Friday, April 16, 2010

If I were Napoleon where would I go? Waterloo!!!

Well, I have a habit of leaving myself a blind-spot. Farseer Jenkins pointed it out for me in his comment on my Socrates post. I have been off the grid in the hills and sticks of southern Kentucky for a few days with little else to think about. I think my core scoring system is sound, if in need of a heavier point allocation to the mission objectives. In the example I used before I was using 1500 point armies. Let's stay at that level for the sake of consistency.

A revised score might look like this:

1500 points possible for killing your opponent (and yes I know there is the strategy of coming to a 1500 point tourney with a 1400 point army)
1000 for primary objective
700 for secondary objective
300 for tertiary objective

Now, bear in mind these point totals can be adjusted upwards to balance with larger armies. I think 130-150% of the army size in play is about right. This means kills are important but not all important.

An example of how this balances comes up ALL the time at the armoury...I call it pulling a draw from the jaws of defeat....take 3 of 5 objectives with only 3 models left on the table at the end of the game. In this case the "losing" player has essentially tabled his opponent and still "lost". His kill points would offset that issue, and balance out the scoring, creating a more balanced score. In other systems this might create more chances for tie scores, but here, there is enough variability in the scoring that SHOULDN'T be an issue. What do you think now?

We are looking at 3500 points possible a round. Now, NO ONE is going to go three games and table all his opponents with no casualties, so a perfect score is technically an impossibility. "So what?" you ask? I think this works well to eliminate the tie scores I have seen so many of over the years. What do you all think?

2 comments:

  1. Wow, I had an incredibly well-thought response here and the computer ate it, so I'm just going to summarize.

    You've got a neat idea here, and it would balance things, but it is getting away from the whole concept of having separate missions objectives.

    Your example points at what happens when someone goes for the table and fails in an objectives-based mission. Considering that the point in a missions like that is to take objectives, if you're going for the table then you're really violating the spirit of the mission. If you pull it off, then you win, if you don't, then you run the risk of rolling a bunch of dice for nothing as you could get beaten by a handful of models.

    I'm not saying that you should never throw dice around and kill stuff, as the overall point of the game is to have fun while making your opponent's toy soldiers fall down through dice rolling. However, in an objectives-based mission, you need to make sure that you keep your eyes on the prize and not just shoot mindlessly. If you can indeed table your opponent, then the game already has a mechanic built in to reward you with a win. In any system, a tabling gives you the equivalent of taking all the objectives as your opponent can't contest anything.

    As for ties, well, I think that there should be a margin within which the game is considered a tie. I seem to recall that fantasy has a "within x points = tie" parameter, and I think that it should apply to 40K as well. The way to get around ties is a good system of tie breakers, which I think I'll tackle next over on the COB.

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  2. Dude, you total still my last Blogspot article title. Only one if us can have Eddie Van Halen.

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