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That makes even less sense, given that the DM can just say "No" at any point and stop you in your tracks.

Rihgu wrote:
Goonhammer, as much as I love the site, appears to view Necromunda as a semi-competitive to competitive game, or at least that's the vibe I get from many of their articles.

 Trickstick wrote:
Some people play competitive DnD. I find the concept baffling, but hey, whatever they enjoy I guess.

I've never met players that are in a competitive Necromunda League or DnD players. SUre you can homebrew a game breaking character but you have a DM. How is it a ranked competitive game if it has a DM? Speed running through curse of strahd?

Maybe its a thing... at the local store goonhammer plays at. Then again they want to use boring ITC/terrible terrain/heavy tournament focus for a boxed GW board game.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That makes even less sense, given that the DM can just say "No" at any point and stop you in your tracks.

Your ignorance is showing here.

Competitive D&D, at least when I last read about it, was usually an arena-style battle where each player had a set number of experience points and gold pieces to build the most powerful character the rules allowed for. These builds assumed a permissive DM that would never ban anything for being cheesy and then simply used rules and game mechanics to determine who won the duel. Sometimes certain overused combos would be banned or the builders would be limited to a subset of books, classes, races, etc.

This was mostly a 3.0 and 3.5 phenomena as 4th and now 5th edition have removed choices (feats, skill points, prestige classes, true multiclassing, mosters as player characters, to name a few) and have the game boiled down to a few preselected build paths with very obvious best pick abilities and very obvious never pick trap options.

EDIT: D&D's 3.x edition had 74 total rulebooks (Slightly less if you want to remove books that were reprinted for 3.5), these don't include setting specific books such as the popular Eberon campaign setting. Add in the dozens of issues of Dungeon and Dragon magazine and the massive 3rd party support due to OGL and you had a ton of depth to build anything you could imagine for whatever purpose suited you.

There's also competitive D&D in the sense of how quickly a group can complete a scenario, and how many macguffins they achieve during it - I believe the UK Student Nationals work that way, anyway.

The problem with that comparison is that one is a roleplaying game where the goal is to cooperatively create a story, and the other is an adversarial wargame where the goal is to compete to win. In DnD, losing and taking bad choices can contribute to the goal. The fun in both cases is that the outcome is unknown, and is a consequence of the players' collective actions. I'm not saying the only option in 40k is to grind your opponent into dust, I am saying the exact inverse: it doesn't make sense to purposefully lose a game. Your opponent isn't going to enjoy playing if the conclusion is foregone. You'd be a spoilsport to throw the game as much as one for bringing a WAAC curbstomping list.

Taking detrimental upgrades is just a step up from that; you're sabotaging yourself, and that's not fun for your opponent either. These powerful upgrades are not hidden interactions that require WAAC number crunching to discover. They do what they say on the tin. So let's set aside the hyperbole of hyper-competitive lists ruining Crusade.

An entirely well meaning, fuffy player can take reasonable upgrades that change the fundamental balance of the game pretty substantially. So what do you do when the fluffy Evil Suns Warboss is charging across the board and wrecking everything on turn 1? What do you personally think you would do when your well-meaning opponent accidentally builds something too strong?

I hadn't considered Rihgu's suggestion of encouraging less-skilled players to take the most busted combinations to level the playing field, and I think that's interesting. There are rules for playing games at a handicap, which I'm much more interested in looking at now.

Was the crusade ever supposed to be balanced? It's for narrative games so it kinda should encompass everything from being able to make absolute tabletop monster to useless upgrades for almost joke characters. I was under the assumption the narrative your group is creating is really the only thing policing crusade

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I played Mordheim with competitive people once, it was awful and I never want to do it again.

This is sort of my point.

I don't think we need to concerned about overpowered combos in Crusade as it's not a game that gets played in that manner. As I said, it's like Necromunda (or Mordheim, if you prefer) for 40K, and the type of people who play that game will be the type that gravitate to Crusade.

Crusade is about playing campaigns and storytelling, not meta-crunching competitive lists. You're not going to play games of "Crusade" against random people like you would a standard matched play pick-up game.

Didn't GW explicitly say you can play Crusade with non-Crusade players?

Such as in a pick-up game?

Asmodios wrote:
Was the crusade ever supposed to be balanced? It's for narrative games so it kinda should encompass everything from being able to make absolute tabletop monster to useless upgrades for almost joke characters. I was under the assumption the narrative your group is creating is really the only thing policing crusade

Right, that's fair. But by breaking balance, I meant in terms of middle-of-the-pack typical player strategy. Like, if your opponent has 2 or 3 characters that have an assault range larger than your deployment zone (which requires 1 upgrade each, so 3 or 4 games played total), playing a normal deployment is often game-losing. It's definitely not game actually unwinnable, because that kind of thing currently exists in the competitive meta (Warptime Lord Discordant, Kult of Speed Wartrikes, etc.). However, you have to commit deployment to either a huge screening castle or reserves or both. I think a lot of more casual players either won't see that or aren't interested in waiting 3 turns before they can push back on to the board.

I can definitely see the value of making a point-imbalanced game for that match-up though. Give the defending player an extra 25% points, and then after the Warbosses run all over their deployment there'll still be enough left over for a game. The defending player gets to do something for the first 3 turns besides hide in a corner and wait for reserves.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I played Mordheim with competitive people once, it was awful and I never want to do it again.

This is sort of my point.

I don't think we need to concerned about overpowered combos in Crusade as it's not a game that gets played in that manner. As I said, it's like Necromunda (or Mordheim, if you prefer) for 40K, and the type of people who play that game will be the type that gravitate to Crusade.

Crusade is about playing campaigns and storytelling, not meta-crunching competitive lists. You're not going to play games of "Crusade" against random people like you would a standard matched play pick-up game.

Didn't GW explicitly say you can play Crusade with non-Crusade players?

Such as in a pick-up game?

They did, and there are rules for it. I think they're actually quite balanced too. You get to advance your Order of Battle, the opponent gets a new weird experience. You can play Crusade Missions or Eternal War. It seems really great, and I intend to do it at my local shop post quarantine.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Didn't GW explicitly say you can play Crusade with non-Crusade players?

Such as in a pick-up game?

Of course they did. As if they're ever going to publicly state "No! You cannot play together!".

 Trickstick wrote:
Some people play competitive DnD. I find the concept baffling, but hey, whatever they enjoy I guess.

Competive style D&D is a few things, One of the reasons old adventures are so tough is to facilitate that. Groups playing though the adventure to see how far they can get and compare to other groups.
As well as the challenge of playing against what is an adventure stacked up against the players.
Can a group of rag tag adventures make it, could they survive and succeed is a narrative itself that lots of players enjoy. It also leads to a lot of very memorable moments for groups that are able to pull though and make it.

Even leading to lots of cool tricks For the GMs, Like do the players work out that the lich encounter was a bit to easy. Lich are never easy, It was a fake but if the players think they killed the lich and leave. They get a cool moment in the future when they talking about it. Or they hate it
Too many people seem to think these things are a binary, We have play old necromunda Campaigns that where certainly competitive and friendly. Mordheim as well, it was friendly also, But no one held back. No one wants to be the the player everyone goes easy on.
At the end we all jump into new narrative games and start again to tell our little story. In both our D&D and table top we dont play easy unless new players needing to learn. Not for everyone, but its dispointing to read when players use Narrative and casual as a excuse for design issues.