Thommy H:
I don't know why you don't get it, Thommy. Do you play in tournaments?
khedyarl
Like most Warhammer players, I do not. Which is exactly my point - there's a vocal minority of tournament - or tournament-style - gamers active online. This creates the distinct impression on the internet that most people take part in tournaments, or at least use them as a barometer for how they should be enjoying their hobby. But this simply isn't true. Statistically, it can't be. I don't have the numbers, but there aren't enough tournaments going on for anything but a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Warhammer players that must exist for GW to stay in business to have anything to do with them.
In another life, I was moderately active in the online community devoted to the pseudo-performance art of professional wrestling. That community was composed almost entirely of what are known as "smart" fans as opposed to "marks". Marks are fans who, at worst, think wrestling is a real athletic contest or, at best, buy into the drama at face value, without knowing anything about the backstage workings. A mark cheers for the good guys and doesn't question what he sees. A smart understands
why the good guys are cheered and how a match is put together. They grasp the psychology of wrestling and what makes it compelling (to fans). But smart fans aren't the majority: we just thought we were. Again, statistically we couldn't be. And as much as we complained about how whatever wrestling show didn't cater to our interests, pushing bloated, steroid-fuelled bodybuilders at the expense of smaller, but more charismatic and athletic performers, the bottom line was that we weren't actually the market. We just convinced ourselves we were because we were the only market in evidence in our limited sphere of influence.
All this is by way of saying that I've seen this kind of thing before, and it happens everywhere. The internet can warp your perception of a community. The truth is that only the most fanatical fans - of anything - bother to become part of online communities devoted to their hobby. So, invariably, you get a cross-section of the kind of people who care most about their interest, which is not an accurate reflection of the real fanbase. You think most Warhammer players know or care which units are "broken"? Or even know or care about the concept of game balance? Most probably don't even think to question that kind of thing. I know I didn't when I started playing. The rules were just the rules.
Now, I know this isn't a discussion about "legality" and gaming attitudes per se, but it covers some of the same territory. I get the thing with tournaments. I get why they matter to the kind of gamer that cares about concepts like game balance - there has to be some kind of acid test, right? But Warhammer just isn't built that way, and the design studio, like it or not, think more like me than the guys who moan about balance and spend their time mathhammering on the internet. By chance or design, I share their philosophy of gaming and, trust me, no one at GW HQ - by which I mainly mean the design studio, so perhaps I should have clarified that - has any interest in defining things as "tournament legal" or not. Undoubtedly there is someone (or a group of someones) who work for GW that draw up a list of legal armies for grand tournaments or whatever, but it's not with the input of any higher-ups, I'm quite certain. They just don't approach the game they've written that way.
This is why I keep harping on about "tournament organisers" - a tournament is just one event, in which a certain number of people get together to play Warhammer with a quasi-competitive spirit. And they can all be completely different, and have different rules and arbitrary things which are allowed or disallowed. Long ago, Jervis Johnson spoke in a White Dwarf (this was in the days of 4th Edition Warhammer and 2nd Edition 40K) about each tournament being a puzzle that the participants had to solve. That's how they used to design the grand tournaments, and it so happened that a lot of the army list limitations they introduced (perversely to make the game
less about extreme armies and magic item combos) were enshrined in later editions of their games. This has had the toxic effect of making some people think that GW games are therefore "tournament systems", sadly.
So I guess what I'm saying is that, when someone allows or disallows a certain army at a tournament, all it means is...well...exactly that: an army is allowed or disallowed at that tournament. It doesn't mean anything for ordinary games and it only means something to other tournaments because the organisers may be influenced by it.
But that's their neuroses and shouldn't be read into. Don't blame GW for it, that's all I'm saying.
