Local Mods

Inspirobot can help with most of your deficiencies.

If you play more than one wargame, you'll be familiar with how fast rules are changed.  It seems like as the Information Age took over and the rise of social media in the last few years, publishers kick out rules at an unprecedented rate.  I have mixed feelings about online "living" rule sets, and so do many others.  It is for this reason you can often find multiple editions of various games played by disparate groups in a community.  For example, 3rd Ed. 40k came out and half the guys I played with stuck with 2nd Ed. until the day they died...which was like 4th or 5th edition.

That was obviously more than a long time ago.  Many editions have came and went, but why?  Why do these games continually reinvent themselves, if not to propagate the business model of their parent company?  The real answer for the force of change may surprise you if you've never thought about it.

The real culprit is the tournament scene.

We've all heard the story.  It's a tale as old as wargaming time.  Certain units from a powercreeper rulebook run the games, and certain builds rise like slag to the top to be skimmed off and used by every power gamer that read that forum.  In order to change the meta, rules are altered, faqs are published, Q&A's clarify bungled collations and new editions change the landscape of your dice rolls (numbered 1 through 6) on a constant basis to stay ahead of the power gamers.

Really, you're going to see that no matter what.  No matter the game.  No matter the edition.

So how does a group cope if they are no longer supported by the publisher?  Or for that matter, if the majority of players have a grievance with a current ruleset that they could easily solve with a few words of text in the House Rules?  Well, then it's up to the club to enact some sort of change to the meta of their game.  This is especially important when the game is old and the metas are all known.

House Rules should be expected...local modifications to the ruleset that allow their meta to be cultivated.

Yet, what works for one group in one area may not work for any other group anywhere else.  For most of these games, the meta will be limited by the group's player base.  This means there will only be so many factions in a particular meta.  There will be a limited number of units, and the POTENTIAL for new units only extends to more models in a player's faction.  This naturally limits the interactions of special rules, and in each case a new meta emerges.

For instance, if your group contains 2 Lizardmen armies, 1 Bretonnian army, 1 Empire army and 3 chaos armies...you're not going to have to worry about High Elves until the day you go to a tournament or have a casual game against a player you don't normally play.  When you go to the tourney, obviously you have to play by their rules, THEIR local mods...but at home among the familiar armies, players and shenanigans you are used to, you may find it necessary to enact house rules to keep the games from becoming utterly ridiculous and NOT_FUN.

Expect this.  Embrace it.  Use unfamiliar house-ruled metas as a new challenge - but most of all, don't whine when you find out there is a 0-1 restriction on Obliterator and Mutilator units.

Frostgrave Cemetery Graves

Welcome to the graveyard, we got snow and graves.

I had a bag full of old gravestones, so I decided to make a graveyard.  You know what they say.  When life gives you a bag of gravestones, make a graveyard.

...wherein we totally ignore the lines we drew...

 So, I got my graves and with some foamcore and a small piece of scrap foam I set out to build a set for a cemetery.    I decided to use foamcore as it seemed to work nicely on the other pieces of terrain.  I knew what i was looking for...four smaller pieces and one larger one.

You're gonna need about 1" per body, Mister.

 One piece would have the larger grave, which is a Buzzy miniature from Reaper Bones.  It comes with a Mr. Bones figure as a pack.  It will be a pretty impressive tombstone for some unlucky sod...

All your stones in a row...

I cut a piece of foam to make a few small rises, for no good reason other than I thought it looked cool.  Once they were glued in place, I gave the whole base a good coat of acrylic brown.  After that, I decided to try a method I used on my daughter's tundra science project and put the snow down first.

I know the names are sophomoric but I don't care.  I really couldn't help myself.

It had snowed here the day before and my yard looked like a sodden mess.  I wanted to try somethings with realistic water, and would use the snow to create bowls for icy puddles.  Using some flock, realistic water and some Winter Tufts from Army Painter I tried to get a blend that looked like the puddles in the melting snow, with some ice around the edges.

That snow is turned to mush in the sun.

More precautions will be taken next time but it didn't look so different from the yard.  These took only a short time to make, and fill out a good portion of the board.  Gravestones can be claimed as cover by infantry, and if it's icy / muddy it also can be difficult terrain.

Alas, poor Buster...we hardly knew ye.

The set actually ends up providing a nice set of obstacles and cover.  The large one obscures line of sight in a most inconvenient way.  Together the whole set has a footprint of about 15-25% of the three foot board depending on how closely they are spaced.  The cemetery graves is the second section of the graveyard, the first one being the gates and the last one the mausoleum.  These graves will be the meat of that setup, and they look great on the board!

As the Ghostmist falls on the tundra, rival warbands fight over the graves of those long dead.

Expect the Meta

Inspirobot eats reptilians.  NOT humans.

Well, we did it.  It's been a few years since D&D went mainstream, and now there's a new set of things we need to be aware of.  Mainly, mainstreamers playing the game and developing 'video game syndrome'.  You know what I'm talking about, but it might be more subtle than you think.

I think I need to define what I mean by 'meta' gaming here.  I think there's two main school divisions as to what is meta, at least two that I can discern.  One is the number-crunching and exploitation of the mechanics, so called min-maxing.  The second is actually reading 'game' material that doesn't have numbers, from monster information to the actual adventure.  I'll have to address both of those individually, as I see them as totally separate things despite the common moniker.

So let's call it "illegal meta gaming" or a "meta gaming foul" when we mean meta gaming in the context of immorally (?) applying knowledge you as a player or character (player character) should not have.

The presence of the internet, with search engines and social media, make it very easy to run across meta game material without even trying.  I've only had trouble with this over the last year, to be honest.  Of course, that's since 5e came along and now everyone belongs to a D&D Facebook group.  So with this in mind, let's explore the meta.

First off - min/maxing.  I do not care about this AT ALL, and further I feel it's an integral part of the game.  If the player read the books and figured something out, good for them.  Unless it's somehow totally game-breaking then it's commendable.  I've never had cause to curtail something in twenty plus years of gaming.   In my opinion, this in NO WAY constitutes illegal meta gaming.  If anything, I feel that half a thought into the character's mechanics actually shows the player is interested in the game.

Now, you might technically call it meta gaming since it takes into account information the character does not have.  Yet, this isn't information the PLAYER shouldn't necessarily have.  The player should definitely have information regarding how they are to play the game, and I believe that includes the information in the Player's Handbook.  The Dungeon Master Guide is also a good thing for the player to read.  I don't even care if they read the Monster Manual, though I don't allow reference of the DMG or MM at the table, for reasons explained below.

So let's further refine our meta gaming taxonomy.  Illegal meta gaming occurs when a player uses information that NEITHER the character nor the player would normally have access to in the ruleset or scenario.  In this case, it's tantamount to cheating because such information would have to be deliberately sought out.

The new players will most likely be focused on the mechanics of the game if they ever played a video game before tabletop, that's just how it is.  Further, you can't expect someone to play a game they don't know the rules to.  We just think it's normal in our hobby because that's how you get gamers into the game, but not everyone that plays in a game buys a book or even bothers to borrow one.

Referencing material at the table should be frowned upon, but who's gonna stop someone from looking up a common monster or magical item in the main books at home?  We just have to assume that (DERP) these characters live in this world, and anything the player might recall from the common books (and even specific campaign books in some cases) MIGHT be something their character knows.  I think a lot of DM's make the mistake of assuming their characters are utterly ignorant of anything other than the races in the PHB, and then forcing the game to operate somehow in that false ignorance.

A character MIGHT know what a monster is or has heard legends of a magic item.  Great.  They might even have an idea of the monster's powers or the item's magic.  They probably don't have such memory that they remember specific details however, like exact numbers and everything else on the page.  This is why I disallow referencing the material at the table.  It's easy for people to Google anything, especially if you are playing on a virtual tabletop.  Make sure folks know the protocol for reference in your game.

Now, the worst type of illegal meta gaming BY FAR is actually reading adventures you are currently playing in.  You can play in modules you've ran or played in before by not acting on information you have remembered, or by allowing your aging memory to completely wipe the adventure from your mind.  However, this type of meta gaming is tantamount to cheating.

DO NOT READ the current adventure.  DO NOT READ adventures you KNOW you will play in.  Especially DO NOT pretend to be ignorant if you somehow do so accidentally, such as before you know you are going to play in it.  I know that's technically three 'do-nots' but it's all really the same thing.  Just don't do that one thing, and you're pretty much golden.

...and that's how I feel about meta gaming.