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.

I always tell new players that at the very least it's a horrible game to try to be competitive at. If that's what someone wants, there are much better avenues. The main thing that pisses me off is when people try to excuse away GW's capability to write rules, saying "it's hard to balance a game this big." How about not charging 50 bucks for a big set of "guidelines" then? It's incredibly deceitful.

JohnHwangDD wrote:
BTW, I'd appreciate if you just refer to me as "John" or "JHDD", rather than as something random. Thanks.

I can't promise that.

Fetterkey wrote:
Wizards bans certain things because they break the game. That's different from my example. To restate: Imagine that there were two gaming stores in your town having a Magic tournament. At one store, they follow the standard rules of Magic. At the other, the organizers decide that they should throw people for a loop and force them to adapt, so they declare that all green spells cost an additional mana for one round, and all red creatures get +1/+1. The first store is obviously better. 40k tournaments work the same way. Tournament organizers shouldn't use scenarios that allow one army to arbitrarily "win" before the game is even played.

I've got mixed feelings on this, (I would just play RDW in the scenario you listed ) MTG and 40k are very different games. What i like about 40k TOs doing this, is that 40k is a wargame, and in war you don't always know what the conditions are gonna be like on the battle field. Is the terrain extremly inhospitable to your army? Is your enemy's main objective to assasinate your commander? I feel this adds a little bit of realism to the game. It is somewhat unfair to the competitors but really they just have to adapt. Adapting to unfavorable circumstances is part of being a good strategist. Perhaps if TOs were required to post detailed information on the tourny they're running, that would solve one of your complaints about 40k tournament gaming?

As far as a gaming store running wierd rules like that for their MTG tournaments, I've seen a few do that. Overall people adapt to it and work around it. I played in a tournament once where each deck was required to have at least one plainswalker, and another one where only one rare card was allowed per deck. I think as long as people know what they're getting into before the game starts, they don't mind. Besides wizards feths their game up all the time without any TO help, (magic 2010 anyone?)

It's not that I completely disagree with you and your original post, its just that I dont think 40k competitive play is totally broken and FUBAR. It could use some tweaking, but it's not a total fail or anything, people seem to like it.

@ Polonius: Yes, but wizards prints completely over powred/broken cards all the time, that they must know are like this, and if said card is black and you play green, then your list is automatically inferior. It seems to me that when they make certain cards, they purposely design them to be a must in every deck. I feel they really havent figured out to balance the power level in magic yet. When I last kept up with the tournament scene, if you were'nt running 1 of 3 different net decks your chances of winning were pretty poor. I'll go back to magic one day and I'll just deal with the BS that comes along with competitive play, that my point it's not perfect but it's still fun.

Norwulf wrote:[
@ Polonius: Yes, but wizards prints completely over powred/broken cards all the time, that they must know are like this, and if said card is black and you play green, then your list is automatically inferior. It seems to me that when they make certain cards, they purposely design them to be a must in every deck. I feel they really havent figured out to balance the power level in magic yet. When I last kept up with the tournament scene, if you were'nt running 1 of 3 different net decks your chances of winning were pretty poor. I'll go back to magic one day and I'll just deal with the BS that comes along with competitive play, that my point it's not perfect but it's still fun.

Ok. I agree, but I dont' see what your point is. I'm not arguing anything about balance or variety of play styles, I was simply saying that both WotC and GW publish over and underpowered rules, but a key difference in play is that Magic has a single "scenario": reduce your opponent to zero life, or run him out of cards, or a few more obscure methods. 40k has all kinds of scenarios, that while fun, aren't anything close to fair. Good tournaments have missions that are more fair to more armies, bad tournaments have things like one RTT I went to where Skimmers simply treated the entire board as dangerous terrain for a game. So, anybody with a skimmer was probably going to lose them all by the end of the game (this was fourth edition). There is no direct analogue in magic. Yes, many magic events have deck construction limits, but those are known ahead of time and generally tend to be pretty even. Rarirty restrictions limit the best cards, but WotC does a good job of making sure each color has solid commons and uncommons. In 40k, the closest analouge would be, say, a limit on how many heavy support choices an army could take. That sounds fair, until you realize armies that some armies really do lean on heavy support more than others. Tau and nids are heavily gimped, while IG, Chaos, and Orks are fine with it.

On a different note, one thing I'd contend is that 40k is becoming more suited for competitive play. Maybe it's because the current rules paradigm is11 years old, maybe it's because they're getting better, but if you look at the 5th edition books, they all feature robust troops choices, and a variety of strong units and builds. They're also far better balanced with regards to elite/fast/heavies all being viable choices.

Yeah, I think GW is trying to balance out their armies more fairly now a days, I think they're doing a better job at balancing than WOTC at this point. My point was someone called magic a game more suited to being competitive and I think its more unbalanced and fethed up than 40k. So obviously 40k compitions having problems rules-wise is not too big a deal.

I think if you wanna play something competitvely you gotta realise life isn't fair, especially when someone's ego is on the line, so we can complain about it or work around it. I think TOs should just follow the rulebook on mission scenarios, (there's 3 in my copy) and that way they have some clear rules on it. But I would totally play in a tournament with some goofy skimmers count as in difficult terrain rule. I'd try my best and work around it. If I lost, I would take comfort in the fact that I was at a severe disadvantage.

Okay, lets think objectivly now, fetterkey doesnt think the way current 40k rules are, can work for competitive play. What can we do about it? Not much. But I have heard some good suggestions here as to how a few things could be fixed.
1. post what kind of scenarios/ rules will be in effect, somewhere that people can see them in advance before the tournament starts.
2.use less goofy/unfair rules in tournaments

Norwulf wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:I spend up to $300 on 40k per year on 40k. That's not even enough to cover a weekly FNM Booster Draft. MtG is clearly more expensive than 40k.

Are you being sarcastic? or Agreeing with me?

No.


____

It's simply a datum.

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Norwulf wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:I spend up to $300 on 40k per year on 40k. That's not even enough to cover a weekly FNM Booster Draft. MtG is clearly more expensive than 40k.

Are you being sarcastic? or Agreeing with me?

No.

I have no idea what you said there.