Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So, I wanted to split something off from a thread in tactics. Here's the starting quote:

 TheCaptain wrote:
Alright.

I'm gunna lay it down for you guys, plain and simple.

Say you've got like, three hotties watching you play an 1850 game. You've got a 6, a 7, and a 9 (all out of 10).

You drop some wicked accurate shots from the griffon, kill a few non-elite troop choices, get the job done conservatively; that six and seven will be pretty damn interested. You've presented yourself as a reliable, consistent man worth their time.

But that sweet, 5'7", Blonde, Sub-100lb Southern Belle of a 9 isn't into that. No. You drop a couple shots with that Medusa; blow up some termie squads, she'll dig it. Powerful, unforgiving, commanding. The Medusa pulls, man.

Go with a Medusa.

You're welcome.

You're right, though. 40k isn't just a game about numbers and planning. It's also a game about awesome. 60 points spend on some mortars will inflict light, consistent casualties. 60 points spent on an eviscerator priest won't do anything for a dozen games, but then a 60 year old man will chop a land raider in half with his 10-foot-long-chainsaw sword.

There should be some sort of a way of objectively determining awesomeness. Not just awesome because of crazy luck or some particular crazy effectiveness. A way that measures awesomeness despite what a unit in question happens to do in any particular turn. Awesomeness is an intrinsic value to the unit itself.

So, there are a few things that I can think of that might qualify for having an impact on this metric:

- It has to be spectacularly effective. Multilasers slowly glancing rhinos to death is uncool. A demolisher callously ignoring the existence of whatever rhino foolish enough to get in its way, suffering from a cataclysmic explosion with a single shot is cool. I suppose there is something on the other side of the spectrum as well. Having a 3x plasma vet squad take off mephiston's last wound is sensible. A squad of conscripts mobbing off mephiston's last wound in close combat, dragging him screaming to the ground as he gets trampled to death by goobers is spectacular.

- Your opponent has to want to kill it. If it's something your opponent can take reasonable steps to avoid or to handle with nearby resources, it's not cool. When a trio of women come up to the table and ask why your opponent is having to focus all their efforts on just one of your models, you can explain that it's awesome, like yourself, which is why you brought three of them, like the ladies. Your opponent struggles to handle one of the three. If it dies, your opponent gets what he wants, and you just don't even care. I'd think both vendettas and respawning conscripts have this. Al'Rahem is also great for this as well. Oh, you killed off 40 guardsmen? Here's 40 more, directly in your deployment zone. While you try and figure that out, I'm going to talk to my friends Krystal, Naomi, and Starla here. Take your time.

- It has to inspire envy. Does your opponent wish they had griffons? No. Do they wish they had Creed outflanking a squad of demolishers? Yes. Do they pine for veterans? No. Do they cry cheese when a vendetta drops off a 3x demo charge SWS? Yes. You can determine this kind of thing by listening to what people have to say, but you can see it most plainly by the kinds of lists people bring. You have a lot of vendettas, and you notice that more people are bringing anti-flier? Interesting...

- It screws with your opponent. Seeing an opponent castle up against deepstrikers or spread WAY out to avoid artillery or never get close to your stuff because you have too many meltaguns is priceless. If you've got stuff that's so awesome, your opponent needs to change the way they think about the game, then that unit(s) is cool.

Anyways, I think as a project it would be interesting to not only define what makes things awesome, but also to see if there is some way we could possibly quantify this.

This cracked me up! Captain dreaming of girls drooling over him rolling dice for toy soldiers, and his dreaming of skeletal, emaciated women. Thanks for the lolz.

"If we all go for the blonde and block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because no on likes to be second choice. But what if none of us goes for the blonde? We won't get in each other's way and we won't insult the other girls. It's the only way to win. It's the only way we all get laid."
~(John Nash, A Beautiful Mind)

"awesome" I think is different to each person. Meaning what you find as awesome I might not. For example when I looked at the new chaos space marine codex and saw how cultists could be turned into zombies, I thought that was the most awesome thing I heard in 40k. But I've yet to find one zombie battle report on youtube or here on dakkadakka. (I did not use the search funtion just to be clear)

Another example is we both play Imperial Guard. We both like having mass amounts of troops but I like getting as many leman russ tanks into my lists as possible. Sure it cuts my ability to hold objectives, but I find them to be pretty awesome on the battlefield.

Anyway just my 2 cents.

I think awesomeness would be something like vehicle explosions with lucky shots (like with a sniper rifle or something)

 60mm wrote:
This cracked me up! Captain dreaming of girls drooling over him rolling dice for toy soldiers, and his dreaming of skeletal, emaciated women. Thanks for the lolz.

This man has never experienced the aftereffects of prolonged Medusa use.

The unit of awesomeness is the Marbo (M), where 1.0 M = a unit which is as awesome as Marbo. Note that since no unit is as awesome as Marbo except Marbo himself, the scale ranges from 0-0.9999999 M, and appropriate prefixes may be necessary for units with extremely low awesomeness. For example:

Creed outflanking a titan is about 0.95 M. It's not quite as awesome as Marbo, but even Marbo would have to admit that it's a pretty cool move.

A Medusa or Marauder Destroyer scores around 0.8-0.9 M. It's clearly lacking that special "something", but who isn't happy when that STR 10 AP 2 shot vaporizes something in one shot, or the second most beautiful model in the game (after a well converted Marbo) makes a bombing run.

A melta gun is about 0.5 M. It's about average, it often does nice things and you like having it, but you can't really get too excited about it.

Ultramarines are about 1nM (nanoMarbo). Admitting you own them is a mark of shame, and you should probably accept that you're going to be sleeping alone tonight.

Well to me awesome is the result. If I put 2.5k on the battlefield and table you with 2.2k left. That's awesome. If I did it with both assault troops and some guns, even better. If i did it with a 4 yearold codex, pure cake. If I can pull it off before turn 4 ends, then there's not much else that can be said.

I know it pales to a mid-major tournament win, but last year I went 6-0, tabled every opponent before turn 4 finished, never lost a unit, against 6 different players with 6 different codices. I can't even say how many times I had great luck and they had horrible rolls. But, to me, that magical run (playing ultras too) was the most awesome 40k moment I ever had.

@Peregrine: what's shameful is thinking women care about any color of plastic soldier.

 Lobukia wrote:
Well to me awesome is the result. If I put 2.5k on the battlefield and table you with 2.2k left. That's awesome. If I did it with both assault troops and some guns, even better. If i did it with a 4 yearold codex, pure cake. If I can pull it off before turn 4 ends, then there's not much else that can be said.

That's not necessarily awesome. Awesome requires style, not just taking a powerful list or having good luck with the dice. A particular one-sided game might be moderately awesome, but it's certainly not a good scale to measure anything by.

@Peregrine: what's shameful is thinking women care about any color of plastic soldier.

What's shameful is sexist s thinking that women don't care about gaming.

PS: who said I was talking about women?

Lol.

Anyways, certainly it's subjective, but there has to be some way of creating the illusion of objectivity here.

I mean, I think we can almost all agree that this car is cool:



And this one is not:



Or at least you'd have a hard time finding someone who thought the second one has more of that indefinable libido appeal than the first. If you won a free car, and got to pick between the two, it's pretty obvious which one most people would pick.

It's that same kind of thing I'm thinking about with 40k. That difficult to define aesthetic. We all know what a gorgeous landscape or a hot woman or a wicked guitar riff is, even if we somewhat disagree on the specifics.

Any unit in the game can be effective. Any unit in the game can do something stunning with fantastic dice rolls. Not all units are, intrinsically, awesome. Things that make the universe a better place just by fielding.

Well maybe something awesome is something both players agree on. Like I wouldn't mind losing a race against that first car but the second one......yeah I would.

Marbo like Peregrine said is pretty awesome and every time I use him my opponent is smiling because of the visuals of him popping up from a sewer or of marbo walking away from a rhino to see it explode.

Or a deathstrike, it silently sits behind a building waiting for the codes to fire all the while that space wolves player knows his long fangs or jaws priest is going to bite it. Creating a tension or narrative, another goal in the game without being too strong. There has to be a balance. If the deathstrike could fire every turn it would only get eye rolls sighs as we would see 3 vendettas and 3 deathstrikes in most games.

TLDR:
Adds something to the game. Goal, narrative, tension etc. for both players.

Just my opinion. (I do like the unit of measure being a Marbo. I laughed at that.)

An imperial armored company is fething awesome for so many reasons...

 Peregrine wrote:

 Lobukia wrote:


@Peregrine: what's shameful is thinking women care about any color of plastic soldier.

What's shameful is sexist s thinking that women don't care about gaming.

Never said they didn't care about gaming, I implied they didn't care about 40k. In almost 20 years in gaming @4 different FLGS, countless local tourneys and conventions, ardboyz, visiting 2 battlebunkers and running 2 clubs, I've seen 2 girls watch 40k for more than 2 turns, and none play. To my wife "awesome" 40k moments are putting away the models and paints... She's in the 90th percentile with that. What's really shameful and sexist is demeaning women, ranking them on a 1-10 scale, and implying dice can get you in the sheets, like the OP. After that I'd say its your sloppy attempt to take the high ground after implying that people who play plastic men A get more than those who play plastic men B.

inb4 CRASSUS ARMOURED ASSAULT TRANSPORT

 Lobukia wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Lobukia wrote:


@Peregrine: what's shameful is thinking women care about any color of plastic soldier.

What's shameful is sexist s thinking that women don't care about gaming.

Never said they didn't care about gaming, I implied they didn't care about 40k. In almost 20 years in gaming @4 different FLGS, countless local tourneys and conventions, ardboyz, visiting 2 battlebunkers and running 2 clubs, I've seen 2 girls watch 40k for more than 2 turns, and none play. To my wife "awesome" 40k moments are putting away the models and paints... She's in the 90th percentile with that. What's really shameful and sexist is demeaning women, ranking them on a 1-10 scale, and implying dice can get you in the sheets, like the OP. After that I'd say its your sloppy attempt to take the high ground after implying that people who play plastic men A get more than those who play plastic men B.

No, no. You're still being sexist. You're just backing it with flimsy personal accounts.

I myself play regularly with a Female Chaos player.

Pretty good, too.

So if I understand correctly...

Rather than talking to the girls coming into the LGS you try to impress them with your minis like a douche uses his car, and you are asking us for which car would do it for most women to get impressed and melt in your hand.

The answer is every unit, as the results are what are awesome, not the unit just standing there.

As I understand it, the comparison to impressing women was simply a metaphor for how impressive units are on the field. I don't think anyone was seriously trying to say that they try to impress potential partners with how their army performs.

Tone, sarcasm and metaphor can be so hard to express in text alone.

 Trickstick wrote:
As I understand it, the comparison to impressing women was simply a metaphor for how impressive units are on the field. I don't think anyone was seriously trying to say that they try to impress potential partners with how their army performs.

Tone, sarcasm and metaphor can be so hard to express in text alone.

Was it really that hard to get for everyone else? I mean, props to you, but A. Ailaros is too smart to make a post about which unit gets girls, and I started out my analogy in the OP with:

"Say you've got like, three hotties watching you play an 1850 game."

Was the thought process just like:

Oh man, what a nerd, he thinks he can just flash his Medusa and get girls? I better berate him online. That'll show him to be a douche at MY Lgs.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Sidenote, I think in 40k awesomeness is relative to the peak performance vs. peak failure capability of a unit.

To harken the discussion back to Marbo: He can wipe a whole Termie squad, or he can blow himself up. Large ceiling of performance, and very great possibility of total failure.

So when it does something awesome, it feels Really Awesome

Same with the Deathstrike, Rough Riders, Lukas the Trickster, Jaws of the World Wolf, Manticores, and Me; The Captain.

Pretty awesome.

There are strong units, there are weak units, but there are no awesome units.

Awesomeness comes from something performing far and away above expectations, being so lucky, and jammy, despite the odds it throws the game on its head, and turns the events into what Hollywood would describe as 'ridiculous'

Everyone knows that Hammernators are pretty brutal, and you would expect them to smear a guardsman, or a Tau firewarrior over the landscape, but what if, upon assaulting the Guardsman, or firewarrior, the hammernators not only fail to kill him, but then proceed to get the snot kicked out of them? and this lucky, plucky hero just refuses to die.

Or the one in a million shot against a vehicle, the hail mary shot... The vendetta has just entered the board, and dropped off a unit in a scary position, you have a single chance to shoot it down, odds are you will fail. your single plasma shot hits, and penetrates, And then the vendetta crashes to the ground wiping out the squad its just deployed, THAT is awesome.

My single most awesome moment was a Broadside, charged by a seer council, who not only beat them in combat, but swept the whole unit off the board, eliciting a WTF from both sides.

the more unlikely something is to happen, the more awesome it is when it does happen. Hammernators killing a squad of guardsman is not awesome. A single guardsman killing a daemon prince in close combat most certainly is

Are you sure that this thread wasn't meant to be titled "Quantifying Autism"?

That's all I'm getting from all of the arguing with the posters in this thread.

 Vladsimpaler wrote:
Are you sure that this thread wasn't meant to be titled "Quantifying Autism"?

That's all I'm getting from all of the arguing with the posters in this thread.

"Everyone is acting dumb; better call them autistic."

"Hey! Hey! You guys are Autistic."

To self, "That sure showed them."


Good move, Vlad. You're a king among men.

 TheCaptain wrote:

 Vladsimpaler wrote:
Are you sure that this thread wasn't meant to be titled "Quantifying Autism"?

That's all I'm getting from all of the arguing with the posters in this thread.

"Everyone is acting dumb; better call them autistic."

"Hey! Hey! You guys are Autistic."

To self, "That sure showed them."

What's wrong, did I touch a nerve there?

Good move, Vlad. You're a king among men.

Sig'd, thank buddy!

Awesomeness is directly proportional to achievement divided by expectation.

I find that the more a force overcomes its shortcomings and achieves something unexpected, the more awesome I consider it to be. I guess this stems from my love of underdogs, which is probably the sole reason I picked up Guard back in 3rd ed.

 Vladsimpaler wrote:

 TheCaptain wrote:

 Vladsimpaler wrote:
Are you sure that this thread wasn't meant to be titled "Quantifying Autism"?

That's all I'm getting from all of the arguing with the posters in this thread.

"Everyone is acting dumb; better call them autistic."

"Hey! Hey! You guys are Autistic."

To self, "That sure showed them."

What's wrong, did I touch a nerve there?

Good move, Vlad. You're a king among men.

Sig'd, thank buddy!

Hilariously, Vlad the Impaler really was a king among men, and quite a good one at that, overcoming personal failings to put Romania on the map as a real European power.

Man, so glad that there wasn't all this mock outrage years ago when Polonius did his write-up on the Leman Russ tanks with "chick" analogies. Informative, and hilarious.

As far as the original topic of the thread goes, the problem is that awesomeness is so different for everyone. Ailaros says awesome is his priest chainsawing a Land Raider in half, other say that tabling their opponents with lots of points left is awesome.

I shut my eyes and I think "last awesome moment", and I picture an Apoc game where I had my plasma CCS shot down to only having the commander and his plasma pistol left. Not a single feth was given as the commander sauntered up to the Eldar Titan in the middle of the board, took the shot, and then proceeded to chain reaction the damned thing into a cataclysmic explosion that took him and just about everything else left on the board out with him. So I think I'm solidly in the "Ailaros camp of awesome", but by the same token, the awesome there wasn't just the mental image, it was the actual unlikeliness (and benefit) of the outcome, so I think my awesome is still different, at least somewhat.

I just don't think you can quantify it.

 Vladsimpaler wrote:

What's wrong, did I touch a nerve there?

I mean, putting down the mentally disabled just seems to indicate a distinct lack of class and manners.

The last Awesome moment I experienced in a 40k game was during a Apoc game , Ghazkull was stepped on by a Reaver titan, and in his turn he succesfully destroyed it with the result of it exploding and killing a bunch of other stuff, while ghazzy (with the benifit of his invul prophet of the waagh save ) walked out of the plasma cloud..and his player anounced "NEXT!".
Us Ork players cheered and the owner of the titan gamer raged ...was pretty memorable.

 TheCaptain wrote:

 Vladsimpaler wrote:

What's wrong, did I touch a nerve there?

I mean, putting down the mentally disabled just seems to indicate a distinct lack of class and manners.

I agree, using autism in a pejorative sense is not acceptable, in the same way that using words like "slowed" or "gay" as insults is wrong.

Anyway, my opponent had an awesome firewarrior in a game I had yesterday. After his squad was cut down around him he managed to finish off some stormtroopers and then absorb an entire turn of shooting whilst standing in the open. By the end I was almost obsessively trying to finish him off. We both laughed about this invincible firewarrior shrugging off lasannons by just hitting the deck. He must have been the most awesome firewarrior I have ever seen.

I will roll for the 5'3" 36-24-36 girl, but yes I see what you did there

 d3m01iti0n wrote:
I will roll for the 5'3" 36-24-36 girl, but yes I see what you did there

Shout out to that.

She doesnt like the Medusa, she likes it when I bum rush MCs with combat knives.