- Joined
- Jan 23, 2023
It's not just Imperial Knights, but it's a few other armies and rules. Anti-pskyer and anti-daemon are weapon abilities that are either completely useless or completely shut down your opponent. Fly is another keyword that is extremely niche offering almost no benefit, but if your opponent happens to bring a tank with an anti-fly weapon your units might get screwed. Terminators with invuln saves are another feels bad rule where, unless you brought something that deals mortal wounds, you're probably waiting for your opponent to roll a 1 on their armor save.
Rules gotchas are more an issue of etiquette. Yes they do exist where you think you're smart and deep striking into charge range, but suddenly your opponent is allowed to move his character behind a building, or you think you can fall back but then your opponent pulls out a stratagem that says no you can't. What is common courtesy between players is that at the start of every game you declare what your army can do. If I'm playing Retaliation Cadre I'm going to make sure my opponent knows that I can Deep Strike within 3" of their models with a stratagem. You should also remind them of rules during a match when you see them clearly attempting a play that you know is not actually possible because of your special rule. Don't wait until your opponent carefully sets up all their models to see your Epic Hero to snipe them from across the board to remind them that actually they have Lone Op and can't be shot at. Also don't fuss about precise positioning of models. If your opponent is clearly trying to use cover, or place their models a specific distance away don't wait until after to say "um actually you accidentally left the rim of your model's base in the footprint of the ruin so I get to shoot you". You should ask "are you intending to block line of sight?" or "how far away do you intend to be?".
When I say it causes conflict I don't necessarily mean two people arguing. Conflict means that one person's enjoyment must come at the expense of the other. I enjoy shooting and killing models, but that means you have to deal with removing models off the board. Since both players want to win, they necessarily have to try to hinder the other which creates an unenjoyable experience. This might be so minimal that it's not even an issue. Playing Chess andlosing a piece causes almost no friction because of how quickly the game moves, and losing pieces is part of the strategy. But even in Chess if you played someone and you never captured a piece the whole match you would probably agree that there really wasn't any point to playing.
The goal is to minimize how bad it feels to lose. Some people are able to go into a game and just want to see what happens. That's great if you can. Most people would rather a game that feels challanging but not impossible. One of my friends is the most laid back guy you could ever meet, but in a recent game he rolled extremely low across the board, and his opponent was rolling hot. by the second turn he had lost most of his army, held no points, had no CP because every ability and strategy he attempted simply failed and fizzled out. Even he said, I know this isn't your fault but this really feels like I'm just getting bullied and I'm not having fun watching you play single player Warhammer. There is a limit to how much failure people are willing to tolerate before they start to question if it's even worth playing. You need to at least feel like there is a chance to do something. Even if you can't win you want to participate. You want to feel like you lost because you misplayed, or your opponent outsmarted you. Losing because for some reason you always roll 1s isn't fun for anybody.
