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I am afraid that a rule set can't really make things casual. It is more of an attitude among the players. Different groups are going to have different ideas of what "casual" is too. Even different subcultures within a group will have different ways they want to play the game. The key is getting the different styles to play well together. I have a Dark Angels army that is getting pretty decent. I can run a full battle company in larger points games and take some free razorbacks that go with the formation, as well as Ravenwing, deathwing and three flyers. When I go up against Kirk's Tau or Robert's Chaos formations, I load my army up to the gills and we have a total slug fest. Our lists may be a bit tougher than the average player in our group wants to play against, but they are single faction, straight codex and supplement with no allies, no unbound stuff, no special secret rules that we got by buying some overpowered Forgeworld book or unit, and no goofy spam. We all have some stuff capable of shooting heavies, we all have some speed, a way to deal with flyers and reasonable balance to our armies. We play with flyers, and we're all okay with it. (We also don't SPAM our lists with an unstoppable number of one unit type, like the guy on you tube who brought out 9 Heldrakes in a standard game) All of our lists would also get tabled by a real OP tournament list in short order. They are still a bit tougher than what the local meta wants to deal with, so we keep it to each other. We have a couple of guys who love having unbound Knights, Forgeworld superheavies and flyers all bashing away at each other. It's the way they like to play, and who are we to stop them? The problem occurs when the guy with the unbound list with all riptides, or the guy with $5,000 worth of Forgeworld wants to take on the new guy who is still fleshing out his first army and rip him to shreds, just to prove he can. We had one guy who got mad because we wouldn't set up organized games to GW rules so that he could bring in an unbound list and beat everybody with it. He showed up a couple of times, called us a bunch of wusses for not playing up to his WAAC style and left. Last I heard, he is still terrorizing the Seventh Graders down at the local gaming store and giving the owner migraines.

Our idea of casual play is as follows. We do not keep track of wins and losses. We don't have standings or prizes of any type. There is nothing to be gained by winning all of your battles. (We will be doing some Kill Team meets this Winter, but they will be separate from our casual gameplay. They also won't have prizes, just pride) You never have to face a certain player or army. There is no set schedule of who must play whom. Sometimes people will agree to play each other in advance, or challenge two or three others to a group of battles with certain sized armies, but our general style is to see who shows up and pair off against guys who have an army that looks like it would be a fun match for ours. The players with the bigger armies and stronger lists are also pretty good about looking at their opponent's army and setting aside units they can't handle and creating a good, fair fight.

We generally encourage a fun attitude We don't care what other people play. If two guys want to whip out Riptide armies, more power to them. If Kirk and Robert want to bring the full armies and flood the table with nasty stuff and slug it out, they are welcome to do that. If I want to toss my slightly less powerful Dark Angels up against them,Knowing I am outmatched, I am welcome to do so, (I have played against both of them and had a good time, even though I was a bit outmatched. One of my big thrills was bringing Kirk down when I had a perfect night, and he didn't.) I am working hard to bring my DA army up to the level of those two, but I am still having fun along the way. It's the attitude that seems to make the play casual, not the rules and lists. If I am going to play the new guy's Ultrasmurfs, I am not going to whip out the three flyer formation, knowing that he doesn't have a lot of AA. I am not out to destroy him. I will play him hard, and my army will be well planned out, but I will also make sure we are both having a lot of fun in the game. One of our saving graces is that we don't have any total jerks in our group. A couple of our guys get a little wound up and competitive, but they can keep it toned down, and we don't ever seem to offend each other. We all seem to like kicking back after a game and laughing about it with our opponent. Even the trash talk is all done with a big grin. We also have all loaned opponents a unit or two to help them out, we have all loaned an army to somebody for a game, and we have all set up for a match against a newer player with a weaker army, and looked at the table and said, "Hey let's switch sides this game and you can play my army while I play yours". We have some good players, but we also are good at playing for fun.

If you are going to start organizing tournaments, keeping standings, or trying to figure out who's ahead, then you will need to set up rules and stick to them. If you want to keep people from outspending each other, then you need to set price limits on units, dictate list contents, ban certain units and limit the size and scope of the armies. This is no longer casual play. This is competition, and the person who works the hardest, reads the rules and figures out what is the best list within the rules will be the winner. No rule can keep the WAAC player from figuring out the best mousetrap and implementing it. The casual player will take a "Close enough" attitude, and "That Guy" will have the perfectly optimized list, no matter what rules you implement. He will also play totally cutthroat on the table and still end up winning more than the other players. It's the nature of competition.

It happens in Dirt track racing. I have raced for about thirty years before a medical situation forced me to hang up my helmet. No matter how restrictive the rules get regarding motors, some people will research a combination, build right up to the outer limits of the rules and spend ten thousand dollars more than the other guy to get the slightly better motor. They will build three or four different combinations, test them all on the dyno at a thousand dollars a pop, and pick the best one to run with. Most of the rest of the guys just build up a motor to the basic specs and run it with the parts they can afford. Guess who usually wins all of the races? The same guy that spams the riptides! If we ban riptides, he will show up with the next best combination. If we ban that list, he will find the next best remaining list. He will always build the most powerful list he can within the rules.

If you are going to have actual competition, (In Warhammer or racing) then that guy will almost always end up winning. (Usually there are a few of them, so there is still some good battling at the front of the pack while the rest of us fight amongst ourselves and enjoy the battle for eighth place.) It is the nature of the beast, and any attempts to rule out advantages will just narrow the gap a little bit. They won't keep the ultra competitive guy from winning a lot. Luckily, the tracks I raced at had good guys up and down the field, and we only had a couple of real jerks. We would usually finish in the top ten, and if we had a really good night, we could sneak into the top five. I always congratulated the winner and the guys I was running with at the finish. The fact that there were a few guys with more resources than I had, and that were more WAAC, never stopped me from going out and having a good time racing. I did engineering related work on the pro circuits for several seasons too, where we all spent millions worth of others people's money to make our driver faster. We were the ultra competitive guys there. (Our paycheck and whether or not we had a job next Month depended upon where we finished our races.) We won some big ones, but it never had the thrill that driving my own car on a local dirt track did, even if I just finished in the middle of the pack.

Trying to totally randomize the game to make the luck of the dice more important than the performance of the armies on the table, and trying to rig the game so that advantages of a powerful army can be nullified by luck is just a crutch. Taking away the power of certain units just makes others more powerful. That guy will still manage to come up with a list that optimizes itself under the new rules. The fact that 40K is about as well balanced as an all Twinkie diet doesn't help either. Some factions will always be better than others. Competitive man will always be playing one of those factions. Get used to it. Casual play and competitive play are almost mutually exclusive by definition. If I don't care about the composition and loadout of my army, and I am playing against somebody who does, I will be at a disadvantage. The only thing that additional rules can do is get the cheesy units that seem to unbalance the players removed or limited.

The only other real solution would be to split the players up by ranking. The top third or quarter of the players would be ranked as "Expert" and would play WAAC Cheese amongst themselves, the middle half would be "Intermediate" and the bottom bunch would be "Novice". Players who won too much would move up into the next class. I can't see this happening with most local gaming metas. If there was a tournament circuit and structure like MTG has, I could see it, but that really seems to go against casual play.

 Verviedi wrote:

 Xathrodox86 wrote:
I think that's impossible with the current state of 40K and human mindset in general. Our group was pretty causal, but then we brought a couple of new guys, one with Tau and 2 x Riptides and the other with a crazy Fist of Medusa combo and everyone lost their head. Now it's WAAC or bust, as everyone is bringing the strongest possible build, because "he's playing an OP force and my army can't be weaker" and other such crap...

Now I don't suppose you asked that *gasp* they tone down their lists, speaking to them in private? If they really affected your community in such a way, why haven't you pointed this out to them?

I did. Have a three guesses at the answer. Altough to be fair, we've decided that our next campaign (if there will be one) is going to be a non-SM factions only. IG, Orks, DE and Tau, altough the Ork player, the one that escalated things, already whines about Orks being gak and thinks about getting some Necrons, which in turn pissess off two other guys, who min-maxed their lists because of him in the current game.

It's like a never ending cycle of t**ts.

I play chaos nurgle themed army so I am always casual lol.

I just moved to a new area and the local gaming group has about 4-5 guys that show up on Saturdays and all are very relaxed. we agree on anything we don't wanna play against. (for me I wont play elder at all lol) but other then that we all just have fun and laugh and stuff that happens.

I've almost finished my KDK army and look forward to playing that. but the guy I play the most is GK so ive come to hate force with so much passion lol.

army's I play against are:

grey knights
blood angels
ultra marines
dark elder (poison spam is annoying)
tau (luckily he's casual and only brings 1 riptide)
other chaos nurgle player
necrons.

Ban the player, not the game? If casual is your goal anyways. Other than that, d-bag buys drinks. They'll go broke or figure it out.

 Traditio wrote:

Peregrine wrote:The fact that, rather than fixing a broken rule so that it is no longer a problem, comp allows you to play with the broken thing, hurt your opponent's enjoyment of the game, and then penalizes you after the damage is already done.

http://www.communitycomp.org/files/CommunityComp.pdf

If you actually examine the community comp document, it's not just about "fixing" OP things. It also takes into account things that are not necessarily strong individually, but become "strong" when taken in large numbers (e.g., fliers and landraiders). It also takes into account the relative strength of things that aren't broken, but are still good for their points.

If anyone's interested, I ran the CAD version of my crimson fists list through the comp standards and got a 5. I think.

6 rhinos = 2 points
2 Imp. Fist dev squads = 2 points
Orbital strike on Pedro Kantor = 1 point

I don't know. I guess this is my inclination: if you want to use a comp system as the exclusive way of fixing in-game imbalances, then I agree with you that it's not enough by a long shot. Saying "Ok, your wraithknight is worth 5 of my imp fist devastator squads" still allows the wraithknight to be taken, and it allows it to be taken at its by-the-book points cost and ruleset.

But what if the goal is simply to ensure that the persons have armies of roughly equivalent power levels, even if all of the points costs are fair?

For example:

"No superheavies allowed. No tau allowed. No eldar allowed. No formations allowed. Limit of 1850 points and 10 comp points."

If you're able to identify a problem clearly enough to create a comp system to punish it then you can change the rule so that the problem never happens in the first place.

I think that the comp system is just right about this. Is 1 drop pod as problematic as 10 of them?

The secondary problem I have with it is that the execution of comp systems is almost always awful. Things that are not balance problems are often penalized because they aren't "playing the game the right way" or because the author of the comp system doesn't understand the game very well.

That's not the impression I got from what I saw of the pdf I linked above.

You can do this, but in practice what comp often means is "casual at all costs" players getting upset if you go anywhere near the maximum comp score.

Yeah, that's just crazy. At that point, they should just have set a lower comp score.

You literally lost ALL credit saying Land Raiders are effective at any number.

And really? Orbital Bombardment isn't even an issue. On top of the company list hating on Bullgryns. Seriously, how can you defend this gak?

I don't really expect him to listen to anything I say, which is why I keep it short with him.

Two drink minimum.

Alright, I'm starting to think making a casual group is more or less a lost cause with the state of 40k as it is. Tournaments and competitive leagues sure have it easy since you can bring whatever you want and no one should complain.

 NInjatactiks wrote:
Alright, I'm starting to think making a casual group is more or less a lost cause with the state of 40k as it is. Tournaments and competitive leagues sure have it easy since you can bring whatever you want and no one should complain.

Not a complete lost cause.
See if anyone is willing to "craft" a scenario based on some 40k lore.
Get the players that are willing to give a list of what they have and see if the forces can be "balanced" powerlevel-wise.
I usually throw in extra "freebie" kit for the each player to use (distracts them and gives more fun) like more Skyfire weapons on a defending wall / fortification, orbital lance strikes or some special siege weapon model (while keeping it even).
There were for Apocalypse some perk/ability cards that were worth some 100 points each that could be bought/used for a battle to help balance things if the hordes of stuff was a mismatch, they would be worth looking at.

Heck, making surviving the environment can add a level of fun on it's own:
- Zombies... the "plague of disbelief" or something that can use rules like the old (or new) kill team rules or the tyranid out of synapse range rules to operate some third faction on the table.
- I had an objective that was some special daemonic artefact so when a group grabbed the item, a Grey Knight squad and a Daemon squad would work their way toward the team with the objective (that is attached to them until the squad dies) the panic for all concerned was impressive.
- Random meteor shower / space warfare debris impacting onto the ground or spontaneous lava flows coming up.
- Earthquakes causing pinning.
- Strange planetary magnetic fields causing 50/50 chance of energy weapons for that squad becoming "gets hot" but +1S and +1AP.
- City of Death started the trend of taking various objectives, automatically confer some bonus (that make sense!).

Casual, is beer and pretzels.
There is little casual with 40k I find.
A strong attempt at making it MOAR fun is a whole different matter.
If I say "I designed a scenario." it is gratifying that my friends ask how soon we can get together?
Because we had fun, because they tend to be close games, insane things happen and all our carefully planned methods of play get thrown out the window and they get talked about like a funny D&D campaign that went terribly wrong.
Because with friends, if it all goes wrong equally, it is good.

 NInjatactiks wrote:
Alright, I'm starting to think making a casual group is more or less a lost cause with the state of 40k as it is. Tournaments and competitive leagues sure have it easy since you can bring whatever you want and no one should complain.

A casual group isn't a lot cause but your initial premise was completely bipolar-
A non-competitive competition (why do people try and do this? You're supposed to try and win but not too hard?) where you allow players to penalize each other after the game (because people are always totally fair right after they've been beaten) based a scale that assumes that fluffy and effective are opposites (clearly not the case) and that fluffy involves taking a random selection of units. (another unfounded assumption) It also requires players to somehow judge the other players intent in their unit selection.

If you want to encourage people to be less competitive then have an organized play event which does not revolve around winning.

Asymmetric missions are also good for this - where both the points and victory conditions are different for the two sides (especially where they're secret). It forces people to think and leads to some really interesting games as well as shaking up the competitive players who are used to playing a specific mission set at specific points.

Have a look at the old GW Battlegrounds events and at the Epic40K fog of war mission for ideas.

 NInjatactiks wrote:
Alright, I'm starting to think making a casual group is more or less a lost cause with the state of 40k as it is. Tournaments and competitive leagues sure have it easy since you can bring whatever you want and no one should complain.

It completely depends on the group that is the problem. All it takes is one tool who wants to show up with three riptides or a bunch of Forgeworld crap and steamroll people and then it collapses. the problem is that these people tend to love 40k because of exactly that reason; if they were truly competitive people they would be playing a game that had much better competitive rules but they don'. they play 40k because it's so skewed they can bring a bazooka to a knife fight and it's still allowed. Even worse than that all the random stuff in the game can cause things to be extremely nonfun through nobody's fault. I played my first game of 40K in 15 years last week and while it wasn't terrible it was not fun because my opponent was scoring every turn from his own area where I had no chance to get because random objectives. My opponent was a great guy but it really made the game seem like a pile of crap because of that.

Even if you have a narrative campaign there will always be that person that wants to bring something to powerful because they want to win whether it's for an actual prize or whether it's for something in the campaign such as taking over a key planet. anytime there is something at stake tangible or not you will get these kind of people that will care more about their own enjoyment then the enjoyment of themselves and their opponent