John Zeitler

For anyone interested, there’re photos of the Warhammer 40K event I participated in over here. Surprisingly all three of my matches are documented there, early on, at any rate. You can tell they’re early on because I still have pieces on the board…

The concept of a Warhammer tournament is a little different from what’s usually thought of by the word. Unlike, say, a poker tournament or a basketball tournament, every participant in these events plays the full complement of games (usually three). Matches are made at each stage of the tournament, usually by rankings, so that everyone stays competitive at any point– a player who gets blown away in his first match could get decisive victories in the next two and come away with an overall win.

Furthermore, since each player has a distinctly different set of figures, and mission objectives change with each stage, there’s almost no predicting what you’ll face. For example, in my Round 2, I wound up taking the attacker’s role against a set of Chaos Space Marines… who were defending by not defending. My opponent chose to keep all of his forces in reserve, let me blunder in and wonder what happened– which also negated the orbital bombardment that I was entitled to at the beginning of the match, because there was nothing there to hit– and subsequently wiped the floor with me.

Overall, though, the $5 or so you pay as an entry fee is really more of a token gesture to the shop hosting the event. That five bucks guarantees you about six to eight hours of wargaming in a competitive and friendly environment. Some shops or clubs will even provide pizza or drinks. Really, it’s best not to go in thinking you’ll win, because unless you’ve got a decent amount of experience behind you, you probably won’t. Instead, focus on the game itself and enjoying the play, rather than obsessing over the results.

Oh, and incidentally: I learned the importance of vehicles. I’d been thinking they were just big targets, but they might just be worth having a couple around… which is why my Imperial Guard army is going to be fitted up with four tanks and four assault carriers.

As mentioned, I’m not terribly fond of the Space Marine faction to begin with, but this trailer does show da Orkz in fine form. Odd, then, that the SMs are my first full army…

I think we’ve established that my family is remarkably competitive. Today I wound up in two card games which could have been mistaken, at times, for a knock-down drag-out no-holds-barred beatdown.

And I loved every second of them. I wonder what that says about me, let alone my sister?

Today was, as can be inferred from yesterday’s post, a very gaming-centric day. The morning saw me finishing up work on the cooperative crime card game I’m developing, and the afternoon held the first playtesting session of the same. It was… educational.

Developing a game is very much an iterative process. Initially you start off with a set of rules, a set of goals, and the tools that the players can use to achieve those goals. In a competitive game, the primary opposition comes from other players, therefore resources should be plentiful but finite. However, cooperative games pit all the players against a preset scenario or challenge, and as such the resources there should be scarce but valuable. Americans have an ingrained sense of competitiveness when it comes to board and card games, and as a result for beginning players, the concept of cooperation (within the game framework) can be a little tricky to understand; however, once that slight paradigm shift is taken, coop games become frantic, tense affairs.

In the session today, three friends and I made a ton of adjustments to the rules that I’d laid out a few weeks prior and codified a bit more solidly last night. It turned out that, while I had made some surprisingly astute and balanced choices in designing certain parts of the game, I made other elements of the game far more restrictive, to the point where a game could be made unwinnable within the first two turns. While I was a little dismayed to note that I’d basically hamstrung the players, it was observed that “it’s easier to loosen up restrictions than it is to tighten them”. Rather than being limited to only one card per turn, for example, players can now play up to their full hand as long as they don’t play more than one card “colorlessly”. (That isn’t a word, I know, but for some reason the spell checker isn’t saying it’s not. Odd.)

In the end, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to refine the game mechanics. It turns out I may need to create a fourth deck for fewer players; I totally messed up the card balance in the “bad things” deck; and there are general tweaks and errata here and there that need to be resolved before we can playtest a “beta” version of the game. Fortunately, I have time to do just that.

Maybe not tomorrow, as I have a pretty busy day ahead of me, but we shall see.

Oh, the zombies? Yeah, you can guess what game I played tonight with only candlelight beside me and the headphones on.

A couple of you have been aware of my nascent foray into miniature wargaming, specifically Warhammer 40,000. It’s a pricey hobby, but I believe that if it’s always going to be as relaxing as it was tonight– wherein I spent two hours just pulling pieces off of the plastic sprues and organizing them, with but one test gluing out of sheer enthusiasm– this might be one of the more pleasant uses of my time than I had initially suspected. It looks very daunting at first blush, and to be perfectly honest I was hesitant to start it up for fear of it taking more time than I have. In a way it probably still will: I have yet to even purchase paints. But assembling them is, surprisingly, a serene experience and one I’m interested in continuing.

Plus, once it’s all done, I’ll have an army of bloodthirsty Orks at my sole command. Serenity now, power trip later.

(Before you ask: I slept better last night, but not perfectly. Tonight should be short but better, and then tomorrow night will be as close to perfect as I’m likely to get, I think.)

I kept this relatively quiet at the time, but around the end of April I picked up the “starter set” for Warhammer 40,000, called “Assault on Black Reach”. This was partly the fault of TV Tropes’ incessant pimping of the game, partly due to an attraction to the fluff, and partly due to the fact that I like da Orks. Orks is green an’ Orks is big an’ Orks is always ‘ard, an’ dey kin stomp da oomies wheneva, wereva. As you can see, the Orks’ particular mindset is… infectious, to say the least.

I’ve yet to actually field the army due to the fact that Warhammer, like most miniatures games, is obscenely expensive. The Black Reach set cost $65, even after discounts through being a member of the club, and it only has enough figures to create the barest minimum fieldable squads for both the Orks and the Space Marines. Furthermore, the “big” units included for the Orks (Deffcoptas) aren’t quite what I’m looking for, as I’d be much happier with just a huge, greenskinned tidal wave of rage swarming over the battlefield.

So, at GASP this past weekend, I looked into picking up some additional figures in order to make up the difference. They start at about $2 per figure, and armies sufficient for a legal match might have up to 100 units or more. In my case, “more” is the operative word since I’m eschewing the heavy artillery in favor of more or less Zerg Rushing. (Some lesser support units, in the Ork parlance: Gretchin, go for about $1.50 each.) The actual numbers crunched to make a legal army differ from faction to faction, and are standardized in faction-specific Codex books that run $25 each. I did mention that it’s in addition to a required rulebook that is itself $50, right? And that the units are seldom sold individually, instead in boxes of 10 or more? And that on top of all of that, units are pretty much expected to be painted, after you assemble them, sometimes with specialized tools? And as a final coup-de-grace, there are army carriers that can run $50 plus $20 per foam layer, so as to prevent damage to the miniatures?

I did say “expensive”. And that’s not why I’m complaining– in fact I’m more than happy to compensate Games Workshop by buying the legit gear when possible and plausible (as amiable as I am, there is no way in Hell I am going to pay a 150% premium for the GW-branded paints when similar or better ones are at the craft store just up the road from my house).

What bugs me is the idiotic way that Games Workshop has managed to “protect” the value of their goods. There are countless horror stories about the draconic controls that GW has placed on the stores that sell models and supplies. A certain percentage of the store’s floorplan must be devoted to their products, and they’re required to hold events (read: release parties and tournaments) at certain times of the year, even if that conflicts with a local club’s events. Ordering from GW is a convoluted process that requires a high-level degree in mathematics to figure out. And purchasing the minis online used to be impossible, because GW found that online sellers were pricing them at significant discounts off the retail value and quickly pulled the licenses of those sellers.

I say “used to be impossible” for a very good reason. Amazon, through its partners program, makes the ugly business of scouring the net for sellers willing to discount far simpler. I managed to find a set of Ork Boyz listed for $15– 40% off the labeled price. For ten Boyz, that’s not bad… multiply that by a few more, and you’ve got a less expensive route to having your own army. To add to the thrill, Amazon is too big for GW to raise a stink at, and there’s a fairly large pool of sellers who’ll offer discounts of varying amounts. Overall, it mitigates a significant portion of the high barrier to entry that the game has.

But it also illustrates an interesting point about capitalism. Even if you hold a monopoly on an item or resource, in this day and age you cannot completely control the end-to-end price points of the goods in question. The free market, or as free as it gets, is always governed by people, and sometimes people will break “the rules”. Nine times out of ten, that’s bad– see all the other cases of big companies screwing people just because they think they have the money to buy themselves out of trouble. But the one time out of ten that it’s good, the lucky or savvy consumer will take advantage of it ten times out of ten.

In all honesty, this isn’t just good for the consumer, it’s good for Games Workshop, too. Sure, they take a hit on the cost of their gear. But they also introduce a lot more people to the game; and like it or not, there will come a day when I’m at a game day or a GW event, and something will break or chip, and I’ll shell out for the expensive, proprietary-branded supplies to fix it (it’s just probability). Like I said, my problem isn’t that it’s expensive, it’s that it’s needlessly so, and that the steps taken to keep it that high are ultimately locking people out of a game that’s, in my opinion, kind of cool.

It’s all a moot point right now, as I’m not exactly in the green enough to go on a major Ork-buyin’ binge. For the time being, I’ll content myself with the books and the computer games. But, well, piecemeal is how these things are supposed to go anyway, I think. And the Ork Codex is on my list for this week.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been doing some pretty intensive reading and writing for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that’ll be starting up in a week or so. The first mission is about halfway finished, but what’s got me thinking is just how much easier getting everything together is under 4th Edition than it was in 3rd.

One of the things that I balked at initially was the concept of character and monster roles; it seemed like an arbitrary and silly way to enforce an intention on the DM and the players. The more I read through and pick out creatures– to say nothing of defining them– I realize it makes things easier in terms of strategizing creature placement and encounter size. In the planning phase, having the roles ensures that you don’t create encounters that are easily dominated by one particular style. For example, a cluster of identical kobolds (Brutes) can be boring to fight through, but give half of them crossbows and have them hang back behind cover (Artillery) and the encounter changes dramatically.

What’s also worth noting is that I’m not being as rigid in defining my encounters and rooms. I have a general idea of what I want to do when the PCs arrive in each new room, but it’s been a point here to stress that the environment is sometimes as much of a danger to the party as the monsters. Dungeons aren’t designed with OSHA compliance– they’re old, decrepit ruins which could collapse entirely at any given moment if a particularly foolhardy halfling were to, say, lunge at a handful of gems tucked away in an innocuous corner. When they’re not, they’re fortresses specifically designed to be hostile to the folks who come barging in. I learned a lot from watching other campaigns, where elaborate set-pieces make sweeping changes to the flow of a battle.

Finally, one of my goals with the campaign is to prove that a good encounter is one that can be solved in different ways. Violence is not always the most successful option, or even the one with the largest chance of survival. Players should be encouraged to hunt out ways to get out of fighting, because constant fighting can get tedious. And trust me, I have ways of making sure my players know the better part of valor.

We’ll know in a couple of days if my studies bear fruit or not– I’m doing a playtesting session this coming weekend. Till then, I want to leave you with this thought: I had to scale back my damage estimates less often than I had to increase them.

Heading out to games day, so this is going to be short and sweet. I did dig the end of Half-Life 2; getting the super gravity gun was fun. Tossing bad guys around like dolls was extremely cathartic, as was blasting the snot out of the monitors. (“What have you created, Doctor Freeman?” ZOT “Why, Dr. Breen, nothing but a new sport: ‘Bowling With Mooks’!”) And I can see why people are creeped out by the G-Man. I do sort of wish the final ‘level’ was a bit more in-depth than just a rail ride up to the top of the Citadel… I was hoping for a bit more stealth and a bigger battle, but I suppose that’s what the Episodes are for. Glad I have those to look forward to.

And so now I go to partake of board games. Which is kinda cool. See you all tomorrow.