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FWIW, my dad alleged I was a Satanist 'cause I got a taped copy of Slippery When Wet, which is an album by Bon Jovi for all of you whose back doesn't hurt.

So...

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I spent the early hours of this morning reading about Marty and Luke. I am lucky enough to have never met anything like the sort.

Well, considering Bon Jovi and Tom Hanks both almost certainly have infernal pacts in place, one can hardly blame your father for that conclusion.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
FWIW, my dad alleged I was a Satanist 'cause I got a taped copy of Slippery When Wet, which is an album by Bon Jovi for all of you whose back doesn't hurt.

So...

-----------------------------------------------

I spent the early hours of this morning reading about Marty and Luke. I am lucky enough to have never met anything like the sort.

Wow. That album was pretty tame even by the standards of the day! Your dad would have had a real fit if you'd gotten a copy of something by, say, Black Sabbath or ManO'War or Iron Maiden...

Got a recent one that fits into the title!

So I had someone ask for a casual game specifically, which I always tend to oblige because I love bringing out my weird models. My list here is an eldar list with storm guardians, an on-foot warlock conclave, an avatar of khaine, a wraithlord, and 1 of each aspect warrior squad except for Spiders all as old metal models with an allied patrol of harlequins, basically 1 foot troupe 1 shadowseer 1 solitaire and some skyweaver bikes with haywire.

The guy I'm playing against has a primaris ultramarines list with intercessors, hellblasters, dakka aggressors, one repulsor and some of the deep striking guys, all standing around the new Calgar, the shoot when you die banner, Tigurius, and a lieutenant in a big ball.

OK. it happens. My opponent came with a way more competitive army than I did, thinking it was more casual than it was. I'm a grown up and I know how to lose while not throwing a tantrum, especially around a new face I haven't seen around before, so I'll just explain to him after the game that we've got a bunch of folks with super old 20 year collections so casual means SUPER casual, nbd.

So we start the game, he goes first, kills quite a bit of stuff in shooting. Basically doesn't move from the deployment zone. I've got my Harlequins mostly hidden behind a building, my solitaire sitting behind a rock, and my bikers all clustered behind several buildings.

So on my turn he makes the aggressors -1 to hit so I decide to dedicate all anti-tank weaponry to the repulsor and use the harlequin warptime power and the saim-hann strat to get the troupe and shining spears into combat.The repulsor goes down to a bunch of mortal wounds and dark reaper rockets, and the shining spears charge the hellblasters.

My opponent says "ok, I'm gonna overcharge." He then rolls - and rerolls, a ton of dice individually for each dude in rapid fire range, and 4/10 of the hellblasters blow themselves up. The one wound they do cause just takes 2/3 of the exarch's wounds, and then they get in and kill 3 more with the lances.

So he just quits the game. I offer to let him take back the overcharging, I'll just set my wounds to 1/3 and he can put the guys back on the table. He says no, it was his mistake but basically the game's over now, so, he's done.

This was my first time experiencing not just a sore loser, but a sore first casualties-er.

now that's lame.

I've had the misfortune of playing people like that.

I arranged a 2000p 40k game a few weeks ago. Play infantry guard. He plays Smurfs.
We set up on the table, he comments that my army isn't exactly "fluff" since I have painted them to look like the troops from Spaceballs, the movie.
I manage to seize initiative, stealing the first turn. He throws a fit.
I use a 2CP stratagem, "preliminary bombardment", managing to inflict 7 Mortal wounds on his army. He throws a fit.
I Move my 5 scout sentinels, 2x 9 inches, as per their scout move. He throws a fit.
I start my shooting faze, expecting him to throw a fit.
I manage to destroy his predator, his stormraven and four marines in the first round of shooting. He throws an EPIC fit, throwing his models into his case and storms out of the club, leaving everyone in there speechless.
I just stood there thinking "Parents of the year in that home..."

I've never been a pick-up game kinda guy, but I remember the last time I played a back-then good friend of mine.

It was one of our first times of playing 2000 points back in 4th edition. We had pretty much started playing a year ago. I played Black Templars back then, he had Guard. I had saved the money for my army over the course of months while his parents bought him about 4000 points worth of guard stuff which I built and painted for him. So, in essence, he was a massively spoilt kid and that fact had strained out friendship to the point of breaking, as he made other people feel that they were inferior to him.

Back to the game. We were about 14 back then, did not have any real experience in playing 40k aside from moving towards the enemy, shooting at anything that moved or trying to get into melee. So, tactical depth was pretty much inexistent.
I dont remember the game in detail (over 12 years ago, goodness gracious). I just know that I had the first turn and pretty much moved my peeps up and maybe shot a handful of guardsmen, so no real damage at all. His first turn, he did not move at all, prefering to shoot. Fair enough and he managed to do quite some damage as he rolled a lot of sixes, but unfortunately they were all behind the buildings in the middle of the battlefield. I was not interested in having an argument and went ahead. The tipping point for me was him trying to shoot a hunter-killer missile from one of his Leman Russ at one of my tanks. The thing is, his target was not visible to him. Like, not at all. 2 buildings in the way. But he went ahead, threw the to hit roll while I looked at him in disbelieve.
"Uh, you cannot see my tank."
"Yes I can."
"No you can't. It is behind two buildings."
"Oh, I can still shoot the missile at it."
"A HKM is a heavy weapon and cannot fire indirectly."
"But it has indefinite range, so it can curve!"

That was too much for me. All the crooked dice throws, him inventing new rules/altering existing rules to his liking (something like consolidating guardsmen squads that took damage to one one squad that has full strength midgame)/outright cheating when it comes to armybuilding (he claimed his Leman Russ with Lascannon, Plasma Cannons, HKM, Storm Bolter AND heavy stubber costs 89 points), this was too much for me. I told him that I would not play on against him when he is cheating. This resulted in a massive fit, denying all cheating (of course) and instead accusing me of cheating. Well, it resulted in the shop owner coming to see what was going on, who asked us to leave if we could not behave in his shop. I did not care as I was not interested in continue playing that guy, but my friend threw a tantrum and insisted to continue playing. I just packed my stuff and left.

Weeks later he called me and invited me to his house. I accepted, as I still thought that he was my friend, but when I came he demanded I apologize to him. I refused and left. That was pretty much it.

I was no saint back then either, as I was... how to put it delicately... rather competitive and was also (sadly) know to throw a bit of a tantrum when faced with a loss. But I managed to put that aside in favor of just trying to have fun and playing the bloody game. But the combination of being a bad loser, an even worse winner, cheating and lying was just too much for me.

 Snowcloak wrote:
I have painted them to look like the troops from Spaceballs, the movie.

Any chance we can see some pictures? This sounds priceless!

I once frequented a place. One guy who worked there was pretty stinky. He was a nice guy and a good painter but he was stinky. I never left because of him but i did avoid him. It was a big store so i could get away but... anyways the guy ended up leaving for a job at GW working on White Dwarf and so on.

A college friend of mine finally landed a GOOD job a while ago. He invited me to his place (full-on guest room) to have a boys week while he took some use-it or lose-it vacation time.

I flew in, so I decided to take a custodes force in a carry-on in case we wanted to do a pickup game.

Local hobby store was nice looking, but something was "off" about it. We paid a small fee for table use, and it became more than obvious that newcomers were not exactly welcomed with open arms. The manager and group of Magic players seemed chummy, but they all stared at us like fish in a bowl.....and it seemed they hated fish.

I'm hoping this was just my Midwesterness throwing them off. I ended up conceding in turn 4 just to leave.

 cuda1179 wrote:
A college friend of mine finally landed a GOOD job a while ago. He invited me to his place (full-on guest room) to have a boys week while he took some use-it or lose-it vacation time.

I flew in, so I decided to take a custodes force in a carry-on in case we wanted to do a pickup game.

Local hobby store was nice looking, but something was "off" about it. We paid a small fee for table use, and it became more than obvious that newcomers were not exactly welcomed with open arms. The manager and group of Magic players seemed chummy, but they all stared at us like fish in a bowl.....and it seemed they hated fish.

I'm hoping this was just my Midwesterness throwing them off. I ended up conceding in turn 4 just to leave.

I've heard of some stores like that, they're basicly a club house for a select group that also sells gaming materials

Played in a tournament at a local store in Lafayette, Indiana called The Game Preserve. Carlos, the manager at the time, made a ruling in the tourney regarding my multimelta hit on a Chaplain on bike in 3rd Ed. that cost me the semifinal match. Not so big a deal, except we had the White Dwarf errata that specifically stated that the bike Toughness buff didn't apply to instant death. Also fair to mention was the fact that I got to play 2 first round games in that tourney because of the "odd number of players", the two being my younger brother and best friend, conveniently enough. The match I lost was to a kid named Tony who was running Imperial Fists, more specifically Carlos' Imperial Fists army that was stored at the store.

 Just Tony wrote:
Played in a tournament at a local store in Lafayette, Indiana called The Game Preserve. Carlos, the manager at the time, made a ruling in the tourney regarding my multimelta hit on a Chaplain on bike in 3rd Ed. that cost me the semifinal match. Not so big a deal, except we had the White Dwarf errata that specifically stated that the bike Toughness buff didn't apply to instant death. Also fair to mention was the fact that I got to play 2 first round games in that tourney because of the "odd number of players", the two being my younger brother and best friend, conveniently enough. The match I lost was to a kid named Tony who was running Imperial Fists, more specifically Carlos' Imperial Fists army that was stored at the store.

Yeah, that smells a little funny. I always suspected the two guys that ran 40k events at the FLGS. For starters, before any tourney they looked over all lists for legality , but their lists were only ever reviewed by each other. I always wondered if they used this as an opportunity to tailor their lists. Also, at the end of a campaign two guys came up as tying for first place, and both were undefeated, however one of them was literally one of the organizers I had a tie game with in the first week of the event.

 Vulcan wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

The wrath of a bored Boomer Karen with Social Media and the ability to do a Google Review can absolutely ruin a business. Even if it's trivial and petty. I've seen this stuff get so out of hand, it had to involve police running Karens off the property and outright restraining orders.

are there many pensioners posting scathing reviews on Google in your area? Surely it’s more likely the parents of the kids in the shop - millennials - who’d be doing that?

My parents are “boomers”, and all they’ve had is a rather amused tolerance at the sort of things I wasted my time on.

You must have missed the mad mothers back in the eighties.

In the 80s, I wasn't into 80s culture. I mean, sure I watched the D&D cartoon, and I assume my friends probably did too. But that's all it was - just a cartoon. Also, I live in a real country, not one made up for TV like America.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Back on-topic, I've thankfully never met anyone who would actually make me leave a gaming venue. Probably because I run the club, so in the words of Sparks, "This town ain't big enough for the both of us and it ain't me who's gonna leave". I've met a few people who think they're relaxed casual gamers, but really aren't - usually perfectly decent people, don't cheat, abuse the rules or anything, but can't quite get into a "narrative" mindset. Thankfully the "great unwashed" seem to be less common these days.

I still haven't done my first game but it will come within the end of this month. Me and my friend decided to make some games between us to learn the game and know the basics. After that we will go to play with other players in our FLGS.
We agree that it wouldn't be fun not for us not for our opponent to play against two complete noobs.
TBH I do not know how I will behave during the game but no matter what, I would never insult my opponent or giving up and play Switch...respect first of all.
Employers in the store are very friendly so I should not have any problems on that side. I saw people playing there and they seems ok even if they are freaking loud but, well, we are italian
Maybe in few weeks I will be back with some nasty stories

Good luck Bearblu! Just remember rule #1 is have some fun! It already sounds like you put some thought into making sure your opponent enjoys the game as well, so sounds like you'll be fine.

I suspect most of the culprits in this thread never once even considered what you already have.

Worst one for me was in 2008 I was in a league playing with a 40k club that met and was based in the local game store I worked at. I did not join this club and flat out told them that I couldn't because I wanted to stay impartial as a store employee, but also because members of said club paid 5 bucks a month into the club so they could "do events with prizing" for club members. Never saw those free club member only tournaments and the old guy who kept all the financial records always had new models and wouldn't discuss club funds... but a story for another time.

So it's the last week and standing for the league are pretty much locked in and no matter what I finish 1st or 2nd. Same goes for my last week opponent. Prizing is the same for 1st,2nd, and 3rd. So I ask my opponent if we can play a super casual game bringing units we don't normally play because we played 7 weeks of high tier competitive games. The league is 30 player 20 hyper competitive and 10 super casual just throw dice players. This guy (I'll call him Bob) is the most WAAC salty player in the group and I hate playing him. So I'm hoping that because the stakes don't matter we can go casual and like me he has 4 of everything for his army. He agrees...

Day comes a I show up early and get set up. I'm playing 5th edition Blood Angels. I'm bringing dev's tacticals curbulo and tycho gunline..... something blood Angel's don't do well. Not one assualt element in my army because these models haven't seen the light of day in.... years!

Welp in rolls Bob and after pleasantries he starts setting up.

He sets up the latest tournament winning swarm bug list that he played every game this edition... I ask him what's going on and he says he is running a little different list then he normally does but its casual still. I say feth and just play he wins roll off and gets the deployment he wants. We deploy and I fail to seize so I use corbulosonce a game reroll and I seize and he loses it about that ability. I move and shoot and he is still going on about the reroll. His turn he moves deep strikes shoots but can't charge so passes turn.

I move everything back but 20 tacticals that I space out to intercept his charge and shoot some more. His turn I'm swarmed and have my army surrounded and know that the game is over. I tell him that no need for a turn three and he goes on and on about if I didn't have a broken reroll there would even be a turn three anyway. The league organizer comes over and gives us our prizes and chats as I pack up. Bob walks around the room telling everyone that the game was an easy win and he knew he was getting first. I'm done listening so i make to leave. Bob stops me and wants to shake my hand congratulating me on a great game and getting second and I finally snap and tell him i won't shake his hand and it wasn't a great game. He starts yelling telling me I'm a bad sport and how I'm not part of the club and shouldn't have been allowed to play. I try to leave again and the organizer stops me and wants to talk and I tell him what happened and he tells me if I don't apologize I can't play because bob is a cofounder of the club.

I didn't play another event with that club.

You know after reading this thread I wanted to share my own little story to this...

So in my area before 8th came out the war gaming scene dried up entirely due to no FLGS supporting miniature gaming. The only FLGS around anymore is all about Magic/coffee as it is a cafe as well. Anything not Magic is never supported by the store and is often not even tolerated by the staff to the point of them demanding that we "sign up" with them any night we wanted to play, even if we had been playing at the store for months every Tuesday night. This is just set up for the rest of the story because after this my dad built a table in his basement and all of my gaming became either with him or one of our few mutual friends. My entire experience with 8th edition has been with the same group of about five people so it is really bad when one of them is just awful to play with.

Generally the group is mid to high competitive but because we are all very friendly we try to have a balance in mind when we arrange games, talking about how competitive we want the game to be long before we even make list. This worked out for the longest time because the three "guest" players that are not me or my dad all have a really good grasp on the game and know exactly how to build a list that will fit into the arranged level of game. The problem started when my dad, who for the longest time just liked throwing dice and laughing with friends and never really cared about how good his list was, started to research and build more powerful list. On top of that his main army was Imperial Guard which have a really good time with 8th and his secondary army was Imperial Fist, which after their supplement became very powerful. Soon my dad got to the point that he was able to compete with our more powerful tournament level list and began winning as much as he was losing.

At this point it might seem like this is turning into a rant about my dad turning into a TFG but the point of this is partially to get it off my chest but also share my experience with 8th. The truth is that I am the awful hobbyist that is causing our group to kind of fall apart. My dad and I have been playing the game since 3rd edition and through that entire time our games have always been rather one sided in my favor because my dad never really cared about doing well he just wanted to have fun. I was a competitive player up until mid 7th edition when I got so tired of how ridiculous the game had become and just started to build my armies around concept and themes, I embraced the fluffy casual life style.

So now that I have set the scene I think most people can see where the conflict is coming into being. The last ten or so games I have played of 8th edition have been completely one sided affairs that ended with my tabled around turn three. One particular game that comes to mind is a 2 v 2 where it was two of our friends playing Eldar/Dark Eldar, my dad playing Imperial Fist and myself playing Slaneesh Daemons/Word Bearers because I wanted to test out the new shinny Faith and Fury rules. I had a small handful of models left on the table by the end of turn two because I of course was running a swarm of 5++ T3 bodies alongside a few squads of Possessed which all got shredded by the Eldar fire power. Now we were playing 3k points per side and my dad had only brought a 1k list so I was rocking 2k of our sides points. Roughly 2k or our 3k was gone by turn two with me effectively out of the game. This being 8th edition with the Imperial Fist supplement fresh off the presses my dad turned around with his army and almost tabled the full 3k Eldar side, it was just...disheartening. I was put off because I already thought that Faith and Fury gave my Word Bearers very little to work with and no matter how hard I tried to make Possessed work it didn't matter because they were still just T4 3+ saves.

Games like this continued as I changed my list, played different armies, tried out new things but due to my new fluff driven mindset I bought models that I thought would match my army concept rather than how powerful they would be. I played a Renegade Knight list against his Imperial Fist because we wanted to see how good the anti-vehicle abilities were, I lost two Wardogs and Two Knights on his first turn before I even got a turn. We both had a laugh and called the game because clearly that game was a forgone conclusion. But every game became the same thing over and over again with me losing most of my army in the first two turns, trying to score points as I could but losing every game.

Finally last week we played two games, one with a revamped Word Beares list heavy on Daemon Engines vs Imperial Guard in which I killed a few Guardsmen and one Hellhound before we called the game and finally the last game that I just lost it on. I was running Sisters of Battle vs the same Imperial Guard list, I was running some heavy guns looking to give him a ranged battle to compete with his own. I had the first turn and fired everything I could at him and moved all of my Rhinos up field to get ready to unload on him the next turn. I managed to kill a Hellhound and damage a Russ pretty good while killing a few Guardsmen that were in range of my combi-bolters and light arms but I looked across the table and could see the four other Russes at full strength and felt despair. His wrecked my army, taking probably 500 of the 1.5k I had brought but the problem was that the 500 he took off the table was most of my anti-tank weapons. I looked at the table at the bottom of turn one and just told him that I was done, I didn't want to sit there for another two hours playing a game where all I did was pick up models while he rolled a hundred dice a turn. He got mad, we had an argument were in the end he said that he just wasn't going to play me anymore which I agreed because I had no interest in playing the armies he plays anymore. Of course we made peace before we left because we are family but at the same time we really have no desire to play each other anymore. I feel like I just don't have the models to play at the level he plays at anymore and he doesn't want to screw up his list building by purposefully making is weaker.

TLDR;
My bad attitude cost me my only play group and it sucks, but I accept that it is my own fault.

I guess the moral of the story is...sometimes TFG just has different expectations than the group? I don't know. I just felt like sharing my story.

A lot of the time its not even casual vs competitive; but often just two people of different skill levels. A person who understands the game really well who builds a casual list is going to make a very different (and often better performing) army to someone who builds a casual list who doesn't understand the game well.


Skill level differences are a real problem because those with a higher skill will more so win and those with a lower skill will lose more often. In Wargames that can last hours and in small play groups this can be a real problem because you can end up in "no win" situations for long periods of time. In games like MTG it can be even worse in terms of power performance (against a good deck a bad deck often has no hope unless the good deck gets messed up with shuffling); however because matches are over fast you can often move onto another player- its not as big a time sink.

Sometimes you do have to realise that there are people you will auto-lose too and that you either play them for a challenge or you play someone else. There's no shame in that, its just learning where you can compete and find a challenge without being overwhelmed.



Another aspect is to ask the better players to teach you to play better. This can be very important with small groups if you get left behind by the skill development of others. In much larger groups you can often soak such variation because there's more chance of more varied skill levels being present.




Maybe its time to make a load of posters; make facebook group; abandon the garage and find somewhere cheap to rent (school hall; church hall etc....) for an afternoon/evening and form a proper club and try to recruit new people.

 Overread wrote:
A lot of the time its not even casual vs competitive; but often just two people of different skill levels. A person who understands the game really well who builds a casual list is going to make a very different (and often better performing) army to someone who builds a casual list who doesn't understand the game well.


Skill level differences are a real problem because those with a higher skill will more so win and those with a lower skill will lose more often. In Wargames that can last hours and in small play groups this can be a real problem because you can end up in "no win" situations for long periods of time. In games like MTG it can be even worse in terms of power performance (against a good deck a bad deck often has no hope unless the good deck gets messed up with shuffling); however because matches are over fast you can often move onto another player- its not as big a time sink.

Sometimes you do have to realise that there are people you will auto-lose too and that you either play them for a challenge or you play someone else. There's no shame in that, its just learning where you can compete and find a challenge without being overwhelmed.



Another aspect is to ask the better players to teach you to play better. This can be very important with small groups if you get left behind by the skill development of others. In much larger groups you can often soak such variation because there's more chance of more varied skill levels being present.




Maybe its time to make a load of posters; make facebook group; abandon the garage and find somewhere cheap to rent (school hall; church hall etc....) for an afternoon/evening and form a proper club and try to recruit new people.

One of the biggest things I've had to stop doing with frustrated people where I play is offering to play their army against mine to show how I'd run it. More often than not I can win, or at least make the game far far less one sided than it was, but if you take away peoples' primary excuse for their loss (my army is just bad/their army is just OP) then they tend to fall back on "This person is just a scummy WAAC player" and they get mad at you or at others rather than at the game.

It seems like a quick army switch would be a good way to get peoples' confidence back up, show them their army CAN win and they just need to use it effectively, but evidence has shown me that's the opposite of what a lot of folks want to see and hear, and they're much happier with a string of losses they can blame on out of control factors.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Angeloftheblood wrote:
Worst one for me was in 2008 I was in a league playing with a 40k club that met and was based in the local game store I worked at. I did not join this club and flat out told them that I couldn't because I wanted to stay impartial as a store employee, but also because members of said club paid 5 bucks a month into the club so they could "do events with prizing" for club members. Never saw those free club member only tournaments and the old guy who kept all the financial records always had new models and wouldn't discuss club funds... but a story for another time.

That reminds me of a group I played with. I was one of the "officers" of the club, meaning I could plan and run events when I wanted to, i could talk with new players, resolve disputes etc.

The club leader was a guy who'd been doing it since like 3rd edition, by 7th he very rarely played and most often would just turn up at the club to talk to people, paint a bit, it was clearly a social thing more so than a game thing, and that's fine. He was like a dedicated PR guy who talked to all the folks who stopped in. We only took cash (like 10$ for a year) because the store offers a really nice discount and just doesn't want us giving it away for free. Similarly, none of us ever saw any of that money, it was ostensibly for terrain and events, but all our events were free (and not super common) and we'd had the same terrain for ages.

Things went downhill when the last "founding member" of the group of friends our club leader had started with moved away to another state for a job, and passed away somehow. The first time I heard about it, which was the only time I really trusted any of the information coming from this leader guy, he said it was "an accident". The guy was probably 50, lived alone, 450+ pounds, so yeah sudden and tragic but you could immediately understand that a cross-country move might be risky for a guy like that.

At that point, club leader dude just stopped showing up. Totally understandable, again - this friend of his was one of the primary reasons he showed up and it'd be a painful reminder. We knew the club was important to him and basically just left it in limbo for almost a year, waiting for the leader to make the first move. It was pretty clear he wasn't coming back, but just in case it was still important to him to be "the leader" we weren't about to contact him and take that away.

We finally hear from him, and as expected he says he wants to step down and have us take over collectively. The only weird point in this conversation was that he wanted us to change the name and logo of the group because he had both those things....patented. Patented? Whatever. We changed the group name and logo to a different thing, and basically continued on as before, except now we were handling the cash and realizing...hey...this kind of adds up. We can run some events with prizes and get some new terrain now, neat!

So months go by, and we hear something about the old club leader guy. A friend says he found a blog made by him and he is talking about how our evil WAAC gaming drove his friend to have to move (somehow...his friend was one of the most competitive players in the group as I remember, at least he had a WK/Scatterbike list in 7th) and therefore we killed him. Furthermore, we were the reason he now had no money, and we all worked together to try and get rid of him. He had all our names, phone numbers and email addresses listed up on his blog. Also, in a moment that made me go from very scared to laughing for a second, he said he was planning on suing us for violating his patent. I really want to see this patent.

We called the cops at that point, and besides that blog disappearing, have not heard anything from him or from the cops about the situation. It has been a couple years.

Not a thing that made me leave a game group, but it did cause a game group to stop existing and morph into a very similar, differently named group under new management!

 Overread wrote:
A lot of the time its not even casual vs competitive; but often just two people of different skill levels. A person who understands the game really well who builds a casual list is going to make a very different (and often better performing) army to someone who builds a casual list who doesn't understand the game well.


Skill level differences are a real problem because those with a higher skill will more so win and those with a lower skill will lose more often. In Wargames that can last hours and in small play groups this can be a real problem because you can end up in "no win" situations for long periods of time. In games like MTG it can be even worse in terms of power performance (against a good deck a bad deck often has no hope unless the good deck gets messed up with shuffling); however because matches are over fast you can often move onto another player- its not as big a time sink.

Sometimes you do have to realise that there are people you will auto-lose too and that you either play them for a challenge or you play someone else. There's no shame in that, its just learning where you can compete and find a challenge without being overwhelmed.



Another aspect is to ask the better players to teach you to play better. This can be very important with small groups if you get left behind by the skill development of others. In much larger groups you can often soak such variation because there's more chance of more varied skill levels being present.




Maybe its time to make a load of posters; make facebook group; abandon the garage and find somewhere cheap to rent (school hall; church hall etc....) for an afternoon/evening and form a proper club and try to recruit new people.

This really isn't an issue of who the better players are, we are all about the same skill level the only thing that has changed is my own goals when it comes to the game/hobby.

Warhammer has never been a game where skill was more important than army selection because of how horribly imbalanced it is. I have played almost every single army in the game and still collect most armies but have recently downsized. Switching armies has been discussed but generally the response to my issues with playing Word Bearers is that I should not play Word Bearers.

All three of the other players in our little group also play Chaos and their advice to me is to essentially play a completely different army composition in order to be more competitive. I know exactly what I would have to do in order to be more competitive within the group but I am not interested in playing an army that is a slave to the meta. I know that Alpha Legion is the way to go, I know that souping in Knights and Renegades will make the army more competitive, but if I do all of that I am not playing an army I am interested in.

So the other solution is just to find other people to play but the pool of players in the area has seemingly dried up with everyone just disappearing or playing at places that are 30-40 minute drives from where I live. At this point in time with a small child and working a bunch of over time I don't have four to five hours to get a game in no including travel time. There is something to be said when I can bring my little one with me to my parents house to get a game in lol.

I'll be honest, I know what the solutions to the issues I have are but at this moment in time they are things I am not interested in. Playing armies I do not want to play because the current edition of the game is so alpha strike heavy, ranged focused and lethal that I am not really interested in even playing much anymore. I am looking more into playing other games but still have the problem that the closest FLGS that supports minis is a rather long drive away.

I just wanted to share my story and maybe give an insight into how some people end up being that guy.

One of the biggest things I've had to stop doing with frustrated people where I play is offering to play their army against mine to show how I'd run it. More often than not I can win, or at least make the game far far less one sided than it was, but if you take away peoples' primary excuse for their loss (my army is just bad/their army is just OP) then they tend to fall back on "This person is just a scummy WAAC player" and they get mad at you or at others rather than at the game.

It seems like a quick army switch would be a good way to get peoples' confidence back up, show them their army CAN win and they just need to use it effectively, but evidence has shown me that's the opposite of what a lot of folks want to see and hear, and they're much happier with a string of losses they can blame on out of control factors

I had this nearly exactly with a guy who I was trying to help getting to grips with BB on FUMBBL. I mean, at first I had to tell him basic stuff like how many sides a dice had ("Why don't I roll a Pow every turn!"? "Because that's like rolling a 6"), but then it was him struggling to have any ability to see the balance in different factions.

He started off playing Chaos Dwarves, losing a lot, then he got absolutely outplayed by a High Elf team. Cue: "AG4 is cheating. It's so OP. You can't beat Elves".
So he made a High Elf team. Lost a lot. Got beaten up really badly in a particular match by Orcs. Cue: "It's not fair, Orcs are such a strong roster, all that S skill access".
At my suggestion he made an Orc team. Actually did ok until he came up against a high TV Chaos Dwarf team. Cue: "it's not fair, Chorfs are OP, you can't win against Claw."
So he made a Chaos Chosen team (called, hilariously, 'Embrace the Claw'). Lost 3-0 to a DE team. Quit the game forever.

In addition to this he could not keep his cool in game, and often resorted to insulting his opponents. It was that, not the team-switching, which led to me refusing to talk to him any more.

I can recall a story from when I first got started playing 40K. This was back in 7th.

I'd only been playing for a few days when my friends took me up to the FLGS to get more games in with new people. I played Salamanders back then, and I went up against a guy playing CSM. He brought two helldrakes with baleflamers.

He got mad when he found out I had a 4+FNP against flamer weapons army wide, even though his list was still specifically designed to club baby seals.

I can think of dozens of examples over the years, but they mostly had to do with extreme personalities.

We had one guy in my FLGS who bought a crazy CSM army. It was 6th edition, he was running double FOCs with 6 Heldrakes, 160 Cultists, and some Chaos Lords with Plasma Guns. The army was impossible to beat, it would just spread out all over the board and he was using all sorts of placement tricks to prevent opponents from being able to target anything but the nearest unit. Every game would end with him controlling every objective through weight of bodies while his Heldrakes BBQed everything that mattered.

The thing was, the guy had awful manners. His army was painted with Testors Enamels, everything had exactly 3 colors. He thought this made it by definition beautiful and would go on about all the effort it took painting it in 2 days. It would take him 40 minutes to get through each movement phase, opponents would literally go to lunch turn 2 because they knew what was happening. The player had poor personal hygiene, he wore a jean jacket that had never been washed all year, including the summer, and you could smell it. And his teeth. Looked like he sharpened them.

The worst part was he would steal his opponents models. You came in with 30 Guardians, you would leave with 28. He was taking them as trophies, we actually caught him with the models in the bag. He pretended it was an accident, but people knew it had been happening. Wasn't long after this he decided he was going to switch to Tau because he wanted something more competitive for other players. Loaded up on Riptides and Drones to create another unbeatable list.

He absolutely lost his cool one day and flipped a table on someone who decided they wanted a fight in the parking lot. Had to call the cops and close the store for the rest of the day while we cleaned up the mess. People started coming into the store just to tell us to ban the guy, there was a lot of anger built up over 6+ months of him hanging around too often. Right around that time, his parents decided to move to North Carolina and he went with them. Never heard from him again.

A reason I don't really tournament or pickup game anymore is because of a few stories.

I've seen the guys that throw a fit when they lose. I've played the guys that chuck dice at the wall when they lose or roll bad. I've played guys that throw their stuff into their case forcibly when they lose or their guys die. I've had the guy that refused any judge overruling some strange rule they were trying to cook up. I've had the guy threatening to take me outside and fight me because he didn't like an event rule I put in place. I've played the guy that got caught with loaded dice (actually six people over the course of a decade in our club were caught with loaded dice and banned from our leagues and events).

The ultimate was a regional RTT back in the mid 2000s where I saw a legit table flip. It wasn't a game I was involved with, but the loud crash, the site of models flying through the air, and dude storming off leaving everything in ruins because he lost a game will never be something I ever forget and was one of the key catalysts to getting out of tournament play for me.

It is really interesting how many of the negative stories here have to do with the mismatch between casual and competitive lists.
It seems to cause a lot of strife.

I notice in this and other threads a lot of stupid store owners. Catering to scumbags because "they spend a lot of money", ignoring the fact they're chasing away other people. It really goes to show that most people who open gaming stores don't have a lot of business sense, its a side project and as a result they don't seem to care much as long as poeple buy from them while often providing nothing other than table space to be worthwhile.

The worst thing I saw was years and years ago when I was in my senior year of high school and shortly after so like 1999. I had a friend (I'll refer to him as "my friend" even though he stopped being one) who's father owned a game store down the street from me, so I went there frequently after school just to hang out. This guy was really smart (in a lot of gifted programs; I had known him off and on since like elementary school) but incredibly lazy. He would lie about working at the store during school hours to get OJT (on the job training) and basically have working count as classes, so he could sleep in. He dropped out of school midway through the senior year because he felt it was easier to just get a GED than finish classes.

Anyways, two stories with this guy, one wargame and one RPG. The wargame one, we did a fairly casual Warhammer Fantasy league, this was like 5th edition, which ran a few weeks and had a prize of store credit at the end. He played a Bretonnian army that was basically a kitted-out hero on a dragon (bretonnia could have a higher than normal percentage of heroes, because bretonnia) and a couple min sized archers who didn't do anything all game; his hero on dragon would just tear through everyone's army. Nobody liked playing him (he was also the rules-lawyering/WAAC type, he did the same in D&D when we were kids) so eventually, everyone dropped out, leaving me to play him in the final round (I didn't have a stellar record but was automatically going to be 1st or 2nd). Anyway, I was playing the then-new Vampire Counts, and since I knew he would field his lord on a dragon I took Hand of Dust which, if I rolled well, would have one shot his dragon. It was basically if I rolled well I would win, if not I would lose. I missed the amount needed to kill him by a wound or two and lost, but came in second and got a small prize while he got the main prize (in credit. in his dad's store. when he was paid there and could order whatever he wanted at cost) and spent it on Magic cards or something. After running everyone else out of the league by being a WAAC scumbag.

The second one, the one that basically got me blackballed from the store for years until it shut down, involved the Hackmaster RPG. Hackmaster was at that time a blatant parody of 1st edition D&D,so the book would talk about how "real men" sucked it up and dealt with the dice, only pansies complained, the GM was god, if you didn't like the idea of the game being uber hard then you're too much of a wimp to play, etc. a lot of macho comedy stuff based on how they act in the Knights at the Dinner Table comic. These guys seemed to miss that it was a parody. I was invited one day to join their group and it turned out that my "friend" not only had the most powerful character in the group because the GM had a tendency to throw ultra-hard monsters at everyone to kill them (claiming it was "part of the game", like I believe we fought a Beholder once at 3rd level who bit my character's head off), but the rest of the group were basically his character's servants and lackeys. I found out from talking to someone who had been in their group on the Hackmaster forums that they would also bring people into the group, let them roll to start with a magic item, then kill them/get them killed and take the magic item then laugh at/insult/run the person out if they complained saying they were pansies who "couldn't hack it" at the game. One guy, who said he was a teacher, would be fethed with constantly and my friend laughed about it because he would take it seriously:

He was given a magic sword and made to think it was a cursed sword that would turn on him when he least expected it so he was always paranoid. The guy was high-strung it seemed and my friend did this deliberately to screw with him. He even got super pissed one day and stormed out of the store, like he was beet red and I thought he might have had a heart attack or break the windows or something, just because of stuff that happened in the game thanks to my friend's antics. So anyway, I wanted to play on my friend's ego and I asked on the Hackmaster forums for character advice, explaining some of the things that went on (I didn't say how they were chasing people out, someone else chimed in and said they did that to him.
I basically just said oh my friend has the strongest character in the group so I'm thinking of playing to that) and saying I wanted to make a character who would have journeyed there because he heard of <My Friend's Character> and his fame and wanted to learn from him (figuring I wouldn't be screwed with if I was playing to his ego). Someone stepped in and said they had played with this group, and talked about what they did to run people off and make their experience miserable. At the time, stores had to be part of the Hackmaster Retail Association to sell the products/have sanctioned games; it wasn't required but had some sort of prestige. So KenzerCo, the company that made the game later came into the thread and said, without going into any details, that after talking to the store and the owner they were removed from the Retail Association. That's when some of the group dogpiled the thread insulting me, my family, anything you can imagine, presumably because they had something happen as a result of this (I never found out what, before this went down I just calmy called my friend one day and said I wasn't enjoying it and wouldn't be back. He either didn't know about this at the time or was playing it calm, which seems unlike him, because he just said okay and nothing else). The guy who was always being screwed with even came on the thread, furious and pretty much cussing me out every other word, to literally threaten to kill me (I am not making this up) and basically warned that I better not show my face around the store because he had a gun (he actually said that. Something like "And just so you know, I carry a gun"). Needless to say, I did not go back. I never did figure out what made them so angry, since to my knowledge there wasn't anything special about being in the Retail Association in the first place. But it had to have been something major to get literal death threats for the inadvertently bringing the store's shenanigans to light.

A year or two later I had talked to a group that played 40k and were going to play at the store. I told them without going into detail that I wouldn't go to that store because we had history but for giggles, if you go there casually mention my name and see the result. The next day they said that not only was I not welcome in the store but I probably shouldn't even be in the vicinity when the group played 40k there. They didn't go into more detail but the way it was worded I imagined being outside getting Chinese food or something (it was next to a takeout place) and having someone from the store look up, see me and yell "There's Wayniac, get him!" and chase me with bats or something. He held a grudge that long, and some of the regulars from that store still would give me dirty looks if I happened to see them over the years (they never said anything, however). All because I asked for advice on a character and it came to light the store and group were basically chasing people away from the game.

 Da Boss wrote:
It is really interesting how many of the negative stories here have to do with the mismatch between casual and competitive lists.
It seems to cause a lot of strife.

Sometimes. But just as often in my experience, the perception of a mismatch between casual and competitive can cause just as much of a rift. I've seen plenty of people getting incredibly angry because their opponent beat them with what was objectively a far less competitive list, because they used tactics that the other player just didn't like.

one of the most common causes of people complaining about negative experiences is a guy who, in my opinion anyway is always extremely polite and friendly, does a reasonably high effort job painting his minis, and plays generally not terribly competitive list builds. I'm talking like, pre Space Marine 2.0, White Scars with tons of bikers, bike HQs, min sized scouts for troops, and lots of vanvets. He kills infantry with dakka and melee, then either ties tanks up or just ignores them, tanking their firepower on lots of 3++ storm shield saves.

But the fact that he very purposefully charges things he knows he cant kill to stop them shooting, very carefully uses his pile in and consolidate moves to wrap up dudes and keep them from falling back, and relies on a pretty decent turn 1 alpha strike just sets some players off to no end.

By contrast, we have a player who's fairly active in the tournament scene and has a reasonably meta competitive Deffskullz ork list with a bunch of reroll spammy KMB units and a bunch of mek guns and a big ork horde who wins well over 3/4 of his game and (IMO at least) has a worse attitude than the first guy by far, spends most of the game complaining about GW like a living dakka post, and nobody seems to care.

He's since switched from that list to a big bugs nid list and I've heard nothing, so maybe it was just that playstyle. But it is interesting how much the perception of competitiveness and certain factions/styles of play get automatically singled out as un-fun regardless of how actually strong they are. People like playing against the orks, for the most part as far as I can tell because they give you time to kill their stuff while you kill theirs, killing you in simple, easily understandable ways, and being a generally beloved faction that people like seeing on the table.

Yeah I can see that. Denial is never a particularly fun playstyle to go up against. Though I think that is a lot less clearcut, you know? Like people complaining about being outplayed by this kind of list probably did not have a fun time, but perhaps they could mitigate that somehow? I like those sorts of lists, most of the time, particularly if it is clear that the player has put some effort into it.

Wayniac wrote:I notice in this and other threads a lot of stupid store owners. Catering to scumbags because "they spend a lot of money", ignoring the fact they're chasing away other people. It really goes to show that most people who open gaming stores don't have a lot of business sense, its a side project and as a result they don't seem to care much as long as poeple buy from them while often providing nothing other than table space to be worthwhile.

The worst thing I saw was years and years ago when I was in my senior year of high school and shortly after so like 1999. I had a friend (I'll refer to him as "my friend" even though he stopped being one) who's father owned a game store down the street from me, so I went there frequently after school just to hang out. This guy was really smart (in a lot of gifted programs; I had known him off and on since like elementary school) but incredibly lazy. He would lie about working at the store during school hours to get OJT (on the job training) and basically have working count as classes, so he could sleep in. He dropped out of school midway through the senior year because he felt it was easier to just get a GED than finish classes.

Anyways, two stories with this guy, one wargame and one RPG. The wargame one, we did a fairly casual Warhammer Fantasy league, this was like 5th edition, which ran a few weeks and had a prize of store credit at the end. He played a Bretonnian army that was basically a kitted-out hero on a dragon (bretonnia could have a higher than normal percentage of heroes, because bretonnia) and a couple min sized archers who didn't do anything all game; his hero on dragon would just tear through everyone's army. Nobody liked playing him (he was also the rules-lawyering/WAAC type, he did the same in D&D when we were kids) so eventually, everyone dropped out, leaving me to play him in the final round (I didn't have a stellar record but was automatically going to be 1st or 2nd). Anyway, I was playing the then-new Vampire Counts, and since I knew he would field his lord on a dragon I took Hand of Dust which, if I rolled well, would have one shot his dragon. It was basically if I rolled well I would win, if not I would lose. I missed the amount needed to kill him by a wound or two and lost, but came in second and got a small prize while he got the main prize (in credit. in his dad's store. when he was paid there and could order whatever he wanted at cost) and spent it on Magic cards or something. After running everyone else out of the league by being a WAAC scumbag.

The second one, the one that basically got me blackballed from the store for years until it shut down, involved the Hackmaster RPG. Hackmaster was at that time a blatant parody of 1st edition D&D,so the book would talk about how "real men" sucked it up and dealt with the dice, only pansies complained, the GM was god, if you didn't like the idea of the game being uber hard then you're too much of a wimp to play, etc. a lot of macho comedy stuff based on how they act in the Knights at the Dinner Table comic. These guys seemed to miss that it was a parody. I was invited one day to join their group and it turned out that my "friend" not only had the most powerful character in the group because the GM had a tendency to throw ultra-hard monsters at everyone to kill them (claiming it was "part of the game", like I believe we fought a Beholder once at 3rd level who bit my character's head off), but the rest of the group were basically his character's servants and lackeys. I found out from talking to someone who had been in their group on the Hackmaster forums that they would also bring people into the group, let them roll to start with a magic item, then kill them/get them killed and take the magic item then laugh at/insult/run the person out if they complained saying they were pansies who "couldn't hack it" at the game. One guy, who said he was a teacher, would be fethed with constantly and my friend laughed about it because he would take it seriously:

He was given a magic sword and made to think it was a cursed sword that would turn on him when he least expected it so he was always paranoid. The guy was high-strung it seemed and my friend did this deliberately to screw with him. He even got super pissed one day and stormed out of the store, like he was beet red and I thought he might have had a heart attack or break the windows or something, just because of stuff that happened in the game thanks to my friend's antics. So anyway, I wanted to play on my friend's ego and I asked on the Hackmaster forums for character advice, explaining some of the things that went on (I didn't say how they were chasing people out, someone else chimed in and said they did that to him.
I basically just said oh my friend has the strongest character in the group so I'm thinking of playing to that) and saying I wanted to make a character who would have journeyed there because he heard of <My Friend's Character> and his fame and wanted to learn from him (figuring I wouldn't be screwed with if I was playing to his ego). Someone stepped in and said they had played with this group, and talked about what they did to run people off and make their experience miserable. At the time, stores had to be part of the Hackmaster Retail Association to sell the products/have sanctioned games; it wasn't required but had some sort of prestige. So KenzerCo, the company that made the game later came into the thread and said, without going into any details, that after talking to the store and the owner they were removed from the Retail Association. That's when some of the group dogpiled the thread insulting me, my family, anything you can imagine, presumably because they had something happen as a result of this (I never found out what, before this went down I just calmy called my friend one day and said I wasn't enjoying it and wouldn't be back. He either didn't know about this at the time or was playing it calm, which seems unlike him, because he just said okay and nothing else). The guy who was always being screwed with even came on the thread, furious and pretty much cussing me out every other word, to literally threaten to kill me (I am not making this up) and basically warned that I better not show my face around the store because he had a gun (he actually said that. Something like "And just so you know, I carry a gun"). Needless to say, I did not go back. I never did figure out what made them so angry, since to my knowledge there wasn't anything special about being in the Retail Association in the first place. But it had to have been something major to get literal death threats for the inadvertently bringing the store's shenanigans to light.

A year or two later I had talked to a group that played 40k and were going to play at the store. I told them without going into detail that I wouldn't go to that store because we had history but for giggles, if you go there casually mention my name and see the result. The next day they said that not only was I not welcome in the store but I probably shouldn't even be in the vicinity when the group played 40k there. They didn't go into more detail but the way it was worded I imagined being outside getting Chinese food or something (it was next to a takeout place) and having someone from the store look up, see me and yell "There's Wayniac, get him!" and chase me with bats or something. He held a grudge that long, and some of the regulars from that store still would give me dirty looks if I happened to see them over the years (they never said anything, however). All because I asked for advice on a character and it came to light the store and group were basically chasing people away from the game.

Wow, what a bunch of unstable gakheads, you're probably lucky to be away from them as they're probably trouble magnets. And that Hackmaster game sounds douchey and cringy as hell.

 Da Boss wrote:
complaining about GW like a living dakka post