Scenarios vs. Points battles

[Lost Egg]

I'm a newbie to Twilight and was just wondering how many of you regularly play the scenarios in the rulebook, points battles or a mix of both?

One of the things I find appealing about the game is the characterful scenarios and so I'm interested how popular they are.

Also if you do play points battles, whats an average size game?

Cheers 

HN

[Geckilian]

I play a mix, either scenarios of games around 500 to 900 points.

[Lost Egg]

So if your playing a points battle do you just fight to the death or a certain number of turns and see who caused the most points worth f damage to decide the winner?

HN

[Brandlin]

you're supposed to PLAY with the figures?

what???

next you'll be telling me i'm supposed to paint the damn things!

pffft what will these newbies think of next?

[Carcharoth]

It seems a bit odd for me to chip in here, but hope you don't mind!

There is something to be said for being able to take two points matched forces and having a reasonably simple game. You can then probably boil things down to a couple of basic scenarios, and we'll generally play something along these lines:
Escort: One side is the defender, one the attacker. The Defender must get a model (eg Engineer, priest, Trader) off the table and the Attacker must try to stop them. The attacker will flee once they've lost all 'leader' type models, the defender won't flee. The Devanu don't really lend themselves to being the defender in this scenario! I've played this a lot with the Delgon trying to get their priest off the table while teh Devanu or Empire (or both) do the attacking.
Straight Fight: Both sides try to kill each other. They will flee when they lose all (or half) their leader type models. Whoever flees first loses.

I've been playtesting scenarios a lot recently, which makes for a very different experience. Most of the scenarios can easily be modified for different games, but to be honest the scenarios in the first book are all variants of the above. There is a bit more variation in the scenarios in the second book that I've just been finishing off, but that does mean they are somewhat less balanced (especially when you start swapping troops around).

Have you seen Jubal's campaign rules? He's developed quite a clever system for linking games and growing forces etc, but I've not tried those out myself.

[Geckilian]

When I play points we usually come up with a game ending moment, such as 'when x dies' or 'when x and x escape here' like Carcharoth suggested. It means that we have something other than pure annihilation to aim for, and also makes it slightly more tactical - sure, I could just run in and kill, but if I have to protect a Priest, it means I have to think more about my turns.

Every now and then we just play the whole 'kill 'em all' approach, and that's always good for a diversion.

[Lost Egg]

I like it that both the characterful scenario and the more simple points based clash is accommodated. A scenario driven game can be tactically challenging but sometimes you just want to kick the crap out of each other.

So is 500-900pts a normal size game? Whats the rough model count for that?

Cheers for the responses!

HN

[Geckilian]

500-900 is normal for me, but probably not normal overall. As I like Striders (which are 50 points each) and own 15 of them, plus characters around 250 points and so forth, not even counting all the infantry I have, I tend to play larger games simply to get to use the figures I own. A typical game for me would be 5 to 6 Striders, 6+ Derakeers, a couple of KalJoran, and a Priest/Acolyte against 2 or 3 Devanu and a silly number of Grishak, around the 6 to 8 mark.

Most normal games I'd expect to be around a third of that in terms of points.

[Carcharoth]

When I was looking at a points system I wanted to go for something much simpler (or at least with smaller numbers of points), but looking at games like Warmachine and WH40k etc I figured it was sensible to bow to tradition and make it so 500pts would be a reasonable sized game. Of course now WH40k has kept increasing in scale and Warmachine have completely rejigged their points... d'oh.

250pts is a good size for a small game, and I'll do starter sets at about that scale. I'm doing larger sets with 400pts as well, which open up the tactical options a bit.
For Empire 250pts is a Knight captain, two knights, a militia captain and a unit of five militia (9 models). For Devanu you could have a Sempa, a couple of Jenta and a beast (4 models). Delgon would generally have more models, maybe something like a Priest, 2 bodyguards, 2 deraks, 1 Strider and 8 soldiers (14 models).

The large assymetry of the forces does mean that it is much cheaper to collect Devanu than Delgon! Unless you just get Roban and a bunch of Striders...

[Geckilian]

Unless you just get Roban and a bunch of Striders...

What a silly approach, surely no one's done that.

[Emberbreeze]

I think scenarios are more fun, even if you're making them up yourself. The unbalanaced nature of them can make it a challenge, and I think swapping sides and playing again is always good (bit like Space Hulk)

I think Salute will be the first time we've played a really large game in ages (how many points is it, well over 1000?), but that is a scenario as well, not just a straight fight.