So I've taken up the mantle of Dungeon Master once again at my shops Dungeons & Dragons Encounters every Wednesday night. Of all the table top games that exist role-playing has to be my favorite. It's a shame that it's also seems to be one of the most complicated endeavors to plan and execute.
Along with D&D I'm hosting a Thursday night Shadowrun game that manages to fill every seat I have available to me. It's nice to run two games like this back to back. If the themes were similar that fact might be different. Shadowrun and D&D have very few meaningful similarities and that makes it easy to engage in each of them week after week.
There was a long time where I was 'done' with Dungeons and Dragons. It had been a rough run in 4th edition where the 'edition wars' here on the internet were the loudest. Every customer who wasn't part of a table on Wednesday nights had nothing but criticism. I'll say that in my heart Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition will always be my favorite; that doesn't make it a good game.
Now that I've come back around I can see the game (in it's current form) as it is. We're just having fun running into ancient dwarven keeps and bashing in monster domes. Granted, there's a greater story being told by Wizards of the Coast and the design team but the best parts of this game are the moment to moment scenarios. Dungeons and Dragons thrives on immediate threat and immediate reward.
The set pieces and their devious trappings are just as important -if not more so- than the over-arching plots scrawled within the campaign books. This is where the stories come from. The Barbarian who spends his bonus action and rolls a critical hit twice in a row? He saved the party from a powerful wraith! The mysterious slime oozing forth from an old tattered door? Only the druid knows what horrors might lurk beyond, and only he knows the stories of the ancient insects that might be borrowing beneath their very feet!
It's nice to take a break from high brow gaming, complex NPC's and interconnected plots. It feels good to present a group of players a straight forward challenge or a logic puzzle that can grant them immediate satisfaction. Even more satisfying for me that I can sit back and wing it every now and then and everyone still has the opportunity to have fun.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
The Eldar are coming!
It seems the 40k releases are coming at breakneck speeds as of late. Seventh edition has been a whirlwind of codices and supplements. Now that the gap between 5th and 7th have been closed Games Workshop turns It's attention to 6th edition, and there's no sign of slowing down. Codex Eldar: Craftworld will be out in a week, and with it comes the hope that our current meta will see some much needed change. Change that most people have wanted for a long time.
It's true that Eldar have been at the forefront of the tournament scene. But I believe this isn't so much about codex imbalance as it is about players taking the easy way out. Eldar used to be a codex that took a lot of finess. They had a speed about them, and each unit had a specific job. With the 6th edition book the wave serpent became an excellent utility unit. It's fast and has enough options that it can take almost any field role. Now some might be saying this is the exact reason the codex is broken. But what about the other armies we see on the field? Let's take the chaos players love affair with the heldrake as an example.
The heldrake has been spammed in many lists just like the wave serpent. Unlike the serpent the heldrake only has one specific job it excels at; killing space marines. It lacks the universal utility a wave serpent is praised for. A much better candidate for chaos utility is the Defiler. For an extra 30 points a stock Defiler kills marines at longer range, carries more survivability, and can hold down large threats in close combat. But we don't see three Defilers in lists do we? I wonder why that is.
Wave serpent spam has always been around because they've always been good at zooming in on objectives. It's an old tactic. Marines used rhinos to capture and land speeders to contest. Every army had that fast unit for claiming objectives during the end game rush. What the sixth edition codex gave us was an opportunity to step away from wave serpents for a while. Have you ever seen a war walker gun wall? It's terrifying, more so than wave serpents. But it's not easy. Wave serpents are easy.
And that's why we see that in the meta. Not because the codex is broken. I believe in the asymmetrical design of the 40,000 codices. I like that facing Dark Eldar or Orks makes me think differently about my tactics. I like that my Chaos Marines are a defensive force. They carry none of the leadership mechanics of a loyalist Marine force and therefor can't afford to be brave. There's so many little differences that make each codex great, and we waste time trying to min-max lists and argue about what's broken, what needs fixing. The truth of the matter is, nothing needs fixing. The meta has had us stuck in this rut for years. We don't pick fun models or interesting units and practice anymore. We try to guess the most broken thing and copy the next guy.
I dare you to build a list that doesn't use your favorite 'broken' model or squad. Omit the wave serpent, ignore the heldrake. Play that 'subpar' list until you know it inside out. Make it work for you. That's what these codices we're designed for. You get to choose the models you love and perfect those tactics. Play enough with an army you really love looking at and soon you begin to maximize their potential and minimize their flaws. Eventually you'll be giving your opponent tough choices, because those subpar squads will start to look like the real threats they are.
It's true that Eldar have been at the forefront of the tournament scene. But I believe this isn't so much about codex imbalance as it is about players taking the easy way out. Eldar used to be a codex that took a lot of finess. They had a speed about them, and each unit had a specific job. With the 6th edition book the wave serpent became an excellent utility unit. It's fast and has enough options that it can take almost any field role. Now some might be saying this is the exact reason the codex is broken. But what about the other armies we see on the field? Let's take the chaos players love affair with the heldrake as an example.
The heldrake has been spammed in many lists just like the wave serpent. Unlike the serpent the heldrake only has one specific job it excels at; killing space marines. It lacks the universal utility a wave serpent is praised for. A much better candidate for chaos utility is the Defiler. For an extra 30 points a stock Defiler kills marines at longer range, carries more survivability, and can hold down large threats in close combat. But we don't see three Defilers in lists do we? I wonder why that is.
Wave serpent spam has always been around because they've always been good at zooming in on objectives. It's an old tactic. Marines used rhinos to capture and land speeders to contest. Every army had that fast unit for claiming objectives during the end game rush. What the sixth edition codex gave us was an opportunity to step away from wave serpents for a while. Have you ever seen a war walker gun wall? It's terrifying, more so than wave serpents. But it's not easy. Wave serpents are easy.
And that's why we see that in the meta. Not because the codex is broken. I believe in the asymmetrical design of the 40,000 codices. I like that facing Dark Eldar or Orks makes me think differently about my tactics. I like that my Chaos Marines are a defensive force. They carry none of the leadership mechanics of a loyalist Marine force and therefor can't afford to be brave. There's so many little differences that make each codex great, and we waste time trying to min-max lists and argue about what's broken, what needs fixing. The truth of the matter is, nothing needs fixing. The meta has had us stuck in this rut for years. We don't pick fun models or interesting units and practice anymore. We try to guess the most broken thing and copy the next guy.
I dare you to build a list that doesn't use your favorite 'broken' model or squad. Omit the wave serpent, ignore the heldrake. Play that 'subpar' list until you know it inside out. Make it work for you. That's what these codices we're designed for. You get to choose the models you love and perfect those tactics. Play enough with an army you really love looking at and soon you begin to maximize their potential and minimize their flaws. Eventually you'll be giving your opponent tough choices, because those subpar squads will start to look like the real threats they are.
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