Sharing dice

pic from baxterboo.com

A short article on how time, space and dice can be saved during a match and increase the fun.

As we all know, when it comes to throwing dice nearly every player has his own habits and usually brings his own dice. All kinds of colours, sizes and throwing techniques, such as screaming out the needed results to hopefully influence the fortune, appear. There are players that like to use some dice shakers or boxes, some like to roll on the table, some like to roll on some special dice boards. There guys that from time to time claim that certain dice are 'empty' or 'have lost their power'. There are even guys that throw some dice through their kitchen because they lost some really important rolls (guilty!).

So usually when two players meet for a match, every body has a hudge amount of dice on this side of the board and every time they have to roll a certain number of dice, they start grabbing and counting some of them, counting again, grabbing some more, putting some back etc.. This takes time and of course if you place them on the board, also needs space on the gaming table. This is why in our gaming group in some of the last games we just used the dice of one single player, of course different colours but just one set of dice belonging to one player. This way, the dices are not located everywhere on the table and of course there are not so many. And whats really nice about it, is that it saves you time and makes rolling dice much easier.
Lets say one player shoots at the other guy he rolls his dice for hitting and wounding and then the other guy just takes the remaining dice for his saves. He can directly take the dice that wounded and does not have count how many dice are lying there and grab his own ones and maybe select a different colour for that melta gun hit,...

It turned out to be very comfortable to share the dices during the games and imho it is even positive for the gaming climate during the game. Of course there are some guys that refuse to use somebodies dices, but lets face it, these guys are just stupidly superstitious or use loaded dice! ;) So in both cases, just put your dice away and use theirs!


For us this was really new and it is probably some old stuff for you guys out there but I really wanted to share this with you.

No 'Risk' No Fun

On how small changes in a list and the way you play it possibly turn out to be a lot of fun and victory! But being hard to apply. Part I

Trying to play a little bit more risky with my marines last night, turned out to be fun and brought me the 8th win in the 10 games I played in our campaign. Usually I basically run a Librarian with nullzone and some other power, a dread, 2 Preds, a Vindi, 3 Landspeeders, 2 tactical squads and a stern guard and I try to vary depending on the enemy, sometimes drop the stern guard and add an additional tactical squad. I did pretty well so far. But as strange as it may sound, I wanted to change something to this working lists I had not tried before. I tried the Captain with Command Squad (4 plasma guns and an Apothecary) against the necrons and it worked out pretty good. So I wandered what to take and after reading a nice article on the 'Yes the Truth hurts'-blog I decided to run a 'Master of the Forge' (henceforth MoF).

the agony of choice
With the current SM codex one definitely has a lot of choices and some of them really sound great, considering the rules or the fluff, and there are many fantastic models BUT, if you do spent some time on studying the individual choices you will see, that in the end a player tends to reduce this plethora of units to a core, which typically is the same had used before. In my case this have always been, dreads, tacticals, scouts, landspeeders, predators , vindicators and stern guard. Additionally some units always drop out because they are really useless or because of personal taste. In my case this have always been things like, bikes, scout bikes, Land-speeder Storm, Assault Marines, ...

Wait, but this exactly melts down to the same list(s) I already mentioned above, and there is the dilemma, you cannot just change your army list completely, you can do changes judging on experiences with units, personal taste, enemies,.. But all these changes are (normally) very 'small' and the core of the army will stay the same. (Ok, at this point I should say that I specialise myself now to the case of a SM army.)
So, changes like dropping Melta bombs when playing against 'Nids or including them when facing IG are usually what happens.

Now what I tried was to at least change the HQ choice and take a look on how this effects my army. Taking the MoF I had to choose whether to give him the conversion beamer and or use him more close combat related. I chose the conversion beamer.
Ok, now since he probably should not move very much in that match, I had to support him with an unit to ensure his survivability. Now the MoF is able to bolster ruins by increasing its cover save by +1. Thus I chose scouts to support him carrying camo cloaks (giving them a 2+ cover save in that ruin), sniper rifles and a rocket launcher.But bolstering ruins is not the only and real advantage of the MoF, he also changes your army list composition by allowing you to take dreads as heavy support. Sounded great, lets play a dread base army I thought, until, until I realised the problem related to

Confinedness of the personal collection
I noticed that in no way I could field more than 2 Dreads, simply because I don't own more then two (well, in fact 3 but one is not usable). And this was not the only unit where I noticed that changing an army is not just limited by the personal taste and the usability of certain units but also the banal fact that one has to own enough models! To cut a long story short, I quickly saw me facing the same choices as always. Sure I could have used a whirlwind proxy but I did decide for the predator again.

Now the final list I used looked like this:

MoF with conversion beamer
10 Tactical SM, with Rocket Launcher, Flamer, Rhino
10 Tactical SM, with Rocket Launcher, Flamer, Rhino
10 Tactical SM, with Heavy Bolter, Melta gun, Rhino
7 Scouts, with Camo Cloaks, Sniper Rifles, Rocket Launcher
Dread with Plasma Cannon, Heavy Flamer
Dread with 2 x twin-linked Autocannons
Landspeeder Typhoon
2 x Predator with Autocannon, Heavy Bolter
Vindicator

As one easily notices, no big changes made even though I tried really hard. But at this point I was really sure, that the change of the HQ choice would enable me to change my style of playing against the 'nids. If it worked out and how will be told in the next part of this article, following the next days...

Long time no see

Its been a while since the last post, and this post is basically just a vital sign to show that this blog is not dead yet.

The reason for not updating this blog is, that we managed to start a campaign and that I set up an additional blog for this campaign in German. It is basically just there for presenting the rules of the campaign and some battle reports and I think the readers are almost only players from the campaign.

In this campaign I am playing my Space Marine Army Iron Knights, which I continuously keep painting. Thus there is no time for painting many Orcs or other stuff. But I as soon as I have some small updates I will post them here and on my DakkaDakka Blog.

But in the recent time I am working hard on my diploma thesis and spare time is getting really rare. In addition I am facing an surgery on my knee the next week and will be out of order for some days..

Cheers
Gewaltatron