The Blogging Oedipal Complex

In writing up the announcements for the House of Paincakes today (an honor which usually falls on Lauby's shoulders, but apparently he was too busy with things that he'll no doubt assure me are not in any way related to Fallout New Vegas) I realized something- its readership is about to surpass Dick Move and in record time, no less. 

Why Comp Sucks: Inspiration Strikes

Today while doing my grocery shopping, I was struck quite unexpectedly with an image that got me to thinking about comp in gaming tournaments.  Somehow I've managed to run this blog since last winter and never really go off on one of the things that infuriates me most in the hobby.  Maybe others have beaten this dead horse into glue already, but I think I found a way to articulate what bothers me about comp: not that it drastically alters a game system, but that it is entirely counter-productive.  Now, I will preface this by saying that I do not intend to step on any toes culturally or offend anyone.  I know that sounds fucked up coming from me, but you'll see why in a minute. 

How I Got Hooked on Warhammer and Why I'm Glad Island of Blood Wasn't Out Then Part 2

To refresh your memories, in part one of this two part series, I discussed my humble beginnings in wargaming, growing up in a medium sized city with few resources to offer the novice gamer.  Without the help of my dad's model railroad experience and learning with friends, I would have been screwed. 

Fast forward to today and we'll see if things have gotten better for the community.  My hometown had at least one dedicated, still solvent game store with GW support, last I knew.  That's an improvement over what I had.  FLGSs are a great resource for novice players, giving an environment where staff and patrons can teach game systems, show you assembly, and give painting tips.  In a brief and completely unscientific survey, it looks like most moderate sized towns have some kind of game store within a reasonable distance.  That's pretty good considering the average FLGS is hell bent on running itself out of business. 

GW Acknowledges WAAC Gamers; The First Rule Can Suck My Balls

Yesterday GW's What's New Today Blog, home of a daily dose of pretty pictures and no useful hobby information, acknowledged and possibly defined what a WAAC gamer is.  If you read far enough into the 9/22/10 Throne of Skulls Survival Guide, you would have run into the following after being bored to tears by the most obnoxious survival guide ever:

the temptation to play to win at all cost can overtake the best of us. However, any unscrupulous play will not earn you many friends and may eventually lead to retribution. If you can't swim I'd be extra friendly just to be on the safe side

There you have it, a WAAC player, according to a published GW contributor, is unscrupulous (a cheater) and acts like a dick. There is no mention whatsoever of bringing a good list, playing by the rules as written, or playing a tight, hard game (no homo, not that there's anything wrong with that). So everyone that I've argued with in comments threads, forums, FNIF's, my mind, in person, or whatever can officially fuck off. Invoking the first rule (have fun, or some bullshit) is likely to earn you a swift kick (or maybe a kwik kick) to your shriveled little testicles. Playing a good game with a good list does not make you a WAAC gamer; being a jerkoff and ruining somebody's "fun" does.

How I Got Hooked on Warhammer and Why I'm Glad Island of Blood Wasn't Out Then Part 1

My copy of Island of Blood just arrived, and as I expected, it is chock full of sweet sweet miniatures and has a rulebook that is actually functional.  This is a welcome departure from the 9,000 page monstrosity that I have been using.  Be that as it may, something doesn't sit right for me, and maybe never has.  How do you prevent a novice player from being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the hobby and rules aspects of the set and game in general?

E-mail in: Bullies and other such pushy douche-bags

E-mail in.  Yeah I get e-mails from people too.  Suck it legitimate hobby blogs.  We're going to get seriously serious for serious here for a minute (can't even be seriously for serious without cracking wise grammatically, eh?) and talk about a topic that has bugged me for a while and is in all actuality part of the reason I started this site:  Cyber-bullying- well that or just being a dick in general perhaps possibly maybe.

The Gaming Lexicon

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them." -Philip K. Dick

FAQ to the Future

Time to jump in your Delorian and get that puppy up to 88.8 mph as fast as you can, the Blood Angels and Tyranids FAQs came out today. Oh wait, everyone with a blog has already talked about this ad nauseum- fuck. Looks like everybody beat me to the punch because I had the most pointless final* ever to study for. I'll cut right to the chase and just throw both of my middle fingers up in the air and shout a big "I told you so" to the members of the gaming community responsible for such Friday Night Internet Fights as the great Mawloc kerfuffle of 2010 and the 2nd annual Demolisher Cannon fest among others. So you're all a bunch of idiots and need to learn the rules better and spot obvious designer oversights. RAI FTW bitches!

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* So Econ 403 where 70% of your grade is determined by a series of online quizzes that can be taken an unlimited number of times. Honestly, if I showed up and wrote my name on the final and had drawn a couple of graphs I would have finished the class with a B. Yet people still complained that the class was hard. A course that didn't even scratch the surface of a subject that undergraduate courses look at in detail is hard? Holy shit. So anyway, I think I destroyed that test and am looking forward to my second 100% score in a class as a graduate student. Way to raise the bar on graduate education Roosevelt University.

Will This Be My Final Fantasy?

Looks like it's more or less official. The fluff bunnies have won the day. Just take a gander at this BoLS Lounge thread to see what I mean. As credible information has begun to leak out about the upcoming WFB 8th ed. release, two of my biggest fears have been confirmed:

Set Sail for the High Accountanseas, Again

After writing up a couple of articles in support of GW's impending price increase, I got to thinking that maybe there was a simpler way to explain some of what's going on, without so much math.

From the Warp

There has been a recurring theme in the comments to my recent gloating about spending too much money and having some great FW customer service: warped parts. If you've ever gotten a FW kit you'll know what I'm talking about.

Spearhead Gives Players the Shaft?

If you haven't seen the rules for GW's newest 40k supplement, Spearhead, yet I have posted a quick rundown of the important bits over on the Chamber Militant forum. Now of course you have to understand before reading this post, I've yet to get in a game using the Spearhead rules, but feel like I'm still qualified to pass some kind of judgement on them.

Retail Win

For those of you reading from the US, you're probably returning to work today after your long Memorial Day weekend. I took some time off from the blog over the weekend myself, as Dr. Girlfriend wasn't on call for the first time in a good long while. Somehow all of my free time then materialized in reading lots of bad sci-fi and listening to a bunch of Gary Numan. There was also a super fun couple days of cleaning the house and gardening along with lots of grocery shopping and a small cookout for some friends and even a surprise band practice*.

Business 101 or the Whiteness of the Whale

In my recent quasi-Internet fight post "Warfare on the High Accountanseas," which dealt with the the incoming price increase from GW I may have taken some things for granted in my readership.

I'm not dead....

...nor have I run out of ideas for posts. What I haven't had is time. Had a pretty shitty week, getting shit on by a group project for Marketing (surprise surprise) and dealing with any number of other things as well. I need to get caught up on some work for Accounting today, so I probably won't have time to post anything today- or if I do it'll be after class this evening. Fear not, though, I should have time to get caught up a bit on my blogging. I've got several half finished, but top notch, things in the pipeline that I should be able to polish up for the weekend and going into next week.

I've gotten a slightly heavier influx of e-mails in this week, so thanks to everyone who's sent something in. Keep the bullshit coming.

Last, in slightly sad news, it looks like the band I have been part of for about the last four years if finally throwing in the towel. Not exciting, but probably about time for this to happen. Anyways, it'll give me more time to focus on my metal band (hitting the studio by this fall, hopefully) and try to get another semi-electronic project I've had kicking around for a while off the ground. If you're in the Chicago area we are planning a farewell show for later this summer with the Nekromantix. Word on the street is we will be getting 2 sets that night on each of the venue that we're working with's stages, to give ourselves a proper sendoff.

Can Small Games Be Fun?

As promised, I'm going to continue to bring some positivity to your Mondays. Mostly this has, so far, taken the form of me pointing you towards blogs that are better than this one, but today I'll be defending an oft shat upon topic: the low points game. A lot of people out there decry any game of less than 1,500 (sometimes even 1,750 or 1,850) points as "not Warhammer." They see it like the WNBA- all the fundamentals are there, but it just isn't exciting. Well, I'm calling bullshit on that.

Have you Snowmobiled Someone Today?

As I've noticed this popping up on other sites lately, I'm going to coin a term for my favorite activity. Henceforth the art of inserting colored text into copy/pasted versions of other people's work with the intent of mocking them will be referred to as "snowmobiling*." You heard it hear first, don't you ever fucking forget it.***

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*Not to be confused with any other form of snowmobiling that may involve either a snowmobile or having your way with your partner doggy-style and grabbing their arms out from under them**.
**When performing this manoeuvre, I would highly advise being cognizant of where you are in relation to walls or any other barriers. That is a story I will not freely tell.
***I am only kind of implying that I have been robbed of this idea. It's not quite as obvious as the time Tiger Army ripped off my band, but I'm suspicious. That is a story that I will glady tell you.****

****Did you notice that there is more footnoted content than post content?

The Mission, again....

I'm beginning to think that I may need to write some kind of a brand/vision statement about this blog and pin it up top.

Here's a comment that came in from anonymous today in the leafblower post:

Help a Brother Out!

Sorry, it's been a bit quiet over here the last few days. I wish I had some awesome excuse, but the truth is that I've been a bit lazy and have been desperately trying to make heads or tails of the new Blood Angels codex. It looks fun, don't get me wrong, but it contains a mind-numbing variety of options and plays a lot differently than the Dark Angels that I (unfortunately) have some experience with.

Stormtroopers revisited, the Imperial Guard Strikes Back?

Blech, can't think of a clever Star Wars themed title, so you're all stuck with the above. In re-reading yesterday's post about IG storm troopers, I realized that I failed to make a key point that I wanted to discuss. Specifically, I wanted to look at the effectiveness of the storm trooper to try and come to an understanding of why they are deemed "bad." Guess blogging while ill isn't the best idea after all.

First let's look at the some of the pros:

• BS4


• Real armor...stands up to bolters even :)


• AP3 weapon


• Cool special rules for maximum tactical flexibility


• Pistols, and CCW, and 2 kinds of Grenades, OH MY!

...and some cons:

• High points costs


• Short ranged


• Obvious target


• Competes with Rambo and Psykers for your Elite attention


• Can't receive first rank, second rank... order

Well, all of the above should be pretty self-explanatory and I'm not going to insult my readership's intelligence by prattling on at length about that shit. Two problems do, however, merit some tender loving care- high points cost & AP3 weapon. A large portion of the points increase with this unit is due to the AP decrease in the new book. Who cares about AP3? Well mostly marines (all types), but Tau and Tyranids certainly care every once in a while. Anybody else care? Not really, and that's why this unit isn't so great.

In response to yesterday's article Chumbalaya had the following to say

*I enjoyed the chicken littling when the hot-shot lasguns got AP3. Oh noes!! What will we do?! The S3 weapons will kill us all!

Like retarded lemmings, these people.

Retarded lemmings indeed. So here's my two sense on the AP3 issue- it's only good against a portion of the field and is, therefore, not competitive. I have used them against Smurfs in the past and they have pretty much always earned their points back in marine kills. Anybody that doesn't see the value of using these against MEQs is an idiot; they rape face and are actually a pretty good deal. Unfortunately against just about everyone else there is no difference (other than range) between a lasgun and a hot-shot lasgun. Do you think a horde of Orks gives a fuck that you're AP3? Good luck with that.

Basically against non-MEQ foes, you're paying a 300% premium for around 1/3 of the killing power vs an equivalent points value worth of regular guardsman (if I weren't feeling lazy, this is where I would bust out some serious statistical data about wounds caused, etc...). So, in a world where you're not sure who you might be facing, their flexibilty is severly diminished when compared to the whole possible playing field. Not a good deal in light of the fact that, if the adepticon rumors are true, you stand about a 1 in 3 chance of facing an IG army now. In the old days where Marines dominated major events, these guys may have had a place in certain types of builds, if you were to believe in a metagame and were less worried about non-Marine armies. Now I'd rather take a unit that can put out a huge amount of firepower instead. They can deal with masses of lightly armored troops and can still force enough armor saves to kill MEQs.

In an unrelated note, what the hell is up with renaming the weapon? We've gone from hellgun to the more P.C. hot-shot lasgun. Isn't the hot-shot powerpack used in sniper weapons in the world of Danabbnetthammer** 40,000?

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*hey chumbalaya, if you can identify the twisted firing of synapses that has led me to choosing this avatar for you I garrrroooonnnnteeeee you will earn my respect. Alas, I fear that you may be to young to be aware of this.....

**Danabbnetthammer 40k's rules are known to frequently differ from the rules Warhammer 40k, physics, common sense, and the established 40k fluff.