Goatboy’s 40k Thoughts – Getting the Mission Done!
Goatboy here again and today I want to ask a question as the new tournament season starts to get revved up – How Crazy do you like your missions?
I know there are different sides to every tournament and competitive thought on this subject and today I want to talk somewhat abstractly about this. I don’t want to go into battle points vs. W/L vs. Rap Battles. I just want to start to look at the basic view point of the mission and maybe see if we can find a way to make things interesting.
To start with most missions begin with the army set up. I know there are only so many places where you can have an army set up. There are only so many shapes a board can take to allow your dudemens to pretend to be in a war. So which ones do you like? I know there are 3 from the book but lately we have seen some triangle set ups as well as board edge flips too. I know personally I just really like the 3 from the book. When you start to get into trying to set up angles and creating an avenue of death it can be somewhat annoying. Especially when you feel your opponent might have messed up. Personally when you get into odd army set ups you start to get into places where armies become unbalanced. I remember Darkwynn talking about an Ard Boyz set up that basically had a Nid army within assault range on the first turn. A massive amount of Genestealers down your throat is a scary thing, especially when you have set up in an ass backwards way that doesn’t make any sense game play wise.
After set up you basically have the avenues of winning. I do like how most events are starting to go into a multi-tiered mission style set up. You have the primary win condition followed by 2 others that either help you out more with battle points or help to resolve ties if the primary is contested. I think this is the way modern events should be run as controlling these objectives can help you create a balanced tournament that can help out certain armies that might not have the strength of codex that other armies have.
I think a mix of the 3 missions from the book works the best with small tweaks to help create interesting objectives. I have lately seen more random movement, 5 objective games that I think sound pretty interesting. It makes for an intense game as things can suddenly shift and you have to react. There has also been a lot of 3 objective missions that create bases for you to hold as well something in the middle to break the tie that a lot of the 2 objective missions create. I have also seen missions where you can fully capture the objective to take it away and others that have disappearing objectives. These usually work well as a primary as they cause the game to be about getting something no matter the cost. This moves it away from the sit and shoot game as you have to go do something that doesn’t directly involve killing.
I like straight Kill Points as I feel some of the other designs out there – ie only pick 5, only one set of units count, etc – can be abused and doesn’t help with what Kill Points are supposed to solve. The massed MSU army that we have started to see more and more. Hell I know I play MSU armies all the time too and I think the benefits of that style of army should have something to help counteract the fact you can target so much more then some of the other low Kill Point armies.
I know some events are starting to put back in table quarters, control terrain, or get something in the center. I like these as the final mission to break a tie as I feel that if you make it primary it allows for a non interactive game as you play the mission of getting into the bushes and not trying to beat up on your opponent. I know I said early just a straight kill your opponent can be boring but this game has to have some ass beating in it.
I always been more in favor of Battle Points versus just a straight W/L event but I plan on trying to make a bunch of these style events next year. I want to go to the Nova Open this year and I will be at Adepticon for sure this year. I am always willing to try any tournament style system. I think we are starting to get to where tournaments will start to really work well and I just hope we can continue to have awesome events where plastic dudemens beat each other up in the dark and evil future.
So tell me, what do you want in your missions? What do you like the most and hate seeing in a mission description?
