Talk to wargamers long enough and you will hear invective hurled at the humble army list and its cousin "balanced scenarios". Today I am going to take a moment to defend the humble army list, because I think it has received more abuse than it really deserves.

What do I mean by army list? A list of units you can purchase with points values and with some degree of restrictions guiding how you build an army. If a game has a list of every weapon in the game and a points cost but does not have some control of how you create units or that you can't make an army entirely out of left-handed tank drivers, then it's not an army list in my view.

I am not going to opine on the dichotomy between scenario driven games and tournament games, other than to acknowledge that often people tend to favour one style over another. I think the army list often gets assigned much of the blame for faults of tournament style play however, and I think that is something that is a bit misguided.

So let's get into it:

Scenario play takes experience that a player may not have

The first time i sat down to try to play a Napoleonic wargame, I literally did not know what a "corps" was other than "quite a lot of guys", nor did I have any idea of how many guns said corps might have. Historical games sometimes include tables of organisation and equipment but not always (and they can be contentious in their own right for scenarios - An infantry division in ww2 does not include any tanks, but gamers howl in protest if you don't include tanks, so how many tanks should I include?)

For science fiction this applies as well. One squad of MegaHeavyAssaultMarineDudes is cool because thats how the game was designed but an entire army of MegaHeavyAssaultMarineDudes might break the game. An army list can helpfully limit the number of MegaHeavyAssaultMarineDudes to something more reasonable because as a new player to the game, you may not even know the problem exists.

(Of course army lists famously don't always catch everything but this is usually a factor of it being better for the game if the army lists are more permissive than more restrictive. I think the general point stands however). 

People sometimes retort that you can just learn from scenario books (some systems don't have them) or from conventions/club games (often not available) but in the end, some percentage of players will be learning from the actual book. 

You don't have to use them

Is this controversial? I feel like it rarely gets mentioned in discussions but you can just not use the points and army lists. Heck, even the most "tourney heavy" editions of 40K have always suggested this sort of thing. If having the army list is cramping your style because you already know how to balance a scenario or you just can't be bothered to count up points, then don't do that. 

You can take the units you want to use in the scenario and then that's it. Heck, if you want you can each pick about the troops you like and then haggle it out. We did that a few times when our 40K games were starting to get REALLY experimental. I suppose there is an argument here that some players wouldn't want to not use the points system if it's offered, but I find that most of the time those players are also not really interested in playing games without points to begin with. I might be wrong about that though. 

You don't have to use the same number of points

Much of the opposition to points values tends to come from the idea that "real battles are never exactly balanced" which is true. But it does not follow that using points values means they must be either. Certainly you can give the attackers 2500 points and the rearguard 1500 points and have a go at a suitably desperate and dramatic last stand. Shoot, you might even use mismatched points totals to slightly adjust other things. One might imagine a WW2 Barbarossa campaign where the Germans have more points than their soviet counterparts in the early invasion, but the balance shifts to a Soviet advantage for the winter counter offensive. 

The funny thing is I have seen people opine on forums that "attackers need 3 to 1 superiority" but you can literally quantify that with a points system :) 

Use as a starting point

This ties back to point number 1 but the army list can always be your starting point. I find this pretty helpful when building a scenario. Let's say the scenario is going to involve a lot of dense terrain and an objective that is difficult to get to. In this case certain units (light scout type of troops) might be more useful while big, heavy tanks will be less so. However using the points values to get a decent starting point can be really helpful just to get in the ballpark of things before I start changing things up, whether I do this mechanically ("For this scenario, tanks are worth 75% of their normal cost") or just eye ball it ("Since those tanks are not as useful here, I'll give them an extra squad of infantry"). 

Pick up games are fine actually

Finally pick up games are fun. Yes, you can whip up a scenario pretty quickly on the fly, but there's something really fun about figuring out an army in advance and then going to your friends place and having a go. I don't always want that specific experience, but when I do, it's nice to have the option complete with trying out new units or a funny idea in the build. 

Army lists are fun to guide collecting and painting

Lastly army lists serve a pretty good purpose in giving you some direction in what to paint and collect. Especially if you are poorly organised (me) and poorly disciplined (also me) it can be very easy to end up buying, building and painting a bunch of units that do not really add up to a playable game in the end. An army list is a ready made check list of things to get and paint which will inevitably guide you towards a playable force on the table. I've even talked to people who don't really play 40K but who use the codex to figure out what units they'd like to paint next. 

Of course army lists do not solve every problem, nor do they avoid having some problems of their own but I think we are, broadly, better off with them than without them. Discuss in the comments.