tanking when prior to that they were the big up and comer on the scene and continued to decline until recently when they rewrote the rules to lower the skill curve and make the game play a bit more casually and started promoting more narrative and non-competitive content.

My impression is that PP actually become 2nd to only GW on MK1-2 based on having a very tight very well written competitive rules set.

The reason they fell from MK2 to 3 was a series of mistakes/blunders/poor choices/situational issues that all happened within a really short time frame coupled to GW actually turning around and starting to do at least some more strict/competitive rules writing. If anything one of the issues with MK3 was that it stopped being quite as well written as MK2 was near the end (I seem to recall Skorne was entirely and utterly broken and had to be rebuilt).

So if anything its actually reinforcing that having tight, well written rules and good balance is a boon.

Losing that for a time along with everything else caused PP to reduce in population.




I do agree though that toxic/hyper competitive local players can be a huge barrier and a problem. But again this comes down two aspects
1) People not the game
2) Marketing the game/game modes.

Heck one of the chats for MKIV and the concern there was that the formats for the game (not the balance nor rules but the game formats) were built for the pro scene only and didn't introduce enough entry level systems for newbies. This also compounded by them only selling big boxed sets for armies instead of smaller starter forces. Both things that PP appears to now be doing a turn around on.
The actual rules haven't changed - the scenarios and the packaging and marketing are.

Again having that good foundation of strong rules, good writing, tight balance - all those things didn't create the problem. It was how they were presented and how they were advertised and encouraged to be used that was part of the issue .


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I largely agree with Overread.

Focussing on competitive play is a good way to gather feedback. Actual, verifiable feedback. Not random letters written in which read akin to…

“Dear GW.

Rock is OP. Paper fine. Love and Hugs, Scissors”.

This is also a very good point that I think deserves highlighting. Competitive games are the game working as it should; at its best by players who know what they are doing. It's also data that can be evaluated and reviewed because its published. Heck today larger events even record and stream games so you can not only record the win/loss and army compositions easily (online); but you can also watch the matches. You can see if one army really is just working better of if its happenstance that its just being played by more skilled players.


Narrative games are nearly pointless to gather balance data on because you can't standardise it when each group (and each game for each group) might use its own house rules. Though gathering that data can be a big help in designing your own narrative game addons/demo games and other elements in presenting the game. But you can't build balance around data that you can't review; nor where the player skill division could be vastly greater than at a competitive event.

Chaos nailed it. I will only add the following controversial takes. I look forward to being flamed and people telling me what an idiot I am. I would also add Guild Ball, and X-wing to the mix.

In my experience, focusing on competitive play creates a dead end in the design space. The game has no place else to go and dies. You see, competitive players basically want the reduction of chance and variability in the game, It has to be predictable. If X happens, then Y will result every time. Therefore, A is superior to B, so only do A. This is a hard limit to what the game can and will do. A more open approach allows for a larger game.

Secondly, your game needs to be able to appeal to a wide audience. Competitive players are only a portion of the play base. Once you cater to them exclusively you exclude others. It only takes 1 competitive player to insist on only playing competitive to make that the default play style in a club. This then excludes the other play styles. Those clubs eventually wither.

That depends entirely on how far you take it.

Using Tournament stats and verified observations can let you see when something is On The Wonk.

It could be as severe as an entire army being drastically overpowered, or as fixable as “that rule doesn’t actually do what we intended, so we’ve altered the wording accordingly”.

So there is a thing as going too far. Where that line is, I will of course not be so arrogant as to draw it myself

As a counter-example, let's look at Blood Bowl. The game is simple to play, and can be done competitively. However, it is not balanced at all.

It is full of random stuff if you want. Yet, it managed to live for years on its own without any support for a number of years.

There is no doubt it is successful, has competitive elements, but does not build or design specifically for that aspect of play.

Blood Bowl’s key is not Having That Many Rules.

Sure you can get Star Player Skills, but everyone otherwise largely follows the same rules. And, like WHFB? The true key to victory is your movement, and the proper planning thereof.

Or so I’m told. I’m utterly hopeless at it. Just a game I can’t get my head around. I’m one to pile in and try to cause as much mindless carnage as possible.

But, it’s lack of balance in certain teams (Halflings, Gobbos, and once upon a time Snotlings) is seen as a sign of pedigree, even if it’s “ha ha! You only got two touchdowns to my none, and my team is crap). And that only works because everyone Plays By The Same Rules.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Blood Bowl’s key is not Having That Many Rules.

Sure you can get Star Player Skills, but everyone otherwise largely follows the same rules. And, like WHFB? The true key to victory is your movement, and the proper planning thereof.

Or so I’m told. I’m utterly hopeless at it. Just a game I can’t get my head around. I’m one to pile in and try to cause as much mindless carnage as possible.

But, it’s lack of balance in certain teams (Halflings, Gobbos, and once upon a time Snotlings) is seen as a sign of pedigree, even if it’s “ha ha! You only got two touchdowns to my none, and my team is crap). And that only works because everyone Plays By The Same Rules.

Isn't that how most game work? Everyone has the same base rules with a few add-ons.

Movement, Melee, Morale, and Missile generally work the same for a game no matter who is doing it.

Blood Bowl is a relatively cheap game in which is trivial to change teams, both AoS and specially 40k are massive games in which you need hundreds if not thousands of dollars to build an army.

Maybe competitive play is a trap, but balance? balance is just as important if not even more to narrative and casual play.

Guild Ball is another game that tanked at the height of quality as a competitive ruleset because it became impossible to get into.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Guild Ball is another game that tanked at the height of quality as a competitive ruleset because it became impossible to get into.

This had more to do with production than anything though. When Steamforge swapped over to PVC and stopped producing pewter the game became impossible to get models for. Of the game's brief 5 year stint, there were nearly 2-3 years where getting models was incredibly difficult.

I will say that the game also suffered from too many patches and a tendency to take fun things away from players in the pursuit of perfect balance. Some of this way a result of some really binary mechanics (Midas, looking at you) and the overal narrow scope of gameplay, but I also think SFG were very much caught up in their own delusions of how easy it should be to perfectly balance a game.

The problem is that GW has "three modes of play" but only put the effort in to support two of them; matched and narrative. "We've been running a campaign" or "my list has the following" are pretty much the only things you hear about these days and it gets tiresome.

Open play is at best mentioned once in the core books but you don't hear about it again. Open play is not just "do your own thing" for players, but a sandbox of experimentation for GW's designers themselves; ideas that aren't suitable for matched play or narrative, but they know some players will still get a kick out of them.

It would help if GW - once an edition - released an Open Play supplement full of fun and goofy ideas; Solo-coop dungeon crawling. Sky battles. Last man standing. Power points for fast'n'lazy games. Custom heroes. Kitbashing. How many guardsmen it takes to bring down a Norn Assimilator. Jousting games for Knights on horse back. Something that reinforces that Open Play is a thing and its absolutely okay to be a filthy casual.

 Tyran wrote:
Blood Bowl is a relatively cheap game in which is trivial to change teams, both AoS and specially 40k are massive games in which you need hundreds if not thousands of dollars to build an army.

I think investment in terms of both time and money is important to consider.

Take a look at card games - they have insane imbalance. A really top end deck and an intermediate deck can be so widely apart that the intermediate will basically only win either if the owner of the advanced deck has no clue how to play the deck; or if the shuffling messes them up. Now whilst you can spend a lot of money on MTG decks; swapping cards out takes seconds.

Bloodbowl is a model game, but as noted most teams are pretty cheap to buy into and collect and you could easily run several. So imbalance can be "slighty" less of an issue because you can chop and change around.

Wargames however are very different. Even ignoring the model cost; the time involved in building and painting an army is considerable. Most people buy into one or a few armies and that's it and even if they have several the time investment for a game is also considerable. They might get 1 game week at best whilst for a card game you can run a whole small tournament in the same amount of time - ergo LOTS of games.

So people want their army to work. Now some will argue that imbalance is good, but that is typically only when the army they have is the overpowered one. Otherwise most will argue for better balance (for their force) because they aren't just going to swap on a whim. They are "stuck" with that army. Look at how people drifted back when armies like Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar went whole editions without updated rules. Forget being competitive, those armies were flat out ignored for whole editions. It didn't make those players more keen to use different armies; it made many want to move to a whole different game.

Cause in the end when you are buying a new army the additional cost to buy into a new wargame is trivial (often 1 additional rulebook and that's it - and with many other wragames not having army books it can be just the same cost as buying a codex)

Also there is something kinda horrible in being told you are meant to be underpowered.

40k would literally die overnight if Games Workshop outright stated as design goal that Marines are meant to lose games because "Grimdark".

My first response is: hell no.

A tightly-written, balanced, complete rule set is a death sentence for a game.

No matter how perfect the rules are, there will eventually be “preferred builds” that push out all the diversity and flavor from army lists and make games feel like a forgone conclusion even if they are not. And once people have their preferred builds, they won’t need to buy more minis unless you “ruin everything” with new rules or competitive new units. And the community will be absolutely toxic for new players or anyone playing any other kind of game than TFG tournament play.

Of the games I have supported, the serious players have been the first to turn on them and start pushing newbies away. Players who are invested in the lore, minis or narrative play tend to stay and welcome more people. Hardcore gamers are not fun and they make the games unfun; they have no chill and do not stay around to fix broken games but only to demonstrate their skill mastery by telling how terrible the thing you enjoy is.


It’s counterintuitive but a tight, tournament-ready rule set written to be “good for everybody” is actually tedious and dull for everyone but the tournament-ready players.

Some great discussion here so far!

As a game designer (12 years designing Magic: the Gathering sets for Wizards of the Coast) I've thought a lot about this topic, and seen a lot of games come and go. I'll relate some of my thoughts to Magic and other trading card games, since that's my area of expertise, but I think that most of these thoughts are equally applicable to other lifestyle hobby games like Warhammer.

First, to answer the topic question succinctly: Is focusing on the competitive scene really good for the survivability of a game? No! Too much focus on competitive play will kill a game.

A big question to ask is, "how skill-testing is your game?". In chess, the stronger player wins basically 100% of the time. In War, the stronger player (if such a thing can even be said to exist) wins basically 50% of the time. The very strongest Magic players have a win-rate of about 70%. This is much lower than chess's 100%, but it's enough that the strongest players tend to do well in tournaments over the course of several rounds. Meanwhile, something very important is also happening: beginning players win a game now and then. It cannot be overstated: nobody likes to lose over and over, and never win. It isn't fun, and players will quit a game if they lose consistently. I've seen more trading card games than I can count whose designers were sure would beat Magic because they'd eliminated so much of the pesky variance that reduces strong players' win percentages, only to discover that, without a constant influx of new players, any lifestyle game will wither than die.

Accessibility is also an important factor, and its an even more serious consideration for a miniatures game that involves painting your own figures than it is for a card game where you just have to buy the cards and put them together in a deck. If you need to buy $500 worth of minis and spend months painting an army before you can play a 2,000 points Warhammer game, it's going to be hard to recruit new players. GW's Combat Patrol format is a good step, and Kill Team is even better. Magic has similar formats like Sealed and Draft where you just have to open a few booster packs to get the cards you need for some games.

As far as rules tightness goes, it's hard to say for sure. Magic's rules are very tight, and the Comprehensive Rulebook is hundreds of pages long, but as a practical matter, less than a dozen people in the world really need to read and memorize those rules. I've been designing cards professionally for over a decade, as I said above, and I certainly haven't read the rulebook from cover to cover. We've made rules reference sheets that are a couple pages long, though I've seen little evidence that anybody even uses them to learn the game; most people learn from a friend or from a video game adaptation. I don't really see how it's practical to write such tight rules for Warhammer and similar games, as the interactions are often pretty ambiguous, but I don't think that a tight ruleset is necessarily a problem as long as people can get to the fun part without having to wade through reading it all first.

Doesn't matter if the focus is on competitive play if the company behind it all doesn't know how to use the incoming data and writes knee-jerk reactions based on high-level win-rates and a few very loud personalities in the tournament sphere.

Yeah, in general, too many balance tweaks for these kind of games can be harmful. Players are generally willing to tolerate a certain amount of imbalance, and every time you nerf a unit (or ban a card, in Magic's case) it has the potential to cause a player to quit. I think it's generally best to wait until play numbers actually start dropping before taking action.

 Pariah Press wrote:
Yeah, in general, too many balance tweaks for these kind of games can be harmful. Players are generally willing to tolerate a certain amount of imbalance, and every time you nerf a unit (or ban a card, in Magic's case) it has the potential to cause a player to quit. I think it's generally best to wait until play numbers actually start dropping before taking action.

I do agree that for physical based games, too many balancing tweaks can make the paperwork side of the game too iffy or messy to keep up with and log - even if you use a digital app on the side to help.

That said in theory if you've started out with a strong focus for balance then the number of tweaks and adjustments that come after should start to diminish to a more sedate pace that's more practical.

GW had issues with this because of how they publish rules in different expansion books and how they also re-write the rules every 3 years so things are JUST starting to settle and then its all up in the air again. It's a huge problem with their approach because it means they can never reach a settled spot where most of the rules are in 1 book for the army and that book is being updated more gradually.

It's a tricky balancing act. They want things to change enough that the competitive players want to keep buying more models, but not so much that peoples' armies are completely invalidated and they get frustrated and quit.

Thanks for the comments, and especially to Pariah Press to give his own work experience ! That's insightful.

I totally agree that having feedback as a game designer is easier when you compile data from the competitive scene : because that's where the organized play is...organized !

But to me, it's a tricky double edged sword because it's data that comes from the competitive scene only. So all the feedback is necessarily from the competitive play's point of view...which has quite an obvious dead angle and can only reinforce all the bias you can have as a competitive play fan if you have this as a game designer, IMHO.

It's pretty clear competitive scene alone isn't enough to sustain sales / game popularity in clubs, yet at least on the internet, the voices of their fans are loud. I wonder if it's not a case of the snake eating its own tail in the end ?


The matter of balance comes back regularly, indeed. I do understand people in a competitive game would like to have as much as a "fair game" with both sides having equal chances to win, and it is also why a rule system with as few interpretations as possible is good for the competitive play, since the ultimate purpose of it is, in the end, a competition.

But that's also why I'm not convinced when I read it's always good for all ways to play to have rules treated and written from the competitive play's perspective (meaning balanced and tightly written rules), that's it's automatically a good base for all games. Because it's all a question of player's game goals, in the end.

If a player looks for fun, for telling a story or even just want to enjoy putting as many as their miniatures on the table, competition isn't his main goal. Should he thus be bothered by trivial matters like "balance" or "boringly written rules" as he tries to get into the game ? If as Pariah Press say, a lot of players actually learn from videos or a friend rather than reading through pages and pages of rules and different FAQs / game situations - and actually take the rules when they're needed depending of the situation rather than consulting them all the time, do they really need to be crucially tightly written / balanced from the start ? Can't they just be interpreted on the spot by talking with your game partner rather than seeing him as your opponent ?

I remember Jervis Johnson talking about the "social contract between gamers" when talking about his game design. And it really struck me when I saw people deriding his vision on forums (mostly coming from the competitive scene, oddly enough): it's in the end a question of game ideology and how you see the people you play with. If they're your opponents you compete with, it's logical to want to have a neutral base for rules and perfectly equal chances for both sides at all times. But if they're your partners to have fun together and the goal is something else than just competition...all of these things are actually secondary, and people would rather zap that boring part to get into the fun, trusting their friends and videos they watched to know how to play.

I know, wargames are about conflicts first. But why both sides should be automatically balanced for that to be a good thing ? If wargames are a picture of how wars happen in our history (or how they would happen in a fantasy world)...well, history and our own game's universes are full of battles that aren't balanced at all. In fact, some of the greatest battles come from desperate situations where the underdog manages to handle the situation to turn the tide against all odds. Obviously, it's never enjoyable to lose all the time when your goal is just competition, but if a special scenario involves the retelling of a battle where one side is twice as numerous / in power than the other, and the game objective is to fight as long as you can because of the story / in the cadre of a campaign where the next battle will start differently depending on which turn the underdog finally breaks...that's a completely different outcome, in which having balanced sides gets in the way of the game.

Making the distinction between Blood Bowl and wargames to justify Blood Bowl purposely having underpowered / overpowered teams on design is, to me, a question of game ideology to defend the point of view of "balance being good for all games". Because a game of Blood Bowl is about competition, in the end : you have 2 teams competing for victory on the other at the end of a match - it's the same than a war between 2 armies, just in fantasy football. But the difference with Blood Bowl is that it aknowledges not all teams are equals in their chances of "winning", that's why some are cheating and the whole game design is about having fun with that ! Why wouldn't that be possible with wargames, in the end, if not a question of game ideology / game design ?

When I read Overread's statement about that, I wonder to myself : why rules couldn't work if it's the other way around, meaning they're written from another play's perspective first ? That's what Warhammer Battle did in the beginning and for quite a lot of years after...and even if surely the competitive scene did moan a lot about that situation, it still worked for that long in the end - so maybe the "solid foundations" needed for a game to last don't actually rely on the competitive play's principles ? In fact, one could argue that Battle died when it focused too much on the competitive scene's aspect of the game and it simply became boring for the rest of players to bother playing it.


On that matter, I'd like to have a thought on the importance of randomness in a game. It's usually represented by dice, but cards can also be another way. To me, randomness is the agent of both perfect neutrality and unfairness. Neutrality because when randomness strikes, it's never a question of emotion or interpretation : you roll the dice, and whatever the result is, it just happens. Unfairness because when a bad result happens and "costs you the game", it's always the easy target of your wrath and sense of injustice as a player. To me, that's the reason they're still the most used tools in game design, and why they're irreplaceable in a game. Yet, they're often the target of the competitive scene, especially the skilled players...because randomness is the enemy of skill. It allows the new players to win with just a stroke of luck against a veteran. It derails a balanced game just because of rolls happening out of "normal stats" and tip the favor in one side. I have indeed seen some "fan game systems" trying to minimize as much as possible the influence of randomness into their mechanisms, so that the skill is mostly favored...and the fact few of us gamers have heard of them is telling me a story about the popularity / interest of such designs as games.

It might just be me, but I think that if you want to bring in plenty of new people, skill (either in listbuilding or play) shouldn't be a very decisive factor. After all, no one wants to play a game where they have to spend a ton of money just to get beaten time and time again. Miniature wargames have the disadvantage that they cost a fair bit of money and a lot of time to get things ready for a game, so you don't want to go through all that effort just to lose. That goes against some of the more competitive ethos.

As a player, I like having a game with reasonable balance. It doesn't have to be perfect or the like, but I like to avoid situations where one side can just walk all over the other unless it's in a specific scenario. Often, you should be able to judge how fair a battle is but that doesn't really work in the GW points-based system where people put far too much faith into points systems.

 Dolnikan wrote:

As a player, I like having a game with reasonable balance. It doesn't have to be perfect or the like, but I like to avoid situations where one side can just walk all over the other unless it's in a specific scenario. Often, you should be able to judge how fair a battle is but that doesn't really work in the GW points-based system where people put far too much faith into points systems.

Ah, you put the finger on something very sensitive : the point building system. I totally get wanting a game with reasonnable balance. The hard question is to define what is "reasonnable".

GW sure is the easy example here, but other games offer some different perspectives. For example, in Saga, there's somewhat of a point system but since all units actually follow the same archetypes, it is very basic : 4 to 8 to choose from, 1 allowing you to buy a unit of a different number of miniatures depending of the archetype. And your warlord is free. There's no real need to go further in details because the way the game handles the lists is already simple in itself.

In 40k, I remember the hot debate about Power Levels vs points system, the first considered "not detailed enough" and thus "more imbalanced. Having used it in the past, I can say that while yes there were some differences if you use the same army building it with Power Level then with points, the impact on the game itself was not necessarily that important to "unbalance" it further. To be honest, I believe the main reason it was left in the end is more a question of habits from veterans who always played with points and didn't see a real reason to change - and the new players taught from them just following what their mentors told them to do. The fact points were overwhelmy used in tournaments from which feedback is gathered by GW certainly didn't help either.

In the end, was the Power Level system "reasonnable enough" for balance or was it more victim of a smear campaign from the competitive players obsessed with points ? Who knows. But it's all a matter of player perception, in the end...and how they are presented the system for a "fair balance".


There's also the question of how often you update that system so that it's the most "fairly balanced", depending again on feedback from players. Was really what they did in 10th edition so shortly after its launch that necessary ? For the competitive scene, it's a firm "yes" from what I read so far. But from casual players, it's more mixed. Having to deal with FAQ / erratas / point update sheet online that early is part of the reasons some didn't want to deal with the game anymore, I have heard.

In comparison, there's no need to update the system in Saga.

Privateer press made a lot of mistakes with regard to wmh in the transition from mk2 to mk3. Mistakes like killing the pressgangers programme, killing no quarter, screwing their distributors, mucking up mk3s release (Skorne had to be completely rewritten out of the gate). Please note the game was declining in late mk2 anyway.

When the dust settled, they resulted in largely was the game retrenched around a hyper competitive rump community.

By this point the game had expanded massively and the time/effort/burden of knowledge to 'git gud' and get to a decent level was too much for too many people, whether returning vets like me or new players (learning mk3 from a mk2 vets position was a significsnt burden of knowledge and ultimately for me, not worth it, it was absolutely an obnoxious one for a player totally new to it) .

All that was left were the super serious players who only played 75pt steamroller as everyone else checked out. Pp had to cater to them to keep the lights on. Catering to them meant catering to a game/community thst was often hostile to new and casual playstyles whixh meant chucking the casual players under the bus. Vicious circle ensues.

Once the casual community left, the main game withered further without new/casual players and simply could not grow- even if the rules were good, this was the fundamental truth of the situation.


Truth is the competitive community in terms of numbers is dwarfed by casual players. Competitive players and the conpetitive game needs the casual game and casual player base to suppott it.

Every competitive player was once a casual or at least of casual/lower skill.


One thing that strikes me is we keep saying if the parent company "focuses on the competitive game" or "the casual player" but I think where we are stumbling is we keep boiling points down to those buzzwords.

As a result I think many of us sound like we are disagreeing on the overall point when we are in fact agreeing on the minor points that lead up to it.




Eg several of us argue that focus on competitive play for construction of the core rules and game balancing is a good thing. Whilst others are noting that hyper focusing the structure of the game and the marketing and such on the competitive game is a bad thing.

Ergo that no company should focus all resources and all attention upon either one or the other. Hyper on either one is unhealthy and the healthy balance is a measure of both in the right places.

Yea Warmachine outgrew itself, it was easy and rewarding to be competitive when there were 4 factions of 10 models each, somewhere mid 2nd edition it was probably already impossible to get in unless you made it your whole life, MTG style.

 Overread wrote:
Every competitive player was once a casual or at least of casual/lower skill.

I was talking with fellows of my club about their history and it turns out it's not as simple as you say : the youngest ones were actually competitive players from the start, taught by their seniors specifically with the current version of AoS that is also their 1st wargame (which, it must be said, is really competitive player friendly on that matter). They absolutely don't define themselves as starting as "casuals". The hardcore competition level was their goal from the beginning.

I'd say it depends on generations and the existence or not of the competitive scene in your area when you start. My generation, those who are old enough to have grown up with Games Workshop at their beginning, we didn't really know a well-organized competitive scene as it exists nowadays. The millenium generation, though, it's a complete another matter entirely. They have a lot of options and cadre to their disposal, and like I said, the crowd in my current club came from a club entirely focused on AoS tournaments. They didn't have a lot of new players, sure...but they still had some.

TBH, it sounds logical that the youngest players have a natural attraction towards competition, because it's the best (and shortest) way to be recognized as a "good player" in their own group. It's part of what it means to be young, I'd say.

With age, I'd tend to say it's the opposite happening : competitive players become casuals when they get tired of the senseless competition that burns them out and want to try other ways to have fun. I have a few of older players of that group leaning towards that tendency, and they are the ones more receptive to other games / ways to play.

Ergo that no company should focus all resources and all attention upon either one or the other. Hyper on either one is unhealthy and the healthy balance is a measure of both in the right places.

No, it's not really what I feel. It's more about having more variety in the approach of writing new games : it doesn't have to be all about "balance" and "tight rules" from the start. And games that don't follow these principles shouldn't be vilipended by players who tend to believe these are the only "solid foundations" that can exist for a game.

It's accepting that there are different "solid foundations", and that it's not a big deal if some game systems have a different approach at their core. At least, that's what I think.

Sarouan wrote:

In the end, was the Power Level system "reasonnable enough" for balance or was it more victim of a smear campaign from the competitive players obsessed with points ? Who knows. But it's all a matter of player perception, in the end...and how they are presented the system for a "fair balance".

The issue with Power Level is simply that the options it provided were still balanced around points being a balancing factor. GW hadn't designed its weapons around serving different roles; some were simply stronger variations of others expected to "cost" more. 10th edition is effectively universal power level and it kind of works because you're often choosing between things like more attacks at less strength or other factors were your options serve different roles. Power level just gave you the choice between the Sword of Smiting or the Sword of Infinite Smiting +10.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm a fan of points. I think players have way too much faith in them and I don't think they work like players often believe. They're often a good means of providing an open list building framework, but they don't really create meaningful choices for players. Assigning points to the Smiting Swords above just results in one of them being the more efficient Smiter. They don't really make them interesting to choose between. Changing points as a balance option rarely changes this issue and mostly serves to invalidate one in favor of the other. It's just a stat like any other and tends to have more say in what's good than the interesting aspects of rules.

The main thing about balancing a game is it takes time to understand the problem and come up with the right solution. The more frequent the patch, the less time is spent understanding the state of the game and what makes options too strong. Rapid changes often create more problems that need more patches, putting games in a whack a mole state that frustrates players. Long gaps between patches give developers more time to create meaningful solutions. The big catch however, is that for this to work, your game needs to be fairly robust and stable to begin with. To be able to let your players dig and find solutions you can't have something like the Eldar problem. Less patching is ideal, but the game needs to be healthy enough to run without them for that to be possible.

 Overread wrote:
Every competitive player was once a casual or at least of casual/lower skill.

You probably dont mean it this way but Casual is not the same as 'lower skill'. And if I may? Consider 'new to the game' or 'beginner' rather than low skill. Youre not wrong but using that term in that context can come across as a little bit elitist.

 Overread wrote:


One thing that strikes me is we keep saying if the parent company "focuses on the competitive game" or "the casual player" but I think where we are stumbling is we keep boiling points down to those buzzwords.

Except where we refer to specific examples of games where the parent company did as a point of fact, focus on the competitive game to the ultimate detriment of that game/community.

 Overread wrote:

Eg several of us argue that focus on competitive play for construction of the core rules and game balancing is a good thing. Whilst others are noting that hyper focusing the structure of the game and the marketing and such on the competitive game is a bad thing.

Not necesarily. Good rules and competitive play are not necessarily the same thing. Tournaments and competitive play is not the ultimate expression of a game, nor are they necessarily good indicators of its health or quality.

 LunarSol wrote:

The main thing about balancing a game is it takes time to understand the problem and come up with the right solution. The more frequent the patch, the less time is spent understanding the state of the game and what makes options too strong. Rapid changes often create more problems that need more patches, putting games in a whack a mole state that frustrates players. Long gaps between patches give developers more time to create meaningful solutions. The big catch however, is that for this to work, your game needs to be fairly robust and stable to begin with. To be able to let your players dig and find solutions you can't have something like the Eldar problem. Less patching is ideal, but the game needs to be healthy enough to run without them for that to be possible.

That's the thing, though...was the "Eldar problem" in 10th edition really that big a deal to justify such a fast reaction ? Or maybe GW didn't leave time enough to the players to adapt and find appropriate counter-measures ? For all the bad situations we heard on that matter before they put out the "patch", and I admit I may have quite a controversial opinion on that topic, I don't think it was that bad to the point of rending the game non-functionnal - even from a hardcore competitive player's point of view. Sure, it was a balance issue, particularly on some specific formats...but it was still playable and it wasn't also an "auto-win" for the eldar side no matter the game.

I feel like there was some kind of "panic reaction" from the 40k design team here more than rationnal analysis of all the feedback they usually take into account (because, let's be honest, it was still too soon for big tournaments of 10th edition to give enough "factual data" given the time they released their new FAQs / erratas / point update).

Though in that case, I'd say it's also a question of game companies reacting way faster than before, because that's what players from this generation expect. World goes faster than in my generation, and they have tools to make it faster too. So I guess it's not "just" a question of competitive scene overreacting here, IMHO.

I am also a game designer, just a published amateur with no real skill or knowledge besides getting lucky a few times.

The sad truth is that people like to talk about playing games more than they actually play them. 40K, D&D, Magic, Battletech, etc. What they all have in common is that you can theorycraft them all day long and never roll a single dice. The importance to their success is that there are good, better, best alignments of things to talk about. If they were all perfectly balanced, there would be nothing to talk about.

Balance and tightness to rules is actually BAD for a game because there is not that much to generate a connection to the game. It will quickly be solved and then what?

Instead of balance or tightness the designer should be focusing on where do I create meaningful decision and choice in the game. That is where the action and discussion is. That is where longevity lies.

I think it’s really telling that some players assume casual players are just beginner competitive players. It’s like they can’t even imagine people playing for any other reason.

Deadnight wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Every competitive player was once a casual or at least of casual/lower skill.

You probably dont mean it this way but Casual is not the same as 'lower skill'. And if I may? Consider 'new to the game' or 'beginner' rather than low skill. Youre not wrong but using that term in that context can come across as a little bit elitist.

I separated the two with a / to denote that they weren't the same, but I can see how it can be interpreted that they are alternate names for the same thing.

My point was that every competitive person has to start out with either lower skill or as a casual player. That doesn't mean casual have lower skill, just that their focus wasn't competitive gaming. Similarly you can start out with a competitive focus, but you will always start with lower skill until you learn the game (even if you come from other wargames). It's reinforcing the point that the competitive end is the part of the hobby that directly relies on casual and lower skilled players. You can't just recruit experienced players into a game; they all have to start somewhere.

But that’s not true at all that they start as casuals. Competitive players start out with the competitive mindset. It’s immediately clear when you play them, even if it’s their first game. It’s the way they approach the game and the rules.

Someone said it earlier, that they see the other player as an opponent and not a partner.

 Easy E wrote:

Instead of balance or tightness the designer should be focusing on where do I create meaningful decision and choice in the game. That is where the action and discussion is. That is where longevity lies.

In my view a tight balanced system is one that does have meaningful choices.

You can have an army with good internal balance that will still require you to actually make choices on what units to take which will impact your game style and performance. The main difference is between having just 1 viable build that works better than all the others and having multiple builds that can vary choices and performance; but which are tactically sound to take.

The former leans into the power-gamer style of competitive balance which I view as a detriment because it means that there's 1 build 1 style of play that gives unfair advantage through being super effective. That leans into the boring style of "only one way to build" that others raised earlier.

Instead if you've smaller variations in power between different builds to where player skill is a greater component and to where you can take one of multiple different compositions of an army; then you've a system that rewards the competitive player for making a good army for those minor gains in addition to their player skill; and you've a system that rewards casual players because they can take different options; different focuses and different forces and not simply be playing with an extreme handicap against other forces (since casual play does not mean no one takes a "good" army in the game).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
But that’s not true at all. Competitive players start out with the competitive mindset. It’s immediately clear when you play them, even if it’s their first game. It’s the way they approach the game and the rules.

Someone said it earlier, that they see the other player as an opponent and not a partner.

As I said you can START competitive you will just be lower skilled (because you are new to the game even if you've prior wargaming experience).
You can also start casual and then become more competitive; stay casual or you can even start competitive and become casual.

My point is that everyone in the skilled competitive side of gaming starts from the greater pool of less skills and/or casual gaming.

Rewarding competitive players punishes everyone else. A game where every choice matters due to the dire consequences is a game that only the dedicated competitors and mechanics-minded can enjoy.


A game that is fun for lots and lots of other types of players will attract a competitive scene just from sheer presence. A game that enjoys lots and lots of benefits for competitive players, is a game that pushes away all other players.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Rewarding competitive players punishes everyone else. A game where every choice matters due to the dire consequences is a game that only the dedicated competitors and mechanics-minded can enjoy.


A game that is fun for lots and lots of other types of players will attract a competitive scene just from sheer presence. A game that enjoys lots and lots of benefits for competitive players, is a game that pushes away all other players.

I'm not quite sure what you mean.

All I've said is that army composition is part of the gameplay experience and that an approach which allows for each unit to have viability and for each army to have multiple viable "builds" is a good thing in the game for both competitive and casual players. Furthermore I've said several times that this gain should be on the marginal side not the "you take X you win because X is super powerful". Indeed I think that's a very bad approach, a terrible approach for both competitive and casual play (its also a false choice because if the competitive scene has one powerbuild then that will become the build everyone uses so that group ends up with flat balance because everyone is rocking the power-build and thus is more evenly matched against each other).


You can of course take this even further; there are games where there are no (or very limited) indivdiual army builds. Where each force has very similar to identical stats behind the units. So army variety is much more visual and artistic than statistic based. There will still be meaningful choices and those choices you make will influence the gameplay - if you take all spearmen and nothing else its 100% going to influence your game over if you take all cavalry or all archers or a mix etc.

Sarouan wrote:
I know, wargames are about conflicts first. But why both sides should be automatically balanced for that to be a good thing ? If wargames are a picture of how wars happen in our history (or how they would happen in a fantasy world)...well, history and our own game's universes are full of battles that aren't balanced at all. In fact, some of the greatest battles come from desperate situations where the underdog manages to handle the situation to turn the tide against all odds. Obviously, it's never enjoyable to lose all the time when your goal is just competition, but if a special scenario involves the retelling of a battle where one side is twice as numerous / in power than the other, and the game objective is to fight as long as you can because of the story / in the cadre of a campaign where the next battle will start differently depending on which turn the underdog finally breaks...that's a completely different outcome, in which having balanced sides gets in the way of the game.

You need a balanced framework to be able to build such unbalanced battles. If one side is meant to be twice as strong as the other, you need a framework that can measure and tell you it is twice as strong, and thus it is also capable of telling you when they are equally strong.

You cannot do that with an inherently unbalanced game, because you don't really know how much stronger one side is over the other. Moreover with a balanced game you can rotate who is meant to be the underdog, while with an unbalanced game one side will always be the underdog.

Making the distinction between Blood Bowl and wargames to justify Blood Bowl purposely having underpowered / overpowered teams on design is, to me, a question of game ideology to defend the point of view of "balance being good for all games". Because a game of Blood Bowl is about competition, in the end : you have 2 teams competing for victory on the other at the end of a match - it's the same than a war between 2 armies, just in fantasy football. But the difference with Blood Bowl is that it aknowledges not all teams are equals in their chances of "winning", that's why some are cheating and the whole game design is about having fun with that ! Why wouldn't that be possible with wargames, in the end, if not a question of game ideology / game design ?

You can do that with historical wargames, after all historically some sides were historically stronger than others.

It is much harder to do that with fictional wargames because there is no historical justification for one side being weaker or stronger. The rule that everyone expects to at least have a chance at winning takes precedence, and for that you do need some degree of balance.

Easy E wrote:
Instead of balance or tightness the designer should be focusing on where do I create meaningful decision and choice in the game. That is where the action and discussion is. That is where longevity lies.

You do need a degree of balance to be able to make meaningful decisions, if the game is too unbalanced then every decision becomes meaningless as the result of the game was obvious from the start.

IMHO that's the crux of the issue here. Yes balance alone isn't everything, we would be playing chess if it was. Yes hyperfocusing on the competitive scene can and has harmed the game.
But they are still important, and overcorrecting to the other side will also harm the game. We need a comprehensive approach that is able to provide both balance and meaningful choices.

That first part was less a response to you and to the common wisdom of games that better game design meant a punishing experience where every choice could win or lose the game. This was around the same time every game prided itsel on being easy to learn but difficult to master. Just ad slogans meant to stroke competitive players that come off as red flags in retrospect.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
That first part was less a response to you and to the common wisdom of games that better game design meant a punishing experience where every choice could win or lose the game. This was around the same time every game prided itsel on being easy to learn but difficult to master. Just ad slogans meant to stroke competitive players that come off as red flags in retrospect.

I'd agree with you that wargames should be more about a culmination of choices not just one big one. It's something I dislike with GW's current approach where they've things like the double turn in AoS; or where many of hteir resolutions to problems (eg close combat being under powered in 40K) is to layer on more powerful options and speed up the game. Ergo high lethality where whoever gets the alpha strike on the other player can often end up winning the game through sheer damage done in one or two early turns of the game.

I do agree; games should be a culmination of many small choices that add up; heck I believe that the best games are when the win-loss remains tightly contested through at least 4-5 turns (for a 6 or so turn game). Ergo where both sides could potentially steal the win well into the mid and early late game. Because then there's active engagement on both sides of the individual game from both players.


Casual can always layer this even more with things like campaign games and such; or they can mess with that kind of balance for different experiences.

 Easy E wrote:

The sad truth is that people like to talk about playing games more than they actually play them. 40K, D&D, Magic, Battletech, etc. What they all have in common is that you can theorycraft them all day long and never roll a single dice. The importance to their success is that there are good, better, best alignments of things to talk about. If they were all perfectly balanced, there would be nothing to talk about.

An aspect you're discounting is that I can talk about games for hours every day at work, on the bus, at dinner, in bed. I can game 5 hours a week tops.

A tangent worth discussing might also be how social-media influencers have poisoned a perception of the "right" way to play games...

It sometimes feels like every random donkey-cave on Youtube has yet another "competitive" gaming channel, and is churning out lazy, low-hanging fruit "content" such as tier-lists for armies, units, etc...

Social media types are aggressively pushing to build communities to send in super-chats, etc... almost exclusively trying to pass themselves off as experts at these super-serious, and definitely very competitive (TM) games... when in actuality, these games rarely make for meaningful "sport" style endeavors, and are best enjoyed as great fun, with a deep potential for personal engagement.

 lord_blackfang wrote:


An aspect you're discounting is that I can talk about games for hours every day at work, on the bus, at dinner, in bed. I can game 5 hours a week tops.

Am I discounting it? I thought I was embracing it. If a game can be talked about that much, it will have longevity.

 Tyran wrote:


You need a balanced framework to be able to build such unbalanced battles. If one side is meant to be twice as strong as the other, you need a framework that can measure and tell you it is twice as strong, and thus it is also capable of telling you when they are equally strong.

You cannot do that with an inherently unbalanced game, because you don't really know how much stronger one side is over the other. Moreover with a balanced game you can rotate who is meant to be the underdog, while with an unbalanced game one side will always be the underdog.

Meaningful Choices = (Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impacts to the Game

Balance is not part of the equation for a meaningful choice at all. Strength is not part of the equation at all. The player needs to decide between the positive and negative outcomes for themselves and their own units, and the opponent's state is more of a secondary concern.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I think it’s really telling that some players assume casual players are just beginner competitive players. It’s like they can’t even imagine people playing for any other reason.

Yeah, my own journey started casual, then became competitive, and then went back to casual when I realized that I hated it, found it exhausting, and made me hate the game and community and was burning me out of interest in the hobby. A friend of mine started casual, and became competitive, and has stayed competitive because he enjoys playing that way. Another friend started as a competitive player - he had some familiarity with the game already but had never played, learned about the tournament scene (I believe he attended a convention or major tournament with another friend as a guest/spectator, etc.) and decided immediately "this is what I want to do". Even though it took him probably 3-4 months of playing pickup games at the store to play his first tournament game, he was doing it with the purposes of practicing for competitive play. And then I have a lot of other friends who have been playing for decades and have never attended a tournament and only play casually. Theres many different interests and paths players take.

 Easy E wrote:

Meaningful Choices = (Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impacts to the Game

Balance is not part of the equation for a meaningful choice at all. Strength is not part of the equation at all. The player needs to decide between the positive and negative outcomes for themselves and their own units, and the opponent's state is more of a secondary concern.

That would be true on an RPG or single player games.

Not here though, every choice you make and their possible outcomes are defined by the strenght relationship bewteen you and your oponnent, after all you both get a say in the state of the other's units.

If one side is blatantly stronger than the other, then there is only one real outcome regardless of choices, and thus there is no meaningful choice.

 Tyran wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

Meaningful Choices = (Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impacts to the Game

Balance is not part of the equation for a meaningful choice at all. Strength is not part of the equation at all. The player needs to decide between the positive and negative outcomes for themselves and their own units, and the opponent's state is more of a secondary concern.

That would be true on an RPG or single player games.

Not here though, every choice you make and their possible outcomes are defined by the strenght relationship bewteen you and your oponnent, after all you both get a say in the state of the other's units.

If one side is blatantly stronger than the other, then there is only one real outcome regardless of choices, and thus there is no meaningful choice.

Agreed to this.

It's not a binary, but the further unbalanced a game is, the less chance there is for meaningful decisions.

If I'm running Army A and you have Army B, and both are equal in power, it comes down to the luck of the dice and tactical decisions.
If Army A has 150% the power on raw numbers as Army B, suddenly it's much harder for any mistake I make or brilliant decision my opponent makes to matter.
If Army A has 25% the power on raw numbers as Army B, any end state other than Army B winning hardcore is very unlikely, making most decisions entirely moot.

Different people will have different tolerances for imbalance, and I can certainly understand someone who says "Balance is not my first priority."
But to totally disregard it is foolish.

Really interesting discussion.
I played in tournaments and was part of a competitive group for a while, and I enjoyed it. Back then, I would have said that unit balance was essential for a wargame, to prevent people choosing a faction based on aesthetics or background and then finding out they can't win games because they were an afterthought for the designers. This was the biggest flaw in 40K to me, and one of the reasons I liked Warmachine/Hordes Mk1 and Mk2.

But then I moved away from my groups and spent a long time not really playing, but working on hobby projects, painting, making scenery and so on. And I've come back to gaming now, but with a very different perspective.

I think whether you think balance is essential depends very heavily on your paradigm of play. If you want to have 1 force for a game and expect to play it against others forces, strangers or club members, that really puts you in a certain paradigm of play where you need the system to do the heavy lifting for you to sort of iron out the vagaries of different unit choice and so on. If you play in this paradigm, it is a no brainer that balance is good, because it leads to a net greater number of satisfying games.

However, since I've been working away on hobby projects and have managed to collect a fair few completed painted armies of various kinds, and a collection of scenery, I tend to be introducing entirely new players to wargames in my social circle, and essentially running "demo games" where I provide absolutely everything needed to play.
In this paradigm, which is pretty satisfying too, I get to choose the game system I will use, which models from my collection, and so on. And if there's an issue with the game not producing satisfactory outcomes, I can tinker with it myself, tailor the model selection, change the system, get a new system or whatever needs to happen to make sure the experience is fun.

As one of my friends gets more experienced and understands the game, he is making more contributions here, making it a more collaborative process.

In this paradigm, what matters most is the accessibility of the rules and the gameplay flavour they evoke. Balance really is a secondary concern - nice to have, but not as important as those other aspects.

It's quite a nice feeling. I guess this is what a lot of historical players do, and indeed I find myself more drawn to historical games as I get older.

I'm now a bit bored by the competitive scene and especially the "list building" aspect of it, and consider it fairly anathema to fun in some ways. I'd much rather just play with my collection, choosing models I like first, than worry about any list building consideration. Choose the models, then choose the rule set, then fix the balance if you feel the need.

In any case, the collective brain of the internet tends to "solve" any popular game really fast, and the designers are really up against it to out think the entire community in these sorts of games. I think it's likely impossible to stay ahead of it, and the fact that everything gets "solved" takes away a lot of the joy of discovery that I love so much.

Edit to add: And I think that's something companies bank on: constant rules updates and releases provide a steady stream of puzzles to solve, keeping the playerbase invested and thinking and discussing your game all the time. I'm not really interested in this any more, having seen the cycle go round and round for a very long time now. I'd rather play "finished" games, with no new puzzles, but with sufficient material that there's something to discover. The people who are into wargaming for puzzles to solve don't tend to bother with games they know are one and done, so you tend to get the fun of discovering them without someone going and reading the "solution" to the game on reddit or seeing some video on Youtube and then bringing it back to your group.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

Meaningful Choices = (Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impacts to the Game

Balance is not part of the equation for a meaningful choice at all. Strength is not part of the equation at all. The player needs to decide between the positive and negative outcomes for themselves and their own units, and the opponent's state is more of a secondary concern.

That would be true on an RPG or single player games.

Not here though, every choice you make and their possible outcomes are defined by the strenght relationship bewteen you and your oponnent, after all you both get a say in the state of the other's units.

If one side is blatantly stronger than the other, then there is only one real outcome regardless of choices, and thus there is no meaningful choice.

Agreed to this.

It's not a binary, but the further unbalanced a game is, the less chance there is for meaningful decisions.

If I'm running Army A and you have Army B, and both are equal in power, it comes down to the luck of the dice and tactical decisions.
If Army A has 150% the power on raw numbers as Army B, suddenly it's much harder for any mistake I make or brilliant decision my opponent makes to matter.
If Army A has 25% the power on raw numbers as Army B, any end state other than Army B winning hardcore is very unlikely, making most decisions entirely moot.

Different people will have different tolerances for imbalance, and I can certainly understand someone who says "Balance is not my first priority."
But to totally disregard it is foolish.

Of course balance is not foolish, but it is just another tool in a designers tool box to accomplish the games objectives which may or may need balance to achieve the end result.

Your argument is that there is no meaningful choices in a solo game? In a scenario driven game? In a historical recreation where you know a certain sides loses? In an asymmetrical game? In Co-op games?

You see, there are other game types that exist outside of the Competitive experience and they do have meaningful choices. Therefore, the "strength" of the sides involved doesn't matter at all for creating meaningful choices in games.

 Easy E wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

Meaningful Choices = (Positive Outcomes / Negative Impacts) + Downstream Impacts to the Game

Balance is not part of the equation for a meaningful choice at all. Strength is not part of the equation at all. The player needs to decide between the positive and negative outcomes for themselves and their own units, and the opponent's state is more of a secondary concern.

That would be true on an RPG or single player games.

Not here though, every choice you make and their possible outcomes are defined by the strenght relationship bewteen you and your oponnent, after all you both get a say in the state of the other's units.

If one side is blatantly stronger than the other, then there is only one real outcome regardless of choices, and thus there is no meaningful choice.

Agreed to this.

It's not a binary, but the further unbalanced a game is, the less chance there is for meaningful decisions.

If I'm running Army A and you have Army B, and both are equal in power, it comes down to the luck of the dice and tactical decisions.
If Army A has 150% the power on raw numbers as Army B, suddenly it's much harder for any mistake I make or brilliant decision my opponent makes to matter.
If Army A has 25% the power on raw numbers as Army B, any end state other than Army B winning hardcore is very unlikely, making most decisions entirely moot.

Different people will have different tolerances for imbalance, and I can certainly understand someone who says "Balance is not my first priority."
But to totally disregard it is foolish.

Of course balance is not foolish, but it is just another tool in a designers tool box to accomplish the games objectives which may or may need balance to achieve the end result.

Your argument is that there is no meaningful choices in a solo game? In a scenario driven game? In a historical recreation where you know a certain sides loses? In an asymmetrical game? In Co-op games?

You see, there are other game types that exist outside of the Competitive experience and they do have meaningful choices. Therefore, the "strength" of the sides involved doesn't matter at all for creating meaningful choices in games.

In a solo game, improper balance can result in what's meant to be difficult being far too easy or what's meant to be possible being not possible.
In a historical game, I can agree it's more important to be accurate to the history than to make sure things are balanced.
In an asymmetrical game, you want the asymmetry to be on the right side. If it's meant to be Army A has a desperate last stand against Army B, but Army A is literally four times better than B, it's suddenly not so desperate of a last stand.
And for a co-op game, you don't want one player to do the lion's share of the work. You want the different participants to all contribute well.

Moreover, it is far, far easier to unbalance a balanced game, than to balance an unbalanced one.

I often wonder if balance is an illusion to some extent, or if its contextual. Look at Battletech - its not really a balanced game per se, even the balancing systems players utilize isn't known to be particularly balanced, and yet the playerbase is fine with it (to the extent that some of the folks on dakka who are big BT fans and who themselves acknowledge the lack of balance in BT are among the loudest critics of the lack of balance in 40k). I have yet to figure out why that is, but my theory is that BT skews towards the simulation end of the spectrum, whereas 40k skews towards game. In the context of a game, the players expectation is that balance must be present and the lack of balance is an anomaly that needs to be corrected.

In the simulationist end of the pool, as far as BT is concerned most of the imbalance is attributable or logicked away in the context of verisimilitude - it makes sense that my light scout lance of 4 25 tonners lost to a clan star of 2 50 tonners and 2 75 tonners. The role of the scout lance was to locate the enemy and harass them in hit and run raids while my main force mobilized, it was never supposed to engage them head on, I lost because of my poor leadership, not because the game isn't balanced, etc.

 JNAProductions wrote:


You see, there are other game types that exist outside of the Competitive experience and they do have meaningful choices. Therefore, the "strength" of the sides involved doesn't matter at all for creating meaningful choices in games.

In a solo game, improper balance can result in what's meant to be difficult being far too easy or what's meant to be possible being not possible.

In a historical game, I can agree it's more important to be accurate to the history than to make sure things are balanced.

In an asymmetrical game, you want the asymmetry to be on the right side. If it's meant to be Army A has a desperate last stand against Army B, but Army A is literally four times better than B, it's suddenly not so desperate of a last stand.
And for a co-op game, you don't want one player to do the lion's share of the work. You want the different participants to all contribute well.

Yes, but do you think those other game types have meaningful choice as a player? Ultimately, that is what we were talking about. You were asserting that meaningful choice can only occur in a balanced game, I posited the opposite.

I gave alternate game types and claimed that meaningful choice was available in non-competitive games. Therefore, balance is not relevant for a player to have meaningful choice.

 JNAProductions wrote:


Moreover, it is far, far easier to unbalance a balanced game, than to balance an unbalanced one.

On this we agree.

Our disagreement is if a balanced game is the only way to generate meaningful choices within the game.

Is the goal of an asymmetrical game to completely beat the other force?
Or is there a more achievable goal, like survive four turns, or kill one specific model, or hold a point for a round?

If the only goal of the game is to beat the enemy, then yeah-not much meaningful choice.
If there’s an achievable goal, then there is meaningful choice.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Is the goal of an asymmetrical game to completely beat the other force?
Or is there a more achievable goal, like survive four turns, or kill one specific model, or hold a point for a round?

If the only goal of the game is to beat the enemy, then yeah-not much meaningful choice.
If there’s an achievable goal, then there is meaningful choice.

I think we are starting to cross our wires and not communicating clearly with each other.

Perhaps we need to go back a bit. Are you saying that the only meaningful choices are choices that lead to a win?

 Easy E wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Is the goal of an asymmetrical game to completely beat the other force?
Or is there a more achievable goal, like survive four turns, or kill one specific model, or hold a point for a round?

If the only goal of the game is to beat the enemy, then yeah-not much meaningful choice.
If there’s an achievable goal, then there is meaningful choice.

I think we are starting to cross our wires and not communicating clearly with each other.

Perhaps we need to go back a bit. Are you saying that the only meaningful choices are choices that lead to a win?

You can only have meaningful choice if your decisions influence your success or failure.

In a pickup game, this means that if one army is 10% the price it should be, your choices don't meaningfully impact whether you win or lose-the 90% discount army is going to win, barring literally giving up or astronomically unlikely rolls.
In an asymmetrical scenario, like a desperate last stand against an overwhelming force, you can't succeed by wiping the enemy forces. (Or if you can, the game is really horribly balanced.) But if that's the goal, then the scenario isn't a good one-the weaker force should have some other goal. It could also, reasonably, be a high score kinda thing. Players take turns being the overwhelmed force, and see how many turns they can survive, for example.

Thanks a lot for the discussion, there are a lot of interesting points raised here.


I did play a few "solo games", the kind that have a game system built to generate enemies by some kind of "AI process" either by random tables or by a series of "if enemy is in X situation, then he does that Y action" conditions. One of the last ones I tried is Five Leagues from Borderlands. The idea is to create a band of adventurers having to face different threats on a map and see how far they're going. You face no other player here, it's all about rolling the dice / checking the conditions to see what the enemies do and deal with the situation.

Now from a competitive player's point of view, this may look like pointless choices. I mean, you're the only player doing them against a "dumb AI", that may sound like it's a boring challenge. The game is also completely unbalanced, because some results can give easy encounters or insanely difficult ones (if not impossible), depending on how strong your band is at the time they happen.

That's where Da Boss' own intervention comes to mind and I thought to myself "that's really it" : the main point of Five Leagues from Borderlands is not really about the "challenge" to overcome, but the hobby project that lies so that you bring all those games to life.

Five Leagues from Borderlands has a lot of tables to generate the events and enemies and use a map with different locations of interest to give a background to the encounters. It's really like a small tabletop roleplaying game campaign, but you don't create everything from the start : rather, you add them as they happen with time and while your band makes progress. The game itself is intentionnaly vague on a lot of "archetypes" for the enemies for example, so you can really fit in what you have in your collection to represent them and what you use as miniatures / terrain to play the games themselves. It works as a sandbox inspiration for your own hobby projects.

Thus, the results of the games themselves aren't really the final goal. It's the journey on the way to what you're calling "the end" (when you defeat all the threats, when your band gets defeated...or when you call it a day after a while) that matters, what you used or added as miniatures during your adventures and encounters. Or what you got inspired to add as some events happen, like meeting a random character that gives you another quest and make you think "you know, I have that miniature of a hooded stranger I never painted until now, it would be cool to paint it so that I represent that event with him".


I tend to be in the same situation than Da Boss myself ; with time, I accumulated an insane amount of miniatures and terrain at my home, and I saw I was able to have all the material needed to play entire games. My current favorite is the game Warcry from GW (which I tend to believe as one of the best skirmish games ever made, sorry if I'm totally subjective here). I collected all the boxes and bands GW released specifically for that game so far, and I found myself actually coming with all the material to do demo games at my club, including pre-made bands that give an interesting game without prior list building. Sometimes, when I play with children, I tend to play with unbalanced smaller lists, depending on the preference of the new player of what band they find cool and then play an antagonist to that band's style that's "weaker" just so they discover the mechanisms of the game while still have fun when they see they have the upper hand (children love to win, after all ). I put myself voluntarily at a disadvantage, at unbalance, just for the sake / atmosphere of the game - and I actually have a lot of positive results in return. People love to have fun with games, that's universal...but that fun doesn't necessarily come with the win itself.


I'm not sure social media is necessarily "ruining it". Sure, there are channels that are entirely dedicated to the pure, unrestrained competition and with very strong opinions on what is seen as a "good game". But there are others that are meant to discover all kinds of games, or present a Hobby project or follow a whole campaign in the likes of Five Leagues from Borderlands. It is also a very good way to present how a game works or to advertise a club's activities (some are really awesome on that matter, I must say - I'm still stuck with mere pictures of the games we play at our own).

Da Boss wrote:

However, since I've been working away on hobby projects and have managed to collect a fair few completed painted armies of various kinds, and a collection of scenery, I tend to be introducing entirely new players to wargames in my social circle, and essentially running "demo games" where I provide absolutely everything needed to play.
In this paradigm, which is pretty satisfying too, I get to choose the game system I will use, which models from my collection, and so on. And if there's an issue with the game not producing satisfactory outcomes, I can tinker with it myself, tailor the model selection, change the system, get a new system or whatever needs to happen to make sure the experience is fun.

In this paradigm, what matters most is the accessibility of the rules and the gameplay flavour they evoke. Balance really is a secondary concern - nice to have, but not as important as those other aspects.

It's quite a nice feeling. I guess this is what a lot of historical players do, and indeed I find myself more drawn to historical games as I get older.
.

Sarouan wrote:

That's where Da Boss' own intervention comes to mind and I thought to myself "that's really it" : the main point of Five Leagues from Borderlands is not really about the "challenge" to overcome, but the hobby project that lies so that you bring all those games to life.

Da Boss, what you describe is called 'game-building' as opposed to 'playing directly out of the box'. When you work with the other guy, beat way of referring to it is 'collaborative game building'.

My own experiences echo yourself tournamented hard for about 10 years, burned out twice and the 'casual' game essentially rescued my overall love of the game/hobby.

My take on it is balance is a bit of a unicorn. There are things you can do but fundamentally, Best you'll get is 'some things match up against some other things, at least some of the time and under some circumstances'. Personally while i value balance, and as you say, its nice to have but imbalance isn't necessarily a hurdle, so long as the game/mechanics are interesting and we have the ability possible to game-craft and list-match around the issues helps greatly (but that comes from experience).

In my personal view, there is nothing wrong with the competitive play - it's just not the one I enjoy the most, as I believe that proper competitive balancing, provided potentially infinite resources on the player's side, is really hard. I am, of course, of an opinion that balance is very important on all levels of play, including very casual ones, but realistically there can always be some fringe cases that break the game's mechanics in some way. For example - and it's a game I have a lot of experience with, - playing against late northern Indian tribes in Blood&Plunder as "normal" 17th century lists on land is pure torture. They can do everything and prevent you from doing anything, and it's one of the most miserable gaming accounts I've ever head. However, barring such cases, I think the game is rather well balanced, and I don't think the Indians are such a huge problem, because, realistically, I don't expect to face off 20 people running the same Indian lists in a game centered around 17th century Americas piracy. I never played Warmachine or other "hard" competitive games, but can imagine that with the ever growing set of SKUs and bloated game mechanics it can become harder and harder for casual players to approach such a game if it is heavily dependant on game knowledge and basic mechanical skill.

I personally absolutely believe that a game needs to find fine middle point between being casual-random and determined-competitive (there's more to these ideas than what a combination of two words, but for the sake of being brief I hope that everyone gets what I mean) in order to make it, well, fun. I know that there are people who derive fun from pure mechanical flawlessness, but I am not one of them. Deep mechanics mean nothing to me if they don't excite me. Self-improvement is worthless to me if I'm not having fun in the process. It's a method I apply to videogames in the same manner. I have a lot of experience with competitive multiplayer RTS, and the thing that I generally disagree with a lot of this genre's audience is the idea that pure mechanical triumph over your opponent by any costs necessary with complete disregard to anything else is worth more than said anything else very single time. It's one of the reasons I eventually stopped playing Starcraft 2's multiplayer. The game's mechanics are built in such a way it's a constant struggle against both your enemy and your own management ablities - 10x of that in C&C, Dawn of War or Warcraft. At one point crushing my own skull with a hammer in an attempt to do 10 things at once or I immediately lose stopped being fun, regardless of how objectively deep the gameplay is. Objectively deep mechanics from my subjective point of view are worth nothing by themselves.

Somewhat connected to this is a thing that I sometimes observe in Internet and real life discussions around me, concerning the way some people new to the hobby behave themselves in competitive environment. Specifically - MTG players that started joining the hobby (mainly Warhammer of course) in recent years. While it's not a problem related to my experience directly and I doubt I will encounter this attitude in the future, I've started noticing a common thing present in complaints I receive from gaming acquaintances who have already has such experience and read on forumboards. It's seemingly a very different set of expectations to what the words "skill" or "victory" mean. Seemingly a lot of players with (for some reason?) specifically MTG background consider exploitation of purely mechanical mistakes going against RAW or abusing the opponent's bad memory as pure showing of skillful victory in the same capacity as proper tabletop tactics, which is wild to me. From a first-hand dialogue with one such player when I asked this question out of curiosity, he seemed to be baffled that "normal" wargamers consider it OK to correct your opponent when they make a direct mechanical mistake (forgetting they should be saving better from your shooting because their models are in cover, for example). Like, making overly long and time intensive moves on purpose so that the other player forgets he needed to do something by the game's rules, not telling him about that or, better, calling in judge to loudly reprimand him for "daring to forget playing by RAW" and thus gaining an advantage against upset and now more sloppily playing person is totally valid tactic in his opinion. Which is kind of insane to me. Similar sentiment was repeated often enough that I can't help but notice similar pattern. I never played MTG, is that just a coincidence and I'm thinking things through too much or is there something in the game's culture that makes people think it's absolutely normal to basically treat your opponent as hostile entity that you need to cheat against every time?

Deadnight: I'm not sure, but I think it may have been posts from you a few years ago talking about this type of thing - moving away from reliance on companies giving you an out of the box experience, taking ownership of the game yourself, that eventually spurred me to move in that direction.

At the time, I was dissatisfied with the various offerings from companies and getting fed up of the edition threadmill, but it seemed an impossible task to strike out on my own as you were describing. A decade in a gaming deep freeze where I just painted stuff and made scenery with no real thought to what it was "for" later, and I found myself able to tackle what you'd been suggesting (if I'm remembering correctly!)

Sarouan: Ah yeah, I do agree with you. I should have been more specific - I mean the "main" communities for the most popular "lifestyle" games. Games that have monthly new releases and an expected edition churn and the like. Even within those games there are smaller totally hobby focused groups that ignore the churn, but with the nature of the modern internet they become hard to find.

I found that playing those games tended to lead to people looking up "builds" online and then just replicating them, which sort of wrecks the slow process of discovering a game together that I really enjoy. Because once one person starts doing that, the rest of the group starts to follow - looking up solutions from others is a lot easier than figuring them out yourself. So soon your group is just following the "internet version" of your game. I even found this happening in my Dungeons and Dragons games. If you play games that are one book, say like Warlords of Erehwon or something not aimed toward this sort of puzzle solving, list building gameplay like Frostgrave, then you have less of this sort of thing. The internet discussion around games like Erehwon is pretty muted, because there's nothing new to discuss, no new puzzles to solve. So there's not really much received wisdom about what the best way to play is.

But when you find one of those hobby groups online, it's really fun to read through. I've been really enjoying reading stuff around the Wargaming in Middle Earth crowd, people doing book-inspired rather than movie inspired Middle Earth Wargaming, as an example.

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
In my personal view, there is nothing wrong with the competitive play - it's just not the one I enjoy the most, as I believe that proper competitive balancing, provided potentially infinite resources on the player's side, is really hard. I am, of course, of an opinion that balance is very important on all levels of play, including very casual ones, but realistically there can always be some fringe cases that break the game's mechanics in some way.

There is indeed nothing wrong with competitive play, with caveats. So long as it knows how to stay in its lane. Its like dating. On a very simplistic level, When someone takes a competitive list against another competitive list, and both players want the same thing - go nuts. when you take a bleeding edge competitive list into a casual ecosystem, it causes problems. Sure, its technically legal, but not very ethical in my mind.

Balance is important with caveats (like i said, if the game/scenario is 'interesting', ill accept skewed balance). My take on it though is after twenty years of gaming, I am doubtful of any games ability (from any company) to blindly 'self-balance' as it were, out of the box. There will always be silver bullets, crutches and gotcha! builds. Especially when the business model if this industry is to expand the game/factions with 'new' waves of stuff. I think, regardless of game, a not-insignificant amount of the balancing needs to be handled by the players themselves, which is why I value the skill of 'game-building' and the pre-game conversation so highly.

 Da Boss wrote:
Deadnight: I'm not sure, but I think it may have been posts from you a few years ago talking about this type of thing - moving away from reliance on companies giving you an out of the box experience, taking ownership of the game yourself, that eventually spurred me to move in that direction.

At the time, I was dissatisfied with the various offerings from companies and getting fed up of the edition threadmill, but it seemed an impossible task to strike out on my own as you were describing. A decade in a gaming deep freeze where I just painted stuff and made scenery with no real thought to what it was "for" later, and I found myself able to tackle what you'd been suggesting (if I'm remembering correctly!)

.

Cheers! I'm not used to being listened to! :p But I'm glad you've found value from my approach.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Is the goal of an asymmetrical game to completely beat the other force?
Or is there a more achievable goal, like survive four turns, or kill one specific model, or hold a point for a round?

If the only goal of the game is to beat the enemy, then yeah-not much meaningful choice.
If there’s an achievable goal, then there is meaningful choice.

I think we are starting to cross our wires and not communicating clearly with each other.

Perhaps we need to go back a bit. Are you saying that the only meaningful choices are choices that lead to a win?

You can only have meaningful choice if your decisions influence your success or failure.

In a pickup game, this means that if one army is 10% the price it should be, your choices don't meaningfully impact whether you win or lose-the 90% discount army is going to win, barring literally giving up or astronomically unlikely rolls.
In an asymmetrical scenario, like a desperate last stand against an overwhelming force, you can't succeed by wiping the enemy forces. (Or if you can, the game is really horribly balanced.) But if that's the goal, then the scenario isn't a good one-the weaker force should have some other goal. It could also, reasonably, be a high score kinda thing. Players take turns being the overwhelmed force, and see how many turns they can survive, for example.

So, to be 100% clear, the only meaningful decisions in a game will lead to a win or loss in that game? Am I understanding your POV correctly? All other choices that a player may make in the game are meaningless? Is that accurate?


*****************

Also, the question in front of us is not if competitive play should exist, or whether it is good or bad. It obviously should exist, and does exist. It is not a value judgement on a player if they like Competitive play.

The question is, does a competitive focused design hurt or hind a game?

My POV is that is hinders a game, as once competitive game play is espoused as the default, it crowds out all other types of gamer preferences. This eventually leads to a dead end in the design space and narrows what future units and forces can do into a fixed set.

As a previous poster said, Balance is a Unicorn.

 Easy E wrote:


My POV is that is hinders a game, as once competitive game play is espoused as the default, it crowds out all other types of gamer preferences. This eventually leads to a dead end in the design space and narrows what future units and forces can do into a fixed set.

As a previous poster said, Balance is a Unicorn.

I wanted to ask you : from a game designer's point of view, if competitive game play espoused as default hinders a game, what solutions could you find so that you avoid that dead end while still not upsetting your competitive scene on the game ? Because while balance is a unicorn, it's certainly one they love to death.

Is it just as "simple" as writing the game from another point of view, and then make a "competitive set" pack with rules more focused / written with balance in mind ? Or, is it also a Unicorn in itself to do such a thing ?

This is the $64K question.

You have to understand that different players want different things and that there are different niches for games. Competitive is just a single niche. Other care about other things. Some people care more about some aspects than others. Each player is unique in their exact mix of interests, but they fall into general categories.

The first step is deciding what Niche your game is going to fit into. You really should not try to be all things to all people. Instead, choose where you want to lean into, and lean into it. You should spend time deciding on what you are trying to "do" (simulate, narrate, or gamify), and lay-out your design goals early in the process. These goals are the guide rails you use when making decisions about how and what to do later.

It is okay to make a game that is hyper-competitive focused, BUT the trade-off is that you know it has a shelf-life. Once you get to a certain point, you have to be ready to just call it done. There is no more space to design.

Really interesting, thanks for the answer.

So the crucial point here is to know where you want to go with your game and not try to chase the last trend just for the sake of it, thinking it will be enough to make sales.

It is okay to make a game that is hyper-competitive focused, BUT the trade-off is that you know it has a shelf-life. Once you get to a certain point, you have to be ready to just call it done. There is no more space to design.

That point makes me think about some recent games that were released on the miniature market, like Star Wars : Shatterpoint. It has a game system that is really appealing for the competitive scene on paper, and it really feels like to me it can't be the kind of game that is intended to last for a long time (like they will release a few extra packs for some characters / emblematic units and then call it a job well done).

Maybe the point of these kinds of game is not about the survival on long term, but they're rather designed to last a specific and finished amount of time before being dropped and replaced by another one. It's certainly fitting for crowdfunding / Kickstarter projects, like CMON branded boardgames.

I wouldn't really say Shatterpoint has that much obvious competitive appeal. It does a lot of things the competitive crowd would consider "wrong" with all the ways it takes control away from the player and focuses on reactive decision making.

AMG is certainly interesting in that regard. One of the big issues people had with MCP initially is that there wasn't much of a competitive push when it launched. No convention packet or anything like that and AMG made it very clear that most of their OP support would be in the form of special multiplayer scenarios and other non-standard game modes. In spite of that, the core game has fostered one of the more voracious competitive communities built entirely by players wanting to play it that way (and a lot of help from TTS).

I do think one of MCPs best features is that there's little that separates a competitive game from a casual one. Players often leave out tactics cards or play with more random scenarios than they "should" but the game itself doesn't demand enough that you'd want to play with less than a full game.

In the end, it really depends on the game and the meta. Some games can pull it off (MTG), and some others... not so much.

The thing with MTG is that it is not strictly designed for competitive play. There are actually a variety of ways to play, and the designers have been pretty transparent in who they are targeting with what types of play.

My blanket answer was going to be yes, if "focusing on the competitive scene" means "being interested in balance in a meaningful way." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I've straight up left game systems behind because the community around them were too focused on the competitive scene.

I left WMH in 2E because:
1. Everyone wanted to play 75 pt Steamroller games, a point level and format I've never loved.
2. I played the same list style every week (colossals had just premiered and everybody wanted to run one with their Infantrymachine lists).
3. There was next to no emphasis on hobby, and unpainted minis on flat terrain suck.

I haven't returned to WMH because:
1. Nobody plays around me.
2. Everyone who does play seems to want to play 100 pt Steamroller games, a point level and format I've never loved.
3. I'm not a good enough player to play WMH with clocks. While I'm not against clocks in general (I play KOW on a clock with no problem), I don't have the reps to not clock out in WMH ... and you can only play WMH on a clock, apparently.

I left 40k in 5E because:
1. I moved and found a WHFB group, the game I would rather be playing.
2. While the powergamer ethos had always been a thing in 40k, this is around where it started to become particularly unpleasant for me. Most casual matches I played or saw at the shop involved (unpainted) netlists built to spam whatever was currently best in faction. My hobby-centric army, always weak, became even less fun to play into a gaming community built on min/maxing. This would only get worse as the editions went on.

I left 40k in 9E, after coming back in 8E, because:
1. The game became even more reliant on having an updated codex, to get access to all the stratagems that had been pumped into the game. Unfortunately the chaos codexes dropped late in the edition, and were on the whole really underwhelming and felt woefully disconnected from Chaos as we had known it.
2. The edition, as far as I could tell, was almost wholly focused on the competitive experience. This may have been my experience from the outside (I've read or watched battle reports since the '90s), consuming largely competitive reporting, but GW itself ramped up its coverage of the competitive angle.

To this day, I hold that Casualmachine and Casualhammer are genuinely fun experiences that I would partake in any day of the week, and so I maintain legal armies for both systems. But I also virtually never play them, as "casual play" is very hard to find in either community outside of your insulated friend group.

EDIT: I'm a huge champion of Kings of War, a game with very good internal and external balance (I won't say perfect in either case but it's the best I know of for a multi-faction wargame). I play in multiple tournaments a year, and see relative levels of success despite actively bucking the meta. However, I'll admit that I'm not deaf to the complaints of casual Kings players, who feel left behind when the meta shifts or endlessly outclassed at tournaments. I think the disparity between casual and competitive is that Kings has a much stronger emphasis on hobby than other games I've been a part of, and the level of balance and scenario play mean that you can compete no matter what you take. You will certainly have a harder time if you don't bring tools with you, but I've never felt hopeless or had the NPEs I've had with GW games. (I won't lump WMH in on this one, my losses always felt like my fault - or the damn clock's!)

That said, KOW is entering a period of growth where tournament lists are becoming much stronger, in part because a lot of WMH players have entered the scene (at least in the Eastern US regions), in part because we're all figuring out what works competitively and what just doesn't. Legacy armies have largely been replaced with new, purpose-made ones, and why build good units when you can build better units? Mantic is trying to address this but I do think a divide in tournament and casual play is widening for KOW. And I don't think Mantic wants that, as it isn't feeding it in the way I've seen PP or GW.

Yeah, pretty similar story here, down to games and editions. But if you'd asked me this in Mk2/5e era, I'd have been giving you an unambiguous "Competitive Balance is an axiomatic good in game design".

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, pretty similar story here, down to games and editions. But if you'd asked me this in Mk2/5e era, I'd have been giving you an unambiguous "Competitive Balance is an axiomatic good in game design".

I think this is just showing that there's a difference between building a games core mechanics and balance around competitive gaming and building the whole game experience around competitive gaming.

One aspect allows for a tight game that has good balance and presents a mostly even (for well built armies) competing field where player skill on the table is the greater measure of victory. That structure can then be used in casual, competitive, narrative, home brew or whatever.


The other is one where everything is focused on the competitive and it bleeds into the marketing, the product focus, the feedback and can create an environment where every game is competitive; where every focus is on competition and where casual play suffers as a result.





I think its very important to separate the two.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Doesn't matter if the focus is on competitive play if the company behind it all doesn't know how to use the incoming data and writes knee-jerk reactions based on high-level win-rates and a few very loud personalities in the tournament sphere.

^^ this

would actually go further and state that if the company is unable/unwilling to make good use of any feedback, using a blinkered approach or otherwise, you probably won't have a very good game

also so far for me at least "good" games tend not to have an associated model range the company is pushing leading to, understandable, commercial pressures to promote newer models

I guess this would all depend on how you define "competitive" and "focus".


I've argued for a VERY long time that a good rule set caters to all types of players for that game. If a ruleset can't pull off competitive, narrative, AND casual within its parameters, then it's worthless as a game. It's why I argue so hard for tight, balanced rulesets. You can ALWAYS take those sets in a narrative direction as players, and the very nature of a balanced set makes casual play easy. It also makes it easier to fine tune the rules when competitive play shows some exploitability.

yeah, if there rulesystem is good every player no matter what they want from the game, can use to their liking without major adjustments
the bad systems need to be tinkered to get one thing right and the others are left behind

 Boss Salvage wrote:

EDIT: I'm a huge champion of Kings of War, a game with very good internal and external balance (I won't say perfect in either case but it's the best I know of for a multi-faction wargame). I play in multiple tournaments a year, and see relative levels of success despite actively bucking the meta. However, I'll admit that I'm not deaf to the complaints of casual Kings players, who feel left behind when the meta shifts or endlessly outclassed at tournaments. I think the disparity between casual and competitive is that Kings has a much stronger emphasis on hobby than other games I've been a part of, and the level of balance and scenario play mean that you can compete no matter what you take. You will certainly have a harder time if you don't bring tools with you, but I've never felt hopeless or had the NPEs I've had with GW games. (I won't lump WMH in on this one, my losses always felt like my fault - or the damn clock's!)

That said, KOW is entering a period of growth where tournament lists are becoming much stronger, in part because a lot of WMH players have entered the scene (at least in the Eastern US regions), in part because we're all figuring out what works competitively and what just doesn't. Legacy armies have largely been replaced with new, purpose-made ones, and why build good units when you can build better units? Mantic is trying to address this but I do think a divide in tournament and casual play is widening for KOW. And I don't think Mantic wants that, as it isn't feeding it in the way I've seen PP or GW.

there is something interesting going with KoW in the US, listening to different podcasts and looking at the list or what is considered good or bad and things are different than in Europe

like in the EU/UK withdraw is hardly used because people see the game better balanced without it while the US is kind of the opposite
also there is a trend that US kind of goes into more "extremes" for list buildings were the UK/EU is more torwards balanced lists

 Just Tony wrote:

I've argued for a VERY long time that a good rule set caters to all types of players for that game. If a ruleset can't pull off competitive, narrative, AND casual within its parameters, then it's worthless as a game. It's why I argue so hard for tight, balanced rulesets. You can ALWAYS take those sets in a narrative direction as players, and the very nature of a balanced set makes casual play easy. It also makes it easier to fine tune the rules when competitive play shows some exploitability.

If only it was that easy.

Balanced rules work best when they are mirror matches, ala Chess. The further you move away from a mirror match the more likely it is to become unbalanced. On the flip side, players don't really want to play mirror matches all day long either. They demand variety, and then more unbalance creeps in. Balance is a unicorn.

What most competitive players want is "predictability". If I do X I can be reasonably sure Y will happen. Meanwhile, Narrative gamers want less predictability, they want to know If I do X, what will happen? You can see why designing to both of these preferences becomes mutually exclusive. Now to make it more complicated, players are not 100% Competitive or 100% Narrative, they have their own level of tolerance going either way on the spectrum, but this level of tolerance varies by player. To make things even harder, there are some players who actually want a game to represent what they think a simulation would look like and ask, "If I do X, would the same result happen in a consistent, real-world universe?" and that is a whole other slew of variables.

The IDEA of balance is great. The reality of balance is that it is impossible. Somewhere, someone will break any system you can build. Plus, players all have different tolerances for balance, and how far you can go from their core question before they reject the game. There is no ONE player type to cater to. Even purely competitive players will have differing tolerances for non-predictable outcomes.

Now, to get back to the OPs question. If you made a game purely for competitive players, you would need to reduce it to its most predictable outcomes. Again, Chess is another great example of this. It is all known outcomes and hence has a thriving competition scene. Shoots and Ladders does not, and no tournament system exists (that I am aware of).

As we see with Chess, you can focus on competition and get a very popular and survivable game. However, no one is making gobs of money off Chess innovations anymore. The design space for Chess is essentially closed. The only space left is to take it to less competitive versions, which many folks do.

disagree here

stick with chess, it is a very good rule set and therefore works for the casual gamer the same way as it it works for competitive gamers

none of those 2 suffers because the rules are balanced and tight

and the narrative gamers have fun by adding themed miniatures and play Rebels against Empire


Shoots and Ladders on the other hand is a game were you play against the game and not against the other people
this is just there to spend time and not about actual "gaming"

and games like 40k, that are more like Shoots and Ladders are used for tournaments because "reasons" and do not work for narrative at all without additional rules

PS: and no, narrative gamers are not just people who want bad rules were the outcome is unpredictable
for the most part they want to play their army and tell a story with their games
and a game were you have no chance winning if you take a themed army with the models you like does not work for that

hence a balanced game is most important for narrative and casual gamers
competitive gamers do not care at all about balance

That’s insane. Narrative gamers like chess? Come on, man, just admit you don’t understand what he’s telling you.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
That’s insane. Narrative gamers like chess? Come on, man, just admit you don’t understand what he’s telling you.

I mean if you take all the words inbetween out you can kind of get that.


But that wasn't his point. His point is that Narrative gamers want to tell a story and its a LOT easier to tell a story within a game when you've a well written set of rules and balanced armies. Because now you know what happens when you start to tweak the rules and the game balance; or at least have a decent understanding.

This means if you, say, want to do a heroic last stand with a defender with fewer models than an attacker; you can have a better idea how big a disparity of points you can create between the two without it making an auto lose in turn 1 for the defender.

Again the point is you can unbalance a balanced game and get a great result. However if the core game itself is poorly build/balanced then the Narrative has a harder time because the core is already wobbly.
That means the narrative has to do way more game theory work themselves to work out the imbalances and then work out how to factor those into what they are trying to build with their narrative game. Now this can be a lot of fun for those who like to do that, but for most people its a whole extra step and when you pay for the core rules and the army expansion (which means for 2 armies you could be easily spending the best part of £100 - and that's sharing the big rule book) many feel that its something you should be getting for your money.

Overread, your comment is a common misunderstanding from players who prefers predictability to what a Narrative gamer actually wants.

Narrative gamers do not want to tell a story. They can do that without a game at all. They want the game to unfold a story for them, they want to see how the game and the story develops by playing the game.

This is the opposite of what the competitive player wants, as the competitive player wants to tell the game what the story is; they want the game outcomes to be predictable.

You can see that designing for one extreme of these two spectrums limits your appeal to the other. They are mutually exclusive.

Obviously, these are sweeping generalizations as each player has their own tolerance within the spectrum. In addition, there is a third axis regarding "believability" of the outcomes that makes things even harder to balance.

The best games straddle these extremes so it can appeal to all sides. The more you move closer to one side, then the more players you lose from the other. In addition, these players at the far edges have a hard time even understanding what the other types of gamers even want from a game experience. This makes it even harder to balance for any individual players tastes and wants.

Therefore, competitive only games eventually get to a point where there is no place left to go. The designer has to inject some unpredictability or the game has no more design space, they have painted themselves into a corner. Chess is such a game. There is no more design space to make it MORE predictable, you can only make it less predictable.



Edit: Just to be clear. This is not about Comp play being bad. It isn't bad at all. This is about the OP's question about whether it is good for the long term survivability of a game. A game can survive a long time being highly competitive. However, a company supporting such a game eventually runs out of space to do anything with it, so stops. Many gamers than think an unsupported game is dead.

Is chess dead? No. Is it unsupported by a manufacturer making money from selling chess sets to people by updating and expanding the rules for chess? Yes.

Sorry what? "unfold a story"?

Last time I checked even narrative players still make choices when playing, still want to have an agency.

They do not roll a scatter dice each time they move a unit or randomly select what to shoot at what.

You forgot the core question is, "What would happen if?"

You make a choice, and you see what happens. That is a story unfolding too.


Also, this thread is not about whether Narrative or Comp is good. They are both good. They are doing different things. The question is focusing on Comp good for the survivability of a game. On the other hand, focusing on Narrative only is equally dangerous for a game. Both directions limit your audience and therefore reduce the survivability of your game.

 Easy E wrote:
You forgot the core question is, "What would happen if?"

That has nothing to do with unpredictability, and arguably is the opposite.

"What would happen if a shoot a Space Marine with a Volcanno Cannon? well he dies, obviously"

"What would happen if shoot a lasgun at a Land Raider? nothing, obviously"

Also I'm pretty sure that is more simulation than narrative, although admittedly I have always struggled to differentitate the concepts.

But simulation has little to do with unpredactibility. In fact we can only make simulations when the variables are predictable.

 Easy E wrote:
Overread, your comment is a common misunderstanding from players who prefers predictability to what a Narrative gamer actually wants.

Narrative gamers do not want to tell a story. They can do that without a game at all. They want the game to unfold a story for them, they want to see how the game and the story develops by playing the game.

And you can get that with a balanced game as well. Deploy differently; setup the terrain differently; arrive on the table differently; make difference choices during the game. There are a MASSIVE number of things that can take place in the game before the dice roll and the game runs which can influence how two armies play out.


Also what you seem to be arguing for is that narrative players don't care or want imbalance within the game itself. Or so much random that it manifests as imbalance. The thing is because each model has fixed stats before it enters the game; the imbalance is also a potential known quantity. It just manifests that instead of X = Y you get X > Y every time (or statistically enough times on the dice rolls).

You're basically swapping one instance for another and I'd argue you're justifying a weaker option because inherent inbalance means that the game is always a negative for those forces on the weaker side no matter if its narrative or competitive and especially if it is competitive. Same for casual - its one thing to go into a game not caring if you win or lose; its another to go into a match knowing that every time you are at a known disadvantage to your opponent purely because of your army choice . Again somewhat extreme, but we've seen it happen where balance gets so bad that one army is almost an auto lose to another no matter the model combinations.

No my argument is that Competitive focus in your game design reduces the survivability of the game. You may have longevity, but it will not survive as a product.

Everything else we are talking about is an aside from that point.


*************************************
To indulge in the aside a bit.....

Now, a lot of people think Comp play equals balance. Not necessarily true. If White always beats Black you can still have comp play, but it will only be White on White. However, the game is still not balanced.

Every player has a different "tolerance" for imbalance, and only they know what it is. Again, Chess has a known imbalance that White (I think) always goes first. However, very few people argue that Chess can not be Competitive because of it, and very few people refuse to play Chess because of it.

Is playing on the Black side in Chess always negative no matter what? Everytime you know you are at a known disadvantage to your opponent purely because of your color choice. Does that mean people stopped playing Chess or having fun playing Chess? Of course not, because Chess has balance but not Perfect Balance. I am arguing that perfect balance is a unicorn, a myth. Balance is not what makes a game popular, give it longevity or survivable.

Now to be clear, I think some sort of internal control is great. The closer to balance you are the better. However, making it the end goal of a game is impossible. You will never have perfect balance, and you will never create a system that someone, somewhere will not be able to break and get an advantage on.

Instead, popular and long lasting games focus on straddling the line between people that want a simulation, people that want a fun past time, and people that want a competition. It is the best at being all things to all people, and NOT lean to far into one particular sub-set of player wants more than an other sub-sets wants.

 Easy E wrote:
You forgot the core question is, "What would happen if?"

yeah, for the outcome of the game, not for rules interaction

can Napoleon win Waterloo is the unpredictable question a narrative player asks and for this he wants a balanced and predictable system and not one were it is random who wins or one that is designed for the English to always win because "balance is a unicorn"

what you are talking about has nothing to do how well designed a game is as if you think you need an unbalanced game with bad rules to tell a story because no one knows what happens if one player starts shooting with a unit than haven't ever been part of a narrative group

90% of the historical gamers are narrative players and the rules that are popular among those are the well written and balanced systems that are easy to learn and also easy to modify to fit the scenario

No, we are talking about if competitive ethos in design leads to survivability of a game, What are you talking about?

If balance is so critical to the survival of a game, explain to me the long-lasting appeal of Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, and other casino games. They are be definition not balanced, yet they are very survivable.

If balance and "well-designed" (Whatever that means) was so critical, than why has 40K been so dominant? It does not follow your own criteria of what a successful game needs, yet here we all are! Why does it keep lasting in spite of your guy's theories?

 Easy E wrote:
No, we are talking about if competitive ethos in design leads to survivability of a game, What are you talking about?

If balance is so critical to the survival of a game, explain to me the long-lasting appeal of Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, and other casino games. They are be definition not balanced, yet they are very survivable.

If balance and "well-designed" (Whatever that means) was so critical, than why has 40K been so dominant? It does not follow your own criteria of what a successful game needs, yet here we all are! Why does it keep lasting in spite of your guy's theories?

Most likely because balance is only one of many facets.

The gambling games you note are popular because money and vast amounts of advertising (and drink). They work by favouring the unbalanced element and tempting people into the concept of getting rich quick. Take the money out and those games would still be popular, but I'd wager they'd not be anywhere near as popular as they are today. They'd likely join Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly and such on the shelf.


As for GW's situation its often been argued that GW is successful despite not because of their rules. GW get a lot of things right and some things wrong; they also have a momentum others in this market just don't come close to touching in terms of marketing, outreach and influence. And GW have had times where their writing was so bad (along with other things) that they were bleeding customers. It gave rise to the likes of Warmachine for a time.


Similarly Warmachine fell apart not because of its competitive rules themselves; but because of a whole host of internal and external pressures and a focus on listening too the competitive end too much in certain aspects (eg shifting toward 2D terrain etc)

 Easy E wrote:
No, we are talking about if competitive ethos in design leads to survivability of a game, What are you talking about?

because a well written, tight and balanced game can be used by all players no matter if they are competitive, casual or narrative

while a bad written game appeals only to competitive gamers for the same reason gamblers chose the unbalanced games
they don't want to win against opponents, they want to beat the game (and be smarter than the game)

hence why those kind of games are popular among the "tournament" players rather than actual competitive games were you are playing against the opponent

and 40k is dominant for reasons that have nothing to do with the game, because by now there are 10 different games that have that name and they are dropped as soon as the new one comes out
40k is a franchise that is popular despite the game, not because of it (same as any monopoly helps to keep that one thing popular no matter how good it is)
and it is ironic that the one game were even the company making it saying it is not for tournament is driven by tournament players

Okay, so you guys both agree that Competitiveness is not a contributing factor to a games survivability.

What you guys are arguing is your preference for rules and what you wish was true. By your own admission, it is not true for Warhammer 40K. Therefore, we are arguing the same thing.

Thanks for the thread. I think we can end it here, because we are all arguing the same point. Competitive ethos in a games design doesn't help its survivability, commercial success, or longevity in the public sphere.

OP, there is your answer.

It didn’t for the first major wargaming company.
That doesn’t mean it’d be the same for other games.

depends what you mean by competitiveness

a game made for gamblers being successful because it attracts gamblers is something different than making a balanced and tight game that can be used by everyone

both can be used for competitive events
and competitive events are the driving factor behind gaming and the more competitive events there are, the more attractive the game becomes for casual players

Texas Hold'em is somehow popular Poker version but not because it is better than others or more "fun" but because the were more and bigger events using that variant and therefore non-event players started playing it as well

so yes competitive events are important for how successful a gaming system is, but this has nothing to do with how good or well written the game itself is or if the game is designed with those events in mind or not
just that bad written games are more exclusive to competitive events (as those don't care about balance at all or if the rules are tight) while good written games can be used by everyone

Can't really back this up with any examples (and apologies if this has been brought up before!), but I think it might be about priorities?

From what I gather, most wargaming companies make the bulk of its money from selling miniatures rather than the rules themselves, and for a game's long-term survival you need to find a way to sell new stuff to the current playerbase. To sell new miniatures, the best way probably is to renew the game with new editions or add stuff in. But it's a lot harder to add new factions in without upsetting the balance of things, and a new edition of the game might upset gamers who are used to the old version or introduce new mechanics that could be exploited in ways unintended by developers. If the main draw of a game was the fact that it was competitive, the bulk of that game's players would lose interest because it's lost the thing that attracted them.

Probably also worth highlighting the fact that wargaming is niche to begin with, and you're only going to appeal to already-existing gamers if the main appeal is a tight game (especially if the game isn't linked to pre-existing IPs or a historical period), which compounds that issue.

Obviously, a competitive game can have a compelling setting and great minis, but it feels like that people are able to put up with GW's chopping-and-changing and fairly sub-par rules because space knights defending a crumbling space empire against Orks from Streatham's pretty cool, while the level of interest in the Iron Kingdoms wasn't quite there.

I think Warmachine did fall apart because of its competitive rules. As a game it got hollowed out to more complicated chess - and if you didn't play it this way, you got completely destroyed (often in a very non-interactive way) by those who did.

I think narrative players do want to see a story unfold. This doesn't mean they don't have agency - but that "winning the game" is secondary to just playing it. Its more fun to charge your general into the opponent's general and have a fight than position such and such a way to maximise your victory points.

I.E. when I play my goblins in WHFB I do so in a narrative way. There's a whole bag of rules that can make my army fall apart. I can enjoy when everything goes right - and I can enjoy when (via animosity, fanatics, inaccurate war machines and exploding wizards) I somehow manage to kill more of my army than my opponent and then flee off the table.

If I was "playing to win" there's a simple answer - "don't play goblins". But I'm not playing for that reason.

By contrast when I played high elves - I was much more demanding. I wanted to win. I was dangerously close to being "that guy" when it came to wanting to win. If I won a game I felt it was due to my decisions - and I lost, I used to think about what I could have done differently, to stack the odds in my favour, so I'd win next time.

Its very hard for those two mentalities to play against each other. Just about every game system I think about will collapse when you have someone trying to win with an optimised list and plan - and someone who is just there for the fun of the experience. Unless the game is incredibly random. As a result I think balance matters, but not as much as you might think.

I feel GW's advantage is partly mass - its so big that these two player camps can exist in numbers, and one doesn't entirely eat up the second. I'm not sure this was true for things like Warmahordes, X-Wing and various other competitors.

I.E. I'm trying to imagine what "casual Infinity" would look like, and sort of drawing a blank.

Tyel wrote:

If I was "playing to win" there's a simple answer - "don't play goblins". But I'm not playing for that reason..

Thing is that's a really good argument for not having super casually/badly/unbalanced written rules for a generic game system.

Good rules should mean that Goblin players CAN win and should be able to win with more than one army composition.
Because some people will invest money and time into a Goblin army and they don't want to have to invest all that again (and might not even be able too) to have a fair chance at winning. They also might just love goblins and not like elves


Again these ideas of inherent inbalance being good can be ok in something like MTG where building a new force is basically grabbing more pre-made cards from a pack. But when its a game that requires hours of investment just to get a functional force; its not something where people just chop and change armies. Even a lot of long term fans will often have armies they've built up over decades and focus on above others. The number of people who drop and start (and get to table ready) armies rapidly is honestly very few. Even fewer if we accept that GW's marketing suggests that most people only stick around ofr a few years in the hobby and then move on.

What is so narrative about a weak army anyways? pretty much every 40k faction is supposed to be either transhuman super-soldiers, endless waves of soldiers and tanks, super advanced ancient aliens, galaxy ending alien infestations, reality warping daemons or some combination of the above.

None of them is supposed to be weak lore wise as they all routinely conquer planets and exterminate lesser civilizations, yes even the Tau do that.

Maybe in WHFB there are armies that are supposed to be a joke (never really got into WHFB), but 40k is too high on its "grimdark eternal warfare" to have weak armies.

 Tyran wrote:
What is so narrative about a weak army anyways? pretty much every 40k faction is supposed to be either transhuman super-soldiers, endless waves of soldiers and tanks, super advanced ancient aliens, galaxy ending alien infestations, reality warping daemons or some combination of the above.

None of them is supposed to be weak lore wise as they all routinely conquer planets and exterminate lesser civilizations, yes even the Tau do that.

Maybe in WHFB there are armies that are supposed to be a joke (never really got into WHFB), but 40k is too high on its "grimdark eternal warfare" to have weak armies.

See that's another thing - even armies like the Gloomspite Gitz or Skaven might have a jovial side to them; but they are a serious threat. Their units might be half insane, but they are still going to kill you and win the battlefield with tactics that work for them. That some of their units are literally goblins thrown from a catapult doesn't matter because those units "work" for them and they win wars with them.

Having an army that's inherently weaker and will just lose battles because its the "weak army" isn't fun. Sure winning isn't everything but there's a massive difference between playing a game where each faction can win and playing one where one faction basically has to accept loss most times no matter the skill of the players involved.

I'm a historical gamer and look in dismay at the way Bolt Action, an excellent system at heart has become Warhammer 1940K and been ruined by an influx of deeply competitive gamers who are not remotely interested in history and only in the 'meta' - its become a horrible monster.

 Overread wrote:

Tyel wrote:

If I was "playing to win" there's a simple answer - "don't play goblins". But I'm not playing for that reason..

Thing is that's a really good argument for not having super casually/badly/unbalanced written rules for a generic game system.

Good rules should mean that Goblin players CAN win and should be able to win with more than one army composition.
Because some people will invest money and time into a Goblin army and they don't want to have to invest all that again (and might not even be able too) to have a fair chance at winning. They also might just love goblins and not like elves


Again these ideas of inherent inbalance being good can be ok in something like MTG where building a new force is basically grabbing more pre-made cards from a pack. But when its a game that requires hours of investment just to get a functional force; its not something where people just chop and change armies. Even a lot of long term fans will often have armies they've built up over decades and focus on above others. The number of people who drop and start (and get to table ready) armies rapidly is honestly very few. Even fewer if we accept that GW's marketing suggests that most people only stick around ofr a few years in the hobby and then move on.

I think you missed the point. In this scenario you wouldn't choose goblins because of a lack of predictability. On average, a goblin army should perform as any other army. But in any given situation and in any given game, the random rules meant to represent their anarchic nature give you a far larger variance in results than a conventional army.

I used to love playing with and against Orks in 40k, back in the day. The random nature of the army meant that you could have anything from an even, tactical game to a swingy spectacle that created memorable moments. The last such game I had in 5th ed, I think. A bomb squig accidentally went after my Trukk and blew it up. But in doing so the Trukk spun out of control, ended up in an enemy unit and exploded right in their faces. Then the survivor found themselves in charge range of the meganobs that emerged from the wreckage. As an example of a hilarious but not so helpful event, my shock attack gun Big Mek who was a major fire support element in my army teleported himself and his very surprised Gretchin into close combat with a Hive Tyrant. Oops. These rules are not an expression of a strictly inferior army. They just offer unpredictable results flanking more expected performance wedged in between them to create a spectacle that reflects their background. These kinds of rules have been lost in the meantime, systematically removed from 40k after 6th ed and not adopted into AoS from Fantasy right from the start (ignore the joke rules - random tables of old got simplified beyond any recognition or dropped outright).

In my opinion this was done to cater to the competitive mindset. You can't have rules in a game that is meant for the tournament crowd that have significant randomness and variance built into them. It's not just that players who are serious about the competition will just not play such an army, but will also feel robbed of a sure victory if the randomness swings heavily against them. 8th ed 40k and onward have been an exercise in predictability and, in my opinion, boredom.

The loss here is that anarchic armies have no place in such a game and therefore players who enjoy this kind of army are no longer catered to in the name of making competitive players happy. It's unfortunate for the game to no longer reflect the background as it once did, and it alienates a part of the customer base. This is one case where a narrow understanding of balance only serves to make the game worse. GW is particularly bad at this. They deprive themselves of a lot of balancing mechanics and try to make what's left work by paring down the game's rules to minimal variance between outcomes, sacrificing flavor and variety in the process.

Thing is you can always start with a balanced structured competitive system and then build a more varied open play system on top.

It would actually give GW a reason to market open play as its own thing instead of "same rules just er do what you want if you want, but you don't have too".


So you'd have your competitive goblin army stats; and then an open play version that just increases their swingy random nature. Which is much easier to build off the back of a well structured core set of rules.

Heck you could throw the double turn in there and a bunch of other things - eg undead armies resurrecting more models etc....



GW is just bad on rules in general - even when they adopt good practice they either do too little too late; or go so over the top with it that the good idea becomes a negative in its own right. Not to mention that in 3 years they'll throw it all out the window and start over.

Their specialist games seem to do better - which probably hints that they are done by different staff who aren't "set in their ways"; or that managers don't "tinker" with things as much

There specialist games show just how silo'd everything still is at GW. TOW talking about a comprehensive list of 75 USRs that take rules from various sections of previous editions and consolidate them into one area that can be easily expressed on any unit profile, and then each army having a few unique army special rules that still function on the same principles... and then 40k has (literally) a 1000 bespoke rules and a half-assed scattered group of USRs randomly written throughout the core rules... how do these two rule sets come from the same company?

 Overread wrote:
Thing is you can always start with a balanced structured competitive system and then build a more varied open play system on top.

I don't think that would work. I think anything that wasn't the "tournament standard" would be completely ignored and discarded by the player base, who either treat every game like a "practice" game for a tournament, or are stuck in local scenes where anything outside of the norm (READ: tournaments) is inherently "unbalanced".

This is why there has always been such a stigma with Forge World units. It's why Legends suffer from this stigma now. It's how the brain-meltingly stupid notion of symmetrical terrain being "required" for "balance" started to infect everything. It's why companies make 60x44 mats now.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
There specialist games show just how silo'd everything still is at GW. TOW talking about a comprehensive list of 75 USRs that take rules from various sections of previous editions and consolidate them into one area that can be easily expressed on any unit profile, and then each army having a few unique army special rules that still function on the same principles... and then 40k has (literally) a 1000 bespoke rules and a half-assed scattered group of USRs randomly written throughout the core rules... how do these two rule sets come from the same company?

 Overread wrote:
Thing is you can always start with a balanced structured competitive system and then build a more varied open play system on top.

I don't think that would work. I think anything that wasn't the "tournament standard" would be completely ignored and discarded by the player base, who either treat every game like a "practice" game for a tournament, or are stuck in local scenes where anything outside of the norm (READ: tournaments) is inherently "unbalanced".

This is why there has always been such a stigma with Forge World units. It's why Legends suffer from this stigma now. It's how the brain-meltingly stupid notion of symmetrical terrain being "required" for "balance" started to infect everything. It's why companies make 60x44 mats now.

At the same time consider that GW doesn't really do much with their "open play" system because there isn't anything really behind the term other than "do whatever you want" which you don't need a game mode to tell you to do (its not a PC game).

I do get your point, and it as a valid concern. That said consider how Kill Team was a game mode for well over a decade, but was mostly relegated to starter games for a few rounds before people moved onto the "proper game". As soon as GW started moving it out to its own thing; giving it its own rule book; fleshing it out; making it a "product" and something they marketed and put into the limelight - then Killteam took off and now its a very successful game in its own right.

I think that open play systems should copy that model. GW can move things into an open play system; give it its own rule section; highlight it and make it its own thing. At the very least it would set the ground work for having potential to establish itself. Pitfalls and issues after that can then be addressed through that system.

It might well be that the issue with the competitive meta is simply a function of group size and game time and that its very hard to move away from unless wargames become semi-mainstream enough to generate big player groups in many areas. Or perhaps there's a few ways along the line to improve things to make more swingy open games work.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
There specialist games show just how silo'd everything still is at GW. TOW talking about a comprehensive list of 75 USRs that take rules from various sections of previous editions and consolidate them into one area that can be easily expressed on any unit profile, and then each army having a few unique army special rules that still function on the same principles... and then 40k has (literally) a 1000 bespoke rules and a half-assed scattered group of USRs randomly written throughout the core rules... how do these two rule sets come from the same company?

I think this is partially by design. We've seen lots of instances of GW using its other games just to see what sticks and if customers actually prefer the things they complain about or if its just the internet's squeaky wheel effect.

for 40k, it very much looks like it was written by 3 different designers, to get the work done in time, who were not allowed to talk to each other during the process to prevent leaks, and than compiled by a 4th one who never played that game before

and TOW is written by a single person who actually tried to play the game before it is released (same as Adeptus Titanicus)

Tyel wrote:
I think Warmachine did fall apart because of its competitive rules. As a game it got hollowed out to more complicated chess - and if you didn't play it this way, you got completely destroyed (often in a very non-interactive way) by those who did.

WM/H died off due to the companies miss-steps and poor management

However the community got the reputation it did as the only metric of success was the tournament win and that created a bad mindset in a lot (but not all) of the community. And if im honest, im now seeing that sort of mindset creeping into the 40K community local to me

What is often overlooked is that the tightness of the WM/H ruleset made it perfect for us as a casual, tea and biscuits, basement group of wargamers as their was little to no arguing about rules. Things either are or are not and there was a strict list of what happened when. So we could just get on with having fun playing rather than arguing about rules interpretations. It was only when we left our basement to go play in the wider "meta" did we discover that while we were playing the same rules, we were playing a very different game to most other WM/H players.

Interestingly, MK4 of WM/H is starting to gain some steam now so it will be interesting to see who plays it. A new wave of friendlier players or the old competitive rump of the Mk3 players.

Sunno wrote:


WM/H died off due to the companies miss-steps and poor management

.

This is largely true. However its also fair to point out this was in part exacerbated by other factors that were fed by the 'conpetitive' game. by mk3, the game had become bloated and very unwieldy; the 'knowledge burden' to get into the game was high so both returning vets and new players were often largely turned off. This combined with the community-at-large's insistence on steamroller/tournaments made the casual ecosystem very sparsely populated and unfriendly to newplayers. Losing both was a catastrophe. Pp's othervery notable misteps such as axing the pressgangers, axing no.quarter, cid, their repeated FUs to distributors and third parties etc also.contributed enormously.

Sunno wrote:


However the community got the reputation it did as the only metric of success was the tournament win and that created a bad mindset in a lot (but not all) of the community. And if im honest, im now seeing that sort of mindset creeping into the 40K community local to me

Again, largely correct.

Sunno wrote:


What is often overlooked is that the tightness of the WM/H ruleset made it perfect for us as a casual, tea and biscuits, basement group of wargamers as their was little to no arguing about rules. Things either are or are not and there was a strict list of what happened when. So we could just get on with having fun playing rather than arguing about rules interpretations. It was only when we left our basement to go play in the wider "meta" did we discover that while we were playing the same rules, we were playing a very different game to most other WM/H players.
.

I don't know about this. Yea, on one hand the rules were unarguably 'clean' and 'tight'. This on its own doesn't make a game a casual.tea and biscuits game in my mind but i understand where you are coming from.its a game that has a whole heap of sometimes very complex interactions going on and all at the same time. the very technical nature of the game/mechanics, the multiple layers of interactions, feats, buffs and synergies makes it a 'serious' game rather than a 'casual' game.

For the record, my group never played wmh and wanted to hsve a go. I took out my stuff, took the lead on building straight forward and uncomplicated 25pt-30pt mk2 lists and then walked them through the 8 million interactions. If I'd not had 15 years experience at the game and could handle it, I'm not sure my guys would have enjoyed the game, let alone want a second go.let alone be introduced to hordes! :p

Now is there anything stopping 2 'serious' wmh players dialling back on the lists, playing 'loose' and not taking the game seriously. No, there's not. I've done it. But I'd still.argue that despite the 'clean' rules, its not a 'casual' game as we all understand it. I think other games fall into thst category better and easier.

Warmachines rules in 2nd edition were tight but they also had some gamey elements that you had to learn. For example declaring charges to gain additional movement instead of using the run order.

Things that are very well written and set in stone and work easily; BUT which are not always intuitive to new players who will use the run to run and the charge to charge and won't think to use the charge that will fail to gain additional movement.


That said the concept of a tight rules system works for casual games because you can play the game without worries.
The difference is then not between well written rules and badly written rules; but rather complex and simplistic rules.

Warmachine I'd class as complex; easy to learn the basics but trickier to master the complexities. However it all "worked". So even when you did complex stuff you could see the logical train of information and interactions.


What you're more arguing for is a rules system that is much simpler and quicker to pick up.


It's basically like comparing Basic and advanced rules for One Page Rules. Both use the same core simplistic structure. The simple rules are super easy to pick up and use very basic generic wargaming concepts that make it easy to see what's going on. The advanced rules add layers to that which increase complexity; whilst still being clearly functional.