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The main issue I've seen with narrative gaming is when it involves a map:

A) It requires a lot of logistics (think a big map like in the old days, with extra rules for movement or requisition or whatnot). People tend to want to use their game time to, y' know, game and not move pins on a map or deal with extra cruft to make it "realistic". Some games scratch this itch but Warhammer is not it. If you have weeks where nothing major happens because armies are moving across the map but nobody has encountered each other, it's likely going to fizzle out.

B) The big one in my experience, campaign games often have imbalanced forces due to something or another (whether because you only left a 750 point army to defend your territory, because you rolled poorly on some chart, half your force got lost and turns up later, etc.) which is almost always unfun for the person handicapped.

I've seen that second one a few times. A 750 point scouting force running into a 2k point army out in the field, stuff like that. It's never fun that I've found, ever. It usually leads to whoever has the massive handicap dropping out quickly.

C) Depending on the campaign, if you lose your early games it might be impossible for you to make a comeback, which for most people will get them to lose interest because even if it's a campaign, who wants to play games every week knowing you have no way of winning? Either you just go through the motions or, worse, you purposely try to knock other people out of the running since it doesn't matter to you. I've seen people basically act like a "hired gun" and go out of their way to attack the player in the lead just to try and drop them in standing, because if they lost it didn't mean anything as they already had no chance of winning.

Now, that's only map-based narrative. The other type of campaign is one that alleviates a lot of those, where it's relatively balanced forces, no map stuff to take up time, and is closer to a league with a story. These I find the issue is often that it tries to involve too many people, and becomes unwieldy to do even without a map. When you have a campaign that involves like 20 people at the game store, it adds yet another layer of logistics issues. Also, these sort of campaigns are more likely to turn into your regular matched play game with maybe a story behind it.

In general, though it's that narrative requires a commitment and caring about the story, and most players just want to play games. The event organizer might care about the story, but it's hard to keep the players interested in what's going on in the campaign rather than just using it as a way to guarantee games each week. And in that case you have a league with a bit of fluff, not a campaign.

 LunarSol wrote:
So.... to keep the ball rolling, I thought I'd bring up the other end of things.

One thing I've noticed is that for a lot of players, narrative play kind of gets beaten out of them similar to the way some people feel competitive play beats certain players out of a game. Narrative events sound great but in execution feel like they often fall apart on the table. This isn't just a matter of competitive players exploiting a gap or something. I regularly see our less competitive crowds (regardless of system) build up these big ideas for campaigns or special scenarios. They put weeks into planning but when the event comes around, they tend to lose interest as quickly as the competitive crowd does.

Some of that gets back to the difference between ideals and reality. The campaign and resources and stuff sounds really interesting, but the first time you have to spend 3+ hours playing a game crippled by outside forces, people seem to realize they'd rather get the best experience they can out of the game in front of them than suffer through busywork encounters as part of a larger game. It's like filler episodes; sure they might have moments but actually being forced to watch them often leaves you wishing you were spending your time on a favorite movie or better episode and tend to kill people's interest long term. I feel like a lot of people are turned off narrative campaigns for the same reason people don't like Jump Anime; the high points are thrilling, but slogging through all that filler just isn't worth it.

I think the will for narrative play is always there. In many ways I think its stronger than competitive. The issue is just that few narrative experiences are as well designed and thought through as the competitive stuff. People are really excited for things like the Oblivion campaign and similar efforts, just hugely skeptical after so many experiences with campaigns that just don't play out the way people hope.

I think there is a distinction needed here: narrative campaigns/events vs narrative scenarios. A series of Eternal War standalone games played out by strangers and linked by a vague background „narrative” is an entirely different beast than a single large, game over 8”x6” table full of carefully planned terrain, with carefully and collectively arranged army lists, planned reinforcements, mid game goals, routes, points of special interest and other bells and whistles. My experience both IRL and here on dakka shows, that typical 40k player never encountered the latter (in contrast to most players of historicals I have met). I have encountered just a few batreps of such narrative games on the web, I know a couple of Dakka regulars arrange such games in their garrages, but such games are hardly if ever played in stores. It is also a reccuring theme in narrative discussions here, that strong gatekeeping is a necessity for such games (for reasons presented below).

With all that said, I agree that what passes for „narrative event” in 40k can easily be a reason for geting „narrative play beaten out of players”. But IMHO it has notthing to do even with narrative mode of play as officially provided by GW, and most certainly not with narrative approach to tabletop wargames, and all to do with poor state of 40k community in hobby areas ranging from terrain making and utilizing it in games (we have discussed this in a lenghty thread around christmas) to actual social skills like true friendships (in opposition to merely „gaming acquaitances”) and general openness to non-official ideas and unscripted human interactions. It is hard to organize a true and open to all narrative event when many of 40k players treat other gamers as disposable AI bots for an otherwise near single-player experience and some even consider any attempt at pre game conversation more complex than „2000 pts Matched Play with rule of three” as a personal insult and attempted cheating.

nou wrote:
With all that said, I agree that what passes for „narrative event” in 40k can easily be a reason for geting „narrative play beaten out of players”. But IMHO it has notthing to do even with narrative mode of play as officially provided by GW, and most certainly not with narrative approach to tabletop wargames, and all to do with poor state of 40k community in hobby areas ranging from terrain making and utilizing it in games (we have discussed this in a lenghty thread around christmas) to actual social skills like true friendships (in opposition to merely „gaming acquaitances”) and general openness to non-official ideas and unscripted human interactions. It is hard to organize a true and open to all narrative event when majority of 40k players treat other gamers as disposable AI bots for an otherwise near single-player experience and some even consider any attempt at pre game conversation more complex than „2000 pts Matched Play with rule of three” as a personal insult and attempted cheating.

Amen to this. A-fething-men. I wish I could exalt this multiple times. That's really it. A campaign isn't something to just throw together with random people or the guys you see each week at the game store. It's something you actually want to have people you communicate with outside of the game so you can really get into it, and have people who are willing to have homebrew missions, imbalanced forces, all sorts of crazy things to fit the story, and not bitch because they can't use their "2k list" that they bought only those models for, or because a mission doesn't allow Flyers and they field an Air Wing every single game and will never want to not do it. The sort of player who wants to talk before games about what they want, doesn't feel PL or open play is worthless garbage that just takes up space in a book, etc.

I think that's the number one reason narrative play gets "beaten out", because narrative play requires you to actually be playing with friends, not people who happen to play 40k at the same game store and that's about it. Even a narrative event can suffer from that. AOS has its yearly "Coalescence" narrative event and I have yet to see any interest in it because it's homebrew scenarios with different size armies (not imbalanced armies, at least not the ones I've seen). But it's more thought than people seem to want to put into it and instead basically want a matchmaking system or the equivalent of World of Warcraft's Dungeon Finder: Something that requires minimal effort and gives you people to play with, but removes any real need to interact with them beyond the basics, let alone care about them.

 Horst wrote:

they will latch on to GW games for competitive play where the whole idea is to listbuild an imbalanced experience and win by having the superior list.

Just wanted to respond to this point, I don't think that's that odd, because both players are looking at the same rules and codex. Yes, you might not own a specific army, but MOST people who play 40k competitively will pick an army they think stands a chance at winning, and then try to build their army to counter everything else. So if both players are trying to build a superpowered imba list, then the idea is it should cancel out. It often does, many of my games are quite close when playing in ITC events.

I agree with that experience, that was exactly what I did for years and my games were fine so long as my opponent was doing the same thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wayniac wrote:
The main issue I've seen with narrative gaming is when it involves a map:

A) It requires a lot of logistics (think a big map like in the old days, with extra rules for movement or requisition or whatnot). People tend to want to use their game time to, y' know, game and not move pins on a map or deal with extra cruft to make it "realistic". Some games scratch this itch but Warhammer is not it. If you have weeks where nothing major happens because armies are moving across the map but nobody has encountered each other, it's likely going to fizzle out.

B) The big one in my experience, campaign games often have imbalanced forces due to something or another (whether because you only left a 750 point army to defend your territory, because you rolled poorly on some chart, half your force got lost and turns up later, etc.) which is almost always unfun for the person handicapped.

I've seen that second one a few times. A 750 point scouting force running into a 2k point army out in the field, stuff like that. It's never fun that I've found, ever. It usually leads to whoever has the massive handicap dropping out quickly.

C) Depending on the campaign, if you lose your early games it might be impossible for you to make a comeback, which for most people will get them to lose interest because even if it's a campaign, who wants to play games every week knowing you have no way of winning? Either you just go through the motions or, worse, you purposely try to knock other people out of the running since it doesn't matter to you. I've seen people basically act like a "hired gun" and go out of their way to attack the player in the lead just to try and drop them in standing, because if they lost it didn't mean anything as they already had no chance of winning.

Now, that's only map-based narrative. The other type of campaign is one that alleviates a lot of those, where it's relatively balanced forces, no map stuff to take up time, and is closer to a league with a story. These I find the issue is often that it tries to involve too many people, and becomes unwieldy to do even without a map. When you have a campaign that involves like 20 people at the game store, it adds yet another layer of logistics issues. Also, these sort of campaigns are more likely to turn into your regular matched play game with maybe a story behind it.

In general, though it's that narrative requires a commitment and caring about the story, and most players just want to play games. The event organizer might care about the story, but it's hard to keep the players interested in what's going on in the campaign rather than just using it as a way to guarantee games each week. And in that case you have a league with a bit of fluff, not a campaign.

Those are all legit issues with map campaigns yes. Map campaigns require a very special type of person, which is why they are mostly an extinct relic of the gygax era.

To echo the above, I'll also agree, narrative campaigning with a pickup group is a very very nasty and difficult process. I've been running public narratives for a very long time and unless your narratives are set up like tournaments, the moment you start dicking with houserules and narrative restraints on force composition, the public pick up group will chew you up one way and spit you out the other. It really has to be a group of people that are friends and all want that type of thing. It only takes ONE pickup / tournament style player in the mix to plant a bomb in a campaign and set it off because it really is a polar extreme to what is considered "standard" gaming.

I'm not sure its just an issue with the people you play with. I largely only game with friends and these things still tend to falter early on once people start really experiencing how they play out. I think one of the key aspects is just the fresh start you get with games as they're played competitively. When you have a bad game, you can just kind of move on, better luck next time, and play another game without feeling like you're at a disadvantage. That's generally more a campaign issue, but I also see it in narrative scenarios that get played out in phases or have lopsided goals. It's very easy for people to get demoralized as games go beyond a couple hours.

I think we all dream of a really engaging campaign system though. I think the challenge is just keeping that "winner take all" feel that most of these games thrive on without making it so the final battle is all that matters. Inevitability is pretty much the bane of any game and its kind of what a lot of campaigns are designed to build towards.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm not sure its just an issue with the people you play with. I largely only game with friends and these things still tend to falter early on once people start really experiencing how they play out. I think one of the key aspects is just the fresh start you get with games as they're played competitively. When you have a bad game, you can just kind of move on, better luck next time, and play another game without feeling like you're at a disadvantage. That's generally more a campaign issue, but I also see it in narrative scenarios that get played out in phases or have lopsided goals. It's very easy for people to get demoralized as games go beyond a couple hours.

I think we all dream of a really engaging campaign system though. I think the challenge is just keeping that "winner take all" feel that most of these games thrive on without making it so the final battle is all that matters. Inevitability is pretty much the bane of any game and its kind of what a lot of campaigns are designed to build towards.

This I would agree with. Part of the drawback to a narrative campaign, even with just two people, is that if you lose one or two games, the campaign is effectively over unless you have the (IMHO lame) type of final scenario that's winner take all even if you lost all the games leading up to it, or the aforementioned "I'm going to stick around playing but try to screw over the winners" type of mindset in a multiplayer campaign which can quickly turn toxic rather than in good fun. Or, possibly worse, if there are handicaps put in place in a game with the person with the losing streak, they might think it's out of pity for them or even think people are letting them win so they don't drop out.

One thing I will say about pickup game/competitive mentality is that it lets you play and move on (and preferably learn/improve) without really feeling dejected for more than a little while if you lost (typically after a game where you get stomped). In a campaign, however, it's easy for the person who is behind to feel bad and just stop showing up because they feel humiliated, especially if they've had bad luck and haven't won a game in the campaign, for instance. I've seen many campaigns where they start out with a bunch of people and within a couple of weeks, half have dropped out because they were 0-X and just felt like it was a useless endeavor to continue playing or cause bad blood if it had an entry fee and in the end you basically paid money so two friends/regular opponents/etc. could have a normal game against each other to determine the winner.

You can get that in a tournament too, but in a tournament, you can reasonably expect several "normal" (YMMV what "normal" means) games during the day, so that alone is often worth the entry fee even if you don't think you have a chance to win. And after that you can just move on. Not always so in a campaign.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm not sure its just an issue with the people you play with. I largely only game with friends and these things still tend to falter early on once people start really experiencing how they play out. I think one of the key aspects is just the fresh start you get with games as they're played competitively. When you have a bad game, you can just kind of move on, better luck next time, and play another game without feeling like you're at a disadvantage. That's generally more a campaign issue, but I also see it in narrative scenarios that get played out in phases or have lopsided goals. It's very easy for people to get demoralized as games go beyond a couple hours.

I think we all dream of a really engaging campaign system though. I think the challenge is just keeping that "winner take all" feel that most of these games thrive on without making it so the final battle is all that matters. Inevitability is pretty much the bane of any game and its kind of what a lot of campaigns are designed to build towards.

For exactly this reason any boons in my campaigns are very minor and are only used to provide the feel of continuity, not advantage, and are granted not for victories/goals but for actual in-mission performance on model level. In our pre-planned missions/sequences (as opposed to assymmetric mission generator we utilize for the rest of our games) we still listbuild for every new mission setup, you simply can (but not have to) use slightly "experienced" unit if you fancy. And we deal with lopsided scenarions pretty easily - we simply play maps twice with switched roles and treat such double-match as a single event. This is also why I don't know of and don't utilize any map-driven campaign system that stays either relevant (rewards both victor and underdog to keep everyone on equal footing) or balanced enough (rewards victor only) after just few games.

But, and it is a very big but - none of us plays for the feel of superiority on "omnipotent general" level, but to unfold engaging stories on model level. That is one of the reasons why we did not switch to 8th ed - puting so much game design emphasis on CPs and Stratagems and not on on-table events and interactions just robs us of too much story and feels too much CCGamey. That aspect of our mindset alone makes us separate enough from pick-up crowd to not want to mix with FLGS culture at all.

I keep hoping we see someone design a product along the lines of the "Legacy" games for minis. The hard part is that that particular genre seems to really thrive in coop (though the original Risk was solid). I think one of the big barriers for campaigns is just that they have such a spotty history. A product that produces repeatably successful experiences in the genre could really change the industry as we've seen from the board game crowd.

 LunarSol wrote:
I keep hoping we see someone design a product along the lines of the "Legacy" games for minis. The hard part is that that particular genre seems to really thrive in coop (though the original Risk was solid). I think one of the big barriers for campaigns is just that they have such a spotty history. A product that produces repeatably successful experiences in the genre could really change the industry as we've seen from the board game crowd.

Co-op is the key word here, as I was trying to picture in my post above. Competetive (even just on "clearly defining a winner" level, not "cut throat approach to gaming" level) approach to narrative is to all my knowledge doomed to failure. And yes, we also incorporate some Legacy elements to our games, but we have the luxury of being able to freely modify rules (for example, we constantly tweak codex entries to reflect desired performance style of particular units, e.g. trully represent adaptive nature of the Hive Mind). But I don't think you actually can design a fool-proof tabletop wargame ruleset to accomodate such modifications/legacy rules without some TFGs trying to break them and naysay. Just look at "4pl card farm" debate in Apocalypse section, a trick that isn't even gamebraking in the slightest, being called out as an ultimate proof for couple of regulars that Apocalypse is garbage in it's entirety.

Another reason why Legacy mechanics do work in boardgames but are hard to implement in wargames is collectible nature of the latter. Take a fresh Kickstarter of Etherfields as example - this game is an attempt on a game with even the core ruleset evolving over the course of the game - not just difficulty rising or unlocking some new mechanics, but also replacing early resolution methods with more advanced ones over the course of the campaign. You can do this with one-and-done purchase that comes with everything necessary, but you cannot succesfully try this with 40K (one could argue, that the very edition/codices changes is exactly this on meta level) as it comes with a very heavy financial requirement. Even narratives in our group are possible only because we collect with large collections and not just static 2000 pts lists in mind and because of our approach there are no "bad purchase choices" - if someone likes a particular model and want's it in his collection, then we will make it usable, no problem.

nou wrote:
Just look at "4pl card farm" debate in Apocalypse section, a trick that isn't even gamebraking in the slightest, being called out as an ultimate proof for couple of regulars that Apocalypse is garbage in it's entirety.

Speaking as the person who started that discussion, no, that's not it at all. The point is not that Apocalypse is trash, it's that the CCG mechanic is a balance problem and needs to be fixed. Please do not build straw man arguments, especially when I have said many times already that Apocalypse is better than 8th.

Given all of the horrible things you have said about 8th in the past. Saying Apocalypse is better means nothing.

If Nu-Apoc is the better game (objectively, not subjectively in the eyes of a few ... every game has somebody who thinks that particular game ever is the bestest), people will gravitate towards it and GW certainly wont mind that the game that finally improves upon 40K after 30 years of non-GW companies producing nothing but pretentious garbage is one of their own.

I think APOC is a test to see how it is received and could form the bedrock for later editions.

I played 30k at Adepticon this year, and all of the Heresy events were narrative. The one I took part in spanned 3 days and multiple different points levels. A tactical map was set up which represented the sector and it's various planets, orbital forces and objectives. It was awesome and panned out very well.

Many of the Black Books contain Campaign systems to run narrative style stuff.

I don't know if it's because 30k draws a different crowd, but competitive 30k is almost unheard of. Players seek to play in fluffy, narrative and fun matches. I think it's one of the main attractions for the game.

30k puts off a lot of tournament players (in my area) because its marines on marines (pedantically yes it includes guard and some other things as well but its based around marines vs marines). So listbuilding is not as important in that game since the forces all pull from the same pool. Take away the listbuilding importance and a lot of tournament players give it a hard pass.

Note i'm not saying listbuilding is not a thing in 30k i'm saying its not as big a thing.

 auticus wrote:
30k puts off a lot of tournament players (in my area) because its marines on marines (pedantically yes it includes guard and some other things as well but its based around marines vs marines). So listbuilding is not as important in that game since the forces all pull from the same pool. Take away the listbuilding importance and a lot of tournament players give it a hard pass.

Note i'm not saying listbuilding is not a thing in 30k i'm saying its not as big a thing.

Your last part is interesting, as 30k has some *really* broken things that make 40k look well-balanced by comparison. However, it's the mindset. The majority of people who play 30k do so for narrative reasons, and not to pwn everyone with their uber army. In the same vein as most historical games will let you min/max and listbuild too but you usually don't find people who want that playing those games.

Which, is really the entire thing. Games attract a certain type of player. Currently, Warhammer has a mix but attracts your competitive, screw the fluff I want to build an uber combo and show my leetness type of player (it attracts more, of course, but this is specifically about competitive). Which is fine, but as we've seen and discussed that mindset bleeds into everything else and can quickly consume a gaming store's community if left unchecked.

 auticus wrote:
30k puts off a lot of tournament players (in my area) because its marines on marines (pedantically yes it includes guard and some other things as well but its based around marines vs marines). So listbuilding is not as important in that game since the forces all pull from the same pool. Take away the listbuilding importance and a lot of tournament players give it a hard pass.

Note i'm not saying listbuilding is not a thing in 30k i'm saying its not as big a thing.

That is one reason, yes, but I think it has more to do with entry cost of 30K. People who buy into this game do so mostly because they are head deep in the lore and buy models out sheer love for model design, not solely for in-game power. Also worth to note is that second hand market for Heresy is so shallow that eventual „meta chasing” is 100% buying directly from FW and that nearly 100% of HH is resin, which is real pain to strip paint from. I think that tempers a lot of tournament players, especially since they already have a great 40k environment to thrive in.

That could also be. A lot of our tournament players here churn and burn like no one's business though. They sell their army in a heartbeat and buy and get pro painters to paint their current force with little thought, so at least here where I am I don't see cost as being the barrier because these guys are tossing hundreds of dollars a year on new armies and paintjobs.

 auticus wrote:
That could also be. A lot of our tournament players here churn and burn like no one's business though. They sell their army in a heartbeat and buy and get pro painters to paint their current force with little thought, so at least here where I am I don't see cost as being the barrier because these guys are tossing hundreds of dollars a year on new armies and paintjobs.

"They sell..." - that's a part of what I wrote about - they have to have people to sell those armies to. Here in Poland at least there is enough aftermarket for 40K for "churn and burn" tactics to at least partially refund itself but there is no FW aftermarket at all, be it 40K or 30K. I think it is similar in other parts of Europe and judging from all those threads about FW outrageous prices that frequently pop up on dakka and are mostly discussed by US flagged dakkanauts, it is not much better across the pond either. But I don't live there, so I may as well be very wrong in this regard.

That is a good point. They do have a market to sell their nerfed armies to, whereas in 30k they don't.

 auticus wrote:
30k puts off a lot of tournament players (in my area) because its marines on marines (pedantically yes it includes guard and some other things as well but its based around marines vs marines). So listbuilding is not as important in that game since the forces all pull from the same pool. Take away the listbuilding importance and a lot of tournament players give it a hard pass.

Note i'm not saying listbuilding is not a thing in 30k i'm saying its not as big a thing.

I'd chalk up the disappointment in a lack of variety to a disappointment in a lack of variety; nothing to do with how important list building is in it. I actually like marines, but I want to play a game in which I'm up against more different kinds of enemies.

That does get back to the point about how people perceive a competitive environment though. Some people see 30k as better balanced due to fewer bad options. Other people see it roughly as diverse as 40k at its worst with a single viable codex available. I tend to lean towards the latter, but again, its because I like wildly different stuff in my games.

Yeah I don't think you can say its all because of this one thing.

I just hear a lot of "it doesn't matter what army I build, and I like listbuilding to matter" a lot from people to formulate my opinion on what I perceive is why a lot of them avoid it.

I still think GW has been on the support the Tourney train and the "yearly" updates because it makes them gak-tons of money.

Since tournament players have to be the leetest of the leet they as said above, churn and burn. That is any business' dream come true. It means they can nerf and buff and sell product that isn't moving by making it into a must have and those tournament players will gobble it up at ANY price.

This of course makes buying on the secondary market nice because the more they churn the more the value on the secondary market diminishes due to basic rules of supply and demand.

I see the future of 40K being what is currently Apoc. They've been watering down the rules over the years to make it faster and more simple. The goal being to boost the "leet" market. The.. ehem.. short attentionspan Death Match type.

GW has been searching for a way to make gains in those areas and its been hard since wargamming is so niche. They have to alter it to be more "common" compatible.. but also faster.. and also to have "leet" builds that attract the WAC mindset to blow money like it's water.

I still hate 8th. It's utter broken gak breaking rules set down in the RT era because of common sense and the nature of D6 and statistics.

It IS faster. It is "more simple". There are much fewer mechanics and many rules are just duplication that can be removed by making a core rule such as "6+FNP" instead of the flavor texted version same with "death to false emperor" is just "every six to hit in combat gives an additional attack". Orks have that as do other armies but they are fluff named for no reason making the game seem bloated when it isnt.

They have also been moving towards the "card game" kind of play for a while now. Selling cards is great. Esp if they go WoC and pull from MtG and make the cards used in battles of Apoc come from booster packs that have rares, commons, etc and the ultra-rares are the best moves and thus you have to buy tons of boosters to get that ONE card to WAC.

That's money money money to GW.

new Apoc is utter gak. But.. again.. it is a FAST playing game that is simple and straight foward.

I can see 9th being Apoc rule set. They've been trying special rules and trying to break out of D6 for a while now and Apoc fits that bill.

Wargamming to me will always be what is supposed to be.. a complex tactical and strategic game where a single misplay or bad roll can hurt and you have to be smart enough and capable enough to overcome it (mostly you can). I still miss weapon arcs and charge arcs and wheeling and more because you had to THINK ahead, plan, and movement was critical as well as facing (for vehicles).

Point being. I am a dinosaur. My age is long over. Today is MOBA. They've been moving that way for a while. So it will.

I loved BFG, Epic Armageddon (I played epic from when it was called Space Marine till it was shelved).

For the record my start in wargamming wasn't GW... it was FASA's products. So hex bases still have a special place in my heart.

I've done the tourney thing back in the 90s. So I understand WAC and LEET builds as well as broken game mechanics abused.

But remember I played 40k when a single battle took 3 DAYS. HAHA.. and "combat squading" required you to write down orders on a piece of paper and your unit was required to follow those orders till it got back with it's old squad again.
Fun stuff. Also Turn Rate Radius.. accell and decell.

We actually made special templates and tools for TRR and ACC/DEC and it wasn't that hard once you had the tools to simplify it. But boy did you have to think ahead about your vehicles or you'd smack into your own squads or terrain. HAHA.

But yeah. I may often feel superior to the plebeian squeakers but the reality and future (as well as the big money for GW) is Apoc, Tournies, and simplified rules for "everyone" (tm). I realize that my era is over. I am a triple webber side draft guy in the era of advanced computer controlled fuel injection. Injection today is plug and play. A caveman could do it. So many more people are "tuners" when I remember being a "builder".. big cams, nasty exhaust, and hot days at the track trying to fix whatever broke. Just as the era of custom crazy vehicle rules in 40k and deodorant hovercraft is over.. and in a way it's good.

I ran a map based campaign that lasted about 9 months in Uni. Basic premise was each territory captured allowed you to 'raise' a unit of a certain type (heavy support, elite, troop, fast attack) with a set budget of points (250 I think?). We played weekly and it did result in lopsided games and lopsided armies (my all fast attack orks were a terror). But we had enough players and a big enough map that people always had a chance to come back from a defeat and so on. In the last two months interest did decline as it became obvious that the real fight was going to be between two players only, but people had a great time with it.
I did not consider that camapign narrative though. It was competitive, there was a definitive winner. It just had a basic strategic level on top of the tactical level.

We ran a narrative campaign based loosely on necromunda (kill team before there was kill team) with experience and injury tables where I was in a GM mode, and each of the players had a different narrative objective. That was a real narrative campaign, though I feel those sorts of games pretty much require a games master to keep things running.

Would love to do that sort of thing again. The group eventually changed into a much more tournament focused group that was often on the Irish etc circuit. That was a lot of fun too!

 Sqorgar wrote:
I swear to heaven that people forget that part of playing when you're a kid is negotiating what the rules of the game are going to be. Then you get stuff like this where it's all "This is how I want to play" and "No, I want to play this other way" and a complete failure of anyone to play nice with each other. :-/

I'll play nice with pick up games. But I schedule my times to play with certainty, which is what tourneys yield. "Pick up game" night sometimes lead to a 'no game' night.
:(
That's time wasted. I'm not a tourney player because I like the cut-throat list play; I go to tourneys for a guaranteed 3 games on a Saturday. GTs are even better. I like leagues too, because those mean a guaranteed set of games within a time period.

Wayniac wrote:
Right. Because people don't seem to WANT to "negotiate what the rules of the game are going to be". They want it to be universal, so they can minimize discussion for some strange reason (despite, y'know, it is a social game because you're playing with other people).

Time would be a factor, actually, plus with tourney formats and 'house rulings' (note: Not "house rules") for those fewer grey areas, means less misunderstandings during the game.

Wayniac wrote:
So for every competitive person who knows when to tone it down and write after-the-fact narratives, there's the jackass who can't turn off "tournament" mode no matter what they're playing or who they're playing with that is always showing up with their LVO-style curb stomp list and demanding to use it because "It's a legal list" and feth anything else and if anyone dares to suggest that maybe they shouldn't bring an LVO face-smashing list to a casual game night at the shop or narrative campaign then they are "CAAC" people who should just git gud and learn to optimize lists better rather than expect the person who knows how to optimize better to also know when is and isn't the right to be to be maxing to the nines.

Now, here's where I take exception, Wayniac. What makes a cut-throat (my words) tourney list versus a narrative event, 'friendly' list?

Can you please provide the difference between my regular tourney list, and what would be a fluffy, narrative drukhari list? I have been playing this at tourneys, for a year, with little variation.
Black Heart:
2 archons, x2 huskblades, 1 blast pistol, Relic: Writ of the Living Muse (reroll to wound bubble)
4x5 kabalite units
3x5 TrueBorn, x4 blasters each, 1 splinter rifle
2x5 scourges, x4 haywire blasters, 1 shard carbine
3x1 ravagers, disintegrator cannons, shock prows
3x1 raiders, disintegrator cannon, shock prow
3x1 venoms

Cursed blade
2x1 succubi, x1 blast pistol
3 units of wyches, 8, 9, 9, x3 shardNets, x3 agonizers

Wayniac wrote:
So it goes back to what was said above: Many competitive players, especially it seems in the USA, only have one mode: Tournament. They have no idea or desire to ever do anything else, and get offended when people dislike that they're always bringing their tournament lists all over the place.

I have not had a problem with anyone not liking my tourney list, since Broadside Bash, 2012 (which was very close to the above drukhari list) and that guy was running 5e Grey Knights. He thought having 24 dark lance weapons was too much. It was my first GT ever.

But *if* someone were to point at my above list and and not like it, I'd ask, as I'm asking you, "Okay, care to show me a criteria that gives clear lines for a narrative/friendly game list and otherwise?

To me a nasty list that should stay in tournaments or in games where you know its coming are lists that *require* a hard counter to do anything against them and *require* a specific army composition to do anything against them.

 auticus wrote:
To me a nasty list that should stay in tournaments or in games where you know its coming are lists that *require* a hard counter to do anything against them and *require* a specific army composition to do anything against them.

I would agree with this, with the caveat that you have armies like Dark Eldar or say Imperial/Chaos Knights, among others, where a fluffy list is also a curbstomp list. Those are the hardest to quantify because it's due to such poor balance that you get that, while some other fluffy list can be garbage.

I'm just looking simply at does it require a hard counter to have a fun game? I don't care how fluffy it is. If you are forcing me to have to play a certain army / certain composition to have a fun game, that is not a game that I want to play.

Right, the problem Wayniac is addressing is when that applies to a faction as a whole. One of the big pitfalls of trying to disarm the arms race is sooner or later some really cool is really broken.

The best example of this I can think of is MK2 Cryx. It completely dominated much of the game, but did so with almost no Mercenary support and really amazing swarms of necro zombies and wraith knights. Their most broken caster was a mechanical lich hoving over the battlefield on a torrent of souls. It often wasn't beatable even with a hard counter, but you couldn't really fault anyone for playing it either. It was just a really cool army that happened to be significantly overtuned.

Yeah I was still playing WM back then (and I played Cryx) and I got out because of that. That and no one wanted to do anything except for tournament play.