Blip wrote:
JThe older players generality liked the initial few games where i got my guard out, moderated my behavior a little with a fluffy list and every one got excited having their old toys on the table. Then we started playing objectives and I brought an assault focused army and things got tricky. I brought out my eldar and i really had to start making excuses.
When you start telling people they need to leave all their iconic marine units in their case (LR, Dreadnoughts, whirlwinds, vindicators, etc) as they are "sub-par" it just kills people's enthusiasm. Similar when someone rocks up with an beautiful bunch of ork clans in battle wagons. People want their army to play something like it used to under SM2.
Truth be told this, and the WAAC objective-based gaming usually available to players of E:A (I can persuade just one person within 150 miles of me to play games for fun with "whatever we want", rather than objectives and with winning as the primary objective), is where all my attempts to get Epic alive again end up dying off.
Plenty of people don't want to engage in tournament-only games, but do want to play Epic. Some people might want to play Epic because of the story that they want to share WITH others, rather than play AGAINST others. However the community at large is oriented towards tournaments and keeps these people from getting engaged in the setting. Great if you like tournaments, or are ambivalent, but a death knell for sourcing new players outside of that often-competitive tournament circle which directs how lists are chosen and games are played. There are plenty of great, fun people that go to tournaments - I've met a bunch at the one tournament I went to, I'm not criticizing them or tournaments in general - but when all the lists are designed and tested with tournament "builds" in mind and very little thought to "is this actually fun to play against?", or when half the toys have to left in the box in favour of five units of X, Y and Z -every single time- because tournament battles are the only game in town?
It doesn't have the tone of an epic game telling a story set in the 40K universe.
That's largely why I've returned to building my armies for lightly-modified SM2 games with the occasional scenario and vassal games with like-minded fluff-first gamers. The people playing that still tell stories and let me just play -with- them.