Codex Secondaries – sharing the journey
With great power comes… I forget the rest. I’m sure it’s an important and memorable quote. The point is that as an event organiser, you have a responsibility to your attendees to give them a great event. That means making decisions for them regarding what the event looks like – you establish the social contract if you will.
As an organiser you establish how long the game will have to be completed, what mission(s) will be played, the size and nature of the players armies and more. The players pay for you to organise these things (and so much more) so they can come out and play. Its quite the weight of responsibility.
Sometimes, you must make a call knowing that you are damned either way – that some part of the community will upset with the call you made – and that there is nothing you can do about that. You cannot please all the people all the time as the saying goes.
What do Codex secondaries have to do with all this? Plenty actually.
Our end of season event for 2020 is the Perth GT – Masters 40k, and I had the unenviable task of writing a players pack to create the format for the day. It’s a long and thankless task which takes days to do. I put a lot of thought and time into the pack trying to cover all the angles and bases. This years pack is no exception. We have rules of clocks and how to handle starting new battle rounds when the time is almost up. We have sportsmanship and conduct clauses. We have the missions and terrain and how to handle them. All in all, its hard work.
When it came time to decide on whether to allow the new codex secondaries into the Perth GT – Masters, my initial response was no. That went in the pack early and was part of the draft copy that went to a handful of other local TO’s and into our Patreon group for review. Sometimes its easy to overthink stuff or overlook it when you spend days in front of the screen working on it. Typos got corrected and any wording issues are fixed. After I was done, the feedback on the decision to remove the secondaries was pretty evenly split for our patrons, in fact it was slightly in favour of banning them!
When I hit this sort of moment – I tend to seek out others with experience and who I trust for advice and help in providing arguments for both sides so I can look at it from all angles. This very topic had been brought up in the ITC Organisers group I am part of with the overwhelming majority – including all the big name events – siding on including them. Mike Brandt – head of events for Games Workshop and founder of the Nova Open weighed in again supporting the use of codex secondaries, confirming that the secondaries were written and built for Eternal War and GT packs including on a rolling basis as they release. He compared them to the faction maelstrom cards which were not meant to be used at tournaments nor play tested for them. The Aus masters will also be using them at Uprising just a week after the Perth GT.
Some pretty compelling support so far. Still, I wanted more angles, so a poll went up in the patrons hidden group asking peoples thoughts. The majority – only by a few – voted in the negative, that they would prefer them to not be used. Interestingly the factions the players use regularly played no part in the votes it seems with players who have no new book anywhere on the horizon voting to include and other with brand new books in the last month voting no. It was during this conversation I got a PM from a player who pointed out you can only pick a single faction secondary per game in the first place. That’s good news for sure.
Undeterred, I got in touch with the local 40k organisers for the Perth community. How would they be handling things? I felt it was important for the event to be in line with what we as organisers would be running for competitive play events going forward. Lots of conversation again occurred with one key point raised – the secondaries are listed as matched play rules. We as a community locally and world wide have spent the last 3 years of 8th edition trying to move to a single format that the whole community plays. One that doesn’t use house rules for terrain or missions or anything else. We want to be playing the same competitive game. 9th edition has gotten us much closer to this than ever before. When we as organisers start tampering with the matched play rules we take steps back in regards to the experience we provide because it becomes a ‘home brew’ version of the game.
Yes for team events I can understand why you would likely disallow them (that’s a whole different issue thanks to the format) but for singles, I don’t think banning them is the answer.
“They score points too easily” or “they can score points I can’t” are two common complaints alongside “its not fair they have access, and I don’t”. I must ask, how is this any different to armies with new codex and rules in general – let alone for the mission secondaries. New books have always done well and its because they just got a refresh, not because they can choose from 21 secondaries instead of 18. If we agree that one of these secondaries they now have access to is too good – how is it any different to data sheets that are clearly under priced and overused as a result? Should we all agree that eradicators for the space marines are to cheap and just put the points up to 50 per model or more? Ban them all together? It’s a slippery slope.
Next, I went digging into the data at First Blood part 2 – we had 4 games and 53 players, and we allowed the secondaries. What data could that event provide?
On the podium we had Sisters of Battle, Death Guard and Necrons – only one of which had access to the secondaries. Looking at the event as a whole, we had 25 of the 53 players using a new codex – nearly half the field. Yes, they all likely accessed their codex secondaries at some point (I have no way of checking this without opening and counting every game manually) but even then, they still must complete it. Some of the core secondaries are easier to score and harder to mitigate than the codex ones. You still have the tactical challenge of completing them.
SO….
We get back to the decision at hand. I know that the competitive events in WA will in general be using them. I know that all the major events around the world will be using them and have feedback from play testers and people ‘in the know’ stating they are intended for just this sort of event on a rolling release basis. I know that as a community everyone is going to have their own take on it and I am going to upset someone regardless of what I do.
My view was that it was better we play the same game and the same standard as the other majors around the world to be part of that community and set standards that place our players in the same arena rather than playing our own version of the game.
With more time these opinions might change, both for me and for other TO’s – who knows what new secondaries might be coming – but for now, this felt like the right call. You can check out the event HERE on Facebook with links to the players pack and more. You should also go and read THIS as a synopsis of what’s changed for this years event.