I am off to Gen Con tomorrow through Sunday, so depending on my access to the Internet I may not post again until then. However, I plan on taking a lot of pictures at the convention, even some video. I'm not sure what if any Games Workshop events/stuff there will be (in past years it's been meager), but in any event general pictures of the dealer's hall and interesting exhibits should be worth posting anyway. Gen Con is the biggest gaming convention in the world, after all (and I've been to all of them since it moved to Indianapolis).
"How Many Bugs are there, Son?"
"All of them, sir!"
-- Exchange between General Miktar and his aid fifty seconds before the General was shot for desertion
We here at 4oKOrigins labs are always hard at work developing new ideas for Origins events. Here is one we think has a lot of potential -- Tyranid Attack. It is inspired by this scene from the (otherwise stupid) movie Starship Troopers:
As you can see the general gist of the scenario idea is that you have an small imperial force placed in a fortress of some size that are facing down wave after wave after wave of attracking Tyranids. Here is the first draft of the possible map:
This is just the first go at the idea. We are still not sure of the size of the table -- two, four, eight? -- which depends on how much stuff we can get out there. There will need to be nigh endless waves of bugs, but fortunately the defenders will have walls and emplaced guns to help prevent themselves from being turned into bug food.
The scenerio could include anywhere from six to twelve players depending on game size. Everything would be provided. One big aim here is to do a "prestige" board that will attract a lot of attention.
So, what do you all think? Please give thoughts in the talkback.
Take a gander at this new cut (at least, I hadn't seen this version before) of the trailer for the upcoming Relic Space Marine video game. Hit the picture above to see it at the CGSociety webpage. However, the real treat is that there is a bunch of new material on the pages below on how the video was made. Well worth reading.
As a father of 3 diaper-weilding children, my gaming budget is very small these days. Usually I can resist giving in to the new stuff that GW has to offer, though things like the bastions and new space marine squad options have tempted me sorely as of late.
I've gotten around my desire for Sternguard veterans by loading up on Deathwatch Kill Team conversions as a cheaper way of fielding WYSIWYG vets. $25 for a conversion kit for 10 marines seems to be the way to go if you've otherwise got a well stocked bit box and unassembled tactical marines laying around.
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?prodId=prod1110206&rootCatGameStyle=
But every once in a while, I make the mistake of looking at Forgeworld. Sure, the greater daemons and titans make me drool on my keyboard, but every so often they put out an irresistable model that's in my price range.
So thank you, Forgeworld. Thank you for ruining my budget once more.
Please keep up the good work. =P
Last time I described the events of the actual RTT at Origins this past June, but now I want to go into greater depth about the ideas and difficulties behind actually designing a tournament. It’s a subject that might at first seem straightforward, but which ultimately has a surprising amount of complexity.
Generally speaking there are a possible four factors that go into determining the winner of a tournament: Army Composition; Painting; Sportsmanship, and; Battle Results. Let me talk about each in turn.
Army Composition: Of the four this is probably the most contentious and the hardest one to nail down successfully. This is so much so that many tournaments just drop the concept altogether (including the last Origins RTT). This is partially due to its highly subjective nature. On the one hand you have the question of just what is a “fair” army design and on the other you have deep philosophical differences of just what role Army Composition should have in a tournament setting. After all, don’t the rules themselves represent the acceptable range of possible army designs?
Problem is that we all know there are particular, otherwise artificial army concepts – A Slaaneshi Chaos Lash force anyone? – that are powerful on the table but otherwise violate the 40K good housekeeping seal of approval. Playing within the setting of the game is important to those of us who tend to cringe at the sight of an army clearly designed with only the intent of winning, which in my experience is most players. The natural impulse in reaction is to institute some sort of additional guidelines – that is, Army Composition – that attempt to put a limit on the cheese and encourage fluffy armies.
Of course, just what is “cheesy” and “fluffy”? Have an overly restrictive Composition design and you get cookie-cutter armies, but not have one at all and the result can be bad feelings and a ruined tournament. Most of us have an internal definition of “fair” that we automatically apply to our own efforts and which we subconsciously expect – within reason – the other guy to follow.
Yet, a tournament is ultimately about winning, not per se having a good time. You hope that the two will nicely align, but is it really unfair for your opponent to have gone all out (within the rules) to come up with a kick-ass force? In fact, for some people they expect to face iron-hard armies and will be a bit offended if they don’t – and will resent the hell out of an opponent who attempts to “shame” them into feeling bad that they actually want to win. Going into a competition facing cheese can even be a bit liberating in that you can simply discard the whole idea of worrying about such things.
However, the difficulty for those running tournaments is that they are faced with the not always compatible requirements of offering good competition while making sure everyone has a good time. No one is going to return to a tournament that was as much fun as a root canal, yet no one is going to respect a tournament that only provides limp, watered down battle.
I’m not really sure what the answer to this conundrum is, but I don’t think it is a problem that will just go away. When designing the Origins RTT I crossed my fingers and hoped no one would bring the Cheesefest Marines (or Craftworld) and fortunately no one did. However, I may not be as lucky next time.
Painting: Again, this is more of an issue than you might think despite the fact that there are fairly good guidelines and examples out there as to what a good paintjob really is.
For one thing there is still a measure of subjectivity involved as judging painting quality is ultimately, well, a judgment call. Yet, a bigger problem that this is the fact that many people may lack the skill to even know what a good paint job really is.
Let me tell you a story. Last decade I went to a number of Grand Tournaments in a bunch of different cities. I hadn’t been playing or painting for all that long, so when I came back from my first GT with a mediocre painting score I wasn’t surprised. However, the fun I had did inspire me to try to do better. Thus, I set about constructing my Vampire Counts army. I converted everything and overall spent three times the effort painting up the force. Accordingly, I go to the GT the next year expecting a substantially higher painting score.
Instead, I received the exact same result. As you might expect I was more than a little miffed. I had spent all that extra time and got nothing for it!
However, over the years as my painting skills and experience have improved I’ve come to realize the score was pretty much exactly right (although the system they were using at the time did tend to grade on a curve that pushed results into a bland middle ground). Despite my efforts I hadn’t really improved my level of expertise and no amount of conversion work can make up for the same old mediocre paint job. Point is that at the time I didn’t really comprehend the limitations of my painting abilities. It took long experience to realize what goes into a good paint job and how difficult various techniques really are to do.
Now, what if I had been my earlier self and gone to the Origins RTT? I probably would have thought the judges were uncommonly tough, maybe even unfair. Funny thing is that I was undoubtedly the harshest of the painting judges for the tourney. On a scale of 0 to 20 I frankly wouldn’t have given anyone there better than a 12 or 13, but not because the paints jobs were so terrible, but because to my mind the scale should be accurate and uncompromising. A 20 represents a Golden Demon winner and I personally think my best work is maybe a 15. Thus, on that scale even a “mere” 10 represents a pretty darn good army more than worth having pride in.
Still, getting a “mere” ten is usually going to be interpreted as a poor result by a player just because it is so far from the best possible (after all, since when is 50% more than a grade F?). Likewise, mediocre scores can all too easily be seen as reducing the value of a good paint job. Why go to a lot of trouble on your army if it only gets you a few extra points? In fact, you might need to have a Painting award just to make sure that people bother trying hard at all. Even then many people may just conclude they don’t have a chance of winning it anyway and just ditch the whole thing.
That would be bad as painting is a fundamental part of the hobby that needs to be encouraged as much as possible. Yet, at the same time it can’t be too much of a factor in tournament scoring or else you just end up with a Grand Demon contest. I’d like to find a happy medium that would integrate painting more fully into a tournament, but I am not sure what that may be.
Sportsmanship: This is an important qualification that is a staple of most every GW-themed tournament out there. It is also in a way the most subjective. The reason boils down to the question of what just a good sportsman is and how people can confuse it with other things.
In theory a good sportsman is one who knows the rules, is polite to his opponent, is reasonable in his judgments, and does what he had to make sure the game itself is successful. However, it is easy for people to confuse this was general charisma and the other guy’s ability to entertain you outside the confines of the game itself (say, he tells great jokes). You shouldn’t have to be an outgoing entertainer to get a good sportsmanship score. Yet, people have a tendency to see likeability as being the equivalent to a good sport.
The other problem with sportsmanship – one which threatens to make it meaningless – is that players tend to give others perfect scores by default rather than judging people as the tournament rules suggest. It’s an unsurprising human reaction. Most of us don’t want to anger those we play needlessly or fail to give him the benefit of the doubt. Worse, in a situation where everyone is getting perfect scores to actually not get one can easily seem like a slap in the face. It can also be seen as the difference between a “good player” and a “bad player” as in “What, that guy only got 17 points out of 20 when most everyone else got full points? Boy, he must be a jerk.”
Of course, if everyone does get a perfect score then what is the point of having sportsmanship at all? You might as well just give everyone the same score from the get-go and avoid any possible recriminations. The basic question then is whether sportsmanship is worthwhile as a tournament concept or whether you can come up with a way for people to be more discerning when grading it.
Battle Scores: By far the single most important factor in tournament scoring, battle results are what really determine who the grand champion will be. In the Origins RTT all by itself it represented 60% of your final score and there are many instances where the ratio is even higher.
In one way this makes sense as ultimately the main point is to play the game and see who wins. On the flip side such a dominating position within the scoring scheme tends to make other considerations less meaningful if not meaningless. That may not sound so bad, but it could have the result of discouraging anything but cutthroat tournament play, including ignoring things like painting which are fundamental to the game(s).
It also has the secondary effect of making each game (especially in a three round tournament) vitally important. Lose even one and you are effectively out of the running for grand champion. That can lead to players losing enthusiasm over the course of play or even ditching out early to go do something else. The last thing a tournament organizer wants is to lose half his players before the final round. Fortunately, the vast majority of players are more respectful than that, but still knowing you are out of the running after the first game is still something of a downer.
Indirectly this emphasis on battle results has the additional effect of making scenario design paramount. It should be anyway since it is key to having a good time at the tournament, but when it comes to battle points even a slight bias or misstep in scenario design can give players an unfair, crucial advantage.
Take for example what happened to me a few times at earlier Grand Tournaments. There were a few games – on both the 40K and Fantasy side – where winning literally came down to a single die roll at the start of the game. Namely, were you the “defender” or the “attacker”? I couldn’t find anyone who won as the second. What could be worse than having something like that happen first thing and destroying any chance for ultimate victory?
But, you don’t need something so extreme to still skew results. For example, a tournament that that gave mobile armies inherent advantages due to scenario design – even for a single round – could ruin the chances of Imperial Guard or Tau players from the get-go. You can mitigate this effect by providing other rounds that reverse the advantage, but the balance is very tricky, especially given most tournaments have an odd number of rounds. It’s also easy to give an advantage without knowing it to certain armies if you aren’t careful, the result being that halfway through the tournament you realize you made a fundamental mistake and can’t do anything to fix it. In such a case hopefully the players don’t notice!