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The wargaming community in Warhammer 40,000 typically seems split between a pair of ideologies. The "fluff/casual/non-competitive" type players, and the "meta/competitive/power-gamer". I use so many words because there is so often moralistic implications to the language people use to refer to each other, and the two camps on Dakka so commonly fall into black and white camps and invent new terms to attempt to disparage what they see as the other group.

I'm not here to do that. I'm here to look at philosophy, and the enjoyment we get out of wargaming. Because, ultimately, the fact that we purchase extremely expensive plastic toys, build and paint them for hours on end, then drive out to a common location with other human beings present and, for several hours at a time, participate in a collaborative/competitive simulation of our toys fighting each other in 2019 is fething BONKERS.

But we do it. and despite prevailing opinion of some of the loudest folks on dakka, we do seem to enjoy it.

I would argue that the enjoyment that comes out of Wargaming comes from two contradictory sources, and my hope here is to possibly convince or at least provoke a discussion about the idea that the more these contradictory sources of enjoyment are allowed to conflict, the less the emotional high from playing wargames will become, and the more bitterness and resentment will start to creep in.

The first source of enjoyment I would propose is what I'll call "simulatory enjoyment." The original kind of happiness that led to the popularity of wargames outside of trying to train people to be good military commanders, it's the enjoyment of watching a simulated experience that typically you only see in your imagination. It's why you play wargames with painted miniatures instead of cardboard tokens which would be, among other things, free. Just like the satisfaction of building a model train and watching it ride around on a track like trains do, it's building and painting your toy soldiers and watching them fight, like soldiers do. The key though, is maintaining the simulation as closely as possible to how it should look, were you actually watching a miniature battle unfold. Anything that breaks the illusion reduces the fun, and if you know the outcome for sure, it's definitely not as interesting. Part of the enjoyment is in the random, the unexpected, the fun is not to know.

The second source is what I'd call "competitive enjoyment." It's the satisfaction of proving that you were better in something where you had an even chance to succeed. And not just that, it's the joy of knowing that out of everyone there, you were the best.

You can see how these philosophies naturally conflict, and how, at some level, almost every single human being participating in the wargaming hobby gleans some happiness from column A, and some from column B. But randomness from simulatory enjoyment directly cancels out the satisfaction of competitive enjoyment, and meta-analysis from competitive enjoyment pulls the curtain back on the illusion of a miniature military force that contributes to simulatory enjoyment.

And the fact that this is a game played with an opponent who, most likely, falls in a somewhat different place on the scale of enjoyment priority to you, it's pretty obvious to see where the resentment and moralizing comes in. It's easy for a crowd of simulation-focused wargamers to exclude someone looking for competitive enjoyment, and it's easy for a crowd of competitive wargamers to deny someone who wants a fun simulation from experiencing that.

And from one extreme, some aspects of the other are always there to tempt you to mix your fun. After all, isn't a story better if the good guys win? And doesn't it take away some of the sting of a loss in a competition if you can take a little of that responsibility on the dice, or some advantage you can imagine yourself morally superior for not taking advantage of?

I am of the opinion that typically, it's one type of enjoyment that initially draws a player into the wargaming hobby, but eventually, external factors draw them towards more and more of a middle ground. Maybe someone starts out and buys a tight, top tier competitive army and gets into tournaments, but the cost of models or a slight break causes the meta to shift around them, and they start to grumble about how the rules were better in the edition they started in, or newer competitive players are using cheap tricks to win they would've never taken advantage of. Or maybe someone starts out just buying things for enjoyment and aesthetics, but they find that the rules don't support the imagined exploits of the soldiers they had in their head, and they start seeking out tactics articles and batreps to make the best of the collection they have...and maybe the next time they buy something they'll make sure it appeared in a few competitive tournament winning lists first.

Maybe mixing your different kinds of fun works well for you. For me, it caused a lot of conflict, resentment of other people, and greatly reduced the fun I found I was having overall playing wargames. Nowadays I take one of two mental approaches when playing a game:

1) There is nothing but yourself.

I developed this approach towards my competitive games by hanging out with a lot of people who like competitive poker. Despite poker being one of those games most associated with random chance, among its competitive community, talking about luck is almost a taboo. The players understand they're participating in a random gamble, but they purposefully disassociate themselves and the games they play from all external factors. The move that gives you more than a 50% chance of victory, statistically, is the correct move, whether you win the hand or not. And the move that statistically shouldn't work was a mistake, whether it worked out for you or not.

Allow yourself absolutely no excuses, and imagine that the outcome of the game is completely determined on your decisions both when making your list and playing the mission. When you win, you won. when you lost (and this is the hard part) YOU lost.

Not your codex.

Not your list to your opponent's list.

Not the dice.

YOU lost.

This is, to be clear, a fantasy. But it is the fantasy that maximises your odds of learning from your mistakes and doing better next time, and isn't that the essence of competitive enjoyment?

2) Play for the tie.

When I play a game to simulate a fun scenario (I hate the term "Casual" because this takes far, far more effort on my part) I completely change the objective of the game in my mind from "win" to "make the game as close as it is humanly possible to make it." I treat the relationship between myself and my opponent more like I treat the relationship between myself and my players in an RPG, where I understand that I am playing an adversarial role, but I'm not, at the end of the day, JUST trying to win. Because the point isn't to win, the point is to maintain narrative tension for as long as possible, and a perfect scenario is one that takes the players straight down to the wire and requires the maximum effort to overcome.

This is really not easy. In particular it is just incredibly difficult to find someone who is actually and honestly working towards that same goal when constructing a scenario, and not trying to maximise their chances of winning during the construction of the mission in the same way they might when constructing a list.

But there is also something kind of liberating about finally coming to an agreement with an opponent and seeing a unit or an army you've been so continually frustrated with perform the way you think they should on the tabletop. That's what keeps me coming back and trying again with the narrative style scenarios. And the more I do it, the better I get at constructing scenarios that make for enjoyable simulations.

And maybe none of that works for you. Maybe you just don't want to go through the effort of making your a whole RPG-style scenario for every game you want to play, but you also just want to throw down your minis and see how it goes, and it doesn't really bother you if someone is more competitive with their listbulding than you are. I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks for reading my super long ass pointless ramble!

I think you are overthinking it.

Alternatively, you could agree with your opponent what sort of game you want today, and avoid the conflict.

We're (mostly) adults playing with expensive toys: is it too much to ask to talk first so you both get a win-win by playing to the same objective, whether it be the victory or the narrative that you seek on that occasion?

You mean united? Because selling to both really seems to be working for them.

Interesting discussion points.
Everyone is different and everyone has different frames of reference for enjoyment.

I think the trick is aiming to be competent in a competition, but not letting yourself get consumed by the competitive side of you. And its just accepting that you will sometimes loose and that's ok too and without sounding cliché, its a learning experience.

In a fairly recent game I noticed I got angry when I was just getting absolutely dismal luck. I think in essence you tactically plan your manoeuvres based on average luck.
I would go further and say conservative approach for playing to below average luck is the safer option and is probably the more common.

Its important to say that a high risk, high reward situation wins or looses you the game and that can be fun also. The hail mary, the charge of the rohirim, throwing one little guy at an incoming horde and watching him hold long enough to buy time, whatever it is, Is appealing to us as strategists. This is echoed through history and most of the outrageous battles lost are due to a gambit paying off I.E. Hannibal crossing the alps on foot rather than going by sea, Alexanders massed cavalry right flank charge at Gaugamela etc. I played risk with my friends and to this day we remember when 3 of my dudes held back a 20+ strong force. It was absolutely epic and we still bring it up from time to time.

It's just a game. I Could see my opponent could tell my anger vibe shot up. I brought a fluffy sub par list to a friendly teaching game to give the guy an easy win but I still got pissed when the dice weren't doing average. Why? We weren't playing for stakes. It wasn't even competitive. That realisation humbled me. It was a weird imbedded competitiveness and I acted like a kid. I think the reason was I put a lot of time and effort in my models so I wanted them to win. Its silly really. The weird thing is I have never been like that with boxing. I lost my cool once or twice very early on and learned a valuable lesson about being humble straight away. Im surprised the experience didn't have applications in other circumstances regarding games.

I've been approaching the game from a more laid back perspectives and whilst making sure I stay competent I wont let myself get ultra competitive. I have a buddy of mine and he would literary flip the board when we played settlers of catan when he started to loose. A grown ass 40 something year old, intelligent doing well for himself kinda guy. We can no longer play catan with him. By his nature he is just way too competitive. Some people are just like that and unless they realise they need to chill out themselves there's not a lot you can do.

I think the main issue is that 40K is a very loosely (and somewhat poorly) designed game. The intent of the company is to make money selling models - something they do very well regardless of how the end consumer plays the game.

The result is that the gamers who play 40K, etc. try too hard to see themselves as "one community" when they're really not. Some people play the game for casual fun, some people play it for competitive, close fought games, some people view it as a mathematical challenge to trounce their opponent mercilessly, etc.

The problem is when GW listens to one group over another...the other groups occasionally end up having their games changed by dint of using the same general rules set. The only time this really becomes an issue is with pick-up games. The vast chasm of "strength" in army lists at opposite ends of this spectrum make it exceedingly hard to find a casual pick-up game. The wide-eyed new gamer with his starter box may well never touch a model again after a tournament champion beats him mercilessly and wipes him off the table in a turn.

Likewise the tournament champion may view a casual or thematic list as a massive waste of time (when he should be practicing for "hard core" tournament games). Games Workshop has no vested interest in a beautifully balanced, nuanced, perfectly executed game. That means more money, more people, more time, more work. The game simply has to be "good enough" to sell to the masses...and it's proving to be so.

Games Workshop benefits either way. Hot, new, competitive models are scooped up by the thousands when they change the tournament meta. Cool, underperforming units are picked up regardless by casual players who value the theme or aesthetic of their armies.

The enjoyment of the game is up to the players, but 40K, more than most other games really suffers from a lack of acceptance that players can decide how fun the game is...it's in their hands. I've never seen a gaming community more averse to house rules, list modification, or scenario creation than the 40K community. Is your codex/army overpowering vs. the army your best friend collects? Well, fix it. Don't max out your best units. It's up to you to create a fun and engaging gaming experience with your opponent.

Regarding the above mentions of unhappiness - I've been struggling a ton lately. My life is in a bad place more or less, so if my dice abandon me in a game of 40K (something I hope serves as a pleasant distraction from everything else) it's like being kicked when I'm down. So I've taken to playing less, and hosting more. I'm more than happy to set up a table, bake some pizza and bring some snacks/drinks, etc. I feel myself get grumpy (not as a result of my opponent beating the gak out of me, but rather my dice failing me completely and then subsequently getting wiped off the table). I acknowledge it, but I need someone who's sarcastic and wise-ass across the table from me to keep me in the game. When I roll bs, I need a buddy who laughs and admits it was bs. The more nice/sincere my opponent is - whilst beating me - the more frustrating it can be for me.

I need someone who calls it like it is, their luck or my luck.

I would agree with most of your points. I started out playing 15mm Napoleonics nearly forty (gah I'm old) years ago. Though the format wasn't competitive we tied it to a map based campaign using Kevin Zucker's games and we played several games a week with mountains of passion. Both for the spectacle of hundreds perhaps thousands of painted models slugging it out and for who was "winning" the campaign.

We played AT, Epic, and Rogue Trader for years in much the same way. I had never heard of a 40k tournament until 3ed. Showed up with Sisters, went 5-0, took first, and won a box of Seraphim for winning a 32 player tourney.... Completely changed the way my circle of gamer friends played wargames for the next ten years. If it wasn't competitive focused, as in for a tourney or at a tourney, we didn't play.

At some point we started to peal off from this looking for balance in our games. Not rules or list balance, but balancing the point of the games we were playing. Campaigns came back, but we still play at or host tournaments. I enjoy it more that way. Mostly though I am looking for the camraderie of a fun game when and wherever I get the chance. I travel a lot for work and always bring my army, troll whatever LGS's within an hour of the hotel and look for games against whoever is willing.

I will play whatever "kind" of game my new friend is looking for. I can play my list as competitive as it can be, or go full narrative with the same list even if it mean's units have to create their own objectives to keep the game a game. I like winning, but sometimes its more fun to try and keep the issue in doubt until turn five. I say that from both sides of the win/loss coin. If I can keep my overmatched army in the hunt till turn five I am happy. If it goes south earlier I may just decide that holding a specific building is my armies new objective, or killing just one specific character. If my opponent is up for it, tabling them turn two is always fun. Though if I am only going to get one game in that night I will likely have more fun simply going for a turn five win.

The point is to play the game. I get more bang for the buck if the game goes five+ turns and entertains me for 2 1/2 hours than if its over in 30 minutes. Sadly that wasn't something I knew for a shameful portion of my gaming career.

the_scotsman wrote:
You can see how these philosophies naturally conflict

I really can't. There is nothing preventing a game from being balanced and well designed such that the overlap between competitive choices and reasonable narrative events on the table is essentially 100%. The conflict only comes when you have incompetent rule authors like the people GW employs and the game is an unbalanced mess full of anti-fluffy rules mistakes to exploit. Rather than blame the players for having conflicting goals we should blame the marketing-driven game manufacturers who shovel out a mediocre product to milk the cash cow as fast as possible, the CAAC s who insist that "BEER AND PRETZELS FORGE A NARRATIVE" is the only way to play and take pride in publishing poorly balanced rules as a means of virtue signalling about how they dislike competitive play, etc.

But randomness from simulatory enjoyment directly cancels out the satisfaction of competitive enjoyment, and meta-analysis from competitive enjoyment pulls the curtain back on the illusion of a miniature military force that contributes to simulatory enjoyment.

That's not how it works at all. Randomness is not an inherent requirement of a "simulation" game, and randomness can improve competitive play by testing your ability to react to a changing situation. And really, the sort of randomness that is bad for competitive play is also bad for the simulation/narrative approach. Stuff like rolling to see what psychic powers you have, random mission objectives that change every turn, etc, replace the coherent story of a narrative-driven game with passively watching what the D6 is going to do. It's the sort of cheap surprise that you only have to resort to when your game has the strategic depth of a puddle. If you can't have interesting exchanges of move and counter move where surprises come from superior execution of a deceptive strategy the only thing left to you is making a bunch of D6 tables and FORGING A NARRATIVE about the one time you rolled a bunch of 6s and killed the enemy leader in one shot. Zero focus goes on the in-universe events of the battle or on the player decisions that led to those events, all of the focus is on what numbers each player rolled on the D6s. And that's the exact opposite of a good simulation/narrative game.

2) Play for the tie.

I somewhat agree. Good scenario design, whether for competitive or narrative play, does require acting as a neutral party and making the scenario rules as balanced as possible. But once the game begins? no. Trying to treat it like a game of D&D, where you're actively manipulating the rules to keep the result in doubt, leads to absurdity like "forgetting" to shoot with a unit because otherwise you'd gain too much of an advantage. At some point the natural conclusion of player choices is that one player gains an advantage and wins, and trying to prevent that from happening is unlikely to produce anything resembling a satisfying result.

As a matter of fact, the biggest games will be the ones that successfully sell to both camps, pretty much by definition. At a certain point in the life cycle of any business, the only way to continue growing is to expand your audience. This often means making certain changes about your products and branding to capture new types of customers. For die-hard fans that can look a lot like "selling out".

It's not all bad though. A bigger miniatures company with more resources at their disposal can mean higher quality kits due to economies of scale. It can also lead to a greater variety of products and a larger player base (easier to find games). All of these things are good for the consumer.

But of course it's not easy for a company to balance these things and there is always the risk of alienating existing customers in favor of new ones. Whether or not a company like GW has succeeded in walking that line is ultimately going to be up to the individual.

 Peregrine wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
You can see how these philosophies naturally conflict

I really can't. There is nothing preventing a game from being balanced and well designed such that the overlap between competitive choices and reasonable narrative events on the table is essentially 100%. The conflict only comes when you have incompetent rule authors like the people GW employs and the game is an unbalanced mess full of anti-fluffy rules mistakes to exploit. Rather than blame the players for having conflicting goals we should blame the marketing-driven game manufacturers who shovel out a mediocre product to milk the cash cow as fast as possible, the CAAC s who insist that "BEER AND PRETZELS FORGE A NARRATIVE" is the only way to play and take pride in publishing poorly balanced rules as a means of virtue signalling about how they dislike competitive play, etc.

But randomness from simulatory enjoyment directly cancels out the satisfaction of competitive enjoyment, and meta-analysis from competitive enjoyment pulls the curtain back on the illusion of a miniature military force that contributes to simulatory enjoyment.

Umm what????????? There is nothing wrong with casual non competitive playing of the game. Some people suck at that aspect of the hobby, it stresses them out so they just want to roll some dice and chill. To suggest that doesn't actually exists and is a virtue signalling construct is a bit over the top. I have people at my club that just don't have that competitive streak in them for 40k so they want to roll some dice and get a bit of social time talking about fluff and make up a story for the game etc.

The only people that truly moan about the rules and bang on about it are the very competitive types that just want their lists to win and don't want to buy another FOTM army for that period. Anybody that enjoys playing for the sake of playing doesn't really care I don't think and people like are also part of the hobby.

 Argive wrote:
Umm what????????? There is nothing wrong with casual non competitive playing of the game. Some people suck at that aspect of the hobby, it stresses them out so they just want to roll some dice and chill. To suggest that doesn't actually exists and is a virtue signalling construct is a bit over the top. I have people at my club that just don't have that competitive streak in them for 40k so they want to roll some dice and get a bit of social time talking about fluff and make up a story for the game etc.

The only people that truly moan about the rules and bang on about it are the very competitive types that just want their lists to win and don't want to buy another FOTM army for that period. Anybody that enjoys playing for the sake of playing doesn't really care I don't think and people like are also part of the hobby.

There is nothing wrong with playing non-competitively. What I am objecting to there is a certain group of people, some of them employed by GW as rule authors, who have this smug attitude that casual play is morally superior and anyone who plays more competitively than they do is a TFG who doesn't understand how to have fun. The virtue signalling is when they take pride in the fact that the rules are badly designed and/or poorly balanced, as if the worse the rules are the stronger their commitment to playing non-competitively is.

I see . I'm not sure where you are getting that angle from unfortunately. The matched play rules and FAQ are far from perfect for sure. I'm not sure there is any agenda regarding that.

I think its just a case of poor planing and some incompetence I.E. glaring copy and paste errors that a schoolboy ripping off his friends essay learns by the time they finish school.

Allow me to play the devils advocate: maybe they do want their game to be played casually and don't want anything to do with competitive play and they honestly believe that it is better for their brand/product/game in the long run. Maybe they see how well D&D is doing and they want to move towards that direction. Surely that's their right as a business? if it fails it fails but its their call.

I can say I haven't watched any interviews with the creators/writers really so I cant comment based on any facts.

 Peregrine wrote:
That's not how it works at all. Randomness is not an inherent requirement of a "simulation" game

I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
That's not how it works at all. Randomness is not an inherent requirement of a "simulation" game

I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

Diplomacy

I'm not familiar with that; A one-word answer isn't helpful to me, I'm afraid.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
That's not how it works at all. Randomness is not an inherent requirement of a "simulation" game

I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

Diplomacy

As if this isn't massively influenced by public opinion and money swinging around that are both well outside the control of most people.

Sometimes I find that the games where not playing completely competitively results in unhappiness are the games where winning or losing is really the only thing of note that happens during the session. So when you lose there's not much justification for the time you just spent as it was just moving models around and throwing dice.

This has about 60% to do with the opponent/atmosphere while playing, and 40% to do with the game's mechanics. Too many games are either mindless dice chuckers, or force the players to spend more time tracking constant eratta or rules spread across multiple sources than actually playing.

Lately, I have been finding the most pleasure in indie titles with lighter rules than with the big name titles. Games where I can focus on the experience, rather than facilitating the game to flow satisfactorily or towards specific win-lose situations. I really like games like Song of Blades and Heroes lately where you use formulas to create your own models and stats from scratch, but where at the same time right in bold print at the start of the creation rules it says "Formulas are no substitute for common sense and do NOT guarantee game balance".

Also, people need to remember that tabletop wargames tell stories just like tabletop RPG's. Someone has to lose, it's just the nature of the beast. But that does not mean interesting occurrences can happen in those games that are not ties to the winning or losing condition at the end. Unfortunately, that is entirely in the hands of BOTH players involved, both before and after a game. Hardcore players cannot whine that they had to "suffer" a more casual opponent who was not motivated as much by winning, if lack of familiarity with their opponent caused that unbalanced matchup.

The same can be had the other way. I, as a much more casual gamer, would never put myself in the situations involved in a hardcore tournament, as it would lead me to unsatisfactory situations that are not the fault of the other players, but myself for demanding something that is not towards my line of thinking to be bent to satisfy me. I have had games at tournaments before where the other player had no interest in connecting or (barely even speaking) with me throughout the whole game, and stupid me for being there in their little boring-arse rodeo..

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
That's not how it works at all. Randomness is not an inherent requirement of a "simulation" game

I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

Diplomacy

As if this isn't massively influenced by public opinion and money swinging around that are both well outside the control of most people.

Err, what? They're talking about the classic game Diplomacy which has no random element whatsoever. Give it a try if you have too many friends and need to trim the list a bit.

the_scotsman wrote:

I am of the opinion that typically, it's one type of enjoyment that initially draws a player into the wargaming hobby, but eventually, external factors draw them towards more and more of a middle ground. Maybe someone starts out and buys a tight, top tier competitive army and gets into tournaments, but the cost of models or a slight break causes the meta to shift around them, and they start to grumble about how the rules were better in the edition they started in, or newer competitive players are using cheap tricks to win they would've never taken advantage of. Or maybe someone starts out just buying things for enjoyment and aesthetics, but they find that the rules don't support the imagined exploits of the soldiers they had in their head, and they start seeking out tactics articles and batreps to make the best of the collection they have...and maybe the next time they buy something they'll make sure it appeared in a few competitive tournament winning lists first.

I can only speak for myself, but for me; big fat nope.

I started not caring about the crunch, I still don't care about the crunch, I never have cared about the crunch and I in fact know nothing of the crunch.

To be fair, if lord_blackfang had actually explained what he was meaning, YeOldSaltPotato wouldn't have made that mistake. I am aware of the game, but not that it has no random element. Also, is Diplomacy a wargame?

However, it does have hidden information in that generally it's not being played by telepaths. In contrast, a miniatures game makes explicit all sorts of information that isn't usually available to a battlefield commander - the lay of the land, the disposition and location of the enemy (and of your own troops, for that matter), etc. Take random movement. Of course units of soldiers don't "really" move in such a random fashion (plenty of Napoleonic rulesets use old rill manuals to calculate move rates), but the rules do that to represent minor changes in ground that a tabletop at 1:1000 or less can't depict, such as muddy patches, small streams, boulders, rabbit holes, etc. Just marking a section of the board as "difficult ground" defeats the point, because now you know ahead of time what it's like and you're back to precise knowledge again.

 Excommunicatus wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

I am of the opinion that typically, it's one type of enjoyment that initially draws a player into the wargaming hobby, but eventually, external factors draw them towards more and more of a middle ground. Maybe someone starts out and buys a tight, top tier competitive army and gets into tournaments, but the cost of models or a slight break causes the meta to shift around them, and they start to grumble about how the rules were better in the edition they started in, or newer competitive players are using cheap tricks to win they would've never taken advantage of. Or maybe someone starts out just buying things for enjoyment and aesthetics, but they find that the rules don't support the imagined exploits of the soldiers they had in their head, and they start seeking out tactics articles and batreps to make the best of the collection they have...and maybe the next time they buy something they'll make sure it appeared in a few competitive tournament winning lists first.

I can only speak for myself, but for me; big fat nope.

I started not caring about the crunch, I still don't care about the crunch, I never have cared about the crunch and I in fact know nothing of the crunch.

 Peregrine wrote:
I WILL DROWN YOU IN THE CRUNCH!!!!!!

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
That's not how it works at all. Randomness is not an inherent requirement of a "simulation" game

I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is nothing but events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants.

it isn't random, but it also is completely blind and inherently designed to be as blinded as humanly possible.

iiiiiiiiit is also pretty famously not balanced....

MFW?

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
MFW?

Edited for clarity. Its a reddit acronym usually associated with "reaction gifs" of people making facial expressions, just used it by habit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
To be fair, if lord_blackfang had actually explained what he was meaning, YeOldSaltPotato wouldn't have made that mistake. I am aware of the game, but not that it has no random element. Also, is Diplomacy a wargame?

However, it does have hidden information in that generally it's not being played by telepaths. In contrast, a miniatures game makes explicit all sorts of information that isn't usually available to a battlefield commander - the lay of the land, the disposition and location of the enemy (and of your own troops, for that matter), etc. Take random movement. Of course units of soldiers don't "really" move in such a random fashion (plenty of Napoleonic rulesets use old rill manuals to calculate move rates), but the rules do that to represent minor changes in ground that a tabletop at 1:1000 or less can't depict, such as muddy patches, small streams, boulders, rabbit holes, etc. Just marking a section of the board as "difficult ground" defeats the point, because now you know ahead of time what it's like and you're back to precise knowledge again.

Diplomacy is very much not a "wargame" was we understand wargames (which could I guess more accurately be called "battle games"). it is a game about a War, like a full-scale world war armed conflict, and it is so abstracted the "who wins the battle" is entirely just down to who has more "strength points" and defenders win ties.

It isn't a simulation of war, though, as much as it is a simulation of....well I'll give you two guesses based on the name.

All players have to submit their moves blind to all the other players, there's a 20-30 minute space in between turns where you just talk to other players about what you're going to do, what they should do, coordinate your actions etc, and then all the moves are resolved simultaneously (it's quickest with a computer).

The way the game is set up you are reliant on other players to get basically anything done, since defenders win ties and you yourself personally control only a couple of pieces, you usually just bounce off of other players territories if you act on your own, and two people collaborating together will absolutely butcher you. But simultaneous turns make it very very easy to stab people in the back.

Ah, thanks. Yes, that does rather kick my argument in the nads.

In my defence, I was thinking primarily of tabletop wargames which represent tactical or strategic combat, rather than anything more general.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Ah, thanks. Yes, that does rather kick my argument in the nads.

In my defence, I was thinking primarily of tabletop wargames which represent tactical or strategic combat, rather than anything more general.

No, it definitely doesn't. Diplomacy not being random is offset by the actions of players being something you don't know, and the fact that there is no random/uncontrolled element to its battle resolution actually DOES make it a less accurate simulation of a war than a wargame with some random elements.

Battles are almost never perfectly balanced, and Diplomacy makes a great highlight to that because it demonstrates that the objective of battle strategy IS making the battle as imbalanced as possible in favor of your side.

The thrust of my point overall is:

The fun/enjoyment inherent in 40k is typically from a close, balanced game.

The two best ways to have a close, balanced game in 40k are to either:

1) make your list as competitive as humanly possible and find an opponent who is doing exactly the same, and play as basic a mission as you can.

2) collaborate with your opponent and modify the rules and scenario as much as possible to play as customized and complex a mission as you can. Treat no rule as a sacred cow. collaboratively build lists intended to be as evenly matched as possible. Seek no gameplay advantage until the moment models hit the table.

The "scrub" "CAAC" whatever mentality that reduces fun comes from deviating from mixing the two approaches. Creating a custom collaborative scenario intended to give only your side an advantage is CAAC. Playing a pickup game using the core rules but then blaming a loss on advantages you opted not to take or the vagaries of random chance is the other most common way to piss yourself off.

What is it that makes a man neutral, Kif?

I am still pretty angry at Diplomacy and it has been 20 years.

The only game I played was a 3 player game, we all took 2 territories each.
I was Austria and Germany, and got ground down from all sides...

Playing diplomacy is like trying to navigate a thread between Powergamers and Filthy Casuals.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

I agree, but there's a difference in execution. Consider three examples:

Diplomacy has zero randomness whatsoever. It has hidden information and making plans based on trying to out-guess everyone else, but the surprises are all directly the result of player decisions.

Randomness in resolving actions involves dice, but in a predictable way. You know you have a 50% chance to kill that tank with a missile, and you can make intelligent strategic choices about how you use your anti-tank units. You know you charge 2D6", representing the unknown difficulty of the ground ahead, but you know that the outcome is heavily weighted to 6-8". This kind of randomness forces players to adapt to a changing situation and prevents the outcome of the game from being too obviously predetermined but it doesn't really drive the game. It's just a resolution mechanic, you aren't telling glorious war stories about how your average round of shooting happened.

GW-style randomness is just random for the sake of being random. You roll a D6, on a 1 your attack does nothing, on a 2-5 it's a normal weapon, on a 6 you do 99999999999 mortal wounds. Sure, the game might have the strategic depth of a puddle and limited meaningful interaction between the players, but you can talk about how awesome it is when you roll that 6! There are no player actions behind that outcome, just a 6 on the die randomly making a "surprise". The game is unpredictable but now the dice are the focus of attention and most of the war stories involve unlikely luck with the dice instead of anything any of the players did.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:
1) make your list as competitive as humanly possible and find an opponent who is doing exactly the same, and play as basic a mission as you can.

2) collaborate with your opponent and modify the rules and scenario as much as possible to play as customized and complex a mission as you can. Treat no rule as a sacred cow. collaboratively build lists intended to be as evenly matched as possible. Seek no gameplay advantage until the moment models hit the table.

I think you have some serious misunderstandings about how mission design works. Basic is not the same as competitive, complexity does not automatically improve balance, and competitive mission design is all about making sure that the mission favors neither side.

 Peregrine wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I'm not sure I quite agree. A "simulationist" game absolutely needs events which are outwith the knowledge of any of the participants. Random events might not be the best way, but other than playing with a GM or an app, I'm not sure how else to do it.

I agree, but there's a difference in execution. Consider three examples:

Diplomacy has zero randomness whatsoever. It has hidden information and making plans based on trying to out-guess everyone else, but the surprises are all directly the result of player decisions.

Randomness in resolving actions involves dice, but in a predictable way. You know you have a 50% chance to kill that tank with a missile, and you can make intelligent strategic choices about how you use your anti-tank units. You know you charge 2D6", representing the unknown difficulty of the ground ahead, but you know that the outcome is heavily weighted to 6-8". This kind of randomness forces players to adapt to a changing situation and prevents the outcome of the game from being too obviously predetermined but it doesn't really drive the game. It's just a resolution mechanic, you aren't telling glorious war stories about how your average round of shooting happened.

GW-style randomness is just random for the sake of being random. You roll a D6, on a 1 your attack does nothing, on a 2-5 it's a normal weapon, on a 6 you do 99999999999 mortal wounds. Sure, the game might have the strategic depth of a puddle and limited meaningful interaction between the players, but you can talk about how awesome it is when you roll that 6! There are no player actions behind that outcome, just a 6 on the die randomly making a "surprise". The game is unpredictable but now the dice are the focus of attention and most of the war stories involve unlikely luck with the dice instead of anything any of the players did.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:
1) make your list as competitive as humanly possible and find an opponent who is doing exactly the same, and play as basic a mission as you can.

2) collaborate with your opponent and modify the rules and scenario as much as possible to play as customized and complex a mission as you can. Treat no rule as a sacred cow. collaboratively build lists intended to be as evenly matched as possible. Seek no gameplay advantage until the moment models hit the table.

I think you have some serious misunderstandings about how mission design works. Basic is not the same as competitive, complexity does not automatically improve balance, and competitive mission design is all about making sure that the mission favors neither side.

So, your example of "good" randomness is...literally how GW does charge distances, and your example of "bad" randomness is...something that rarely, if ever, seems to appear in the current game.

The sheer quantity of dice rolled in combat resolution in 40k has the drawback of making resolving attacks a huge percentage of the time you spend on a game, but it's tough to argue that it doesn't make for some seriously predictable probability. And most of the biggest changes from 7th to 8th were the removal of some of the extremely random, extremely impactful moments from the game: Random psychic power selection (GG didn't get invisibility in my deathstar army), random tank damage tables that include "instant death", random warlord traits, heck they even tried to remove random first player turn, and everyone HATED it.

A couple of in-game elements having "Critical success" and "Critical failure" on the bleeding edges of the probability curve are not anywhere close to the biggest flaw currently present in the game, and typically they're concentrated in factions who have unpredictability or expendability as their selling points, like Orks having some Crit Effects and Admech having some self-immolating superweapons.

If you asked me to talk about the flaws in 40k I'd probably talk about the persistent problem of tabling being more efficient than playing to the specific objective of the mission, CHARACTER being too potent of protection on the extreme ends of the scale in terms of the cheapest and most expensive character-protected models, Terrain in the base game not having enough of an impact and the fact that melee is nice and abstracted (and features a ton of player decision making and skill expression) while shooting includes highly arguable LOS rules and is extremely point-and-click.

With the sheer volume of the dice you roll, stuff in 40k in general tends to be fairly low-variability. If more people used and trusted instant dice rolling apps, a lot of the tedium of rolling and re-rolling and picking out buckets of dice would be removed.

Please don't build straw men. I pointed out one example of bad randomness, one that was on my mind because of a recent thread where people were praising it for creating "memorable moments", because it is one that is relevant to the current topic. Nowhere did I say that it is GW's biggest failure, or even compare it to other bad 40k rules.