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I've been running events for quite a long time and perhaps someone else has an idea on how to get people to ACTUALLY play WFB for tournaments. Are other people noticing the huge drop in participation for such events?

Is there a certain format that attracts more people? Or anything else that could stimulate any kind of interest? My 40k events draw 30-40 people on average at Legions but our last WFB event got 6, it's coming to the point where it's almost not even worth running events for it

Any ideas are welcome to getting the word out to get people to physically get out of bed and travel to a WFB event. Im seriously believing that people don't consider fantasy worth the drive compared to 40k which draws a ton

The rules for fantasy have gotten progressively worse which has lead to less players.

A tournament FAQ that either eliminates or sets a lot of the random rolls during the game (like terrain features) and the banning of some of the more ridiculous magic items would probably be a good start.

Yeah, I think you'd have to get a consensus on what players hate from the new edition and sorta errata the game for that. Possibly.
I dunno. I still love collecting and painting fantasy armies, but I don't feel much enthusiasm for playing in the new environment.

Turn it into a 40k event and blammo problem solved!

Ditch random terrain, buildings of any sort, and special characters might make it better.

Da Boss wrote:Yeah, I think you'd have to get a consensus on what players hate from the new edition and sorta errata the game for that. Possibly.
I dunno. I still love collecting and painting fantasy armies, but I don't feel much enthusiasm for playing in the new environment.

Yup, which I have done.. Still hasn't had much effect. The issue is that we only have local people coming and most have other things they "need to do" on event days. With no infusion of new players and a growing apathy among local players I don't see a bright spot in the WFB scene here.

Perhaps bribery of outside players??

Turn it into a 40k event and blammo problem solved!

I would need to write up some FAQs on how to use your WFB armies in a 40k game.

Tell potential fantasy players to quit reading the internet and make a judgement for themselves. It's easily the best edition of fantasy put out and matches 5th 40k for quality. Hell, around here in our province people are dropping 40k for fantasy. It's 40k players who've never really played fantasy or people who can't play for fun that are destroying fantasy's player base, saying how awful it is for no real good reason.

As a veteran fantasy player, both casual and competitive, if you made a no magic tournament I would bring my entire crew (only 5 guys now, but it was 14 last year) to go play in it. And I'm a Lizardmen player.

As a middle ground, you could not allow caster lords. The 50pts less of spell items and reduction in caster levels would go a long way.

8th edition fantasy is still god awful, and while not intended to be a competitive system anymore, the internal and external balance of armies is simply pathetic.

~Greg V.

Thank for Greg but somehow I doubt your whole crew would travel to Pittsburgh!

However, if your whole crew was like 20 people Id make rules to accomodate

Basically my goal is to make the LEAST amount of changes that target the worst parts of the system for tournaments

To that end I added Half VPs for Units once again, and Vps for fleeting units. To tone down magic all I did was allow ward saves to be taken against Dwellers Below, Pit of Shades, Final Transmutation and Purple Sun

Took me awhile to come up with small changes with large effects, but thats what I decided on

However, due to the apathy of the WFB crowd no one is showing up still.. so the problem I think is totally local

Yeah, it hits and missed in some areas. The scene has died out in my area as well. Ironically, my friends without top tier armies (besides myself) are the only ones that still play regularly!

~Greg V.

Am I the only one who only really likes 8th better than prior editions?

What are the top tier armies these days anyway?

I know in Cleveland WFB is played either entirely in small groups that know each other, or among a small handful of competitive guys.

So, you either play one of a handufl of uber builds and crush each other, or nobody sees you play. I've got some empire sitting on the shelf, but me and my buddy are trying to get Kings of War going locally.

If people like a game, they'll come to tournaments.

Not popular belief, but my opinion:

Skaven
Lizardmen
Dark Elves
High Elves
Daemons

Things in common? Great magic. Things not in common? Monstrous creatures w/ ASF, rerolls, and Thunderstomps.

People seem to cry about dwarves on occasion, but I believe they are definately 2nd tier.

Thats what Im thinking is the issue.. If people really wanted to play as in physically playing the game often instead of talking about it.. Then they'd show up

I just hate to see WFB events be removed from my list of events I run due to attendance

Fantasy is what got me into GW games. I loved my HE and my WOC armies and had a VC and a sigmarite empire army in the works while my son has lizards.

The simple fact is that the game is now a beer and pretzels only game to me. I will not pay money to go to an event that is not a campaign style story driven event that I am interested in.

Why? because GW has redesigned the game around two concepts. Really big units and things that kill really big units (magic for the most part) Which is fine if smaller units were viable, which for the most part are not. You do not loose steadfast if you are flanked by two ranks???? that means flanking is no longer really tactical. no save insta death spells that affect entire units including characters? that makes taking any character that is more than 100points too risky. Random charge range? so movement and planning matters much less.

Now this is my opinion of course and is only based on about 50 or so games of 8th edition. I really tried to make it work, I tried as I use to love playing fantasy, I just find it boring and repetitive (even trying different units and army combinations) without the depth of 7th edition.

I pretty much agree with what you are saying Ascmedic. Im trying to find a way to get around that or get people to show up again

@Kirasu- Why don't you just run 7th ed tourneys?

7th ed has serious massive army book imbalances.. The rules however, worked well enough

Are there guys playing WFB at Legions that don't come out? Or has the scene dried up in general?

After playing several different armies for WH40k and losing interest in the game (mainly because of the convoluted and terriblely written rules) I moved over to WHFB. Warhammer Fantasy seems to be a bit more better at rules without tons of loopholes and whatnot so my group is now tending to play WHFB more than WH40k. Of course, our core group is moving over to Warmahordes (a few of them played back in MKI) and with a bunch of new comers to the table (including me and many others), we are all kinda diversifying out from WH40k.

About the rules and unbalanceness of 8E, this is my take on it as a player who never played 7E or earlier:

The charging rules do not seem to be an issue. Having a random charge range still allows for tactical movement because you know your average movement roll. You also know your average movement roll for other armies charging you. The random charge range adds a bit of surprise to the game because you are not sure if that average charging unit of 11" will all of a sudden be charging 8" or 14".

About the strength of magic, I do recall a Pit of Shades being casted on my 12 strong ogre unit with my Tyrant, BSB, and Slaughtermaster along with a Slave Giant near it completely disappearing except for the BSB and 2 ogres. Of course, I saw a Slann Mage-Priest completely disappearing off the board because of a miscast on 3 dice (IF), rolling a 1 to give the first miscast to one of my casters, then rolling a 3 on the miscast chart, annihilating himself and his unit.

I am not sure on how to get people to play WHFB. Maybe the issue is not so much you or the tournament but Games Workshop itself. I hope you get some way to get some people together. These types of games are really fun when it's not just you by yourself.

Hi

I sympathize with your situation. 8th is better "for fun" but previous editions were better as competitive tests of skill.

I think that we are in a period of transition for the Warhammer tournament crowd. Many "old guard" players are going to stop heading out and perhaps play the old system in their basements, a few "old guard" players will adapt to the edition and embrace it and still go to tournaments. And hopefully (as a fellow tourney organizer, I truely hope this is true) a whole new generation of players will be interested in tourney play.

As for what to do about it... that is a tougher question... the changes that you have mentioned are all good ones for leveling the playing field in a minimalistic manner. I would take the big magic nerf one step farther and alter them such that they do D3 wounds rather than "remove from play."

But when you get down to brass tacks, can you blame people for not wanting to travel for games that might only last ten minutes each? If there is the potential to spend more time setting up your army than playing it, then it isn't an appealing use of your time, especially when you pay to enter the event. At that point, why not stay in your basement or at your FLGS and play with people you like?

Cheers,
Nate

I'd suggest using the ETC restrictions as a first step. It is clear the game needs some external comp, but everyone has their own ideas on what is correct.

I suggest the ETC, because it's a bunch of world-class level players that openly discuss comp at length and come to a consensus. No system is perfect, but having attended the last 2 years, the games are a lot more even. It takes the work out of your hands and removes the subjectivity bias of doing your own comp.

Polonius wrote:Are there guys playing WFB at Legions that don't come out? Or has the scene dried up in general?

No one plays WFB for casual games except for the same 5-6 people. It's been this way for years it seems like. We have people come out for tournaments, but no one new and then if 2 people cant show up the entire event is basically a wash (in terms of time spent)

We had to stop doing Flames of War at my FLGS for the same reason. People just stoppped playing.

Sometimes the feeling that there's a tournament every month (or every other month) puts less pressure on people to make each one. Try moving them to quarterly or even twice a year. See if that boosts attendance.

How many did you have for hard boys?

Depends on your location I guess. Around here, fantasy was and is much more popular than 40k. We regularly travel to Fantasy events and people travel to the ones we host. You really only need a few things to "comp" fantasy:

- Max 12 dice per magic phase (6 dice per spell, even dark elves)
- spells that normally would remove you from the game (purple sun, pit, dwellers, 13th etc.) only do 1 wound to characters
- No teclis/Kairos

That is pretty much the min comp and is what we tend to do around here for tournament and friendly play.


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drpieceofme wrote:Not popular belief, but my opinion:

Skaven
Lizardmen
Dark Elves
High Elves
Daemons

Things in common? Great magic. Things not in common? Monstrous creatures w/ ASF, rerolls, and Thunderstomps.

People seem to cry about dwarves on occasion, but I believe they are definately 2nd tier.

*facepalm*

Almost every tournament bans teclis which makes high elves pretty bad.

Vampire Counts win the most tournaments with dark elves and daemons bringing up the top 3. Skaven and Lizardmen are very good but generally don't win many tournaments compared to the main 3.

Another thing to try is 1500 point games. They take less time and most armies won't field giant units. Time is the largest issue I have with tournaments here taking 12-13 hours in a single day(Sundays). That's set up to pack up, doing it twice a month (40k WFB) you get burned out.

As much as I might despise 8th ed, its not the reason for the poor turn out. It seems to be a regional thing. In the IL/WI/MN area, WFB tournaments are everywhere.

Blood in the Sun pulled in 50 for a 2 day/5 game event.
http://www.bloodinthesun.com/results.asp

Core Comp at the Chicago battle bunker has 46 players pre-registered. http://www.iwfb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3869

I'd try to summarize, but there are just so many events going on: http://www.iwfb.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=19 IWFB has a good listing of what's coming & what has happened in the past 6 months.

For the most part, the rules seem to have a basic format of battle, comp, & paint. No significant changes are made to the event rules for magic or other "issues".

It comes down to the local culture. Either you have groups that build up tournament players or you don't. It sounds like you don't, and then there's not much you can do. At the Bugeater GT we had to open up more spots for fantasy because we sold out. That's also because there are solid groups in surrounding cities that were willing to travel up to 8-9 hours to get to our GT because they have a strong local fantasy scene.

Don't listen to the people who dislike 8th edition. By in large, they are either unwilling to adapt to the changes in the ruleset or their army was neutered by the new edition. Are there problems with 8th edition? Sure, you can decry the uber death spells, but if you run a tournament you give characters look out sir and it solves most complaints. I wouldn't even object to giving people ward saves against the uber spells. And quite frankly, games are won much more often by the utility spells than those mega death spells if you're playing it right.

8th edition, with minor magic changes like mentioned above, is far better than 7th edition for balanced tournament play. By in large, the people that disagree lack sufficient game experience to make a proper judgment. Coming from someone who embraced the worst elements of 7th ed - running vampires that broke everything on turn 1 because I outnumbered on fear, running the terror bomb Slaanesh where you would win without getting into combat, I could win without any real effort. The chance for a "low tier" army to compete against daemons or skaven is better now than it was before.

I think 8th is probably more balanced between the books, but the game is less fun to play and more biased to big killy explosions and things than it was. There are many improvements, mind, and I'm not dead against 8th, but I'm not enthusiastic about it either.