Victory points, Tournament use

I've seen KP's and VP's coming up alot in discussions lately....

I think we should give VP's a try in tournaments again. The only real argument I ever saw against VP's is some people would make really hard expensive units to play the "denial" game...oh yeah, they STILL do that with KP's.


What do you think the pros and cons are for VP's and KP's?


VP's benefits:

1) They ensure that every player has the same amount of points.

2) They offer partial credit for killing stuff - especially wounding characters. People might be less likely to abuse wound allocation in this regard.

3) VP's are still in the rule book and so need no "overhaul" or sliding scales/conversions to make them work.

I'm all for VP's. I'm sick of 2 out of 3 missions being KPs in tournaments (in some cases they all are KP missions). 5th edition was designed around taking objectives...and the primary focus of a game should be about taking objectives.

2/3 of the book missions are Objective based and tounaments should likely reflect this.

I'm also a big fan of having less draws - I think VP's should automatically be used to break ties. I've seen to many games where you beat the tar out of the other army to have them draw anyways....

True, but there's a huge difference between denying 1 or 2 KPs vs 500-700 VPs. At the end of the day, I don't think either system is a real winner there. Both are equally "abusable".

Since the majority of the wound allocation shenanigans are in squads with multi-wound models, I don't think that switching to VPs will curb that issue.

I'm all for adding VPs to the mission objective pool. However, I think that KPs are easy to "fix", and they're a lot easier to count up, especially when you get into retinues and such - VPs can get complicated.

All you need to do is make KPs a ratio of how many were won vs how many were available to begin with. So if your opponent's army has 10KP available, and you score 5 of them, your KP score is 50%. If you killed 9 of them, your score would be 90%. It's a single math problem: Number of KPs won divided by number of KPs available. You don't have to calculate halves or remove dedicated transports from your army builder totals.

It's brutally easy, and evens out armies. Yes, your guard army has 30KPs and my marine army has 12. If you kill 6 of mine and I kill 15 of yours, we tie. The old complaint about having so many kill points to give up is gone because now it's a ratio.

VP's win over KP's at least due to partial credit. KP's are all or nothing and punish plaers for having weak units.

Sure it does: I'll bounce wounds off of Eldrad & Yriel as long as they are not instant kill wounds. Even if I fail both saves I didn't lose a single model. I've seen this with lots of other lists too. Obviously, multi wound stuff like Nobz present a different problem but they too are bouncing or soaking stuff with their warboss. Giving up 1/2 VP's again may make a player a little more cautious about doing it....

"Denial" is even stronger with KP's due to it's all or nothing status. Sure is a bitch to kill 9 of 10 models in my concil and get nothing for it. Stuff like this encourages weird play where people are hunting down transports/pods etc as they are easy pickings. You almost can't afford to deal with the super unit as the reward to cost ratio blows but you can't afford not to as well....

If KP's were supposed to "simplify" things we certainly don't need a "ratio ystem". VP's are such an easy solution....

Rhubarb used a KP ratio system this past weekend and it seemed to me based on hearing other players there that they weren't all that happy/excited about it. For me, I'm just tired of tournaments as of late being all about what you kill. The game itself isn't centered around that. It's meant to be an objectives first kind of game. If I have to play 1 KP game in a tournament, I don't mind so much, but lately the tourneys I've gone to have had 2 KP games...and in some cases all 3 games involved KPs. That's retarded.

I like VPs more than KPs, but I don't mind KPs either when they aren't used in every damn mission.

Exactly what he said.

This edition is more about objectives than killing. 4th edition was 3/4 of the time VP and all it led to was armies just min maxing and neglecting troops.

I agree with all of the above.

5th edition is supposed to be about objectives.

KP is fine but only 1/3rd of the missions.