Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Short answer for facing this guy: You gave him every chance: pound on him, he can ramp up his game or play with someone at a more appropriate level.

I was using Vulcan and forgot all the flamer wound re-rolls. It was a game for me to lose. Never forgot after that. Pounding on people straight out of the gate is for tournaments or competitions or a friendly bet! ;-) New players should have things they miss pointed out once as they happen and then nothing after that. Kids 10 or less require a special degree of kindness and if you can not do it, avoid the game altogether.

Heh, I am guilty of some of the numbers thing. For whatever reason after a long game my mind dies on me when it comes to WS.
Honestly if you really want to help him......do a temporary army swap, as in he plays your army for that match and you play his, expect the game to take long. Think 'out loud' when doing the basic stuff e.g. armor saves, special rules etc. it is very possible he may have reading issues, so reading some of those rules out loud may very well help him/ Now do not be afraid to stomp him with his own army, he will hopefully learn from example. And for a new guy(and hell even with experienced friends) I like to go over what could have been done different after the game. More importantly ASK HIM what he could have done different and what you could have done different, see what his input is and just talk it out with him, that may help.

Some useful advice for figuring out what you need to roll at range is 7-firing units BS, so a Tac Marine has a BS of 4 so 7-4=3, meaning you need to roll 3+.


P.S. I want to apologise for poor punctuation, a good writer too little sleep does not make.

Am I the only one who thinks he might be handicapped? Or as you say, he's just "slow"?

Could you not just play a smaller points game if you ever play him, like 5-600 points? It will be better for him as there's not as much stuff to remember or keep track of and it's better for you as you're not stuck playing for 3+ hours and getting frustrated?

My club often plays 400 point combat patrols.
We then move up to 600 armies.
Anything over 1500 points is rare.

So, despite my lapses, things roll along for everyone quite well, whether new to the game or not.

It really depends on the situation. If he really is "slow" then you need to give him the benefit of the doubt, be more forgiving and just play the game for fun as you choose. If he has issues you won't necessarily fix them over the table top, so the key then becomes to just have a fun experience playing instead. You are already taking the high ground by be sure to include him anyway, so you aren't a total jerk in all of this.

When I play younger players, I find that they don't think methodically through every turn and often forget things and so on. In their first few games I don't worry about it too much, but once they've played enough to really know better I stop letting them slide. The first time they make such a mistake I clearly state, Ok, this once for this game I will allow you to go back to that unit to shoot with a part of it you forgot to us, but from now on you need to remember to do everything with that unit before you move on to the next one. When it happens again in the same game then you stick to the line you already laid down. In these instances, though, the key is to get the younger player to become a better player by forcing them to focus. So it is a little different. I also never throw a game for any reason. If an opponent makes a big mistake I will make them pay for it if they can. Then after the battle with discuss with them how what they did was really foolish and enabled me to punish them for it. Actually doing it shows them the end result of not planning ahead or thinking through their moves. If you tell them you *could* have done it, the impression on them is not close to the same and they might do the same thing again in the future. Wipe their unit out and capture an objective because of it and it will stick with them.

In this situation keep being the nice person you are being. Offer a game from time to time. Play the game. You are allowed to continue to play your army even if your opponent is using theirs poorly and you don't have to play him every week either. On the other hand, if he doesn't have some kind of real issue getting in the way of his learning the game and he is just a lazy gamer floating through games without bothering to know what he is doing then I don't see a need to keep including him if you don't want to. Also if you do play him and he is just lazy stomp him into the ground as it might give him the impetus to learn a bit better.

Skriker

OP: I'm the guy on the other side of the table. (not really)

I am also trying to learn the game and only have 6-8 games played so far and no one has been "kind" enough to let me win, intentionally or not. this hasn't stopped me. I have a lot of trouble trying to keep track of everything going on, and have come to the realization that i need to play 500-750 point games and really focus on a few select units till i know them inside and out. being new, i want to put tons of models on the board and i wanna try all these tactics and lists i come up with the other 6 days of the week im not playing.

One of my biggest issues however is having people across the table being politely impatient. rather than allowing me to slowly work it out for myself what is going on, they interrupt me by just telling me what happens next and give me no time to learn. it sucks for everyone involved. my opponent is unhappy because i'm slow and dont know what im doing and im unhappy because im embarrassing myself. by turn two i feel like i have wasted everyone's time by deciding "hey, i've spent tons of money on this hobby. I think i should take some time and find people to actually play with me!"

i think what im getting at is that with the new edition, there is also going to be new players. people who havent played this game, let alone any wargame. its an expensive hobby and it sucks to feel like you wasted your investment because no one has the patience to play with someone who is learning. this isnt against you, OP. I'm just saying that in general it would be nice if EVERYONE could be more patient and willing to embrace a new player without acting like "oh man, this 2000 point game shouldnt take this long. aargh, how long has his turn taken? why cant you remember EVERYTHING?" biggest peeve is when im sorting saves and have the opponent interrupting while i count them out and figure it out. how am i supposed to learn if you do it for me? ugh, sorry, turned into a rant.

advice: make him play smaller point games to focus on units till he fully understands them. don't interrupt him as he figures stuff out. ask him IF HE NEEDS HELP if he is struggling, but dont do it for him.

Got a local guy who insists on playing with Calgar and a Command squad in almost every game he plays regarless of points. And most games are around 2K points. Needless to say he doesnt do to well because I can simply ignore hime and kill everything else by turn 3ish. Well I tell him he should "RE-THINK" his army selection and he might have a better gaming experience. Well he doesnt listen and he keeps loosing and loosing. He has even started to say that my list is to "TOURNAMENT" and over tooled to play against (Drop Podding Vulkan list, No Speeders No Bikes 10 THSS Terms MAX). I have stopped playing him becasue it feels to much like clubbing a baby seal and it isnt fun for me anymore. I try and give the guy pointers but he then goes on to blame the "RULES" and game mechanics for why he isnt doing so well. Some people just arent fun to play against.

In my experiences of teaching 40k, I find that letting the person learning win is generally a bad idea. They start to expect to win every game they play even with a bad list/strategies and when they do lose they either rage or acuse you of being too hard on the beginner all the while NOT actually learning the strategies of their units/army.

Different people have different minds and they all work a little different.

I have read the rule book forward and back multiple times and my recollection of those rules and such is spot on when sitting around chatting with others, but once there is any amount of pressure I forget the most basic of things. Before the game it is Space Marines have toughness 4, my strength is 3, wounds on 5+. During the game that becomes Space Marines have toughness, uh 4?, my strength is 3, wounds on.. let me look it up.

The suggestion of flash cards is an excellent idea for players like me or any newbie to the game. Warmachine does it right with easy to reference stat cards for units, something that crosses over well into 40k.

O h I remember how it was when I was learning the game. I would have like 750-1k points because I bought a little at a time. I would show up to play and get hammered by someone that would bring 2k points, but play me with 750-1k points... but with crap I could not kill easy or at all. I knew going in I would get creamed, so I just focused on learning the rules, distances, str of my weapons, and ap...how shooting phase and assault phase works.

I still make mistakes, and I have been playing since 5th release. The other day I tried to embark into my rhino and move the rhino and disembark....

I'm a vetran gammer it didnt stop me stupidly skipping the movement phase once last night in my excitement to try out my doomscythes deathray.

I usually let a new player win the first game, or make stupidly bad moves that I know will create an interesting match-up to prove a point or teach them something they would rarely see in your typical game for rules purposes. After the first game,, it's full force from there on out! Typically they also find out rather quickly that I was playing easy mode for their learning convenience!

Good discussion, thanks everyone : )

Dooley wrote:
Got a local guy who insists on playing with Calgar and a Command squad in almost every game he plays regarless of points. And most games are around 2K points. Needless to say he doesnt do to well because I can simply ignore hime and kill everything else by turn 3ish. Well I tell him he should "RE-THINK" his army selection and he might have a better gaming experience. Well he doesnt listen and he keeps loosing and loosing. He has even started to say that my list is to "TOURNAMENT" and over tooled to play against (Drop Podding Vulkan list, No Speeders No Bikes 10 THSS Terms MAX). I have stopped playing him becasue it feels to much like clubbing a baby seal and it isnt fun for me anymore. I try and give the guy pointers but he then goes on to blame the "RULES" and game mechanics for why he isnt doing so well. Some people just arent fun to play against.

So he includes his chapter master a support squad in *every* game, but your list is too tournement? Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Your efforts against his army are a perfect example of how 40k doesn't let one big monster character/unit completely dominate the whole game on its own. The interesting thing is watching a lot of players. They see Calgar and squad on the table and focus everything on trying to wipe it out and end up losing because they blew all their shots on a hard target for the entire game with limited results. We have a younger player in our FoW league who expects jus the presence of his tigers to win the game for him. Many games he gets caught at a point where his big bad tigers have been sitting and taking potshots from afar with impunity, but when he wasn't looking the rest of his army gets killed and he has no way to win because he isn't anywhere near an objective with his big bad tigers.

Skriker


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Kal-El wrote:
O h I remember how it was when I was learning the game. I would have like 750-1k points because I bought a little at a time. I would show up to play and get hammered by someone that would bring 2k points, but play me with 750-1k points... but with crap I could not kill easy or at all. I knew going in I would get creamed, so I just focused on learning the rules, distances, str of my weapons, and ap...how shooting phase and assault phase works.

I still make mistakes, and I have been playing since 5th release. The other day I tried to embark into my rhino and move the rhino and disembark....

Every game is a learning experience and even the best players don't know EVERY rule and don't ever make any mistakes any more. Everyone forgets to fire or move with a unit from time to time, or without thinking about it tries to embark, move, disembark in the same turn. It happens all the time. Sounds like you had the right focus, though. Learn how your army units and weapons work. Then once you really know that you can better apply them in future games and scenarios. If you don't know your armies strengths you can't use them and if you don't really know your armies weaknesses you can't shield them.

Anymore I play 40k less often than Flames of War, so often have to refer to the rulebook again during the game, especially with a new edition of the rules in play. Some days you just don't remember if you are remembering the rule the right way for the right version.

Skriker

I'm of the opinion that with most things, the best way to learn is to get violently, brutally, mercilessly beaten into a bloody twitching pulp.

It's how I relearnt to play Warhammer 40k - losing pretty much solidly for a year with my Dark Eldar, sometimes quite horrificly, learning the new units, testing most everything in the codex, learning strengths, distances, chances, etc.
Then I turned round, constructed a Take All Comers list and won damn near every game from then to 6th edition.

In 6th, it's very much going to be a similar thing (though only a few months of it I hope) while I rejig my list - the important thing is to try and impart on new players that losing isn't bad, so long as you take something away from it, it's simply a learning experience. It'll help you improve, make changes, and ultimately, hopefully, come out on top.

It also gets boring winning all the time.

(It's also how I learnt YuGiOh and Halo Multiplayer among other things. In YuGiOh I became probably 6th in my region, in Halo after my frankly brutal string of defeats, I ended up being outstanding in Team Snipers.)

I always punish the new ones. Thats how I learned and Im undefeated for sixth. Hopefully one day the rookie will learn and beat the master.

hobojebus wrote:
I'm a vetran gammer it didnt stop me stupidly skipping the movement phase once last night in my excitement to try out my doomscythes deathray

I know that feeling except in my case I missed an entire shooting phase to charge Incubi into assault.

With a shooty army.