POLL: How I Ruined Warhammer 40K (This Week)
Jwolf here. Last week I had things to attend to, so I could not arrive for my regular Thursday festival of destruction until 7pm. When I arrived, Goatboy walked over and explained to me that I had ruined 40K, and that I should expect to be hearing about it soon. And I sure did…
Goatboy had been stuck with a lousy work schedule, so he was really only playing 40K with me for the past month or so. I encourage him to bring horrible armies, whatever bad things he can come up with, the latest being a swarm of Battlewagons with Deffrollas and a small distraction force of Nob Bikers (with Warboss, of course). To me, this is a fun army to play for a casual game – Orks play quickly and we can get a couple games done in an hour or two. It turns out that not everyone likes to play games where a pile of crazed Orks are in your face on turn 1 (and every turn after that). The current emphasis on Anti-Mech doesn’t do much when the enemy is out of Melta range and then in assault. So I got an earful about how I ruined the game by encouraging Goatboy in his evil list building.
My response was written for me by Thucydides: “We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.”
If you’re a competitive player, play the hardest opponents you can drum up, and play more games. Even if you’re a casual player, try to spend an extra couple of hours at the table this week; if you can’t do that, read the rules or something. Casual play does not have to be slipshod, after all.
~So are players like me ruining the game for everyone, or are we just doing whatever it takes to continually hone our skills on the tabletop? How do you guys deal with competitive players in your playgroups, and once a playgroup has “beefed up” with months of hardcore competitive play, can they ever go back to what they were before? Poll, right hand column, Attack!
