WOW! What a day!
Let me tell you, today was a great day for me! I attended a Warhammer 40k Rouge Trader Tournament, and let me tell you how it went.
First of all, I faced David and his world eaters, which are a chapter of Chaos Space Marine, think Marines who have gone over to the dark side. He came from the far side of Little Rock to attend. The scenario was Unplanned Assault, where you figure out what you're supposed to do in the middle of the game. You also start out with very little of your troops on the board, and you have to bring them on according to die rolls. Anyway, we set up and went at each other. It was a blood bath, mostly Ultramarine blood being spilt. What won me the match was the fact that because this scenario was written under 3rd edition, I could use transports to hold objectives. In 4th edition (the current ruleset) you can't use dedicated transports to hold objectives. My opponent thankfully ignored my Rhinos, and I was able to contest two objectives with them. My command squad managed to contest a third objective. What won me the game was one squad of his marines (who was trying to hold onto an objective) did what is called "blood rage". This meant he had to charge forward toward the nearest enemy unit. So he had to advance them 5 inches, before they realized, "Hey, aren't we supposed to protect that building?" and they moved back 6 inches. Well, this left them exposed to my Predator and it killed 3 marines which prevented them from holding the objective. So I zipped my landspeeder over to grab the objective. Score, Mark 1, David 0.
Second round, I faced Boomer and his generic CSM. The scenario was The Hunted. This is where you nominate an enemy unit that you get bonus points for killing it. I nominated Boomers Predator tank, he wanted one of my Dreadnoughts. We might have well been beating each other with 10 pound sledgehammers, it was bloody and both sides paid the price. When the smoke cleared, both of our hunted units were still alive. When the points were tallied, Boomer was on top by 221 points, just enough to eke out a win. If you're within 10% of the total points value of the game (which was 2000 points), it would have been a draw. Both of us poured so much firepower into the chosen units and how both of them survived is a mystery. I hit his tank multiple times, but failed to do any permanent damage.
3rd round, I faced down William, who faced Boomer in the first round. This scenario was Arch Rivals.The thing here is the two Headquarters units really hate each other and need to kill each other, in hand to hand combat if at all possible. If your general kills the enemy general in hand to hand combat and survives, you get 200 bonus points. I set up a killing zone with my Predator pointing straight down a street, and had a Devastator Heavy Bolter squad set up 90 degrees on a side street, setting up a nasty cross fire. I killed everything that came down that street, he might as well been marching in line, assaulting machine guns. I killed both his HQ's this way. By the time the points were tallied, he killed 530 points of mine, he stopped counting at 750 when it became clear that I had won.
Now all of the point tallying was done, and as a surprise and complete shock to me, I came in 2nd (!!!) only 5 points behind the overall winner. I had a total of 81 points, and I took the Best Sportsman (again).
This now makes *three* Best Sportsman awards that I have on my wall. One from the Bunker back in October of '05, one from Fanatic from May, and now this one:
In case you forgot, I placed in 3rd place in my prior RTT, now in 2nd place here. When I first started attending these events I thought I could never actually win one of them. Now, I have the hope that I can.