Did you know Star Wars has repulsor mines? There's two kinds. One is actual explosives that are only detonated by repulsorfields to blow up tanks. No use for those right now. But there's also repulsormines that use repulsorfields to trip people. That would be really cheap and easy to model. Make a handful of weird, vaugely tech looking discs, and scatter them over an area. The perimeter they encircle is the whole of the field, it provides very rough terrain to people and small non-flying vehicles.

Still have to add some barricades...

On 6/22/2018 at 10:11 AM, TauntaunScout said:

Tournaments are really bad for the game, in the long run. Which is why I don't care if they get much support in the form of red tape to choke the rest of us on. Tournaments in wargames can only provide the illusion of a fair test of skill. A lot of people get money or emotional benefits from denying that it's an illusion. But it is.

Amazing... Every word of what you just said was wrong.

I challenge you to provide any evidence that tournaments hurt games in any time frame or that tournaments don't measure skill.

Evidence to the contrary is X-Wing. It has a massive international tournament community which has evangelized and proselytized the game and brought many new players into fold. Our tournaments are the main recruiting ground for new players. Well attended tournaments are a signal of the health of the game and the nature of the community and and indication of whether it's worth buying into a game. Small regular tourney turnouts don't bode well.

Some people are competitive and competitive people are good sportsmen. This is also a draw to the game for many when they see competitive games played and players having fun and being casual. Bad apples are rare. They are discovered, excoriated and ostracized very quickly e.g. 'spinning-dial-gate'.

Finally wargame tournaments are absolutely fair tests of skill. Look at http://lists.starwarsclubhouse.com/tourneys and look at the results of regional, national and world tournaments.

You will see the same names pop up over and over again at the top. Why does this happen if tournaments don't bubble the best players up? What attribute do these players posses that makes them so common in top 16s? Was Paul Heaver (3 times X-Wing world champ) lucky? Half the players here http://nationaltabletopgaming.org/x-wing-rankings eat, sleep and drink X-Wing and they have results to prove it.

By the claim that tournaments don't mean anything, you rob these people of an awful lot of agency and credit.

On 6/22/2018 at 10:11 AM, TauntaunScout said:

Miniature battles cannot and should not be expected to be fair, they should be expected to be awesome.

You are peddling the idea that mini wargames should be a narrative and not a competitive experience and this is the only way to have fun. This your opinion and completely reasonable preference, but it's not my opinion and completely reasonable preference. Your writing makes it look like you're telling people how to have fun.

On 6/22/2018 at 10:11 AM, TauntaunScout said:

Then 40k should be financially dead by now. It's about as lopsided as it gets! Yet I still paint more units for it.

40k had been on a decline for a while (and was getting outsold by X-Wing) until GW rather aggressively changed their approach to gameplay, re-set the rules, is monitoring tournaments, and is releasing FAQs. It's not a coincidence.

1 hour ago, DrDickSplash said:

Amazing... Every word of what you just said was wrong.

Maybe a picture of a cute kitten calling me wrong would have been better.

Quote

I challenge you to provide any evidence that tournaments hurt games in any time frame or that tournaments don't measure skill.

Tournaments hurt games because in the long run, few companies can ultimately resist the temptation to imbalance the game with pay-to-win marketing techniques. This is good for the quarterly bonuses of individuals but bad for the long term survival of the game. Without the invisible "peer pressure" of officially sanctioned tournaments, players are far less liable to fall for this pay-to-win stuff. Some tournament scenes work out ok but this is a fatal flaw in tournaments for games, if the games last long enough. Lest we forget, the lifespan of even successful miniature wargames can be pretty short indeed compared to traditional mass market games.

Quote

Evidence to the contrary is X-Wing. It has a massive international tournament community which has evangelized and proselytized the game and brought many new players into fold. Our tournaments are the main recruiting ground for new players. Well attended tournaments are a signal of the health of the game and the nature of the community and and indication of whether it's worth buying into a game. Small regular tourney turnouts don't bode well.

The majority of the customers are so-called casual players. Most people who buy a core set, or the equivalent, for any given game will never attend a tournament. Trying to cater to tournaments, in ways that makes the core rules bad for at-home play (such as by dictating our scenery for us) is a disservice to the customer base that floats the hobby. Tournaments don't recruit players, because non-players don't hang out at tournaments waiting to get recruited. People get into a game, then seek out tournaments if they are so inclined. Low tournament turnout is because there's a smaller player base for tournaments to draw from, not the other way around. People don't invest in a new miniature army because they hear there's a hot tournament scene for it two towns over. Unless their pre-existing friends are already involved in that gaming scene or something. Otherwise, most people buy a game because it looks cool, keep playing it because it's well written, and play at home or in local clubs.

You're switching cause and effect. A healthy customer base creates a healthy tournament scene. X-Wing (and the old D20 game) was sold in major retailers like Target, it had a huge customer base. It can't get by without good rules and stuff too, but most of the "gamer-games" simply haven't been marketed like that since the D&D fad of the 80's. There's not a super hot nationwide tournament scene for most of the Milton Bradely style games but they do just fine. There are big Scrabble tournaments and such but they represent a tiny fraction of the total Scrabble players.

Quote

Bad apples are rare.They are discovered, excoriated and ostracized very quickly e.g. 'spinning-dial-gate'.

Not from what I've seen. There's been an overall decline. Yesterday's bad apples are today's average players. Maybe it's regional.

Quote

Finally wargame tournaments are absolutely fair tests of skill. Look at http://lists.starwarsclubhouse.com/tourneys and look at the results of regional, national and world tournaments.

I don't play X-Wing but I'm assuming that it wasn't played with matched fleets of models, to determine the skill of the actual playing. Those guys you mentioned probably are the best players around, if they spend that much time on it, but the tournament itself doesn't mean much to me, if its methodology of skill-testing is fundamentally flawed.

Quote

You are peddling the idea that mini wargames should be a narrative and not a competitive experience and this is the only way to have fun. This your opinion and completely reasonable preference, but it's not my opinion and completely reasonable preference. Your writing makes it look like you're telling people how to have fun.

It's not the only way to have fun, but it is the way the scenery guidelines should be written because to do otherwise is an uphill battle. They can't predict your scenery collections well enough to write more than very vague guidelines. There's nothing wrong with the scenery guidelines as written, for a tabletop wargame. Vague guidelines for scenery are the nature of the beast. Unless you go down the GW route of trying to get people to only use official, trademarked, high priced scenery.

Quote

40k had been on a decline for a while (and was getting outsold by X-Wing) until GW rather aggressively changed their approach to gameplay, re-set the rules, is monitoring tournaments, and is releasing FAQs. It's not a coincidence.

40k's had a lot of declines over the decades. It's almost like the backstory and models can float it through rough times, tournaments or no... I'm the first to point out that GW's negatives are partially showcased by X-Wing outselling 40k. I have a laundry list of complaints against them like anyone else who has paid attention to how they operate. 40k's about the only one that's been around long enough to have had major ups and downs though. Everything you just listed about them isn't new: they've had FAQ's in the past, used to do tournaments, have had numerous rules resets. Sometimes those actions also coincided with dips in sales, like they go together with an increase in sales now. Any study of GW or one of it's games has to be taken in a much bigger context. Very little real data exists on the hobby as a whole and the resources necessary to create a proper study of it are unlikely to materialize. It would be interesting to see a bunch of numbers on various aspects of the hobby for the last 50 years but that's not gonna happen. If that kind of dispassionate research ever did get done, there would probably be some very unexpected correlations.

@DrDickSplash Someone with a different opinion from yours isn't wrong, they just have a different opinion. Saying so just makes you look not credible. The world is a chaotic place and the "facts" we cling to are mostly just conditions that hold true under a certain situation and fall apart in another.

Comparing something like X-wing which is pure game to a hobby-then-game like these miniature games isn't a good comparison. Hyper competitiveness in a play group of mostly hobbyist can be toxic to that group. On the other hand the energy the try-hards bring to a game can keep it going, if there are enough like minded people. While tournaments are optional and can provide a chance to play a game where otherwise there wouldn't be any, they also bring out people's hyper competitive nature, which can be quite ugly. If you truly believe competitive people are good sportsmen, then you really haven't been paying attention to life. Not to say you can't have a competitive and mature person with good sportsmanship but all too often you get a very different type of person and I am not talking about cheaters. There is more than one example of bad behavior.

3 hours ago, Mep said:

@DrDickSplash Someone with a different opinion from yours isn't wrong, they just have a different opinion. Saying so just makes you look not credible. The world is a chaotic place and the "facts" we cling to are mostly just conditions that hold true under a certain situation and fall apart in another.

I said " You are peddling the idea that mini wargames should be a narrative and not a competitive experience and this is the only way to have fun. This your opinion and completely reasonable preference, but it's not my opinion and completely reasonable preference."

In the above I'm conceding @TauntaunScout isn't wrong. Just that we have different opinions from which it's clear our disagreement arises.

3 hours ago, Mep said:

Comparing something like X-wing which is pure game to a hobby-then-game like these miniature games isn't a good comparison. Hyper competitiveness in a play group of mostly hobbyist can be toxic to that group. On the other hand the energy the try-hards bring to a game can keep it going, if there are enough like minded people. While tournaments are optional and can provide a chance to play a game where otherwise there wouldn't be any, they also bring out people's hyper competitive nature, which can be quite ugly. If you truly believe competitive people are good sportsmen, then you really haven't been paying attention to life. Not to say you can't have a competitive and mature person with good sportsmanship but all too often you get a very different type of person and I am not talking about cheaters. There is more than one example of bad behavior.

Why is X-Wing less of a hobby than a game? I'd encourage ANYONE interested in painting and modeling to join the X-Wing painting and mods FB group and marvel. Likewise some people hate painting and will play legion strictly as a game. My point here is I don't know why it's an invalid comparison.

The toxic tournament player is a stereotype I just haven't seen and I've lost count of how many X-Wing events I've been to locally and in other cities about the US and never saw the drama or ugly. In fact I've made fast friendships with many of the people who I rekt and who rekt me. If you gather 120 people, one of them's bound to be a knob but I'm sure this holds across any human enterprise and isn't caused by the competitive environment. Knobs gonna Knob.

There was a fantastic article written a few years ago by a 40k player, this was circa 5th ed. I can't find it, perhaps someone else could. In it he makes a convincing case that to be competitive is to be a sportsman. The sort of player who'll argue rules against him and not correct rules errors that are for him is not interested in competition. The player who uses bullying or anger as a tool to intimidate an opponent or who plays psychological games like saying "Are you sure you want to do that?" when their opponent is about to make a good move is not interested in fair fight. A competitive player wants to test their mettle against the best players in the most even environment because they are looking to to a) find out if/how good they are, b) learn and improve.

3 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

Tournaments hurt games because in the long run, few companies can ultimately resist the temptation to imbalance the game with pay-to-win marketing techniques. This is good for the quarterly bonuses of individuals but bad for the long term survival of the game. Without the invisible "peer pressure" of officially sanctioned tournaments, players are far less liable to fall for this pay-to-win stuff. Some tournament scenes work out ok but this is a fatal flaw in tournaments for games, if the games last long enough. Lest we forget, the lifespan of even successful miniature wargames can be pretty short indeed compared to traditional mass market games.

...

The majority of the customers are so-called casual players. Most people who buy a core set, or the equivalent, for any given game will never attend a tournament.

The "power creep" that we've seen in FFG games I do not believe is intentional. It's rather a consequence of adding more mechanics, units and themes to a game in order to keep it vibrant and under or over correcting or not finding certain combos or effects during playtesting. Making games balanced is so hard, it's practically impossible. This is what dictates the lifespans of these games as well as licenses

Also, if most player's don't play tournaments, why would tournaments apply pressure to the devs to go to pay to win mechanics?

If anything, FFG has shown that they use tournament results to balance their games as best they can.

@TauntaunScout I understand that we have a different relationship to 'fair' in these games and I'm sincerely interested in your perspective on this. You said earlier something like: these games should aim not to be fair but awesome. Please explain what you mean by this and how you envision an awesome game of Legion. Are you alluding to a narrative style of wargaming? Can you point to examples of game systems that do it right? Can you identify what in a game system gives rise to the kind of experience you're talking about? This isn't a Socratic dissection, I'm genuinely interested in your (and by extension a significant swath of the wargaming community's) take on this.

Disclaimer: Not referencing anyone posting in this thread, and specifically not a response to Legion's forum contributor TauntaunScout

The argument I have encountered often boils down to

"I am a very skilled player

I do not win tournaments

Ipso facto, tournaments are not a good test of skill."

See also: "It's just a dice game" :D

The try-hard tournament players go out of their way to exploit poorly balanced and some times out right broken game mechanics and pieces. This is not good sportsmanship in any fashion.

Of course if you are going to play competitively you have to keep up with the Joneses and play the same broken meta mechanics. Then of course, you get the anti-meta blow back and the cry for nerfs and that is what the game devolves into. So yes, you can in fact have skilled players who don't like tournament play since it is all about broken meta lists, decks, what have you, and completely devoid of good sportsmanship, since good sportsmen will pass on playing something that is obviously broken because winning isn't everything and they can help themselves. This doesn't mean that those to choose to keep up with the Joneses or actively seek out the broken combo are bad people or are unpleasant to play with. They can in fact be very pleasant to play with despite how they choose to play the game.

However, don't kid yourself. It isn't the best sportsman that wins tournaments but the one that can find the most loopholes, most broken elements in the game to exploit and also has the skill to make good use of that style of play. There are two different games being played, the actual game and then the "how do I game the system" game. Both have to be played well to win.

That isn't to say all competitive play is bad. It does drive a high level of energy you won't find in casual gaming and a certain level of interest that drives the game as a whole and forces change in the game. We have X-wing 2.0 coming because of tournament play. So for all the bad competitive game brings, it also brings a lot of good. As with all things in life, there is good, bad and a whole lot of indifference in between.

And yes, a few people paint and mod their ships, a few. Most don't and the game rules certainly doesn't encourage model modifications. The level of personalization one can do in X-wing just isn't on a comparable level with miniature games.

51 minutes ago, Mep said:

The level of personalization one can do in X-wing just isn't on a comparable level with miniature games.

I disagree with this statement. We see a tremendous amount of personalization - Everything in X-wing can be personalized... Models (paint, mods(Shape, articulation and lighting), kit bashing custom units...), bases, pegs, tokens, dice, templates, ship and upgrade cards, play mats, terrain (both ground and space) - Co-op systems, RPG systems, (Heroes of the aturi cluster) Missions, storage solutions...

What kind of personalization can you do in a miniatures game that you can't do in X-wing? How is it not comparable?

15 minutes ago, Ravncat said:

I disagree with this statement. We see a tremendous amount of personalization - Everything in X-wing can be personalized... Models (paint, mods(Shape, articulation and lighting), kit bashing custom units...), bases, pegs, tokens, dice, templates, ship and upgrade cards, play mats, terrain (both ground and space) - Co-op systems, RPG systems, (Heroes of the aturi cluster) Missions, storage solutions...

What kind of personalization can you do in a miniatures game that you can't do in X-wing? How is it not comparable?

How many people actually cut the models up, or even just paint them? Most just mark their asteroids so they can tell they are theirs. Bases are FFG standard or against the rules. Yes there are people who put out some very creative things, but how many xwing players made their own play mat, I mean physically made the thing, not just bought one?

This whole thread is about how you have to make something for the game, that is not in the game box. Basically, X-wing, out of the box is fully ready to go. You buy the ships, the mat, maybe some 3rd party tokens, done. You aren't assembling anything, painting, making terrain, etc. The hobby aspect can get rather deep for X-wing but you are talking about a small fraction of players. It isn't comparable to what you see with a miniatures game. X-wing is a game first and a game second. Legion is either a game or hobby first, the other second. People can clearly do anything they wish, but the game system itself for X-Wing doesn't have any hobby aspects built into it. Even if you made your own custom asteroids they aren't legal to play with. So no, not comparable.

5 hours ago, Mep said:

This whole thread is about how you have to make something for the game, that is not in the game box. Basically, X-wing, out of the box is fully ready to go. You buy the ships, the mat, maybe some 3rd party tokens, done. You aren't assembling anything, painting, making terrain, etc. The hobby aspect can get rather deep for X-wing but you are talking about a small fraction of players.

Yes. People can and do carve their own chess pieces but that doesn't make it a hobby wargame.

My response got somehow split into two posts, tried combining them but can't get rid of this thread.

7 hours ago, Ravncat said:

I disagree with this statement. We see a tremendous amount of personalization - Everything in X-wing can be personalized... Models (paint, mods(Shape, articulation and lighting), kit bashing custom units...), bases, pegs, tokens, dice, templates, ship and upgrade cards, play mats, terrain (both ground and space) - Co-op systems, RPG systems, (Heroes of the aturi cluster) Missions, storage solutions...

What kind of personalization can you do in a miniatures game that you can't do in X-wing? How is it not comparable?

12 hours ago, MattShadowlord said:

Disclaimer: Not referencing anyone posting in this thread, and specifically not a response to Legion's forum contributor TauntaunScout

The argument I have encountered often boils down to

"I am a very skilled player

I do not win tournaments

Ipso facto, tournaments are not a good test of skill."

See also: "It's just a dice game" :D

It's only a dice game to people who base their lists on dice probabilities, and don't paint armies which don't have backstories, and don't make their own scenery.

There's always exceptions but, at most, tournaments test skills which I lack respect for at best, and hold in contempt at worst. Not always, and it varies from game to game. I've never gone near an X-Wing tournament because X-Wing in and of itself disinterests me. But X-Wing appears to be much more controlled than an old fashioned miniature wargame. Having tournaments for miniatures games feels like trying to have tournaments for roleplaying games. It's just... weird. It's too subjective to have meaningful tournaments of.

49 minutes ago, TauntaunScout said:

Depends on the game. Chess tournaments are a much more objective test of skill although last I heard, white does win a tiny majority of the time.

The "skill" normally on display for games like Imperial Assault and I fear Legion as it develops, lays in discovering a loophole slightly before anyone else does. Some people are very good at that. Imperial Assault lent itself particularly well to this because of the hyper-standardized scenery of boardgame-wargame hybrids. One more reason to oppose more than vague official scenery guidelines.

In martial arts a lot of very talented kids don't do well at tournaments because they don't know how to "play to the judges" and their opponent does. The ability to play the tournament as opposed to the game comes into effect in many games.

It's only a dice game to people who don't paint their armies or have any sort of backstory to them.

Legion is my first Miniature game where the "hobby" part comes into play. X-wing was my gateway drug into these types of games. I've got way into terrain building. Something I've never done before a month ago. I've only ever painted a few DnD miniatures (poorly) but i am learning. I am building a battle map that is more or less symmetrical. I enjoy fair and competitive play. I like figuring out metas and diving deep into the rules. I'm not a tournament player or anything but the group of people i play with have that same kind of mindset as i do.

I think there can be some sort of happy medium between both extremes. That is at least what i am going for.

16 hours ago, DrDickSplash said:

@TauntaunScout

@TauntaunScout I understand that we have a different relationship to 'fair' in these games and I'm sincerely interested in your perspective on this. You said earlier something like: these games should aim not to be fair but awesome. Please explain what you mean by this and how you envision an awesome game of Legion. Are you alluding to a narrative style of wargaming? Can you point to examples of game systems that do it right? Can you identify what in a game system gives rise to the kind of experience you're talking about? This isn't a Socratic dissection, I'm genuinely interested in your (and by extension a significant swath of the wargaming community's) take on this.

Narrative campaigns take a lot of work. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Take combinations of things that are less than mathematically optimal, just because they are cool. Never take illogical unit combinations just because they are mathematically optimized: for a Star Wars example, do not take C-3PO and Gideon in every mercenary list in Imperial Assault. To do otherwise was found to be highly unsportsmanlike until recent years. Yesterday's bad apples are today's norm. Intentionally place objective markers in places that will create dramatic encounters, like at the top of a spire. Only use painted armies with finished scenery, I can't stress that one enough. Much negativity has its root in widespread comfort with unpainted armies. These games ARE hard for publishers to balance, but it's a lot harder for players to exploit unforseen loopholes if they can't plop a new figure on the table the day it comes out. Vertical castling is/was a chess thing, the likes of which ought not to pervade miniature gaming but often does, particularly often in commercialized games like these which have to keep to a relatively rapid new release schedule. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/12/11/outside-the-box/

It's up to the players to reject the numerous "vertical castles" that can be found in these types of games if you look hard enough. Tournaments cause people to embrace them. There are people who really enjoy finding unforseen loopholes, but, that's the sort of thing for which an entire industry of boardgames and cardgames caters to. Stop trying to get re-writes to the rules for an entirely different genre of game, so that they'll contain more loopholes to exploit. "25% of the table" is about as much of a publisher guideline as you need for a wargame. Use your own experience to figure out what kind of scenery you need, detailed info on it from the publisher will just create new loopholes to exploit and/or reasons to whine about losing on a non-regulation table.

Here's an example from 2nd edition 40k. The Space Wolves got the first army codex, ever. It was unintentionally imbalanced, because no one at GW knew how to write an army codex yet and couldn't predict the things players would do. There was a particular Space Wolf army list that was nigh unbeatable. It was legal, and pretty easy to figure out. You just bought 10 or 11 terminators with autocannons, and some sort of army general, and there you had it. Virtually indestructible, better shooters than most armies artillery, and not bad in hand to hand combat. Not that anything could usually survive the hail of fire to get into hand to hand combat. This was the opposite of the character of the army background, for those unfamiliar with them. There was no real money to be made in this, it wasn't a pay to win list really. Later on GW would figure out pay-to-win with special characters and making the most recent army to come out usually overpowered. But back to the assault cannon list. In fact it was really inexpensive compared to other ways of getting tournament sized armies, making the problem worse. But the pervasive attitude among most people was "Yeah I guess you COULD do that, but what kind of #@$%& WOULD do that?". But people frequently did take that list to small local tournaments, with the result of this weird sort of hatred against all Space Wolf players. People would just flatly refuse to play any and all Space Wolf players, or automatically concede to them at tournaments and people would just roll their eyes if a Space Wolf player won the tournament. I'm not saying people should do any of the above. But now, the obsession with synergy is such that, that stupid assault cannon list hack would utterly dominate every casual and competitive game today. It gets really boring to see the same stuff over and over, or to never see certain cool characters and squads. I know guys who, upon trying a game for the first time with borrowed figures, hop on their smartphones to look up what stuff they "should" take. It's crazy.

To keep it on point, scenery guidelines are always best left vague because fair scenery varies wildly with the armies involved (local play styles can vary) and homemade scenery is one of the great things about this type of game. Homemade scenery is, by definition, hard to write rules for. Getting rigid scenery guidelines is just going to bring out the worst in a lot of people.

Edit: Might be overlooking a source of potential personal bias. I already have a f%^kton of Star Wars appropriate terrain, I don't need any help with it.

10 hours ago, Mep said:

The try-hard tournament players go out of their way to exploit poorly balanced and some times out right broken game mechanics and pieces. This is not good sportsmanship in any fashion.

Of course if you are going to play competitively you have to keep up with the Joneses and play the same broken meta mechanics. Then of course, you get the anti-meta blow back and the cry for nerfs and that is what the game devolves into. So yes, you can in fact have skilled players who don't like tournament play since it is all about broken meta lists, decks, what have you, and completely devoid of good sportsmanship, since good sportsmen will pass on playing something that is obviously broken because winning isn't everything and they can help themselves.

However, don't kid yourself. It isn't the best sportsman that wins tournaments but the one that can find the most loopholes, most broken elements in the game to exploit and also has the skill to make good use of that style of play. There are two different games being played, the actual game and then the "how do I game the system" game. Both have to be played well to win.

And

2 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

It's only a dice game to people who base their lists on dice probabilities, and don't paint armies which don't have backstories, and don't make their own scenery.

There's always exceptions but, at most, tournaments test skills which I lack respect for at best, and hold in contempt at worst. Not always, and it varies from game to game. I've never gone near an X-Wing tournament because X-Wing in and of itself disinterests me. But X-Wing appears to be much more controlled than an old fashioned miniature wargame. Having tournaments for miniatures games feels like trying to have tournaments for roleplaying games. It's just... weird. It's too subjective to have meaningful tournaments of. 

This thread has moved too far from the initial topic so I'm not going to do a deep dive into these quotes other than to say they reflect a profound lack of understanding of what tournaments are and do and what constitutes sportsmanship. I'm trying to be charitable in my interpretation but I can't get away from reading this as "Good sportsmanship is when you play the way I want you to play".

2 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

... for a Star Wars example, do not take C-3PO and Gideon in every mercenary list in Imperial Assault. To do otherwise was found to be highly unsportsmanlike until recent years. Yesterday's bad apples are today's norm. Intentionally place objective markers in places that will create dramatic encounters, like at the top of a spire. Only use painted armies with finished scenery, I can't stress that one enough. Much negativity has its root in widespread comfort with unpainted armies...

It's up to the players to reject the numerous "vertical castles" that can be found in these types of games if you look hard enough. Tournaments cause people to embrace them. There are people who really enjoy finding unforseen loopholes, but, that's the sort of thing for which an entire industry of boardgames and cardgames caters to. Stop trying to get re-writes to the rules for an entirely different genre of game, so that they'll contain more loopholes to exploit. "25% of the table" is about as much of a publisher guideline as you need for a wargame. Use your own experience to figure out what kind of scenery you need, detailed info on it from the publisher will just create new loopholes to exploit and/or reasons to whine about losing on a non-regulation table.

... It gets really boring to see the same stuff over and over, or to never see certain cool characters and squads. I know guys who, upon trying a game for the first time with borrowed figures, hop on their smartphones to look up what stuff they "should" take. It's crazy.

To keep it on point, scenery guidelines are always best left vague because fair scenery varies wildly with the armies involved (local play styles can vary) and homemade scenery is one of the great things about this type of game. Homemade scenery is, by definition, hard to write rules for. Getting rigid scenery guidelines is just going to bring out the worst in a lot of people.

I was hoping for some insight into why you favored a 'non competitive' style of game design or examples of what games do it right. You seem to put the onus on players to play in a fashion that would exclude non hobbyists and people who like tough and balanced matches. This again reads to me as "Play my way otherwise you're a bad apple"

Would you advocate for the shooting rules to be vague or the scenarios to be vague? Why should any rules be left vague? Write the rules nice and tight, let people make their scenery how they like and do the best they can with what they have. It could be put in the tournament guides only so that you can unambiguously do what you want with your casual games.

I'd suggest that we spin up a new thread to carry on the discussion so this thread is kept on topic, but I fear that we have reached an impasse; we fundamentally disagree on what sportsmanship is and we are looking for very different things out of our mini games. I hope Legion can continue to satisfy us both.

I mean... I would struggle to define “sportsmanship “ outside of a few specific examples of good or bad...

... even though I have numerous “best sportsmanship” awards on my shelf from my tournament playing days...

On ‎5‎/‎23‎/‎2018 at 12:41 AM, NeonWolf said:

Those folks use the Competitive Terrain rules even in friendly games because, as they used to tell me in the Army, "you train the way you fight".

Yes, Sir.

48 minutes ago, DrDickSplash said:

I was hoping for some insight into why you favored a 'non competitive' style of game design or examples of what games do it right.

Yeah you're right I went off on a tangent and forgot the question.

DBA did it up pretty good for tournaments. There were some horrendously underpowered armies in it but overall I think the system worked for tournaments and it had a really good run as THE tournament game for a long while as a result. It was almost entirely non-commercialized which helped with objectivity in rules. The publishers and the figure makers were far removed from one another. It wasn't perfect but I still think there's a lot to learn from it. I didn't pick it up until long after its heyday. You don't have much choice in army selection (though you do have some) but there are enough armies to choose from that it balances out that way. There were so many factions in it, it was impossible to know what you'd be facing at a tournament, and thus no "best" army. Also everyone had to model a camp and a unit of civilians which was cool: people who didn't really care about models could build a matchstick fence around a base and use it as a "camp" for all their DBA armies and use a spare unit of whatver as their "camp followers", but people who loved modelling can really create fun camps and camp followers. The rules, in addition to being well balanced enough for tournament play, really evoked a sense of the ancient/medieval battles if one reads much in the way of primary sources. So there was really something well and deeply ingrained in it for everyone: the game players, the painters, the military historians. You don't need a ton of figures to play it but the rules somehow make the armies feel really big, which is also neat. Games of DBA don't take very long, which is ideal for tournament play because you can get a lot of games into an afternoon at a con.

As for why I favor a non-competitive style of play, it's important to note that it's limited to miniatures games. I wouldn't really advocate for non-competitive chess or MTG or whatever. But with miniatures it doesn't tend to work out very well in the longrun for a few reasons.

A non-competitive army selection (the main part of the game that is up for a competitive vs casual debate) has its rewards. Here's an example from 40k again. I use a completely worthless squad of space marine scouts. The squad is equipped for close combat, yet include a heavy weapon. It's utterly stupid. I take that equipment for out of game reasons, and could easily solve the problem out of game too, by painting a spare scout with pistol & cc weapon. But my irrefutably mathematically inferior squad layout adds a lot of tough decisions to my games which is great. Tough decisions make individual game sessions a lot more interesting.

If you take a game too "seriously" for lack of a better word, the publishers will pull the rug out from under you. It's not if but when. That, and a constant sense that your awesome collection of figures just isn't good enough. It is not a healthy way to live. Today's competitive army that you worked really hard on is tomorrow's worthless speedbump, or worse, an illegal army. But the versatile armies that aren't highly optimized for the moment will tend to weather the ups and downs of different editions or waves of releases much better. I have way too many armies to redo them constantly, but I'm not going to leave them sitting on a shelf either because they've become less powerful in-game.

48 minutes ago, DrDickSplash said:

Would you advocate for the shooting rules to be vague or the scenarios to be vague? Why should any rules be left vague?

No. Because we don't scratch build our own rulers of different lengths and such, to use in shooting, or have hours put into carefully crafted dice that we want to carry over from one shooting system to another. We do with scenery. They can't tell you how much scenery to use because it's too subjective. As someone else pointed out, an LOS blocking item has very different implications depending on how far it is from a table edge. Maybe for people who aren't old miniature gamers they really could be giving much better scenery placing advice, but I wouldn't want rigid scenery placing rules.

To go back to topic:

I think, the type of terrain matters as much as the amount of terrain. I've been to a tournament just recently, that had 25% terrain, but only blocking terrain. It was beautiful terrain. But playing there was not that great. There was no shooting from cover.

I think two core sets worth of barricades are a good point to start from. (We usually treat two barricades as one piece of terrain, so they are placed together as an emplacement.) And then add equal amounts of blocking terrain (buildings or hills higher than a Stormtrooper) and covering terrain (e.g. Woods). The Scouts will like Cover 1 terrain, but I would add some Cover 2 terrain.

1 hour ago, DerBaer said:

To go back to topic:

I think, the type of terrain matters as much as the amount of terrain. I've been to a tournament just recently, that had 25% terrain, but only blocking terrain. It was beautiful terrain. But playing there was not that great. There was no shooting from cover.

I think two core sets worth of barricades are a good point to start from. (We usually treat two barricades as one piece of terrain, so they are placed together as an emplacement.) And then add equal amounts of blocking terrain (buildings or hills higher than a Stormtrooper) and covering terrain (e.g. Woods). The Scouts will like Cover 1 terrain, but I would add some Cover 2 terrain.

For almost all games, we start with a piece of LOS & movement blocking scenery just off-center in the table. Then we usually plop down a piece of cover like fences near but not in each deployment zone.Then we add something that hinders movement like a swamp but is clear for LOS, then add something that slows movement AND provides cover, like a base of woods.

Then we kinda look at it from 5 feet away and see what it seems like it needs. But that's how we start, one of each broad category, with something blocking LOS near the center so that the first round of shooting doesn't decide the game.

On 6/25/2018 at 9:49 AM, Ravncat said:

Still have to add some barricades...

Do you count that entire bottom platform as terrain? I would think only the 2 barricades on it provide cover, but i often see people counting flat nearly unraised areas as terrain

1 minute ago, WillKill said:

Do you count that entire bottom platform as terrain? I would think only the 2 barricades on it provide cover, but i often see people counting flat nearly unraised areas as terrain

Yes and no, it's going to be used as a landing platform for a U wing... we can consider it difficult terrain for movement (heat/steam vents, elevator lips etc.. ), not totally smooth across the top, but not LOS blocking, so it doesn't grant cover. Need to get a cotton steam effect.

We also are trying the standard ground round as difficult terrain, and the platform and internal bunker ground he only "non difficult" terrain... still experimenting

the flames add add light cover.

18 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

Then we add something that hinders movement like a swamp but is clear for LOS,

For other games I would agree, but for Legion I don't like this kind of terrain at all. It favors Speeder Bikes and shooting, but hinders tactical movement of troops and AT-RTs. I'd always recommend not to use this kind of terrain.

6 hours ago, DerBaer said:

For other games I would agree, but for Legion I don't like this kind of terrain at all. It favors Speeder Bikes and shooting, but hinders tactical movement of troops and AT-RTs. I'd always recommend not to use this kind of terrain.

Why?

A mix of terrain types favors trying different builds. That seems good no?