Playing Faster

[skkipper]

playing faster.
1. if you are going second start setting up your army while the other guy is deploying and once he is done you can move your stuff if you don't like the setup.
2. if you have lots of rolling to do at the start of the game like demons or nids or CSM. make a check list so you can run down it quickly. a table summary at the bottom would be great to speed up rolling. make 5 sheets so you can write down the results on it as you roll.
3. while opponent is moving put you dice in blocks of ten so when you need to make rolls, you can do so quickly.
4. "The finger of death" this is when the opponent is measure long moves like jump packs and aircraft. Help him buy putting your finger at the end of the tape measure. so he can set the tape down and move the guy. it speeds up movement and prevents guys moving to far.
5. practice with your army.
6. have stats for your dudes on your army lists. you should be able to play the entire game without opening a rulebook or codex unless your opponent requests it.

[Admiral-Badruck]

That is great advice. I for one will be taking all of it.

[skkipper]

though i totally suck. I have played in probaly 50 large events in the states and the UK. I have been playing horde orks recently so you get good at playing fast. having 180 boyz makes you a man if you can finish every game.

[Konrad]

though i totally suck. I have played in probaly 50 large events in the states and the UK. I have been playing horde orks recently so you get good at playing fast. having 180 boyz makes you a man if you can finish every game.

Just playing Orks makes you a man. nuff said.

[skkipper]

I promise to finish every game this year. our list at 2000 points has 29 models.

[Admiral-Badruck]

Grey-knights. ?

[Primarch_Vanguard]

I for one like the idea of a death clock or something like it. Is it so bad if you know you have only 12 minutes a turn to get all your moving and firing done. Now does it really hurt a player with a large army. I don't think so since the smaller armies with less models most likely lose as happened in the last game. Yet standing around all day waiting for the other guys to finish isn't fun either. A clock makes it a fair playing field as long as it is a fair amount of time. No reason to push someone but a person would a large army should be more focused on getting their stuff done. I enjoy chatting while gaming and agree it is part of the reason I game. To meet like minded fellows. But again, this is a war game and being the best general means knowing your shit and being organized. And if you are not, sorry. And alas, this is a tournament, not everyday gaming. Time is limited. People should be there to compete and save the socializing for afterwards. This would not be a system of I moved in 5 minutes and you have to do the same. If you can't make your moves and shooting in say 12 minutes, then something is wrong. You should have a plan and get to it. And let's be realistic, a mob in real time would be harder to control. And knocking their heads to get them to do what you want in a timely manner is realistic. Thus it's fair that a player with less miniatures would in fact have better control over their forces. Am I wrong? I'm someone who believes in fair play on all levels. I'm not looking for an edge, just fairness. And having the game turns limited as someone else commented on because someone is too slow,which can influence the outcome of the game, is unfair.
As an example. I was used to playing tournament paintball in japan. This meant a slower speed and about 10-20 minutes between games. No problem. Then the national team travelled to Malaysia to play in the world cup. We get there to find out, you only have 2 minutes between games and five games in a row. And as we knew, the speed is 300ft ler second. Now I'm fit but this ran me ragged. But the better trained teams won and deservedly so. And it's a tournament. So you come prepared or get peppered. We had to adjust or not compete.
If there isn't going to be a guideline to a tournament for times and such, then it shouldn't be called a tournament. It should be called a gathering or outting. My final thoughts are this, people with big armies are going to complain that it isn't fair, but is it fair to the other person waiting for you or that your slowness might influence the game? No it isn't. So a medium needs to be found. So let's have a game and find out what the timer should be set at to be fair to everyone yet not hamper either side too much. Or just simply divide the game time into time slots. I think that comes to about 12 minutes or so per side. I think it adds to the professionalism. The main thing to remember is that it's a tournament. Not a normal game day.

[Konrad]

So these deathclocks, do we we strap them on or what? How do they kill slow players? Explosives? Lethal injections? Electric shock?

[me_in_japan]

All of the above, plus piranhas.

[Primarch]

I've been thinking about PV's points overnight, as I don't want to upset folks by giving a blanket Yay or Nay to this without at least being able to provide a reason.

Now, you are free to disagree with my choice if you so wish, it's a free world and people are entitled to have their opinions about such things. You are always welcome to run your own events and use any rules you want to, what I say here applies only to the events that I run under the NagoyaHammer banner. (I.e. NagoyaHammer, HistoryHammer, Orc-toberfest and Winterblitz, plus any other odd games I throw out there). If you are running a demo game, participation game or mini-tournament at one of my events (e.g. like Danguinius' Warmahordes tourney last year at NH2012), then again, you can apply any rules or stipulations you feel like, I wont interfere.

I am totally against the idea of timed turns. Whilst I can understand why they might be useful, I can see massive pitfalls including forcing players to conform to a limited choice of forces or army composition, causing stress for players, giving players a new and quite powerful way to game the system (not saying people will, but it does open up quite a few nasty tricks) and overall making the game less fun or appealing to anyone who doesn't consider themselves to be a hard core gamer.

Now, I said I wanted to explain my reasoning for this, so let's start by looking at what benefits timed turns offer to all players. The only point I can find in their favour is that they force you to finish your game in the time provided. This has been a complaint of some players in the past, games ending on turn 3 or 4 are admittedly a bit of a downer especially if you know you could have won if you had managed to play one more turn. I don't particularly like games like that and I understand that players would like to see their games through to completion.

However, there are a lot of negatives to the idea as well and I think they far outweigh any benefit that could be brought in by timed turns. First of all army selection. It does take time to move models. The more models you have, the longer it takes. It also takes a lot of time to roll through the bucket loads of dice that an Ork mob or IG Blob can throw out. When you think about the fact that in one turn you could have 30 orks moving, shooting and assaulting in one unit alone with massive quantities of dice and measuring and moving involved of course it is going to take time. Tournament rules should not constrain army choices. Any army should be a valid option.
My second point that I want to cover is quite easily served by comparing Warhammer (either version) to Warmahordes. Generally speaking in Warmahordes, you don't actually need your opponent to be present when it is your turn (an exaggeration, but still accurate) except as someone checking boxes on a card. You move your models, you roll your dice and damage is recorded. Your opponent doesn't do anything until it is their turn, at which point you can go off and read a book or something. Warhammer is much more interactive than that. With the exception of the movement stage you will have something to do when it is your opponent's turn. Saving throws, wound allocation, fighting in assault etc all take time from your opponent's part of the game. Suprisingly small armies are generally the most time consuming to deal with.
E.g. Orks vs Grey Knights. A mob of 30 ork boyz all have the same T value and the same save, which let's face it is practically worthless against everything anyway. A bunch of terminators open up on them and you don't even need to roll saves if you aren't in cover. So the Grey Knight player with his small army is looking at more time saved. Now, how about if 30 orks assault the Grey Knights. Paladins with Draigo (the extreme example of a small army here) can have models in the unit with the following mix of saves without any trouble: 2+ armour, 2+ invul, 3+ invul, 4+ invul, 5+ invul, 5+ FNP, 2+ LoS. Now, that is quite a lot to deal with and it all comes out of the Ork player's turn. Smaller armies tend to have a lot of things at their disposal which make hurting them in your turn harder to do. Feel no pain, we'll be back, look out sir, mixed saves in a unit etc ALL come from the other player's time.
So, whilst horde units tend to die quickly and easily to the superior quality of small army firepower, (Making the small army's turn faster), small army units tend to soak up a lot from the superior quantity of horde army attacks (Making the horde army's turn slower). This isn't always the case, but it serves to illustrate a point.

I mentioned above that player stress is another factor that needs to be considered. Personally I think I play pretty quickly and that I am fairly focused when I play. After 3 games over a 12 hour day I feel pretty tired and strung out. For folks travelling from out of town and with a long ride back, a full day tournament can be pretty grueling. Adding to that the pressure of having a clock ticking away and feeling rushed, the whole thing can become pretty daunting. As Ashmie said

...this kind of pressure ain't fun or enjoyable.

Of course, some people might thrive on the challenge, which is fair enough, but you are always free to set yourself limits to beat without enforcing them on others who might not enjoy it so much.
Players who feel pressured to play fast will also tend to make mistakes more often. Mis-measuring things, picking up the wrong number of dice or forgetting rules are all things that can happen when players feel stressed or that they have to go faster.

The third point I brought up was that it allows players to game the system a bit. Again, let me reiterate I am not saying players will do this or that it is in any way acceptable.
Let's say that it is the last turn of the game. You have a couple of models standing on an objective and one of them is about to be charged by a unit of Genestealers/Harlequins/TH&SS Terminators and you KNOW they are going to die and will lose you the game. At the same time, your opponent is running out of time on the clock and needs to do his shooting phase to clear the way for the assault unit. If your opponent gets timed out before the assault phase (therefore losing the game and his shot at winning the tournament), where does the blame lie? Did you roll all your saves as fast as you possibly could? Did you do everything to facilitate your opponent's victory? Or did you look something up in your codex? Did you roll saves individually or umm and ahh about which models to take off? Regardless, what should have been a close run thing becomes soured by the fact that you might not have been as quick as you could, at least in their mind.
Similarly, anything that can interrupt your opponent's turn becomes a tactic to use against them. Rules that let you react to enemy movement or act in the enemy turn become much more useful. E.g. the Interceptor rule gives you a round of shooting in the enemy turn with a gun/unit. Necrons can potentially deepstrike 3 of their own units in the enemy turn or force you to take difficult/dangerous terrain checks for your entire army. (Yes, yes, Necrons are broken).
You go from a situation where a player can slow play the game in the hopes of winning, to simply slow playing your turns and guarantee it. It is a poor player who plays like that and I hope to never encounter someone who would try to pull something similar.
My one experience of playing with deathclocks also provides another example of how they effect play. In Danguinius' mini warmahordes tourney last year I played against Underdweller in one game. By about the middle of the game we had reached a point where we had effectively stale-mated each other. Both of us had our entire force camped on one objective each and couldn't realistically hope to defeat the other except by using every model we had left. Underdweller had far less time left on her clock than I did, so there was no way she could allow the clock to run out. Instead she had to send some of her forces forward to try and engage me even though she clearly had no way to overcome my own force that was sat waiting. As it was I took the game because the deathclock forced her hand. No deathclock and it would have been a draw. Stalemates aren't always the best way to finish a game, but they are probably better than losing because a digital alarm clock told you you had to.

So there you have it folks, a long winded explanation, but one that I feel provides decent reasons for my decision.

If you feel that your opponent is slowing the game down with avoidable delays (chatting to people at other tables, spending all his time looking up stuff in his books etc), then by all means, help him out with the rules, encourage him to play faster and focus on the game at hand. This thread is full of useful advice about how to improve your game and to get things moving faster. Patience is a virtue and this is especially true if you want to have a good time playing with people who you have never met, who may not have played as much or as often as you and may not speak the same language as you do. If you take 5 minutes for your turns, well done, but if it takes them longer for their turns use the time to plan ahead, grab a drink, catch your breath and watch how the game is developing (plus, you know, roll all your FNP/Armour/Cover/LoS/Invulnerable saves).