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 Overread wrote:
Wild crazy things happening because of fluffy reasons can be fun
It's not so much fun though when those wild crazy things mean you lose a game regularly because of those super swingy dice rolls that means that you, the player, have so little input in the game at critical moments that you might as well have tossed a coin for who won.
Heck even a win can feel hollow or undeserved when you win because you got a double turn in AoS and wiped your opponent off the table before they could do anything.

Mechanics like BA pulling troops to form the Death Company, Orks rolling for zzap guns, or even just basic things like unpredictable reserves or scatter on deep strike, weren't anywhere near the same level of random swinginess as the double turn in AoS where it has major game-wide impact and there's precious little you can do about it. I mean, if you lost because your Tactical squad was forced to charge due to a failed Ld check, it must have been an incredibly close game for that to be the deciding factor. If you lost because you put a third of your points into an all-star Terminator deathstar and then they didn't show up until turn 5, well, that's on you.

The number of mechanics in older editions that could lose you the game outright due to randomness and which you had no means to mitigate or avoid was somewhere between 'extremely limited' and 'nonexistent'. The things I always saw people complain about were much more tame mechanics where usually they could be mitigated, but the players would fail to enact any contingency and then blame the rules when it didn't work out. The random charge distances we still have are more impactful than pretty much any of the random mechanics in 3rd.

And to be fair, it isn't just tournament players who dislike randomness. They just tend to be the loudest about things out of their direct control- asymmetric or varied missions, atypical terrain layouts, random mechanics- getting in the way of a pure test of skill.

PenitentJake wrote:
So while it may not be in the core publications anymore, and while weapon lists for Matched Play games are increasingly restricted to what's in the box, I don't think conversion is as dead as you think it is.

It isn't, but if you've never arranged a pick-up game and had someone question your cool conversion (or even just old model) because it's 'modeling for advantage', let me assure you that it is a very frustrating thing to deal with.

 catbarf wrote:
It isn't, but if you've never arranged a pick-up game and had someone question your cool conversion (or even just old model) because it's 'modeling for advantage', let me assure you that it is a very frustrating thing to deal with.

For me I can usually sniff out the people truly modeling for advantage and it's exceedingly rare. Sometimes people take their games way too seriously.

 catbarf wrote:

or even just basic things like unpredictable reserves or scatter on deep strike,

The problem with unpredictable reserves and scatter deepstrike is that it was one of the blatant cases of "rules for you, not for me" in which some armies (Marines) had different ways to mitigate or outright negate such rules (drop pods, teleport homers, etc.) and everyone else had to deal with the randomness.

Yes.

It causes standardization in models, terrain, and layouts of the board.

It causes people to mathematically analyze the rules to "solve" the game, ignoring the lore, how an army works, or other factors beyond killing power or scoring power of combos and stats.

It causes people to follow constraints to be accepted in the group. Not interested on creating an unbeatable roll fest at 2000 points? Don't play/Git Good.

The meta imploded here due to several pushing the latest and greatest to make this a sport to climb to the top of, like it's boxing or wrestling or football.

WMH saw the samething. Page 5 was some people's excuse to be right donkeys. It was meant to tell you that you can bring whatever you want because it's all at the same level. You didn't have to bring your weakest stuff because your buddy doesn't have the right models to stand up to your hero-hammer combo. The strong to be balanced by the weak. What happened? Tourney Go-ers just didn't bring the weak, causing the same issues as 7th ed 40K.

The win at all cost crowd feed off the tourny circuit, and it will come at the cost of the group and the game. Once that dies, they move on to the next competitive game.

Personally I don't care for house rules in the sense of changing things to me from back in the day a house rule was something like our weekly games are 1500 points and no special characters. Not a bunch of random things to change So even if you had somebody new show up you could very easily tell them hey here's what we generally play because they would end up asking anyway.

I don't have a problem with that same like I don't have a problem with tournament players I have a problem with tournament mentality corrupting everything else to fit that way and nothing else. I have literally seen in the 20-plus years that I have been around 40K, starting in 1997, that you will eventually have groups where tournament play is the only thing that happens whether or not there's a tournament just because the pervasive idea is tournament play is balanced ergo everything else is not balanced. So you have this intrinsic fear that if we are not playing using the latest tournament rules we are introducing the potential for an unbalanced game.

The problem I had with War machine was it went a little too far in that direction which overall was good Because it went to the extreme you pretty much only ever had tournament play because non-term and play was barely supported and was pretty piss poor if I do say so myself and I was a press ganger very briefly. The non-tournament scenarios were abysmal and made GW scenarios look like the best thing ever by comparison.

War machine I think actually shows what happens when you lean too much to the tournament crowd because for example 2D terrain was not something supported The rulebook even showed well done 3D terrain with like removable trees or something like that so they fit putting models in it but looked visually appealing however that was too difficult so you had all this 2D mouse mat printed terrain that worked but looked absolutely terrible and when you got into proxy bases and markers and things like that you literally had the board filled with counters testing everything out before you actually moved. It was a little ridiculous on the extreme because of how precise tournament play wanted to be. And then yes you had the jackasses that saw page 5 and used it as an excuse be complete donkey-caves to everyone when more page 5 actually meant was the game was not designed to have to tone things down in the sake of wanting a casual game. Instead the whole point of it was to say always bring your A game and try to win because you're playing a competitive game but you don't need to be a jackass. Instead who was it who took that and started applying the "lol you suck git gud" type stuff? The competitive players because that's all they know

 Tyran wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

or even just basic things like unpredictable reserves or scatter on deep strike,

The problem with unpredictable reserves and scatter deepstrike is that it was one of the blatant cases of "rules for you, not for me" in which some armies (Marines) had different ways to mitigate or outright negate such rules (drop pods, teleport homers, etc.) and everyone else had to deal with the randomness.

Which, frankly, I would be completely fine with if that's their shtick and they pay accordingly. Marines having reliable deep strike and reserves would emphasize good C&C as a key strength, and that predictability is more newbie-friendly.

 catbarf wrote:

Which, frankly, I would be completely fine with if that's their shtick and they pay accordingly. Marines having reliable deep strike and reserves would emphasize good C&C as a key strength, and that predictability is more newbie-friendly.

I'm not sure if you can properly cost ignoring core rules. Sounds like the kind of stuff that inevitable ends being broken one way or another.

If you can put a price on deep strike, you can put a price on more reliable deep strike.

And I mean, if you can't put a reasonable cost on either, then there are deeper issues than whether one faction gets more reliable deep strike than the others.

 catbarf wrote:
If you can put a price on deep strike, you can put a price on more reliable deep strike.

And I mean, if you can't put a reasonable cost on either, then there are deeper issues than whether one faction gets more reliable deep strike than the others.

We make the drop pod expensive to account for reliable deepstrike, because putting that cost on a unit that might not use it would be needlessly punishing. And now you have a drop pod that's ONLY useful for deepstriking on tanks. And that reliability allows you to math in weapon options that aren't anti-tank, but bring sufficient volume to tackle rear armor very effectively thereby circumventing the need for direct anti-tank and giving that army the advantage of weapon flexibility where others are forced into an appropriate amount of AT.

An issue typically not addressed in this kind of threads is "how the non-tournament focussed focussed game would look like". It is assumed, that it would look the same, just had way more imbalance to it.

This view is fundamentally wrong.

When you're designing the game for tournament play, you must design it to accommodate two major factors - a) 3hr setup&play time, to fit in the typical tournament schedule, b) players won't know eachother and won't negotiate anything

So, when you take an initially non-tournament game, like 40k, and try to make it tournament compliant, you remove everything that doesn't fit this mentality. The discussion above, about fluffy randomness is a good example of this issue. Those random bits swinging both ways did not destroy balance, they destroyed predictability. They were designed to spice things up for players, who play against those same friends, with those same armies again and again. Same goes with asymmetric scenarios or terrain, and with random mission elements, like warlord traits, psychic powers or maelstrom missions. All of those design elements increase replayability of the game in friends&family context, but are a hindrance in tournament context.

You also have to remove any rule, that within a friendly context is perfectly manageable, like blast templates, but in a torunament context will cause a frequent need for impartial arbiter. Same goes with any rule, that takes an additional time to resolve, or requires additional book keeping above wound counters.

Bottom line is - casual/narrative are not simply "less serious take on a tournament-ready game".

But my biggest gripe with tournament mentality is a social one, described at lenght by Wayniac. Tournament mentality will always remove 90% the game out of the game and focus on the most broken 10%. It is not a problem at all to play with ANY unit, from ANY 40k edition and have a close game in a friendly context, where players have the mentality of "today I accommodate your fancy, tomorrow you accomodate mine". 99.9% of all possible lists are not a "tournament optimized" ones and a low power game is as enjoyable as high power one. But when you only play in a "serious business" type of club, those might as well not exist at all. Same goes with battlescapes and missions. "Unbalanced & unfair", but unique and interesting games are bread and butter of historicals and nobody treats it as a bug, but a feature. Not in 40k.

Just think about playing the same ITC style standard table, with the same GT mission pack, with the same opponent, with the same army, again and again, because you are a garragehammer player and everything not tournament-oriented has been removed from the official game. Nobody sane can call than an entertainment.

Tournament players have their needs, narrative/casual players have theirs, and it is seriously disingenious or ignorant, to think that tournament players somehow make the game better for anybody except themselves. In an ideal world, those two crowds should have two distinctively different rulesets, going far beyond mere "two ways to play" approach.

And last but not least, blind pick-up players actually demand higher levels of balance, that tournament players do, and this has everything to do with "listbuilding as a skill" expectation of tournament crowd. Tournament players actively do not want "random assortement of units has a 50-50 winrate against my carefully optimised list" state of balance, while casual pick-up players would be more than happy with a game, where they can bring ANY list they fancy and have a good game.

Tournament mentality will always remove 90% the game out of the game and focus on the most broken 10%.

This can, and will, still happen in casual gaming circles. Some people just like stomping scrubs and having the game less tournament oriented won't remove that. People want to use "Good units" most of the time. The difference is that one might not always be aware of what is good and what is not.

Tournament players actively do not want "random assortement of units has a 50-50 winrate against my carefully optimised list" state of balance, while casual pick-up players would be more than happy with a game, where they can bring ANY list they fancy and have a good game.

Yikes, that's a pretty broad stroke against tournament players. I have met super casual players that engage in tournament play(ergo tournament players) because they like meeting other people and showing their cool stuff. It is easy to project your fears/hatred upon a certain subsection of the player base but it doesn't necessarily make it true.

50-50 winrate is nigh impossible. We have a lot of gamings showing that it is nigh impossible. 45-55 seems to be the sweet spot for most. I mean chess favors players who chose white 52-56% in winrates.

Let's say you have a hero on a mount that boosts all mounted units. Then you add nothing but foot slogging units. So a list with that hero and mounted units will outperform any list with a hero and footslogging units.

It also does not account for the fact that as soon as you start introducing units that provide synergies to certain units this imbalance increases. I remember Blades of Khorne in 1.0 and 2.0 where there were over 15 heroes each providing different buffs to the army. That inherently reduces the ability of balancing "anything goes" kind of lists. As soon as you create a unit that boosts other units or skews a list into a current meta status the balance starts to go out the window. BoK was also super mono-build thanks to that.

However, you can also have something like One Page Rules which simplifies everything, but even then the most hardcore CAAC I know will complain about that because it "doesn't add character"(their words). They want to identify with their faction and specific traits.

In the end, the hatred people feel for tournament players is a projection of uncertainty. If you are not getting what you desire from a game - and that could be anything depending on the person in question - it can feel nice to attack tournament players as the evil scourge. Because at the end of the day we all want a group to blame for all our misery. Even if all tournament players would disappear in a single day people would still complain about the game and people would just find someone else to blame for the state of the game.

I do agree that narrative and competitive should be entirely different games...

But the internet exist and people will bring optimized lists regardless of what they are playing. Maybe not the best optimized list possible because model limitations, but in general people don't like to cripple themselves for free.

 Eldarsif wrote:

Tournament mentality will always remove 90% the game out of the game and focus on the most broken 10%.

This can, and will, still happen in casual gaming circles. Some people just like stomping scrubs and having the game less tournament oriented won't remove that. People want to use "Good units" most of the time. The difference is that one might not always be aware of what is good and what is not.

It does, but it happens way more when the tournament mindset creeps into casual circles, again due to the "Tournament play must be balanced, therefore everything not tournament play could be unbalanced. Do you want to play an unbalanced game" type of weighted questions. It's not a flaw to expect tournament players to want to bring the best stuff, but IMHO it IS a flaw to have that mentality bleed into everything else so that 90% of the game may as well not even exist, because taking it is going to actively hurt your chances of winning.

Tournament players actively do not want "random assortement of units has a 50-50 winrate against my carefully optimised list" state of balance, while casual pick-up players would be more than happy with a game, where they can bring ANY list they fancy and have a good game.

Yikes, that's a pretty broad stroke against tournament players. I have met super casual players that engage in tournament play(ergo tournament players) because they like meeting other people and showing their cool stuff. It is easy to project your fears/hatred upon a certain subsection of the player base but it doesn't necessarily make it true.

50-50 winrate is nigh impossible. We have a lot of gamings showing that it is nigh impossible. 45-55 seems to be the sweet spot for most. I mean chess favors players who chose white 52-56% in winrates.

Let's say you have a hero on a mount that boosts all mounted units. Then you add nothing but foot slogging units. So a list with that hero and mounted units will outperform any list with a hero and footslogging units.

It also does not account for the fact that as soon as you start introducing units that provide synergies to certain units this imbalance increases. I remember Blades of Khorne in 1.0 and 2.0 where there were over 15 heroes each providing different buffs to the army. That inherently reduces the ability of balancing "anything goes" kind of lists. As soon as you create a unit that boosts other units or skews a list into a current meta status the balance starts to go out the window. BoK was also super mono-build thanks to that.

However, you can also have something like One Page Rules which simplifies everything, but even then the most hardcore CAAC I know will complain about that because it "doesn't add character"(their words). They want to identify with their faction and specific traits.

In the end, the hatred people feel for tournament players is a projection of uncertainty. If you are not getting what you desire from a game - and that could be anything depending on the person in question - it can feel nice to attack tournament players as the evil scourge. Because at the end of the day we all want a group to blame for all our misery. Even if all tournament players would disappear in a single day people would still complain about the game and people would just find someone else to blame for the state of the game.

And yet, I think it's correct. Very few tournament players I have met want a 50% chance of winning, where skill is the deciding factor. No, they want to maximize their own chances by picking the best things. They want to focus on the "skill" of picking a good army, often to the exclusion of all else (i.e. they want to win the game before it starts by having a superior list). The focus on winning a game through tactics/generalship seems to have diminished in favour of "I'm going to come at you with a force you can't beat, so I don't need to win by superior skill".

The problem here is twofold: You need SOME variety and flavor, or the game is bland. But 40k goes the other extreme and has so much "flavor" that it bogs down the game, and adds needless complexity which nobody wants. On the same token though, the game rules should strive to AVOID having the "tournament play dominates" mindset and the "Only take these things if you wan to win", or, worst of all, have the answer to "I like Uni tX, how do I make it work" be "You can't, take Unit Y instead" and have that statement said as though it's not indicative of a grievous flaw in the design.

One thing I greatly miss from WM/H, which I have never really seen in 40k, is the notion of "This unit may not be the most competitive, but here's some ways to improve it" and having that be enough so that it has a chance to pull a "dark horse" win because it's unexpected. Instead, 40k you most often see the notion that if something is "bad", nothing in the game can fix it at all, and you should instead force yourself to not like it so much rather than like it and want to make it work.

nou wrote:

When you're designing the game for tournament play, you must design it to accommodate two major factors - a) 3hr setup&play time, to fit in the typical tournament schedule, b) players won't know eachother and won't negotiate anything

1. If you want to change the length of the game, that's as easy as switching up the point values
2. A game you have to negotiate on what you're allowed to bring is a bad game to begin with

 Tyran wrote:
I do agree that narrative and competitive should be entirely different games...

But the internet exist and people will bring optimized lists regardless of what they are playing. Maybe not the best optimized list possible because model limitations, but in general people don't like to cripple themselves for free.

This is the biggest issue, but I blame it partly because of the constant "If it's not tournament standard it might be *gasp* unbalanced!" rubbish peddled constantly by the loudest of people. The content creators, the blog authors, etc. are almost overwhelmingly also tournament players, so they're basically pushing their agenda that tournament play is the standard, rather than a strict subset that should exist only for those types of games, and often will make it sound like without that safety yet, you could have an unfun game against a lousy opponent, and waste your day, and do you really want that, no of course you don't, so why wouldn't you use the "most balanced" set of rules all the time to ensure a fun game?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

nou wrote:

When you're designing the game for tournament play, you must design it to accommodate two major factors - a) 3hr setup&play time, to fit in the typical tournament schedule, b) players won't know eachother and won't negotiate anything

1. If you want to change the length of the game, that's as easy as switching up the point values
2. A game you have to negotiate on what you're allowed to bring is a bad game to begin with

I disagree on that second point, only because the vast majority of games before Warhammer operated on that value. It was generally assumed that you would decide what to bring within reason, and change it if necessary to fit your opponent, not bring what you wanted and feth the rest. But those games also generally assumed you were playing in a club with mates, not "Hmm I'm going to go up to the local game store, maybe someone else decided to turn up too" kind of approaches, so why wouldn't you want to talk things over with friends to enjoy a good game? No, in this case I blame pickup game culture by removing the fact that you're playing with friends; you're often playing with strangers where the only commonality is that you both buy things at the same game shop.

 Tyran wrote:
I do agree that narrative and competitive should be entirely different games...

They pretty much are. There's tons of books dedicated to narrative players with asymmetrical missions, events, and other things.

Lights going out:


An external space battle causing decompression of a compartment:


A radiation leak:


It's absolutely disingenuous for people to assert that GW doesn't keep narrative or casual play in mind. And all tournament players are asking for is some regulation on the units themselves. Shock. Horror.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
It's absolutely disingenuous for people to assert that GW doesn't keep narrative or casual play in mind. And all tournament players are asking for is some regulation on the units themselves. Shock. Horror.

While you aren't wrong, it seems more and more like tournament players want their mode to be the default, to the exclusion of all else, rather than a mode for use when they want to play in events. So you often find the very same tournament players arguing against narrative-type rules because "it's not balanced", refusing to even entertain them as existing, and often times encouraging everyone around them to ignore them as well.

Wayniac wrote:
And yet, I think it's correct. Very few tournament players I have met want a 50% chance of winning, where skill is the deciding factor. No, they want to maximize their own chances by picking the best things. They want to focus on the "skill" of picking a good army, often to the exclusion of all else (i.e. they want to win the game before it starts by having a superior list). The focus on winning a game through tactics/generalship seems to have diminished in favour of "I'm going to come at you with a force you can't beat, so I don't need to win by superior skill".

I don't think you've met many tournament players. People play competitively, because stomping people actually isn't fun. The guy that stomps is a guy who likes abusing casuals. They could be a tournament player, too, but I'll pretty much guarantee that they're not a good one.

If the system is more balanced then playing casuals is less likely to result in a blow out, which makes competitive players more like to want to engage, and removes the list-building win aspect of the game. Win-win.

In 9th the concept of a list building win is extraordinarily rare outside the lower tables.

Wayniac wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
It's absolutely disingenuous for people to assert that GW doesn't keep narrative or casual play in mind. And all tournament players are asking for is some regulation on the units themselves. Shock. Horror.

While you aren't wrong, it seems more and more like tournament players want their mode to be the default, to the exclusion of all else, rather than a mode for use when they want to play in events. So you often find the very same tournament players arguing against narrative-type rules because "it's not balanced", refusing to even entertain them as existing, and often times encouraging everyone around them to ignore them as well.

Often the narrative stuff has a large additional time constraint that makes is less feasible when you're time limited.

Some of the narrative stuff is super whacky. Most of that was in older editions. Crusade is hard to juggle on top of all the other 9th rules so I don't do it much yet.

Lots of people will balk when a D6 randomly removes models. It just isn't really that fun unless you're totally into the narrative. Someone showing up to the shop to find a game is NOT going to be in that mindset. But I would absolutely play interesting missions that have characterful battlefield considerations

Wayniac wrote:
This is the biggest issue, but I blame it partly because of the constant "If it's not tournament standard it might be *gasp* unbalanced!" rubbish peddled constantly by the loudest of people. The content creators, the blog authors, etc. are almost overwhelmingly also tournament players, so they're basically pushing their agenda that tournament play is the standard, rather than a strict subset that should exist only for those types of games, and often will make it sound like without that safety yet, you could have an unfun game against a lousy opponent, and waste your day, and do you really want that, no of course you don't, so why wouldn't you use the "most balanced" set of rules all the time to ensure a fun game?

I disagree on that second point, only because the vast majority of games before Warhammer operated on that value. It was generally assumed that you would decide what to bring within reason, and change it if necessary to fit your opponent, not bring what you wanted and feth the rest. But those games also generally assumed you were playing in a club with mates, not "Hmm I'm going to go up to the local game store, maybe someone else decided to turn up too" kind of approaches, so why wouldn't you want to talk things over with friends to enjoy a good game? No, in this case I blame pickup game culture by removing the fact that you're playing with friends; you're often playing with strangers where the only commonality is that you both buy things at the same game shop.

Blame whoever you want to blame, doesn't change the issue that both the internet and pickup games aren't suddenly going to stop to be a thing.

To be blunt a narrative game still needs to be balanced. Sure it can be allowed to be more complex and slower than a competitive game, but a modern wargame cannot rely on the playerbase to balance itself.

Wayniac wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
It's absolutely disingenuous for people to assert that GW doesn't keep narrative or casual play in mind. And all tournament players are asking for is some regulation on the units themselves. Shock. Horror.

While you aren't wrong, it seems more and more like tournament players want their mode to be the default, to the exclusion of all else, rather than a mode for use when they want to play in events. So you often find the very same tournament players arguing against narrative-type rules because "it's not balanced", refusing to even entertain them as existing, and often times encouraging everyone around them to ignore them as well.

If 2000 points of a TAC Marine list isn't balanced against a 2000 TAC Tyranid list, then your asymmetrical missions aren't going to be healthy to begin with.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
It's absolutely disingenuous for people to assert that GW doesn't keep narrative or casual play in mind. And all tournament players are asking for is some regulation on the units themselves. Shock. Horror.

While you aren't wrong, it seems more and more like tournament players want their mode to be the default, to the exclusion of all else, rather than a mode for use when they want to play in events. So you often find the very same tournament players arguing against narrative-type rules because "it's not balanced", refusing to even entertain them as existing, and often times encouraging everyone around them to ignore them as well.

If 2000 points of a TAC Marine list isn't balanced against a 2000 TAC Tyranid list, then your asymmetrical missions aren't going to be healthy to begin with.

1000 points of marines holding off against an infinitely respawning horde of tyranids until extraction will never be balanced, thats the whole point of that asymmetrical mission....

And it totally does not matter in most scenarios unless the balance is so off that one side is leafblowing the other with zero effort (which isnt a thing). Playing a campaign isnt about winning or losing, its about having memorable moments where the sarge of a terminator squad manages to hold off long enough against a horde of 'gants until he manages to be warped back onto the battle barge with the intel he was sent to collect.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
1000 points of marines holding off against an infinitely respawning horde of tyranids until extraction will never be balanced, thats the whole point of that asymmetrical mission....

And it totally does not matter in most scenarios unless the balance is so off that one side is leafblowing the other with zero effort (which isnt a thing). Playing a campaign isnt about winning or losing, its about having memorable moments where the sarge of a terminator squad manages to hold off long enough against a horde of 'gants until he manages to be warped back onto the battle barge with the intel he was sent to collect.

Something like that requires pre-planning to be fun. It just doesn't work for pickup.

But I could totally see marines get 1,000 points with no restrictions and nids get 500 of what they want and then 1500 of respawning troops. Just giving someone more stuff doesn't always make for a great experience.

 Daedalus81 wrote:


Something like that requires pre-planning to be fun. It just doesn't work for pickup.

doesnt all narrative stuff?

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
It's absolutely disingenuous for people to assert that GW doesn't keep narrative or casual play in mind. And all tournament players are asking for is some regulation on the units themselves. Shock. Horror.

While you aren't wrong, it seems more and more like tournament players want their mode to be the default, to the exclusion of all else, rather than a mode for use when they want to play in events. So you often find the very same tournament players arguing against narrative-type rules because "it's not balanced", refusing to even entertain them as existing, and often times encouraging everyone around them to ignore them as well.

If 2000 points of a TAC Marine list isn't balanced against a 2000 TAC Tyranid list, then your asymmetrical missions aren't going to be healthy to begin with.

1000 points of marines holding off against an infinitely respawning horde of tyranids until extraction will never be balanced, thats the whole point of that asymmetrical mission....

So let's say 1000 points of Marines handily beat 4000 points of Tyranids because the balance was thatboff, how many rounds are you having them respawn for your scenario?

All about introducing interesting victory conditions.

Hold on…he’s coming out again…



During 2nd Ed, my local store ran such a scenario. For the Tyranids to win with their endlessly respawning hordes, they had to wipe out the entirety of the enemy army.

The Tyranids promptly lost, because rather cleverly, we stashed the odd character here and there in hiding. Literally hid the models where it was practical and game-legal to do so.

We still gave a good accounting, and both sides had to sing for their supper. But at the end of the game? A lone IG officer was still safely tucked behind some crates.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

So let's say 1000 points of Marines handily beat 4000 points of Tyranids because the balance was thatboff, how many rounds are you having them respawn for your scenario?

read the whole post before replying ffs..

And it totally does not matter in most scenarios unless the balance is so off that one side is leafblowing the other with zero effort (which isnt a thing)

The problem being that it "is" a thing.

There's this strange idea that "competitive people" are agonizing over points over a pinhead. They aren't. Its when a faction is clearly head and shoulders over another that you have a problem. And that goes just as much for casual/narrative play as it does for tournaments.

Its I tickle you on my turn - and then you delete half my army on yours. Its been the case numerous times in 9th, 8th, 7th... etc.

Tyel wrote:
The problem being that it "is" a thing.

There's this strange idea that "competitive people" are agonizing over points over a pinhead. They aren't. Its when a faction is clearly head and shoulders over another that you have a problem. And that goes just as much for casual/narrative play as it does for tournaments.

Its I tickle you on my turn - and then you delete half my army on yours. Its been the case numerous times in 9th, 8th, 7th... etc.

is it right now? Not in my experience, both sides fething delete each other somehow.

 Daedalus81 wrote:


Something like that requires pre-planning to be fun. It just doesn't work for pickup.

Well, exactly what this is all about. When one reads a thing or two about wargames history and steps out of a 40k "wargaming" world, there is a whole universe of games, that are designed specifically not with the pick-up culture in mind. Some of them only have entirely fixed army lists and/or fixed scenarios, some only have army construction rules, that do not specify any fixed cost of units, etc. "Pick-up ready" is only a subset of all wargame rulesets out there, but amongst 40k players, mostly U.S. based 40k players, pick-up is the default mode of wargaming, to the point where everything else is treated as fairytales.

This is why I stressed, that it is a social problem, not ruleset problem. It takes just a small minority of players in a club with a cutthroat tournament mindset, to start the arms race and push out any casuals/narrative guys who don't want to participate in it out of the club. Seen it happened just too many times. You can also see this in pretty much every thread on Dakka, that there are people, like EviscerationPlague, who can't even fathom, that there are different approaches to wargaming even possible, and that blind pick-up culture is somehow the only way wargames are used. From the history point of view, pick-up is only a relatively recent concept in wargaming.

This distinction is usually dismissed with the broad "if only balance was good enough" statements, which miss the point entirely.

BTW, I think that some peoples' heads would explode, if they knew what "validation" means in a historical wargaming context

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
is it right now? Not in my experience, both sides fething delete each other somehow.

Well yeah, not right now. But that's due to GW reacting to all the people complaining about balance and wanting a balanced game.
At numerous points in 9th its been much worse.