WYSIWYG and aesthetic choices

[Schlitzaf]

My only 2 cents:

This is why I love mono loadouts. I can give my characterbro an awesome ax or thammer and it doesn’t matter. Sense he only has 1 loadout.

[Sergeant Bastone]

I just tell my opponents at the start "all of my sergeants have plasma pistols and power weapons", "all of my vehicles have a hunter-killer missile and heavy stubber", and "these sentinels have lascannons, they just look like multilasers".  Nobody has complained.  As long as you are consistent this i think it's fine.  I feel like it'd be a jerk move to expect my opponent to remember that 2 of my multilasers were lascannons and 2 were plasma cannons.

[Rogue]

That's an interesting grey area for me. I feel like there's a point where this becomes excessive - if you're fielding ten units, and all of them are not quite what they seem, that's a lot for me to remember.

 

Similarly, whilst I agree about consistency, telling me that weapon A is really weapon B, C is D, E is F and G is H might be consistent across your whole army, but I'm unlikely to remember it once we get going.

 

That's what I mean by grey area - the occasional swap is fine in a friendly context, but do it too much and it starts to feel like you're taking the mickey. And I'm not quite sure where the line is.

 

One more example. I once played against the Alpha Legion. 75% of the army was WYSIWYG, with the last unit being unpainted terminators missing several arms (and thus missing most of the weapon options).

 

So pre-battle, I'm told that the guy with no arms is one heavy weapon, the guy with just a left arm is a special weapon of some kind, the guy with just a right arm is whatever, and so on. Honestly, I'd forgotten what was what almost before he'd finished explaining.

 

But that's okay - I knew what was in the unit, and figured the best weapons would stay on the board the longest. (Also, it was a friendly game against a friend who wanted to try terminators, rather than a serious competitive match.)

 

If he'd done this with every unit, it'd be a nightmare to play against. But one unit? Sure, why not. Somewhere between those two points must be the line, but I'm not sure where.

[spessmarine]

It's complicated.

 

Modelled what looks cool even if it is not a legal loadout is generally awesome. Trying things out is fine too.

Well organized like "Crisis suits with a blue striped base have loadout X and I've got it written right here that blue = X so you don't get mixed up at anytime" is good too.

 

Less great is, it counts as whatever is the latest hotness or cheese. Or is a disorganized mess, "The coke can is a broadside, while the gray terminator is a commander, and the other gray terminator is another commander. They have different loadouts that you will be confused about who has what and neither of us will manage to keep it straight."

[Orion]

For those who do proxy a lot, what's the goal?

Is it entitlement? Like if a loadout is better or free, you should get to use it no matter what?

Is it fear of the game being unbalanced if you don't take an optimal loadout? 

Do you tweak loadouts based on opponent or do you use the same every game?

Do you win often? 

Do loadouts win or lose you games?

If wysiwyg was enforced in your local group, would it change who wins games? Would it make the game less enjoyable?

 

It is kinda weird that although you can only proxy outside of tournaments, I'm assuming people do it to keep competitive one way or another.

[Warden-Paints]

I almost always use wysiwyg, even if it's not optimal. Proxying breaks my immersion. 

[Rogue]

1 hour ago, JayJapanB said:

For those who do proxy a lot, what's the goal?

Is it entitlement? Like if a loadout is better or free, you should get to use it no matter what?

Is it fear of the game being unbalanced if you don't take an optimal loadout? 

Do you tweak loadouts based on opponent or do you use the same every game?

Do you win often? 

Do loadouts win or lose you games?

If wysiwyg was enforced in your local group, would it change who wins games? Would it make the game less enjoyable?

 

It is kinda weird that although you can only proxy outside of tournaments, I'm assuming people do it to keep competitive one way or another.

 

I'm not quite the target of the question, but I do proxy from time to time - in my case, almost entirely limited to "These guns are being these other guns today", with an occasional "This character is being this other character" for variety.

 

Sometimes, it's to try out an option before committing to buying and painting. Is a Reductus worth hunting down? Let's play a game or two with this Kellermorph as a stand-in, see how it goes.

 

Often, it's for ease of play. In 9th edition, acolytes had access to three types of mining weapons (all good in different ways). I have a few of each painted up, but would usually blanket all the mining weapons as one thing, so that I could just roll one set of dice each time, rather than fiddling about with different attacks and stat lines. I think that can make things easier for the opponent too - if an acolyte is holding a big red choppy thing, it'll do this one thing every time.

 

And partly it's a balance thing - if I'm due to play an army I got turned over by last time, and I don't yet have the right weapons to hurt them, I might proxy the right guns to give me a bit of a chance (because getting stomped again isn't fun for either of us). On the other hand, if I won big, I can just pick other units or leave out a few heavy weapons, so proxying isn't needed.

 

Going back to my opening point, and your question about entitlement - right now, a neophyte unit of ten can have an icon, two heavies and two specials for free. My current list has a block of twenty and two tens - the tens don't have an icon, and only have one heavy and one special each, because that's what I have painted. For me, if I want the icon or the full complement of extra guns, I need to paint them (which is good motivation to get on with it). Just throwing in some random models and calling them seismic cannons feels like crossing the line.

[DemonGSides]

4 hours ago, JayJapanB said:

For those who do proxy a lot, what's the goal?

Is it entitlement? Like if a loadout is better or free, you should get to use it no matter what?

Is it fear of the game being unbalanced if you don't take an optimal loadout? 

Do you tweak loadouts based on opponent or do you use the same every game?

Do you win often? 

Do loadouts win or lose you games?

If wysiwyg was enforced in your local group, would it change who wins games? Would it make the game less enjoyable?

 

It is kinda weird that although you can only proxy outside of tournaments, I'm assuming people do it to keep competitive one way or another.

 

Sometimes i just don't have the model and I wanna try it out before dumping $40 into a single piece of plastic.  Also, I'm not buying Agastus just to try out Desolators; I can just grab 5 devastators holding rockets and run em in a game and see if I like them before dropping $200 on 10 models. 

 

Not entitlement, and a little weird you think it is.  They're toy soldiers lol.

Edited August 12, 2023 by DemonGSides

[Warhead01]

If I were playing 40K now I would not have any issues with non wysiwyg armies as long as it could be made clear as to which models had what or were what inside of units and all that. 
40K as far as models is now imop extremely low effort. If you could manage* your non wysiwyg army reasonably well and no cheat then cool. What ever. My armies are all painted and wysiwyg. My expectations of ever new person I might meet any play against are incredibly low. GW's more or less killed the hobbyist and creativity side of the hobby.  As a player now your high bar is simply assembling models and putting a coat or two of paint on them.  

*By managing I mean things like this one heavy bolter over here in this squad is really X, I needed an extra model. when I take a casualty I'll pick that model up first. For example. It could be something else. The more convoluted a persons list the more difficult that would be to manage. 
 

[DemonGSides]

5 hours ago, Warhead01 said:

GW's more or less killed the hobbyist and creativity side of the hobby.  As a player now your high bar is simply assembling models and putting a coat or two of paint on them.  
 

 

Couldn't disagree more. Now I can make my guys however I want and I'm not punished by being non viable. I've put more effort into kitbashes and making my guys my own in the past few years than any time during 7th or earlier, where you had so many granular options that by trying to play wysiwyg, you were handicapped if you made a bad modelling choice.

 

Now I can make my guys look cool (to me, the most important person they need to be cool to), while also being fine for the gameplay of the game.