Thinking of Running a Tournament

I don't mind the discussion

HC= Bjorn in a 750 list versus nids. Hmm, lets see, thats an armor 13 vehicle. Lets look at what I have to kill that... hmm, strength 6 on my tyranid prime... nope. genestealers? glancing if I am super lucky... My tyrannofex could handle it. But wait, 3 attacks? ws 3? yeah...

Also, Greg for the example win. You have in the past tried to house-rule something because you didn't like GW's ruling.

I don't see any arguing being done by Alex, all I see is him expressing his opinions in his usual (maybe a little overly assertive) way.

HC you were on here a month ago saying some rule was crappy and before anyone ever had a problem with it you wanted to create new house rules to alter it based on a lame blogger.

IIRC The debate in question was him being misled by a blog post, he seemed to think that the rule was going to be misread by people and wanted to stop that before hand. We all told him "That's stupid you don't have to house rule common sense, we're actually halfways competent around these parts" (Even myself with a nifty motivational poster combining both deadpool AND common sense. Hah top that! ... uh where was I?) and it ended there.

Now, away from defending alex..


I like special characters, I think they add great flavour and special rules to the game, and I would personally vote for them being allowed. I understand that some are over- or under-powered, but the same can be said for most types of units.

I have to say I'm really against the 'painting required' aspect for many reasons, though they're all personal.
I don't enjoy painting, I'm not good at it, and as such I don't paint my armies. My friend/roomate Adam has offered to paint mine (And has started on a couple tanks), but I can't exactly rush him on something he's doing as a free-of-charge favour with his own spare time.
I would rather use an unpainted army than a poorly painted army, simply b/c I have a strange kinda pride, which would be hurt less by the thought of "They'll look good eventually" than by the thought of "They suck".

Also, I got into 40K for the wargaming aspect, not the creative modelling (Though I enjoy seeing others creative models, and have tried a few modifcations of my own) nor the painting (Though again I enjoy seeing others well painted models), nor even the fluff (I tried reading one of the books once but it just didn't appeal to me, so I get all my fluff from codeces and hearing other people talk about it).

I'm willing to accept the fact that other people are gaining points for their painting, which allready puts me at a handicap, and it makes me have to rely more on my generalship to have a chance of making a good showing. Saying that an unpaintede army is outright not allowed though..
Shouldn't a tournament be a combination of all aspects, rather than having them required? REQUIRED painting makes no more sense to me than requiring the player to have read X of the books, or have X self-made models, or requiring a list to have X meltaguns.

I'm not suggesting this b/c I want to be included, I doubt I'll be able to make it anyways (I'm a night guy and usually go to BED around 7AM, so would be sleeping through the first half of your tournament), but I did want to make my stance known, and I think it's something to discuss for future reference as well as this tournament.

I'm just sincerely hoping we don't start a trend of "must be fully painted to play", b/c if we do I'll be seriously tempted to just spray paint my entire army then throw blotches of paint at them from a few feet away and start saying 'they're chaos guard, they like weird colours'. which is something I'd rather not do.

The required painting is something that is very common in the tournament circuit. GW events i think requires a painted army. Having painted armies makes the whole event more appealing to people when they are playing. If the league decides one day to advertise out of town then it's not as exciting for other to come all the way to saskatoon with their sweet armies to find people that don't partake in the whole aspect of the game.

Painting your guard wouldn't really be that difficult either. FOr a simple plan you could just base one colour drybrush your secondary then paint the skin on tone. It's not paz/cam/dana quality, but it'll look much better than a plastic grey army.

I would have to agree with Jim on the concept of needing an army to be painted.

Its less personal for me, because all my 40k is painted, but I dont think players should NEED to have their guys painted; this is because it excludes some players.

Giving a "best painted" award, or giving bonus points for painted models is ok. But, This creates the situation where I have seen an army of orks in green spray pain and dots of other colours from Red and Black Spray Paint that were showered over the army. This was for a 40K hall of heoroes tourney in a Games Workshops store where you needed 3 colours AND the bases done.

Its fine if someones army is unpainted as long as you can tell what everything is, (special weapons and characters)

i think there should be a slight bonus for having a fully painted army because it shows you devote time to all aspects of the hobby.

I think Ben just summed it up in a sentence. BONUSES for those who do delve into all aspects, not Exclusion for those who don't.

Paz wrote:HC= Bjorn in a 750 list versus nids. Hmm, lets see, thats an armor 13 vehicle. Lets look at what I have to kill that... hmm, strength 6 on my tyranid prime... nope. genestealers? glancing if I am super lucky... My tyrannofex could handle it. But wait, 3 attacks? ws 3? yeah...

Hive guard are your friend. Or zoanthropes.

Bringing a tyrannofex in 750 is silly, same reason you don't bring a land raider; they cost too much.

With all due respect, your list wasn't the best, and getting rolled by Bjorn was inevitable.

GW events i think requires a painted army

'ard boyz doesn't, iirc.

i think there should be a slight bonus for having a fully painted army because it shows you devote time to all aspects of the hobby.

But a tournament isn't about the entire hobby, it's about the wargaming aspect; the same way a painting competition isn't about the wargaming aspect. You don't game with a fully painted Golden Daemon army, you only have a few models to show off.

edit: Man, my semi-colon abuse is terrible at midnight. fixed, lol

Actually for a lot of people, a tournament IS about the whole hobby, its just that generalship/tactics/strategy is the biggest part of the tourney. The point of most tourney's from what I've read/seen is to showcase your skills at Warhammer (Which includes modelling, painting, interacting with others, and strategy), which is why there are usually scores or prizes for painting/sportsmanship. I agree with that aspect, I just dislike the idea of exclusion.

Jim said it well

After reading the arguments of others, i'll change my stance to giving 'bonus' to those who paint. i still don't like to play against a super powered list that has no paint or just primer on it. exclusion is the word that made me feel a little different. It's a strong word that requires attention. It should be a BIG bonus for painted armies though

Based on the arguments, I'm looking at doing painting out of 3.

0 = all unpainted
1 = Some painted (33% or less), some not, or some just based
2 = Mostly painted, some not (33% or less)
3 = Completely Painted (including bases)

This gives painting the same value as a game, and most people will get 1 or 2 points, and if I give a 2 pt bonus to the winner of the "A" final, 1st will still go to the person who wins all their games, unless they happen to be a bad sport as well (which will also be a score out of 3 instead of 5, details later).

I'm close to putting together a package, and I have a few dates to run past Darren. I'll keep everyone posted.

I agree with you Robyn. The three are equally important otherwise everyone would just play prepainted model games like mechwarrior or that heroe click game. The best general award seen at many tournament is to cater and recognize the guy that wins the most games but isn't the best at it all (painting, sports, etc.). Did i mention i was best general at the pa tournament? i failed on the quiz though (it was pretty hard this time, even paz only got 5/10).

Lore weaver. making paint, sports and winning all worth equal amounts gets my praise.

yep yep, the three should all be included. I really like the "outta three" painting score, as long as we include a separate "best painted and/or best army" score, voted by everyone during lunchbreak. That's a fun part of the PA tournie, running around to see all the armies set up on display.

I'm looking forward to this, its looking to be a well thought out tournament!

If this tournament does go through and is at a time that I could attend, I'll likely make an appearance as well.

Despite the fact that I doubt any of my paint jobs would ever win any kind of award, I gotta agree with Paz and Robyn on the importance of the hobby aspect.

Personally, I got into the game as a replacement for hobby for D&D when 4th ed came out. I'll freely admit that modeling and painting takes a backseat to rules and strategy in my household, but I know there are an equal number of players who collect 40k the same way people do model airplanes, they just get to play with these in a way that doesn't have too many people looking at them bug-eyed when they do.

Out of 3 paint score sounds perfect, with an added bonus for Best painted sounds right. My take would be to have best painted go on the final scorecard as "Which of your opponents armies was best painted." Or something similar.

System Commander wrote:
Some, like Alex.. think a tournament should be game wins only. "ard boyz does do this, but I think they might be the only decent tournie ... perhaps in the world that does this. Most tournaments of any caliber require at least a fullypainted army. Even though I mentioned Alex, this is deifinitely not an isolated view, ALOT of people thik tournies should be based on generalship only.

As an aside...

The problem I have is that the competitive part of the hobby gets shafted with people blurring the lines with things like painting and modeling scores. In some ways, it's simply not fair, what with things like Golden Daemon being only about painting. Where is wargaming's exclusive piece? It seems to be a leg that some would stand on in case they didn't do too well with their tactics or list building skills. "Oh but you spent a lot of time making it look pretty, so you can score higher than the person who's a better general than you". I don't buy it; I don't mean to belittle the work of some very talented artists, but why do they get the handicap? Where's my Golden Daemon handicap because I tabled the best artist?

But this is more of a philosophical thing, not really relevant nor applicable at this time. Just some food for thought.

it's the nature of warhammer. it is designed as a complete hobby meant for players to build, paint and THEN play the game. There's usually a category for 'best general' as i mentioned before and that is the person with the best battle score.

You want to play in something that is all about the tactics and list building then make the playoffs for league. there's no painting bonus there and matt got $100 for winning. pretty good prize if i may say so. Tournaments are for those elitist players and to be elitist requires more than just good tactics.

System Commander

Testify, Brotha!

I'm putting together the format as a document, defining the missions for each round, and then I'll run a few dates past Darren.

Depending on Darren's availability combined with mine, this will all happen mid-late April or early May. I'll keep everyone posted.

I may need 1 volunteer to show up early and help setup tables. Prizes will be announced in the package, and scoring will be detailed there too. As an aside, I'm looking at having a "Best General" award for the one player that goes undefeated.