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How do you feel about player place terrain at tournaments? There are cons and pros for players' to place terrain but it feels bad to win/lose a game because someone did a great job of placing terrain. It has become a new skill set for this edition.

What do you mean, specifically? Players placing terrain at the start of the game? As part of the scenario? Alternating back and forth?

I mean, I set up three tables at my place for a series of games a few weeks ago, and then played on them. Does that make that terrain "player placed"?

Good point, I mean in a tournament setting it doesn't matter what style.

In prior editions setting the table was just as much part of the game as deploying your forces.

For tournaments, having pre-set tables saves time. I can see the appeal.

For casual play I prefer jointly setting up the table and making sure it looks fine for everyone involved.

I don't know if "competitive terrain deployment" is a bell we really want to ring. The bland symmetrical ITC-style terrain layouts are bad enough as it is.

I prefer tables that look like they could conceivably exist for the world the games take place in. Cohesive, themed terrain that all works together to provide an environment.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I don't know if "competitive terrain deployment" is a bell we really want to ring. The bland symmetrical ITC-style terrain layouts are bad enough as it is.

I prefer tables that look like they could conceivably exist for the world the games take place in. Cohesive, themed terrain that all works together to provide an environment.

No arguments here. I’d rather have a battlefield that looks like it could exist, not a hodge-podge of random stuff, or identical block setups.

Was it 6th that had you slice the table up into 2x2 sectors and roll a d3 for how many pieces each part got? Then took turns putting stuff down. Very gameable, as “one piece” could be a little 6” section of wall, or a 3 story hab block. So if you wanted to play on planet bowling ball to support your gunline, you could place the big LOS blocker off to the side, and fill the middle of the table with shrubs. Your opponent, obviously, would try to stop this. But it ended up with tables looking a mess.

 CKO wrote:
How do you feel about player place terrain at tournaments?.

I don't do tournaments. So I have no feelings concerning who places the terrain or how in that setting.


For general play I prefer;
A) We sent the table together, making an interesting/logical "scene". Or at least something that looks good....

B) we do it completely random by section & take turns pkacing/not placing something.

And then there's two other ways I commonly play;
1) Laziness. The one shop I play at always has several tables already "dressed" (they change them about once/month). We're free to walk over to the storage racks & pull out whatever we like though.
But many a game has been played where we just pick one of the 4 tables & use what's already there....

2) we roll off & high roll gets to decide who sets the whole table.

I'm with HBMC 100%. A logical, themed tabletop that creates an environment is best.

Back in 6th edition there was a pretty cool system for creating the battlefield.

Players would gather a pool of terrain pieces, anything, any size.
Roll a D3 for each 2'x2' section of the battlefield - This is the quantity of terrain pieces to be placed in that 2'x2' section.
Players then alternate placing terrain on the table, anywhere - The D3 was used as a countdown marker for each 2'x2' section and you had to place terrain until all countdown markers were at zero.

This made for some really wild and interesting tabletops and added quite a lot of pre-game enjoyment.

At home putting a table together fairly and thematically with friends is best. At tournaments I rather they just setup terrain themselves… the day is long enough already I don’t want to waste time setting up terrain. It’s not a skill I want to develop or exploit.

gungo wrote:
At home putting a table together fairly and thematically with friends is best. At tournaments I rather they just setup terrain themselves… the day is long enough already I don’t want to waste time setting up terrain. It’s not a skill I want to develop or exploit.

This is worded perfectly! There are already a million things players have to do for tournaments these days like trying to remember popular stratagems and secondaries and terrain placement is almost too much icing for the cake if you know what I mean.

One thing for sure everyone wants a nice themed terrain to play on regardless if it is at a tournament or not.

I like standardised terrain layouts, BUT I do wish fortifications were more useable and the current ones all but prevent that.

 oni wrote:
I'm with HBMC 100%. A logical, themed tabletop that creates an environment is best.

Back in 6th edition there was a pretty cool system for creating the battlefield.

Players would gather a pool of terrain pieces, anything, any size.
Roll a D3 for each 2'x2' section of the battlefield - This is the quantity of terrain pieces to be placed in that 2'x2' section.
Players then alternate placing terrain on the table, anywhere - The D3 was used as a countdown marker for each 2'x2' section and you had to place terrain until all countdown markers were at zero.

This made for some really wild and interesting tabletops and added quite a lot of pre-game enjoyment.

I also really liked that rule, it's probably the one good thing that 6th had.

If IIRC correctly, it was a trainwreck in tournaments though. There was this image floating around of a guard player picking all the large terrain pieces and putting them in corners of the board to deny cover to his opponent. If you go the route of player-placed terrain you need to find a way to avoid that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
When we just play non-narrative games, we set up the boards and then put our boxes of terrain in the middle. I usually place some scenery to start a theme and make sure that board has at least some cover and then the rest of the players continues off that. When everything is done, I usually check once more for playability to make sure the boards aren't a shooting gallery, that vehicles can cross the board and that all terrain types are clear.
Tables are then chosen afterwards, before anyone knows what mission they are playing.

For narrative games, it's either the same or the campaign master sets up the whole board when it matters for the scenario.

So this topic is suppose to be more about comp, sadly Dakka isn't fully up to speed in that department. Personally I hate it bc some armies just dont care and will try to screw you over instead of help make a better game.

I think the old - random player places certain pieces in the 1' strip around the edge, then the other pieces in the 2'x4' in the centre, then other play chooses the board edge worked fine.

But I guess now with the model densities so increased and some army's dependant on models with large bases, you are stuck with pre configured terrain. But gods stop making it mirrored! If you are worried your imagination can't do a fair non symmetrical set up use a weighted D6 roll to decide who picks the side (so the codex's with the worse win rates get D6+4, down to (+3, +2, +1) the best codex's who just get D6).

For games with friends, player placing was/is fine. In my experience, those games were usually not time restricted and were at a friends house to enjoy an afternoon or evening.

When I started playing competitively in stores and tournaments back in 3rd through 6th, player placement was a nightmare. You were on limited time and it only ate into it. Some players wanted to use up little time so did not think about placement. Often to their detriment. Others wanted to slow play the whole game because they thought they had a bad matchup and needed as few turn's as possible of play time. Terrain placement was just another opportunity to burn time for them.

As mentioned previously, the last time we played I set up several tables prior to people showing up:


... and it meant that people could just unpack their stuff and start playing.

No further need for set up and everything, and it let me concentrate on making cool tables whilst everyone else could just get on with it.

I don't know if adding a 'game' aspect to terrain would enhance anything. So I guess I'm finally voting 'no' on this.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
As mentioned previously, the last time we played I set up several tables prior to people showing up:

Spoiler:

... and it meant that people could just unpack their stuff and start playing.

No further need for set up and everything, and it let me concentrate on making cool tables whilst everyone else could just get on with it.

I don't know if adding a 'game' aspect to terrain would enhance anything. So I guess I'm finally voting 'no' on this.

The point of Player place terrain for events is to have another level of tactics and also takes all the blame off the TOs, some like it, some don't.

And, to repeat myself: I don't know if "competitive terrain deployment" is a bell we really want to ring.

And frankly, it sounds stupid. And it's not part of the game. Play the game using the table. Don't make setting the table up part of the game.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
As mentioned previously, the last time we played I set up several tables prior to people showing up:

Spoiler:

... and it meant that people could just unpack their stuff and start playing.

No further need for set up and everything, and it let me concentrate on making cool tables whilst everyone else could just get on with it.

I don't know if adding a 'game' aspect to terrain would enhance anything. So I guess I'm finally voting 'no' on this.

In my opinion, player placed terrain has the advantage of not having to rely on GW, a host or a TO/team to set up a table that doesn't ruin the game because there is no cover, too much cover, the wrong kind of cover or larger models are getting blocked. In 9th, setting up tables in a good looking and functional way is a skill many people don't possess. Not every group is lucky enough to have people like you or me setting up their tables for them. In my group too many games have imploded into one-sided slaughters because of badly placed terrain.

H.B.M.C. wrote:As mentioned previously, the last time we played I set up several tables prior to people showing up:

Spoiler:

... and it meant that people could just unpack their stuff and start playing.

No further need for set up and everything, and it let me concentrate on making cool tables whilst everyone else could just get on with it.

I don't know if adding a 'game' aspect to terrain would enhance anything. So I guess I'm finally voting 'no' on this.

Great looking tables!

Jidmah wrote:In my opinion, player placed terrain has the advantage of not having to rely on GW, a host or a TO/team to set up a table that doesn't ruin the game because there is no cover, too much cover, the wrong kind of cover or larger models are getting blocked. In 9th, setting up tables in a good looking and functional way is a skill many people don't possess. Not every group is lucky enough to have people like you or me setting up their tables for them. In my group too many games have imploded into one-sided slaughters because of badly placed terrain.

Player placement at stores and tournaments I went to was still dictated by the terrain the shop/event had available and provisioned for use at each table. While its physical positioning on the table could be adjusted, the terrain pieces available to choose from were already set per table. So if the terrain pieces are poor for *reasons*, player placement can only do so much to mitigate that. Not enough, imo.

In short, skill at placement is important. Actually having good pieces in reasonable quantity is much more important imo. Hopefully any given store or event has a active enough community to volunteer time and come together on terrain days to help assemble and paint product to get to that point.

I much prefer terrain to be set up by a neutral 3rd party, or in collaboration with my opponent (probably not happening at a tournament!). I also dislike single fixed terrain layouts on all tables, as we see at GW events. Varied layouts that are still fair to both players is my preference. I don't think specific terrain set-ups are things players should be able to practice for prior to a tournament.

 Marius Xerxes wrote:
Player placement at stores and tournaments I went to was still dictated by the terrain the shop/event had available and provisioned for use at each table. While its physical positioning on the table could be adjusted, the terrain pieces available to choose from were already set per table. So if the terrain pieces are poor for *reasons*, player placement can only do so much to mitigate that. Not enough, imo.

In short, skill at placement is important. Actually having good pieces in reasonable quantity is much more important imo. Hopefully any given store or event has a active enough community to volunteer time and come together on terrain days to help assemble and paint product to get to that point.

That is absolutely true, but when I still used to play at stores, tables were often set up by the staff which either were only meant to look good, but were nonfunctional or were set up by people who were used to playing LOTR, WHFB or warmachine which have completely different requirements to terrain from 40k.

Our group literally has boxes and boxes full of terrain, but (in 9th) despite that it's still incredibly easy to decide a game by bad terrain placement before a single dice is rolled.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
At this point a shout-out to the TTS table designers who go more than an extra mile to add sound, weather effects, flying birds and whatnot to their maps and even design their own models instead of just copy&pasting DoW prefabs. Some of those maps go above and beyond of what is possible with real tables and makes one forget about all the drawbacks that TTS has compared to real games.

I dislike the alternating player placed terrain with bland cookie cutter terrain pieces that has taken over tournaments. The board are ugly, uninspired, and it eats up time which is a precious resource in a tournament. In all other games I like to build the table with my opponent.

 CKO wrote:
How do you feel about player place terrain at tournaments? There are cons and pros for players' to place terrain but it feels bad to win/lose a game because someone did a great job of placing terrain. It has become a new skill set for this edition.

Why is this a bad thing? I'd say that in a tournament having more of the game decided by player agency is a very good thing! The more skill the better, and at least if you lose because of terrain it was because you were out-played and not because the TO made a bad table layout.

I'm against it for practical reasons though, tournament games are already on too tight a schedule as it is. Adding an additional setup phase is just too much. If people want player-placed terrain we need either longer rounds and events split over more days or 1000-1500 point games.

Because placing terrain shouldn't be a "skill".

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Because placing terrain shouldn't be a "skill".

Why not?

Because the place in which a fight occurs is something that you have to deal with, not something you control.

If everyone can just place the terrain how they want, then you'd just end up playing endless games of 2fort.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Because the place in which a fight occurs is something that you have to deal with, not something you control.

If everyone can just place the terrain how they want, then you'd just end up playing endless games of 2fort.

Tournament games are already disregarding the narrative in favor of symmetrical "sit on these arbitrary points" missions on perfectly symmetrical battlefields using standardized terrain. If the goal of a tournament game is to test skill at playing the game why shouldn't placement and use of terrain be part of that skill? 40k certainly needs more skill and player agency involved, and at least terrain placement isn't more of the same old attempts to reduce the game to winning in the list building phase.

 Shas'O Ky'husa wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Because placing terrain shouldn't be a "skill".

Why not?

Because you end up with situations like the socal open where the ork player wins by walling off his entire army from assault by abusing flyer bases… because he setup his bases and terrain like a wall that the other army has to go around to even have a chance to get into combat… there is very little skill in this.. it’s just abusive tactic.

It’s an abusable tactic that isn’t fun or fair especially when you have no control over the type of terrain to choose. But honestly tournaments are already taking to long so why waste even more time doing this nonsense.

 Shas'O Ky'husa wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Because placing terrain shouldn't be a "skill".

Why not?

The problem is right now Obscuring is so important to the game if 1 side has more it becomes insanely unbalanced, Imagine if you are a Knights player, you want the opponent to have as little as you can so you place as much as you can in bad spots (Each player places 5 large and 5 small from some events so I will use that as an example). All terrain has to be 3" away from each other, so you make sure to place your first 2 large pieces 8"-9" from each other in no mans, forcing a large gap. You dont care that you can place a minor piece of terrain bc all it does is giving light cover or dense which wont effect you all to much compare to Obscuring. That is just one of the few problems and ways to manipulate where the opponent can place their terrain and be protected, if the opponent knows you are doing this then they have to "counter" place, but then they are not placing where it is going to help them anyways, its a lose lose situation.

Over all I think a bit of each would be best, TO place 3 large and 3 small that can not be moved and let the players pick 1 large and 1 small each to move around a little if you want that type of event and still be more balanced. I personally don't like it bc I've seen it screw over players even if they are both equally skilled bc it always favors 1 side a little more. But I also think WTC tables are bad too and favors melee way too much.

NOTE: Could a lot of the problems be prevented with better rules for placement? yeah maybe, so in the future my thoughts on this might change, but i've seen player placed terrain events from 5th and the majority has not liked it so far for many reasons, so it will take a lot for me to think its the better approach for events.