On Painting Scores in Miniature Gaming Tournaments, Part II

I started discussing painting scores in Part I, where I discussed the positives and negatives of painting scores in general in war game tournaments.  Here in Part II, I'll discuss my thoughts on where and when painting scores are best implemented and the varying weights painting can be given.  Tomorrow in Part III, I'll talk about paint judging and how best to effectively score painting in your tournament.

Part II:  The Where and the Weight of Painting Scores

You could sum up the entirety of my first post by just writing "know your audience and know yourself".  Thus, the two most important factors when determining whether you should consider when creating your tournament and implementing (or not implementing) a painting score are "What are my players looking for?" and "What am I looking for?"

For store owners/managers/employees running tournaments, providing a venue for new players to participate might be something important to emphasize.  Thus, I've found that stores are more likely to forgo painting requirements in favor of pure battle scores.  Likewise, if  you're running an event to introduce new players into the hobby and game, ignoring paint scores and requirements might be the way to go as well.

On the other end of the spectrum, individually run tournaments, especially the two day affairs, will most likely appeal to veteran gamers, and very often contain painting scores and requirements.  While there are a few that do not, those tournaments are target towards the "playing only" group of hobbyists, and are in the minority for many game systems.  

If you've decided to use painting scores, there are different ways to go about doing so.  If you'd like to reward painting without punishing you "playing only" group, a great way to go about doing so is to award a separate prize for the best painted army, while keeping those painting scores completely separate from the battle scores and overall prizes.  Otherwise, you'll want to figure out just how much you'd like painting scores to matter in terms of overall score.  More "hardcore" tournaments might contain painting as a small component of overall score, while soft score oriented tournaments might have painting as more than thirty percent of the overall. 

I've found that the best way to go about calculating the effects of painting score is to look at your battle scores first.  Figure out how many battle points a player can potentially earn in a day of tournament play, and then work out how many points painting should count as from there.  For instance, if you're running a five game tournament, and players can earn up to one hundred points from battles (twenty points per battle), you might decide that you want painting to be worth about the same as one battle, and award up to twenty points.  Depending on your emphasis, go higher or lower!

See you tomorrow to discuss judging!