Weekender XLBS: 3 Colours Minimum; Tournament Painting – Too Harsh?
September 24, 2017 by brennon
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Don’t remember getting a hug from @warzan when I joined backstage but the kiss only got weird with the tongue.
Welcome aboard Kevin!
Yeah sorry… I can get quite carried away 😉
I must admit that if I saw an Oliver Hardy lookalike in a Desert Rats t-shirt hanging around a street corner looking shifty I’d be straight onto the Colerainestone Cops! (Sorry, that last bit was a bit forced)
Lol
Especially if they said they just wanted to feel their package! Or was it present?.Can’t remember now
And yes I’m settling myself in to be schooled on the importance of the wars between France and England in 1697…
This could be a long day lol 😉
Bloody Haspburgs and their bloody Holy Roman Empire!
Ah, the ‘Nine Years War’. Yes I can see that working for Twilight Struggle, and boy… there’s some fascinating history and intrigue to learn about then!
Ah – I stand corrected, you’re referring to the War of the Spanish Succession, and what followed that, which followed as a consequence of matters not covered by the Treaty of. Ryswick that ended the Nine Years War. Intriguing!?!
Ah @warzan. The nine years war (as is tradition) lasted 10 years, well 9 years 51 weeks. and so some guys killed some other guys while a some guys in ships made big heavy metal balls go fast towards other people in ships and some guys on horsies rode around looking dashing while not really doing that much of any real use. Then at the end of the day France got Alsace while the Holy Roman Empire got Lorraine and of course that was the end of the matter and it absolutely would not become a giant issue in another… Read more »
I see what you are doing there 😉
#useyourreversephsycologypowerswisely
Happy Sunday!!
The board game for “The Expanse” is supposed to be like Twilight Struggle
I’m really struggling to get past the first episode of that 🙁
Me to. Just couldn’t get into it
The first episodes of the TV series are weird, they introduce characters that only appear much later in the books. The series gets better, but I highly recommend the books first.
Never read he book but the series is great, grab some beers and try again.
@warzan I’m giving The Expanse another shot. The first two episodes drag but I’ve been informed by many friends that it really picks up after episode 3.Still, it’s a bit of a struggle…
@Warzan says, if you’re going to build an army of demons go for Khorne. It makes sense if you’re bringing a pack of demons to go to war, then bring the ones that worship the god of war, not the god of pimples, not the god of you’ll pay extra for that in Thailand, and definitely not the god of it didn’t look like that a minute ago! 😉
Eloquently put @avernos!
Ah but my dear @avernos a hammer doesn’t fix every fault.
Why not bring the whole toolbox with an Undivided force.
you just need to hit it harder 😉
I learned at the Jeremy Clarkson school of mechanics here ^^
Yup hit it till it’s fixed or you need a new one
And by new one we mean a new hammer.
just get a bigger hammer.
@thisisazrael I could see, with Guild Ball doing all of the Teams in pre-coloured plastic, that there should be a tournament with unpainted minis. There is no need for more terraine then a pitch mat, so it is a hybrid boardgame with wargaming rulesets.
happy sunday. u guys do know hw to brighten up a sunday morning lol
you’ll probably get a more complete answer later, but I thought I’d throw this in Charlemagne was born in 742 and died in 814, which kicks off the “Dark Ages”, the viking raid on Lindisfarne was 793 and that’s often viewed as the start of the viking age and raiding in britain.
@thisisazrael the two metal scale armour in that picture is I think weathering, but it was sometimes used for decorative purposes. Cataphract cavalry often used this.
I forgot to mention the Roman Empire pulled out of Britain in roughly 400, so that period between them leaving and the saxon arriving shortly afterwards through until the vikings arriving is where A&A fits for Saga, proto dark age 🙂
@avernos and everyone else . You might find these interesting
https://darkagewargaming.wordpress.com/category/age-of-arthur/page/2/
The European ‘Dark Age’ begins with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, and lasts to the Charlemagne at the earliest, or 1066 at the latest. The Viking Age covers the latter part of the Dark Ages. The Arthurian Age is the earliest part, especially in Britain. The last Roman legions left Britain to fend for itself in 410. Historians tend to use Early Middle Age as opposed to Dark Age as the latter is perjorative. Likewise Greek historians now prefer Iron Age to Dark Age for the period between the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation… Read more »
*to the reign of Charlemagne.
Is there a list of the ‘ages’ that relate to mankind that is sort of official anywhere? @redben
Not that I know of off the top of my head. A quick google turned up this –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_periods
Happy Sunday – a dangerous kettle of fish to open with the 3 colors up. I would say that it is the choice of the TO, are you trying to run a narrative colourful event, or an advanced chess game or both
I want to pickup on this Tournament and respect thing. Let’s look at it from the TOs perspective and the participants expectations of the tournament which almost certainly includes: – good organisation in the run up, clear comms and smooth booking/payment – a suitable venue with essential facilities – refreshments, catering etc. – well planned scenarios and round structuring (ko, round-robin) – organised prizes/raffles that often cost OK and then what? And this to me is the clincher… – nice gaming tables with suitable scenery finished to a standard. If a TO has gone to that much effort then the… Read more »
BTW, I don’t think PP intended page 5 to apply to organised tournaments, more about casual settings and how to play/enjoy their game. That may have been adopted as a pronciple for organised play.
Check this out however – I’m intrigued by the subtle difference between the Format entries for Masters and Champions events!
http://files.privateerpress.com/op/2017/LnL/Masters%20n%20Champions%20Rules%202017.pdf
Agreed but it set a tone in the early days that while no doubt added to its success it did perhaps also overemphasised the meta over the other aspects of it as a hobby.
But equally it was a key differentiator at the start and i would be reluctant to change history on that 🙂
I want to feel entitled too! Rather than be ‘shackled’ by the inconvenience of having to purchase and assemble models for a tournament (yet alone paint them) I want to pay, turn up and be provided with models ready to play so my entitlement of being allowed to experience a competitive tournament is met, otherwise surely I’m being excluded and discriminated against! Where else do certain peoples logic lead us?
Actually, people who don’t want to paint anything are catered for tournament wise. Systems like X-Wing etc, yet alone board and catd games are for you.
How perfect the world could be!! lol
Well come to my DzC tournament I provided two players with fully painted armies and had a third ready to go…lol
Recently released Runewars tournament rules specifically state “Players MAY paint their models”
https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/90/30/90309e24-c076-4ce8-bd1a-5bc0b052f633/rwm_tournament_regulations_v10_text_version.pdf
The Star Wars Legions question is interesting. Going back to the ‘respect’ issue, I can imagine there will be lots of players who would be deeply offended and upset if their opponent laid out a force of pink StormTroopers with a Purple Darth Vader. They aren’t having their immersion experience diminished by unpainted models – its under full scale assault! I can imagine some rules about not going outside some bounds of conformance to the lore based on published sources with the right to exclude if deliberately broken. The IP owners might like that too!
Yup the starwars point is a very interesting one!
Happy Sunday, Thanks for the shout out and thank you @thisisazrael, who found time to teach and give me a game. Also a thank you to @redben who helped me learn and play Netrunner too. It was my first time and both were very gentle. I also got in a couple of games post boot camp which I really enjoyed. 7 wonders is a great game with a good level of depth and is certainly a game I would like to play again now I understand it that little bit better. I also squeezed in a Saga game with the… Read more »
glad you enjoyed the game @noyjatat and your line of chess followed by checkers sums it up beautifully, and I will be using that often to explain it. Have been talking to @Lloyd about getting some games on camera in the not too distant future.
Very cool, would be interesting to see some Let’s Plays as there are so many forces and each play differently.
Yeah im all for awards for painting, sportsmanship and other things. But i prefer clear boundries between them as i wouldn’t expect to have to play a game or be nice to other painters to win a painting contest 🙂
All of our local 40k tournaments give an award for “Best General” which is the player who did the most winning of games. But in order to win the big tournament trophy you must at least meet the minimum requirements for painting (and other categories like theme, sportsmanship, etc). If you come to the tournament with a grey plastic army that’s a netlist WAAC spamfest and act like a complete tool to all of your opponents and win all your games on turn 2, you’ll win best general but be 1/3 to halfway down the rankings overall.
There is nothing new with the competition and painting problems. Even back in the 80’s people were complaining about unpainted minis. At WRG 6th and 7th tournaments you would get bare metal minis stuck on bits of beer mats
And, presumably, most, enjoyed the experience and those who were ‘offended’ by such ‘sacrilegious’ practice as unpainted minis, were very much in the minority? ; )
It would seem that no matter what the event, subject matter etc, we are always trying to appease everyone, (often those in the minorities!).
I will clarify one point on this, disrespect and offence don’t have to go hand in hand 🙂
No one has to take offence (something they do by choice or not) for someone else to show a lack of respect (equally something they do by choice or not)
🙂
I’m torn on the painting issue.
Whenever I’ve played at 40K events it doesn’t bother me to see an unpainted army but at a Bolt Action event it seems very out of place.
I suppose I split the two. For Historical games, even friendly games, I only play with painted minis (seeing as normally one person brings two forces there isn’t any rejection involved) but with fantasy stuff it doesn’t matter to me.
I haven’t played in tournaments for years probably decades now so never encountered the 3 colour minimum thing. So if some one came along with their minis and just had 3 small dots of paint of different colours somewhere on the figure would that count as 3 colour minimum?
Nope, that would qualify for a game of slapsies 😉
As you would expect there is some ‘sub rules’ to the whole 3 colours minimum thing to try and acciunt for total paint coverage etc
Happy Sunday! On the topic of ‘painted vs unpainted’ minis: Back in the 60’s, when I first got into wargaming,(it started after watching the film ‘They Died with Their Boots On’ a 1941 B&W film staring Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer, after which my uncle Ron explained the history bit to me, I was hooked!). I think I was about 8 or 9, didn’t get pocket money, yet, and only had Airfix’s ‘Betta-Bilda’ (a cheaper version of Lego!). Had no Airfix ‘toy soldiers’ yet, so the white single bricks were the US cavalry and the double bricks, the Indians… Read more »
WOW what a show! Loved the massive chat about the painted miniatures… Really interesting, I do find myself on the side of @Warzan and @brennon. I want to go and fight my war against hordes of green orks, take the fight to the Ultramarines, the way i see the events unfold in my mind are so much more real when against painted armies. fighting grey space marines could be any chapter, just doesn’t sit the same. For me thats the enjoyment of the game as a whole, I’m not super competitive, nor a great painter. I’m not even sure I… Read more »
Hey Marty! Playing some games and putting a face to the name would be epic!
We’re actually hosting a 40k open day at the studio on Sunday October 22nd if that suited for you to come up?
Facebook Event Link
Az
A lot of hurt feelings around for the painting fans here 😉 A lot of entitlement too. No idea where this ‘disrespect’ thing comes into it. Disrespecting me at a tournament would be arguing every point, turning up late, and generally being a dick. Unpainted minis doesn’t disrespect me. Not knowing the rules doesn’t necessarily disrespect me as tournaments are great ways to learn the rules. Just turn up, play fair, don’t be a dick. No idea how a painted mini is less of a token than an unpainted mini. Most minis have a footprint of their based, sometimes their… Read more »
Disrespect is relative and not black or white. If an event has a requirement for painted armies (to a rudimentary level) then that is part of the experience, if enough people want to do it it will go ok, if not then I would say its up to the organisers to determine if they want to change the format of the event. 🙂 But if those attending are working towards a mimimum level and you turn up with unpainted minis and demand to play just because you disagree that the minimum level was there in the first place then i… Read more »
I agree on your points about rules and not being a dick btw.
I’m taking the discussion as being one over whether the rule should be there, as opposed to whether you can ignore the rule if it is there. I also think there’s a lot of other things which need to be discussed before we reach the point of deciding whether painted armies should always be enforced for every tournament for every game. There’s two underlying assumptions to the latter which I fundamentally disagree with. One is the right of the person who thinks minis should always be painted to impose that on an entire consumer base. The other is that enforcing… Read more »
Ok I get you. My point is it’s up to the organiser (whoever that is) to decide what level is appropriate. (And as I stated at something like a GT or a narrative event I can see why, but also see why at clubs or stores it’s not required) It would be interesting to see research on the lifetime spends of those who ‘game with a game’ and those who ‘hobby with a game’ and other softer parameters like who recruits more and how long they stay as a customer of the game. I have a hunch (but only research… Read more »
@redben said “I’m going to go out on a limb also and say that 40K has much the higher proportion of purchased product which isn’t used.”
Any thoughts on if a particular category is doing that ‘game the game’ Vs ‘hobby the game’
Again I’m tempted to think it’s those in the second category?
I’ll both add and clarify that I’m not saying no tournament should every have a minimum painting requirement. It’s more that every tournament should have a three-up requirement. In many ways I’d like the fully-painted tournaments to have a higher standard than that.
I suspect a lot of purchased minis are never used, whether they were bought primarily to paint or to game. Those who can ensure their purchases are always used for at least one or the other probably don’t spend much. It’s our industry’s dirty secret that we buy far more than we use. In many ways I think the question is a red herring, because GW are triggering our pleasure response in buying the mini far more than it being a case of hobby/game. The polite word, I believe, is collecting….
I resemble that remark @redben
A lot of us do….
On the point of buying minis you never use I’d love to see a Beasts of War poll on what percentage of the minis people have bought have been used in games.
Further bad news on Imperial Struggle, @warzan, it doesn’t look to be a reskin of TS. It’s being pitched as a spiritual successor, presumably because it’s the same design team doing it and it’s another geo-political long-term conflict game. Still very much looking forward to it, though.
Any idea what drew them to that particular war @redben?
Is it just ‘something of interest to them’ or is there something about it that lends itself to this type of game?
I don’t know why they chose it. I stumbled across it by accident on FB (as I tend to with lots of things these days). I suspect it must be of interest to one or both of the designers as I can’t imagine you’d want to put that much work into a game for a setting you don’t enjoy. So it’s probably the case that it ticks both boxes. Britain and France are jostling for global dominance over a long period of time encompassing war, but also politics, trade, finance, and so on, so it makes for a suitable global… Read more »
I wonder if they will include the Great Northern War in along with it
Is it worth reaching out to them for a skype interview?
Yes it is 🙂
Yes Ben, yes it is. Designer interviews are always insightful and engaging, and I hear that skype is very much the coming thing. Exposure for their products doesn’t hurt either 🙂
Would be interesting to know just what went into designing TS.
I enjoy painting, so perhaps I’m not the person to shove his opinion around on this (though that’s not stopped me before). I think two painted armies (or Blood Bowl teams, or whatever) look great. One or both player’s minis being unpainted detracts from that.
It’s not THE factor in a game being fun or not (that’s usually down to the attitude of both players) but it’s definitely a factor.
To add to this, my point stands for two armies (teams, etc.) painted to an ok standard, not Golden Demon standard.
One of the entertaining XLBS shows in a long time, great topic, interesting points of view. I’m no longer a huge fan of painting and was delighted to welcome Warren into the fold. However though I no longer consider myself a painter by any means I do still derive some joy by what I style as ‘colouring-them-in’. This entails undercoating them, usually in a halfords white, them applying a shade, usually a GW one, and then depending on the faction painting the base a nice indicative colour, like Khorne Red. This gives my forces a rather vibrant 4 colour comic… Read more »
Codename Pictures is a good game. you can learn it very fast and it doesn’t take very long. I learned this on a birthday party with people I didn’t know and we had several games. It was hilarious seeing the other team discussing which pictures to chose and hoping they chose yours. 7 Wonders a very great game indeed. On Painting models: I started playing GW games a long time ago they said you have to have painted armies to play at tournaments. It was only me and my brothers who played it at home at the time. There was… Read more »
Happy Sunday! I’m with Warren on this one, if you’re at the shop or club, go nuts, do what ever you like. If you’re going to a tournament, put some effort into putting a basic paint scheme on your minis our of respect for the organisers and your opponents. I can see Az’s point about wanting to try a tournament, but you’re going to spend a while learning the game before jumping in at that level surely? During which time it’s not difficult to throw 3 basic colours onto a mini. As Ben said, there’s so many resources out there… Read more »
You guys really need to do a SAGA week soon … so much talk about it over the past year. This is a game the gang has been playing on their own, talking about .. would love to see it in action.
I have SAGA pieces (vikings painted) can’t wait to play it myself (other then the demo I had at Adepticon)
Watch this space. Mwahahahaha
@nakatan is just about as good as it gets. if he’s up for it your painting tutorials would be the envy of the internet. painted or unpainted? I have no issue with tournaments choosing one way or the other, it just has a different emphasis. your going to get people at both ends of the spectrum who will be excluded one way or the other. I know that for me personally painted miniatures and the visual spectacle is every bit as an essential ingredient as the gameplay and setting. not inspiring to me seeing lumps of unpainted plastic and metal… Read more »
What wasn’t really discussed here is the extent to which a companies position on the importance of painting their miniatures (one way of positioning this being their policy for official events) is probably a way for them to knowingly influence the culture of the game. GW I think do a lot to discourage the potential to focus on the pure mechanics of the game, on purely competitive play, and do everything they can to emphasise the immersive, narrative, and hobby elements. If you ran two tournaments side by side, with all other things being equal, but only one having a… Read more »
I really enjoy the panting aspect of the hobby and I never use an unpainted mini even for friendly games. This also helps to keep my lead mountain in check. In friendly games I do not care if my opponents army is painted or not. In large tournaments I want things to be painted, I am usually spending a chunk of money on travel, accommodation, entry fees and even on the army I am taking. I want to look across the event and be wowed by the scene. I have offered and lent painted minis and entire armies to people… Read more »