slutman, slitman and beardflakes

The recent Highlander Games tournament has given me a lot to think about, especially in terms of the metagame and the variety of players we have in our hobby. Here in Glasgow we have a competitive WM set, living happily alongside gamers that a mate ably described as "game tourists because they suck at games".  Dundee seemed to be entirely normal , rounded gamers.  There do exist the others though.  The slitmen, the slutmen, and the beardflake.

Normal Gamers(us):
Here we have a gamer like myself (and you, probably): normal, well adjusted (...like fuck I am), and interested in gaming as a whole, whilst actually playing only 2 or 3 games. We tend to invest more heavily in one game than others, although we may dabble occasionally in the murky waters of different scales, or periods.  Or one off games like Incursion(which is awesome).  We are the average, everyday, silent majority.
We would shop in GW, but not consider it a social venue.  We are open minded, and open to new things.

Beardflakes:
The Historical Single Period gamer, his favorite game is something like Fast-Play Rules For Conflicts in The Mugubugu Wars of 1610...Anyway...  what more could be said for this individual?  What further torment can we inflict?  None.  He has made his bed, let him lay in it.

In fact, no, lets digress a bit here.  dear historical gamers.  Learn to paint neatly, not everyone can be a picasso, but everyone can paint inside the lines, k?

The painting on some historical miniatures is Ebay Pro Paint standard.  Its like they taped a brush to an epileptic and turned on a strobe light.  Sick fucks!  Epilepsy is not to be laughed at! And its most definitely not there for your painting convenience!  Fucking sickos. "this is my goobooowugu force from the hamster wars of 1718, fought against the numerically inferior but technologically superior prussio-hungarians"  Seriously? That's real guys that died, not made up cryptofascists or steam driven magical robots.  At least paint them neatly

My Fluff/Band is better than your Fluff/Band, and so's my Fluff/Band.
And while we are on the subject, I care less about your made up chapter where the fluff gets raped like a slave at a ludus, than I care about in your band that blends Metallica and Sum 41 and Nirvana to create a new sound. It doesn't, you suck. And you always will.  Fuck off, cut your hair, and sell your guitar, then come back so I can tell you to fuck off again.  Then sell your marines (cos its always fucking marines).  Then fuck off, again...again.

I have literally heard the following:
 "My chapter are the secret lords of terra, they rule in the emperors stead and move behind the scenes , the emperor is their puppet and they wear camoflage and have access to all the best weapons, so I get land raiders for every 5 man squad".

Flying fist of fuck off and fuck yourself!  It is an absolute insult to spew this shite at another human.  There should be a law against it!

Slitman
We also have the single system gamer, one of my personal favourites because they think they can do better than anyone else at designing games; based on their experience of 1 game ; that game is invariably 40K.

Many is the time I have read a fuckwitted thread and realised they are bending 40K into a game that has already existed for years, but they simply do not have the exposure or will to realise that it does.  I'm thinking of a recent thread about 40K needing rewritten badly, the guy basically described FWC/Stargrunt/Hammers Slammers, but was ignorant of their existence.  If only he knew that his needs had been met, but his ears were closed, as was his mind.  I was sad :(

Single System Gamers are bad for the hobby, as they suffer from interminable myopia and mistake their views for reality all too often.  You know one, you really do...

He starts sentences with "I think you'll find..." and spews banal trivia at your face until you want to punch yourself for failing so hard in life that you are of an equal social station to this fuckwit.  Yes, it's your fault, and your's alone that you are stood here talking to a bad gamer who knows everything about everything and compares absolutely every fucking game to 40k.

His frame of reference is so limited its a fucking slit, and so is he.  He is a Fucking slitman.

He happily interrupts conversation at the FLGS with some shitty insight into why X is better than Y, and invariably its a fallacy of the excluded middle anyway.  But he is so fucking right in absolutely everything all the fucking time.

Slutman
At the other extreme from slitman is slutman.  The gaming slut.  He can usually paint really quickly and extremely well.  He can learn the rules for any system really quickly, and play a full game in an evening.  By next week he has painted 10,000 cuntgobblers in 1mm and is playtesting an exciting new set of rules for two guys on a forum in Bremen.  10,000 well painted cuntgobblers, like, awe-inspiringly well painted.  They are then consigned to a drawer while he paints up 6 54mm Gimps for use in a novelty set of rules that , *chortle chortle* lets you play "The Story Of O" Bondage using an IGOUGO system with interrupt activations.
So. Fucking. Novelty.

My mate rationalised these guys as " too afraid to get beat so they constantly try and be first at the new system, hoping this is the one that will fix all their problems and make them winners".  They invariably win 1 game, then the rest of us catch up, and they move onto something even more obscure and self-fellating.

So what(actual Gaming content)?


How to be a well rounded gamer:


Now, my non-scientific observations have noticed something.  The winners, the guys who repeatedly show up tops in tournaments or are considered "good" players, are the guys who fall into the first category.  Normal, well-rounded, open-minded gamers.  The slitmen usually end up losing due to simple things like deployment and poor list building, and the slutmen are simply scared of tournaments, people, and open spaces.

If you want to be a winner, if you want to be a better gamer, fewer systems more often is far better that 1 system all the time or all the systems none of the time.  No matter how much you theorycraft or study the army lists, there is no subtitute for actually playing games against other people.  Here's the secret about other people, they aren't you!

Get out there and play!  It may look good on paper to have X list , but have you used it in actual, on the table play?  Quite often , as happened with my Orcs and Goblins, the reality of deployment and first turn is very different from the theory.  Quite often, the local meta will flavour your list building, until you come across a different meta, this happened in Dundee, units we had never faced before and had never had to counter were suddenly there, across the table, silently condemning us for our lack of preparation.

By all means, do the deployment training using battle chronicler and vassal,  have your spreadsheets of probabilities and ratios, but temper this with the actual human element of contact with another mind.

There is a very famous quote about plans and enemies, and you should know it if your reading this.  Take it to heart, because whilst prep is only 9/10 of the battle, the other 1/10 is the one that counts the most.

Now get out there and win!

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