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Hello Dakka!

We are finally in the new space, and while it's still a little... rustic... we are set to go with our first 40k tournament in the fabulous new game room! I'm going to be giving out as much cool stuff as I can muster from the endless mountains of stuff that I found during the move to mark the first event, so make sure you come down!

I am mixing things up a bit for the format this time around. We are going to a more streamlined format; no comp, no soft scores, painting is separated into its own category, and, most noteworthy...

Winner takes all!

As I mentioned above, Composition will not be scored at this event, so bring the big guns! Sportsmanship will not be scored, instead I'm going to have a simple one-warning system. If a played has a legitimate complaint levied against them for unsportsmanlike play, they'll be notated as such, and any subsequent legitimate complaints will result in the player in question being asked to leave the event.

Scenarios will be "from the book" with some minor special rules here and there to spice things up. We will be using an 'Ard Boyz style Massacre-Major-Minor-Draw scoring setup. Don't worry though.. there won't be anything silly like Victory Points! Tiebreakers will be scenario bonus points first, followed by strength of schedule, followed by the casting of bones and chicken entrails, followed by rock-paper-scissors, followed by astrological chart reference. In the case of an odd number of players, one player per round will get the bye, which will count as a Major victory with no bonuses. After 'Ard Boyz it became clear that giving the bye a minor victory, particularly in the first round, basically meant that player had no shot at winning, which isn't the intention of the bye at all, so Major victory it is!

I will be keeping strict watch of the round times during the event, and I will be walking around the tables during games to help keep people on track. Games that do not go for a minimum of four full turns will not be scored and count as a loss for both players.

The first place player takes the whole hog, all $150 in GW product (straight value, no tax) right off the shelves and goes home to swim around in new plastic bits! Painting will be judged separately from the main event, with armies in consideration being scored by a panel of judges. Highest score takes home the painting trophy and whatever other swag I can rustle up! I will also be giving out other door prizes and so on as I see fit.

For the tournament there is a $10 entry (or $20 purchase) to play. The doors will be open early for players to come in and get set up. As usual, I want to kick this one off as close to 10:00am as possible so we don't go too long.

The schedule will stick as closely as possible to the following:

8:30ish - 9:30 - Show up early, have donuts with Travis (B&C donuts on Alta Dena and Foothill is particularly good for those of you in a generous mood! ), talk shop, complain about how Eldar break the meta/the newest FAQ nonsense/6th ed rumors
9:30am - 10:00 - check-in, sign-up, event preamble, pairings
10:00am - 12:15pm - Round 1
12:15 - 1:00 - Lunch
1:00 - 3:45 - Round 2
4:00 - 6:15 - Round 3
6:30 - Winners announced

It all goes down at Game Empire Pasadena:

1795 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA. 91106
626-304-9333
http://www.gameempirepasadena.com

Make sure you note the new address!

Please let me know here or on the tournament thread on the Game Empire forums if you're planning on attending so I can get a rough idea what to expect. You can RSVP on Game Empire's facebook as well. If you RSVP on facebook, I'll give you a free candy and soda!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=242372049146382

Finally, if anyone out there is interested in being available as a 'ringer' for the at least the first round or two, I would be very appreciative and spiff you accordingly. Basically, you'd pay no entry fee, only have to play for the first round or two as your schedule permits, and get some swag in exchange for making sure the odd man has an actual game, instead of just free points.

If you have any comments or questions, let me know here or give a call to the store, and hopefully I'll see you there!
-Dis.

I'll be there, can't wait for a winner takes all no comp event!

*Edit: The rule that games must go 4 rounds or be counted as a loss for both players is fantastic, I have enjoyed that for the last few months at the tournaments run by GEP. It keeps all those purposeful, and not so purposeful, slowplayers in line!

I would go if Pasadena was not so far =(.

Can't hop on a plane, or I'd be there!

Im gonna try hard to make this one. It is only two hours away so thats good.

So does painting go into the final score or is that a separate things I'm a little confused

mortetvie wrote:I would go if Pasadena was not so far =(.

Awww... Come on! We'd love to see those monstrous Eldar on the field again! Besides... It isn't that bad of a drive...

Julnlecs wrote:Im gonna try hard to make this one. It is only two hours away so thats good.

See?

azgrim wrote:So does painting go into the final score or is that a separate things I'm a little confused

Sorry if I wasn't clear, painting will be judged and scored separately. The painting prize is its own category and is not factored into the overall scoring.

-Dis.

disdainful wrote:

azgrim wrote:So does painting go into the final score or is that a separate things I'm a little confused

Sorry if I wasn't clear, painting will be judged and scored separately. The painting prize is its own category and is not factored into the overall scoring.

-Dis.

I wish there was a clapping ork emoticon... Guess I'll settle for a thumbsup and nod.

I know a lot of events have been doing a 'Renaissance Man' prize for the player with the highest combined battle points and painting score... I'll probably do something like that as well, but it will remain separate from the overall prize.

-Dis.

So there will be a best painted ,best overall ,and Best Facebeater?

azgrim wrote:So there will be a best painted ,best overall ,and Best Facebeater?

Effectively, you're looking at three categories:

Tournament Champion - Most Battle Points
Best Army - Highest Painting Score
Renaissance Man - Highest combined battle points and painting (that didn't win one of the others)

Tournament Champion takes home all the tacos (figuratively speaking), Best Army and Renaissance Man get flash trophies and the esteem of their comrades!

And I've squirreled away a variety of door prizes and odds and ends to give out as well, so there should be plenty of blister packs flying around at the end.

-Dis.

Well im looking to give the new place a test drive hope i can make it down

Do we just show up to the event pay are entree and were in? or do i have to rsvp to go?

azgrim wrote:Well im looking to give the new place a test drive hope i can make it down

Awesome, I look forward to hosting, and I'm sure the new store will not disappoint!

deamonwithin wrote:Do we just show up to the event pay are entree and were in? or do i have to rsvp to go?

If you're planning on coming, you can let me know here or RSVP on facebook; it helps me to have a rough idea of what to expect so I can get the right amount of tables set up and there's no scrambling right before we begin, but if not you're welcome to just show up on the morning of the event. We definitely have enough room to accommodate everyone now, so I'm not worried about running out of space!

-Dis.

I really wish I wasn't going to be of of town this weekend.

Why can't the GE in San Diego be this cool? San Diego one is fail sauce compared to this...

Well, Pasadena has an unfair advantage over San Diego, Pasadena has Travis (disdainful). Travis is Pasadenas superstar event coordinator. They should definitely do a reality show about him some time.

Darrian13 wrote:Well, Pasadena has an unfair advantage over San Diego, Pasadena has Travis (disdainful). Travis is Pasadenas superstar event coordinator. They should definitely do a reality show about him some time.

Shadows and dust, Maximus... Shadows and dust!

Seriously though, if they did something like that I'd need to get in better shape... you know, work out with someone that like, knows their way around a gym, or something...

-Dis.

disdainful wrote:
Finally, if anyone out there is interested in being available as a 'ringer' for the at least the first round or two, I would be very appreciative and spiff you accordingly. Basically, you'd pay no entry fee, only have to play for the first round or two as your schedule permits, and get some swag in exchange for making sure the odd man has an actual game, instead of just free points.

If you have any comments or questions, let me know here or give a call to the store, and hopefully I'll see you there!
-Dis.

now im sure i can go but about the ringer part my bro wants to be the ringer is the spot still available ? he said he be happy to do it sence he was gonna go to watch me play lol i useally roll with family to these things

disdainful wrote:Tiebreakers will be scenario bonus points first, followed by strength of schedule, followed by the casting of bones and chicken entrails, followed by rock-paper-scissors, followed by astrological chart reference.
-Dis.

How about keeping track of kill points to use as a tie breaker instead of Scenario Bonus Points.

There is a pretty good chance that they will tie the tie breaker...

I'm leery of Kill Points in particular as a tiebreaker for the single reason that there is inequal access to the tiebreaker. In one case, you have a player who plays three games against high KP lists, going up against a player who fought low KP lists all day; one player had a much greater opportunity to accumulate tiebreaker points.

In another case, you have a player who played newer / less experienced players in the first round or two, going up against a player who fought a field of veterans; the guy with the less experienced opponents has much more of an opportunity to 'farm' his opponents for points, whereas the guy who played vets all day probably had a much harder fight for every KP he earned.

At least, with scenario bonus points, everyone has equal access to the tiebreaker. Is it perfect? No, but few tiebreakers are.

That being said, KPs is definitely a good option, and I may replace the bone-casting with it. Astrological chart readings definitely stay, however. My calculations show that this tournament will favor Libra!

Automatically Appended Next Post:

deamonwithin wrote:now im sure i can go but about the ringer part my bro wants to be the ringer is the spot still available ? he said he be happy to do it sence he was gonna go to watch me play lol i useally roll with family to these things

I've got another guy who was talking about being the ringer, but he's only around for the first couple games so I'll probably have a game for your brother... provided there's an odd number of players, anyway!

-Dis.

ok cool like i said he be happy to do it , i would do it but i wanna be in the tourney lol

nvm my bro cant he aint going

Uh oh, hopefully I don't get the bye again!!

Well, we're in the middle of the second round, sixteen showed up.

Army breakdown is:

2 Eldar
3 Space Wolves
1 Deathwing
3 Imperial Guard
1 Orks
2 Grey Knight
2 Blood Angels
1 Chaos Daemons
1 Tyranids

Pretty good variety... no CSMs or Vanilla Marines but otherwise an interesting field.

-Dis.

Results please.

Some random demon player with a fully "converted " paper mache army got first place .Hopefully he sent the price money on real models to replace the tau/ork/eldar/nid models in the army.

Dang, I think my Eldar would have done quite well, shame I couldn't end up going. Grats to everyone who played!

i was the daemon player and nope i like my converted army and no paper mache was use to build the army ,my army was built this way cause i made it theme to make a daemon army who posses others in the 40k world

soulgriders were converted bottom of defiler with top carifex with guns and other was hal wriath lord top with a huge blade made of a wapeserpent

fiends where made with genestelers with green stuff with huge tale going over it

plagues bearers where orks with green stuff

fire warriors were horrors with tyranid death spitter as guns

herads of tzeentchs one was eldar riding deaffcoba that with eldar bits that made it huge that counted as his steed second one was on a bike that had a platform on the bottom that also made it bigger to be the steeds

khorne herald was made out of hal carnifex bottom ,top part out of a hive guard with a bloodletter on top riding it with a chain across him

herald of snaalesh was a old hive tyrant that was converted to look like a snake with a daemonnette rider

flesh hounds where chaos hounds

bloodletter where old metal bloodletters

lol i might be a bad painter and im still working on my army but i like it and no paper mache was use

just thought i throw this out there


and for the event it was fun had a blast playing agaist the imperial guard player didnt know leman russ shot nine plasma cannons that was fun to get hit by and travis is fun guy who made the event awesome (he went to my table and laught at my fiends getting ready to take 10 burna boys in the face )
nice store had a great time

Overall I think it was a great day. Daemons took the top spot, Deathwing took the Renaissance man for most Battle Points and Painting score combined, and a beautifully painted Eldar army took the painting award. For our first try at a different format, I'd say it went pretty well. Smooth games, solid results, no one timed out, and we all got to go home at a reasonable hour!

mortetvie wrote:Dang, I think my Eldar would have done quite well, shame I couldn't end up going. Grats to everyone who played!

If you had made it, that would have been three Eldar players! I think that would have been more Eldar than I've seen all year!

azgrim wrote:Some random demon player with a fully "converted " paper mache army got first place .Hopefully he sent the price money on real models to replace the tau/ork/eldar/nid models in the army.

I know a few people were a little miffed at the very... 'chaotic' look of that army. And I know that the people who played against it said that they were confused at some point about what was what during the game.

It's a fine line to tread for a TO; you want to include as many people as possible, but when you see something that, while clearly made up of a majority of GW models and which likely took quite a while to actually convert (since we all know kit-bash scratch-builds are often exceptionally time consuming), is very difficult to decipher visually, it's a rough spot. There's a very valid argument that an army that is very heavy on the converting and kit-bashing is breaking WYSIWYG and should not be allowed in tournaments where the bulk of the field is made up of models that accurately represent their codex selections.

There's a variety of questions in this little minefield, and I've been tossing a few of them around for a while now. How much is too much? What allowance, if any, should be made for exceptional conversion work, which forces one to make a value judgment of the aesthetic 'quality' of someone else's work?

And there's a lot of elements to consider. A heavily converted army creates a time issue where the explanation of what this-or-that bizarre scratch build is actually supposed to be eats up precious minutes in a competitive, timed environment. Furthermore, is a player really responsible for having to remember what a whole armies' worth of 'counts-as' represents? Finally, there's the issue of modeling for advantage. Taking two examples from yesterday, would anyone argue that a silly huge conversion of a Soul Grinder that was probably at least twice a tall and wide as the normal model is modeling for advantage? Unlikely. But what about low-profile Devilfish, off the flight stand, turned upside down, and Ork-ified into a Battlewagon? Maybe. In the age of true LOS, it's definitely harder to model for advantage, but it's still something that can come up.

I know, I know... tl;dr. The heart of the matter is, how strict does one need to be about questionable conversions and counts-as models? I'll definitely be adding at least a pre-approval requirement for suspect stuff, and possibly a requirement to have some portion of the correct models available in case an opponent isn't comfortable having to deal with what they consider to be too far beyond the pale. It is definitely a significant imposition to expect your opponent to keep track of an armload of counts-as, but GW is a hobby, at heart, so strict sanctions on someone who's more of a hobbyist and less of a painter or player get thorny as well.

-Dis.