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I've been doing 40k for over 20 years. I went through my uber-competative phase culminating in the attainment of becoming a tournament champion. In that time I have had a love-hate relationship with games workshop and a hate-hate relationship with douchy players and game-store employees who throw around words like "noob" and "cheese" as if they were the annointed lords of some tabletop fiefdom. It is precisely because of the douchy duo mentioned above that I rarely game in a gaming store anymore. Luckily over the years I have met some great folks who play 40k and have enjoyed seeing friends of mine become wonderful players and fans of the game in their own right. It was a few years ago during a late night gaming session at a friends house that my buddy Bob made the following observation: "You know dude, no body plays the game like this." "Like what?" I replied. "We have three huge deli trays of food, great drinks, cool music, interesting special rules we designed specifically for this game and great 40k-themed prizes for winners and losers. On top of that the whole series of games we've played are part of a narrative campaign you or I have made up." He was right. We do this for almost every game to a certain degree. We even had developed a code of conduct that put the pleasure of gaming before cut-throat win-at-all-cost tactics and rules challenges. We came to the conclusion that the way we play the game is not quite Warhammer 40k anymore. It is something else. We call it Funhammer, and we welcome you to join us in growing the movement. Go Funhammer!

+1.

The only way to play 40k is casually, since there's enough random and/or broken stuff that it doesn't make sense to play competitively (and there are plenty of other games out there if serious competition is your game).

My group has played a modified version of your funhammer for as long as I can remember... barring special situations, we make the absolutely toughest lists we can. Other than that, your Funhammer sounds VERY MUCH like ours.

Eric

Thanks for replying gents. Lets keep the discussion going.

I like to do things like come up with special scenarios, and a few home brew supplements. Nothing too over powering, just something like giving my death guard some special Nurgle relics and letting plague marines be Errything.

Sure, a plague marine havoc is tough, but he is also as many points as a Terminator!

I also gave them hatred against anything Tzeentch, and anything Tzeentch counts as a distrusted ally. Just seems fluffy.

The group I played 40k with in Augusta Georgia had its share of douchers, but those tended to complain about continuosly losing to everyone. However there was a small group of us who would play funhammer of all kinds build narrative store culminating in a huge apoc game where there where so many twist and turns to the story you never knew who would win. We also had tournment glorifing the person who had the worst tourney record as the champion it was a lot of fun and most of the guys play to have fun not to wreck people. Which made getting back into the game very easy and fun. Most of us would meet at one another house to play or to talk about narratives or just to build terrain for the next campaign. Those are the kind of 40k groups i like to be involved with.

MagickalMemories wrote:My group has played a modified version of your funhammer for as long as I can remember... barring special situations, we make the absolutely toughest lists we can. Other than that, your Funhammer sounds VERY MUCH like ours.

Eric

I think you may have missed the entire point. You may bring a deli tray but WAAC gaming is the polar opposite of the the OP is talking about.

We even had developed a code of conduct that put the pleasure of gaming before cut-throat win-at-all-cost tactics and rules challenges.

vurumai wrote:

MagickalMemories wrote:My group has played a modified version of your funhammer for as long as I can remember... barring special situations, we make the absolutely toughest lists we can. Other than that, your Funhammer sounds VERY MUCH like ours.

Eric

I think you may have missed the entire point. You may bring a deli tray but WAAC gaming is the polar opposite of the the OP is talking about.

On the contrary. Our group is not WAAC. It's FunHammer with tough lists.
Don't go pretending you know me.

Eric

Eric, my group is the same, we laugh, we drink, we tell jokes, but we bring competitive lists.

I think you guys _are_ missing the point.

Having fun while bring tough lists is not the same as playing the game for fun, lists-be-damned.

I play mostly historicals when I play, and these tend to be scenario-based. In many games, there is zero or near-zero chance of victory for one side. That doesn't mean that the players don't play hard, but that victory isn't the test. And it also doesn't mean that there aren't occasional upsets. But "winning" is ranked well below "playing".

No one's saying that you're wrong to play that way (or any way), but that the idea of Funhammer (expressed by the OP--special rules, narrative campaigns) seems incompatible with min-maxing lists. Although the mention of prizes is a little confusing.

Given the problems in the meta, it seems hard to imagine that bringing the hardest list can be fun for either the victor or the vanquished, unless you're house-ruling so much stuff that what you're bringing ISN'T the hardest possible list, but rather a toned down version thereof....

On the contrary, Sorrow. With the exception of prizes and that we bring "hard" lists, his game is exactly like ours. We have the trays of cheeses and meats, snacks, chips, beer (if you drink it) served in bottles, steins and/or pewter mugs. There'a always great food and great fun.
We build the hardest lists we can within a "code" (no unbound armies, no demon-bomb armies, proxying is okay when like-for-like [plasma marines = melta marines [both are SPECIAL weapons on otherwise identical models] is okay, but "all these Dreadknights and Wraighknights are Riptides" is NOT], etc.). More often than not, the games are close. Even when they're complete blow outs (like what happened to me last weekend when my dice wouldn't convert a hit to save my life), we still have a ball together. We laugh and joke and crack jokes at our own and each other's expense. It's a close-knit bond that we enjoy.
If you ever want to play a derivative game (no models over X points, max out on troop selections, etc), someone is usually up for it.
From my reading of what his Funhammer is, it is nearly identical to my own.

Eric

MagickalMemories wrote: From my reading of what his Funhammer is, it is nearly identical to my own.

Fair enough--I can't entirely interpret the "not competitive" part from the "prizes" part.

I think any game group needs a code, just as any social group does, and all the food/music etc. is great too.

I tend towards a casual list but played seriously. It actually partially came about from playing Sedition Wars, where the optimized lists are really dry grunt spamming mostly, but the suggested forces create pretty dynamic games. Similarly, I'll go for decent fun lists, played competitively, as it means I'm not throwing the game or anything, but neither of us are playing with serious stakes.