I’ve been quiet here for the past weeks or so; mostly because I haven’t had much to say.  Instead, I offer you: a monkey riding a goat.

There were a lot of good suggestions re: the number-crunching dump from last week… though I’m not likely to implement any of them.  My spreadsheet-fu isn’t up to the additional levels of calculation required.  I might try throwing it together in a program (since that’s sort of my thing, professionally), I might not.  It’s annoying that I’m a .NET developer by trade, but have a Unix-based webhost for personal use; so sharing anything might be a bit tricky.

I’ve been painting quite a bit: I banged out six Stormvermin what seems ages ago.  Also, I painted another ten Slaves, got started on an additional set of ten, and assembled another ten Clanrats.  I’m trying to stage this stuff to keep things interesting.

Haven’t taken pictures because… my Stormvermin look like my Stormvermin (only based with grey and not grass) and my Slaves look like my Slaves.  Nothing really new to share.

Slightly disappointed by the lack of response to the terrain I built.  I’m quite pleased with it: finally got to pop the cherry on it last Tuesday (and the water features had an enormous impact on the game).  Someone commented that it “looked like tournament terrain.”  I’m sure it was meant as a compliment, so I’m happy to take it as such.

I picked up Space Hulk: Death Angel at Games Day.  Late last week, I muddled through a solitaire game, trying to get a feel for how it played.  The game got considerably more brutal every time I got a better grasp on a rule.  No joke: the terminators were obliterating Genestealers as they came on, preventing any of them from having the chance to attack.  As soon as some got through, though, it was a dead terminator a round.  I’m looking forward to playing it with other people, as I expect the game will be even more difficult.  Should be fun.

Now that I’m back from vacation, I’ve got a few random things to flush out of my head in hopes of making way for a return to more regular posting:

Although I won’t be able to participate in the NoVA Open, I will be helping set up (and will possibly be helping break down).  That also means I’ll be kicking around the activities on Friday evening.  I’ll have my Khornate Daemons with me, and will have a hunger for carnage.

The Iron Fist League doing Rapid Fire at Games Day again.  I probably should give this it’s own, full post, but in case I don’t… better to touch on it here or not at all.

It’s an adaptation of the format we’ve used at Game Vault for two years, jiggered to make it easier to build lists without much prep.  500 point games; as many as you feel like playing.  No commitment to spend your day stuck in games… just the opportunity to play some quick games and break up your day.

We’ve dragged our heels a bit on getting the rules out: the 40K army construction rules are unchanged from last year, but with the new edition of Fantasy, we’ve hemmed and hawed about construction rules for that quite a bit.  It looks like those have mostly cleared up, though.

It was an immense success last year, and I hope it’ll be one again this year.  Make sure to stop by and say hi and maybe get a game or two in!

I’m extremely disappointed with the Cypher‘s treatment of Hell Dorado at Gen Con.  Malifaux and Hell Dorado fill very much the same sort of niche, and Cypher (in my opinion) really needed to launch Hell Dorado at Gen Con this year to get back on people’s radar.

That they didn’t have the rulebook ready killed it, I think.  We’ve known that it’s been translated for a very, very long time (the translator is active on RPG.net’s OGO board), so there’s really no excuse.    That the game wasn’t launched at Gen Con means that Malifaux will continue to pick up steam and not really leave much room for Hell Dorado.

Heck, at this point, the best thing Cypher could probably do is wait for Malifaux to run it’s course and, in a couple of years, take advantage of all the folks who’ve grown disillusioned with the overcomplicated mess Malifaux is doomed to evolve into (as Malifaux took advantage of all the folks who’d grown disillusioned with the overcomplicated mess Warmachine had evolved into).

Speaking of Malifaux, while I haven’t been doing much with it since 8th came out, I had planned on picking up the new book and gremlin stuff.

Then I took a look at the Ophelia spoilers and it pretty much killed any enthusiasm I’ve had for the game.    It’s just so much crap to learn and memorize.  I don’t think I want to get stuck in a cycle of having to learn 18 billion new rules every year (see above comment about an evolution into overcomplicated mess).  Too much to have to keep up with.

I mentioned on my Twitter (something I think I’m going to try to use a bit more) that I might be done with hobby podcasts.

I’d only started listening to them because my friends had started one of their own, and I figured I owed it to them to show them a little support.   That lead into listening to a few other podcasts, specifically The 11th Company and Dice Like Thunder.

DLT cheesed me off when they started talking tough about soft scores in tournaments.  Besides being Wrong, when you’re not involved in tournaments, you don’t get to speak authoritatively about what works and what doesn’t work with tournaments.  You literally don’t know what you’re talking about.  That, followed by “tactical advice” based on misunderstandings of the rules was enough to convince me my time could be better spent.

The 11th Company’s interview segments are, I think, extremely interesting, but the codex countdown stuff doesn’t work for me.  And, for some reason, I’ve been having a really hard time keeping up with it.

The only podcast I’ve kept up with is, understandably, The Gamer’s Lounge… and I turned that sucker off on the drive into work yesterday.  I expect Jay to occasionally wade in the Sea of Unreasonableness, but Bill really went off the deep end over the Throne of Skulls thing.  After the third or fourth, “Really?  Oh, come on,” that would never be heard, I decided it was too much annoyance for a Monday morning commute.


It’s possible that this is just a bad aspect of the meta-hobby for me to “participate” in.  “Participate” gets the scare quotes, because it (listening to podcasts, at least) is really a passive activity: just sitting there, listening to some dude spout off about whatever.  If I agree with them, I gain nothing… because I already agree with them.  If I disagree, nothing happens.  They just keep talking…  I think I’m too opinionated to for this.

So, some time off.  Maybe I’ll come back to them.  Maybe not.

I think that’s all the kruft rattling around in my head for now.  I’ll have to get a painting progress post up soonish, since I spent a good chunk of my vacation painting Skaven.  I also should do some rumination about Golden Daemon: I’ll be putting some things in, but I don’t expect any of it to go particularly far this year.

As a follow on to yesterday’s post about hatin’:

Game Parlor had the new Warhammer book in last night.  Not a single game of Fantasy was played as the Fantasy players crowded around it.  We’ll have to see what comes up on the forum today, but from the noises I heard yesterday (and Ben’s post from last night), those guys might not be as negative as they appeared.

Ben, who’s been sort of relentlessly down on the new edition, basically said, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as the rumors made it sound.  There are some things that I don’t like the look of and some things I like the look of.”

So, maybe my grousing about their grousing was just as unreasonable early.

My FLGS, The Game Parlor, has been charging folks to play in the store for about a year now, give or take a few months.

To play in the store for however long costs each player either $2 or a ticket given out with every $20 worth of purchase.  So, basically, if you play in the store, it’s kinda sorta a 10% discount.

The new policy caused a lot of heartburn when it was announced, and a lot of the complaints were legitimate I think.  Now that there are two GW stores within 15/20 minutes of GPC, there are places you can play, for free, on tables that have terrain (without having to bring your own).  The store was asking for folks to pay for something they used to get for free.

I was, with some reservations, okay with it.  I get a lot out of being able to play in the store; there’s a community there.  It’s clean, open, and well-lit.  You don’t have salespeople constantly interrupting your game.  Game Parlor’s a part of the area community in ways Games Workshop stores could never be.  Cindy, who runs GPC, is possibly the nicest person I’ve ever met.  There is a value to playing in the store.

My reservations really boiled down to to points:

• Try other things, too.  The store keeps screwy hours, for example: being open when it’s dead at best while closing so early, professional folks in the area don’t have time to play a game.  Charge for tablespace if you must, but it’s not going to be the whole answer to the store’s financial woes.
• They’ve now put a dollar value on supporting the store.  Before, the decision to shop in the store vs. going online was always a tough one.  “Support the store… or save $30… Hrm.”  It’s not as hard now.  So long as I shop in the store enough to generate enough tickets to play in the store… it feels like I’ve discharged my duty to the store.  

I’ve just updated the template for this sucker.  It’s not 100% done, but all that’s left are wonky little text-formatting little things I expect I’ll slowly work my way through.

If something looks especially retarded, please let me know.  I hate, hate working with CSS sometimes.

Also, for the hell of it, I’ve added a separate Twitter feed where I can dump thoughts that relate to the blog… but aren’t big enough to actually merit posts.  Hopefully, it’ll be useful.

More and more, I see people turning to video battle reports and reviews.  Bell of Lost Souls has done them for nearly half a year, now, and Jay’s gotten really spun up on them.

Multiple Scenarios

The one really great thing (in my opinion) to come out of War of the Ring is its approach to scenarios.  As with 40K, there’s a little table and you roll for the random scenario for the game.  Where it differs from 40K, though, is that you roll more than one time.  So, you could roll up a game that’s both King of the Hill and Kill Points, for example.  Each scenario comes with a set of victory points, which you total up to see who’s won.

Now, we’ve been muttering about trying to play 40K this way pretty much all year.  The only sticking point is how to make the goals of the different scenarios roughly comparable.  Because, in theory, winning at one when your opponent wins at another should result in a draw.  It’s easy to compare how objectives in Seize Ground and objectives in Capture & Control should work together, but it gets a little tricker with Kill Points in Annihilation.  If we make the assumption that the average 40K army has 12 Kill Points (which seems like a reasonable assumption to me), we can say the following:

• Seize Ground: Each objective is worth 3 VP.  That gets us an average of 12 VP, with a minimum of  9 VP and a maximum of 15 VP.
• Capture & Control: Each objective is worth 6 VP.
• Annihilation: Each Kill Point is worth 1 VP.

I’ve been painting miniatures off and on since the early ’90’s, and actually rolling dice around in the context of them for the past three years or so.

I play Warhammer 40K more than anything else, but have dabbled to varying degrees with some other games as well. At the time of this post, the armies I’ve got are:

Warhammer, 40K

• Dark Angels
• Tau Empire

Warhammer

• Skaven

Warmachine/Hordes

• Cygnar
• Circle Orboros

Hell Dorado

• Démons
• Égarés

I figure this thing will be for posting pictures of projects I’m working on, in addition to saving my friends and family from endless mumbling about army lists. (Unless they’re reading here, in which case they have it coming to them.)