Casual vs Competitive

[Hellios]

 

 

 

 

Stop quoting what GW says about the rules... GW just pulls stuff out of its ass. They don't care to make the best (within reason) set of rules that they can (how could they justify new editions!)... Hell according to them... they ain't even a games company (I call bull).

 

They don't say this, only the community parrots this

 

I still advise not listening to GW, I mean they have admitted that everything they say is a lie... or is that the lie!

[the jeske]

I would just like to point out that in an edition where you can check range to everything , if you roll X on a charge or shot something and your out of range , it is not exactly the thing one could call being WAAC . I doubt you re-rolling dice, if they come up too good or too bad .

Picking up dice is also not cheating , if you have 8-10 min for a round you learn to roll fast . If you don't you go to time or worse get called for stalling the game .

[Iron-Daemon Forge]

I've been considering going to ToS for a while now.  Mainly because I really want to play some of the people that have posted in this forum who are attendees, like IP.

 

I'd love to send my Iron Warriors up against his some time.  However, my exposure to tournament players has been coloured somewhat by the likes of the Black Sun (a UK based fantasy group, who used to play regularly at the Poole GW Bunker) and a local 40k tournament player, who insists on running his thoroughly unpleasant Fateweaver Flying Circus list, even in (what are supposed to be) friendly club games.  They aren't the sort of people I want to play (I'm not saying all Tournament players are like that, I've just had a few bad experiences is all).

 

Maybe one day I'll bite the bullet and get my list meta-ed properly and come up for some competitive games.  I'll just have to hope I get drawn against people who are up for a laugh rather than just wanting to stomp face and move on to their next game.

 

Dam13n

 

I think you should go to Throne of Skulls.  I've really enjoy attending the event & each one has gotten better & better, making me want to get even more games in because it been a great weekend.

The event team are really great, they done a lot of event since they started in 2010, I think last year alone saw over 50 events for all diffrent aspect of the hobby.

 

Also allow you to see Warhammer World in Nottingham.  I'm willing to travel down from Scotland, stay Friday to Monday (Sunday if friends have drove down to Nottingham) because I've enjoy each Throne of Skulls I attended since they started the current format in 2010. 

I've only had on terrible game out of 10 Throne of Skulls events I attended (5 games each), rest have all been brillaint & been some of my top games, like the game against Space Wolves that ToS Novemeber when we both had 3 models left in Big Guns never tire, my Chaos Lord slaughter a unit of Long Fangs & then got Line breacker, but I could easily failed the charge or save (on a single wound) or they could have taken out my last Obliterators on a single wound holding a object.  It been one of my hardest fought games & people watching commented how it was a hard call but how great the game had been to watch.

 

As well as Throne of Skulls March next week, I will be going to Throne of Skulls Septemeber.

 

IP

[Redtoof]

I also recommend warhammer world events. It's not super competitive, but is usually a good laugh. Plus they feed you. If you can grab a partner or a team I recommend Battle Brothers (1500 point doubles tournament) or Council of War (4 player teams, 3 1500 point individual games followed by 1 4v4 apocalypse game) as well.

 

Edit: Look at me doing GWs marketing for them! Just to balance it out, the Chaos Marine codex is rubbish!

[hornywingythingy]

I'm definitely a competitive player, I like taking the best list I can to suit my play style, and playing against opponents of similar or better caliber (I'm not great by any stretch, but I'm improving) if I find myself playing an opponent less skilled who is struggling, I will try to help them and explain to them why I'm doing what I'm doing, trying to help them get better.

 

I can build fun lists for my local group, by but tend to just use weaker armies.... TBH I find playing like this annoying at times, being used to optimised lists I find unoptimised lists feel flabby to play, but I have no desire to table people without them having a chance...

 

I tend to find if people I play are gonna lose they have lost in deployment or turn one, I'm very strong on tactical deployment (played fantasy for years and years)

 

Don't consider myself WAAC, as I actively try to help other players and want to enjoy my game, I tend to just enjoy it more when I'm being pushed or challenged.

[Shuggnuggath]

Real competitive players don't enjoy steamrolling their opponents. They get far more from a closely fought contest than a whitewash.

 

Everyone who plays 40k would benefit from a more balanced set of rules and codexes. Casuals and competitive players.

The only people who may lose out are the so-called WAAC types who you probably wouldn't enjoy playing anyway.

[Zhukov]

I think the gap between casual and competitive players has widened, but I'll have to explain it to show in what way:

 

During 5th there were several strong armies. In general they had 3 things in common: Lots of (mostly cheap) vehicles, lots of small units, lots of firepower spread out through the army. Even though casual players naturally lost to top players here too, they did have more of a chance in the sense that everybody knew what to prepare for. Most players knew they had to take a lot of anti-tank for example, preferably in the form of melta.

 

Now in 6th the overall meta is much more volatile. You have to be able to deal with a wide arrange of things now (Fliers, FMC's, deathstars etc) while still being able to play the mission. Add on top of that all the new datasheets, supplements and what not.... and there is no way that a casual player can keep up with all of this. Casual players their weaknesses are exploited way harder by all the extremeties they can come across when competing against 'serious' tournament players.

 

 

Regarding 'competitive' and 'WAAC': I stopped fighting this battle. Some people want to be ignorant, I let them be. But I can tell you one thing: True competitive players are not WAAC players by definition. They like to compete more than anything and by cheating or being a prick you are trying to gain an unfair advantage to win, which competitive players are not looking for. If I give myself as example: Winning in itself isn't important for me, what I have to do for it is. I much rather lose 3 games in a tournament to great players, than that I win the tournament while having beaten several weak players.

 

But I'm not that competitive anymore either, the game isn't really suited for it anymore in my opinion. Even if I still am: It doesn't mean that I can't play casually. I'm not interested in stomping locals, neither do I Always want to play 'on the edge'. I enjoy some less serious games as well, where I can play more layed back while fielding units I find pretty or cool.

[Smurfalypse]

This is a topic I will approach with caution. I am a casual player, to the bone. I could give two :cusss whether or not I win a game or not. So I play the units and models I like and rarely attend tournaments. I don't care that I plop my money down, play a few games and lose. I still love losing, for me this game is about the models and the social interaction. But when I go to a tourney and 1/3 of the players there are playing the same list, almost to a T, then I get turned off.

I've never played 40K competitively but I used to attend a lot of local Magic the Gathering competitions and do quite well. Here is something I have noticed, a similarity if you will. The competitive players play to win, that's the enjoyment for them. Winning. Then you get this idea that you are better than others because you beat them at a game. The casual players enjoy the game for the mechanics, the card, or artwork. They enjoy sitting around a table and drinking beer while building up huge army's. They view the competitive players as braggarts because they win.

I don't care either way, for me it's about personality. If you're a dick, I won't play games with you. Plain, and simple.

 

End of Line

 

See here is where I get annoyed and why I wanted to post this.

 

I play in tournies fairly regularly, I am not a dick and most people seem to enjoy playing with me (I cannot speak for them but I have no problems getting random pick up games from my local gaming shop). I do not play in tournies to win the tourny, I play to play random folks and to have harder matches than I normally get in my local gaming store, if I really cared about winning turst me, I would not be using CSM as my primary army :P That said, I am considered a competitive player when I show.

 

"The competitive players play to win, that's the enjoyment for them. Winning. Then you get this idea that you are better than others because you beat them at a game."

You make a very basic generalization of all people who play in a competitive environment, this is like saying that all casual people are winey bitches who are just mad because they cannot hang.

 

"But when I go to a tourney and 1/3 of the players there are playing the same list, almost to a T, then I get turned off."

This is another thing, right now the meta is so broad that you rarely see the same lists in the same tournaments (unless it is a 200+ man tournament where that type of thing cannot be avoided). 25 man RTTs and it would be rare to see more than one Seer Council or Ovesa-Star. Just saying.

[Smurfalypse]

Real competitive players don't enjoy steamrolling their opponents. They get far more from a closely fought contest than a whitewash.

 

Everyone who plays 40k would benefit from a more balanced set of rules and codexes. Casuals and competitive players.

The only people who may lose out are the so-called WAAC types who you probably wouldn't enjoy playing anyway.

 

Ran out of likes for the day so wanted to highlight this :P

[Sception]

A well designed game can allow players to 'play to win' without everybody playing the same thing.  Look at magic during a decent rotation - people are there to win at tournaments, but when the rotation is healthy you still see a bunch of decks.  But that requires a lot of design effort and testing to be put into the development of the rules themselves, and requires after-the-fact maintenance via errata or ban lists or otherwise if some particularly unbalancing rule or combination of rules sneaks through the development process to dominate the meta and squeeze out other deck builds, and all of that is effort that GW simply does not and does not care to put into their rules.

 

I'm primarily a casual player myself, I like to play to theme and seek out narrative situations in games.  But that also suffers from lack of effort, investment, and testing on the part of the designers!  Arguably more so than competitive 'play to win' gaming!  Competitive players, ime, generally are less attached to particular factions or builds, akin to a magic player who figures out what deck they think will be effective than gets that deck, rather than a magic player who lets themselves get emotionally invested in a color or theme and only plays decks that can play into that theme.  So if the balance says you only run from a particular narrow subset of builds, then competitive players simply play one of those builds.  Yeah, they might get bored by the lack of variety in an unhealthy meta, but they don't get mad that 'their army sucks' because they don't have an army.

 

Likewise, while the rules may be intended for cool, immersive, narrative moments on the table, rather than intellectually engaging competitive play, that doesn't mean it requires less design effort.  If anything it requires more, since it's far easier to test for balance than it is to test for more subjective experiential criteria.  If you screw up narrative rules, that doesn't bother competitive players.  Barrage sniping is just a tactical element of the game to account for, it doesn't matter whether it 'makes sense' or not.  But for the casual player, rules that don't make sense in character snap the immersion, ruin investment, and reduce the narrative of play from a grand battle between epic heroes and villains to an over-complicated board game played with overpriced toy soldiers.

 

 

Again, lets say, for example, that I used to run chaos terminator lords or even Abaddon himself with large terminator retinues deep striking in during the game to target enemy HQ units because I was emotionally invested in narrative depictions of the Black Legion fighting in just that manner and wanted to experience the thrill of enacting that narrative on the table.  Now, maybe I'd win, maybe I'd lose, that part didn't matter too much to me, and honestly once my opponents were hip to my ways I frequently did lose, since the terminators required aid from other squads to deep strike into those positions, and since the terminators were so expensive those other squads were typically smaller and fewer and less well supported than they needed to be to survive enemy attention, and I often lacked the points needed for the kind of specialists that could eliminate enemy anti-terminator units before my retinue landed.  But I could accept all that, because everything still worked the way it was supposed to in the narrative, those struggles were struggles that fit with the narrative I was playing to.

 

But then, just for example, lets say a new codex removes homing beacons from the list entirely.  Suddenly my force is split, there's no longer mechanical interaction between the deployed forces and the deep striking squad, so right away the narrative of the battle is less engaging.  And without homing beacons, the terminator squad either needs to land much further away, avoiding dense enemy formations and no longer targeting central enemy HQ units, or has to deep strike unaided into the middle of the enemy formation, with significant risk of mishap.  Tell me, how many times in the narrative have you read about abaddon teleporting into a rock and dying?  Or his retinue falling over dead when they materialize on top of the enemy?  Last book I read where terminators literally appeared on top of the enemy, the enemy unit was crushed, not the other way around.  Or the last time you read about a chaos force defeated because their lord and his deadly terminator retinue appeared a mile away from the battle and all the rest forces were wiped out by the time they made it to the fray on foot?

 

Again, it isn't about winning or losing, I didn't care if I won or lost before, I'm angry because the narrative created by the games I play no longer fits the narrative of the game lore.  I can play the "units I like, the way I want", but doing so is no longer fun.  Now it's just frustrating.  Units that don't work right - that either don't function at all or that don't function the way described in the fluff (termicide is function, but doesn't fit the narrative at all) - those units aren't fun to play, and that's why I don't play them, not because I "can't win with them".  I might still enjoy modeling and painting them for my collection, but if playing them on the table is just frustrating, why would I do that?

 

The units that people take most often aren't just the ones that are 'good', they're also the ones that behave at all as they're described within the narrative.  Winged princes are melee monsters that crash into the enemy like a vengeful comet.  Belakor is a cloud of fear and darkness that breaks into a terrible storm.  Cultists are expendible rabble that choke the enemy with their dead or stay back to debase objectives & defile them with runes to the gods while the more numerically limited soldiers of the legions attempt to krak enemy hardpoints.  Predators and havocs rain heavy weapons fire on the enemy, plague marines are poisonous zombie marines deadened to pain, etc.  The units people don't play?  Not only do are they 'not good', but they also don't act as expected.  Possessed, despite their fleet, are still slow, both on the way to combat (infantry, no effective assault transport) and when they get there (no grenades), are no tougher than generic marines against most attacks, and have a tendency to not even hit all that hard, depending on what you're fighting and what you roll.  Tzeentch sorcerers are pretty poor psykers.  Thousand sons are no tougher than generic marines against most attacks.  Warp talons are pretty bad to begin with, but go from bad to downright awful if you try and play out the deep striking gimmick that defines them within the narrative.  Berzerkers aren't much better than regular khorne marked chaos marines in close combat.  Chosen, despite being tough enough to survive for millenia in the eye of terror, die as easily as tactical marines.  The more more narratively appropriate the 'veterans of the long war' upgrade is for a particular unit, the more the codex tends to discourage you from taking it via jacked up points costs.

 

 

And narrative/mechanics dissociation isn't the only problem.  There's also model/mechanic dissociation.  Chaos Dreadnoughts used to be proper beasts, mechanically.  While they were never exactly points efficient, they could be tooled up to have impressive firepower and be quite difficult to bring down.  Now we have a proper beast of a model, one with a serious visual impact and presence... but if you run it on the table, that presence just isn't there mechanically.  Their offense is lackluster at best, and they're very vulnerable, and while that offense improves slightly up close, they have a hard time getting there, and even if they did, their vulnerability skyrockets at close range due to melta weapons and krak grenades.  And that dissonance between the physical presence and mechanical presence of the model on the table top is just as immersion breaking as chaos terminator lords killing themselves by deep striking into enemy units or massive, indirect-fire seige cannons being the most deadly accurate sniping weapons.  A purely competitive player doesn't care, they just take some other unit (or more likely another faction).  It's the casual player who's left unhappy with a model that looks cool but consistently fails to live up to that coolness when played.

 

-----------------

 

Then you have subfactions who have lost their subfaction rules.  Again, purely competitive players?  whatever.  Maybe they used to play heavy spam iron warriors or slaaneshi siren prince daemonbomb, but they don't any more, now they play taudar or screamerstar and those old armies were sold off long ago.  It's the casual gamer, the one invested in their personal physical collections, in their own faction lore, the ones who have named all their characters, those are the gamers who still care about such things.  Because they're invested in their personal army, and miss that mechanical distinction, no matter how small, that says 'this is us' when writing lists and playing games.

 

 

If everyone was a purely competitive player, you'd hear a lot less whining, because everyone would have moved on years ago.  Pretty much nobody is purely competitive or purely casual, but as a general rule, anger about problems with how a faction plays on the table top comes more from the more casual end than the more competitive end, because anger is an emotional reaction, and emotional reactions come from a place of emotional investment in the faction or models or narrative, which is the heart of casual play.  competitive play is more about emotional investment in the outcomes of the games as games, and as such a competitive player might get upset about poor balance leading to narrow fields, they're less likely to feel personally wronged and hold a long term grudge over the mechanical treatment of individual models or factions.

 

Of course, that doesn't mean angry reactions are good.  Yes you want people to be invested, but if they're invested but angry at you, then you've done something wrong.  "You being mad at me as a creator means I'm doing a good job since you care so much", is one of the most infuriatingly smug, and frankly stupid responses to criticism that a creator can adopt.  It's basically giving your audience a middle finger for being your audience in the first place.

[Kol Saresk]

I think Smurfalypse is still pretty attached to Chaos.

[Fibonacci]

 

 

 

 

Stop quoting what GW says about the rules... GW just pulls stuff out of its ass. They don't care to make the best (within reason) set of rules that they can (how could they justify new editions!)... Hell according to them... they ain't even a games company (I call bull).

 

They don't say this, only the community parrots this

"We have a simple strategy at Games Workshop. We make the best fantasy miniatures in the world and sell  them globally at a profit and we intend to do this forever."

 

That's their business.

 

They do go on to say things like: "The more fun and enjoyable we make our games, the more customers we attract and retain, and the more miniatures our customers want to buy."  But their business is to sell models.  If they can make a fun game while contibually rotating who is hot they can obviously sell more models than leaving the game static where the army you bought 10 years ago is all you will ever need.

 

The name of the game is change and balance is not conducive to change at all.

[Sception]

There is no such 'rotate who is hot' plan, or if there is it doesn't matter.  Actually enacting such a plan in rules form requires a level of testing they do not engage in.  Basically, it doesn't matter what they are trying to do with the rules - they don't put enough testing in to actually pull it off in any deliberate way.

 

Even so, the 'rotate who is hot' plan is pretty clearly not in effect.  Witness the times when they were attempting to throttle back codex creep - which only keeps the same builds hot until they go back on that plan.  Or witness multple successive versions of books where the same units are good or the same units suck (plague marines best cult in 4e book, still best cult in 6e book.  thousand sons worst, still worst.  possessed and dreads bad, still bad).  Even the 'new model hotness' thing doesn't bear scrutiny.  Yeah, drakes are super good, but fiends and smith are 'meh', and apostle is downright terrible.  Same when you look at the progress of other books.  There is no actual pattern here, only confirmation bias.

[Kol Saresk]

I'm confused, how is that related to the topic?

[Sception]

Don't know, just responding to Fibonacci.  Oh, it relates to competitive vs. casual in terms of what GW says they intend their rules to be for, vs what their actions indicate they're actually trying to do, & what the amount of work they put into design & especially playtesting allows them to do regardless of intentions.  there.

[Kol Saresk]

Uh-huh. So it relates to the thread title, not the thread topic? Okay.

[Fibonacci]

There is no such 'rotate who is hot' plan, or if there is it doesn't matter.

Right.  Not overtly at least.  What they do is make new models.  They make what they think are cool models.  Then they make cool rules for their cool models.  Whatever they are working on at the moment gets the focus, gets the rules, gets the exposure in WD and the older things ... well, they don't.

 

Take for example (since it was recently mentioned) the flamer chariot.  There is no denying that it is a cool looking model.  There is also no denying that unless you oponent moves into position for you the flamer will not be flaming anyone.  What would it take to fix the flamer chariot?  One line in an FAQ changing any one of several points that all need to work together to keep the flamer from being useful.  It is not going to happen as long as the developers are all focused on other projects.  Their new stuff with new rules and cool new abilities.  They will always be adding new models and enticing us to buy new things.  As a result, the army that most people fielded last year is poorly represented this year; and next year will be more of the same. 

 

Taudar are the hot new toys.  At least they were yesterday.  Before summer time is over there will be a new top tourney army.  Not by design entirly but that is just what happens when the new toys get their time in the sun. 

[Fibonacci]

The point is that the divide is bad for any community and does nothing cause people to argue over pointless things. I just wanted to get everyone input on this type of topic if possible

Uh-huh. So it relates to the thread title, not the thread topic? Okay.

It is all spherical.

[Nehekhare]

I feel obliged to once again attest to the fact that by the very definition of "competition", it is impossible to not play 40k (or any wargame) competitively.

 

Competition in biology, ecology, and sociology, is a contest between organisms, animals, individuals, groups, etc., for territory, a niche, or a location of resources, for resources and goods, mates, for prestige, recognition, awards, or group or social status, for leadership. Competition is the opposite of cooperation.It arises whenever at least two parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared or which is desired individually but not in sharing and cooperation. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition

 

therefore, anyone playing for fun is having fun by (at least) trying to win. There is no such thing as "non-competitive" wargaming - it would be a contradictio in adiecto.

[Iron Skull Mask]

As I see it, real balance would not help anybody. On the competitive/tournament level, it first would be about manouvering, and after that about rolling the dice. If the competitive game was only about skill, the weak players by and by would drop out. If it was soly about luck, it would become stale very fast.

 

Most guys out to win big tournaments buy and sell armies, so they can play a currently strong army at tournaments. Others just got their pet army and knowing its limitations (if it not just happens to be on top of the heap atm), just take all comers, looking for cool games. And finally there are those who stick to their pet army and complain all the time because it isn't currently on top of the heap. I mean, there are definitely things worth complaining/ be upset about in regard how some armies have been managed in general terms and when compared to others. But you will always meet people claiming their army got it so bad compared to yours and that's the only reason you won.

 

In the end I think that's unevoidable, but to focus on casual players and let competitive players work out their combos and creating their tournament meta is the right move for GW in my opinion. You can play the game competitively, you can play it casually. What it boils down to is how you do it and your attitude.

[Shuggnuggath]

Because GW don't play test their stuff properly before the release it 'into the wild' they tend to miss about as often as they hit tbh. New units are not always better than the old ones.

 

As Mal pointed out a lot of the new units in our book are duds. On the other hand spawn and bikes got a lot better. If you had ripped the fast attack section out of the GavDex you wouldn't have missed out on anything worth taking. Now the fast attack section is the best bit of our codex, apart from warp talons...

[Ammonius]

I feel obliged to once again attest to the fact that by the very definition of "competition", it is impossible to not play 40k (or any wargame) competitively.

 

Competition in biology, ecology, and sociology, is a contest between organisms, animals, individuals, groups, etc., for territory, a niche, or a location of resources, for resources and goods, mates, for prestige, recognition, awards, or group or social status, for leadership. Competition is the opposite of cooperation.It arises whenever at least two parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared or which is desired individually but not in sharing and cooperation. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition

 

therefore, anyone playing for fun is having fun by (at least) trying to win. There is no such thing as "non-competitive" wargaming - it would be a contradictio in adiecto.

I think you make a very good point with that last statement. If two players come to the table, set up terrain, deploy armies and attempt to fulfil the victory conditions of a scenario, they are competing in a wargame, no matter how friendly the banter, no matter how wel painted the armies, no matter how tasty the snacks are.

 

Once you have two people that come to a table, set up terrain to represent a specific event that they have agreed upon, deploy the armies that have mutually agreed fit the specific event, and move them around the table to simulate the events that they have agreed to play out, they are no longer wargaming. They may be having a great time, they may have wonderfully painted armies, they may have tasty snacks, but they aren't playing the same game as the folks in the first example.

[Kol Saresk]

 

 

I feel obliged to once again attest to the fact that by the very definition of "competition", it is impossible to not play 40k (or any wargame) competitively.

 

Competition in biology, ecology, and sociology, is a contest between organisms, animals, individuals, groups, etc., for territory, a niche, or a location of resources, for resources and goods, mates, for prestige, recognition, awards, or group or social status, for leadership. Competition is the opposite of cooperation.It arises whenever at least two parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared or which is desired individually but not in sharing and cooperation. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition

 

therefore, anyone playing for fun is having fun by (at least) trying to win. There is no such thing as "non-competitive" wargaming - it would be a contradictio in adiecto.

I think you make a very good point with that last statement. If two players come to the table, set up terrain, deploy armies and attempt to fulfil the victory conditions of a scenario, they are competing in a wargame, no matter how friendly the banter, no matter how wel painted the armies, no matter how tasty the snacks are.

 

Once you have two people that come to a table, set up terrain to represent a specific event that they have agreed upon, deploy the armies that have mutually agreed fit the specific event, and move them around the table to simulate the events that they have agreed to play out, they are no longer wargaming. They may be having a great time, they may have wonderfully painted armies, they may have tasty snacks, but they aren't playing the same game as the folks in the first example.

Except the second scenario means that there is a way to play 40K without being competitive. Which runs contrary to Nehekhare's extreme belief that this is a wargame, only a wargame and nothing but a wargame and if you put a model on the table, you are playing to win by any means necessary.

[Ammonius]

 

 

 

I feel obliged to once again attest to the fact that by the very definition of "competition", it is impossible to not play 40k (or any wargame) competitively.

 

Competition in biology, ecology, and sociology, is a contest between organisms, animals, individuals, groups, etc., for territory, a niche, or a location of resources, for resources and goods, mates, for prestige, recognition, awards, or group or social status, for leadership. Competition is the opposite of cooperation.It arises whenever at least two parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared or which is desired individually but not in sharing and cooperation. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition

 

therefore, anyone playing for fun is having fun by (at least) trying to win. There is no such thing as "non-competitive" wargaming - it would be a contradictio in adiecto.

I think you make a very good point with that last statement. If two players come to the table, set up terrain, deploy armies and attempt to fulfil the victory conditions of a scenario, they are competing in a wargame, no matter how friendly the banter, no matter how wel painted the armies, no matter how tasty the snacks are.

 

Once you have two people that come to a table, set up terrain to represent a specific event that they have agreed upon, deploy the armies that have mutually agreed fit the specific event, and move them around the table to simulate the events that they have agreed to play out, they are no longer wargaming. They may be having a great time, they may have wonderfully painted armies, they may have tasty snacks, but they aren't playing the same game as the folks in the first example.

Except the second scenario means that there is a way to play 40K without being competitive. Which runs contrary to Nehekhare's extreme belief that this is a wargame, only a wargame and nothing but a wargame and if you put a model on the table, you are playing to win by any means necessary.

But are you really playing 40k when you are specifically not competing? I think that there are a near-infinite number of ways to enjoy one's models, and playing a game of 40k is just one of them, but when you play the game, you are competing.

 

Also, I double-checked, and I don't see "by any means necessary" in Nehekhare's post, which is one reason why I liked the point he made - he didn't resort to hot-button words.

 

Let me ask this:

If you are playing non-competetive 40K, what do you call the other people playing? How do you react to them and their units?

[Smurfalypse]

I think Smurfalypse is still pretty attached to Chaos.

 

lol you have no idea how in love I am with CSM and my Word Bearers. Been playing them for 18 years now and have never picked up another army, I run Daemons as my primary every so often but CSM are always allied in and that is still pretty rare for me (probably 90% of my games are with CSM as primary).

 

Got an RTT this weekend (might go to a second one about an hour away Saturday and then do my normal one Sunday, not sure yet). I will try to snap some pictures and do a battle report on them to maybe show the type of stuff I see, what I play against, and I can tell you how the game went conversationally.