For the Love of Spelling

This post will start out with a shocker of epic proportions- I hate bad spelling.  Ironic coming from someone whose posts are invariably not proof-read and often riddled with typos, but I’m allowed to have double standards if I want, so up yours!  I think a lot of you have been wondering for a long time why I’m such a stickler for spelling, well I’m going to whip it all out and rub it in your face today. (more…)

WYSIWYG- Not the same thing as “counts as”

GMort put up a great article on the HoP railing against many of the things that I believe in….. like that FAAC players are among the biggest bunch of fucking idiots in the universe.  Oh and also buried in there is a call for creativity and competitive spirit.  I love it when people understand that wanting to win AND adhering to the fluff can coexist.  (more…)

Dethtron Solves the Foreign Relations Crisis

Thanks to the magic of WordPress, I’ve discovered an unfinished draft for a post dating all the way back to June….  In light of some recent events and what not, I’ve decided to resurrect this and update it.  I hope this sparks a conversation that needs to happen around the topic.

There is a growing trend in the 40k community that is really starting to get to me- broadly generalizing gaming styles by nationality.  If you’ve been following BoLS for the last 24 hours you’ll probably have some idea why I’m particularly irked right now ~so this should probably be changed to the last  6 months; here is the article in question, but rest assured this is something that’s been bugging me for quite a while now.  More of this should materialize later this week, say around Friday ~this actually popped up 6/25/10, so here is that FNIF, but I wanted to get some shit off my chest now. (more…)

In Defense of Play Whatever the Fuck Points Level You Want To

Over the weekend I got myself caught up on the latest White Dwarf and came to a startling revelation- you have to go way the hell back to find any reference to a small game.  Lots of people will cite the 5th edition Designer’s Notes to claim that the game is balanced to be played at 1,500 points. I honestly feel like this is a Jervis style argument that doesn’t actually hold true.  You all know the Jervis argument: 40k isn’t designed for competitive play, although that part of things has clearly been polished up in the new edition.  For examples of successful competitive events please see the Internet.  What I’m driving at here is that just because the designers notes say that X is true doesn’t also mean that Y isn’t or even that they intended for X to actually be the truth.  The designers can claim all day long that 1,500 points is the ideal level for play because it seems like a low barrier of entry for new players.  Model counts and thus expenditures are lower.  It’s much easier to sell a new player on dropping $250 than $500 or more to get into the game.  Now, having said that I personally think that the real fun starts around 1,750-2,000 points, where you can build a list with proper amounts of redundancy that won’t fall apart at the first sign of trouble- you know, something that will allow you to bounce back. (more…)

U Mad DJ?

Looks like it’s two misses in a row for one of the newer BoLS writers.  Here’s hoping for a 3rd strike, resulting in him being thrown off the site.  From the man who brought us the tale of chicken little explaining quite erroneously how the new* concept of true line of site is killing warhammer, we get a wonderfully terrible write up of why wound allocation is ruining the game.  Seriously, if there are so many forces conspiring against your ability to enjoy the game, maybe you should just quit.

Imaddj is quickly becoming one of my favorite BoLS writers, for all the wrong reasons.  To begin with we’ve got the name.  What’s up with that seriously?  Is he a ddj?  Is he a mad dj that can’t use verbs?  I won’t speculate any further beyond that. 

Last week, as I mentioned, he vomited the worst article about TLOS ever written all over the interwebs.  I think a lot of you were expecting me to say something about that, but sometimes an article is just too obviously bad or has already been beaten to death.  In that case, both were true.  So I’m not going to say anything about it other than that it was factually inaccurate, had admittedly made up statistics presented as fact, and tried too hard to be cute.  The inaccuracies were probably the worst part of the whole thing.  Somebody (it may have even been the author- no fucking way I’m wading through 400 comments to find it again) said that, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘opinion pieces don’t need to be factually accurate.’  Worst argument ever.  Opinion pieces especially should be based on fact.  The absence of fact in opinion is what has created things like the tea party here in the states. 

Having just been posted, I think it’s early enough for me to get a good whine in about his newest article, Wound Allocation- cheating with loopholes?, though.  God I hate it when titles have question marks in them.  It’s the biggest most trite douche bag move of all time.  I also hate it when somebody makes sweeping generalizations about something that is “new” to the game that is actually a mechanic that is now going on 2 years old.

Now here’s what we’re going to do.  Rather than go through and snowmobile the whole thing, which I could do, I’m just going to hit his major bullet points and refute them- with profanity!  Fuck yeah! 

Time to get this going since I think my intro will be longer than the rest of the article…..

Wound allocation was supposed to help the shooter
Guess what dickhead, it still does in most cases.  Just to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass, I even grabbed my 4th ed rulebook to look up the old casualty removal rules.  If you still have the book, they start on page 26, if you want to reference them at any point.  Under the old system, the owner of the target unit (or catcher, receiver, bottom, power bottom or whatever else you’d like to call him) decides which models to remove or give wounds to.  Sgt. with a power fist?  Multi-melta?  Flamer?  Well looks like you’ll have 7 other bodies to wade through before any of them die.  Those special weapons will pretty much always be around to haunt you, until the unit is removed entirely.  Now, if you torrent the shit out of a unit, there’s a chance for all those toys to go away earlier, helping out the shooter.  Can it be abused?  Well of course, just like most rules it can be in extreme circumstances.  For reference see FNIF round 22 about stretching termagants across the board.  Good thing there aren’t many opportunities in the game to do this.  Really nob bikers and shooting units with weapons with differing AP are the only things that come to mind immediately.  As you’ll see later there are even good arguments behind why the AP rules make sense in 5th. 

Many People don’t actually use wound allocation
Sweet, more sweeping generalizations made up from a representative sample of n=0.  Fuck off.  If you’re not using this rule, you’re playing not 40k, plain and simple.  It’s a fundamental rule, you can’t skip it.  Sure people fuck up and get antsy and just start removing casualties sometimes, but this really isn’t even worth discussing.  Next!

Wound allocation slows the game down
Yes it does, thanks for sharing captain obvious of the obvious task force to point out the obvious.  Good thing that many other changes to the fundamentals of 40k, like TLOS and vehicle damage charts, speed things up.  I think the game still plays more quickly overall, but hey that’s just my opinion based on a lot of research that I didn’t do.  Sometimes a change is needed in a rule to make it more fair (which I think it is- again, see my made up research study) even if it takes a little longer.  Plus, when you get down to it, he never raises the point that the new rule, while slower, is actually less complicated than the old one.  No more of this ‘if the unit takes a number of wounds equal to or greater than the number of models in the unit, the firer may select one casualty’ bullshit.  Fuck that!  I’ll take more straightforward rule without a ‘see subclause 1c’ situation any day of the week.

Wound allocation actually helps the target, not the shooter?
Good job repeating the inverse of your first topic (since we’re all about math and statistics today that would be topic A^-1).  Back to writing 101 for you.  Everything I said above still applies here.  At least this time we get some concrete examples- nob bikers, of course, and an AP situation. He calls this cheating.  Note, it’s not cheating if it’s allowed by the rules, dipshit.  Now specifically regarding the AP situation, we are given a unit of 6 marines that takes 6 plasma and 6 lasgun wounds.  Imaddj is confused about why 3 men could absorb all 6 plasma shots.  He says it isn’t realistic.  Is it more realistic to consider that all 6 shots hit a different target?  That must be one ace trick shooter.  I’ve found that when playing a game with plastic toy soldiers it’s best to have an imagination.  This might help you make it through the hobby imaddj.  Until you do manage to loosen up, though, please stop writing.

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*and by new I mean 2 years old.  Get used to it people, we’re well into 5th edition.  Learn to suck less and get ready for 6th in 3-5 years so you can have something new to complain about.

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