Brent Rants on 6th: What’s Wrong with you People?

Call it what you will, it’s a wasteland of contradictory opinion!  It’s finally happened… the Internet Personalities have turned on one another, and the Bloggers are playing in the blood.  It was inevitable, I suppose; ideologues of any stripe make me nervous in all the wrong places.  All these scattered articles – this tide of unfinished thinking and poorly blended army lists!  

It’s Heresy.  Call in Inquisitor Dave Taylor please.  It’s past time he set this right.

So is it all that hellfire and brimstone speak… or just another edition of Warhammer 40K?  Yeah, I thought so.

Jeez, folks, we go through this every time, with every edition!  Look out, Chicken Little, the sky is falling.  Oh, wait; that’s just Exterminatus.  Open wide.

Folks, we older hobbyists (note I avoided ‘old’) have gone through this time and time again.  With every edition, there follows months of teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing as hobbyists everywhere work out the rules and develop a general consensus.  For that reason, we should have known what all this commotion was from the start.  So couldn’t we have been a bit prepared?  Wasn’t it our duty to shepherd the younger folks through it?  

It could have been something like this…  *key music*  

Wise Older Person, dispensing wisdom:  “Now, with every new edition of the game, things seem a bit odd at first.  Our preconceived notions will color our every perception, even as we work to find meaning in all these new rules!  Further, our biases, lovingly nurtured through 5 previous editions, will influence our every opinion.  We might be right.  We might be wrong.  But without a doubt, we’ll be loud.  Hear, hear!  Shout them down, I always say.  I have more models – I must be right.”

Snide Younger Person, cutting through the crap:  “Suck it, grandpa, we’re actually playing over here.”

I’m sure that’s how it could have gone, anyway.

So perhaps we should have been a bit more prepared to appreciate the old game while ushering in the new, but this edition had something the others didn’t.

A fully armed and operational Internet aimed right at it.  Maturity, like Alderaan, never had a chance.

The birthing pain was inevitable.  Doctor, let’s hope the baby survives the parents.

Well, we may not have graceful but we certainly have discourse.  What’s perhaps most surprising to me are the voices of reason appear almost entirely from the audience.  Whereas (in many cases), the knee-jerk overreaction…

…could be traced back to the Bloggers and TO’s (tournament organizers), the writers and influence peddlers.  

Huh.

Look folks, for me this isn’t about right and wrong.  Nor is it about ability – the writers and TO’s and peddlers don’t have a monopoly on clever wordplay; far from it.  Not to mention, I’ve long trusted the audience to write the better half of my articles anyway.

No, the surprise here is consistency.

Here’s the rub – and reread it as necessary, allowing it to sink in:  the same people arguing 1999+1 and 1750 point games and Allies as game-breakers and 2K isn’t balanced…

…are the same people who swore they wanted a competitive system in 5th!  Who said they wanted to use all the rules in a tournament!  Who said Comp was bunk and everyone should be allowed to play what they wanted!  

These are the same people who thought the only ‘real’ mission was a 12-inch deployment zone and Kill Points for the win!  Anything else interfered with their MSU army – the only way to play, where any loss was the terrain in the middle.

Now… NOW…  the game is here but two weeks and some bright bulb out there thinks there’s more than enough information to base a blanket judgement on?  There are people actually writing that there is only one way to play this game, otherwise it’s broken.

The game isn’t broken, only the old 5th Edition paradigm.

Deathstars won’t break the game; the trick to dealing with them is not to deal with them.  Play the mission.  Nobody promised you easy.

Flyers won’t break the game; but sometimes you might have to pay the tax.  If you can’t beat ’em, ignore ’em.  Hold the objective and hunker down.

Allocation won’t break the game – and I don’t even need to say why!  Kirby has written the definitive piece on the subject.  Read it HERE, and rejoice!  He’s made it easy for you.

Dual force org slots don’t break the game; they add to the complexity.  They breathe new life into stale armies (*cough*  Nids!  Sisters! *cough*).  Go ahead, combine them with allies!  Just how many points do you think you have?

You can’t have it all; the required units will eat your points but quick.  The elitist amalgamation you’re left with no doubt has holes to exploit, not least of which is weakness to any mission involving an objective.  (I’d go through the book again!)

The game isn’t broken, it’s reborn.  There are new challenges to master and new ways to play the army you want to take you there.  The game appears to reward a balanced approach; keep that in mind, then let your army take shape naturally.  It’s time to collect again – it’s all fun again!  

Then, with your army at hand, arrive at the table and play the game you want to play.  Outthink your opponent.  Outmaneuver his units.  If he’s playing allocation games off a Death Star, shoot the two five-strong troop units hiding in the back, then play keep away for awhile.

At least you’ll have fun!

There is one thing that’s broken, sure as spitting, and that’s the paradigm about what the game is and isn’t.  

It’s a game with multiple missions, with different avenues to success and different units a general can take for the task.  It’s about playing in all phases of the game, not just maximizing toward mastery of one.

What it isn’t is a shooting match across an empty field.  What it isn’t is collecting Kill Points to prove who’s best.  Let’s shoot a moving target this time, huh?

Face it, we’re a more modern audience now.  Maybe we were brought here kicking and screaming, but we’re here now.  The old missions were played out.  They’re too simple; we now value complexity, even as we decry it.  It’s what will still be keeping us interested five years from now!  

I suppose I’ll play Checkers, but I’d much rather try to master Chess.  

Here’s a final word on the concept of ‘broken.’  You’ll like it – it’s very like a Koan…