This thought was sparked by discussions on another thread here, but it didn't really fit there.

I wanted to share this story of an army that came along to a 1500 tournament with no restrictions announced. I should point out that this was the only army of its kind there, everyone else brought something that was recognisably an 'army'.

MORDOR

epic heroes
Gothmog
Gollum
Khamul the Easterling
The Betrayer
Saruman (ally)

legendary formation
The Tainted riding Fell Beast

common formations
3 companies of Morannon Orcs
9 companies of warg riders
5 companies of mordor orcs

rare formation
uruk-hai berserkers (ally)

So... twelve levels of magic, including Saruman's epic ruination. Gollum to munch at your best unit, the Tainted to remove any leadership bonuses you might have, and three Darkness casters to stop your charges. Plus Gothmog to copy any epic abilities you might have of any use.

Not an army to my eyes, more a collection of powerful stuff. He came second.

Now to provide a point of explanation - the user of this army is a young GW employee. About six months after WotR was released at lot of the younger GW staff suddenly got right into it. These are the kinds of armies they play against one another. Not to my taste, but it works for them.

Also, we purposefully asked him to bring his worst along. This was our first tournament, and our group has its own style of play and we honestly had no idea of what other people might bring. Everyone else brought armies similar to those we play ourselves.

After this tournament we introduced two fairly straightforward composition rules, designed for 1500 points:
1. No more than 5 levels of magic mastery per army
2. No more than one Extremely Hard to Kill model per army

To date this has been working fine.

We've invited the same GW employee to our November event, let him know of the new restrictions, and asked him to bring the nastiest thing he can come up with using the new composition rules. That should test them!

Ultimately no matter what you do if someone wants to break a system, they will do it regardless of the amount of restrictions placed.

Problem isnt the system itself but the players who have different thoughts on what is competitive.

Tournament play, especially if there are prizes on the line, is almost always more aggressive. But you are right that there does seem to be a different mentality to some of the army builders in WotR vs. SBG. To be fair though, in the SBG days before LoME came out you would get some pretty cheesy forces as well. Although there was some debate over LoME when it hit the shelves (most of it around the $ value of the product) it really did a good job of controlling army building. You could still play the system in some areas, but it helped a lot.

Part of me really loves WotR's more "open" policy when it comes to lists. There were some things that I think LoME had missed the mark on ( you couldn't actually get Spirits in a Dol Guldur army…so why is he called the Necromancer??), and WotR's format is better at supporting such combos. But at the same time, having so many varied forces all lumped together in these larger bundles is just problematic. Elves, for example, are probably one of the worse of the bunch. Three completely separate groups, each of which could be a strong and viable list of its own, are thrown into a single mix. You want Gil-Galad, the Twins and Legolas all working together with a bunch of heavily armored Rivendell warriors, Galadrhim Knights and backed by a host of cheap Wood Elf archers? No problem. Not even any ally restrictions there. But hardly appropriate I think.

Battlehost seems to try to help here in that it creates more themed lists and then gives you some incentive to play them with special rules and new Fortune/Fate options. There is a point cost but for the size of the force the points are usually not that big of a deal. The problem comes in that in order to have a BH force you usually are looking at close to 2000 points or armies, and not many people seem to have that and no event seems to play that level. So BHs are only a partial answer. It would be good if there was a BH-lite, or such that offered options for 1000 - 2000 point forces at a lower point cost with fewer special rules.

It sounds like your local game group is very similar to our in that "just because you can do a thing, does not mean you must do that thing", and most of your players use reasonable (and probably themed) lists. But as soon as you pull in from the larger community and make it a "competition" rather than a "game", you are likely to see the other side of list building. And no offense to WH/40K players as a whole, but I have personally seen that players from those systems that have come over to WotR for the game system itself are far more likely to look for these "maximized lists" over Middle-Earth themed armies than players that have come to SBG/WotR from a larger appreciation of Tolkien's world.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

See... With the Elves, now, I feel that if you split them up into three different lists, there aren't enough units per list to make each one interesting. At the very least, they would all look the same - there's, what, all of three High Elf units in the game?

Now, granted - I'm no Tolkien expert, and I could VERY easily be wrong on this.

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"What's so civil about war, anyway?"

Hey I read erly on when WOTR first came out some GW employees fihured a way to take 3 Balrogs.So just be thakful he did not take that option or at keast try.But I agree with just because you caan break something to find out what it is then you have trueky left the path of wisdom.

Yeah that's one of the major criticisms about this game around my local gaming area, that Wotr is a lot like pokemon or something where it is all about the heroes and how you match & combine their powers together.

Honestly it may not have any theme but it doesnt seem like such an overpowered list.

He wastes almost 300 points on sarumon and gollum who really wont do much to make their points back and sarumon is easily dueled. Spells of ruin probably have the least bearing on the game aside from a well timed shatter shields.

He also doesnt have many troops and the few he has arent solely morannon which are clearly overpowered. A few pikemen would ruin his day.

The cheapest part of the list is the 3 nazguls obviously but the good side has their fair share of overpowered duelist and casters that can easily counter them. They only have 1 might point and that would be used on epic strikes.

If he were to remove sarumon and gollum and add in durburz, durzhag and more (a lot more) morannon orcs then I would agree with you. Right now it looks like the only thing he did wrong was ignore theme and take nazguls. But seriously is everybody supposed to not take them because some game designer didnt think things through. They are beatable but it seems everybody would rather complain about them instead of figuring out how to combat them.

It would be very rare, especially at the time of the War of the Ring, to see forces from all three major Elvish groups fighting along side each other. There were occassions that are hinted at but nothing that jumps to mind that is so clear as to justify this as anything less than exceptional and the ones I can think of were probably just two of the three. Elves don't have a lot of troop variety individually, but the differences show up when viewing troops between the various groups, so an army from any one of the three would be pretty "plain" and you would then need to tap allies for variety. I agree that it doesn't make for as interesting of an army list and I can live with the freedom to mix troop types in this case as long as you use appropriate Heroes.

But what really grinds me is the fact that WotR lets you mix forces and Heroes from completely different time periods into a single army as well (and doesn't even give any hints that you're doing so!). This isn't just a problem with Elves, but rather nearly every force that has some historical background suffers from it. Eorl the Young riding to war with Theoden…Isildur and Aragorn side by side…all these and more are totally stupid and against theme but totally legal. At least in SBG the LoME rules made most obvious situations illegal. The large pools of WotR models into just a few base lists is easy and flexible but very prone to abuse (even more so if theme is important to you). If they would only have put some time period flag on the Heroes and Formations then it would help prevent players from mixing up the time line.



I do believe there are situations from some of Tolkien's supplemental work of multiple Balrogs together, but back then the Elf forces and Heroes were also far greater than in the Third Age and they could be faced on more even terms. But in WotR I'm not sure how effective your force would be to sink that many points into 3 Balrogs.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

I noticed this as well. It goes backwards too - if I wanna field Eorl I can't use ANY other Epics unless I wanna be a COMPLETE toolbox.

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"What's so civil about war, anyway?"

Except it isn't. It's a system flexible enough to incorporate those who want to approach the game that way, but it's hardly compulsory. My group has so far found more success (and fun!) from combining the abilities of formations, with epics there to keep things motoring along.



Agreed, to me it's a strength of the system, not a weakness.


The restrictions are intended to (hopefully) allow people to play as hard as they want without constructing a steamroller to crush everyone else in the shortest time possible. Other issues such as Aragorn and Isildur together have never cropped up (yet!), so we've left that open.

My issue with restrictions is that there is a line between taking the edge off the super competitive lists, and of forcing everyone to build their armies and play the way you think they should build their armies and play. IMO that means stepping back from certain judgments and just giving a few parameters and letting people do what they feel works for them within that.

Yeah it's flexible and it's great when you have a group of friends willing to agree to terms to add restrictions but not everyone has that luxury. And when it comes down to it where you or anyone in general is playing in a gaming tournament that friends aren't hosting, you have to abide by the general rule set. Which means heroes galore are allowed. And you said it yourself that the GW guy wiped the floor with most of you though he wasn't unbeatable.

I wonder how an all star uber hero "army" would fair against an army of 3+ companies sized formations lead by a decent hero in each one to boost the F & C values along with giving epic rules and at the double!

Actually you should turn the discussion into now "what happens when restrictions can't be agreed upon and you must face these uber hero armies? How do you defeat them with a "regular" themed army?"

That's not a discussion that interests me. Feel free to start that thread if you want, I'm sure some people must want to talk about this.

At risk of starting said discussion, I've never encountered a situation where "restrictions couldn't be agreed upon." If I really didn't care for the rules for a certain tourney I wouldn't enter, and if someone wanted to play casual with such an army, I'd advise them to ask someone else. Not hard.