So, we just had a ptg league...

[hellalugosi]

I just say that summoning basic infantry from your allegiance table is free, summoning from an elite table takes a glory point. So in the end, yes you can fill the board with skeletons, but if you wanna lay down some morghasts, you better be ready to give up some glory and make it worth it!

Its the same kind of thought process when shadow war does special characters you can hire.

 

[Captain Marius]

4 hours ago, hellalugosi said:

I just say that summoning basic infantry from your allegiance table is free, summoning from an elite table takes a glory point. So in the end, yes you can fill the board with skeletons, but if you wanna lay down some morghasts, you better be ready to give up some glory and make it worth it!

Its the same kind of thought process when shadow war does special characters you can hire.

 

That is a cool idea, i like it!

[Kamose]

On 7/30/2017 at 0:04 AM, rokapoke said:

Your play group is broken, not the rules.

That is possibly the most accurate and succinct explanation for most of the problems people run into playing narrative campaigns.  Maybe a little on the nose if we care about people's polite sensibilities but true nonetheless.  

No doubt summoning can be abused in Narrative Games just like the mythical "20 Nagashes" in Open Play.  However, as lots of people have pointed out, it is the responsibility of the group to self govern its own play style and determine what is and what isn't appropriate for their group.  What that means is literally unique to every gaming group.  I can't tell anyone here how to do it though I can tell you how my group has done it.

We run a small, monthly Open Play event at our local gaming store.  The army composition is simple; 30 models or, recently, 5 units.  That's it!  "Oh but that's so easy to abuse!!"  It is easy to abuse.  In fact one person here plays Ogors.  During the first event he brought 12 Ironguts in one big squad and rolf-stomped everyone.  Since that day he has voluntarily chosen to either forego the Ironguts or bring a minimum-sized squad.  He did this because of the how unpleasant his army made the game FOR OTHER PEOPLE!  

Humans are absolutely capable of and frequently are altruistic.  Hyper-competitiveness to the point of ruining other people's hobby is not human nature but it is unacceptable and needs to treated as such. There is a place for that kind of cut-throat gaming and its Matched Play.

This is an example how people self-regulate in their gaming group.  Its shows maturity that you can change how YOU play to ensure that others enjoy themselves.  If someone doesn't understand that their behavior has ruined other people's games (or doesn't care) they should be politely asked to "tone it down next time." (By the way, even this warning shouldn't be necessary for most groups, as most people are mature enough not to need it.)  If they persist even after being asked to be considerate of others, then what they are doing is simply selfish and bad behavior.  It absolutely should not be condoned or encouraged by the group.  THAT is what will ruin Narrative Events.  

It sucks and no one likes doing but if someone persists in their bad behavior in spite of warnings they deserve to be banned from the event.

[wayniac]

I think a major issue is that you often get people who WON'T stop doing it, simply because nothing prevents them from doing it, so therefore everything is fair game.  And, for whatever reason, groups seem reluctant to just shun that person until they stop or just can't get games; in fact, what often happens, inexplicably, is the exact opposite: Everyone else tries to abuse the system to "keep up" with the lone abuser, instead of banding together to stop him, or they lambast the playstyle and just ignore the fact they can fix the problem.  

The pick-up game mentality also helps to stop just refusing to play with people, because when you don't have a group but essentially an open event (which is required at many stores to have an event at all; you can't just limit it to certain people, it has to be open to anyone who wants to join) it makes it much harder to agree to not abuse the rules, because the more people you have participating, the greater the chance someone will do it anyways (again, often simply because "the rules let me") and, another symptom of pick-up game culture, if you refuse to play Bob because you know he abuses the rules, you might not get a game at all that day if Bob is the only one available to play against; for many people, not getting a game in is worse than playing a miserable game.  Thus the fault is with the system, and not the player, because the system allows the abuse.  I vehemently feel that the reason people want to blame the system, and by extension hide behind "the rules let me" when building an abusive army with Matched Play, is because it gives an excuse.  Think about it:  With Open/Narrative play, the person who abuses units or summoning has no excuse other than "I'm a ****** and only care about my own enjoyment", since the rules system is loose enough that the onus is on the player to NOT immediately try to break it.  However, once a system is in play (e.g. Matched Play) then any such abuses are defended with "It's a legal army, the rules let me do this" and that suddenly makes it okay, when the same thing was bad and unacceptable  when there was no structure.  A common 40k example was from the previous edition:  Unbound let you take anything you wanted (albeit still requiring points) with no army building restrictions, and was lambasted as being an awful, terrible thing that should be banned and never played.  Then there was Formations which let you break army building restrictions, and these were shining beacons of a good thing that should be allowed and only whiners banned it.  So for some reason, playing all tanks with Unbound was vile and a cardinal sin and should be illegal, but playing all tanks using some Formation was perfectly viable, when they were the same thing except one was introduce as a type of structure, and the other was unstructured.

It's like someone arguing that a hypothetical anarchic society where everyone agrees to punish robbery (for sake of argument let's assume this is agreed upon and can be enforced in the anarchic society) is somehow worse than a structured society which also punishes robbery, simply because the anarchic society isn't structured, even though it has the exact same concept with the exact same law (again, assuming both can be equally enforced).

It's also a symptom of human nature, perhaps, that everything immediately gravitates towards the "best" or "most optimal" options.  I see the same thing in Warhammer 40k with the "power levels" concept, which I really like:  People immediately lambasting it compared to oldschool "pay for everything" points because "it can be abused" by simply taking the "best" weapons, in as many quantities as allowed, taking every single vehicle upgrade allowed, etc. and simply deliberately taking options that abuse it, and then claiming it's the system that's broken because "there's no reason to ever not do it". 

In fact, what bothers me the most perhaps is that AOS was meant to be an escape from the WHFB-style thinking, only to have the most vocal people demand that it come back (in the form of Matched Play) so here were are basically playing WHFB with round bases, instead of something that could have been new and unique.

[Sleboda]

2 hours ago, Kamose said:

Humans are absolutely capable of and frequently are altruistic.

Not really. Ppl ultimately are self-serving. What appears to be altruism is really just a side effect of wanting social acceptance and more gaming opportunities. At the very least it is about him not wanting to deal with people being negative toward him. 

In the end it doesn't matter, though,  because the result is the same - your event prospers. That's neat! 

[Tidings]

Honestly, players like that exist, and no ruleset is going to be so loophole free that they won't be able to find SOME way to be a tryhard ******. If he comes into the store to play, and everyone he asks for a game says "sorry, I don't really have any fun when we play together", he will either leave or be forced to change the way he plays. 

If he asks "how come no one wants to play a game with me anymore?" and then when told, answers with "but the rules allow it?" there is a simple retort. "Whether the rules allow it or not is besides the point. We come here to play and have fun, and you abusing a mechanic is not in the spirit of fun. It may be fun for you, but not for the rest of us."

[wayniac]

Exactly.  People need to recognize the power that a group of like-minded individuals have.  Just don't play the person, and when asked it's flat out "Sorry, but I don't have fun playing against you".  Explain why, if they ask for a better reason (e.g. "You always play super competitive min/maxed lists" or "You chain summon pink horrors all the time").  They'll either change, or stop playing there when they go to the game store every week and walk away with nothing to show for it.

The solution wasn't to just cave in and let matched play dominate, it was to reign in the abuse per-community.  So what if tournaments couldn't be run?  Warhammer has only tenuously given nods to the tournament crowd, even when GW had grand tournaments (and I remember those days, going back to 1996).  It was never a focal point for the game, and was usually kept in its own little corner without letting it take over everything else.  The old "Spirit of the Game" articles existed for precisely that reason.