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Haha. Aren't all the primarchs literally just fancy ubermensch versions of joe carpenter, tony abbot, and ironman hammerstein?
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Apr 24, 2015 17:48
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MikeCrotch posted:The original FASA Crimson Skies had the same issue, to the point that it felt more like you were pushing around tanks than planes. Crimson Skies had the best upgrade I've ever seen in any tabletop game ever - you could buy your pilot a faithful hound. He sat in your back seat and barked at enemy planes. He could even bark to warn you of the ultrasonic pulses used by homing weapons. Me and mah doggie, takin' to the skies... It also had that delightful childs-colouring-book damage grid. It was like the damage grid in Warmachine only a lot bigger. You coloured in each square as bullets hit it, and certain weapons made you colour in X shapes or blocks. Fires coloured in a bit more of the shape each turn. If a chunk of aircraft was surrounded by filled boxes, it fell off. Slow as hell, but it was the most fun damage allocation step in any game I've played. Full Thrust kinda did the same thing for critical hits, in a "big diagram of the ship on your bridge and these bits are now glowing red" kinda way...still the slowest part of the game to resolve.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:13
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Leperflesh posted:All I can think is that you must not have been playing a lot of RPGs when D&D 3rd edition came out. I was. I've been playing RPGs long enough to know that this. quote:The book had a table of contents, an index, and a glossary. Character classes all advanced at the same rate. The writers made an attempt at game balance, which was more than could be said for a lot of other games at the time, including at least D&D 2nd edition, RIFTS, and Shadowrun. The rules were broken up into these things called "chapters," and each chapter was actually focused on a specific area of the rules. 75% of the books were not equipment lists. The game acknowledged that point buy might be a good way to generate stats. is a list of "innovations" that only qualify as such if the only RPGs you had ever played up to the point that 3E came out were D&D and more D&D. No, you're totally right man, D&D3E invented "having chapters" and "characters advancing at the same rate," spot on there. quote:So I don't give a gently caress if you hated D&D 3rd edition, and I'm not actually interested in debating the fine points of just exactly how flawed it was. "I don't give a gently caress and don't want to debate, now have eight paragraphs of debate to show how little I give a gently caress."
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Apr 24, 2015 18:24
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Kai Tave posted:"I don't give a gently caress and don't want to debate, now have eight paragraphs of debate to show how little I give a gently caress." You're just determined to ignore my point, aren't you?
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Apr 24, 2015 18:29
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JcDent posted:The thing about Gundam is that they're cheaper, sure, and better made, but I have 0 interest in them. But I'm not representative of painters, who, it appears, will paint anything they can afford, fluff and interest be damned. And really, can't be interested in the fluff at all. Gundam isn't everybody's cup of tea. Bu there's a lot of Gundam out there. some of it's really terrible, yeah, but some of it's really good. I'd suggest giving Gundam 0080 a try. It's only six episodes long, and you don't need to know anything about Gundam to enjoy it. It's just a good story with good characters, without the emotionally disturbed teen pilots or other anime tropes that can scare people away from other Gundams. Plus it's all on Youtube, in English! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E4LFzAEtfg Even if you don't like it, the first five minutes have a pretty great robot fight! boom boom boom fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 18:33
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NTRabbit posted:
Link? I wanna read about this hilarity. Like did somebody just lift it from the auction table?
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Apr 24, 2015 18:34
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Leperflesh posted:You're just determined to ignore my point, aren't you? Well you seem determined to miss mine by a mile so hey. Like, I can disagree with many of your assertions without believing that you're some secret 3E fanboy or whatever you've decided I'm trying to drive at, because I don't think that but I do think that a lot of what you're trying to ascribe to this particular game is being considered from a position of ignorance, sorry.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:38
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Yeah. My point was that GW isn't evolving, and that people put up with "bad" games back in the day because they were, for their time, the best we had. GW's rules are still written in a bad, unbalanced, poorly-organized, inaccessible way. I tried to use specifics and examples and I guess it was some kind of loving trigger for you, you couldn't avoid having a good rant about how terrible 3rd edition D&D is. Other folks were saying stuff like "naw, warhammer has always been lovely" and I kind of felt like that wasn't fair... in 1998 or whatever, warhammer wasn't especially more lovely than other contemporary games.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:41
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah. My point was that GW isn't evolving, and that people put up with "bad" games back in the day because they were, for their time, the best we had. GW's rules are still written in a bad, unbalanced, poorly-organized, inaccessible way. And here is my point, not bringing up 3E this time so I won't be "loving triggered" or whatever, which is that "it wasn't lovely for the time" is kind of a weird, rose-tinted, and not even very accurate way of looking at things. lovely is still lovely, whether there were better examples to compare something to or not, and I'm reasonably certain that if you actually dug around and looked you could find games that did stuff better than Warhammer even back when it was ostensibly "good."
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Apr 24, 2015 18:47
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I want to know what the rhino rush of other games were during that time. Or the dark Eldar being included in the starter set then ignored for a decade. I'm actually ignorant and curious.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:49
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FrostyPox posted:
Supposedly early next year. They pushed back their entire kickstarter schedule because they were burying themselves and kept digging deeper since their entire cotporate model it's hanging on kickstarter at the moment.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:52
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PlaneGuy posted:Link? I wanna read about this hilarity. Like did somebody just lift it from the auction table? https://www.facebook.com/pages/Blood-and-Skulls-Industry/302835446422577?fref=nf He hasn't specified, seems like he had it at a FLGS to show it off and a semi-regular just walked off with it maybe? FrostyPox posted:I find some irony in criticizing Warpath's background as being a scribble on a napkin when IIRC that's basically how 40K's background started. I do wish they would expand Warpath's model line a bit faster but I guess there's gonna be a Kickstarter at some point in the near future? Don't forget the Deadzone model line is also the Warpath model line, so the DZI KS just expanded it a little more in infantry terms at least. NTRabbit fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 18:53
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NTRabbit posted:Don't forget the Deadzone model line is also the Warpath model line, so the DZI KS just expanded it a little more in infantry terms at least. Yes, and to some degree the Warpath line is the Deadzone line. There are some Warpath models that are not marketed as such but they have cards for Deadzone. I really wish they'd go to some effort to clarify everything.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:01
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"It wasn't lovely for its time" is a perfectly reasonable statement to make about any number of things, because things improve as time goes on and the state of the art increases! My 1991 Plymouth wasn't lovely for its time, but it sure as heck was outmoded by the time I replaced it last year! The 486DX my mom got in the early 90s wasn't lovely for its time either! I realize I'm talking about engineered devices here but why do nerdgames somehow exist on a different plane than any other field of human endeavor?
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Apr 24, 2015 19:06
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JerryLee posted:"It wasn't lovely for its time" is a perfectly reasonable statement to make about any number of things, because things improve as time goes on and the state of the art increases! My 1991 Plymouth wasn't lovely for its time, but it sure as heck was outmoded by the time I replaced it last year! The 486DX my mom got in the early 90s wasn't lovely for its time either! I realize I'm talking about engineered devices here but why do nerdgames somehow exist on a different plane than any other field of human endeavor? In the context of nerdgames specifically "it wasn't lovely for the time" is a statement that often ignores or omits a whole bunch of other examples of contemporary games that didn't, in fact, have the problems of the game in question that only somehow became lovely "later." A lot of the innovations ascribed to, say, D&D3E are only really innovations in the context of "I only play and care about Dungeons & Dragons" and even then it's kind of questionable to say "well at least they tried making things balanced!" while ignoring that, well, so did previous editions of D&D too, that's where all those asymmetric XP progression charts came from, and at least in AD&D2E you didn't retroactively feel like the biggest idiot in the world for rolling a Fighter. Other RPGs at the time D&D3E came out had figured out things like "advance characters at the same rate" or "try to give the GM some advice" too, along with unified task resolution which was another big "innovation" that 3E was lauded for and was an innovation if all you'd been playing up to that point was AD&D (or Rifts). So I guess my question is, since I'm less familiar with the tabletop wargaming scene than I am with the tabletop RPG scene, was Warhammer/40K actually "good for the time" or were there other games out there doing stuff at least no worse than GW was that are just getting elided over in all this?
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Apr 24, 2015 19:20
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Chill la Chill posted:I want to know what the rhino rush of other games were during that time. Or the dark Eldar being included in the starter set then ignored for a decade. I'm actually ignorant and curious. Absolutely I can give examples. In warmachine Haley2 is totally better then any other caster, by almost any standard in a very control based faction. She has received no nerfs since the last rules almost 7 years ago. In a game that says WAAC literally in the book her total dominance has resulted in almost 10% of ALL tourney lists including her especially in major cons. Despite there being 12 factions other totally OP factions sometimes make up 15% or more of tournies. Granted, Gencons final was between the equivalent of Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar but don't let that confuse you GW is a totally normal and awesome company. As far as no new releases TSR has released NOTHING for dnd in years. It's like they abandoned it. PS you should ask in your post how Many settings survived being blown up. White Wolf maybe? They are doing OK right? *sarcastic* Doctor Borris fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 19:32
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The only other contemporary fantasy/sf tabletop wargames I'm familiar with from the mid 1990s were: Battletech. Fun, still around with basically the same mechanics, but "balance" was hilariously absent (you picked mechs based on tonnage, which was just a complete failure), the game was (and still is) stuffed with terrible mech designs (for fluffy reasons, but still newbie traps), the miniatures were not to scale with each other and also not very good and also very expensive, and everything not a mech was an afterthought that you'd regret using. Chainmail, the revamped D&D tabletop wargame. LOL. Crimson Skies came out in 1998. I never played it so I can't comment, but it didn't survive long in my area. Full Thrust. Not a very big or popular game, but I managed to play it (using paper ship chits on a hex board). Extremely fiddly, poorly written rulebook, sort of fun, but not accessible enough and as far as I know, no miniature support to speak of. Heavy Gear. I never played that or even saw it being played, but there was stuff for it in the shop. I can't speak to its rules writing quality in the mid 1990s. OGRE. Another game I heard about but never saw being played. It was a mid-90s Steve Jackson game, though, so I assume it had some of the same issues all SJ games of that era had. Star Wars Miniature Battles (West End) was around. By every account, it was (and still is) a grognardy, awful game with bad rules and bad balance that people played because it was star wars and that's all. Someone can say different though, I never played it. The rulebooks at least seemed colorful? FASA's star trek game. Even worse! That mutant chronicles game, Warzone. Apparently the rules were really bad, it got a revision in the late 90s that improved things a little, but the company didn't survive or the IP got moved or something, now Paradox has it? I dunno. Fantasy games were really bare at the time. Most of the tabletop games being played near me were either Battletech, or GW games; mordheim, necromunda, blood bowl, warhammer fantasy and 40k, gorkamorka, adeptus titanicus, epic. I stopped paying attention in the early 2000s (I was focused at that time on RPGs) so I might have missed a few. There's this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miniature_wargames which was helpful to remember a couple like Full Thrust that I had pretty much forgotten about. Mostly tabletop games at that time seemed to be the ugly stepchild to RPGs at the game store, with the one bright exception being Warhammer. The other games (the ones I haven't mentioned, you know... the third-runners) came in softback, hand-typeset books with few illustrations and mostly just page after page after page of charts of unit statistics. Not much in the way of actually how to play the game, which I guess you were supposed to learn from a fat graybeard. The one game that had significant support in terms of rules, minis, supplements, board elements, a progressing fluff, and even genre novels, was Battletech. But comparing Battletech rules to Warhammer rules of the late 1990s, I don't think either has a particular edge in terms of writing or design. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 19:40
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Doctor Borris posted:As far as no new releases TSR has released NOTHING for dnd in years. It's like they abandoned it. Maybe that's because TSR went out of business a long time ago? There is a brand new edition of D&D.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:41
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Are we really having a conversation about mid 90s RPGs while excluding Vampire? Which had at least as good balance as 3e(by accident admittedly), even advancement, and a lengthy GM section?
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Apr 24, 2015 19:43
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JcDent posted:The thing about Gundam is that they're cheaper, sure, and better made, but I have 0 interest in them. But I'm not representative of painters, who, it appears, will paint anything they can afford, fluff and interest be damned. And really, can't be interested in the fluff at all. what? gundam literally predates 40k by a decade, and largely had the benefit of not being carbon copies of every other fantasy universe all smashed into one
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Apr 24, 2015 19:44
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counterspin posted:Are we really having a conversation about mid 90s RPGs while excluding Vampire? Which had at least as good balance as 3e(by accident admittedly), even advancement, and a lengthy GM section? I did mention it. It was never for me, but yeah, it was about as well done as D&D at the time. People still had to modify the rules, they still filled up the game with stuff like Mage that apparently wasn't well balanced to Vampire (but you could totally play them together, honest!). There was also Chaosium stuff. Again, pretty hard back books, a game system that worked, but you still had to houserule some stuff, balance wasn't always great, etc.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:45
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That game was and is mostly an excuse for depressing goth sex parties.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:46
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Yeah, balance in 3e is poo poo right out of the first book. I played a ton of 3e, but the idea that it was superior to it's peers is iffy. It's vastly superior to 2e, but there was a lot of good stuff going on at that time that wasn't 3e. It wasn't a standout unless you compared it to its own prior edition. Another game that covers all those criteria from that period - Unknown Armies, which is a way better game with a way better system.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:47
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I never claimed D&D 3rd edition was "better" than its contemporaries. Just this:Leperflesh posted:3.5 was a huge rules improvement on 2.0. It was great, for its time. It has since been superseded by much better rules designs, and clinging to it is very grognardy... but at the time when it came out, no, it was very well written, well organized, affordable, attractive, it fixed a lot of serious problems, and the fundamental mechanics were open-sourced. It was a great game, in its time. It was much better than 2nd edition. It was doing the things other games were doing. Balance, principles of book layout and accessibility, etc. were considered during its writing. It had a more unified mechanic. It wasn't "better" than Vampire or Shadowrun or whatever. But it was keeping up. Games Workshop, with regards to Warhammer, was more or less keeping up at the time, as far as rules writing and presentation went. But that was 20 years ago and nowadays, it's way way way behind, and GW seems to be either uninterested in improvement, or completely oblivious to what other games are doing. It's pathetic.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:52
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An Angry Bug posted:That game was and is mostly an excuse for depressing goth sex parties. This makes it sound like a pretty good reason to buy a game.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:58
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I think if you'd drop 'balance' as one of its benefits I'd probably be fine. I don't think 3e is well balanced compared to either its predecessors or its peers, partly because the system was explicitly designed to punish the uninitiated with bad characters. But you are right, it was a big step up in a lot of other ways from 2e.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:59
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Talking about older games, there's a lot of love here for Necromunda. 6 of us tried it again recently. By game 2, one guy had to restart he'd been screwed so bad in the post-game rolls, and another was so far ahead it was laughable. We'd started infinity the week before, only the IceStrom set, but even so. I had a Ton of fun and played Necromunda to death when it came out, but now, it's trash. (Edit) Also playing the DnD 5th, and it's Fun, but that could just be the beer and knob gags
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Apr 24, 2015 20:11
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It's interesting to note everyone in this thread brings up necromunda, mordaheim, and other games as big parts of their memory. Even though they may not have been major sellers they were a key part of GWs Market dominance. Easy entry into warhammer I guess? I can get into entire new factions in x w wing or warmachine For less then a hundred Now. Both those games are like carbon copys of the old business model of specialist games.
Doctor Borris fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 20:12
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An Angry Bug posted:That game was and is mostly an excuse for depressing goth sex parties. If your goth sex parties are depressing, you've got too much Einstein Neubauten and not enough Horatti, and you're Doing It Wrong.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:13
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Renfield posted:If your goth sex parties are depressing, you've got too much Einstein Neubauten and not enough Horatti, and you're Doing It Wrong. I haven't actually been to more then a half dozen Gothic sex parties so someone more experienced is going to have to step in here and explain the ins and outs of them.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:21
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Doctor Borris posted:I haven't actually been to more then a half dozen Gothic sex parties so someone more experienced is going to have to step in here and explain the ins and outs of them. You need the ins and outs.. of a sex party, explained ?
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Apr 24, 2015 20:22
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If it's not too hard.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:25
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Kai Tave posted:And here is my point, not bringing up 3E this time so I won't be "loving triggered" or whatever, which is that "it wasn't lovely for the time" is kind of a weird, rose-tinted, and not even very accurate way of looking at things. lovely is still lovely, whether there were better examples to compare something to or not, and I'm reasonably certain that if you actually dug around and looked you could find games that did stuff better than Warhammer even back when it was ostensibly "good." I don't see the benefit in insisting that the game 20/30/40 years ago should be considered out of context. Modern games have the benefit of working off the last 20 years, which is one of the reasons they provide a less favorable comparison. It's possible for a game to be comparatively lovely now but not in the context of when it was released. See also: Most NES games. By modern conventions, the original Super Mario Bros, Dragon Warrior, Castlevania, and Mega Man are all bad games. But it'd be ludicrous to remove them from their resepctive contexts and argue that they've always been lovely games. You can do it, but what new insight are we supposed to glean from the idea that the earlier attempts aren't as polished or well-designed as the later ones?
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Apr 24, 2015 20:34
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Were any miniatures wargames in the 80s / 90s good? Stuff like Car Wars and Battletech were, but they weren't really what I mean. Mass battle games were relegated to never-advertised historicals, and fantasy had ... D&D Battlesystem? Sci Fi games like Kryomech existed, but I didn't know anyone who could afford to get into more than one back then. And it was usually Warhammer because that was the big one.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:35
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Broken Loose posted:what? It's really hard to overstate how revolutionary and original Gundam was. It created a new genre of anime, mecha anime where the robots were part of an existing military structure, and fought other military robots as part of a larger war. It was the first giant robot show where the main character didn't shout the names of his giant robot attacks, mainly because the giant robots in Gundam didn't have special attacks. No Rocket Punch, just shooting a gun. And the characterization was revolutionary too. Both sides had genuinely good people, it was the leaders who were incompetent, corrupt, o megalomaniacal. The main character, Amuro, isn't a hot-blooded youth out to save the world. When we first meet Amuro, he's a whining, cowardly teen. He tries to run away several times, he's really just the worst. He only pilots the Gundam because he was the one guy who could and didn't die when Zeon attacked. On the other hand, the main antagonist, Char, is cool, charming, and likable. He pilots his custom Zaku because he's the best pilot Zeon has. Over the course of the series we see Amuro grow into a responsible adult, and we discover that Char is actually a broken, bitter man. The show delivers a strong anti-war message, and the idea that it's the young who suffer when adults make war. For a Saturday morning kid's cartoon in 1979, Gundam was unprecedented. As a point of comparison, Gundam was on the air at the same time as The Super Friends.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:40
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moths posted:Were any miniatures wargames in the 80s / 90s good? Stuff like Car Wars and Battletech were, but they weren't really what I mean. 80s/90s miniature games where made in the before-time, when every boardgame was an ameritrash game, when D&D was considered the norm, and streamlined rules and stong game design were unheard of. The players back then used fifteen charts to figure out how much damage a goblin spear did to an elf elbow, and they accepted it, because they knew nothing else. So no, all the sci-fi and fantasy games were either horribly unbalanced or insanely clunky. Historical games were often more balanced, but also way too complicated and reliant on bookkeeping. Pick up a copy of Harpoon and try to figure it out: I dare you. E: and to hit on the current topics -GW rules were comparatively good compared to the competing miniature games during the 90's, maybe even early 00's. -Mordheim and Necromunda were fun, but horrendously unbalanced, even more so if you play them as campaign games. -Gundam kits are neat to build but I'm also one of those who only find the designs of a handful of them appealing. As a Battletech kid I'm pretty much imprinted to only accept Macross designs. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 20:49
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Necromunda and mordaheim were not that bad straight out of the box. Both games were pretty balanced at campaign beginning and because of the unique rules and scenarios where the objective was to do other things besides fight games were always in flux. I am not trying to say they were perfect by any stretch but they had a pretty fun balance and generally never felt like you had no chance. Even losing you stI'll got some thing to improve. Battletech is a pretty well made rules TBH. Good internal balance with weapons, maneuvering rules, and design specs without being totally bogged down.The setting is decent as well. Several years of awful releases for an rpg and miniatures company doomed them more then anything else. There are still battletch clubs at my FLGS. Doctor Borris fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 21:05
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Doctor Borris posted:Necromunda and mordaheim were not that bad straight out of the box. Both games were pretty balanced at campaign beginning and because of the unique rules and scenarios where the objective was to do other things besides fight games were always in flux. I am not trying to say they were perfect by any stretch but they had a pretty fun balance and generally never felt like you had no chance. Even losing you stI'll got some thing to improve. Mordheim wasn't horrible at the time if you play it as gentlemen. But you can easily break the game like a twig if you want to, even without using the later additions suchs as the awful Elf gangs.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:27
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3E actually had even worse balance than AD&D. The latter was way more clunky, but over the years, its classes got hammered into rough parity. Then 3E came along and totally hosed the saving throw system, so now as you leveled you became more vulnerable to save-or-suck spells. It put every class on the same progression without giving every class equal power. It took away the large scale narrative tools that warriors and rogues got at higher levels and gave spell casters even more high level magic effects. Finally, it inflated monster HP totals while simultaneously making warriors worse at pumping out damage. For all its improvements in regards to clarity and organization, 3E was actually a worse game than 2E. A unified resolution mechanic doesn't mean poo poo if the developers don't bother actually doing math and just assign numbers they feel are right or deliberately create trap options.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:33
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lilljonas posted:Mordheim wasn't horrible at the time if you play it as gentlemen. But you can easily break the game like a twig if you want to, even without using the later additions suchs as the awful Elf gangs. Skaven for instance, were completely broken right from the get-go. Dirt cheap rats with slings was the big offender, as was anyone spamming two weapons because armor and shields were worthless. Dwarves too, what with their comparatively high toughness, access to armor that meant a gently caress, and only being able to be taken out on a 6, made any fight with them a total slog--and god forbid they lived long enough to get advancements. Mordheim was in fact incredibly imbalanced right out of the box and even with the specialist games rules committee working on it (when GW still sorta supported the game), they couldn't quite hammer in a good level of balance between weapons and armor.
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