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.

Hi everyone,

At the last iteration of our yearly tournament, we tried to heavily emphasise the "fun" aspect of the tournament by implementing all kinds of "wacky" missions.
The idea being, that people would automatically understand that this a less-than-serious tournament and not bring their usual WAAC overpowered lists.

Unfortunately, this didn't work out very well, as we had about 50% of the people bring fun, fluffy lists but the rest bring Riptide/Wraithknight Spam, Eldar scatbike/Wraithguard/Wraithknight, etc etc. A lot of the more 'fun' local players were quite disgusted by some of their matchups and didn't enjoy them very much.

The lesson we took from this: if you want people to bring balanced lists, enforce it -explicitly- in the ruleset.

So, for this year, I've started thinking how we could implement something like this. We certainly want to keep our wacky, heavy-objective dominated missions, but in addition to this, I'd like to come up with a ruleset that more or less gives all armies a fighting chance. 40K being what it is, I unfortunately don't see another way than putting some heavy restrictions on the list-building.

This is what I've come up with so far:


Specific restrictions
No D Weapons
No Gargantuan Creatures
No Superheavies
All formations that would give 'free' vehicles such as Gladius don't give free vehicles.

Army building restrictions
Maximum of 2 Formations and 1 Fortification slot

"Special" Highlander rules
-- Per -specific- Monstrous Creature: 1 allowed.
So Tyranids can have a Carnifex and a Hive Tyrant and a Tervigon, but not two Hive Tyrants or a brood of three Carnifexes for example. Tau can have a Riptide, but not a Riptide Wing.
Special and unique MC's counts as their 'mundane' counterpart (e.g. SwarmLord counts as a Hive Tyrant)

-- Per -specific- character: 1 allowed
Special and unique characters counts as their 'mundane' counterpart (e.g. Eldrad counts as a Farseer; Shadow Captain Shrike counts as a Captain)



Now my question to the more experienced tournament players amongst you: does this cover all the bases? Or can you still think of the more WAAC builds that will still be unaffected by this?

If you have other ideas on this topic, they are more than welcome as well!

Many thanks

Update: some additional ideas that have been suggested by people in this thread:

* Limit the max number of Psyker dice
* Don't blanket limit the Vehicles; instead ban/restrict the 'problematic' formations (e.g. no Gladius, max 2 Flyers, ...)
* Don't try to limit the lists, but let 'power players' play power players based on a self-assigned Competitiveness score
* Restrict to only CAD
* Play against the list you brought
* No vehicle squads unless they had less than 33 AV (front+side+rear)

Only one vehicle per any type? That means orks can only take one trukk and one BW and dark eldar one venom and one raider? That would completely suck, and these two armies couldn't field any possible lists that survive turn 3.

Specific restritions and army building restrictions are 100% fine, but you shouldn't ban the transports, ban grav guns and limit the dice number in the psychic phase (for example max 10+D6, regardless of the psykers involved) instead. You can ban decurions and formations too, but don't limit standard units, especially transports. Otherwise average or weak armies like tyranids, dark eldar, orks, ecc wouldn't stand a chance just the same.

I'm glad you learned that lesson. The real take away from this should be to plan around the person that brings the least "fun" army possible. If you can design a game/mission where even games against that person are fun, then you are likely heading in the right direction.

For that reason, let me just say; no matter what restrictions you put in, there will always be someone who finds a way to "game" the system. In this specific case, you can still make some crazy things, specifically using psychics. You could take a Librarian with allied Grey Knight and Inquisitor and who knows what else, and you end up with an Inivisible teleporting deathstar all the same. Sure, you had to jump through an additional hoop, but the basis of what's "cheesy" is still there. You can also go Bikespam (specifically with Gravbikes or Scatbikes).

Ultimately, basic army building restrictions won't get you there.


I've done the following for the last two tournaments I've helped to host, and it's worked FANTASTIC each time. Have your players rank their own competitiveness, and have that rank factor into their score. This gives you a score to start pairing people up with for Game 1, so no matter what happens, people get at least 1 game in against someone with a similar score. So long as you have 8 or more people, it also practically ensures that people can't use the system to "smurf" lower ranked players, because then that player will lose to the higher ranked player when they get the same win/loss ratio. (the more players in the tournament, the better this system becomes at weeding these people out of the prizes)

In this way, Best General truly goes to the person that deserves it, but everyone will still get a good game in. From the past two tournaments I've helped run with it (16 players and 20 players), we didn't have anyone that smurfed that system. People that want to win rank themselves higher, because they see the benefit of doing so, and those players nearly always would rather a game against a similarly powerful opponent. It made it so people weren't afraid to bring out their power lists that they feel chastised for normally bringing, but people also didn't have to worry about playing against power lists. Having a 50/50 split like you described means this system will work PERFECTLY for you!

 Blackie wrote:
Only one vehicle per any type? That means orks can only take one trukk and one BW and dark eldar one venom and one raider? That would completely suck, and these two armies couldn't field any possible lists that survive turn 3.

Specific restritions and army building restrictions are 100% fine, but you shouldn't ban the transports, ban grav guns and limit the dice number in the psychic phase (for example max 10+D6, regardless of the psykers involved) instead. You can ban decurions and formations too, but don't limit standard units, especially transports. Otherwise average or weak armies like tyranids, dark eldar, orks, ecc wouldn't stand a chance just the same.

Thank you for the input; the idea behind the vehicle restriction would be to make Gladius spam impossible, as wel as limit Flyer spam. Do you have any other suggestions as how to implement this?

As far as banning decurions, that makes certain armies just impossible to play, for example Genestealer Cult and Raven Guard to name two.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yarium wrote:
I'm glad you learned that lesson. The real take away from this should be to plan around the person that brings the least "fun" army possible. If you can design a game/mission where even games against that person are fun, then you are likely heading in the right direction.

I've done the following for the last two tournaments I've helped to host, and it's worked FANTASTIC each time. Have your players rank their own competitiveness, and have that rank factor into their score. This gives you a score to start pairing people up with for Game 1, so no matter what happens, people get at least 1 game in against someone with a similar score. So long as you have 8 or more people, it also practically ensures that people can't use the system to "smurf" lower ranked players, because then that player will lose to the higher ranked player when they get the same win/loss ratio. (the more players in the tournament, the better this system becomes at weeding these people out of the prizes)

In this way, Best General truly goes to the person that deserves it, but everyone will still get a good game in. From the past two tournaments I've helped run with it (16 players and 20 players), we didn't have anyone that smurfed that system. People that want to win rank themselves higher, because they see the benefit of doing so, and those players nearly always would rather a game against a similarly powerful opponent. It made it so people weren't afraid to bring out their power lists that they feel chastised for normally bringing, but people also didn't have to worry about playing against power lists. Having a 50/50 split like you described means this system will work PERFECTLY for you!

That's a very interesting system. I'd be interested to see how you implemented this. Care to shed some light on how exactly this calculation goes?

thanks

Polkadragon wrote:


Thank you for the input; the idea behind the vehicle restriction would be to make Gladius spam impossible, as wel as limit Flyer spam. Do you have any other suggestions as how to implement this?

As far as banning decurions, that makes certain armies just impossible to play, for example Genestealer Cult and Raven Guard to name two.

thanks

About flyers spam it's easy, add a rule that allows max 1-2 flyers. About gladius you can ban only those specific formations that grant free vehicles, after all just a couple of armies have something like that and it's not fair. This way decurions and formations could still be available, but it also would be possible to orks or dark eldar to take their typical lists, with only a couple of transport allowed no one would play them. Also the AM would be almost impossible to play with only one kind of vehicle allowed.

 Blackie wrote:

Polkadragon wrote:


Thank you for the input; the idea behind the vehicle restriction would be to make Gladius spam impossible, as wel as limit Flyer spam. Do you have any other suggestions as how to implement this?

As far as banning decurions, that makes certain armies just impossible to play, for example Genestealer Cult and Raven Guard to name two.

thanks

About flyers spam it's easy, add a rule that allows max 1-2 flyers. About gladius you can ban only those specific formations that grant free vehicles, after all just a couple of armies have something like that and it's not fair. This way decurions and formations could still be available, but it also would be possible to orks or dark eldar to take their typical lists, with only a couple of transport allowed no one would play them. Also the AM would be almost impossible to play with only one kind of vehicle allowed.

A fair point I guess. I'll start adding these suggestions to my original post.

Thanks for the feedback so far!

Polkadragon wrote:
That's a very interesting system. I'd be interested to see how you implemented this. Care to shed some light on how exactly this calculation goes?

thanks

Let's see if I can remember it. My partner kept the excel file

Whenever players submitted their lists for review, we asked the players for their competitiveness rating out of 10, with 1 being "I'm playing to lose" and 10 being "I've made the most powerful stuff the internet can imagine". Winning a game was worth 1000 points, I think drawing was worth 500, and losing was worth 0. Whatever you rated yourself was simply added to your score. All the "competitive" players were scoring themselves between 7 and 10. The biggest surprise to me was how high the "casual" players ranked themselves, with many of them going for 4 to 6. People that showed up with joke lists often wrote themselves in as a 3. I don't think anyone listed themselves as a 1 or 2.

So yeah, it's pretty dirt simple, but very effective. You match people up with the same or close scores each game, and because people who ranked themselves higher have a higher score, they will keep facing other people who also scored themselves higher.

You could always old school to being CAD. That'll solve a lot of unit spam problems that are inherent with formations. Yes people don't get to have their special rules and what not, but it does level the playing field a lot more, I believe.

 Yarium wrote:

Polkadragon wrote:
That's a very interesting system. I'd be interested to see how you implemented this. Care to shed some light on how exactly this calculation goes?

thanks

Let's see if I can remember it. My partner kept the excel file

Whenever players submitted their lists for review, we asked the players for their competitiveness rating out of 10, with 1 being "I'm playing to lose" and 10 being "I've made the most powerful stuff the internet can imagine". Winning a game was worth 1000 points, I think drawing was worth 500, and losing was worth 0. Whatever you rated yourself was simply added to your score. All the "competitive" players were scoring themselves between 7 and 10. The biggest surprise to me was how high the "casual" players ranked themselves, with many of them going for 4 to 6. People that showed up with joke lists often wrote themselves in as a 3. I don't think anyone listed themselves as a 1 or 2.

So yeah, it's pretty dirt simple, but very effective. You match people up with the same or close scores each game, and because people who ranked themselves higher have a higher score, they will keep facing other people who also scored themselves higher.

To be clear, you're adding the Competitiveness rating to the scores that determine Win/loss/draw right? Because otherwise I don't really see how a score from 1-10 will affect a score of 1000

I find it an interesting system for sure, although I'm not 100% sure how exactly it would weed out casual players playing WAAC players.
After your first round, where you've paired the compeititive players against each other, some of them will have lost their game, and will probably be paired against a casual player who won?

So how, apart from the first round, has this changed the problem?
Not meant as critique, just trying to understand the system.

In my favourite tournament you always played against the list that you brought, instead of a max point limit you got a min point limit. You build the least powerful wysiwyg battle forged army you can. All of the models that never make it to the table were out and the people that only owned the most powerful units for the best armies were nowhere to be seen because they would just be easily beaten by their own cheese.

Giantwalkingchair wrote:
You could always old school to being CAD. That'll solve a lot of unit spam problems that are inherent with formations. Yes people don't get to have their special rules and what not, but it does level the playing field a lot more, I believe.

To be honest, I find this a bit *too* old school and it would just completely kill some armies. To reiterate my previous examples, Genestealer Cult in a CAD are just guys in 5+ armour, and Raven Guard in a CAD are just black Space Marines.

The limitations look more like you're punishing quite ordinary lists (and/or effectively hard-banning a few Codexes; can you imagine trying to play Grey Knights with only one Dreadknight and one Rhino? Or the Inquisition with only one of each transport?) while trying to get at the power lists.

Banning multiple Flyrants makes perfect sense, but banning multiple Carnifexes is silly. And the way the ban is worded I can have as many Land Raiders as I want as long as there's only one each of the Phobos (normal), Proteus, Achilles, Redeemer, Crusader, Helios, Ares (if you're permitting rules that are that old), Prometheus, etc., but I can only have one Rhino?

If you want comp rules to restrict what armies you see you're going to have to write specific comp rules for specific problem units/formations, not hard-ban or hard-restrict entire unit types. Saying 'we'll ban Lords of War!' catches out Wraithknights and Stormsurges, yes, but you're also banning Dante, the Avatar, Calgar, Grimnar, Azrael, and whoever else has been shunted into the LoW slot for no particular reason, and it's hard to argue unique Chapter Masters are ruining the game.

How many points is this event?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Polkadragon wrote:

Giantwalkingchair wrote:
You could always old school to being CAD. That'll solve a lot of unit spam problems that are inherent with formations. Yes people don't get to have their special rules and what not, but it does level the playing field a lot more, I believe.

To be honest, I find this a bit *too* old school and it would just completely kill some armies. To reiterate my previous examples, Genestealer Cult in a CAD are just guys in 5+ armour, and Raven Guard in a CAD are just black Space Marines.

And scatterbikes in a CAD are still scatterbikes.

Restricting people to the CAD rewards armies with powerful Troops (Tau, Eldar), punishes people with weak Troops (Grey Knights, Space Marines), and bans the Codexes that didn't get HQ choices for some reason (Skitarii, Harlequins).

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The limitations look more like you're punishing quite ordinary lists (and/or effectively hard-banning a few Codexes; can you imagine trying to play Grey Knights with only one Dreadknight and one Rhino? Or the Inquisition with only one of each transport?) while trying to get at the power lists.

Banning multiple Flyrants makes perfect sense, but banning multiple Carnifexes is silly. And the way the ban is worded I can have as many Land Raiders as I want as long as there's only one each of the Phobos (normal), Proteus, Achilles, Redeemer, Crusader, Helios, Ares (if you're permitting rules that are that old), Prometheus, etc., but I can only have one Rhino?

If you want comp rules to restrict what armies you see you're going to have to write specific comp rules for specific problem units/formations, not hard-ban or hard-restrict entire unit types. Saying 'we'll ban Lords of War!' catches out Wraithknights and Stormsurges, yes, but you're also banning Dante, the Avatar, Calgar, Grimnar, Azrael, and whoever else has been shunted into the LoW slot for no particular reason, and it's hard to argue unique Chapter Masters are ruining the game.

How many points is this event?

It'll be 1750 or 1850 points.
Common feedback so far was that blanket restricting all vehicles would indeed be too much.
(although in your example I'd rule that all of those count as 'Land Raider', so you'd only be allowed one).

The problem with writing very specific comp rules, is that it requires you to have a complete overview of every codex and/or formation to be able to determine case-by-case whether a unit is ok or not. I don't really have that level of competitive knowledge to make such rules.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 roflmajog wrote:
In my favourite tournament you always played against the list that you brought, instead of a max point limit you got a min point limit. You build the least powerful wysiwyg battle forged army you can. All of the models that never make it to the table were out and the people that only owned the most powerful units for the best armies were nowhere to be seen because they would just be easily beaten by their own cheese.

I like that; some friends of mine did the same for Bloodbowl tournaments, worked very well! Although I have to say that, given the variety of codexes and formations in 40K these days, I would find it very difficult to play three games with armies I might never have played with before.

As much as I dislike tournaments, I think that fun and balanced is very much the opposite of what you'd get from most tournament-minded players. As such you're already at odds for most of your market (and will thus turn off a lot of folks).

I can see running some larger narrative events based on that kind of system and thought process, but the very thread title itself seems a little ambivalent.

 Elbows wrote:
As much as I dislike tournaments, I think that fun and balanced is very much the opposite of what you'd get from most tournament-minded players. As such you're already at odds for most of your market (and will thus turn off a lot of folks).

I can see running some larger narrative events based on that kind of system and thought process, but the very thread title itself seems a little ambivalent.

YMMV of course, but for our local gaming community, I do not find this to be case. Personally, I'm very tournament minded because it allows me to play against some armies and players I never otherwise get to play against. Having said that, playing a 'fluffy' and balanced list is just as important for me, so I'd like both to be possible. The net effect is of course that I hardly play any tournaments, because they are dominated by soulless WAAC lists, so that's the problem that I'm trying to solve for our own tournament.

How about single CAD only, no allies, no formations, one fortification. Add that to your Specific Restrictions and you've killed most of the spam out there as it usually relies on formations or allies.

Polkadragon wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
As much as I dislike tournaments, I think that fun and balanced is very much the opposite of what you'd get from most tournament-minded players. As such you're already at odds for most of your market (and will thus turn off a lot of folks).

I can see running some larger narrative events based on that kind of system and thought process, but the very thread title itself seems a little ambivalent.

YMMV of course, but for our local gaming community, I do not find this to be case. Personally, I'm very tournament minded because it allows me to play against some armies and players I never otherwise get to play against. Having said that, playing a 'fluffy' and balanced list is just as important for me, so I'd like both to be possible. The net effect is of course that I hardly play any tournaments, because they are dominated by soulless WAAC lists, so that's the problem that I'm trying to solve for our own tournament.

That's my point though - as you said, you hardly get to play in many tournaments, because I'd imagine you're in a relative minority (playing tournaments with balanced and/of fluffy lists). So my question is more - do you think people will show up if you run a tournament the way you want to run it? I'd gladly try to play in something like that, but I don't know how many normal tournament players would do so - if their goal is to win at all costs and claim prize money/swag. It's a noble idea, but if you get three people to sign up when you wanted thirty two...it's all for naught. Do you think you have the community of players who would actively participate in something like what you've posted?

Polkadragon wrote:
To be clear, you're adding the Competitiveness rating to the scores that determine Win/loss/draw right? Because otherwise I don't really see how a score from 1-10 will affect a score of 1000

I find it an interesting system for sure, although I'm not 100% sure how exactly it would weed out casual players playing WAAC players.
After your first round, where you've paired the compeititive players against each other, some of them will have lost their game, and will probably be paired against a casual player who won?

So how, apart from the first round, has this changed the problem?
Not meant as critique, just trying to understand the system.

No problem! We had a good, hard look at it. I actually ran a bunch of test scores with it to make sure, because that was a definitely concern of mine. The trick lies in the number of players. If you have 4 competitive players that have ranked themselves around the same, in the first match they all fight each other, two of them win, and two of them lose. The two winners will fight each other, and the two losers will ALSO end up fighting each other, because they're ranked a little bit higher than the casuals that also lost their first match. As you get more players, the number of consecutive matches you have against people of similar rank goes up. If you have 8 competitive players, then those who ranked themselves high and also won all their matches will end up against each other. For this reason, so long as you have enough players, a smurf player can't make it to the highest table because the highest table will be two legitimate players that won all their games and also ranked themselves higher.

Let's do an example for 16 players. Half of the players rank themselves 3-6, and half of them rank themselves 7-10. We end up with a distribution something like this:



In that example, each player fights their adjacent same-scored opponent. Let's now assume that they play their games, and there are no draws, with all the even numbered players winning (for simplicity's sake). Our distribution now looks like this:



Now all the even numbered players will end up facing each other, but in each case you have only a difference of 1 competitive point between them, so in this example, EVERY player that rated themselves "competitive" is going to fight someone else whom is "competitive". Let's go ahead and continue the example to the third round. Let's assume in this case that every player that has a higher competitive score wins, and again there are no draws.



In this situation, for the final game (assuming it's 3 matches to the tournament), we have Player 12, whom rated themselves an 8/10 for competitiveness, going against Player 16, whom rated themselves 10/10. Player 4 will also fight Player 8 for SECOND PLACE, and again there's just a 2-point competitive score difference between them. Third place will also go to another player whom rated themselves competitive, but lost a match. Now, if it's not quite a 50/50 split, it doesn't work out as cleanly, but it still means that the majority of people get to have the majority of their games against people of very similar power levels, which is really what people are hoping for going into these things.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Note, in that example, if you assume that Player 2 was a WAAC and smurfing player (which, again, I did not find anyone who wanted to game this system, but that's just anecdotal evidence on my part), and they won Round 2 instead of losing it, they would still be fighting Player 8 for second place, not for first place.

IN ADDITION to this, since they're submitting their lists and competitive rankings at the same time, if their ranking doesn't match their list at all, as the TO you can just say "no, this is not a casual list. This is competitive. I assign you a score of 8.", so there's an additional stop-gap there.

but the rest bring Riptide/Wraithknight Spam, Eldar scatbike/Wraithguard/Wraithknight

Can someone answer me something?

Why do people do this?

I just don't understand.

The "easiest" solution would be to play all matches with swapped armies. This way no one will ever bring WAAC lists unless ALL players bring WAAC lists. But this is hard to enforce.

The second non-comp method is to make "tables" - carefully designed terrain+mission setups (prefferably assymetric and played twice), which heavily penalize most commonly abusive lists. This is doable and fun, but requires a lot of planning and A LOT of terrain.

As far as "standard Eternal War 40K" with just some minor restrictions goes, marriage of casual_fun+tournament_attitude is realy an abusive one more often than not...

 Yarium wrote:


No problem! We had a good, hard look at it. I actually ran a bunch of test scores with it to make sure, because that was a definitely concern of mine. The trick lies in the number of players. If you have 4 competitive players that have ranked themselves around the same, in the first match they all fight each other, two of them win, and two of them lose. The two winners will fight each other, and the two losers will ALSO end up fighting each other, because they're ranked a little bit higher than the casuals that also lost their first match. As you get more players, the number of consecutive matches you have against people of similar rank goes up. If you have 8 competitive players, then those who ranked themselves high and also won all their matches will end up against each other. For this reason, so long as you have enough players, a smurf player can't make it to the highest table because the highest table will be two legitimate players that won all their games and also ranked themselves higher.

[Snip]

IN ADDITION to this, since they're submitting their lists and competitive rankings at the same time, if their ranking doesn't match their list at all, as the TO you can just say "no, this is not a casual list. This is competitive. I assign you a score of 8.", so there's an additional stop-gap there.

That is awesome. Thank you for the explanation.

Another step in the process could be that you as a TO just assign these scores by default. Depends if you can trust your players to be really honest about it, I guess.

Much to think about.

Restrictions on transports and characters are very restrictive.
Harlequin lists with a single shadowseer and a single starweaver are unplayable (and it would actually be very difficult to make a 1850pts list, also because of a single voidweaver).
DE also need their transports.

Banning free transports might be better.
As for the characters, I don't really know. Maybe a limitation on the ratio (no more than 1 character per 3 units), or the point ratio.

 Whitebeard wrote:

but the rest bring Riptide/Wraithknight Spam, Eldar scatbike/Wraithguard/Wraithknight

Can someone answer me something?

Why do people do this?

I just don't understand.

In defense of those players, this is a very common practice in tournaments, where most players assume that they need to bring the 'best' list, not necessarily the fluffiest or funnest.
You can't hold this against.them because they are working within the set limits of the tournament rules, If a tournament doesn't want this, you need to make it explicit in the rules (which is hard, hence this thread). Implicit rules don't work, appealing to 'common sense' rarely works as well.

Polkadragon wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The limitations look more like you're punishing quite ordinary lists (and/or effectively hard-banning a few Codexes; can you imagine trying to play Grey Knights with only one Dreadknight and one Rhino? Or the Inquisition with only one of each transport?) while trying to get at the power lists.

Banning multiple Flyrants makes perfect sense, but banning multiple Carnifexes is silly. And the way the ban is worded I can have as many Land Raiders as I want as long as there's only one each of the Phobos (normal), Proteus, Achilles, Redeemer, Crusader, Helios, Ares (if you're permitting rules that are that old), Prometheus, etc., but I can only have one Rhino?

If you want comp rules to restrict what armies you see you're going to have to write specific comp rules for specific problem units/formations, not hard-ban or hard-restrict entire unit types. Saying 'we'll ban Lords of War!' catches out Wraithknights and Stormsurges, yes, but you're also banning Dante, the Avatar, Calgar, Grimnar, Azrael, and whoever else has been shunted into the LoW slot for no particular reason, and it's hard to argue unique Chapter Masters are ruining the game.

How many points is this event?

It'll be 1750 or 1850 points.
Common feedback so far was that blanket restricting all vehicles would indeed be too much.
(although in your example I'd rule that all of those count as 'Land Raider', so you'd only be allowed one).

The problem with writing very specific comp rules, is that it requires you to have a complete overview of every codex and/or formation to be able to determine case-by-case whether a unit is ok or not. I don't really have that level of competitive knowledge to make such rules.

If in the example given above you'd count all 'Land Raiders' as the same vehicle because they're the same chassis, despite different armament, would the Predator and Vindicator be counted as the same vehicle? How about the Falcon and Fire Prism? Not to mention the 'no duplicate vehicles' rule at 1,750-1,850 makes many Codexes (let's see...Deathwatch...Grey Knights...Guard/MT...Inquisition...Orks...Dark Eldar...Harlequins...Sisters...five different FW variant Guard lists...) actually unplayable, most of which really don't need the nerf.

Aside from the self-competitiveness-rating mechanism (which seems too easily abuseable) and the swap-armies mechanism (which always seems to me a shortcut to starting arguments over respectful handling of the other guy's models) any attempt at a set of fair composition rules is going to have to be case-by-case restrictions. I'd suggest the following as a starting point (this isn't by any means absolute/complete, this is based on my prior experience dealing with people trying to run casual tournaments and what things break them):

Quick FAQ:
*If an effect would grant a rerollable 2+ on any roll the reroll is only passed on a 4+.
*Invisibility sets the attacking unit to WS/BS 1 instead of requiring snapshots/hits on 6s.
*All psykers taken as an HQ from any Codex (not Brotherhood of Psykers units, just the HQ psykers) get a Psychic Hood for free.
*Conjuration powers are treated as having 'targeted' the initial point on the battlefield the model is being summoned in on for purposes of denial.

(Note: These are mostly intended as a quick fix to make psykers more interactive/counterable, so armies with masses of minor psykers and Brotherhood of Psykers units (GK, Thousand Sons, Tzeentch Daemons...) are allowed to play with their current Codexes rather than needing significant overhauls or just being outright banned.)


Comp rules for all armies:
*No super-heavy vehicles.
*Two detachments, or one meta-detachment ('decurion') at maximum. A few specific exceptions will be noted elsewhere.
*No more than two psykers. A few specific exceptions will be noted elsewhere.

Space Marines:
*The Gladius Strike Force doesn't grant free transports if you have two core formations. All other effects of the meta-formation remain unchanged.

Dark Angels
*The Lion's Blade Strike Force doesn't grant free transports if you have two core formations. All other effects of the meta-formation remain unchanged.

Deathwatch
*You may take one Deathwatch kill-team formation per other detachment in your army that doesn't count towards your detachment limit.

Grey Knights
*Grey Knight units restricted to specific Sanctic powers (anything that isn't the Librarian, basically) don't count towards your cap on the number of psykers in your army.

Inquisition, Imperial Agents, Talons of the Emperor
*You may not mix the Imperial Agents Inquisition chapter and the Inquisition Codex. One or the other.
*If your Warlord is an Inquisitor you may take as many Inquisitorial Detachments (if you're using the old Inquisition book) or Inquisitorial Representative detachments/Inquisitorial Henchmen Warband formations (if you're using IA) as you like, counting them as one detachment for purposes of these composition restrictions.
*You may take one non-Inquisitorial detachment from Imperial Agents, Null-Maiden Task Force, or Golden Legion Task Force for each other detachment in your army. If your Warlord is not an Inquisitor you may take Inquisitorial Detachments, Inquisitorial Representative Detachments, or Inquisitorial Henchmen Warband formations subject to these same restrictions.
*Otherwise you may take one Inquisitorial Detachment
*Wyrdvane Psyker units taken as part of an Adeptus Astra Telepathica detachment do not count towards your detachment limits.

Imperial Knights
*No. Go away. We know it's a Codex, that doesn't mean it's allowed at a no-superheavies tournament.

Thousand Sons
*Thousand Son and Scarab Occult units do not count against the limit on the number of psykers that may be in your army.

Chaos Daemons
*Pink Horrors don't count against the limit on the number of psykers that may be in your army.
*Be'lakor may not be used.
*The Infernal Tetrad may not be used. (Tentative on this one)

Craftworld Eldar
*Destroyer weapons may not be used. If you want to play Iyanden for fluffy reasons you may treat Wraithcannons as Strength 10 weapons and Wraithguard D-Scythes as Strength 4 weapons with Armourbane and Fleshbane.
*Warlocks or Seer Council units that choose to roll on the Runes of Battle or Sanctic Daemonology tables don't count against your psyker limit.
*You must take at least one Ranger, Guardian, or Storm Guardian unit per Windrider or Warp Spider unit in your army. Windrider units with no more than one scatter laser or shuriken cannon per three models are not subject to this restriction.

Tau
*The Riptide Wing formation may not be used.

Polkadragon wrote:
That is awesome. Thank you for the explanation.

Another step in the process could be that you as a TO just assign these scores by default. Depends if you can trust your players to be really honest about it, I guess.

Much to think about.

It saves you time if you don't have to rate them all yourselves, and it prevents players from accusing you of having a bias. If there is a list that is smurfing, or someone that really doesn't understand what the difference between competitive and casual is, it'll be painfully blatant.

Polkadragon wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Only one vehicle per any type? That means orks can only take one trukk and one BW and dark eldar one venom and one raider? That would completely suck, and these two armies couldn't field any possible lists that survive turn 3.

Specific restritions and army building restrictions are 100% fine, but you shouldn't ban the transports, ban grav guns and limit the dice number in the psychic phase (for example max 10+D6, regardless of the psykers involved) instead. You can ban decurions and formations too, but don't limit standard units, especially transports. Otherwise average or weak armies like tyranids, dark eldar, orks, ecc wouldn't stand a chance just the same.

Thank you for the input; the idea behind the vehicle restriction would be to make Gladius spam impossible, as wel as limit Flyer spam. Do you have any other suggestions as how to implement this?

As far as banning decurions, that makes certain armies just impossible to play, for example Genestealer Cult and Raven Guard to name two.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yarium wrote:
I'm glad you learned that lesson. The real take away from this should be to plan around the person that brings the least "fun" army possible. If you can design a game/mission where even games against that person are fun, then you are likely heading in the right direction.

I've done the following for the last two tournaments I've helped to host, and it's worked FANTASTIC each time. Have your players rank their own competitiveness, and have that rank factor into their score. This gives you a score to start pairing people up with for Game 1, so no matter what happens, people get at least 1 game in against someone with a similar score. So long as you have 8 or more people, it also practically ensures that people can't use the system to "smurf" lower ranked players, because then that player will lose to the higher ranked player when they get the same win/loss ratio. (the more players in the tournament, the better this system becomes at weeding these people out of the prizes)

In this way, Best General truly goes to the person that deserves it, but everyone will still get a good game in. From the past two tournaments I've helped run with it (16 players and 20 players), we didn't have anyone that smurfed that system. People that want to win rank themselves higher, because they see the benefit of doing so, and those players nearly always would rather a game against a similarly powerful opponent. It made it so people weren't afraid to bring out their power lists that they feel chastised for normally bringing, but people also didn't have to worry about playing against power lists. Having a 50/50 split like you described means this system will work PERFECTLY for you!

That's a very interesting system. I'd be interested to see how you implemented this. Care to shed some light on how exactly this calculation goes?

thanks

Want to limit Gladius? Say only one of any sort of formation can be taken.

Banning multiple vehicles is pretty stupid.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also why no Lords Of War? You already banned super heavy stuff.

Went to a barebones tournament a few weeks back and really enjoyed it.

It was simply a stripped back 40k tournament for fun.


1,500 points
1 FOC only
No formations or additions to this.
No lord of war choices.

So essentially you had this to work with:

1-2 HQ
2-6 Troops
0-3 (of each) elite, fast and heavy

Other restrictions were no vehicle squads unless they had less than 33 AV (front+side+rear)

Was just like playing older armies again and really was a good laugh.
Anyone wanting to run a pure competitive list took one look and changed their mind.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

[Snip]

Imperial Knights
*No. Go away. We know it's a Codex, that doesn't mean it's allowed at a no-superheavies tournament.

Thanks for the input!

I just had to LOL at the above remark

 Jackal wrote:
Went to a barebones tournament a few weeks back and really enjoyed it.

It was simply a stripped back 40k tournament for fun.


1,500 points
1 FOC only
No formations or additions to this.
No lord of war choices.

So essentially you had this to work with:

1-2 HQ
2-6 Troops
0-3 (of each) elite, fast and heavy

Other restrictions were no vehicle squads unless they had less than 33 AV (front+side+rear)

Was just like playing older armies again and really was a good laugh.
Anyone wanting to run a pure competitive list took one look and changed their mind.

Again, orks and dark eldar completely crippled with those restrictions

Gents, the responses to this thread have been extremely helpful, much thanks to everyone for this.

Based on all of these responses, my conclusions are:

* It's not possible to completely eliminate all 'powerful' combinations, but that was never the idea. To level the playing field a bit, I'd still enforce restrictions to eliminate the worst excesses (I've modified the original post to reflect this).
* The system of a 'Competitiveness Score' is something to look at further. It won't allow you to isolate the power lists 100%, but I do believe it can generate much fairer draws.

For the tournament, I'd be inclined to work on different angles to achieve the goal.

- Work with varied and multi-dimensional missions to force people to make flexible army lists

- Eliminate the worst excesses in army composition. People will still be able to build powerful lists, but that's okay.

- Ask players to provide their 'Competitiveness score' and also provide different prices for different kind of players.
** Best General: simply put, the player with the most points. Those players that wish to go for this price, probably need to set a high Competitivenes Score for themselves.
** Top Player: or 'most fun to play against' or 'most enjoyable': whatever you want to call it, this is the player that the other players indicated had the most fun playing against, whether its due to his personality or his fluffy list, or both. Those players that wish to go for this price, probably need to set a low Competitivenes Score for themselves (although if you can win this price with a 'killer list', more power to you!). Points for this category are awarded by your opponent after each game.
** Best Painted: nothing new there.
** Wooden Spoon: just because


Hopefully, this will allow for a tournament that can cater for 'power' players and 'fun' players alike.

I want to thank everyone for their contribution and ideas. o7