Brent: Fluffy Bunnies Have Teeth

My entry into 40k was via reading Horus Heresy fluff, late one night on my computer on a long-dismantled angelfire site with various links to copied fluff from various sourcebooks. Every choice I’ve made in my wargaming career has been to capture the same drive that kept me riveted to the screen well into the night on that first discovery of the richness of the background that Warhammer had to offer. And while I’m not one to write fanfiction about my invented commander, or fan-author new rules, I am one to want a project to create that has something nobody else has.

By and large, I’m not a terribly competitive person – I’m a teacher by trade, and enjoy the process of play more than the product in part because the majority of my interactions with others are by nature non-competitive. If you’ve ever had that friend’s dad or other peter-pan-adult that got ego boosts from winning against kids at whatever pursuit, you know how sad that kind of petty competitiveness can be. On the other hand, I’m decently good at tactics and strategy, and have put in my time to be better than an average player. I fall into the “fluff bunny” category because I like the whole shebang – the modeling, the painting, the project-end as well as the playing end, and it has to have a larger scope to keep me interested and not succumbing to “project add.” Fluff bunnies can use that idea of larger scope to their advantage in order to create some new and interesting list ideas, and find a match that fits their ideal play style best.

Plus, it’s not fun when you know you’re going to win before you try, and unless you’re playing the elite of your area who are all playing WAAC lists (min/maxed for every advantage), it’s less about proving your skills as a general and more akin to spending hours grind-leveling up in a vrpg so you can instakill a boss. It’s more mechanics and less actual skill.

How do you make a game fun? Some people have competitive local leagues, or a number of different levels to play at. The best example of this is the tournament player, for whom finding the most experienced opponents and attempting to beat them is a drive. For the competitive player, the fun is in the conflict of self vs. other, and how that conflict pans out long-term.

The “fluff bunnies,” on the other hand, are different. They are individuals whose primary conflict is vs. self – defeating an opponent is actually a test of their own flexibility or strategy because they aren’t in competition with others at heart. They have fun playing the game. If the game is too easy, or the locals too inexperienced to provide a challenge, though, what are your options?

If you’ve ever known (or been) that student who decided not to do homework in a boring class just to see if you could still get an A, or played a game with younger neighborhood kids outnumbered, you know of self-handicapping to keep things interesting. Sometimes, you need to make a list that has a thematic component, or a list that has a modeling opportunity, rather than one optimized to win. If you can win with that, you better prove your supremacy than if you buy the newest supercharged codex-creep posterchild and can win (when even new players can hold their own against veterans in those conditions).