Just ran my first event.

[Master Of Malfeasance X]

To start, this previous Saturday, I ran my first real tournament. It was 1,000 points and I had about 3 hours warning that I was going to orchestrate the whole thing. I quickly hand-jammed three scenarios and put together some event cards. I am aware that in a 3 game tournament, winners are supposed to play against winners, but we had 14 people, which meant 7 winners first round. Thus, one winner had to play a loser. Is there any way around this?

 

Not seeing one immediately, I cherry-picked a fellow whom I knew to be a superior player who'd had a bad first round and paired him with the odd winner out. To my astonishment, the fellow I picked, who will be named Hammer, absolutely trashed his opponent who later turned out to have snuck a bunch of upgrades into his army between games and subsequently was around 500 points over. The Hammer had become my personal assassin. This meant 3 winners emerged into the 3rd round. Crap, another odd man out. I turned to the one person I knew I could trust--the one man who would gleefully crush the dreams of tournament players in his iron grasp--I turned to the Hammer.

 

Thus sicced on another unsuspecting tournament player, the Hammer did not disappoint, taking firm hold of another hopeful and hurling him to the ground.

 

In the third round, I realized I might have more than one person who was 3/0 and also that I was going to have to have some other sort of criteria for figuring out who would take 2nd and 3rd place. In the end, I decided to use kill points from the first round, though I admit, I felt bad that I had not published this in the printed scenarios.

 

So, my questions for the tournament community are these:

1. I ran my scenarios with primary/secondary/tertiary objectives, trying to ensure that no scenario could end in a draw. Is this acceptable?

2. In the future, I intend to assign a point value to every objective, such as 1/2 battle points per kill point, 3 per objective held, etc and just compare everyone's totals at the end. Does this seem reasonable?

3. Soft scores? If I am assigning point values even to objectives, would it just be easier to assign similar values to soft scores such as painting and sportsmanship?

4. In this particular scenario, after the games, I heard many disturbing rumors of people cheating; there was the aforementioned overpointed twink. One guy apparently thought his bloodletters had frag grenades and was wrecking space marines in buildings, as well has using FNP on his bloodletters and bloodthirster. I only found out about this well afterward (his opponent was fairl new and didn't know these things). What might I do about this now?

[Something Wycked]

1. I ran my scenarios with primary/secondary/tertiary objectives, trying to ensure that no scenario could end in a draw. Is this acceptable?

Absolutely. Having multiple routes to earn "victory points" is really necessary to prevent Draws in an environment where W/L is the standard for determining rounds.

 

2. In the future, I intend to assign a point value to every objective, such as 1/2 battle points per kill point, 3 per objective held, etc and just compare everyone's totals at the end. Does this seem reasonable?

Point values certainly make things easier to compare in an objective fashion (pun... might have been intended) versus yes/no or pass/fail. I think its completely reasonable.

 

3. Soft scores? If I am assigning point values even to objectives, would it just be easier to assign similar values to soft scores such as painting and sportsmanship?

Absolutely easier. And it allows you to set an importance on both relative to on-table objectives. Is a good paint job worth one objective? Three? Ten? I would value sportsmanship higher than painting, personally, but of course its your tourney :)

 

4. In this particular scenario, after the games, I heard many disturbing rumors of people cheating; there was the aforementioned overpointed twink. One guy apparently thought his bloodletters had frag grenades and was wrecking space marines in buildings, as well has using FNP on his bloodletters and bloodthirster. I only found out about this well afterward (his opponent was fairl new and didn't know these things). What might I do about this now?

The Daemon player might have been relatively new, as well- maybe he didn't assume his Bloodletters had Frags and instead wasn't aware that assaulting through cover reduced his I to 1. It is far less easy to explain away the FnP, however. I would want to get the Daemon player's side of the story; I would approach him with general questions about how the assaults went and see if the stories matched. Who knows, maybe he might have learned he made a mistake and own up to it. I'd at least give him the chance to do that.

 

If he gives a completely contradictory statement, then one of the two people are lying- but we don't really have enough evidence to know factually which one. I'd let them both know that they will be watched in future as a simply precautionary move. The next person of the two that has a complaint against them is your problem player, and needs a stern warning at that point- shape up or don't show to my events.