Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

scott holder · Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 2:23 pm Post subject: Deployment at Hcon

First, it was hugely gratifying to have someone, in this case Rich Kroupa, come up to me Sunday morning and damn near hug me because of how deployment and start of play was handled at Hcon. His comment was that over the years (and still going on), he'd get into a game and his opponent would simply take forever to get going, more than an hour to start bound 1.

Clearly that behavior isn't conducive to the long term health of this game.

So, here's what I did.

1) I made it clear that if you didn't have your terrain at hand, tough. *No* wandering around bumming that one piece of terrain you need in this one instance. That being said, I didn't need to "enforce" this because of #2:

2) Everyone was expected to be starting Bound 1 NLT 40 minutes from the start of the game. I went around to every table and checked. If someone hadn't started, it didn't take long to figure out who the offending slow-ass party was. But even then, there was an out, #3:

3) Everyone was expected to be starting Bound 2 NLT than 60 minutes from the start of the game. If not, I figured out who the offending party was, provided some stern words and moved on. I have every player a 1 game "grace" slot on this, but yes, in 3 instances, I made a note of the slow player and if it happened again *anytime* during the weekend, I was ready to levy penalties.

Said penalty would start at giving the offending player's opponent 201 points to apply as he saw fit, ie, add to his own score, subtract from his opponent, or any combination thereof.

It never came to that. In each and every game I umped, everybody was on Bound 2 by 60 minutes into the game.

One way I "got around" players from starting early in some vain effort to gain more time, I didn't put the pairings out until 5-10 minutes before the start of the round. That gave everybody time to find their opponent, get their crap moved and resettled onto a new table and then plenty of time to play the game.

In my experience in the theme, we got plenty of bounds in, anywhere from 8-12 in my three games, and that was me running a potentially skirmishy loose order foot army against predominantly close order foot armies.

So, expect to see this again next year.

scott

joncleaves · Moderator Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 16447

Long overdue.

Bill Chriss · Centurion Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1000 Location: Texas

Agreed. See my comments posted elsewhere. In past years, I have had to swallow 2-1s or 2-2s that should have been 5-2s or 4-2s because we didn't have this kind of system in effect.

Ewan McNay · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 12:05 pm Post subject:

I mentioned this briefly previously; but agree with most of Scott's comments. Some folk *were* still slow st startup, and received a comment that this had been noticed - but again, were always on bound 2 within the hour and got in at least 5-6 bounds per game in the end.

I put up pairings within 5-10 min of the previous round ending; there was only one round where people wanted to start early, and I had no problem with that as long as I knew what time they were starting Smile

so could end their games early also.

scott holder · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 1:52 pm Post subject:

I should add that the actual scheduling worked out pretty well.

Initially for Fri and Sat, I provided 2 hours between rounds 2 and 3. And that was the time frame when everybody drifted back around 1.5 hours and started twiddling their thumbs. Thus, for Saturday, I tweaked the schedule so that there was only 1.5 hours between rounds and that seemed to work quite well.

I kept the 1 hour between rounds time frame for Rounds 1-2 and that seemed to work well.

Thur was a different monster but it also seemed to work very well. Combine that with shorter rounds and well, the day seemed downright leisurely. And what struck me Saturday night around, oh, 8-9pm was the serious *lack* of fatigue. The last two years by Sat night, mental fatigue was readily apparent across the board. Less so this year.

Keep in mind that for Cold Wars, the Mini will be played as it was at Hcon this year, in terms of time (I'm working on bringing back the Mini Theme Campaign tourney we did at Cold Wars 03). Team games will remain at 4 hours in length although I'll still be nasty about setup and deployment.

Hcon will be like we did this year except that the schedule I used on Saturday will also apply to Friday.

BTW, we had 52 players this year, which means that after DBA, us and WAB are the main games being played.

scott