WFB Events: Did You Notice?

In preparing and running a 3 day multi-system event I learned something that surprised me and I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else noticed this. Warhammer 40K tournament rules consist of a lot less information than Fantasy does.

Does that mean Fantasy is more complicated or that we over complicate it?

It has been my experience that 40K players really only need to be told if Forgeworld models and armies from the Imperial Armor books are legal, Fantasy currently requires a lot more. Starting with comp. 

The lead up to any event here on the West Coast of Canada is usually centered around comp. Will the event have it, what will it include, how will it affect the armies and how will it affect the games. There have always been two camps in the discussion: those for and those against and the conversations tend to get ugly. 

I personally have always been against comp, feeling that it should be the scenarios themselves that dictate how an army or selection of armies is designed, built and played. We have been proving that at recent events and suddenly we are seeing those from  the “for comp” camp changing their minds and accepting that Scenarios have the ability to dictate army builds as well if not better than comp would. I will post the Scenarios we used at Kippers’ on my personal blog and you can see how we worked the Scenarios (feel free to use them for your own events).

No comp, in my opinion, allows players to choose from the full extent of their army range, including those things that make the army strong. The Scenarios have the ability to limit those over the top “net lists”. At the event I recently ran we did not see duplicate builds, no large numbers of monsters or chariots or even artillery. The scenarios were designed to keep these types of lists from dominating. We used a combination of Objectives, and Missions to keep armies like that from dominating the field and allowed all armies the chance to be successful. A few tweaks and I think we will see a change from comp driven events to scenario driven events.