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All,
I'm trying to make an effort to play more 40k. In recent years I haven't been a huge fan of 7th edition, but I think that's been more of a "Me" problem than with the game system. What I wanted 7th edition to be was more like 3rd through 5th where we had a thriving tournament scene that pitched codex vs codex and how player builds out of that single codex could match up to other single-dex builds. Truth be told, it was probably a giant rock, paper, scissors match but it was still an amazing time.

In my humble opinion today's 40k game isn't about tournaments, or at least not in the structure we've known them to be in. So rather than try and squeeze the current edition into the usual tournament structure, I'm wondering how many people would play in something like this:

Imagine a 3-Day 40k gaming event...
For starters you still register for the event as you would a tournament that tells you how big you should build your army. When you register, you state what army you'll be bringing.

Next, when you arrive you are assigned a faction of either Imperial (Order) or Chaos (Disorder). T.O.'s can use certain armies to balance out the numbers. (Eldar, Dark Eldar, Astra Militarum)

On Friday, you kick things off by having a giant Apocalypse game (Or games depending on the number of players.)

On Saturday and Sunday players will play 5 rounds against 5 opponents from the opposite faction and a score will be kept for each faction based on the number of objectives earned, HQ's killed, highest valued units destroyed, ect.

At the end, individual prizes are awarded not on wins and losses, but who achieved the most objectives, who killed the most HQ choices, who took the fewest losses, how many units your Warlord killed, ect.

The idea is that you still have a competitive element and goals to achieve, but rather than hope that your rock beats your opponent's scissors, you're playing for a bigger goal which is to achieve victory for your overall faction and achieve as many objectives as possible. This is the type of event that you could take full advantage of the Maelstrom missions if you wanted to and not worry about just wins and losses. Heck, how many times have you played a Maelstrom mission and achieved 20+ objective points and still lost the game? Well, now those objectives still matter.

Obviously you could still award prizes for Best Painted, Best Sportsmanship, ect.

Thoughts? I can't be the only one who would want to play in something like that...

Probably not. You've got all of the problems of a competitive tournament, without any of the things that make a narrative event appealing. Dividing 40k up into "order" and "disorder" sides doesn't work fluff-wise, at all. So the story is going to suck, and I'm going to ignore whatever rationalizations you have for how the teams are constructed and just play the games. Then the games are still won or lost by the same rock/paper/scissors metagame of competitive 40k, and the best way to help your team and achieve objectives is by winning your individual game as decisively as possible. The only real difference is that any prize for winning is (presumably) divided up between the whole team, so I don't get any individual rewards for playing well, other than the satisfaction of slaughtering my enemies. From a game-experience point of view things go almost exactly the same as any other tournament.

Also, Apocalypse on friday is a really bad idea. Many of your players will either be working on friday or, if your event is big enough, traveling on friday. So people won't be there until early evening, and that really limits the amount of time you have to handle registration/setup/etc and start playing the actual game. And an Apocalypse game takes an entire day if you want to have more than one turn, so trying to do it on friday evening means that you'll spend a ton of time unpacking models and putting them away again, but very little (if any) time playing a game. That's not worth it.

 Peregrine wrote:
...Then the games are still won or lost by the same rock/paper/scissors metagame of competitive 40k, and the best way to help your team and achieve objectives is by winning your individual game as decisively as possible.

No, not really - that heavily depends on how missions and reward system would work in detail. If missions were heavy BRB Maelstrom escalation variant and rewards would be in fact for "best contributor" defined as a NUMBER of objectives (NOT a VP score/killpoints generated), then right here Alpha strikes and any tabling strategy goes out the window and most deathstars are inefficient. If someone were to try to mitigate this by "almost tabling" first turn and then avoid causing any more casaulties to safely "harvest objectives", suicidal strategies become obvious "damage controll" sacrifice for greater good (overall team score). And because this is a team effort, this is perfectly viable strategy. With clever design of mission/reward system, this could be a completely different experience to typical tournament. And because of this, nobody would be an "expert metagaming player", because nobody would have practical experience in such enviroment, every "meta idea" would be theory to be proven in game...

...Also, Apocalypse on friday is a really bad idea. Many of your players will either be working on friday or, if your event is big enough, traveling on friday. So people won't be there until early evening, and that really limits the amount of time you have to handle registration/setup/etc and start playing the actual game. And an Apocalypse game takes an entire day if you want to have more than one turn, so trying to do it on friday evening means that you'll spend a ton of time unpacking models and putting them away again, but very little (if any) time playing a game. That's not worth it.

This is very true, Apocalypse should start as early as possible at Saturday and be designed to last whole day or be a Sunday closing "entertainment", after the main "competition" is resolved (or as an additional part of main event, that would allow to "tip the scales" in the last, group effort).

I agree though, that making up a "believable enough" backstory for "order and disorder" metafactions would be very, very hard. But as for event itself, it sounds interesting.

 Wolflord Patrick wrote:

At the end, individual prizes are awarded not on wins and losses, but who achieved the most objectives, who killed the most HQ choices, who took the fewest losses, how many units your Warlord killed, ect.

if the prizes are for those other goals, then nobody will play to "win" each individual game.

You can certainly come up with new and novel missions. But most competitive armies will still score well no matter what the mission format is because eliminating your opponents units eliminates his opportunities.

You might look at the Warzone Atlanta "bounties" system and other "narrative" event formats. There's plenty of prior art out there.

Aside from the Apoc game, you've just described the basis of the campaign weekends at WHW, they're fun!

Apoc = yuck.

Here's what I think would be a cool tourney system.
2 day event:
Day 1 Grand Tourney
Day 2 Grand Tourney Contenders and RT Tourney for others.

- 1250 points
- Single codex builds
- You may bring 2 lists. Same armies with different builds or different armies. In case of disagreement person who rolls for first turn chooses army second, but deploys first.

If and only if you are a word smith:

At the beginning of the tourney you set a scene where each battle will fit into an over all narrative, but don't tell them how.
Then, between each round you give a brief verbal batrep of a SINGLE game (no more than 1 min) and how it fits into the whole narrative.

In secret, keep track of the player(s) who changed their lists the least ((Order)) and the player(s) who changed the most ((Chaos)). Whichever has the highest cumulitive score wins a prize at the end and that side wins the narrative event that you've been weaving between rounds... Chaos vs Order. In the end, even if they were playing the goodie-goodie Grey Knights and the Astramilitarum, but they switched back and forth alot.... they were corrupted by the seduction of the warp... LORD OF CHANGE wins!!!!!!

Kablam. You can keep that one for free. If you want another... it'll cost ya.

Why the Apoc game? I would not play Apoc outside of my game group.