Let me start off by saying the title for this posts could use some work, but for once I’m more interested in getting my point across than trying to be clever. Because ever since I got back into the Warhammer 40,000 hobby earlier this year something has started to bug the crap out of me.
The first time I gave the hobby a whirl was back when the 3rd Edition of Warhammer 40,000 was released (my first ever White Dwarf was the one that came with a free Dark Eldar Warrior). Maybe it was largely because I’m from the Netherlands, but back then there were a few clubs around for the more experienced players whilst most players just met up at their local Games Workshop store on Fridays for free-play against like-minded casual players. It was a nice mix of novice players trying their best and some of the older players that just preferred playing something that had a lot of character but lacked any sort of punch.
I myself was somewhere in between; I had some experience playing the game, but am a big fan of choosing character over functionality. This meant that my armies hardly ever did anything worth mentioning, but I can’t remember a single Friday that I came home feeling like crap because my games blew up in my face. I always had a few moments that made the afternoon worthwhile, like a Space Marine Sergeant killing off a strong character (after said squad had weakened it) in a single round of combat or one of the many occasions where I’d have a small victory in one combat only to be completely wiped out the next minute.
Maybe I’m just a big masochist at heart, but that to me was what the hobby was all about. You pick an army you like, paint up units you like to look at and then try to field them effectively whilst at the same time having a good laugh about it.
Now with 5th Edition whenever I take a look on the internet to find information about the game I keep coming across forums where the discussion has boiled down to percentages and filling your force organisation chart with a single type of unit just because it happens to be “really killy” (even if the fluff says that said unit is extremely rare within the army). And I blame the fact that nowadays there seems to be a tournament of importance every other week.
In a hobby where you tend to pay through your nose for the models you want to field I can understand people not wanting to end up with stuff they’ll never use. But I also feel that if you never look beyond the 1500/1850/2500 points limit for your army list you’re really missing out on something that makes the hobby special.
A good example of this were the Apocalypse armies that Games Workshop recently featured on their website. I might be off by a mile, but I can’t imagine a hard-core tournament player to get the same feeling of utter, utter jealousy that a casual or fluff player gets when they see someone’s full company of Space Marines displayed with pride. Not that we do not admire said army and would like to congratulate the owner, but damn, do we ever wish we were them. Most tournament players will probably scan the pictures, comment on some unwise weapon options and go, ‘impressive, but…’
When you are just playing the game to play the game (if you know what I mean) then why do you even bother using miniatures? I mean, if tournaments started allowing representative tokens, would most tournament players really bother with spending hundreds of dollars on new miniatures? They already playtest their new lists with them, so why not? They already jokingly call the brain-exercises involved in making a new list ‘MathHammer’ so why not just make it an actual separate game using tokens? That way we casual players can just go to non-token events to have fun and leave the competitive stuff to the MathHammer players.
Just to make it clear; I am aware of the huge loss in revenue if Games Workshop were to do the whole token thing. I wasn’t seriously suggesting they’d go down that route, but merely stating that ‘they might as well’ to illustrate my point that tournament players not only play the game differently, they play it so differently that they might as well play a different game altogether.
