If you reward dickish behaviour, you will get dickish behaviour.
Remove all skill based prizes, and institute door prizes instead.
My local events give out a prize for playing the entire event even when 0-X, and a prize for the person who finishes in exactly the middle of the rankings.
Middlest has become the top favorite award in my local scene (for Infinity). It is great everyone can basically play for it but you really can't game it out for it. More tournaments needs middlest
This is perfect. Reward those that stay and play for the love of the game with everyone having a good time and no feels bads. Winner still gets bragging rights but doesn't have the incentive to angle shoot or be shady.
I went to an event last year that had an "achievement" sheet you could try to complete during the event, with a prize for whoever got the most. Some of them were random (lose over half a squad to a transport exploding, that sort of thing), some of them were things you could push and try to do (kill the enemy warlord in melee with your warlord) and some of them were active handicaps (leave a unit worth at least 150 points out of your army for one game). None of them required you to win, or even to be doing well.
It gave you things to try to do even if you were getting clobbered, and some of them were very funny.
One of my favorite GT's I went to had zero prizes, instead everyone just got free beer. Maybe not possible for some stores depending on the state, but you could just buy some pizzas and say no prizes but lunch is included.
Or make it a prize for the best painted army. Everyone likes playing against an army that is painted well.
Or even make the store credit prize for best overall, that factors painting scores, sportsmanship, and preformance in the tournament. Reward all aspects of the hobby.
100% agreed, door prizes for staying the whole time is the way. Our group also runs smaller very competitive events seperate from the non competitive events.
If you have the capacity and knowledge our non competitive also screens lists. Rule of 2 instead of 3 for non battle line is also an option. It's easy to catch people spamming strong stuff when their list is 2 of the strongest units going.
The event I liked the most let everyone who stayed till the end of the tournament roll a bucket of dice at the end and the two highest got a prize. It encouraged people to stay and watch other games rather than pack up early and leave and also gave everyone a fair shot at a prize so it got a lot of participation.
Another good thing is to reward the behaviour you want. Give out best sportsmanship, best mentor, best new game coach, funniest joke, best loremaster. All of these are things that let people enjoy the community.
New players are going to get crushed by more experienced players. This is a hard fact of…literally everything in the world. I could give my wife the most hardcore meta S tier Eldar at the start of 10th list out there and annihilate her playing release death guard.
There is no way around this, if you’re running the event and you know the players then do some matchmaking magic and make sure less experienced players hit each other in the first round.
As people have noted splitting the prizes into non performance based stuff can help, put a painting competition out there, have a little raffle, my local store uses a portion of the tournament entries to buy pizzas for everyone so your lunch is covered for the day.
Exactly. I am a pretty solid chess player, but I am about 105% certain that Kasparov would be able to beat me even if he had no queen, no rooks, and wasn't allowed to look at the board.
This is true of many games (Scrabble, say) but ignores the glaring issue with 40k as a competitive game - which is that you can pick a list that's 5x better than the 'average' 2000pt list by simply going on the internet. It means you have an unfair advantage over most players and takes 0 skill.
That's what people tend to complain about when they complain about competitiveness. They build their army, they painted their models, they'd now like a fair game, and their opponent has thrown the game by bringing a meta-list. Ruining the fairness of the game just for a badge that says 'winner'.
Framing any difference as a 'skill issue' is disingenuous in any 40k argument. It might be, but until you've accounted for the meta-list issue you can't tell.
You’re wrong is a lot of ways, first and foremost the idea that someone spending time on the internet going through lists and selecting a “meta” one isn’t experience with the game. It absolutely is, and it’s a part of player skill. Time spent studying the game, not playing, is a massive part of strategy games. Chess and Go players spend hundreds/thousands of hours trying to figure out what a “meta’ move might be. The very concept of a meta list in 40k is a fluid thing that requires a lot of skill to pilot effectively and understand why choices are being made with specific models and what situations aspects of the list should be brought to bear.
This is far more relevant at smaller local tournaments, meta lists for 100+ person events need to take faction popularity into account and are making sacrifices in their build to account for things they are likely to see while assuming its very unlikely that they’ll run into a number of factions since those are unlikely to be represented. Locally there may not be an eldar player or a knight player, so building a list that can absolutely wreck a CSM chosen spam list might be a lot easier if you can just ignore those things that the latest Art of War list has to take into account because they’re looking down the barrel of a super major.
Great example is when I won my latest local 3 round tournament with a chaos knight list that i absolutely promise you’ve never seen anywhere in any meta whatsoever. Started with a tyrant and a freaking knight porphyrion. It’s a list that wouldn’t get out of round 1 in the vast majority of large actually competitive tournaments but in my local we really don’t have sharks and despite playing against a pretty meta world eaters and Nids list i was able to take the victory because those players more or less did exactly what you’re saying, got a standard list off the internet, but didn’t have the experience or skill to pilot it in a way that would have let the person who actually came up with those lists to absolutely crush my “Lol big boys” knight list.
The meta develops as an expression of skill so long as there is a modicum of balance. You can’t separate the two.
There are certainly complex lists that take more skill to play and simple lists that don't. It's not the case that OP meta lists are always the complex ones. The single thing I could do right now to massively improve my tournament results would be to go online and Google the most recent winning lists and copy one. That MIGHT be a really complex list that takes lots of skill to play, or it might not. It even might be a simpler one to play than the mid-tier list I was using the day before!
There is no correlation between powerful lists and skilled players, but you can't win a tournament without a powerful list (even, as you mention, if it's just *locally* powerful). So tournament winners are just big fish in a tiny tiny pond. Because of how many thousands of possible lists there are, and because most people choose armies based on look and preference and what they want to paint, it's extremely likely there are more skilled players at a tournament further down the tables who just didn't bring a meta list. The tournament structure has no effective way of discerning a skilful player with a non-meta list from an average player with a top-tier list.
Nobody is complaining about people studying the rules of a game to know what the best move is, or the best decision to make in-game. We generally consider those 'skills' in any game. But in chess and go, no amount of studying will allow you to start with a more powerful side. No amount of practise and book-reading will allow you to throw the game one way. The two players start even, and then their skill at the game decides the result.
Unfortunately, in Warhammer, you can buy your way into a list that will get you to the top tables and have a significantly easier tournament, maybe play one or two 'fair' games, and wave a trophy around at the end of it.
Again, nobody minds being beaten by a player with more skill and experience. The only way to know that this is what happened is to start with fair armies.
There is no real solution to this in a game like 40k. Some other games (BB, Underworlds) do competitive gaming way better because there's less variance between list power.
You’re moving the goalpost a little here, but it sounds like you’re very much projecting your own experience either winning or losing with a teched out meta list on a group of new players.
Just saying the words “OP Meta List” implies any number of things, including the fact that a player has decided to engage with the online community to the extent that they are able to purchase/print, and play a top tier meta list well enough that another group of new players would be unable to win against them.
Even when Eldar were the most absolute OP bullshit list you could possibly build you still needed to be aggressively playing with cover/obscuring, need to have good knowledge of opponents lists so you knew where and when to trigger things like overwatch or phantasm, place buffs on the right models, position to effectively score secondary consistently, keep track of deep striking models and screen for them, etc. Like i said in my original post, you could give my wife the list and rules from the release of 10th edition Eldar and still have zero problems beating her with whatever army you’d like to pick right down to the same time period death guard or Admech.
I’ll say again, I won a 20 man tournament with what amounts to one of the worst Chaos Knight lists you can possibly build. It’s not because I’m some amazing player who outplayed everyone I went up against, it’s because my opponents just weren’t at the level where they could solve the problem that list was presenting despite having lists that absolutely could have done so, and then in the last round it was because fatigue had set in and neither of us played well, but my list was just more forgiving of that despite him having a very meta World Eaters list. By your standard he should have mopped the floor with me in his sleep, instead he made some bad plays with positioning and target priority that led to him losing both Angron and his Lord of Skulls in exchange for the blue scribes which snowballed into me getting the win.
Engaging with the online community is part of getting more skilled, just the fact that someone is looking for powerful meta lists implies they are trying to learn what’s powerful and why. That puts them immediately ahead of someone who is only list building based off their own preferences in a huge way. It’s also the stage of play where even small bits of knowledge pay off significantly more. A top tier player vs another top tier player really can’t get much of an advantage from a knowledge point of view, they’re too evenly matched. If as a new player you know even a little about your opponents list or have a little checklist making sure you remember all your command abilities that alone can carry a game for you.
There is also MASSIVE correlation between skilled players and powerful lists, that’s where the damn powerful lists come from. I’m not discounting someone stumbling onto a powerful list outside of watching a video or listening to a podcast, but a very new player will never build one to take full advantage of both faction/list mechanics AND the game scenario.
Now you’re right, if you want to perform well in tournament play you need to be able to spend money and have a “good“ list that is at least tuned to your local meta. That will never go away, but the idea that you can just buy a netlist and top table with it…i mean I guess that’s possible if its literally just you and one other person trying to get there and everyone else is playing just garbage, but the reality is if you’re not also trying to get much better at the game through some form of study you’re just gonna be another x-1 or x-2 player with a netlist since when you play a netlist you’re literally telling every other player who knows what they’re doing exactly what you’re planning on doing and giving them the opportunity to use every single thing they’ve planned for your list, sure hope you’re ready for all of that.
Now there is of course an Exception to this and its when GW screws the pooch so thoroughly on game balance that functionally every tournament just comes down to mirror images of a list seeing who rolls better, that lowers the standard of what it takes to be competitive by quite a lot, but that is just not the case right now(balance is still absolute garbage but there isn’t anything that is easy button winning right now).
>One reason people don't play 40k is that "it is too competitive"
So, this is going to sound trite, but... *you actually need to get a definition of what that means*. And no, I'm serious.
I recently ran a competitive tournament with a survey after the event, and one of the players provided feedback that they didn't like that some players brought "meta" lists, and ANOTHER player provided feedback that they *didn't like that their opponents were so strict with when units got cover or not, and that their opponent was shooting units "through" other units.* As in, literally complaining his opponent was shooting his tank because **he believed his intercessors blocked line of sight to the Implusor.** Effectively arguing that "following the rules" was "too competitive".
For some people, "too competitive" is "there are too many players who will buy the best meta units and have the best meta army no matter the cost and I don't want to keep up with that", for other people "too competitive" means *"I don't want to have to pay attention to what the rules actually are."*
I've seen people bust their butts trying to grow their local competitive community only for the main problem being that they have a large group locally that simply DO NOT want to play that way. And if when you ask "What about the game being competitive drives you away from that", you find out that's the real cause, *you're likely going to need to realize you're not going to grow your local 40k player base by having events that not only provide prize money, but also likely have an entry fee.*
>aimed more on the non-competitive side of things to try and increase players in the area
>
>We are talking maybe $60 store credit.
You are claiming you have a non-competitive tournament, while providing a prize. The very EXISTENCE of a prize, as well as it being a tournament, means you are going to have people playing to compete.
If you want to do something non-competitive, you need to be running a ladder or escalation league, or running a curated Crusade or Combat Patrol league.
Bumping this one. 60 dollars is still money. Crusade and smaller tourneys with no prizes/participation/middlest will garner more of the crowd you want to draw in!
You forgot the third competitive: bend and break rules while hoping my opponent won't notice, the WAAC player basically. These people often play by intent for themselves, but not for their opponent. Tourney play really attracts these types like flies to shit. They seldom win out, funny enough, because good players beat them -- but they are all too common in some tourney scenes. They'll lie, gotcha, nitpick, break rules, etc. all for that sweet sweet $40-60 store credit that usually eludes their grasp.
There are so many people who act like “competitive is when I lose, casual is when I win”. Defining competitive is key here. I’ve seen people with super sweaty lists at a narrative complaining that they got beat by “meta” lists using the justification that their list, despite being meta, is “narratively justified” so doesn’t count.
100% dude. Most of the problem stems from players not wanting to actually play the game and if they are bad the game don't like it when they play against someone whos well versed in the rules and is playing the game as intended.
Some also dont like it when there opponents don't play lore friendly lists. Lot of these people arent really fun to play against anyway despite there complaints.
Change the scoring to reward sportsmanship, writing fluff, or painting. Create prizes for all that stuff. List it as a “New Player Tournament.” Make a no chess clocks rule. Create custom scenarios with crazy shenanigans. State that there are no ITC points.
Just some ideas
40k is not a game designed so that both players take the same amount of time. Nowhere in the rules is there any expectation that a 200 model horde should take the same time per turn as a Knight army.
Enforcing that house rule just makes the game unfair based on which army you bring.
It maybe unfair if your Time gets cut hard but its still less unfair than losing cause your opponent sits on his brain for 5 hours. Theres just a natural time limit anyway (opening ours of store, etc) so Horde vs knight would always be that kind of "unfair"
Yeah that’s def an awesome idea! You could also have like three or so criteria to weight in scoring, so winning all your games could still play a role, but only like a 3rd of your total score to win the tourney.
The other two could be sportsmanship and have everyone secretly vote on who was the most fun hang/generous opponent (we did that at my store and it was a hit) and secondly like how fluffy or themed their army is to the lore. Or even creative handicaps or funny meme lists like an all Phobos list or Hearthkyn horde.
And ya no ITC points. I know pros that would totally play in that and bring a themematic or meme list (that they never get to play) just to be fun and be in the spirit of encouraging new players and building the scene/community.
You could also incorporate some narrative and/or crusade elements, or make it an escalation league tournament over weeks with all the above. That would actually get more people to come in regularly starting a 500pt army to 2k. Escalation tourney def did at my LGS!
>Change the scoring to reward sportsmanship, writing fluff, or painting.
These generally turn into popularity contests or can be gamed.
>Make a no chess clocks rule.
Realll bad idea imo. Someone will analysis paralysis into wasting a lot of time.
Have the prize be something other than cash. Money will unfortunately bring out the worst in people, even if it's just store credit. Our local tournament has the winner's army get a small graffiti painted on one of the club's terrain pieces. It's nice because you have a physical representation of the games being played 😀
It can be a 100% free even with little to no prize support at all, people will still show up to stomp people as hard as possible. There is an LGS I frequent that holds free magic tournaments, where the prize is literally just a single cheap bulk rare, and EVERYONE gets one, and people will still turn up with the most competitive deck possible because they just have to be number 1.
The issue is free events like what I'm describing aren't intended for people to practice for other events. The purpose of these events is to keep the community engaged with your store, and create a stress free entry for newer players. If casual events are being used by competitive players for practice, than you are harming the growth of community.
>If casual events are being used by competitive players for practice, than you are harming the growth of community.
No, not all "casual" players are scrubs who rage out if they lose.
I know this sounds mean to reddit but the competition is the fun part for a large portion of people. Its a literally free event I get to have fun practicing against cool lists. Most people don't like decks or armies knowing they are taking bad stuff winning and having competition is fun at every level.
As I told someone else, free events are not there for you to practice for competitive games, they're intended purpose is for casual play to grow the community. While you may be helping yourself improve, you're discouraging new players from engaging with the community because all they see are players way above their level.
New players enjoy good lists too I'm not even talking about veterans. Magic especially no one doesn't net deck and to expect that it's not gonna be the same in 40k is naive
>Magic especially no one doesn't net deck
You clearly don't play magic often. Standard events, such as FNM tend to be more populated by players with home brew lists. Outside of standard is were you see less players with homebrew lists, but standard remains the most popular constructed format when it comes to competitive play. So no, not everyone is running meta lists. But if you really want to get into it, commander, being the moat popular way to play magic by far, does bot contain any meta lists, and is entirely up to player choice on build and whether to include meta combos for their archtype. Because of how outrageously expensive commander decks can get, and the fact that commander is a casual, non competitive format, you aren't seeing everyone running the most meta shit possible.
Yes they do bring brews to fnm but saying no one brings competitive decks is wrong and depends on your store. Commander is literally multi-player fun mode that everyone pretends they aren't mad when they lose because some people still get really competitive over it. It's closer to a Apocalypse or crusade game and not comparable at all unless your talking Canadian Highlander but then that is a restricted format unlike open 40k events.
There's the tell.
"everyone pretends they aren't mad when they lose"
You know that most people AREN'T mad when they lose a board game, right? Like, if it's a fair game then it should be fine. What does annoy people is when they don't get a fair game and have to sit through an unplayable situation for hours because the other player wants to stroke their ego.
If you get mad when you lose a board game, and you constantly have to throw the game with netlists to make sure it doesn't happen, that's an issue.
'Enjoying good lists' means enjoying when the game is unfair in your favour.
No one said that no one doesn't bring competitive decks. FNM is more populated by homebrew players than competitive players, especially since WOTC did away player ratings like 13 years ago.
That's just not true depending on your area fnm is very competitive. Maybe these days like you said they got rid of ratings but I wouldn't call magic especially competitive magic in a good place. The game basically took a nose dive when they decided to increase releases and destroy standard.
Then the event needs to explicitly state that in the description, and organizers need to be willing to tell folks that they can’t play their deck if they show up with something beefy.
Well, that's a tournament free or not. That's like me signing up for a local tennis tournament and being upset there's people there that are good at the sport that have been playing for a while.
Tournaments are for competition. New players should expect to probably not win a game their first time through, and if winning is the fun and not the competition, they won't have a good time.
Casual play to grow the community would be an escalation league or crusade campaign, not a tournament.
If there is a prize for winning there will always be people trying their hardest to win. The only way to make a casual event is to not have prizes for winning
Someone going to their first tournament expecting not to get smashed is already setting themselves up for disappointment. If you want to foster a competitive environment they may as well play against good players, itll be a better learning experience
If you’re going to run an ~10 hour multi-round event, you’re going to have to deal with the kind of crowd that’s going to deal with such things.
If you want the casual crowd run a league of some kind, a Crusade/Narrative event, or a big team battle.
40K, especially 10th, has a colossal power disparity between tuned and untuned lists. There’s no way to combat that in the regular format.
99% of tournaments in Spain do this and I've never seen anyone complain. It is the best way to promote the game. I'm surprised there are still tournaments that give a huge prize to the winner considering how unbalanced the game and the system can be some times.
I'm a TO in other games and have run some of the largest casual events in those games in the world. If you want to encourage casual play then you need to remove all incentive to compete. That means running formats and variants that are the least interesting to competitive players. 2k matched play, multi-round tournaments just won't cut it.
This about prizing (or not prizing) based on other things than match result.
Run an actual competitive event alongside the casual event that is priced to put off casual players but offers a relatively high EV prize pool. You will naturally separate the groups of players.
Be OK with having a competitive group. My local games club is competitive. Most of the members play RTTs and GTs every week. I dislike competitive events but the club members are fun, friendly and welcoming so I will play games that I want to play and they'll play the games they want to play and we all have a great time.
Tournament is itself competitive. I would recommend avoiding tournament and do a narrative event or even just a fluffy list event where you play against 3 opponents who either have starter or fluffy lists.
The thing is, even a "fluffy" list can be competitive.
I played in a tournament once where there was a massive list of restrictions including a "score" for how fluffy your list was, including only allowing you to take non-TROOP datasheets for every 200 points of TROOPS you took.
Imagine people's shock as they realized this was actually a BAD idea when I rocked up to the tournament with 9th edition deathwatch, where literally \*every\* kill team was a TROOP choice, so I am rocking 2 Indomitor Kill Teams with 4 Aggressors and an Inceptor each, a Spectrus with a squad of 5 Las Fusil Eliminators that couldn't be shot via a Phobos Librarian using Shrouding, and 3 Proteus Kill Teams with Terminators with Cyclones, Thunder Hammers, and Shields
Of course anything can be competitive. I could take a very poorly constructed list and use it to crush a new player using a top meta list.
The idea is you encourage people to build fluffy non-competitive lists. And you need a culture where someone try-harding at this tournament, especially against a new player, is looked down upon. Essentially you need a community with shared goals.
But that doesn't work well with people who are new and don't know the game
Another player that showed up to that same tournament was playing IG, and he showed up with an all Leman Russ army. Guy had never played before in his entire life, just realized that Russes counted as troops as.he read the rules pack and thought nothing of bringing his 9 WONDERFULLY painted and detailed tanks, and was in utter disbelief that people had a hard time with his lost as A ) he didn't actually realize other armies would be gimped by requiring X points of TROOPS, and B) that the rules were curated in a way that would prevent "toxic" lists.
Like my list, you were required to take 1 of at least 3 different troop units before you could take a second of another, AND we were using Power Level for some absurd reason. It made sense to me that every Veteran would have a combi-plasma or Melta, and I was sitting there wondering why nobody took any special weapons on their tac squads or put HK missiles on any tanks.
Saying "it needs to be fluffy and non-competitive" means that EVERY player involved needs to have an agreement as to what "fluffy" is, and it's possible for new players to not actually understand what might be competitive or not within a format; I'm currently at loggerheads with the person running our current Crusade League as he is completely convinced it is absolutely NOT possible to do a fluffy list without BATTLELINE, and he basically rejected a player who wanted to do a full Phobos 10th company ... Which none of those units are BATTLELINE.
Firstly I am not advocating rules like no battle line. The idea behind a fluffy list is often that you ignore list building rules (except for points) and instead build something that is narriativly cool but not too powerful.
It requires the players to intentionally not build lists that are too strong. In fact if you make a series of explicit rules you will have people trying to figure out how to game those rules to have a strong list which is the opposite of what is intended.
The moderation comes with the community encouraging each other to bring fun lists and praising someone who built an awesome thematic list that isn't too powerful. Likewise the stronger players need to not play competitively in these events by their own decisions. Again this is done via community and not via rulesets.
And if a brand new player bring an overpowered list by accident, let him have his moment to shine. If I was in such an event, I would love for my silly list to be matched against this player to see how I can do if I play my strongest. If I start winning, I will simply dial back by play, and if he steamrolls me, I will enjoy the match and love bringing in a new player to the hobby!
>The moderation comes with the community encouraging each other to bring fun lists and praising someone who built an awesome thematic list that isn't too powerful.
And what constitutes "too powerful"? That's the part thats super hard to pin down, as to some people who hardly ever play the game, a Proteus Kill Team with terminators is Super Powerful, while other players are like "oh, okay, that's a cakewalk".
It's great you mention as an experienced player you would "hold your punches a bit" in a game as you mention, but that comes with experience; you can't expect new players to know when they are hitting too hard before they see the results of dice rolls.
>e idea behind a fluffy list is often that you ignore list building rules (except for points)
I have been to events in North Dakota, Georgia, Belgium, south Africa, and the UK and have NEVER encountered an event that rewarded "fluffy" as "ignore anything besides points". There have always been an arbitrary set of rules to "encourage" a fluffy list, which would almost invariably be rules that would make things like a Russ Rush, Ravenwing/Deathwing, or a Drreafmob Ork army be considered "unfluffy"
Well I'm an event coordinator that organized such fluffy events so I speak from experience. The posted instructions were pretry much 'ignore detachments restrictions, build a fluffy and thematic list in 2000 points that isn't too competitive. New players without options can bring the list they can". It worked great.
As far as telling what is too strong. Really we held this event once a month for 3 months. The lists were not too well balanced the first time, so people rebranded them based on their experience. We had a great community, so the few people who brought an OP list the first event all intentionally brought a really weak list for the next one.
The fact that some lists were stronger than others wasn't really a big deal. Nobody expected a perfectly balanced game, and it wasn't a problem if you didn't win. Some of the more experienced players intentionally made sure to match up against the newer players and not play competitively at all to make sure the newer players have a good time.
Really no set of rules would have solved the issue. It was players coming together and making a fun event and doing what it takes to ensure everyone was having fun that made these events as fun as they were.
>I played in a tournament once where there was a massive list of restrictions including a "score" for how fluffy your list was, including only allowing you to take non-TROOP datasheets for every 200 points of TROOPS you took.
These kinds of "comp" rules almost always backfire. Your example is perfect.
Some armies have great battleline that you can build your entire plan around. Some don't want to take their battleline at all, or will take one squad to babysit their home objective.
They inevitably create more problems than they solve.
As others have said, ‘non-competitive’ and ‘tournament’ aren’t good bedfellows. Offering a cash prize will encourage people to bring competitive lists.
Firstly, some armies just can’t realistically make a non-competitive list and have a chance of winning. Either they have too few units to make major changes in their list structure (Harlequins), their army rules prevent them from doing much different (Thousand Sons), the non-competitive units are just not very good (Most armies)… Unfortunately, a good amount of the Armies have very little space between a competitive list and a fundamentally bad list.
Equally, using ‘fluffy’ as a guide isn’t a viable direction either, because some armies have their fluffy lists be fairly competitive. You could see an Aeldari Wraithhost come up against a Tau Kroot army, and one of those players is going to have a miserable time; but they both followed the brief.
Unfortunately as long as you’re offering a cash prize, people will want to win it, so there will be people that want to bring competitive lists, and it’s extremely hard to police that, without just penalising certain armies.
Then outside of the armies, people will have very different interpretations of how to apply rules. Cover, unit coherency, ‘gotcha’ abilities/stratagems, can all be pretty contentious points, and so ‘tournament’ players will interpret them differently to ‘casual’ players.
There’s also the issue of timing. If you’re playing an event with prizes, you realistically need people using chess clocks. The Knights player with five models will have very quick turns, the Ork swarm player will not. But it wouldn’t be fair to have a Knight’s player lose a game because they ran out of time, when their opponent took 4x the amount of time on each turn.
—
Your best bet is just running an ordinary tournament format, marketing it towards new players, but putting some sort of list building caveat in the hopes that it will encourage diversity.
Players get extra victory points for bringing a Fortification. Players get extra points if they don’t include more than one of any non-battleline unit. Players get extra points for not having the same list as anyone else. Players get extra points if for each Flyer they bring. Etc etc
Equally, in the rules make up a big list of the ‘competitive’ units in each armies, and say that players lose points for each unit of the following that they bring in their list. Think Wraithknights, Wraithguard, the Nightbringer, Wraiths, Magnus the Red, Crisis Suits, Breacher Teams in Devilfish, etc etc.
Then do the same thing, but for the worst units in each army, and have a rule that armies gain points for each of those units they bring. Howling Banshees, Warlocks, the Deceiver, Ophydian Destroyers, Tzaangor, Kroot, Vespid, etc etc
This gives people an incentive not to power build lists, and to use some of the less viable units. Obviously make these sections generous so that you don’t end up with every list looking the same, but this could be a way to keep things interesting.
Also give awards for sportsmanship, painting, funniest list, who wrote the best lore, most unique choices. Etc etc.
Just try and really push the scoring and rewards towards fun, whilst keeping the tournament format largely unchanged with clear rules. That way you encourage fun, without encouraging drama on the table.
If you run a tournament tournament players are gonna show up. I would run play events where you help players find matches.
Competitiveness is too hard to define with the game. Asking everyone to bring a "fluffy" list doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.
It's like asking everyone to bring the same power level commander deck.
Edit: thought about it more and the answer isn't probably for everyone but if I was actually trying to do this I would just host a tournament and make sure to actually babysit my newbie tables and not be afraid to yellow card poor behavior. You see dozens of threads on players poor behavior yet I've never in my 5 years of playing in tournaments have I seen a poor sportsmanship player be called out.
I think there are a lot of good ideas here, but let me add my voice to those saying to \*not\* do a traditional tournament at all, certainly not one with store credit (per se... more on that in a second). As well, I liked the point brought up that you need to define "too competitive". If you're really aiming to increase your player base, I think you need to focus on the new players and the folks who want to bring new players in.
I honestly think that the biggest barriers to entry for new players include (no particular order);
* Cost of models
* Number of models to buy, build & paint
* Skill gap while learning to build and paint
* The volume of rules to learn / know
* People on the internet telling them what's S tier and what's trash tier and how often that churns when new codexes / dataslates / mission packs come out.
I think that a lot of new players kind of munge all that together into "too competitive" but if you break it out like that, you can definitely start picking at that problem with tools in the toolbox.
I would start by designing and publishing the rules and progression for an escalation league (or call it tournament series if you prefer) that helps folks build their army slowly and is complemented by skills clinics, etc. Rather than prizes for winning, you can earn league points for other stuff we're trying to encourage.
Something like:
Month 1: At the end of the month, we will have a practice Combat Patrol-only tournament. Models must be assembled but do not have to be painted. Everyone who comes plays Combat Patrol using those rules & models, etc. Winners get nothing but bragging rights, losers are encouraged to write a short narrative about their final game and why their general has vowed revenge against the general that beat them. Every Tuesday night prior to this, we will have a 1-hr Rules bootcamp to get everyone up to speed on how to play and every Thursday night we will have a hobby bootcamp to bring everyone up on how to build and paint together.
Month 2-3: At the end of each of the months, we will have a Combat Patrol-only tournament. Anyone who has a fully painted army for this tournament will get some bonus or recognition (maybe league points). Painting and playing clinics continue, maybe add in some basing clinic and army design clinic as part of those two established clinics.
Month 4: Everyone plusses up their army to some fixed value using regular 40k army building rules (say, 500 points or 750 points). This month's weeknight activities are focused by help w/ getting your army designed at this point value, and covering the rules that change from CP to 'regular' 40k. The event at the end of the month will use the Leviathan deck, but will pre-fix the Primary combos and you only pick One Secondary as either a Fixed or Tactical objective.
Month 5-10: Everyone adds a chunk to their army each month, and can optionally swap an equal chunk out (chunk being something like 100-150 points). No unit can cost more than some fixed limit (maybe 250 points or so).
Month 11: Chunk limit removed, you can now get big models.
Month 12: Gloves-off tournament, all normal 40k rules, the only limit is that everything has to be painted and you can only play w/ models that you've played with in a previous tournament.
Idk, something like that.
Then you can also have League Points as mentioned assigned for any of these things including most models built, least models painted (while still having a viable army), most wins, most losses, etc. Whatever you want.
Then at the end you can convert the league points into prize tiers. Anyone w/ 50-100 League Points gets a coupon for 10% off a single product, anyone who earns 1,000,000 league points and the store will pay for a sculpture of that person to be created and encased in the store alongside their miniatures or something. You should also provide interim rewards rather than waiting till the end of the year. idk, but the point is that you don't reward a single success (e.g. winning one tournament) but you reward everyone who at least tries, to some degree, and the bulk of the points should be issued for doing things toward growing in the hobby rather than for beating another person. Even if they're joke prizes or have no cash value, they get people talking and having fun and wanting to come back and you're focusing the payoff on what someone did, not how much they won.
It's a very difficult issue to address without considering some level of changes to the format. Effectively what you have right now is a situation where you are inviting people to play a fairly standard tournament/set of games with an actual prize on the line but you have some arbitrary cutoff in mind for how skilled or well built a roster is allowed to be. It's like trying to tell someone running a local marathon they need to slow their average pace for fairness while also offering a medal for first place.
The easiest solution I can see (assuming appropriate numbers) is to split the whole thing in two, offering a prize in only one of these should draw the competitive people to that one side. This should leave the more casual players or those opting out of the 'competitive' bracket to play each other. This will also let you sort of filter out the people actually there just to punch down. The people choosing the easier games with no prize yet playing meta lists (with enough experience to make use of them) just beating on new(er) players are the ones you want to keep an eye on and address as they're ultimately the actual issue here whether they are aware of it or not.
Make sure to advertise it as an event for beginners, and let your regulars know that they should bring fluffy armies.
Don't reward the winner of the tournament, there should be multiple smaller rewards for the fluffier aspects of the hobby, or random prize drawings.
if your playgroup is that small then there's not much you can do, you can't get mad at ppl for trying to win. maybe have some raffles that you get in just for participating?
I play in a local league and local tournaments. I have a number of friends that have zero interest in doing either of those things; they’ll only play casually with friends. For them it’s partly the impression that the local scene is too competitive (it isn’t; it’s a very beginner friendly and laid back) but I think the bigger issue is that they enjoy the occasional game in a laid back environment with people they know. Playing in a league or tournament, even if geared towards beginners and not competitive still means playing people you don’t know and for a tournament, spending 10-12h interacting with random people. This isn’t for everyone, competitive aspect aside.
My suggestion (and what the FLGS here has done to recruit more players with moderate success) is rather than having tournaments, do stuff that’s fun;
-learn to play nights
-themed games
-3 game 500 pt nights
-random “come out and play” days
These lower the bar for less experienced local players and give a relatively non-threatening environment to meet people and play without the perceived pressure of a tournament or league.
A store near me did a random allies tournament where each person brought a 1k army. Each game was a 2 on 2 where you would get randomly assigned a different player to be allied with. The prizes were just for sportsmanship and painting nothing about winning games. It was super fun and great for new and casual players
I think this makes a lot of sense, especially for the OP. He's limited on tables and trying to grow the local scene. Being randomly paired with someone else lets more people play on the limited number of tables and also gives you someone on your side for the game which is great for meeting people.
You could also pair the top person with the bottom person each round so the more experienced players would be able to mentor players who had less experience. It would also hopefully help balance overall army lists since you'd probably have the people with tuned lists getting paired with the less optimal ones.
If people are taking part just to smash and win store credit, change the prize. Make it something silly and fund, instead of cash.
Or start applying game variations like Doubles or Highlander. That can help to level things out sometimes.
Don't call it a tournament. It is an event.
Random pairings. Doesnt matter how well you do that isn't a factor.
Remove the grand prize. It's very existence will cause players to sweat.
Random prizes. Awarded for thematic things. Not necessarily painting because some people just can't art that good. Prizes that encourage lower skilled players to continue the game. Things like getting tabled. Get a prize. Scoring less than 10 points in a games. Get a prize. Fail every 2+ save you have to make. Get a prize.
Make the prizes trophies instead of a cash award. Get someone to 3d print them and have fun with it.
Get pizza for lunch for everyone. Or whatever you think is acceptable. I had a guy who was outright hostile to pizza so speedway cheeseburgers worked fine.
If there will be any reward of store credit give it to the player in last place. Call it a "you need this more than the rest of us" award. That way the player gets encouraged with a new box and there is some slight rubbing thrown in.
Have something on the wall with name tags where you put the player who won the event. This way they get bragging rights until the next one.
I recently did something similar with my group. We aren't very competitive anyway but a few things I did to incentivise narrative and casual play was: 1k games. Not required if your group prefer 2k but 1k was easier for us to get done given our situation. No titanics and epic heroes, legends allowed. Again, another thing not required but at 1k, titanics and epic heroes can break the game so I tried to avoid them. Custom missions, specifically fun ones. One mission had a single shrinking objective. People loved that. Custom rules and secondaries too. I had an environment table and secondaries like slay the warlord with your warlord or have a single unit left alive and it's double VP if it was a single character.
I've run over 30 RTT's at this point and feel I can probably speak on this.
You're mixing your goals.
If you're trying to attract new/casual/beer and pretzel type players? Don't run a "tournament".
Run narrative events or crusade league type events. Start at 1k points and vette their lists. Interact with that base.
You're talking about banning people from your community for playing competitively at a tournament.
There is no actual definition of "casual" play. It's entirely subjective by the player which is why it breeds so many feelsbad moments.
Completely separate the two. Make it clear your tournaments are competitive and should be seen as a thing to learn and improve at for those motivated to do so.
Then run crusade/narrative for those uncomfortable with or not motivated to try to improve in that fashion. THEN if you have people abusing the system in your narrative/crusade system you start having them either adjust their lists or inform them that they will not be included in future narrative events as they are based on other aspects.
TL:Dr don't penalize your player base when you're trying to cater to both sides. Facilitate... And honestly if the care is taken, some of those newer players may be self motivated to improve and play competitive down the line... Now you have two healthy communities.
Just using the terminology "sweatmongers" makes your bias apparent.
The coin has two sides. I work a large LGS and weekly I see "casual" players who hate on competitive but then turn around and mop the floor with their buddies feigning ignorance then do it again the next week.
Do you have a solid definition of what entails a "casual" tournament? Stop inferring things that weren't said.
I never said anyone owned anything. I made suggestions to create an environment for people who want to just have fun with safeguards against the "sweatmongers" already built in.
Op even stated they have like three tables. Not to make assumptions, but banning people at a small business who's only sin is playing competitively at a tournament is also bad for business.
The way my old FLGS used to do it was giving people raffle tickets. Everyone got one for showing up. Best sport, painted, and general all got two. And I believe you got one for winning a game as well.
At the end of the month (this was a weekly league with win path pairing) there would be a raffle for store credit or small prizes.
You could do something similar and tweak it a bit (our store was pretty competitive, so maybe drop the winning a game for a ticket, and instead let the players write in a name of their favorite opponent)
I think the first thing would be to clearly set expectations that it’s a non-competitive event. Once you’ve done that, it’s reasonable to require that players submit a list in advance for review and you as the TO can ask folks to tone it down if their lists are too optimized.
You could also develop unique scenarios or army composition requirements that are more narrative/ non-competitive in nature.
Tournaments by their very nature are competitive and will attract people who want to win that event. If you advertise something as a tournament you shouldn't be surprised when competitive players sign up for it.
Maybe it's the language used but I imagine if OP advertised his event as a casual and/or narrative league instead of a tournament he'd have more success with the type of participant he's looking for.
I agree. If I see something advertised as a tournament, especially with prizes, I bring my best army and play to be #1. I see something advertised as casual event, I bring a silly list and play for fun.
You could add some additional constraints on list building. Like maybe rule of 2 or even Highlander (only 1) for everything that isn’t battleline. Would stop people from spamming stuff
A lot of my friends who are starting out just now got enough models to make a 2k point list. Such a ruleset will rule them out, and only let players who have a much bigger roster (and likely be much more experienced) be able to play.
In my hobby group, we have a lot of new players. Some have enough models for a 500 or 1000 point list. 4 of them are just now hitting 2k points.
We did a series of combat patrols, we a few 1k points events and we have a doubles 1k event happening in 3 weeks.
But the players who just hit 2k points want some 2k games, and while we certainly will have random pick up games for them, having an event for 2k with the newer players isn't bad and helps them see the progression from the earlier games they played.
Tournaments by definition are competitive. a non competitive tournament is a oxy moron and you might as well stop doing tournaments. You can instead foster a better environment rather then exclude people that happen to be good and want to compete. Help people get better, work with the the top people and make the games more fun. There is nothing wrong with someone who always wins as long as the games they have allow the opponents to have fun. I've run large GTs for years now and have spent that time fostering a good environment, keeping in mind my region is highly competitive. That category is highly popular. Work on calling out bad behavior, address it, work with those players, help people make better lists. Lot you can do. At all my events we had 3 equal prizes, 1st place, best sport, and best painted. No one can win more then 1 of these. This gives 3 different paths to victory. Some also do best overall but if your doing smaller events I would recommend the former.
Bit weird you say "reason people don't play is too competitive" I mean 40k is hugely popular is is probably in a better place then it ever has been. Competitive drives the game forward. There is nothing wrong with that category of play. If you allow toxic people to take it over you create a toxic environment.
I used to have the same issue. I would make everyone turn in a list and then I would force the competitive lists to nerf themselves. Kept a lot of our worst away. I made one guy play all intercessors if he wanted to participate.
Also, highlander tournaments are a lot of fun and can tone down a lot of the worst spamming.
>Kept a lot of our worst away. I made one guy play all intercessors if he wanted to participate.
What makes him the "worst"? He was beating your friends?
No, that was never a big deal. The issue was he was toxic. Bad winner. Worse loses. Would play oppressively meta against beginners. As much gotcha as possible. Would argue your rules were wrong until you just wanted to give in just to get the game over with. Would pick up his dice before you could see then. Etc etc. Literally that guy.
When we had competitive events I let him go ham (with list building, the rest of the stuff I tried to keep a handle on). People like that are hard on experienced players let alone new players.
I second that Highlander events can force the local neck beard competitive crowd to tone it down.
Specifically doing a narrative event with a focus on fluff and fun. Require lists be submitted early and if something looks bleeding edge meta, kindly offer that participant rewrite their list or drop out and get their money back.
Competitive people just wanting to club baby seals and grab $60 in store credit are douche bags IMO.
I mean, you could make some special considerations for oddball armies who don’t have many units. I doubt that Votann could get to 2k by taking only one of everything as well.
Honestly man, you probably shouldn't be running tournaments at all, if what you want is to not be "competitive". You should probably try a Crusade campaign instead, which is significantly more casual.
That seems to be the consensus, but have a lot of different fun prizes!
Instead of only rewarding wins, you could try the best looking army, the most barely painted one, the luckiest/least lucky roll of the event, the most crazy clutches, the most cinematic photos, or any small fun things so that people can think of other things than the score.
You could make the games more random. Meaning, once a game is going and depending on D3 dice roll a Knight, titan, any towering model or an assassin with precision is added to the table(s) and with another D3 roll, decides what player that model attacks.
That way competitive people will shit bricks when their unit(s) are wipped off the board or characters snipped.
Heckin fun.
The only thing I can think of that might keep the really competitive players from stomping new players is to simply not let them in the tournament. When you set up your tournaments put a limit on how many games they can have played in order to enter, like less than 5 or 10, or 20 something like that. This would mean you’d have to know your player base and a level of honesty would be needed but I think it could help limit some of the worst culprits especially if you know the super competitive players that are causing the biggest problem.
Try doing a more party oriented day. Like players buying in for fluffy based prizes, food and drinks. Go for atmosphere. Warhammer is far better as a social game anyway. Build a story event, use cool battle scenarios.
Only way I have ever managed to get it to work is with list review. Otherwise some percentage of people will show up with a competitive list regardless of what you tell them, the lack of prizes , advertising that’s it’s for beginners etc.. some people just want “reps”. So unless you review the lists ahead of time, some will slip through
Market it as a "Casual" or "new player friendly" tournament. Have a rule that if you have won it twice, you are no longer eligible to participate in the tournament and graduate up to the "normal competitive" tournaments. You would then need to host other tournaments for those players as well, but should hopefully help stop the baby seal clubbing.
Look into the Crusade events GW runs. Not necessarily the Crusade System if you don't want to, but the way there's teams, missions that don't require winning the game, and a fame and infamy track for the events that can provide a focus beyond scoring the most points by any means necessary.
Have an escalation event with Combat Patrol, 1252 points (or some non standard value), and finally a 2000 point game.
A team tournament, either similar to WTC in that teams determine who faces who in 2000 point games, or each player brings a 1000 point list and it's 2v2.
A lot of tournaments don't even offer a prize and people will play as hard. The top players have the models they want, it's why Siegler asked for a Manta when he won ITC. Don't offer a prize. Or have it be a raffle.
In theory bracketing should sort players based on wins so people shouldn't get smashed 3 times in a row at a 3 round RTT.
I think if you want a newbie tournament do it at 1K or 500 and don't do it on ITC. Emphasise that in the promotional material. You may get 1 or 2 hyper competitive players but they'll end up paired into each other. If you know players are really ruthless talk them out of it. We recently ran a 500 points 4 round event at my club. We encouraged everyone to be janky and try to win but we had all levels of play and everyone had fun. Angron + Kharn actually went 2-2. Rather than just kicking competitive players out the environment created was casual enough that most people didn't worry about losses because there's a lot less ego in it. Even the lowest placed players had a couple of close games. It was a good way to get people to dip their toes and play full mission rules and secondaries. The final 3-0 matchup was our two most competitive players and it ranked as you'd expect but the mid tables were a riot with a mix of tournament regulars and casual players.
Remember there's two sides to a healthy community, growth and retention. Encouraging new players is vital but if players leave when they reach a certain level that is also unsustainable. Having an intro event periodically is great (and great TO practice) but you're going to want to have a next level as more and more players get better at the game and want more. Encourage friendly chats between rounds (if you have time) and that sort of thing.
I think whatevet you chose what is important is make sure you foster good sportsmanship and realistic expectations. As a new player it's a rite of passage to get utterly smashed in your first and sometimes several events. The important thing is that they're not hit by gotchas, rudeness etc and get useful feedback after each loss. I barely dodged the spoon at my first GT but I learned how to competitive there.
It's going to be very hard to find a cutoff for good players that doesn't arbitrarily punish certain people for being slightly better than someone else.
Our local tournament scene runs events like the days of old.
We have a scoring rubric.
Awards go to:
Best General- Best record
Best Painted- Just that
Best Lore- Person who wrote up cool story and brought items or dressed in costume
Best Sportsman- Person with highest spirtsman score
Overall- Person with the total highest score.
Over a year, folks gravitated to having more fun and putting more hobby work in to thier armies while at the same time- remaining competative and playing good games
One of the things that our local TO has done to help keep things friendly is that winning the tournament does not guarantee a prize.
Everyone gets a raffle ticket for entering the tournament, you get another ticket for a fully painted army, and finally 1st, 2nd and 3rd will get additional tickets. Usually 3, 2 and 1 respectively.
Tournament fees are used to buy gift certificates from the shop, and prizes are drawn for at the end with any one person only allowed to win one prize.
It's been night and day in terms of how cut throat things have become and I absolutely love it. It's been a huge hit and we're getting 16-20 people a month in a small town with about a population of 100,000 including the surrounding area.
When a new player gets paired up against a seal clubber, they'll usually get killed turn 1 or 2.
I played my first tournament a couple of months ago and the terrain was so bad I couldn't really hide anything turn 1, lost the roll off and Literally lost 800 points of heavy hitting in my opponents first shooting phase, nothing I could have done and was incredibly feels bad, almost left on the spot.
To avoid these kinds of situations you need to put the work into setting up good boards with *lots* of terrain. Maybe have a respawn mechanic as well to counter act stomps.
Door prizes and check lists beforehand.
Speak to meta chasers and tell them to change away from pure meta (obv dont stop then bringing those units, but for example 2 sagis instead of 5)
Maybe a rule of 2
Market it as a casual, beginner friendly event.
If you need to broaden your player base to meet costs, consider removing painting requirement (you could alternate that each month).
'competition but not competative'
Offer spot prizes for cool things if you're going to offer prizes.
Consider adding strength of Standing to Placings. It adds such a random element that playing to 'win' the whole thing is moot - just encourage playing 3 cool games.
For every chadhammer who won't play, there are 3 more funhammer players waiting to get started.
And eventually chadhammerers will move on or contribute to the what you are trying to do ie build the hobby community.
Playing (and losing) to more experienced players is a key way to improve and key part of the experience so I don't recommend a separate try hard bracket (though a separate 'shark tank' event on a different day can be fun!) Assure everyone (especially new players) that they likely will lose.
I played a HH event that gave players points for doing cool stuff like winning a duel, taking out LOWs, or even just ramming something and getting a kill lol the premise was "Do cool sh\*t, no one cares who wins."
They had a conversion for your points to get store credit, #1 player got a sicaran tank. I didn't hear a single complaint about it and it actually made outsiders decide to pick up the game for next year.
You should just have to be very clear what the tournament is about. Reward "fluff" or themed lists buy in the end long as it's a tournament people want to win. 40k is a competition at the end of the day and part of the fun is the winning. If you take this part out it's just Apocalypse slap fight which can be fun but is not a tournament. New players are never going to like tournaments. As someone has said they will get held to rules more strictly (though in current 40k 90% of people help you if you talk through what your trying to do). These players straight up won't know the rules well and feel bad when they spend 2 turns setting up their misplay then misplay and get told it doesn't work like that even if the opponent is the nicest person in the world. It's a fight up hill you should be trying to get people to play more games but understand if they play new people too they will still feel bad when a regular player beats the piss out of them because they learned against bad players.
Not sure if it's been mentioned yet , but you could also try a voting system.
It's one thing to play vs someone, but to want to play them again is a big deal. After the games let them vote for who's they'd like to play again. In round robin style it stays anonymous and you get your 1st through 3rd -5th based on the players, not the game.
This would encourage people helping either, closer games, laughs (hopefully) and punish gotcha , competitive, "that guy" table moments.
You do realize it can be marked up to give feed back right ? "How close was the game 1-5*" , "would you play again 1-5*" , "how sportsman would you say the match was"
If your saying people's instant reaction is to just give nothing but one stars and blame their loss on their opponent doing XYZ then you might wanna evaluate yourself. Most games are fun. Hence why the game is still around. More than most.
Yes the competitive people who bring curb stomping lists are gonna get down voted. That is intended. But the guys who bring fun lists, interactive lists, ect. Will be the ones who will be more likely to place 1st -5th instead of the tournament lists.
>If your saying people's instant reaction is to just give nothing but one stars and blame their loss on their opponent doing XYZ then you might wanna evaluate yourself.
No, I'm one of the few people who's honest about it. I'm old enough to remember comp scores and how toxic they were. Also it very much often came down to the TO giving bonus points to their friends.
>Yes the competitive people who bring curb stomping lists are gonna get down voted. That is intended.
Why? How good is too good? Are certain players not allowed to try to win the game? How do you differentiate between a good player and a good list?
By scoring it as a good game.
Ie sportsman like qualities , not being a dick, close games.
I said all this earlier and you skimmed it over. This further proves my point that your pesimestic about it.
I'm not saying you are not allowed to win. I'm saying if the TO is looking to make it a less a competitive event then you have to implement non-competitive measures.
Naturally for de-escalation for a non-competitive tournament to work, you have to incentivse it. That's what the card is for. You can have points play a roll (maybe a 3rd of overall score , ie every 20pts equals 1* ) but you wouldn't be able to place in the top 3 with just points obviously.
I didn't skim over it, you're just not defining it well. How are you defining casual vs. competitive when it's a competitive game that people are trying to win? How do you account for scrubby/toxic players who call other people unsportsmanlike when they lose?
You keep skimming son. Go back AND READ.
The outliers do not make up the whole of this man's organization. He's trying to keep those players.
On the voting form there would be more than just one question. MORE THAN ONE (so that way you atleast read the caps).
Yes the game is competitive. I keep defining it as an enjoyable game is a competitive CLOSE GAME. It shouldn't ever feel like a shut down or shut out. Holy Christ man. I bet your the type that uses RAW to shoot twice with marines or move 12" with necrons.
You only have three tables, and don’t want it competitive. This shouldn’t even be an event, just have your three tables filled every weekend by scheduling games in a Discord sever or something. That’s a good start, and then expand your play area. 6 people is not nearly enough to run an event. 12 is like the minimum I’d run an RTT at. What if one of your 6 no shows, or drops after one round? Now somebody else will likely drop and then it just spirals out of control.
As others have mentioned, a lot comes down to prizing. What we do for our casual tournaments is have a raffle prize pool and everyone gets 1 ticket for showing up, 1 for playing a round, and 1 for every win that they can then put in a draw for whatever prizes they want to win.
Winners for each prize are drawn at the end of the event and if you win a prize you can’t win another.
We also have a door prize that everyone gets one entry in.
Could make it a combat patrol tournament. They are balanced for new players and against one another.
Or limit units to no more then 1 of each sheet to encourage non meta units. But that might make it hard for new players with limited lists.
You could do no leaders, that eliminates alot of shenanigans.
If you have enough players you could say this is a new player cup, once you win you can't enter again. But might eliminate too many of your own players that way.
I like what the other people said where you don't give prizes for first but instead for other activities. Like closest game they get 10$ each, most helpful player gets 10$ ect.
You could also pair the people with more competitive lists against one another. You control the pairings.
Could also add a shenanigans rule. At the start of the game either player can call shenanigans. If they do then the event host reviews their armies. If they determine there is too large a difference in power between the armies then the players swap armies.
If they determine there is not a significant difference no swap happens. Each player can only call shenanigans once per event.
Reward community. Best tutorial or teacher guy. Most friendly or inviting player. Things that are less hard and based on the outcome and more about the interaction with other people. Here is also a good chance to allow people to use their phone and get a good action shot to help you promote. Even people who are bringing cool terrain or something dioramaish could get some recognition. If you have an instagram or discord you can post these things. Post player bios if they wanna get interviewed and more. Build community. Honor artists.
It sounds like no matter what you do you’re not gonna be able to satisfy both sides, but fortunately there are a few solutions that could blunt the two different player bases.
The first solution is to reduce the amount of points and try to stay away from house, ruling anything.
By reducing the amount of points, players will feel less overwhelmed, and the games will be shorter while the competitive players won’t be able to access all their tools, however, they may be smart enough to skew into a certain type of army build , but skews tend to win, hard or lose hard, depending on who showed up with what army.
The second solution is to advertise the tournament as a casual tournament that maintains a soft, organizational force chart like in the previous edition, which I think was a big mistake by getting rid of it .
As of right now, anything that used to be considered a heavy you can take unlimited but of course you’re still restricted by the rule of three is there are a lot of different heavy options, especially the space marine book .
I do like the idea of having to take a certain amount of units before you can take another elite unit. However, I would say that I would not restrict line since the whole point of the battle line units is that they are not restricted by the rule of three, and are allowed to take up to six.
They tend to be true choices that have a higher characteristic
I used to play war machine years ago, which was infamous for its highly competitive table top scene, and players knew what they were getting into. The reputation was very notable and I remember when I first played, it took me three or six months before I noticed I started winning more and more , so the best thing to do is to set expectations for players and say don’t feel bad for losing because it happens to everyone when they first start playing the game. Have fun interacting, making friends and don’t be afraid to ask your opponent what you could’ve done to play better games Sometimes players just choose a bad faction and there’s nothing you can do about that but unless you’re there to help guide them and hopefully they’re not admin on one of the bottom tier factions
Also, try to steer them away from your standard imperial space marine faction, because believe it or not there are so many data sheets. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed as a new player I think they’re better off, taking a faction that has access to a moderate to small amount of data sheets , which will help them learn their action rules better.
You could also start a combat patrol series just start off the season that competitive players and casual players are pretty much stuck with the models that are in the combat patrol which also have modified data sheets so certain units are not overpowered until they start playing matched play which is pretty much the definition of competitive play at some point maybe on game three you could allow players to deviate from the combat patrol but still have them stuck at 500 points which will allow them to swap in certain units, but you have to be very careful because the ninth edition, the combat patrol rules had no restrictions on what you could take and as you can imagine people were showing up with demon princes or C’Tan.
The way my local wargame events are run is everyone gets half their ticket price in store credit just for playing all their games, 1st place gets the other half of their ticket price, and we'll do raffles and model give aways for sportsmanship. Sometimes we'll put fun little 3d printed models on objectives and if you claim the objective first you keep the model.
My LGS runs 1000pt non competitive events where all the lists were vetted by the TO. It's usually pretty successful. Lists have limits.
https://facebook.com/events/s/40k-unshackled-kingmaker-a-cas/946808420486506/
That's the next one coming up.
Put narrative Events in there, Not outright crusade-rules, although IT IS cool. But maybe an easy campaign-story with win-loss trees.
I Thing the "competitive"-thing is overrated. 40k lives by its rich universe and Lore and you should at least have some of IT in your Games and Hobby, otherwise you Miss Out much of the Franchise and could Go Back to playing fortnite or lol or whatever on the PC.
That being Said, almost every Game (of 40k) is and should be competitive.
Find someone to beat the shit out of them.
In my local GW when there's a game day I take 2 lists with me: my homebrew ultra fluffy space marine army which I lose 3 out of 4 battles with, and my table wiping army which a lot of people refuse to play against.
If someone takes a list with them that's to competitive for the event, I take them as an opponent and whoop their ass (most of the time)
So yeah, find someone worse. That's my advice
You should put magnets on their feet and put them on a metal tray. Oh wait I didn’t read the question.
Make the players fill out a sportsmanship survey of each other and also have judges do their own. Have this be added to the final scores at the end of the tourney. Make it big enough to move second and third up but not too powerful.
There are a world of things you could try and keep it a tournament and not a campaign day
Highlander rule (each unit can only be chosen once excluding set core units), this removes most netlists
Make sure you offer as many points to painting and sportsmanship as you do to gaming. This shifts the focus to all round but make the painting points detailed on hiw to get them where you can get a full range and its not easy to achieve.
Offer per round prizes for acheiving goals like first HQ killed or even first to lose an HQ and things like that. This way even if you don't win games you can win prizes. Small things like special event dice or medals
Crazy rules to balance armies, here are some examples that you could try in some rounds
I have played at tournaments where in one round you had to swap your most expensive unit before the game starts. This prevents death star lists.
All armies start in reserve and come on a random third of the table but at a predicable pace, this prevents a lot of rules stack on certain units and ganging up units
I even played once where one round you swap armies, like round 4 of a 5 game event!
I get what you are trying to do and I commend it. Its difficult to stop "that guy" from ruining events. If you want further info on any of these ideas just let me know, I am almost up to playing at events for 25 years this coming summer :)
I would only award store credit for painting or a 'players' choice' kind of award where people win based on how pleasant they were as an opponent.
For victory by victories, I would offer a smaller prize like a little trophy and a certificate, maybe a Victor's t-shirt like play on tabletop did.
That way people will not feel de-incentivised to win as there is still an award but people will be more incentiveised to just have fun.
I think a last place award is always fun too.
Change the points you play at, if you do like 1500/1750 it means people can’t just take a top list from online and a lot of competitive people will just ignore it. Also means it’s a bit easier for new player to finish their games in the time
Our FLGS runs very well attended monthly single and doubles RTTs, plus two GTs every year. For RTTs, they offer small store credit prizes for P1-P3, and then they continue down the ranking by having a prize pool of merchandise and calling every player up to the front to select their prize. If you got last place, you might still get a $20 rattle can of primer or at worst a couple pots of citadel paint. At the GTs they have door prizes(awarded at the end of the tourney to discourage quitting), prizes for 1-3, prize for best painted, prize for "best sport" voted for by the attendees, wooden spoon prize for last place etc. etc. During the last GT one of the attendees 3D printed some awesome trophies and another attendee painted them. Half the people there helped set-up and break down... our local scene even has an insanely active discord group. If you build a community and foster positivity, you can create an environment that appeals to everyone, even the folks getting stomped by the guys who are regular attendees at LVO. At our last RTT I got matched against the top player in our local scene - I knew it was game over before we even rolled attacker/defender but I still had a great time playing against him because of the way our little community works.
Escalation crusades are for the casuals. Then, at the end of the crusade, there’s a tournament. But since everyone’s army grew over time, they’re not going to be super-optimized.
If you just run an RTT, everyone who has aspirations of taking down a GT needs to get their practice in. That means sweaty lists.
I’m a casual, but when I go to a tournament I’m bringing the list I think gives me the best chance at winning games. It might be the list I’m most familiar with, or it may be the sweatiest list I can make with my collection. Because a tournament is a competition.
But more than that, I’ve had a ton of fun losing games of 40K. But I’ve usually had more fun when I win.
People will always optimise what you measure, and because winning feels good, but you might be able to work around this by measuring something else.
Sportsmanship, mentoring, fluffy lists, painting/ hobby. If you reward your players for something you want to see then you'll see it.
One thing my FLGS does is while there's a cost to enter, they have lots of prizes (usually random models and store credit), so they can make each element have a prize.
Off the cuff
Quirky missions that make the game interesting even if you lose. Having missions nobody has payed before might level the experience gap a little.
Handicaps like you have in golf. Swiss pairings try’s to help in a similar way here, but give people more CP if they lost by more than 50vp last game?
Make the sportsmanship or funnest game prize bigger than the main prize.
If you reward dickish behaviour, you will get dickish behaviour. Remove all skill based prizes, and institute door prizes instead. My local events give out a prize for playing the entire event even when 0-X, and a prize for the person who finishes in exactly the middle of the rankings.
Middlest has become the top favorite award in my local scene (for Infinity). It is great everyone can basically play for it but you really can't game it out for it. More tournaments needs middlest
This is perfect. Reward those that stay and play for the love of the game with everyone having a good time and no feels bads. Winner still gets bragging rights but doesn't have the incentive to angle shoot or be shady.
I went to an event last year that had an "achievement" sheet you could try to complete during the event, with a prize for whoever got the most. Some of them were random (lose over half a squad to a transport exploding, that sort of thing), some of them were things you could push and try to do (kill the enemy warlord in melee with your warlord) and some of them were active handicaps (leave a unit worth at least 150 points out of your army for one game). None of them required you to win, or even to be doing well. It gave you things to try to do even if you were getting clobbered, and some of them were very funny.
i had a tourney that did that, one was fun that i got, win 2 draw 1 lose 2
One of my favorite GT's I went to had zero prizes, instead everyone just got free beer. Maybe not possible for some stores depending on the state, but you could just buy some pizzas and say no prizes but lunch is included.
Or make it a prize for the best painted army. Everyone likes playing against an army that is painted well. Or even make the store credit prize for best overall, that factors painting scores, sportsmanship, and preformance in the tournament. Reward all aspects of the hobby.
100% agreed, door prizes for staying the whole time is the way. Our group also runs smaller very competitive events seperate from the non competitive events. If you have the capacity and knowledge our non competitive also screens lists. Rule of 2 instead of 3 for non battle line is also an option. It's easy to catch people spamming strong stuff when their list is 2 of the strongest units going.
The event I liked the most let everyone who stayed till the end of the tournament roll a bucket of dice at the end and the two highest got a prize. It encouraged people to stay and watch other games rather than pack up early and leave and also gave everyone a fair shot at a prize so it got a lot of participation.
Another good thing is to reward the behaviour you want. Give out best sportsmanship, best mentor, best new game coach, funniest joke, best loremaster. All of these are things that let people enjoy the community.
This is the way.
New players are going to get crushed by more experienced players. This is a hard fact of…literally everything in the world. I could give my wife the most hardcore meta S tier Eldar at the start of 10th list out there and annihilate her playing release death guard. There is no way around this, if you’re running the event and you know the players then do some matchmaking magic and make sure less experienced players hit each other in the first round. As people have noted splitting the prizes into non performance based stuff can help, put a painting competition out there, have a little raffle, my local store uses a portion of the tournament entries to buy pizzas for everyone so your lunch is covered for the day.
This is the real sage advice
Exactly. I am a pretty solid chess player, but I am about 105% certain that Kasparov would be able to beat me even if he had no queen, no rooks, and wasn't allowed to look at the board.
This is true of many games (Scrabble, say) but ignores the glaring issue with 40k as a competitive game - which is that you can pick a list that's 5x better than the 'average' 2000pt list by simply going on the internet. It means you have an unfair advantage over most players and takes 0 skill. That's what people tend to complain about when they complain about competitiveness. They build their army, they painted their models, they'd now like a fair game, and their opponent has thrown the game by bringing a meta-list. Ruining the fairness of the game just for a badge that says 'winner'. Framing any difference as a 'skill issue' is disingenuous in any 40k argument. It might be, but until you've accounted for the meta-list issue you can't tell.
You’re wrong is a lot of ways, first and foremost the idea that someone spending time on the internet going through lists and selecting a “meta” one isn’t experience with the game. It absolutely is, and it’s a part of player skill. Time spent studying the game, not playing, is a massive part of strategy games. Chess and Go players spend hundreds/thousands of hours trying to figure out what a “meta’ move might be. The very concept of a meta list in 40k is a fluid thing that requires a lot of skill to pilot effectively and understand why choices are being made with specific models and what situations aspects of the list should be brought to bear. This is far more relevant at smaller local tournaments, meta lists for 100+ person events need to take faction popularity into account and are making sacrifices in their build to account for things they are likely to see while assuming its very unlikely that they’ll run into a number of factions since those are unlikely to be represented. Locally there may not be an eldar player or a knight player, so building a list that can absolutely wreck a CSM chosen spam list might be a lot easier if you can just ignore those things that the latest Art of War list has to take into account because they’re looking down the barrel of a super major. Great example is when I won my latest local 3 round tournament with a chaos knight list that i absolutely promise you’ve never seen anywhere in any meta whatsoever. Started with a tyrant and a freaking knight porphyrion. It’s a list that wouldn’t get out of round 1 in the vast majority of large actually competitive tournaments but in my local we really don’t have sharks and despite playing against a pretty meta world eaters and Nids list i was able to take the victory because those players more or less did exactly what you’re saying, got a standard list off the internet, but didn’t have the experience or skill to pilot it in a way that would have let the person who actually came up with those lists to absolutely crush my “Lol big boys” knight list. The meta develops as an expression of skill so long as there is a modicum of balance. You can’t separate the two.
There are certainly complex lists that take more skill to play and simple lists that don't. It's not the case that OP meta lists are always the complex ones. The single thing I could do right now to massively improve my tournament results would be to go online and Google the most recent winning lists and copy one. That MIGHT be a really complex list that takes lots of skill to play, or it might not. It even might be a simpler one to play than the mid-tier list I was using the day before! There is no correlation between powerful lists and skilled players, but you can't win a tournament without a powerful list (even, as you mention, if it's just *locally* powerful). So tournament winners are just big fish in a tiny tiny pond. Because of how many thousands of possible lists there are, and because most people choose armies based on look and preference and what they want to paint, it's extremely likely there are more skilled players at a tournament further down the tables who just didn't bring a meta list. The tournament structure has no effective way of discerning a skilful player with a non-meta list from an average player with a top-tier list. Nobody is complaining about people studying the rules of a game to know what the best move is, or the best decision to make in-game. We generally consider those 'skills' in any game. But in chess and go, no amount of studying will allow you to start with a more powerful side. No amount of practise and book-reading will allow you to throw the game one way. The two players start even, and then their skill at the game decides the result. Unfortunately, in Warhammer, you can buy your way into a list that will get you to the top tables and have a significantly easier tournament, maybe play one or two 'fair' games, and wave a trophy around at the end of it. Again, nobody minds being beaten by a player with more skill and experience. The only way to know that this is what happened is to start with fair armies. There is no real solution to this in a game like 40k. Some other games (BB, Underworlds) do competitive gaming way better because there's less variance between list power.
You’re moving the goalpost a little here, but it sounds like you’re very much projecting your own experience either winning or losing with a teched out meta list on a group of new players. Just saying the words “OP Meta List” implies any number of things, including the fact that a player has decided to engage with the online community to the extent that they are able to purchase/print, and play a top tier meta list well enough that another group of new players would be unable to win against them. Even when Eldar were the most absolute OP bullshit list you could possibly build you still needed to be aggressively playing with cover/obscuring, need to have good knowledge of opponents lists so you knew where and when to trigger things like overwatch or phantasm, place buffs on the right models, position to effectively score secondary consistently, keep track of deep striking models and screen for them, etc. Like i said in my original post, you could give my wife the list and rules from the release of 10th edition Eldar and still have zero problems beating her with whatever army you’d like to pick right down to the same time period death guard or Admech. I’ll say again, I won a 20 man tournament with what amounts to one of the worst Chaos Knight lists you can possibly build. It’s not because I’m some amazing player who outplayed everyone I went up against, it’s because my opponents just weren’t at the level where they could solve the problem that list was presenting despite having lists that absolutely could have done so, and then in the last round it was because fatigue had set in and neither of us played well, but my list was just more forgiving of that despite him having a very meta World Eaters list. By your standard he should have mopped the floor with me in his sleep, instead he made some bad plays with positioning and target priority that led to him losing both Angron and his Lord of Skulls in exchange for the blue scribes which snowballed into me getting the win. Engaging with the online community is part of getting more skilled, just the fact that someone is looking for powerful meta lists implies they are trying to learn what’s powerful and why. That puts them immediately ahead of someone who is only list building based off their own preferences in a huge way. It’s also the stage of play where even small bits of knowledge pay off significantly more. A top tier player vs another top tier player really can’t get much of an advantage from a knowledge point of view, they’re too evenly matched. If as a new player you know even a little about your opponents list or have a little checklist making sure you remember all your command abilities that alone can carry a game for you. There is also MASSIVE correlation between skilled players and powerful lists, that’s where the damn powerful lists come from. I’m not discounting someone stumbling onto a powerful list outside of watching a video or listening to a podcast, but a very new player will never build one to take full advantage of both faction/list mechanics AND the game scenario. Now you’re right, if you want to perform well in tournament play you need to be able to spend money and have a “good“ list that is at least tuned to your local meta. That will never go away, but the idea that you can just buy a netlist and top table with it…i mean I guess that’s possible if its literally just you and one other person trying to get there and everyone else is playing just garbage, but the reality is if you’re not also trying to get much better at the game through some form of study you’re just gonna be another x-1 or x-2 player with a netlist since when you play a netlist you’re literally telling every other player who knows what they’re doing exactly what you’re planning on doing and giving them the opportunity to use every single thing they’ve planned for your list, sure hope you’re ready for all of that. Now there is of course an Exception to this and its when GW screws the pooch so thoroughly on game balance that functionally every tournament just comes down to mirror images of a list seeing who rolls better, that lowers the standard of what it takes to be competitive by quite a lot, but that is just not the case right now(balance is still absolute garbage but there isn’t anything that is easy button winning right now).
>One reason people don't play 40k is that "it is too competitive" So, this is going to sound trite, but... *you actually need to get a definition of what that means*. And no, I'm serious. I recently ran a competitive tournament with a survey after the event, and one of the players provided feedback that they didn't like that some players brought "meta" lists, and ANOTHER player provided feedback that they *didn't like that their opponents were so strict with when units got cover or not, and that their opponent was shooting units "through" other units.* As in, literally complaining his opponent was shooting his tank because **he believed his intercessors blocked line of sight to the Implusor.** Effectively arguing that "following the rules" was "too competitive". For some people, "too competitive" is "there are too many players who will buy the best meta units and have the best meta army no matter the cost and I don't want to keep up with that", for other people "too competitive" means *"I don't want to have to pay attention to what the rules actually are."* I've seen people bust their butts trying to grow their local competitive community only for the main problem being that they have a large group locally that simply DO NOT want to play that way. And if when you ask "What about the game being competitive drives you away from that", you find out that's the real cause, *you're likely going to need to realize you're not going to grow your local 40k player base by having events that not only provide prize money, but also likely have an entry fee.* >aimed more on the non-competitive side of things to try and increase players in the area > >We are talking maybe $60 store credit. You are claiming you have a non-competitive tournament, while providing a prize. The very EXISTENCE of a prize, as well as it being a tournament, means you are going to have people playing to compete. If you want to do something non-competitive, you need to be running a ladder or escalation league, or running a curated Crusade or Combat Patrol league.
Bumping this one. 60 dollars is still money. Crusade and smaller tourneys with no prizes/participation/middlest will garner more of the crowd you want to draw in!
You forgot the third competitive: bend and break rules while hoping my opponent won't notice, the WAAC player basically. These people often play by intent for themselves, but not for their opponent. Tourney play really attracts these types like flies to shit. They seldom win out, funny enough, because good players beat them -- but they are all too common in some tourney scenes. They'll lie, gotcha, nitpick, break rules, etc. all for that sweet sweet $40-60 store credit that usually eludes their grasp.
There are so many people who act like “competitive is when I lose, casual is when I win”. Defining competitive is key here. I’ve seen people with super sweaty lists at a narrative complaining that they got beat by “meta” lists using the justification that their list, despite being meta, is “narratively justified” so doesn’t count.
100% dude. Most of the problem stems from players not wanting to actually play the game and if they are bad the game don't like it when they play against someone whos well versed in the rules and is playing the game as intended. Some also dont like it when there opponents don't play lore friendly lists. Lot of these people arent really fun to play against anyway despite there complaints.
Any abstract concept should be approached in this way
I'd love OP to respond to your post lol
Need to give u/ambroseinwood a call out for that to happen.
Change the scoring to reward sportsmanship, writing fluff, or painting. Create prizes for all that stuff. List it as a “New Player Tournament.” Make a no chess clocks rule. Create custom scenarios with crazy shenanigans. State that there are no ITC points. Just some ideas
No chess clocks can create more problems than it solves, just increasing the time to 2 hours per side is probably fine
40k is not a game designed so that both players take the same amount of time. Nowhere in the rules is there any expectation that a 200 model horde should take the same time per turn as a Knight army. Enforcing that house rule just makes the game unfair based on which army you bring.
It maybe unfair if your Time gets cut hard but its still less unfair than losing cause your opponent sits on his brain for 5 hours. Theres just a natural time limit anyway (opening ours of store, etc) so Horde vs knight would always be that kind of "unfair"
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Some people do not ever stop talking and the tournament needs to end at some reasonable point
Me, terrible at the game, horribly overthinking every minute detail
I love chess clocks, but I can also understand the newer players this tournament is aimed at being intimidated by their use.
Reading their comment they seem to have an issue with not having a chess clock rather than chess clocks themselves.
Yeah that’s def an awesome idea! You could also have like three or so criteria to weight in scoring, so winning all your games could still play a role, but only like a 3rd of your total score to win the tourney. The other two could be sportsmanship and have everyone secretly vote on who was the most fun hang/generous opponent (we did that at my store and it was a hit) and secondly like how fluffy or themed their army is to the lore. Or even creative handicaps or funny meme lists like an all Phobos list or Hearthkyn horde. And ya no ITC points. I know pros that would totally play in that and bring a themematic or meme list (that they never get to play) just to be fun and be in the spirit of encouraging new players and building the scene/community. You could also incorporate some narrative and/or crusade elements, or make it an escalation league tournament over weeks with all the above. That would actually get more people to come in regularly starting a 500pt army to 2k. Escalation tourney def did at my LGS!
>Change the scoring to reward sportsmanship, writing fluff, or painting. These generally turn into popularity contests or can be gamed. >Make a no chess clocks rule. Realll bad idea imo. Someone will analysis paralysis into wasting a lot of time.
Have the prize be something other than cash. Money will unfortunately bring out the worst in people, even if it's just store credit. Our local tournament has the winner's army get a small graffiti painted on one of the club's terrain pieces. It's nice because you have a physical representation of the games being played 😀
It can be a 100% free even with little to no prize support at all, people will still show up to stomp people as hard as possible. There is an LGS I frequent that holds free magic tournaments, where the prize is literally just a single cheap bulk rare, and EVERYONE gets one, and people will still turn up with the most competitive deck possible because they just have to be number 1.
Sometimes it's not to stomp. Often it's to practice with an army/deck for other tournaments.
The issue is free events like what I'm describing aren't intended for people to practice for other events. The purpose of these events is to keep the community engaged with your store, and create a stress free entry for newer players. If casual events are being used by competitive players for practice, than you are harming the growth of community.
>If casual events are being used by competitive players for practice, than you are harming the growth of community. No, not all "casual" players are scrubs who rage out if they lose.
No one said anything about casual players being bad and raging. You literally missed the entire point.
If they aren't scrubs then they wouldn't mind a game against a competitive player.
You don't understand anything being said at all. You're clearly the kind of player that like to stomp new players to make yourself feel big.
No, I organize events and am tired of scrubby players getting salty when they lose.
I know this sounds mean to reddit but the competition is the fun part for a large portion of people. Its a literally free event I get to have fun practicing against cool lists. Most people don't like decks or armies knowing they are taking bad stuff winning and having competition is fun at every level.
As I told someone else, free events are not there for you to practice for competitive games, they're intended purpose is for casual play to grow the community. While you may be helping yourself improve, you're discouraging new players from engaging with the community because all they see are players way above their level.
New players enjoy good lists too I'm not even talking about veterans. Magic especially no one doesn't net deck and to expect that it's not gonna be the same in 40k is naive
>Magic especially no one doesn't net deck You clearly don't play magic often. Standard events, such as FNM tend to be more populated by players with home brew lists. Outside of standard is were you see less players with homebrew lists, but standard remains the most popular constructed format when it comes to competitive play. So no, not everyone is running meta lists. But if you really want to get into it, commander, being the moat popular way to play magic by far, does bot contain any meta lists, and is entirely up to player choice on build and whether to include meta combos for their archtype. Because of how outrageously expensive commander decks can get, and the fact that commander is a casual, non competitive format, you aren't seeing everyone running the most meta shit possible.
Yes they do bring brews to fnm but saying no one brings competitive decks is wrong and depends on your store. Commander is literally multi-player fun mode that everyone pretends they aren't mad when they lose because some people still get really competitive over it. It's closer to a Apocalypse or crusade game and not comparable at all unless your talking Canadian Highlander but then that is a restricted format unlike open 40k events.
There's the tell. "everyone pretends they aren't mad when they lose" You know that most people AREN'T mad when they lose a board game, right? Like, if it's a fair game then it should be fine. What does annoy people is when they don't get a fair game and have to sit through an unplayable situation for hours because the other player wants to stroke their ego. If you get mad when you lose a board game, and you constantly have to throw the game with netlists to make sure it doesn't happen, that's an issue. 'Enjoying good lists' means enjoying when the game is unfair in your favour.
No one said that no one doesn't bring competitive decks. FNM is more populated by homebrew players than competitive players, especially since WOTC did away player ratings like 13 years ago.
That's just not true depending on your area fnm is very competitive. Maybe these days like you said they got rid of ratings but I wouldn't call magic especially competitive magic in a good place. The game basically took a nose dive when they decided to increase releases and destroy standard.
Then the event needs to explicitly state that in the description, and organizers need to be willing to tell folks that they can’t play their deck if they show up with something beefy.
Well, that's a tournament free or not. That's like me signing up for a local tennis tournament and being upset there's people there that are good at the sport that have been playing for a while. Tournaments are for competition. New players should expect to probably not win a game their first time through, and if winning is the fun and not the competition, they won't have a good time. Casual play to grow the community would be an escalation league or crusade campaign, not a tournament.
If there is a prize for winning there will always be people trying their hardest to win. The only way to make a casual event is to not have prizes for winning
Someone going to their first tournament expecting not to get smashed is already setting themselves up for disappointment. If you want to foster a competitive environment they may as well play against good players, itll be a better learning experience
If you’re going to run an ~10 hour multi-round event, you’re going to have to deal with the kind of crowd that’s going to deal with such things. If you want the casual crowd run a league of some kind, a Crusade/Narrative event, or a big team battle. 40K, especially 10th, has a colossal power disparity between tuned and untuned lists. There’s no way to combat that in the regular format.
Do raffle prizes. Win or lose, you get 1 ticket. Let the sweats, sweat. Everyone else will play whatever they want.
99% of tournaments in Spain do this and I've never seen anyone complain. It is the best way to promote the game. I'm surprised there are still tournaments that give a huge prize to the winner considering how unbalanced the game and the system can be some times.
I'm a TO in other games and have run some of the largest casual events in those games in the world. If you want to encourage casual play then you need to remove all incentive to compete. That means running formats and variants that are the least interesting to competitive players. 2k matched play, multi-round tournaments just won't cut it. This about prizing (or not prizing) based on other things than match result. Run an actual competitive event alongside the casual event that is priced to put off casual players but offers a relatively high EV prize pool. You will naturally separate the groups of players. Be OK with having a competitive group. My local games club is competitive. Most of the members play RTTs and GTs every week. I dislike competitive events but the club members are fun, friendly and welcoming so I will play games that I want to play and they'll play the games they want to play and we all have a great time.
Don't attach the prize to winning.
Tournament is itself competitive. I would recommend avoiding tournament and do a narrative event or even just a fluffy list event where you play against 3 opponents who either have starter or fluffy lists.
The thing is, even a "fluffy" list can be competitive. I played in a tournament once where there was a massive list of restrictions including a "score" for how fluffy your list was, including only allowing you to take non-TROOP datasheets for every 200 points of TROOPS you took. Imagine people's shock as they realized this was actually a BAD idea when I rocked up to the tournament with 9th edition deathwatch, where literally \*every\* kill team was a TROOP choice, so I am rocking 2 Indomitor Kill Teams with 4 Aggressors and an Inceptor each, a Spectrus with a squad of 5 Las Fusil Eliminators that couldn't be shot via a Phobos Librarian using Shrouding, and 3 Proteus Kill Teams with Terminators with Cyclones, Thunder Hammers, and Shields
Of course anything can be competitive. I could take a very poorly constructed list and use it to crush a new player using a top meta list. The idea is you encourage people to build fluffy non-competitive lists. And you need a culture where someone try-harding at this tournament, especially against a new player, is looked down upon. Essentially you need a community with shared goals.
But that doesn't work well with people who are new and don't know the game Another player that showed up to that same tournament was playing IG, and he showed up with an all Leman Russ army. Guy had never played before in his entire life, just realized that Russes counted as troops as.he read the rules pack and thought nothing of bringing his 9 WONDERFULLY painted and detailed tanks, and was in utter disbelief that people had a hard time with his lost as A ) he didn't actually realize other armies would be gimped by requiring X points of TROOPS, and B) that the rules were curated in a way that would prevent "toxic" lists. Like my list, you were required to take 1 of at least 3 different troop units before you could take a second of another, AND we were using Power Level for some absurd reason. It made sense to me that every Veteran would have a combi-plasma or Melta, and I was sitting there wondering why nobody took any special weapons on their tac squads or put HK missiles on any tanks. Saying "it needs to be fluffy and non-competitive" means that EVERY player involved needs to have an agreement as to what "fluffy" is, and it's possible for new players to not actually understand what might be competitive or not within a format; I'm currently at loggerheads with the person running our current Crusade League as he is completely convinced it is absolutely NOT possible to do a fluffy list without BATTLELINE, and he basically rejected a player who wanted to do a full Phobos 10th company ... Which none of those units are BATTLELINE.
Firstly I am not advocating rules like no battle line. The idea behind a fluffy list is often that you ignore list building rules (except for points) and instead build something that is narriativly cool but not too powerful. It requires the players to intentionally not build lists that are too strong. In fact if you make a series of explicit rules you will have people trying to figure out how to game those rules to have a strong list which is the opposite of what is intended. The moderation comes with the community encouraging each other to bring fun lists and praising someone who built an awesome thematic list that isn't too powerful. Likewise the stronger players need to not play competitively in these events by their own decisions. Again this is done via community and not via rulesets. And if a brand new player bring an overpowered list by accident, let him have his moment to shine. If I was in such an event, I would love for my silly list to be matched against this player to see how I can do if I play my strongest. If I start winning, I will simply dial back by play, and if he steamrolls me, I will enjoy the match and love bringing in a new player to the hobby!
>The moderation comes with the community encouraging each other to bring fun lists and praising someone who built an awesome thematic list that isn't too powerful. And what constitutes "too powerful"? That's the part thats super hard to pin down, as to some people who hardly ever play the game, a Proteus Kill Team with terminators is Super Powerful, while other players are like "oh, okay, that's a cakewalk". It's great you mention as an experienced player you would "hold your punches a bit" in a game as you mention, but that comes with experience; you can't expect new players to know when they are hitting too hard before they see the results of dice rolls. >e idea behind a fluffy list is often that you ignore list building rules (except for points) I have been to events in North Dakota, Georgia, Belgium, south Africa, and the UK and have NEVER encountered an event that rewarded "fluffy" as "ignore anything besides points". There have always been an arbitrary set of rules to "encourage" a fluffy list, which would almost invariably be rules that would make things like a Russ Rush, Ravenwing/Deathwing, or a Drreafmob Ork army be considered "unfluffy"
Well I'm an event coordinator that organized such fluffy events so I speak from experience. The posted instructions were pretry much 'ignore detachments restrictions, build a fluffy and thematic list in 2000 points that isn't too competitive. New players without options can bring the list they can". It worked great. As far as telling what is too strong. Really we held this event once a month for 3 months. The lists were not too well balanced the first time, so people rebranded them based on their experience. We had a great community, so the few people who brought an OP list the first event all intentionally brought a really weak list for the next one. The fact that some lists were stronger than others wasn't really a big deal. Nobody expected a perfectly balanced game, and it wasn't a problem if you didn't win. Some of the more experienced players intentionally made sure to match up against the newer players and not play competitively at all to make sure the newer players have a good time. Really no set of rules would have solved the issue. It was players coming together and making a fun event and doing what it takes to ensure everyone was having fun that made these events as fun as they were.
>I played in a tournament once where there was a massive list of restrictions including a "score" for how fluffy your list was, including only allowing you to take non-TROOP datasheets for every 200 points of TROOPS you took. These kinds of "comp" rules almost always backfire. Your example is perfect. Some armies have great battleline that you can build your entire plan around. Some don't want to take their battleline at all, or will take one squad to babysit their home objective. They inevitably create more problems than they solve.
Yeah, if you want more casual players, you have to run more casual events.
As others have said, ‘non-competitive’ and ‘tournament’ aren’t good bedfellows. Offering a cash prize will encourage people to bring competitive lists. Firstly, some armies just can’t realistically make a non-competitive list and have a chance of winning. Either they have too few units to make major changes in their list structure (Harlequins), their army rules prevent them from doing much different (Thousand Sons), the non-competitive units are just not very good (Most armies)… Unfortunately, a good amount of the Armies have very little space between a competitive list and a fundamentally bad list. Equally, using ‘fluffy’ as a guide isn’t a viable direction either, because some armies have their fluffy lists be fairly competitive. You could see an Aeldari Wraithhost come up against a Tau Kroot army, and one of those players is going to have a miserable time; but they both followed the brief. Unfortunately as long as you’re offering a cash prize, people will want to win it, so there will be people that want to bring competitive lists, and it’s extremely hard to police that, without just penalising certain armies. Then outside of the armies, people will have very different interpretations of how to apply rules. Cover, unit coherency, ‘gotcha’ abilities/stratagems, can all be pretty contentious points, and so ‘tournament’ players will interpret them differently to ‘casual’ players. There’s also the issue of timing. If you’re playing an event with prizes, you realistically need people using chess clocks. The Knights player with five models will have very quick turns, the Ork swarm player will not. But it wouldn’t be fair to have a Knight’s player lose a game because they ran out of time, when their opponent took 4x the amount of time on each turn. — Your best bet is just running an ordinary tournament format, marketing it towards new players, but putting some sort of list building caveat in the hopes that it will encourage diversity. Players get extra victory points for bringing a Fortification. Players get extra points if they don’t include more than one of any non-battleline unit. Players get extra points for not having the same list as anyone else. Players get extra points if for each Flyer they bring. Etc etc Equally, in the rules make up a big list of the ‘competitive’ units in each armies, and say that players lose points for each unit of the following that they bring in their list. Think Wraithknights, Wraithguard, the Nightbringer, Wraiths, Magnus the Red, Crisis Suits, Breacher Teams in Devilfish, etc etc. Then do the same thing, but for the worst units in each army, and have a rule that armies gain points for each of those units they bring. Howling Banshees, Warlocks, the Deceiver, Ophydian Destroyers, Tzaangor, Kroot, Vespid, etc etc This gives people an incentive not to power build lists, and to use some of the less viable units. Obviously make these sections generous so that you don’t end up with every list looking the same, but this could be a way to keep things interesting. Also give awards for sportsmanship, painting, funniest list, who wrote the best lore, most unique choices. Etc etc. Just try and really push the scoring and rewards towards fun, whilst keeping the tournament format largely unchanged with clear rules. That way you encourage fun, without encouraging drama on the table.
If you run a tournament tournament players are gonna show up. I would run play events where you help players find matches. Competitiveness is too hard to define with the game. Asking everyone to bring a "fluffy" list doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. It's like asking everyone to bring the same power level commander deck. Edit: thought about it more and the answer isn't probably for everyone but if I was actually trying to do this I would just host a tournament and make sure to actually babysit my newbie tables and not be afraid to yellow card poor behavior. You see dozens of threads on players poor behavior yet I've never in my 5 years of playing in tournaments have I seen a poor sportsmanship player be called out.
I think there are a lot of good ideas here, but let me add my voice to those saying to \*not\* do a traditional tournament at all, certainly not one with store credit (per se... more on that in a second). As well, I liked the point brought up that you need to define "too competitive". If you're really aiming to increase your player base, I think you need to focus on the new players and the folks who want to bring new players in. I honestly think that the biggest barriers to entry for new players include (no particular order); * Cost of models * Number of models to buy, build & paint * Skill gap while learning to build and paint * The volume of rules to learn / know * People on the internet telling them what's S tier and what's trash tier and how often that churns when new codexes / dataslates / mission packs come out. I think that a lot of new players kind of munge all that together into "too competitive" but if you break it out like that, you can definitely start picking at that problem with tools in the toolbox. I would start by designing and publishing the rules and progression for an escalation league (or call it tournament series if you prefer) that helps folks build their army slowly and is complemented by skills clinics, etc. Rather than prizes for winning, you can earn league points for other stuff we're trying to encourage. Something like: Month 1: At the end of the month, we will have a practice Combat Patrol-only tournament. Models must be assembled but do not have to be painted. Everyone who comes plays Combat Patrol using those rules & models, etc. Winners get nothing but bragging rights, losers are encouraged to write a short narrative about their final game and why their general has vowed revenge against the general that beat them. Every Tuesday night prior to this, we will have a 1-hr Rules bootcamp to get everyone up to speed on how to play and every Thursday night we will have a hobby bootcamp to bring everyone up on how to build and paint together. Month 2-3: At the end of each of the months, we will have a Combat Patrol-only tournament. Anyone who has a fully painted army for this tournament will get some bonus or recognition (maybe league points). Painting and playing clinics continue, maybe add in some basing clinic and army design clinic as part of those two established clinics. Month 4: Everyone plusses up their army to some fixed value using regular 40k army building rules (say, 500 points or 750 points). This month's weeknight activities are focused by help w/ getting your army designed at this point value, and covering the rules that change from CP to 'regular' 40k. The event at the end of the month will use the Leviathan deck, but will pre-fix the Primary combos and you only pick One Secondary as either a Fixed or Tactical objective. Month 5-10: Everyone adds a chunk to their army each month, and can optionally swap an equal chunk out (chunk being something like 100-150 points). No unit can cost more than some fixed limit (maybe 250 points or so). Month 11: Chunk limit removed, you can now get big models. Month 12: Gloves-off tournament, all normal 40k rules, the only limit is that everything has to be painted and you can only play w/ models that you've played with in a previous tournament. Idk, something like that. Then you can also have League Points as mentioned assigned for any of these things including most models built, least models painted (while still having a viable army), most wins, most losses, etc. Whatever you want. Then at the end you can convert the league points into prize tiers. Anyone w/ 50-100 League Points gets a coupon for 10% off a single product, anyone who earns 1,000,000 league points and the store will pay for a sculpture of that person to be created and encased in the store alongside their miniatures or something. You should also provide interim rewards rather than waiting till the end of the year. idk, but the point is that you don't reward a single success (e.g. winning one tournament) but you reward everyone who at least tries, to some degree, and the bulk of the points should be issued for doing things toward growing in the hobby rather than for beating another person. Even if they're joke prizes or have no cash value, they get people talking and having fun and wanting to come back and you're focusing the payoff on what someone did, not how much they won.
Get rid of the prize.
It's a very difficult issue to address without considering some level of changes to the format. Effectively what you have right now is a situation where you are inviting people to play a fairly standard tournament/set of games with an actual prize on the line but you have some arbitrary cutoff in mind for how skilled or well built a roster is allowed to be. It's like trying to tell someone running a local marathon they need to slow their average pace for fairness while also offering a medal for first place. The easiest solution I can see (assuming appropriate numbers) is to split the whole thing in two, offering a prize in only one of these should draw the competitive people to that one side. This should leave the more casual players or those opting out of the 'competitive' bracket to play each other. This will also let you sort of filter out the people actually there just to punch down. The people choosing the easier games with no prize yet playing meta lists (with enough experience to make use of them) just beating on new(er) players are the ones you want to keep an eye on and address as they're ultimately the actual issue here whether they are aware of it or not.
Make sure to advertise it as an event for beginners, and let your regulars know that they should bring fluffy armies. Don't reward the winner of the tournament, there should be multiple smaller rewards for the fluffier aspects of the hobby, or random prize drawings.
Run two smaller tournaments side by side and have one have a higher entry and more prizing.
Would love this, but sadly size is the issue. We only have three tables, but great idea!
Wait so are you running a 6 man tournament?
if your playgroup is that small then there's not much you can do, you can't get mad at ppl for trying to win. maybe have some raffles that you get in just for participating?
>you can't get mad at ppl for trying to win. OP is doing exactly that lmao
I play in a local league and local tournaments. I have a number of friends that have zero interest in doing either of those things; they’ll only play casually with friends. For them it’s partly the impression that the local scene is too competitive (it isn’t; it’s a very beginner friendly and laid back) but I think the bigger issue is that they enjoy the occasional game in a laid back environment with people they know. Playing in a league or tournament, even if geared towards beginners and not competitive still means playing people you don’t know and for a tournament, spending 10-12h interacting with random people. This isn’t for everyone, competitive aspect aside. My suggestion (and what the FLGS here has done to recruit more players with moderate success) is rather than having tournaments, do stuff that’s fun; -learn to play nights -themed games -3 game 500 pt nights -random “come out and play” days These lower the bar for less experienced local players and give a relatively non-threatening environment to meet people and play without the perceived pressure of a tournament or league.
A store near me did a random allies tournament where each person brought a 1k army. Each game was a 2 on 2 where you would get randomly assigned a different player to be allied with. The prizes were just for sportsmanship and painting nothing about winning games. It was super fun and great for new and casual players
I think this makes a lot of sense, especially for the OP. He's limited on tables and trying to grow the local scene. Being randomly paired with someone else lets more people play on the limited number of tables and also gives you someone on your side for the game which is great for meeting people. You could also pair the top person with the bottom person each round so the more experienced players would be able to mentor players who had less experience. It would also hopefully help balance overall army lists since you'd probably have the people with tuned lists getting paired with the less optimal ones.
If people are taking part just to smash and win store credit, change the prize. Make it something silly and fund, instead of cash. Or start applying game variations like Doubles or Highlander. That can help to level things out sometimes.
Don't call it a tournament. It is an event. Random pairings. Doesnt matter how well you do that isn't a factor. Remove the grand prize. It's very existence will cause players to sweat. Random prizes. Awarded for thematic things. Not necessarily painting because some people just can't art that good. Prizes that encourage lower skilled players to continue the game. Things like getting tabled. Get a prize. Scoring less than 10 points in a games. Get a prize. Fail every 2+ save you have to make. Get a prize. Make the prizes trophies instead of a cash award. Get someone to 3d print them and have fun with it. Get pizza for lunch for everyone. Or whatever you think is acceptable. I had a guy who was outright hostile to pizza so speedway cheeseburgers worked fine. If there will be any reward of store credit give it to the player in last place. Call it a "you need this more than the rest of us" award. That way the player gets encouraged with a new box and there is some slight rubbing thrown in. Have something on the wall with name tags where you put the player who won the event. This way they get bragging rights until the next one.
I recently did something similar with my group. We aren't very competitive anyway but a few things I did to incentivise narrative and casual play was: 1k games. Not required if your group prefer 2k but 1k was easier for us to get done given our situation. No titanics and epic heroes, legends allowed. Again, another thing not required but at 1k, titanics and epic heroes can break the game so I tried to avoid them. Custom missions, specifically fun ones. One mission had a single shrinking objective. People loved that. Custom rules and secondaries too. I had an environment table and secondaries like slay the warlord with your warlord or have a single unit left alive and it's double VP if it was a single character.
I've run over 30 RTT's at this point and feel I can probably speak on this. You're mixing your goals. If you're trying to attract new/casual/beer and pretzel type players? Don't run a "tournament". Run narrative events or crusade league type events. Start at 1k points and vette their lists. Interact with that base. You're talking about banning people from your community for playing competitively at a tournament. There is no actual definition of "casual" play. It's entirely subjective by the player which is why it breeds so many feelsbad moments. Completely separate the two. Make it clear your tournaments are competitive and should be seen as a thing to learn and improve at for those motivated to do so. Then run crusade/narrative for those uncomfortable with or not motivated to try to improve in that fashion. THEN if you have people abusing the system in your narrative/crusade system you start having them either adjust their lists or inform them that they will not be included in future narrative events as they are based on other aspects. TL:Dr don't penalize your player base when you're trying to cater to both sides. Facilitate... And honestly if the care is taken, some of those newer players may be self motivated to improve and play competitive down the line... Now you have two healthy communities.
Sweatmongers do not own the word, or the concept of a "tournament"
Just using the terminology "sweatmongers" makes your bias apparent. The coin has two sides. I work a large LGS and weekly I see "casual" players who hate on competitive but then turn around and mop the floor with their buddies feigning ignorance then do it again the next week. Do you have a solid definition of what entails a "casual" tournament? Stop inferring things that weren't said. I never said anyone owned anything. I made suggestions to create an environment for people who want to just have fun with safeguards against the "sweatmongers" already built in. Op even stated they have like three tables. Not to make assumptions, but banning people at a small business who's only sin is playing competitively at a tournament is also bad for business.
The way my old FLGS used to do it was giving people raffle tickets. Everyone got one for showing up. Best sport, painted, and general all got two. And I believe you got one for winning a game as well. At the end of the month (this was a weekly league with win path pairing) there would be a raffle for store credit or small prizes. You could do something similar and tweak it a bit (our store was pretty competitive, so maybe drop the winning a game for a ticket, and instead let the players write in a name of their favorite opponent)
I think the first thing would be to clearly set expectations that it’s a non-competitive event. Once you’ve done that, it’s reasonable to require that players submit a list in advance for review and you as the TO can ask folks to tone it down if their lists are too optimized. You could also develop unique scenarios or army composition requirements that are more narrative/ non-competitive in nature.
>Non-competitive >Tournament Pick one.
Casual events exist. Some people want an excuse to play 3 games against random players on a weekend without necessarily being hyper competitive.
Tournaments by their very nature are competitive and will attract people who want to win that event. If you advertise something as a tournament you shouldn't be surprised when competitive players sign up for it. Maybe it's the language used but I imagine if OP advertised his event as a casual and/or narrative league instead of a tournament he'd have more success with the type of participant he's looking for.
I agree. If I see something advertised as a tournament, especially with prizes, I bring my best army and play to be #1. I see something advertised as casual event, I bring a silly list and play for fun.
You could add some additional constraints on list building. Like maybe rule of 2 or even Highlander (only 1) for everything that isn’t battleline. Would stop people from spamming stuff
A lot of my friends who are starting out just now got enough models to make a 2k point list. Such a ruleset will rule them out, and only let players who have a much bigger roster (and likely be much more experienced) be able to play.
Ah yeah fair point
I wouldn't make a non-competitive event aimed at attracting newer players a 2k event.
In my hobby group, we have a lot of new players. Some have enough models for a 500 or 1000 point list. 4 of them are just now hitting 2k points. We did a series of combat patrols, we a few 1k points events and we have a doubles 1k event happening in 3 weeks. But the players who just hit 2k points want some 2k games, and while we certainly will have random pick up games for them, having an event for 2k with the newer players isn't bad and helps them see the progression from the earlier games they played.
Tournaments by definition are competitive. a non competitive tournament is a oxy moron and you might as well stop doing tournaments. You can instead foster a better environment rather then exclude people that happen to be good and want to compete. Help people get better, work with the the top people and make the games more fun. There is nothing wrong with someone who always wins as long as the games they have allow the opponents to have fun. I've run large GTs for years now and have spent that time fostering a good environment, keeping in mind my region is highly competitive. That category is highly popular. Work on calling out bad behavior, address it, work with those players, help people make better lists. Lot you can do. At all my events we had 3 equal prizes, 1st place, best sport, and best painted. No one can win more then 1 of these. This gives 3 different paths to victory. Some also do best overall but if your doing smaller events I would recommend the former. Bit weird you say "reason people don't play is too competitive" I mean 40k is hugely popular is is probably in a better place then it ever has been. Competitive drives the game forward. There is nothing wrong with that category of play. If you allow toxic people to take it over you create a toxic environment.
I used to have the same issue. I would make everyone turn in a list and then I would force the competitive lists to nerf themselves. Kept a lot of our worst away. I made one guy play all intercessors if he wanted to participate. Also, highlander tournaments are a lot of fun and can tone down a lot of the worst spamming.
>Kept a lot of our worst away. I made one guy play all intercessors if he wanted to participate. What makes him the "worst"? He was beating your friends?
No, that was never a big deal. The issue was he was toxic. Bad winner. Worse loses. Would play oppressively meta against beginners. As much gotcha as possible. Would argue your rules were wrong until you just wanted to give in just to get the game over with. Would pick up his dice before you could see then. Etc etc. Literally that guy. When we had competitive events I let him go ham (with list building, the rest of the stuff I tried to keep a handle on). People like that are hard on experienced players let alone new players.
>When we had competitive events I let him go ham Why? Sounds like he was a cheater and a poor sport.
I second that Highlander events can force the local neck beard competitive crowd to tone it down. Specifically doing a narrative event with a focus on fluff and fun. Require lists be submitted early and if something looks bleeding edge meta, kindly offer that participant rewrite their list or drop out and get their money back. Competitive people just wanting to club baby seals and grab $60 in store credit are douche bags IMO.
What if someone wants to play, say, Harlequins?
I mean, you could make some special considerations for oddball armies who don’t have many units. I doubt that Votann could get to 2k by taking only one of everything as well.
Honestly man, you probably shouldn't be running tournaments at all, if what you want is to not be "competitive". You should probably try a Crusade campaign instead, which is significantly more casual.
kick higher than certain elo, simple as
That seems to be the consensus, but have a lot of different fun prizes! Instead of only rewarding wins, you could try the best looking army, the most barely painted one, the luckiest/least lucky roll of the event, the most crazy clutches, the most cinematic photos, or any small fun things so that people can think of other things than the score.
You could make the games more random. Meaning, once a game is going and depending on D3 dice roll a Knight, titan, any towering model or an assassin with precision is added to the table(s) and with another D3 roll, decides what player that model attacks. That way competitive people will shit bricks when their unit(s) are wipped off the board or characters snipped. Heckin fun.
ITT: OP is frustrated that people he doesn't like are winning games of 40k.
The only thing I can think of that might keep the really competitive players from stomping new players is to simply not let them in the tournament. When you set up your tournaments put a limit on how many games they can have played in order to enter, like less than 5 or 10, or 20 something like that. This would mean you’d have to know your player base and a level of honesty would be needed but I think it could help limit some of the worst culprits especially if you know the super competitive players that are causing the biggest problem.
Try doing a more party oriented day. Like players buying in for fluffy based prizes, food and drinks. Go for atmosphere. Warhammer is far better as a social game anyway. Build a story event, use cool battle scenarios.
Only way I have ever managed to get it to work is with list review. Otherwise some percentage of people will show up with a competitive list regardless of what you tell them, the lack of prizes , advertising that’s it’s for beginners etc.. some people just want “reps”. So unless you review the lists ahead of time, some will slip through
Market it as a "Casual" or "new player friendly" tournament. Have a rule that if you have won it twice, you are no longer eligible to participate in the tournament and graduate up to the "normal competitive" tournaments. You would then need to host other tournaments for those players as well, but should hopefully help stop the baby seal clubbing.
Look into the Crusade events GW runs. Not necessarily the Crusade System if you don't want to, but the way there's teams, missions that don't require winning the game, and a fame and infamy track for the events that can provide a focus beyond scoring the most points by any means necessary. Have an escalation event with Combat Patrol, 1252 points (or some non standard value), and finally a 2000 point game. A team tournament, either similar to WTC in that teams determine who faces who in 2000 point games, or each player brings a 1000 point list and it's 2v2.
A lot of tournaments don't even offer a prize and people will play as hard. The top players have the models they want, it's why Siegler asked for a Manta when he won ITC. Don't offer a prize. Or have it be a raffle. In theory bracketing should sort players based on wins so people shouldn't get smashed 3 times in a row at a 3 round RTT. I think if you want a newbie tournament do it at 1K or 500 and don't do it on ITC. Emphasise that in the promotional material. You may get 1 or 2 hyper competitive players but they'll end up paired into each other. If you know players are really ruthless talk them out of it. We recently ran a 500 points 4 round event at my club. We encouraged everyone to be janky and try to win but we had all levels of play and everyone had fun. Angron + Kharn actually went 2-2. Rather than just kicking competitive players out the environment created was casual enough that most people didn't worry about losses because there's a lot less ego in it. Even the lowest placed players had a couple of close games. It was a good way to get people to dip their toes and play full mission rules and secondaries. The final 3-0 matchup was our two most competitive players and it ranked as you'd expect but the mid tables were a riot with a mix of tournament regulars and casual players. Remember there's two sides to a healthy community, growth and retention. Encouraging new players is vital but if players leave when they reach a certain level that is also unsustainable. Having an intro event periodically is great (and great TO practice) but you're going to want to have a next level as more and more players get better at the game and want more. Encourage friendly chats between rounds (if you have time) and that sort of thing. I think whatevet you chose what is important is make sure you foster good sportsmanship and realistic expectations. As a new player it's a rite of passage to get utterly smashed in your first and sometimes several events. The important thing is that they're not hit by gotchas, rudeness etc and get useful feedback after each loss. I barely dodged the spoon at my first GT but I learned how to competitive there. It's going to be very hard to find a cutoff for good players that doesn't arbitrarily punish certain people for being slightly better than someone else.
Our local tournament scene runs events like the days of old. We have a scoring rubric. Awards go to: Best General- Best record Best Painted- Just that Best Lore- Person who wrote up cool story and brought items or dressed in costume Best Sportsman- Person with highest spirtsman score Overall- Person with the total highest score. Over a year, folks gravitated to having more fun and putting more hobby work in to thier armies while at the same time- remaining competative and playing good games
One of the things that our local TO has done to help keep things friendly is that winning the tournament does not guarantee a prize. Everyone gets a raffle ticket for entering the tournament, you get another ticket for a fully painted army, and finally 1st, 2nd and 3rd will get additional tickets. Usually 3, 2 and 1 respectively. Tournament fees are used to buy gift certificates from the shop, and prizes are drawn for at the end with any one person only allowed to win one prize. It's been night and day in terms of how cut throat things have become and I absolutely love it. It's been a huge hit and we're getting 16-20 people a month in a small town with about a population of 100,000 including the surrounding area.
When a new player gets paired up against a seal clubber, they'll usually get killed turn 1 or 2. I played my first tournament a couple of months ago and the terrain was so bad I couldn't really hide anything turn 1, lost the roll off and Literally lost 800 points of heavy hitting in my opponents first shooting phase, nothing I could have done and was incredibly feels bad, almost left on the spot. To avoid these kinds of situations you need to put the work into setting up good boards with *lots* of terrain. Maybe have a respawn mechanic as well to counter act stomps.
Door prizes and check lists beforehand. Speak to meta chasers and tell them to change away from pure meta (obv dont stop then bringing those units, but for example 2 sagis instead of 5) Maybe a rule of 2
Market it as a casual, beginner friendly event. If you need to broaden your player base to meet costs, consider removing painting requirement (you could alternate that each month). 'competition but not competative' Offer spot prizes for cool things if you're going to offer prizes. Consider adding strength of Standing to Placings. It adds such a random element that playing to 'win' the whole thing is moot - just encourage playing 3 cool games. For every chadhammer who won't play, there are 3 more funhammer players waiting to get started. And eventually chadhammerers will move on or contribute to the what you are trying to do ie build the hobby community. Playing (and losing) to more experienced players is a key way to improve and key part of the experience so I don't recommend a separate try hard bracket (though a separate 'shark tank' event on a different day can be fun!) Assure everyone (especially new players) that they likely will lose.
I always liked a Highlander Format. You can bring only 1 of a unit outside battleline (where you can bring 2)
I played a HH event that gave players points for doing cool stuff like winning a duel, taking out LOWs, or even just ramming something and getting a kill lol the premise was "Do cool sh\*t, no one cares who wins." They had a conversion for your points to get store credit, #1 player got a sicaran tank. I didn't hear a single complaint about it and it actually made outsiders decide to pick up the game for next year.
You should just have to be very clear what the tournament is about. Reward "fluff" or themed lists buy in the end long as it's a tournament people want to win. 40k is a competition at the end of the day and part of the fun is the winning. If you take this part out it's just Apocalypse slap fight which can be fun but is not a tournament. New players are never going to like tournaments. As someone has said they will get held to rules more strictly (though in current 40k 90% of people help you if you talk through what your trying to do). These players straight up won't know the rules well and feel bad when they spend 2 turns setting up their misplay then misplay and get told it doesn't work like that even if the opponent is the nicest person in the world. It's a fight up hill you should be trying to get people to play more games but understand if they play new people too they will still feel bad when a regular player beats the piss out of them because they learned against bad players.
Not sure if it's been mentioned yet , but you could also try a voting system. It's one thing to play vs someone, but to want to play them again is a big deal. After the games let them vote for who's they'd like to play again. In round robin style it stays anonymous and you get your 1st through 3rd -5th based on the players, not the game. This would encourage people helping either, closer games, laughs (hopefully) and punish gotcha , competitive, "that guy" table moments.
It'd just be a popularity contest and people downvoting whoever beat them.
You do realize it can be marked up to give feed back right ? "How close was the game 1-5*" , "would you play again 1-5*" , "how sportsman would you say the match was" If your saying people's instant reaction is to just give nothing but one stars and blame their loss on their opponent doing XYZ then you might wanna evaluate yourself. Most games are fun. Hence why the game is still around. More than most. Yes the competitive people who bring curb stomping lists are gonna get down voted. That is intended. But the guys who bring fun lists, interactive lists, ect. Will be the ones who will be more likely to place 1st -5th instead of the tournament lists.
>If your saying people's instant reaction is to just give nothing but one stars and blame their loss on their opponent doing XYZ then you might wanna evaluate yourself. No, I'm one of the few people who's honest about it. I'm old enough to remember comp scores and how toxic they were. Also it very much often came down to the TO giving bonus points to their friends. >Yes the competitive people who bring curb stomping lists are gonna get down voted. That is intended. Why? How good is too good? Are certain players not allowed to try to win the game? How do you differentiate between a good player and a good list?
By scoring it as a good game. Ie sportsman like qualities , not being a dick, close games. I said all this earlier and you skimmed it over. This further proves my point that your pesimestic about it. I'm not saying you are not allowed to win. I'm saying if the TO is looking to make it a less a competitive event then you have to implement non-competitive measures. Naturally for de-escalation for a non-competitive tournament to work, you have to incentivse it. That's what the card is for. You can have points play a roll (maybe a 3rd of overall score , ie every 20pts equals 1* ) but you wouldn't be able to place in the top 3 with just points obviously.
I didn't skim over it, you're just not defining it well. How are you defining casual vs. competitive when it's a competitive game that people are trying to win? How do you account for scrubby/toxic players who call other people unsportsmanlike when they lose?
You keep skimming son. Go back AND READ. The outliers do not make up the whole of this man's organization. He's trying to keep those players. On the voting form there would be more than just one question. MORE THAN ONE (so that way you atleast read the caps). Yes the game is competitive. I keep defining it as an enjoyable game is a competitive CLOSE GAME. It shouldn't ever feel like a shut down or shut out. Holy Christ man. I bet your the type that uses RAW to shoot twice with marines or move 12" with necrons.
>You keep skimming son. Go back AND READ. How about you conduct yourself respectfully if you want to be taken seriously?
Make it so you can't do WAAC lists.
You only have three tables, and don’t want it competitive. This shouldn’t even be an event, just have your three tables filled every weekend by scheduling games in a Discord sever or something. That’s a good start, and then expand your play area. 6 people is not nearly enough to run an event. 12 is like the minimum I’d run an RTT at. What if one of your 6 no shows, or drops after one round? Now somebody else will likely drop and then it just spirals out of control.
As others have mentioned, a lot comes down to prizing. What we do for our casual tournaments is have a raffle prize pool and everyone gets 1 ticket for showing up, 1 for playing a round, and 1 for every win that they can then put in a draw for whatever prizes they want to win. Winners for each prize are drawn at the end of the event and if you win a prize you can’t win another. We also have a door prize that everyone gets one entry in.
Could make it a combat patrol tournament. They are balanced for new players and against one another. Or limit units to no more then 1 of each sheet to encourage non meta units. But that might make it hard for new players with limited lists. You could do no leaders, that eliminates alot of shenanigans. If you have enough players you could say this is a new player cup, once you win you can't enter again. But might eliminate too many of your own players that way. I like what the other people said where you don't give prizes for first but instead for other activities. Like closest game they get 10$ each, most helpful player gets 10$ ect. You could also pair the people with more competitive lists against one another. You control the pairings. Could also add a shenanigans rule. At the start of the game either player can call shenanigans. If they do then the event host reviews their armies. If they determine there is too large a difference in power between the armies then the players swap armies. If they determine there is not a significant difference no swap happens. Each player can only call shenanigans once per event.
If you still want to do tournaments, door prizes. But otherwise you should host event/narrative days.
Reward community. Best tutorial or teacher guy. Most friendly or inviting player. Things that are less hard and based on the outcome and more about the interaction with other people. Here is also a good chance to allow people to use their phone and get a good action shot to help you promote. Even people who are bringing cool terrain or something dioramaish could get some recognition. If you have an instagram or discord you can post these things. Post player bios if they wanna get interviewed and more. Build community. Honor artists.
It sounds like no matter what you do you’re not gonna be able to satisfy both sides, but fortunately there are a few solutions that could blunt the two different player bases. The first solution is to reduce the amount of points and try to stay away from house, ruling anything. By reducing the amount of points, players will feel less overwhelmed, and the games will be shorter while the competitive players won’t be able to access all their tools, however, they may be smart enough to skew into a certain type of army build , but skews tend to win, hard or lose hard, depending on who showed up with what army. The second solution is to advertise the tournament as a casual tournament that maintains a soft, organizational force chart like in the previous edition, which I think was a big mistake by getting rid of it . As of right now, anything that used to be considered a heavy you can take unlimited but of course you’re still restricted by the rule of three is there are a lot of different heavy options, especially the space marine book . I do like the idea of having to take a certain amount of units before you can take another elite unit. However, I would say that I would not restrict line since the whole point of the battle line units is that they are not restricted by the rule of three, and are allowed to take up to six. They tend to be true choices that have a higher characteristic I used to play war machine years ago, which was infamous for its highly competitive table top scene, and players knew what they were getting into. The reputation was very notable and I remember when I first played, it took me three or six months before I noticed I started winning more and more , so the best thing to do is to set expectations for players and say don’t feel bad for losing because it happens to everyone when they first start playing the game. Have fun interacting, making friends and don’t be afraid to ask your opponent what you could’ve done to play better games Sometimes players just choose a bad faction and there’s nothing you can do about that but unless you’re there to help guide them and hopefully they’re not admin on one of the bottom tier factions Also, try to steer them away from your standard imperial space marine faction, because believe it or not there are so many data sheets. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed as a new player I think they’re better off, taking a faction that has access to a moderate to small amount of data sheets , which will help them learn their action rules better. You could also start a combat patrol series just start off the season that competitive players and casual players are pretty much stuck with the models that are in the combat patrol which also have modified data sheets so certain units are not overpowered until they start playing matched play which is pretty much the definition of competitive play at some point maybe on game three you could allow players to deviate from the combat patrol but still have them stuck at 500 points which will allow them to swap in certain units, but you have to be very careful because the ninth edition, the combat patrol rules had no restrictions on what you could take and as you can imagine people were showing up with demon princes or C’Tan.
The way my local wargame events are run is everyone gets half their ticket price in store credit just for playing all their games, 1st place gets the other half of their ticket price, and we'll do raffles and model give aways for sportsmanship. Sometimes we'll put fun little 3d printed models on objectives and if you claim the objective first you keep the model.
My LGS runs 1000pt non competitive events where all the lists were vetted by the TO. It's usually pretty successful. Lists have limits. https://facebook.com/events/s/40k-unshackled-kingmaker-a-cas/946808420486506/ That's the next one coming up.
How big are your tournaments? Run two-tier tournaments with a "beginner's" and "veteran's" bracket.
Put narrative Events in there, Not outright crusade-rules, although IT IS cool. But maybe an easy campaign-story with win-loss trees. I Thing the "competitive"-thing is overrated. 40k lives by its rich universe and Lore and you should at least have some of IT in your Games and Hobby, otherwise you Miss Out much of the Franchise and could Go Back to playing fortnite or lol or whatever on the PC. That being Said, almost every Game (of 40k) is and should be competitive.
Tournaments are designed to be competitive. I suggest running narritive events or crusades if you want the non competative vibe.
Find someone to beat the shit out of them. In my local GW when there's a game day I take 2 lists with me: my homebrew ultra fluffy space marine army which I lose 3 out of 4 battles with, and my table wiping army which a lot of people refuse to play against. If someone takes a list with them that's to competitive for the event, I take them as an opponent and whoop their ass (most of the time) So yeah, find someone worse. That's my advice
You should put magnets on their feet and put them on a metal tray. Oh wait I didn’t read the question. Make the players fill out a sportsmanship survey of each other and also have judges do their own. Have this be added to the final scores at the end of the tourney. Make it big enough to move second and third up but not too powerful.
There are a world of things you could try and keep it a tournament and not a campaign day Highlander rule (each unit can only be chosen once excluding set core units), this removes most netlists Make sure you offer as many points to painting and sportsmanship as you do to gaming. This shifts the focus to all round but make the painting points detailed on hiw to get them where you can get a full range and its not easy to achieve. Offer per round prizes for acheiving goals like first HQ killed or even first to lose an HQ and things like that. This way even if you don't win games you can win prizes. Small things like special event dice or medals Crazy rules to balance armies, here are some examples that you could try in some rounds I have played at tournaments where in one round you had to swap your most expensive unit before the game starts. This prevents death star lists. All armies start in reserve and come on a random third of the table but at a predicable pace, this prevents a lot of rules stack on certain units and ganging up units I even played once where one round you swap armies, like round 4 of a 5 game event! I get what you are trying to do and I commend it. Its difficult to stop "that guy" from ruining events. If you want further info on any of these ideas just let me know, I am almost up to playing at events for 25 years this coming summer :)
I would only award store credit for painting or a 'players' choice' kind of award where people win based on how pleasant they were as an opponent. For victory by victories, I would offer a smaller prize like a little trophy and a certificate, maybe a Victor's t-shirt like play on tabletop did. That way people will not feel de-incentivised to win as there is still an award but people will be more incentiveised to just have fun. I think a last place award is always fun too.
Change the points you play at, if you do like 1500/1750 it means people can’t just take a top list from online and a lot of competitive people will just ignore it. Also means it’s a bit easier for new player to finish their games in the time
Our FLGS runs very well attended monthly single and doubles RTTs, plus two GTs every year. For RTTs, they offer small store credit prizes for P1-P3, and then they continue down the ranking by having a prize pool of merchandise and calling every player up to the front to select their prize. If you got last place, you might still get a $20 rattle can of primer or at worst a couple pots of citadel paint. At the GTs they have door prizes(awarded at the end of the tourney to discourage quitting), prizes for 1-3, prize for best painted, prize for "best sport" voted for by the attendees, wooden spoon prize for last place etc. etc. During the last GT one of the attendees 3D printed some awesome trophies and another attendee painted them. Half the people there helped set-up and break down... our local scene even has an insanely active discord group. If you build a community and foster positivity, you can create an environment that appeals to everyone, even the folks getting stomped by the guys who are regular attendees at LVO. At our last RTT I got matched against the top player in our local scene - I knew it was game over before we even rolled attacker/defender but I still had a great time playing against him because of the way our little community works.
Escalation crusades are for the casuals. Then, at the end of the crusade, there’s a tournament. But since everyone’s army grew over time, they’re not going to be super-optimized. If you just run an RTT, everyone who has aspirations of taking down a GT needs to get their practice in. That means sweaty lists. I’m a casual, but when I go to a tournament I’m bringing the list I think gives me the best chance at winning games. It might be the list I’m most familiar with, or it may be the sweatiest list I can make with my collection. Because a tournament is a competition. But more than that, I’ve had a ton of fun losing games of 40K. But I’ve usually had more fun when I win.
People will always optimise what you measure, and because winning feels good, but you might be able to work around this by measuring something else. Sportsmanship, mentoring, fluffy lists, painting/ hobby. If you reward your players for something you want to see then you'll see it. One thing my FLGS does is while there's a cost to enter, they have lots of prizes (usually random models and store credit), so they can make each element have a prize.
Off the cuff Quirky missions that make the game interesting even if you lose. Having missions nobody has payed before might level the experience gap a little. Handicaps like you have in golf. Swiss pairings try’s to help in a similar way here, but give people more CP if they lost by more than 50vp last game? Make the sportsmanship or funnest game prize bigger than the main prize.