Warhammer 40K: We Need to Talk About Painting Requirements
9th Edition shocked many with GW’s points-for-painted-armies rules. But was it too much, or too little?
As we move forward many of us are starting to plan to attend events. This usually includes forming a list, building and testing various parts of that list, and finally getting the final touches on the army before making them tournament ready. In the last few years, we saw a trend by tournament organizers to require armies to be painted to a 3 color minimum or you would get points deducted or have those unpainted models removed. It was done by some of the larger events because they were starting to see a lot of the top tables with armies that had very bad looking conversions, models that were only base coated, maybe with some basing, or they weren’t painted at all and were just grey plastic models.
The increase in exposure of the game to a wider audience also made it feasible to have an event put its best foot forward in these situations by making sure that the armies that the general public would be seeing on the top table were painted to a basic standard as to not bring embarrassment to the game. Some would argue that this still has been achieved but that’s another discussion. With all tournaments requiring painted armies, and it even being incorporated in the match play grand tournament book, should tournaments still require armies to be painted or should the requirement be done away with and let the actual mission points determine who wins a game/tournament?
No Requirement Needed
Many people seemed surprised when the points for paint were revealed with the new edition. People seemed concerned about losing a close game because they didn’t get those ten points because their army wasn’t fully painted to a tabletop standard. This isn’t really an issue on the RTT level since many players use these tournaments as a way to test out lists, so many organizers simply do not enforce the rule or just automatically give every player 10 points no matter how much or little the army is painted.
I painted each Marine’s name on the back of their base. Let me show you!
However, that is the whole point of the rule. Like the painting requirement at tournaments in the past, this rule helps ensure that armies that are played at the tournament are painted or the rule helps to keep those unpainted, or barely painted, armies away from the top so that the people watching in person or later, if the game was being streamed, can only see fully painted armies battling it out for the top spot. Once players that want to compete for the top spot start losing games because of this new rule, they will certainly be starting to paint their armies, or at least pay someone to paint them, in order to compete for the top prize. As people see players with painted armies in the big tournaments, it will trickle down and you may see a lot of newer players making sure their models are painted when they got to their local RTTs.
It is Still Needed
Just because there is a rule about armies needing to be painted doesn’t mean that players will actually paint their armies. There are always those players that will not follow the tournament rules and will try to slide by them and hope they either don’t get discovered or just get a slap on the wrist. The other hiccup with the idea is that it really doesn’t help keep players with unpainted armies from contending in the tournament. Depending on the player and match up, a player can sometimes easily score enough points in their win to overcome the ten-point penalty. From what we have seen in many of the tournaments that have occurred so far, the large point difference happens a lot.
I play the Relictors, I just haven’t applied the decals…
So if I intend to bring a top-tier army that I have extensive practice with then I will most likely score enough points to overcome the penalty. This is the main reason that the rule needs to still be in place. The other reason is so that people still keep the habit of making sure you have a painted army. If we only rely on the Games Workshop rule, then players will get used to not painting their army if they don’t care about it. If Games Workshop decides to get rid of the ten-point rule then tournaments will have to re-implement the paint requirement and then we are back to square one in regards to enforcement. It is better just to keep the paint requirement since everyone is already used to it.
~That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think, and what you think of the paint standard in general, in the comments section below.
