Today I want to share something that’s a bit old but good
fun. About two years ago, before I
really started playing Warmachine/Hordes, I was still playing Warhammer 40k
fairly regularly. The crowd at my local
game store was fairly strong but some grumbling had begun to creep into the
community – people were starting to become a little unhappy and bored with the
armies regularly seen at events like tournaments. My friend, Jon, and I came up with an
interesting and fun idea: what if we had a tournament where winning didn’t
matter? I’m not just talking about
including “Comp” or Composition scores on army construction (still a controversy
in the 40k community), but winning legitimately
did not determine the winners of the tournament. It was a radical idea and some in the
community didn’t like the thought of having a community where winning didn’t
matter. Really, who blames them? What’s the point of a tournament
otherwise? Me and Jon were convinced
that this could work and actually be quite fun, however, and thus, the
Gentlman’s Tournament was born!
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| "Why yes, ol' chap, I do still think you were being a douche for taking so many Long Fang squads!" |
There are some key features of the Gentleman’s Tournament
which you should understand. The first
part I already mentioned: winning doesn’t
matter. Once you get past the idea
of winning, what’s left to the game?
Well once you no longer consider winning to be valuable, it frees you up
to look at the other aspects of the hobby which are important to a gaming
community. The point of this event was
to build a stronger community, not to
see who the “best player” was. The
catalyst for this tournament was that people were getting tired of losing to
the same player and the same lists over and over again, and the community
needed a jumpstart.
So once you remove winning as a key condition, what’s left? Well the purpose of the tournament was to
encourage what we consider to be “proper” behavior of a member of a miniatures
gaming community. In other words, what
kind of people did we want as fellow gamers?
While this might seem subjective, I think any of you reading this blog
will agree on the following aspects of a player being important: having a
fully-painted and based army, being a good sport, playing with some kind of
theme, and supporting others in the community.
We had no shortage of competitive players, but those competitive types
were driving away the players that just wanted to have fun. We decided that this tournament was our
opportunity to use some positive reinforcement to get players to behave in the
way that the community wanted.
So these were our criteria: sportsmanship, theme, and
painting. These three areas are common
to comp-style tournaments, but we decided to take a different approach than
some other tournaments have. Most
tournaments at the LGS had a painting prize anyway, so this wasn’t anything new
to players in the community. However,
since our community was small (about 20), the same people won those painting
prizes over and over again, so we again had to think outside of the box. We decided that a “fully-painted raffle” was
the best solution, encouraging everyone to get all of their models painted and
based, regardless of skill, and everyone would have an equal chance of winning.
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| "This mission looks right." "No, I do insist on this one." |
We also decided that since winning didn’t matter, we should
give players the opportunity to try traditionally “bad” units that they might
not use otherwise when winning a tournament prize was on the line. Therefore, we decided that each player should
create a list with a particular self-determined theme in-mind. Instead of deciding on a particular rubric to
judge the players as tournament organizers, instead we decided that perhaps we
should leave it up to the players of the tournament to decide what themes were
fun and interesting to play against.
Each player would create their own list with a particular theme of their
choosing and they would pair that list up with a special mission from the GW BattleMissions book. They could choose any
mission they wanted, they just had to justify it with their particular theme. Since the players
were the ones who would vote on which ones they liked, there was more of a
motivation for people to choose something wacky and fun.
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| "I say! Good show, ol' chap!" |
Sportsmanship didn’t really need to change too much, except
we decided to give a rubric for the players so that it was a little easier for
them to choose an appropriate score instead of giving everyone a top
score. Also, we gave them their
sportsmanship evaluations at the end
of the tournament so that they could judge according to the rubric. Past tournaments at the LGS limited the
number of scores people could assign, but we had faith in our players that they
wouldn’t all give the same scores, and they didn’t so it turned out alright.
While these are all good, since it was a Gentleman’s
Tournament, we decided that in order to get everyone into the spirit of the
tournament, we would require all participants to wear a tie throughout the
entire event. That’s right - we forced
our players to be classy! We even added
a “Best Dressed” award that players would vote on, to encourage everyone to
dress even classier. Even if someone showed up and claimed to
“forget” their tie, we brought extras so that there were no excuses! This ended up being tons of fun and we were
clearly the most impressive individuals in the entire store!
That still left us lacking a “top prize” for the
tournament. Well, naturally, the
Gentlemanly thing to do was to have the players determine who deserved to get
the top prize – for whatever criteria they deemed most fitting. Everyone in the tournament cast a ballot at
the end for the player who was most deserving of the “Gentleman’s Award” –
whether it be due to generalship, sportsmanship, thematic creativity, painting
skills, or fashion sense. In essence,
the Gentleman’s Award was an award for the ‘Renaissance Man’ who embodied the
best aspects of the hobby.
The end result was that we had higher attendance than any of
the tournaments the store had held prior to that event in some time, everyone
had fun, lots of people went home with prizes, and there was a near-unanimous
approval of the player who was most deserving of the Gentleman’s Award – who
even brought-in purity seals with descriptions of the martial prowess of his
Black Templars (prior to their FAQ update, mind you). It was a great success and I forgot how much
fun it was to run.
So what am I telling this for? I think I’m inspired to create a similar
event in the future for Warmachine/Hordes.
Why not? There’s already an easy
way for restricting players to playing themed-lists. Warmachine/Hordes, although more balanced,
still has a community known for having some really nasty lists that are tough
to face. Removing winning games from the
tournament equation really levels the playing field and allows people to try
things they haven’t considered trying before, and Warmachine/Hordes can benefit
from that just as well as 40k can. What
do you think?
Here's the link to the revised Gentleman's Tournament documents in case you are interested in running one of these tournaments at your LGS:
The Steam-Powered Gamer wishes to remind you to...
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| "Keep it classy!" |