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This is mainly just a vent thread, so look out for whininess!

Yesterday, I played a particularly disappointing game of 40k. I was using my Orks, (Trying out a modified Battlewagon Bash list), and my opponent brought Chaos Space Marines.
Instead of a play-by-play, here's where the suck came from:
1. He didn't know the rules. Since he's not the most experienced player, I was actively trying to give him advice, but his rule-knowledge was so poor there was little I could do. (I advised him to assault my Kustom Battle Fortress, for example, because he told me his Khorne Berserkers had 4 S6 attacks on the charge, but it's actually 3 S5 attacks.) He didn't understand challenges in 7th, (And when I explained it declared that the rules were stupid,) and I was constantly having to check his stats because he didn't know.

2. His dice were bad... And he took it personal. His dice were fairly poor all game. He mishapped with 3 Obluterators and died, (1" shy of being fine,) rolled three 1s out of four 2+ saves, and failed all his attack rolls (Either to-hit or to-wound) on turn 1. Oh, and his first 2 Boons of Mutation killed 2 models. This was fine, but he then acted like it was my fault for it. And when afterhe rolled the 3 1s and lost his Chaos Lord, I thought it was morbidly funny (Because of his completely unfair bad luck,) so I called across the room to mention it to a friend, and he responded as though I had just announced to the room that he was impotent and wearing ladies' underpants. (If anything, I had assumed thebad dice would absolve him of all blame for losing. I don't know anyone who could win with dice like his, all his important rolls were positively awful.)

3. Lastly, his attitude. I know the game kind of sucked for him: His dice were bad and his army was a terrible matchup for mine (Or maybe just terrible in general, it was a Khorne Party Bus backed up by a squad of Marines with MON in a Rhino, a Sorcerer, a Juggerlord by himself, some Thousand Suns, some Noise Marines, and some Havocs.) On the other hand, he had a terrible attitude the entire time, acted hurt every time something bad happened, and he surrendered on turn 3 because he didn't want to play anymore. He was constantly fudging things to his advantage unless I called him on it, and to top it all of he made some vaguely homophobic comments when I made a joke about my Ork Boys 'Coming out' of the Battlewagon.

All in all... Three hours wasted, and I won't be playing against him again. :(

Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. As you said, no one is forcing you to play him ever again.

We can't fix the attitudes of other players. Some people just don't play with the correct mindset.

I hope it doesn't happen again! He has some maturing to do as a player it seems.

Nothings your fault. You tried to help.

But yeah, I understand not wanting to play him again. I'm thankful I don't play against people like that here.

The dude could be having a rough time elsewhere and having his "fun time" go 100% sour might have been a breaking point. While knowing the rules is one thing, it could just be a case of "really bad day."

For chaos that have to do challanges the new dual rules are kind of a stupid. Considering the army the dude has he must be losing all the time, add bad dice to that and no wonder he felt bad. This ain't prison, you can't make him enjoy stuff he doesn't like.

Give up forever or don't play that guy. One of those two.

Just to perhaps add some perspective, if I were having a bad game, and my opponent called across the room to his buddy about what a bad game I was having, I might get a little pissed off too.

Your intentions may have been to share something hilarious, but it would have been easy to see it as gloating from the other table edge.

Doesn't excuse bad behaviour, of course, but we are in a "people in glass houses" situation here, and, especially when we only have your account, we have no assurances you were a faultless opponent either. (Making no accusations, just a point.)

Waaaghpower wrote:


All in all... Three hours wasted, and I won't be playing against him again. :(

Not wasted. Now you know on person you would not play against again

I would play him again to see if his attitude changes to be honest. I don't think I'm a bad loser but I can't always keep a smile on my face when my Death Compnay are shot of the board or a scatter into terrain.

Apart from that tell him to suck it up buttercup.

To be fair...The challenge rules for chaos are remarkably stupid.

Forced challenges for every character in your army? Mind boggling.

Arbiter_Shade wrote:
To be fair...The challenge rules for chaos are remarkably stupid.

Forced challenges for every character in your army? Mind boggling.

He was mainly upset that I got to fight into the challenge. I pointed out that it allowed him to kill my Nob, and I would have simply refused the challenge and hit him with my boys had the rule not been that way...

Azreal: The exact reason I told my friend is because normally he's the one with awful dice. It happens so frequently, in fact, most of our locals refer to bad rolling as 'Daniel Dice,' so I asked him when he traded dice with my opponent. If that clarifies things, yay!

Ah, ok. There's a whole world of potential misunderstandings/accidental upsets that could occur though, so I wouldn't write this guy off on the basis of one game. Perhaps you can surreptitiously observe him playing someone else, and suss out if you just caught him on a bad day?

Weirdly, I also regularly play a guy called Daniel who is known for poor rolling, perhaps it's a thing?

I was playing on the next table over to this game in question and I feel some additional insight that I feel needs to be added.

Following Waaghpower's points

1.His opponent (Mark) only gets about one game a week in, plays two armies: tau and chaos, and had just recently switched from 6th edition to 7th edition. From everything I've seen and heard about mark, he doesn't have a firm grasp of game mechanics outside of the armies he uses or armies he encounters often. Most of his games are against newer players in the store's community where neither party has a full grasp of the rules so he has never really been forced to understand them further. So while this doesn't completely absolve him of blame, it is well known that he has a loose understanding of the rules. I know you were aware of this, as you've played him before at least once that I've seen.

2. Bad dice happen to all of us and when it does, its frustrating. Doubly so when bad luck kills off the unit that could have swung things in their favor as 3 oblits deep striking with melta guns can ruin any battlewagons day.

But the way you acted about it was well out of line. You didn't just say "hey you have bad dice like Daniel", you announced his 3 out of 4 ones on his chaos lord to everyone in the room. So loudly that you someone buying models at the register stopped buying this products to look at what was going on. In fact my own game was interrupted by the announcement and the additional context you felt needed to be added (again at room awareness volume) when my opponent had to tell you to lay off the kid (who was to anyone watching, clearing getting upset over the public showing of his luck). No one in the store, including the owner, was happy that you did that to a person who already was having a bad game.

If you want to make light of bad dice you say something like "oh man if you hit with those melta guns I would have been dead to rights" or "man that sucks, you should have only lost X instead of that many" not "Hey this kid can't make any 2+ saves" which is how the entire store felt you were saying about the game. It doesn't matter what you meant to say, its how others viewed your actions that matters most.

3. His attitude is a little bit sore, and Mark takes losses pretty hard, I'll grant you that. Also I didn't hear the homophobic comment but I can easily see it occurring. But here are a few things you left out of the original post:

A. His army is based off of the few models he has and most of his armies center around 1500 points plus a unit or two of switch in models if he feels like it. The 2000 point list he had was a single force org 1500 point list with a few ad hoc units added in, giving him an awkwardly focused army. Juxtapose this against the "competitive battlewagon list" you brought that uses 2 CAD, a lord of war battlefortress, pair of battlewagions filled with boyz+ pain boy, some grots you used to pad out the list's troops and a biker squad with a kff, warboss and painboy. You brought a focused tournament level list against the kid who had a mismatched list with maybe 2 units that could hurt armor 14, much less kill it at the needed pace the game would dictate.

Lets call a spade a spade, you clubbed a seal

B. You were grandstanding him pretty hard during the game, you might claim you making light of it but no one got that impression. I wasn't watching your game closely, but I did hear the following:

"Congratulations, you killed your first ork of the game, good job"- Turn 2 or 3 in a sarcastic tone

"I know you didn't have fun or enjoy the game, but it was a lot of fun for me"- You said this as you were leaving the store, if I just had my army stomped by a list like yours and then you said something along the lines of "I had fun murdering your list" I'd be pretty upset too. (Again its not just me who understood it this way, several people were upset with this remark and your method of treating him during the match)

Several times you'd celebrate killing a unit of his, or chuckling at his poor luck, that is not cool if the other person is getting sore over the match

40k is a social contract, in a friendly pick up game you don't act like this, intended or not, to an opponent who is having a rough time. If they're clearly not having fun don't make comments that could be taken as humiliating them, that is disgusting and extremely unsportsmanlike.


TLDR- You played a tournament level list against someone with a pick up game list, you did a large amount of grandstanding (intended or not, your attitude was very damaging to your opponent's spirit) vs a player that you knew he doesn't have a very good understanding of the game/takes loses hard.

Here is the overview: You won a game, and you have the gall to make a thread to complain that he didn't make it more fun for you. Your time may have been wasted, but I wouldn't doubt that you made him reconsider this game as a hobby after that match-up. I'm sure many here on these forums, if they saw the game as I did, would react similarly as I have here.

If you think I'm making this up, feel free to ask the store owner or anyone who was at the store yesterday about your actions. I'm certain you'll find that almost everyone outside of Daniel was disgusted with your actions, Max.

Okay, let's go down the list of all the things you got wrong or inaccurate. (Not to be rude, but you aren't remembering or recording things right at all.)

1. I didn't know this, but I ALSO only get about one game in a week. I don't see why this is important, other than that it sucks more if your only game that week is boring and sucky. It isn't that big of a deal that he doesn't know the rules, either, it's his reaction when I corrected him. (One of frustration, anger, or saying that the rules were 'stupid' and 'wrong.) As a side-note, I remember for a fact that I had told him the rules about challenges the last time we played.

2. I highly doubt that one Battlewagon would have swung the game, even if he had managed to kill it. (1 Melta shot would realistically have gone through since it had a 4+ Invuln... 50/50 chance for it to blow.) But yes, his dice sucked, as I already mentioned.
When I 'Announced it to the room,' I'd like to point out that the room is about 8 meters across. I also DID repeatedly mention that his luck should have been a lot better, and that his luck was really screwing up his game.

3. I have nothing to say here, so, yeah.

A. (You switched to lettering?) As I already said, I only get in one game a week. I planned out this list on Monday, and I had been looking forward to using it all week. In-game, too, I warned him amply about things, made sure he understood what I was doing and the capabilities of my units, suggested what might be effective, and gave advice. I wasn't going to take a kiddie list, since I really wanted to try this one out. On the other hand, I tactically advised him the entire game and did everything I could to keep the game from being one-sided without actively weakening my own army.

B. I never said that thing about Congratulations. On turn three, after he killed one of my Nobz,' I did say something (As close to ver batim as I can get it "Have you killed anyone yet? (After he confirmed it) Wow, that's just bad dice."
I also didn't say your second quote quite as you listed it, what I said was: "I don't want to say 'Good Game' since you didn't have fun, but I enjoyed playing with you." It's a subtle difference, but unlike your version it didn't translate to "I had fun stomping your list" unless you're intentionally trying to take it in the most offensive way possible.

As for chuckling at his poor luck and celebrating the kills... It's a game. When I chuckled, I pointed out that he reasonably should have been doing far better, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with his tactics. I was laughing at his luck, and repeatedly making this as clear as I could.


Lastly, to your overview: I won a game, sure. It'snot about winning, it's about having fun. You play 40k entirely to have fun. If my opponent complains for the duration of the entire game and yells about the rules being stupid because he doesn't understand them, it sucks. I was trying to keep things lighthearted, making jokes, reminding him that it wasn't his fault for doing so poorly, trying to make light of the bad luck.

And then someone who overheard the situation from a different table, who misheard things and only saw half the situation, steps in and assumes to know what everyone was thinking about what was happening then begins pointing fingers on the internet.

As I said, this is a vent thread. I was frustrated for having my time and only 40k game of the week wasted, and so I shared the story on the internet.

It sounds like both of you could learn something from this. While there's obviously two sides to every story, my recommendation would be to take a new list against this guy, avoid him, or maybe play him later once he has the grasp of things.

No one's making you play him, and your store may receive you better off for avoiding him. I'm not saying either of you is right, but it sounds like this guy may just not be the right person to play against and needs to develop on his own.

There's only really one lesson to get out of this.

What you meant to say or think you said is very often not what people understood.

You may very well have said what you're saying you did, but everyone else around was also likely not paying 100% attention to you and the impression they got is what your friends seems to be pointing out.

Live and learn.

Voldrak wrote:
There's only really one lesson to get out of this.

What you meant to say or think you said is very often not what people understood.

You may very well have said what you're saying you did, but everyone else around was also likely not paying 100% attention to you and the impression they got is what your friends seems to be pointing out.

Live and learn.

Actually, I barely know the guy. We've met maybe once or twice, I can't recall having a conbersation with him excluding chit-chat about new 40k releases, I don't even know his name. Actually, since the most I know about him is that he is disgusted with me to the point of writing a very long reply to a vent thread purely for the sake of telling me and everyone on DakkaDakka how disgusting of an individual I am... Please don't use the word 'Friend'.

I haven't really talked with anyone else who was there about what happened (Except my friend who gets the bad dice, but while he agreed with me that the game sucked, etc., that's hardly an unbiased opinion, we're pretty close,) but I didn't really get the impression that anyone thought I was so drastically out of line. I might bring it up to the store manager next time I'm there, but as far as I could tell that didn't seem to be the case.

With that being said, the point of this thread was to vent stress and now I'm even more frustrated than before, so I'm gonna make like a tree and stop posting on this thread, so... Yeah.


EDIT: Okay, I realize what I just said, but immediately after posting this I realized... What'sHisName actually made an account just to respond to this thread and tell everyone how awful I am.

Waaaghpower wrote:
EDIT: Okay, I realize what I just said, but immediately after posting this I realized... What'sHisName actually made an account just to respond to this thread and tell everyone how awful I am.

Am I on Jerry Springer?Seriously, that seems like kind of a stretch that he intentionally sought you out, found you posting on Dakka, and responded to throw you under the bus.

Waaaghpower wrote:
Actually, since the most I know about him is that he is disgusted with me to the point of writing a very long reply to a vent thread purely for the sake of telling me and everyone on DakkaDakka how disgusting of an individual I am... Please don't use the word 'Friend'.

Me-ow.