The Praxis of War Gaming

Hey all

Dr Cox here with more rambling. But hopefully on a subject we all know.

I was having a discussion with a nameless individual about a list I was running, and he suggested that I 'drop X for Y, because X is better'.

Now this is a not uncommon statement, but actually is X going to be better, and it may be better but can you still utilise it, and that us where Praxis comes in!

some tank hunter teams i painted, absolutely no relevance to the post

Praxis is a concept of from Ancient Greece and is 'to which the end goal was action'. Not theory or production, but the truth of action. And I think this is something often overlooked by gamers.

A great example of this was my chaos demon army in 5th edition 40K, on paper it looked a joke, and frequently people would ask (and expect an easy) game. It was a strange mix of 'non optimised' units, but I think in one 12 month period it lost 4 games, sadly always around game 4 of a tournament.

More panthers I painted

But people could not understand how I managed to use it effectively, and the answer was that I used it a lot, I understood it, I could use what I knew to react to novel situations, and many others just did not understand their armies to the same degree; I remember a space wolf player I was annihilating going 'I just don't understand according to the Internet this is a good list!' And it was, if Ben had been using it, it would have been a tough game, but he didn't understand it.

So where am I going with this? Well having done my experimental adventures with the schwerepanzerjager I'm now doing so with the volksgrenadiers, and I'm losing a fair bit, but that's not a problem. It's an army I'm unfamiliar with and I will screw up (I still forget storm trooper 98% of the time it feels) but by using it I can understand it and know how to use it. Turning the action of using it from rolling dice and pushing models into playing (and hopefully winning) a game.