..in my mind would be to alter the structure of tourny events.

At the moment some builds excel because the only objective is to 'kill everything'.

If like in 40k tournaments i've ran in the past there were around six different scenarios you could play (that you rolled before playing each round) then you'd have to take a force capable of a wide variety of roles.

It would be no use taking something entirely sluggish and with loads of firepower if one of the scenarios required you to jet around collecting message pods etc.

I think if FFG made the tournament scenarios more diverse you'd see a corresponding diversity in list builds as you'd be stupid to rely on 'one trick ponies'.

Yes, let's turn tournaments into "who gets lucky on the scenario rolls" contest. Anything that comes from 40K should never be mentioned anywhere the same breath as "competitive" or "balanced." The game is fine; minor tweaks at this point, not sweeping change.

Problem here is unless combat is removed from the scenario it's not too far fetched to solve most scenarios with 'murder that nerd'. Also big turret ships are pretty fast, so they'd be good at speed missions too.

Obviously it would not be a case of 'who gets lucky with the dice' because:

1. any scenario included should be balanced, the only thing it would favour would be someone who threw their entire lot in with a one trick pony and that would be self regulating because the odds of them getting the speed based scenario over and over again would be pretty slim, in most cases it would be detrimental to have a force only geared up for one thing.

2. You have a diverse spread of scenarios and with x players playing 5 rounds each you'd get an average (unless your tourny as tiny or you used a loaded dice) that you'd end up playing at least three of the five over an event.

As it stands 100/6 deathmatch where you can knock two big ships down to 1 hull point each and still lose doesnt seem to be too ideal a system either.

Yes, let's turn tournaments into "who gets lucky on the scenario rolls" contest. Anything that comes from 40K should never be mentioned anywhere the same breath as "competitive" or "balanced." The game is fine; minor tweaks at this point, not sweeping change.

But you're grasping the wrong end of things here. The problem with 40k has always been the balance between forces and power creep and often at times very vague wording of rules leading to interpretation.

There has *never* been a problem with the organised play system other than when 'sportsmanship' was added to the scoring as it allowed a 'bad loser' to hobble a player my marking him for minimum sportsmanship even if he was really fair and easy going player.

I haven't seen a scenario yet that I would drive more than 15 minutes or pay to play.

Again, thats not the point is it.

The issue would be FFG taking the time to make some truly excellent tournament/organised play scenarios.

The fact they currently, to you, dont exist isnt an argument against them ever coming into being.

The thing is as a former proffesional tourney organiser and organised play manager it is simply a case of Swiss type deathmatch tournaments are easy and simple to run.

Things with plot and narrative require a lot of work.

Things with plot and narrative take more time to be enjoyable and relevant. I don't doubt that you could have a narrative event here or there but scenario-laden standard tournaments(unless the game is specifically designed around them, like Netrunner) aren't very popular for a reason.

There are some pretty popular scenarios in the builder. 0% of them would fly as Store Champ scenarios.

I dunno

Its hard to judge the popularity of a 'campaign event' or a 'scenario tournament' until someone actually runs one

(to that end I'm working on running one in my area later this year)

I'd also argue that Games Workshop Grand Tournamnents (and the qualifying heats) would sell out in under and hour from going on sale, and they used scenarios for competitive play (at least they did when i was running them).

People quite often go 'of that will never work' until someone does it and it does work, then it becomes accepted.

I seem to remember people telling me that narrative campaign weekends would 'never work' yet they always sold out months before the date they were held. Admittedly campaign events took about a week to sell all 200 places and were not as popular as GTs but thats because GTs had a longer heritage and were seen to have more 'prestige'.

Armada does it like this:

You pick 3 objective cards as part of their build

Your opponent picks 3 objective cards as part of their build

The player with initiative picks an objective from their opponent's set. Then that is the objective for the round. It typically adds bonus points to the final scoring, like a certain ship is the flagship and is worth double the points.

Most objectives (from the combat set at least) typically favor few big ships (Imperial) or many small ships (Rebel). So it lets you build your squad to either go for the initiative and pick what best suits, or go jack of all trades (like tourney builds now) and deal with everything.

I'm not saying that this would work the way it is for X-wing. My point is that there are other ways to involve alternative point scoring objectives without making it 100% dependent on random chance.

But i bet the armada system makes you think 'i'd better take X in case A shows up, but also Y in case B is an objective'

I like the fact that you have something to potentially change the nature of that round without being a massively dominating factor and that, i imagine, you need to make your force 'multi role' or accept the fact that some objectives will be a struggle for you.

Unfortunately, I think that even if the tournament scene changed to involve alternate objectives or scenarios, we'd still see the same problem. Sure, 2-ship builds may fall off the radar, but they would be replaced by the top 3-5 most versatile builds and we'd be complaining again about list diversity.

Of course, then we could go back to dogfights in a year or two and change things up again, so I guess there's some merit there.

objectives have been an amazing addition to the games that use them, but especially Warmachine and Armada

I fear, however, that X-wing was not at all designed with them in mind and would suffer for their inclusion (unless they introduced ones similar to Armada)

You see in my eyes i'd make the scenario list have say have more of a chance of rolling 'basic dogfight' (like 40ks meeting engagement or 'cleanse' as a common standard at the time) but with the possibility of something a bit different.

e.g if there were six options on a d6 1 and 6 would be 'stock dogfight'

The other might be something like a scenario that required you to be in possession of 'quarters' of the board at the end would favour swarms and penalise two ship builds , other scenarios might do the opposite. You might never get those scenarios (and thats an extreme example) but it would make planning a contingency for it a good idea and diversify lists.

simply put if you've got one mission objective your list only has to be able to do that... kill everything. How you do that is optional.

But if you have to factor in the possibilty that you might have other objectives then you've obviously got to hope you can meet those mission requirements.

Necromunda is a great example of a game where you can win by focussing on your objective *or* by just murdering the other gang but if you are not careful you can have your hopes dashed by a player who *is* concentrating on the objective and is able to achieve it before you kill all of his force.

It actually limits builds, becuase you have to build a squad good enough for all the possibilities. So, good luck seeing someone bring out of the left field squads that are good because they have practiced so much with them, becuase you increase the needed practice a ton.

The only benefit from scenarios is that they change what is on top. Which I think a lot more concerned with right now than actual balance.

Something like this maybe could work in X-Wing but I don't think making it Random is going to fly.

It may not produce the big variety of scenarios but simply changing the time allowances for each round would likely alter how things are played. Maybe everyone plays 75 minute rounds the same way they'd play 60 minute rounds using the same squadrons but if your big concern is having both sides with ships on the table, which I believe is at the core of many complaints, I think that would help speed things up. Maybe one side can get a lead and hold on to it for five-ten minutes but if that suddenly turned into twenty to twenty five minutes things may not be so certain.

If scenario play is introduced I believe everyone would need to be following the same scenario in any given round.

Yep but i dont think that would be the case. If you add more objectives, if each objective has various ways to achieve things then you'll get more diversity.

If for example one objective was to guard or destroy a fuel container then you might see more people chancing something like a bomber.

Something like this maybe could work in X-Wing but I don't think making it Random is going to fly.

If scenario play is introduced I believe everyone would need to be following the same scenario in any given round.

That is a good point, time constraints would make the scenarios probably better decided in advance by the TO

It would allow you to potentially have quick starter rounds with smaller forces, a larger main day battle and then 100 point matches towards the end.

Something like this maybe could work in X-Wing but I don't think making it Random is going to fly.

If scenario play is introduced I believe everyone would need to be following the same scenario in any given round.

That is a good point, time constraints would make the scenarios probably better decided in advance by the TO

It would allow you to potentially have quick starter rounds with smaller forces, a larger main day battle and then 100 point matches towards the end.

That sounds a LOT like the escalation format. It also requires different builds for every round.

Maybe it wouldn't increase build variety directly but what I was suggesting is that you'd need to create a build that can fight for a variable length of time. The ultimate objective remains "destroy all enemy ships" but now you need a build that can reliably do that because you can't count on "destroying a few enemy ships then outlasting the others" for a win.

Yeah i see what you mean.

I mean i don't know if my idea will work but i'm going to give it a try and run a store tournament.

If i've totally got it wrong its not the end of the world but *if* people really like it, well it might start off a new organised play format.

I've always believed in the 'if you build it they will come' model.

I've ran music festivals that people told me 'didnt have a chance' and became the biggest of their kind in the uk... i was unsatisfied with the 'open day' blatfest airsoft scene and created WWII airsoft with some friends for a more scenario driven immersive experience... again we were told 'no one wants to do that' and now there are thousands of people with WWII loadouts for the game.

When i moved to Nottingham there was no club night running the sort of night i wanted to go to so I set up my own and its been going strong for 15 years now.

You've got to take risks to make changes.

You never know til you try these things. Perhaps someone already has in xwing, if they have i'd love to know how they got on, what went right and what went wrong before i have a go at it.

I played Warhammer Fantasy for 13 years and saw a very similar situation. The army books became terribly unbalanced, but the tournament scene was strong. There just were some armies that were under powered and didn't have much of a chance to win in the "kill them all" game. There were some tournaments that had scenarios and such, but many of the serious tournament goers didn't like them. They wanted to play hard core "kill them all" games. What GW eventually did was make them mandatory. All games had to be one of 6 scenarios. Casual games would have you rolling a die. Tournaments had the scenarios picked ahead of time in specific order. These scenarios were well balanced and due to the fact that you might have to play any of them, they encouraged well balanced lists. If you went too hard in one direction, you had a much harder time to win at all the scenarios. Oh, some you won better than before, but others you had little chance to win. There was not one list that had a good chance at every scenario.

What happened? Even though all the serious tournament players lamented it and said it would kill the tournament scene, it didn't. Everyone still went and the tournament scene even grew. They became an accepted part of the game. Lists were more well balanced. Were there still favorites that did better than others? Yes, but it was not as skewed as it had been and even the odd lists had a better chance of winning if they played well. The overall health of the gaming scene improved.

Personally, I think FFG should make missions or scenarios officially part of the tournaments. Some say that they wouldn't go to tournaments anymore, but most would not end up quitting over it and would still go to the events. I think you can make them diverse enough that the best chance you had to win was to take a well balanced list and fly it well. Two ship builds might do better in some missions, but do poorly in others. Part of the balance is not just in each mission alone, but when you compare them all together. I even think that this could help balance the game overall. How? Well, why would anyone take an X-wing over a B-wing? Few do these days as the B-wing is more economical in points in a straight up fight. What if mobility mattered more? What if you needed to get around the table faster to handle different threats or objectives? X-wings are superior in movement than B-wings. The value of the X-wing would improve. You could solve a lot of balance issues if the only question wasn't about who could kill the other faster...and lose less in the process.

Some people on these forums have stated that FFG planned to move towards an objective based system once people got bored with death matches, but that they were surprised that people hadn't gotten sick. Well, I think it's about time to introduce it. I think it would be the proper "fix" that some people are clamoring for.

Thank you, you put that far more eruditely in one post than i managed to in ten

I think the 100 point squad limit, as mentioned, would be problematic as would be player attention spans (which I don't understand but I guess is a thing).

I don't see this is being as being able to unseat 100 pt deathmatch as the most common tourney format, but I do see it as a viable alternative. There's enough people who're tired of the basic format.

The fact that FFG has made debris clouds tournament legal tells me they aren't opposed to adding a little more variety than just your list choice. That said, I'm doubting that scenarios as you describe them will ever be a thing in this game.

I think the 100 point squad limit, as mentioned, would be problematic as would be player attention spans (which I don't understand but I guess is a thing).

I don't see this is being as being able to unseat 100 pt deathmatch as the most common tourney format, but I do see it as a viable alternative. There's enough people who're tired of the basic format.

Why would time be an issue? Keep the same limits. No need to change that. No need to be longer. I don't see 100 pts being a problem for building a squad to fit missions.

Also, if you don't make it mandatory for all tournaments, it won't fly.