The Adventures of Outlaw Shizzle - Episode 1 "The Great Escape"

Haven't had any time at all to play any kind of wargame and I'm so dissappointed I missed the Remembrance Day Challenge. But that's life I suppose.

Instead of being too down that I can't get my gaming fix, I decided to start up a Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition campaign with my old playgroup. We haven't played an RPG in a long while and 4th edition D&D seemed like a great place to start. The ruleset is quite straight forward and there's a lot of variety to keep everyone happy. Not to mention we were all itching to play some kind of RPG again.

One of the things we always hated was character creation as it took a while if no one knew what they wanted to be exactly. So we decided to assign a role to everyone (each player took on the role of striker, controller, leader or defender) then roll for random classes in each role and then finally random races. We ended up with some interesting combinations and shortened character creation time considerably (no looking through each book to figure out what to be).

• The defender of the party is a dragonborn warden named Cardiac Bison
• The striker of the party is a goliath ranger named Sergeant Enforcer
• The controller of the party is a human invoker of the Raven Queen named Jack Crusher
• The party has two leaders (we had a fifth player who rolled his role randomly), one half-elf cleric of the Raven Queen named Mr. Hunter and one dwarf bard named Andre Zodiac.

We were all fans of the WWE at some point and one of the players had a wrestler name app on their iphone and named everyone in the party (and the party name too) using it, so the names of the characters are kind of strange (the app did speed up the character creation as well)

The party was balanced and the players got to play characters they haven't played before. Not surprisingly being veteran gamers my players all did their best to min/max their characters to be the best they could be.

Anyways what follows is a recap of our first adventure.

Lists for the Remembrance Day Challenge....

So regardless of my reservations about the tournament format, I'm still going to try and play. Hopefully my super themed army of terminators won't affect my army selection score too much. Considering everyone will outnumber me (aside from maybe Grey Knights) it shouldn't be too bad.

Unfortunately deciding on what to bring at 1850 is causing me a lot of problems. I have, however decided on at least the core. Regardless of what list I use it will at least contain the following:
HQ
Belial - Claws (maybe TH & SS if I can get the shield arm painted in time)

Troops
Deathwing Squad 1 - Apothecary, 1 TH & SS, 1 pair of Claws
Deathwing Squad 2 - 1 TH & SS, Cyclone, Chainfist
Deathwing Squad 3 - 1 TH & SS, Cyclone, Chainfist
Deathwing Squad 4 - Cyclone, Chainfist

Fast Attack
Ravenwing Land Speeder - Multi-Melta, Typhoon
Ravenwing Land Speeder - Multi-Melta, Typhoon

This brings the core part of my list to 1245 points. So I have 605 points to spend. Here are the best options available to me based on what is painted and/or easy to paint given the time I have (these are the best in my opinion at least)

14th Annual Remembrance Day Challenge

A tournament I can actually play in! The longest running 40k tournament in the region is coming back for its 14th iteration. I've played in this tournament every year I think except last year (Penny was born the week before) and when I was completing my 2 year Bachelor of Education.

Sadly, I generally don't do very well at these tournaments (somewhere in the upper half usually though) as I've only finished in the money once (I'm not counting my string of consecutive pop quiz wins) but they are still a blast. Admittedly I have reservations about playing in the tournament this year because of how I ran Orktoberfest (and Orctoberfest last year).

Orktoberfest 2011

Another year, another Orktoberfest.

Not as big a turnout as last year but fun nonetheless. Lots of prizes so everyone walked away with something. I will probably organize it again next year, but I'll need to do something to ensure I get more people attending. It would give me more money for prizes and will help grow the hobby more.

My new sportsmanship scoring worked better as I got a wider spread of scores this year. Also refined my Renaissance, Artistic, Honourable and Tactical rating formulas so the probability of a tie between the top players in each category should be practically non-existant.

Anyways pictures!

Orktoberfest 2011

'Ard Boyz semi-finals summary

Well the 2011 40k 'Ard Boyz semis are done. Not as good a showing as I would have liked placing 8th out of 10 people who showed up. Definately goes to show that practice is good. Still had lots of fun and even managed to get a door prize! (which will be added to the Orktoberfest prize pool as I don't actually need it).

Here's a brief summary (detailed reports hopefully later this week)

Game 1 vs. Razorspam Wolves w/ drop pods - Got Massacred
- Had a promising first turn as I siezed the initative and downed a bunch of razorbacks, but the retaliation crippled me way too much.

Game 2 vs. Orks - Major Loss
- Close game but lost my last few terminators in the last assault phase of the game.

Game 3 vs. Chaos Marines - Major victory
- Could have been a massacre for me but couldn't get passed the cover save of an obliterator who had gone to ground.

'Ard Boyz semi-finals scenarios up

They finally put up the 40k 'Ard Boyz semi-finals scenarios here. Seems a little better written than the prelims. They appear to be pushing armies with lots of scoring units but I suppose that's good for them as people will want to buy more models. One of the three scenarios require you to have a lot of scoring units and another may require you to have a lot of scoring units. For most armies though they can only muster 6 without some special rules like combat squads or imperial guard infantry platoons so they will have a hard time I think getting massacres.

Here are my thoughts on the scenarios with my army

To go to tournaments or not to go - Part 3: My Army Isn't Painted

So far I've talked about two reasons for not attending tournaments: cost and attitude. Those I think are the biggest deterants. But if neither of those reasons are a big enough deterant, the last reason generally finishes it for most people and that is the issue of having their army painted.