Tales of a Ringer: A Case in Point

Courtesy of GW

A day or two ago I wrote a post about why we need edition updates and if there might be some better way of doing things.  You can see it here: Why On Earth Do We Need New Editions?

Well, I got to play my game as the ringer for my friend's tournament today. I only played one game as the wife wanted some help in the afternoon with the boy.  My friend obligingly let me play one game and had another ringer lined up for rounds 2 and 3. 

My instructions were to make a sub-optimal army that would be easier to win against.  Thus, I went down my check list of things that make a Dark Elf army nasty. 1) Unkillable Lord TM, 2) double hydras, 3) cauldron of blood, and 4) insane volumes of fire. Easy enough.  I decided to start out by taking no ward saves whatsoever on my characters.  Thus, I took a single level 4 with the darkstar cloak (+1 casting dice).  I then decided to forgo having a fighty lord as my general at all and instead took two slightly less fighty hero characters.  One had a S6 weapon and armor that got better the more he killed and the other had a S5 armor piercing whip and a 2+ armor save.  Nothing special.  Next, every army needs a BSB in 8th.  Let's take a BSB with naught but a bathrobe for protection, a Death Hag.  I gave her a sub-optimal setup with the hydra banner (+1 attack for the unit on the charge), touch of death (killing blow) and cry of war (on the turn I charge, you take a leadership test or lose a point of WS).  So, yeah my character selection is fairly blah, though I did take the obligatory level 4 and shadow lore as it is a good beater lore.  Here's the character setup.

Level 4- darkstar cloak
Master-crimson death, blood armor, seadragon cloak
Master-whip of agony, dragonhelm, heavy armor, seadragon cloak, shield
Death Hag BSB- hydra banner, touch of death, cry of war

Next I looked at core.  Well, I needed to limit my shooting, so instead of multiple units of shooty, I took a 40 man spear unit (dun, dun, dun, horde unit), two ten man crossbows units with musicians, and two dark rider units with crossbows.  This produced 60 shots and a fat unit of squishy elves to chop up. 

I skipped to the rare selections then and did exactly what I was supposed.  No double hydras.  So, I took a single hydra and two repeater bolt throwers which everyone says are crap now.  They are. 

Finally, I looked at my elite slots.  In order to make the army look dangerous but not actually be, I decided to sink a 5th of my total points into a unit of naked, screaming witches.  That's right, I took 21 witch elves with an assassin.  They had an armor piercing banner, the assassin had the venom sword (which I am told was a waste) and the hag had +D3 extra attacks.  In all, this unit usually folds like a wet tissue.

To round things out I took a 10 man squad of black guard with a banner and the ASF banner. 

So, sum total for my ringer army, I had:

Level 4- darkstar cloak
Master-crimson death, blood armor, seadragon cloak
Master-whip of agony, dragonhelm, heavy armor, seadragon cloak, shield
Death Hag BSB- hydra banner, touch of death, cry of war

40 spears- full command
10 crossbows- musician
10 crossbows- musician
5 dark riders- crossbows
5 dark riders- crossbows

21 witch elves- armor piercing banner, hag with rune of khaine, assassin with extra handweapon and venom sword.
10 black guard- standard, ASF banner

Hydra
2 bolt throwers

So, in all I had 1,000pts of my army with no save at all.  The best armor save besides my hydra and masters was a 5+.  What did I take that was good? A single hydra, a horde unit of spears, and shadow lore.  That's about all I needed. 

I, interestingly enough, played against an Orc and Goblin army with no casters.  It had a bit of everything.  Lord, BSB, warboss on boar, horde of gobbos, 18 black orcs, 18 savage orcs, 5 savage boar boyz, 3 trolls, 20ish orc boyz, 2 x 5 squig hoppers, 4 bolt throwers, 2 giants, 2 mangler squigs. So, what's a ringer army supposed to do when his opponent is less optimal than he is?

The tournament used some of the BRB's scenarios and we played Blood and Glory which created a system where you had a Break point (equal to 1 point for each 1,000pt. of army rounding up) and Fortitude points ( 1 for banners and BSBs, and 2 for general)  When your fortitude number reached the same number as your break point you lost, no matter what.  So basically, when your fortitude number reached 3, you lost.  My opponent and I both had 8 fortitude points, so I needed to kill/capture 5 points worth of generals and standards. 

The game ended in turn 3 when his general, bsb and 18 man black orc unit charged my witch elf unit.  My assassin challenged and drew the BSB, who he subsequently slipped one wound through and killed via the venom sword.  Then my Death Hag put all of her attacks on the general garnering one killing blow.  Finally, the witches killed some 8 or 9 black orcs due to poison, armor piercing and just plain rolling tons of attacks.  In the end, the unit fled only dealing about 5 wounds to my witches.  We decided to keep playing as if it were a normal victory points mission.  In the end, the unit that worked for me the best was the horde spears with level 4 using okkham's mindrazor (use leadership value for strength).  I even threw units forward carelessly at the midgame point just to create some fun for my opponent.  In the end, I came out with a win in victory points as well.  A big thing that helped garner the victory here was no shooting to speak of.  My witches die in droves to shooting, but they were never shot until the end when my opponent got a nice flank shot with two of his bolt throwers that killed about 6 witches. 

So, looking at this from a whole game perspective and not just the scenario, the thing that won me the game was the level 4 with buffed spears in a horde formation.  Which happens to be the perceived successful build for most units in the Fantasy these days.

I failed miserably as a ringer.

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Why On Earth Do We Need New Editions?

I got involved with GW as a college junior when I was introduced to Warhammer Fantasy by my brother.  This was during 6th edition.  Since then, I have seen the passing of 6th edition, the advent of 7th, and the knee-jerk reaction that is 8th edition.

With 6th edition 40k rumor blood in the water, I have begun to wonder about GW's edition release plan.  I understand that historically, after every couple of editions, GW severely changes up its games' rulesets. However, I wonder if this is good.  For crying out loud Dungeons and Dragons has only gone through 4 (major) edition changes. 

Do we need to reinvent the game every edition or two?  Should there even be a regular cycle of core ruleset changes like the ones GW uses?  Being a Warhammer Fantasy player, I have seen the game go from what I think was a fairly decent and logical game (6th and 7th edition) to a totally new animal that has gone a long way in completely alienating quite a large population of gamers (8th edition).  I have played perhaps a dozen 8th ed. games simply because it is such a drastic departure from the previous 8-10 years of gaming.  It also completely invalidates a lot of the collection of minis I have.  I simply don't have the miniatures to create a truly successful army (read as an army with multiple 40+ model units).  What I had worked beautiful in the previous edition though, even helping me win a major Indy GT. 

This makes wonder if being old reliable might be better than trying to inject perceived freshness in order to garner profits.  Personally, if a gaming company did all it could to maintain a solid and reliable core game mechanic with occasional erratas and corrections to rules found to hamper gameplay, I would stick with it much better.  However, having a game that every 5 years says, "screw your army and rules knowledge," is taxing.  The prospect of spending days, weeks, and months recollecting models, relearning rules, and replaytesting armies is enough to make players, even veterans throw up their hands and quit.  And I don't blame them.  Currently, it seems like most threads on blogs about 8th ed. Fantasy are bashing it's core rules and 6th ed. 40k rumor threads are already garnering their fair share of angst at having to deal with a new edition.

So, is there a solution?  Could GW simply be better at amending and errata-ing their current rules (i.e. Saying they were wrong)?  Could they simply work at creating better written, well balanced source material like campaign books and mission packs? 

I simply don't know, but there is nothing worse in life (and in a hobby) than seeing all of your hard work completely invalidated after a period of time. 

Other useful articles:
Staving Off Hobby Burnout
Really?!
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Staving Off Hobby Burnout

Since I teach, summer is a real important time for me as it allows me quite a bit of extra paint time to work on commissions.  This is great since teacher pay is absolute crap.  However, I find that I usually run into the proverbial wall at some point about halfway to two thirds of the way through a concentrated time of painting or other hobby related activity.  It is at this point, that I find that I really don't want to finish my work, would rather do just about anything than think about Warhammer 40k, and get plain old lazy.  If you have been in the hobby long, I am sure that you know what I mean. 

Burnout occurs in just about everything we do in life if we aren't careful to regulate ourselves.  It can lead to people giving up on something that they, up to a point, were very committed to.  So, I would like to give a few tips on how to avoid burnout, shorten the period of burnout, and/or get yourself motivated again.

1) Do other things with your time.  As mentioned above, I spend a great amount of my summer time working on commissions.  The demands of meeting deadlines and making sure everything looks great can really be a weight on my shoulders.  That is why I have instituted the "day off".  Basically, this is a day, once or twice a week, in which I am not allowed to paint.  I spend them time hanging out with the wife and son (whom I hang out with regardless) doing something fun with them.  I read a book.  I take a nap.  I watch a movie.  Basically this is a weekly scheduled break from the hobby. Doing something else amidst hobby related stuff keeps your fresh and allows you to work out some of the stress and tension that build up with concentrated hobbying.

2) Take a short-term fast.  Don't touch the hobby for a week or two straight.  This is similar to #1, but for a longer period of time.  I have found that, in many cases, I start to jones for the hobby more after taking a long break from it.  This is good.  It gets you motivated to dive back in.  I find this especially useful after a long tournament experience (army prep/painting, playtesting, actual tournament games).  After spending so much time preparing for a tournament and playing in it, it is nice to take a good break from the hobby to detox and allow your batteries to recharge.

3) Doing something else similiar...but different.  Take up another game for a time.  Play some Warmahordes.  If you don't want to spend excessive amounts of money, try boardgaming or even roleplaying. Most good LGS have a solid crowd of people who can help you get involved in other avenues and who are glad to show you the ropes.  By doing something with a different style, rules, etc. you allow yourself to recharge, while not getting too far away from what really drives you in the hobby. I generally swap between playing 40k and Fantasy.

4) Get inspired.  When I just can't muster the motivation to paint, I look for inspiration. To do so, I try one of two methods.  I either pull out a totally different model than what I'm working on and paint it, usually some spiffy looking hero or HQ model, or I go looking for inspiration.  I check the blog rolls.  I go to coolminiornot.com. I go play a game and take a look at what my buddies are doing.  Most of these get the juices flowing and prep me to take my painting again. 

It isn't a matter of if you burnout or not, but usually when will it arrive.  Everyone reaches their maximum level of saturation and needs a break.  How you handle this event can many time determine whether or not you throw in the towel or keep trucking.  Hopefully, you will find a way to refresh and recharge and then leap back into the fray.

Other articles you might find useful:
Hobby Fervor, Community Understanding, and a Real World Economy
What got you into the game?

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Why You Should Spend More Money on a Better Brush

I'm going to start this post with a woeful tale of a time when I chose to save a bit of money on a gift for my wife (bad idea guys, just splurge). 

Not my wife, but she looks similar when sewing.

When I first got married, my wife declared that she wanted to take up a hobby.  Being the astute observer I am, I discovered that she was interested in sewing, namely the kind that requires a sewing machine.  At the time (and even now) we were pretty hard up for cash.  She was getting a master's degree and I was a teacher You can imagine our position.  Undaunted, I decided to shop for a sewing machine for her.  I looked high and low and finally found an economically priced unit that got decent reviews online.  To make sure I did my homework, I called a local sewing shop and asked their opinion.  I distinctly remember to this day, the lady on the other end of the line telling me, "If you want to her to get frustrated and risk giving up, then you can get her that machine."  She then went on to try to sell me a more expensive machine, which I knew I couldn't afford.  Thus, I bought the economically priced machine.  My wife loved it!  She was quick to work with it and we were even delighted to find out that her sister-in-law had the same machine and had few to no problems.  Furthermore, I asked a friend who is a fashion design instructor and seamstress to give my wife a few lessons.  In the end, we figured we were set. However, as time went on, my wife would find herself in between project for long periods of time due to life and what not.  Now, every time she pulls the thing out, there are exasperated cries of frustration due to the fact that she can't ever remember how to get the thing loaded up and started.  It seems to require a different preparatory regimen every time!

What does this have to do with painting wargame miniatures?

The morale of the story. 

Sure, you can save money purchasing cheaper synthetic brushes like the ones GW makes or simply the cheap ones you can find at your local hobby store.  But, many painters find, they are frustrating themselves using a far inferior instrument.  Simply put, painting with a cruddy, cheap brush could actually be hindering your painting more than you know.  I have met many average to decent painters who don't think they are any good, but could easily improve their result by using a superior brush.  I learned this when one of my friends who is a painting mentor, suggested I spluge and purchase a Windsor Newton Series 7 Kolinksy Round brush.  This thing is the real deal.  Each brush runs around $10 which could probably make most gamers, think I'm crazy, but the change in my painting was noticeable the first time I picked up one of the brushes.  It was amazing.  The way the natural hair tips soaked up and released the paint made smooth lines, more accurate painting, and an overall cleaner product for me. Just by picking up the brush!  Not to mention, the WN brushes last far longer than the cheapies. 

I know there are plenty of people out there who say things like, "I use crappy GW brushes and love the result." Trust me, the nicer brushes are more expensive for a reason.  They merit their higher price.  If you think you love painting with GW brushes, pick up a natural hair brush like the Windsor Newton Series 7's and you will be amazed at how much better the painting experience is. 

Suffice it to say that when I picked up the WN brushes, I have never gone back.....and next time I buy a sewing machine, I am going for top of the line!

Other articles you might find useful:
Painting Halfway Decent Power Weapons
Space Wolf Project....Complete!
Live Long and Prosper... Making Vulkan


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