Post by Havock on Dec 18, 2018 6:15:30 GMT
For our demo games, we didn’t use battle boxes.
None of us (the guys running the demos) particularly like the battle boxes, and we felt they do a poor job of highlighting the game’s strengths.
Instead we each built 20-point lists, making sure to use relatively simple casters, but with condition that each list have at least 1 solo, 1 heavy and one unit. We avoided solos that buff as support tends to complicate things unnecessarily.
As I recall, we had Baldur2, Butcher1, Krueger1 and (something Menoth, forget who) to choose from. We also had some basic scenario to force people to get stuck in.
The specifics don’t honestly matter too much, they’re just a way to get you thinking about how you’d do it instead. What matters is the goal, which imo is:
1) Newbie has fun
2) Newbie sees the strengths of WMH (whatever you may think those are)
3) Newbie learns some basics of the rules
4) Vet has enough to work with that he doesn’t get bored
Point 4 is often neglected, or simply treated as some suffering that the vet is just going to have to power through. If you design it right, this doesn’t have to be the case, and far more vets will be happy to teach newbies, which helps everyone
Good points and I agree; Battlebox games are something to be done for absolute newbies (and you should make a distinction between those new to the game and those new to wargames in general), most everybody wants more meat to play with, give them a unit, a solo and they'll have fun figuring it out.
Yes they'll do things wrong, but that can be corrected, either because you pick it up or later on, the most important thing is that they have fun.
That is achieved, in part, by challenging them.
And while the new SR is horrible unsuited for lower point games, some of the old scenarios are fine: Close quarters, Supply and Demand and other more compact scenarios are easily transfered and work just fine with lower footprint armies.
"But SR is..."
perfectly fine; They are semi-balanced setups that make sure there are more things involved than dice rolling, and while SR is a dime-a-dozen for us vets it is also one of the things that will be new for players coming from other games. Use it.