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I'm thinking of trying to run an alternative format 40k event at adepticon, but I'm not sure if there'd be any interest.

I'd provide pre-made units from a number of armies (pretty much any but tyranids). The players (8, probably) would then 'draft' units, kind of like a MtG draft, taking turns picking from the available choices. They'd then get a few minutes to construct a 1500 (single FOC) list from these choices (with everything you draft counting as battle brothers / a single army for the event), and then play a 3 round tournament. Army-specific rules would only apply as relevant, so a guard commander couldn't give orders to a dire avenger, but could order about an infantry platoon that was drafted by the same player.

This would be scheduled for the Friday of the con, so an option for those who didn't make the championship finals.

Thoughts? Would this interest you if you didn't make the championships?

So you'd have all the models that are eligible to be drafted there ready for people to use?

It sounds like fun to me. As long as the unit pool has a nice depth of synergies and styles to really encourage the dual strategy of building to your plan while trying to deprive your opponents of key units they are building towards.

I think it's an idea that has potential, but it's probably going to take a lot of work. Two issues I can see:

1) Getting the models is going to be hard, unless your personal collection is really that big. You need people who are willing to loan out their models to complete strangers, and you need to make sure everything stays organized and gets back to its owner after the event is over. And if you want proper diversity of models it's going to be even harder.

2) Reaching the point total is going to be a pain. MTG doesn't have this problem, any random 40 cards is a legal deck and the only question is which 40 you will play. But in 40k you have to get 1500 points out of a bunch of random fixed-price increments. So you'll probably have a lot of games with 1490 points vs. 1405 points just because one player couldn't fit in an entire additional unit and couldn't add any upgrades to their existing units. You'll at least need to give more than a few minutes for army construction and be sure to let people draft plenty of excess models so they can arrange everything to at least get close to the point limit and not be at a disadvantage before the game even begins.

Also, I think to make this work you should emphasize the thing that makes MTG drafts so much fun: trying to do the best you can with very limited resources. For example, you can draft good removal spells, but you'll be stuck with whatever second-tier (or worse) creatures are left after everyone else takes the best ones. Everyone can figure out how to win with a Wave Serpent or drop pod full of melta, but what do you do when the best anti-tank you have is a few random melta bombs on sergeants? So I'd break the pool of units into "rarity" levels:

Rare (one per player): powerful tournament-level units. These are clear winners that you'll want to take with your first pick and they will likely be the focus of your army.

Uncommon (2-3 per player): average units. For example, a tactical squad with appropriate weapon upgrades. They aren't the best, but at least they function properly.

Common (unlimited per player): garbage units. For example, an IG veteran squad with a flamer, a sniper rifle, and a melta gun. They suck, you hate them, but you can't build a whole army without them so you'd better figure out how to get as much as you can out of them.

And to make it really interesting you should try to find some really obscure stuff to provide. Everyone knows how to evaluate a tactical squad, but what about that weird FW cargo loader Sentinel or some random special character most people don't remember? Or maybe even invent your own units that nobody has seen before? This gives a big reward to the players who can correctly evaluate the unusual stuff and find value in unexpected places instead of just picking the consensus "best units". For example, the cargo loader Sentinel sucks until you realize that it's the only cheap unit still available and your final list is otherwise only going to be 1450 points.

1500 pt of draft?

Here's what I would do....

You have the players bring 1000 points of their own army, a single CAD. You'll group the drafts in numbers no more than 8.

On the day of the draft, there are new-in-box units (wrapped in generic boxes) in the center of each group of 8, purchased by their entry fees.

Then in a white-elephant fashion:

THE GAME:

1. Each guest who wishes to participate must contribute a gift. Everyone sits or stands in roughly a circle around the pile of gifts.
2. Prepare slips of paper equal to the number of gifts with clearly written numbers. Be sure to distinguish 6 from 9, 1 from 7. Each participating guest draws a number and holds onto that slip of paper.
3. On the first turn, the guest with paper slip #1 chooses a gift, opens it, and all admire it.
4. On the second turn, the guest with paper slip #2 gets the choice of "stealing" any unwrapped gift (#1's) or choosing a wrapped one. If #2 steals #1's gift, then #1 must open a wrapped gift.
5. On the third turn, the guest with paper slip #3 gets the choice of "stealing" any unwrapped gift (#1's or #2's) or choosing a wrapped one.


The game continues based on the following:

1. If a gift is stolen from you, you can steal a gift (within limits, described below), or open a wrapped one.
2. The turn proceeds until a wrapped gift is chosen.
3. A gift cannot be immediately stolen back from the guest who just stole it.
4. The fourth "owner" of a gift gets to keep it. The gift is "dead" after it has been stolen three times.
5. "Owners" of "live" gifts must keep them visible and hold them up when requested.
6. The gift exchange ends when the last wrapped gift is opened. Usually, guests are encouraged to perpetuate the gift stealing as long as there are "live" gifts, but no one is obligated to do this.


The players then may assemble their models (god help them if they got a box of something fiddley). Or the models could be pre-assembled.

The unit they end up with, is added to CAD detachement as a battle brother.

The players get to keep a model(s) and play a weird game.

What do you think?

 doktor_g wrote:
What do you think?

Sounds like something that hardly anyone is going to be interested in doing. If you have to rush through assembling everything right before the game then you're going to ruin the models and they're all going to end up in the trash after the game is over. So who is going to want to waste money on funding a game like that?

I think it could work, but I think I would consider a few things.

1.). I might treat it more like a fantasy football draft than an MTG draft. So players have slots to draft for like 1-3 hq, 2-6 troops etc. Have players pick units in a snake draft order (the person selecting last in each round, selects first in the next.

2.) have units pre-equipped, and with fairly easy points costs. Then have players select more points than they can use (based on the point totals of the units make it such that every player ends up with a minimum number of points, say 2000.) This helps with the points cost issues, because players can have more units to work with.

3.) have more units than players will draft, so that the last picks don't just get stuck with things. In addition these units could be used to potentially trade down, if a player needs to make points work.

Responses:

1) Peregrin: models are not an issue. I will provide all of them. Between me and a friend, we've got eldar, tau, necrons, marines, guard, orks, daemons, csm, grey knights, sisters, imperial knights... all painted and ready to go.

2) Breng77: Yeah, I was thinking of a FF snake draft for actual implementation, and also with easy-to-work-with point costs.

I was thinking of doing it such that there were multiple semi-equivalent picks of different types of things.


- a few big fatties - imperial knight, wraithknight, dreadknight, riptide(knight), lord of change

- a few deathstarish units - nob bikers, paladins, etc.

- some big troop picks - infantry platoon, 30 ork boyz, 20 kroot

- some standard troop picks - 10 dire avengers, 10 necrons

- some small troop picks - 3 nurglings, 3 jetbikes

- some transports

- other units

There will be more than are required to play with to pick from.

So, I gave this a shot at Adepticon. Packed 126 different units up and set them out to be drafted. My event sold out, not hard to do at a con of over 1000, when you have only eight slots to fill. But everyone showed up, and it worked out well. Everyone present claimed to have had a great time.

If anyone is interested, I've got some google docs shared that provide more detail:

Draft Cheatsheets, and final draft order

The game packet, including missions and a couple of extra rules to make things flow.

PDF of Event rules from Adepticon website

Details on the draftable units:
Astra Militarum
Chaos Daemons
Chaos Space Marines
Eldar
Necrons
Orks
Space Marines
Tau
Other

This is a seriously cool idea, I'm going to steal this and try a similar format (albeit much smaller scale).

Was it difficult to balance points per army once all of the units were assigned per person?

Out of curiosity, what kind of armies ended up being fielded? Who won overall? What would you change next year?. The concept seems really cool, does it need any refinement?

This is a flippin awesome idea.

Somewhat limited by the fact that the TO has to have all the models available for people to use however.

 lajollagrad wrote:
This is a flippin awesome idea.

Somewhat limited by the fact that the TO has to have all the models available for people to use however.

If you wanted to do it at your FLGS, I’m sure you could get people to loan a couple of units each to the pool. People with multiple armies could help out a bit extra. Your pool would only be a diverse as what you have locally, but still probably better then a single person trying to run it.

clamclaw wrote:Was it difficult to balance points per army once all of the units were assigned per person?

They drafted units, and then made 1750 lists with those units. No one complained that they couldn't make points. There were several low-point units available for drafting, and so everyone seemed to try and get one or two of those to fill space when their other points were gone.

Nevelon wrote:Out of curiosity, what kind of armies ended up being fielded?

I was actually surprised that more people didn't try and find obvious synergies. There were a handful of units that worked really well with other units. The Lord Commissar and Senior Officer with either guard platoon. The Tau Commander w/ marker drones and/or the pathfinders, with the other tau units, the necron cryptek with any number of the reanimation units, the chaos lord of slaanesh who would make the noise marines objective-secured scoring, and so on. A couple of those things ended up together, but almost as an afterthought. I also thought players might try and draft into a theme - for example, going infantry horde by drafting the guard platoon, and the big units of orks, kroot, daemons, and/or necrons.

Instead, there was more of a 'best available' approach, with a couple of runs on things that people thought were going too fast (kinda like in a Fantasy Football draft, where two people take kickers, and then everyone else panics and takes a kicker, even though they're kickers.)

Someone tooks pics of it, http://www.feedyournerd.com/greggles-tabletop/adepticon-2015-30k-highlander-classic-draft-combat-patrol-titans - draft photos are about halfway down the page. The first pics are pre-drafting, where you can see what is available. The last few pics (with models on boards) are the armies as drafted.

Who won overall?

Drafter in position 2. I don't have the sheets with the names on at the moment. He had the wraithknight and unit of wraithguard, among other things. I think maybe also the howling banshees, which got to ride in a land raider...

What would you change next year?. The concept seems really cool, does it need any refinement?

Not a lot, really. It seemed to work pretty well. Maybe changing up the missions, I kept those deliberately simple as I figured people would have more than enough to remember with the number of probably unfamiliar units they'd be using.

 Redbeard wrote:
I think maybe also the howling banshees, which got to ride in a land raider...

... I wish I could have watched that play out.

Yeah, give them an assault vehicle and all of a sudden they're not a horrible unit. They're not great, but they'll do some damage.

This looked amazing all spread out, and it was exciting watching a bit of the draft before my round started in Highlander.

I'm definitely signing up for this next year if you run it.

It was also cool meeting Mrs. Redbeard, after years of seeing her knitted handiworks and occasionally hearing of your motorcycle adventures and such.

I was very intrigued by this when you first posted. Glad it went so well.

 Mannahnin wrote:
This looked amazing all spread out, and it was exciting watching a bit of the draft before my round started in Highlander.

I'm definitely signing up for this next year if you run it.

It was also cool meeting Mrs. Redbeard, after years of seeing her knitted handiworks and occasionally hearing of your motorcycle adventures and such.

Same as Ragnar, once I saw the line up I was really sad I didn't get to play.
If you do it again, I'm definitely jumping on this.

This looks like it was a great time! I'd have very much enjoyed playing :-)

Quick thoughts, since I'm also kind of a MtG design junkie;

#1 - Draft "whole units", with a few specific price points. So list the points next to the model when it's up for draft, but try to keep everything to a few specific points; 50 points, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400 sounds right. This both allows players who are unfamiliar with everything to know how expensive a unit is as they "draft" them. The restrictions will breed creativity, since the units will now be pre-built and can't be adjusted to fit.

#2 - Separate into "army packs". Players must pick from a table of a whole army first, but then "pass" the rest of that army to the next person (done by having to pick from the army next to it). Each army "pack" should have 12 choices. They do not need to total up to the same amounts.

#3 - Devise a rarity structure. Some units, like Knights, are rare and you might only have 1 or 2 in the draft. Other units, like Ork Boys, appear 3 or 4 times! This helps you bank on certain units "wheeling" (you can be pretty sure someone else will steal the Knight before you do, but if there's 4 units of Ork Boyz, you can probably bank on there being at least 1 left when the army comes back around to you).

#4 - Let players modify their armies inbetween games from whatever they've drafted. It gives players a chance to cut models that vastly underperformed in game 1, or adjust for an unseen weakness in game 1 or game 2.