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Radish posted:I hope I can get a virus grenade and one shot my opponent's army that was cool to do in 2nd. The virus grenade/strategy card was kinda bullshit. If I recall space marines, aspect warriors and tyranids were immune so it was more or less useless versus them. There was also the case with the sustained fire which ( was fixed in WD) but before you could essentially bypass shooting at the closest target by walking your shots through an enemy squad and focus on a character. Or how you learned to correctly space your figures inc vehicle squadrons to minimize sustained fire and blast templates. Or the assassins, especially callidus or vindicare that forced you to hide your commander the whole game( which was ok if you had a Farseer with mind war). On the other hand everything could be killed so expensive characters and vehicles rarely were worth it.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 18:50 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 06:51 |
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Do you not think, that maybe, possibly - a game specifically not designed for tournaments or regulated play like Chess - a game that is centred around lore, artwork, jokes about Thatcher and football hooligans - maybe, just loving maybe - you could tell your opponent to not use the virus grenade/strategy card? Or that if you bought an entire army of Warp Spiders to the table then you could just say 'Congratulations dickhead, you won the pissing contest now I'm going to go play with someone else' ? Do you need every single combination that could be put together to give you an advantage over your opponent explicitly written in the book for you? I mean poo poo, if you want that kind of thing play Chess, or Go, or Warmachine or whatever - because especially with RT/2nd if you think like that you're going into the whole experience with a mindset that is diametrically opposed to the spirit of this particular game. I'm reading about historical wargaming and frequently they don't have army lists, they don't have points. Frequently there's the expectation that one side is going to lose from the outset. You can be damned sure these people take the game seriously but this slavish devotion to loving over your opponent by taking and making the most broken poo poo you can find from a game where, regardless of your particular proclivities and the recent shoe-horning, the intent and spirit is most definitely along a fun, casual, narrative game between friends.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 19:18 |
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The card should never have been made and the designers acknowledged this on multiple occasions, telling players to take it out of the deck and tear it up It was part of a random deck of "strategy cards" that players drew from before the game started. Yeah, you could take it out of the deck and not play with it--and that's what people did--but if you didn't know any better coming in that wouldn't have helped you
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 19:24 |
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I know how strategy cards work bro, but the point I was trying to make is that you can act like an adult even the first time you ever see it and say "huh, this is going to totally wreck me and this game won't be any fun. I will not use it". You don't need GW to tell you to not use it.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 19:31 |
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I don't care about virus grenades (vortex grenades were worse, really), my point was that when the designers were specifically confronted with a situation where someone exploits the system to make a terrible game, their response wasn't 'Oh wow we didn't think of that, that's a problem', or 'Well, we have given you a lot of freedom to let you make a force that suits your story and vision, but it does mean that you have to responsible about using it - talk to your opponents before or after a game to resolve these problems' (which would have been an answer with at least some sort of consideration in it). The response was 'Well you can always break the game ridiculously in another way to one-up them!' That is like the worst possible answer you can give people.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 19:45 |
Southern Heel posted:Do you not think, that maybe, possibly - a game specifically not designed for tournaments or regulated play like Chess - a game that is centred around lore, artwork, jokes about Thatcher and football hooligans - maybe, just loving maybe - you could tell your opponent to not use the virus grenade/strategy card? Or that if you bought an entire army of Warp Spiders to the table then you could just say 'Congratulations dickhead, you won the pissing contest now I'm going to go play with someone else' ? Do you need every single combination that could be put together to give you an advantage over your opponent explicitly written in the book for you? Do you not think it's better to have a game that's playable as written? I mean Christ I'm on board with fun as king and not giving a poo poo about optimal design but this is such an extreme and retarded permutation of that approach and it seems to have become a desperate creed for so many 40k/AoS players. It's still loving terrible for a narrative game to be so badly broken for so many reasons. It fucks over the social side (yeah lol at warham players but it's still a social hobby) and creates a terrible judgemental community where screaming about THAT GUY is a constant issue and an easy out even when the opponent doesn't deserve it (virus bomb warp spider bullshit might be clear cut, 90% of the time it isnt). It encourages this 'only play with your besties' wank for the sake of having a flimsy-rear end excuse for bad design. It hampers people's ability to make whatever themed army they choose when their theme has a decent chance of being broken bullshit by pure coincidence. It doesn't have to be homogenized tournament poo poo like KoW but a social, narrative, beer and pretzels bweh bweh bweh game is infinitely better served by being relatively balanced and tight instead of encouraging butthurt nerds to police eachother in the name of FUN Saint Drogo fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Mar 23, 2017 |
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 20:07 |
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Ashcans posted:I don't care about virus grenades (vortex grenades were worse, really), my point was that when the designers were specifically confronted with a situation where someone exploits the system to make a terrible game, their response wasn't 'Oh wow we didn't think of that, that's a problem', or 'Well, we have given you a lot of freedom to let you make a force that suits your story and vision, but it does mean that you have to responsible about using it - talk to your opponents before or after a game to resolve these problems' (which would have been an answer with at least some sort of consideration in it). The response was 'Well you can always break the game ridiculously in another way to one-up them!' That is like the worst possible answer you can give people. This is a good post A well balanced system would mean you don't need to ask the question "is it OK if I bring X for our match?" to begin with.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 20:14 |
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Soulfucker posted:This is a good post It's fine if a game disregards balance, most Historicals do this. Typically when people play Historicals, they agree in advance with their opponent what they're bringing. They're good games, they're simply not trying to be a competitive game. On the flipside, a lot of games are very competitive, and for them, being balanced is important. Warmachine is an example of this. Warhammer's problem isn't that it's not balanced. Just being unbalanced is fine, if you're not going for competitive gaming. The problem is that GW tries to package it's game as a competitive game, with points, tournaments, listbuilding, and so on, but can't balance a loving thing to save it's life. 2nd Ed had a lot of poo poo that was extremely powerful, stupidly imbalanced, but was still a lot of fun. You usually had options to do some crazy moves. 3rd ed swung the pendulum entirely the other way, with "move", "shoot my gun" and "hit with my sword" being the entirety of most units' repertoire. Even so, with every unit being identical to every other unit except for it's statline, it still wasn't balanced. But now it was also not fun to play. Warhammer's primary problem has always been that it's just not a good game that is fun to play. I love a nail-biting competitive Warmachine game, and I love playing extremely one-sided scenarios in Chain of Command, because these games are intrinsically well designed and engaging. Even if Warhammer were to somehow become the very incarnation of the platonic ideal of Balance, it would still be poo poo, because it's not a system of rules that make pushing little wardolls around for three hours fun.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 20:33 |
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I seriously cannot comprehend how anyone who actually played 2nd edition could think that it was fun Like I don't even have fond memories of it and I was like 14 at the time, prime nostalgia-tinting age
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 20:52 |
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Yeah, maybe it's just nostalgia. But at least more interesting things happened than "my guys shot your guys and then some of your guys assaulted my guys and then the game was over".
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 20:55 |
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Saint Drogo posted:Do you not think it's better to have a game that's playable as written? If you're honestly saying that 40k 2nd ed was unplayable without having every explicit rule and suggestion spelled out to you by GW hovering around like an orbiting parent protecting you from a boo-boo then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I think that Geisladisk is correct in that it started to be packaged as a tournament-style game with the internet communities around places like Warseer, where attending a bingo hall to win in sportsman-like competition became a factor at all - IMO a huge mistake, it's like having a D&D game competition or something. It's not designed for that and the framework was never set up that way, despite GW's desperate attempts to try to make it so. Saint Drogo, your point about certain combinations being frankly just better than others is also a good one. I don't think this is a game suited to any kind of pickup-game, because you're right that it IS unbalanced.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 21:49 |
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I don't think anyone is contending that 2nd Ed 40K was unplayable, just that when played as written that it was unenjoyable.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 21:53 |
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What happens when your opponents fun comes from "wacky" events like eliminating your army?
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 21:56 |
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Bad Moon posted:What happens when your opponents fun comes from "wacky" events like eliminating your army? Then your opponent probably gets easily amused by lolrandom monkey cheese bullshit*, which can be satisfied in an easier and more fulfilling manner by showing random 9gag or meme pages from your phone rather than a 2 hour setup+game with a dumb punchline. *I know because I am that person. Show me some sweet memes instead of going through the motions of playing bad games any day
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:00 |
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Chill la Chill posted:Then your opponent probably gets easily amused by lolrandom monkey cheese bullshit*, which can be satisfied in an easier and more fulfilling manner by showing random 9gag or meme pages from your phone rather than a 2 hour setup+game with a dumb punchline. Surprising lack of chill from chill la chill here
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:03 |
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Memes are v chill, my friend. Also, playing a game without much player input but with a lot of effort of rules and setup for an instawin combo isn't v chill, imo. I mean, you could go through the trouble of setting up a sigmar game for the doom bell combo, but that's also frustrating and not chill at all e: also my perspective is probably off because I think food chain magnate is a v chill game due to its simplicity Chill la Chill fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Mar 23, 2017 |
# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:04 |
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Ilor posted:I don't think anyone is contending that 2nd Ed 40K was unplayable, just that when played as written that it was unenjoyable. Seriously. Also the notion that it's the players' fault for not correcting a game's faults through a number of gentleman's agreements may be true in the most technical sense, but it's also pretty banal. It's the equivalent of saying that DnD's problems are easily solved by a good GM as though that prevents the game from being flawed
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:13 |
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it's not equivalent at all, because for all of d&d's faults, it does have a referee whose job it is to adjust the game to the tastes of the players. on the other hand, 40K is meant to be played by two opposed, more or less equal players.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:17 |
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Cease to Hope posted:more or less equal players. I get the impression that for this to be true in 2nd ed 40k, you gotta ignore anything in Dark Millennium and restrict the game to less than 1000 2nd ed points. And even then it's still abusable if you play with lovely players
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:39 |
Southern Heel posted:Saint Drogo, your point about certain combinations being frankly just better than others is also a good one. I don't think this is a game suited to any kind of pickup-game, because you're right that it IS unbalanced. at the end of the day eliminating gamebreakers is not much to ask from a company like GW, and making the game viable for competition doesn't actually take away from anyone's ability to enjoy it as a narrative/casual thing...whereas making it hosed and easily breakable can bring it down for absolutely every type of player.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 22:43 |
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A game needing some gentlemen's agreements and house rules to fix problems is fine - If it's played with a consistent group of people who can come to a consensus. Me and my friends play Chain of Command a lot. We have a document with house rules, shared interpretations of grey areas, and additional rules for situations which the rules don't cover. It's well into it's second page by now. We don't mind though, because COC is a genuinely good game. It's just a little rough around the edges, because it's made by two fat middle aged British men. That kind of thing is fine, if the game is worth polishing to begin with, and if the group that plays the game is small and close enough for that kind of thing to work. The problem is that Warhammer is a turd not worth polishing, and that your average 40k community is not made up of a handful of friends, but rather a loose circle of a couple of dozen nerds that wouldn't otherwise hang out and meet at a store to play. A game with that level of popularity needs to have rules that are close to airtight, and it needs to be balanced enough for pickup games to be enjoyable. And a company the size of GW should have absolutely no problem delivering that, considering pretty much every other company a fraction of their size can do it.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 23:43 |
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Chain of Command is a god drat gem of a game compared to 40K. I will hear no ill of it.
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 23:48 |
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Reminder that 2e was a game made for and marketed to children and expecting non adults to even consider that they should modify the game to make it better let alone do it in a sane and well thought out manner is nuts Like I never considered that virus stuff or the vortex grenade was game breaking overpowered because I literally wasn't capable of an accurate bird's eye view of how everything fit together
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# ? Mar 23, 2017 23:50 |
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TKIY posted:Chain of Command is a god drat gem of a game compared to 40K. I will hear no ill of it. It's fantastic, but it's got grey areas and vague spots big enough to drive a Jagdtiger through. That's where shared interpretations and house rules come in.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 00:06 |
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Honestly we didn't find that but historical gamers are way less worried about rules issues in my experience.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 00:20 |
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It's tougher to design good games now that everybody's got the internet on their phones. If one person discovers a game breaking combo or move, everybody knows about it immediately.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 00:50 |
Open betas like mantic's seem like the perfect way to turn that around. but at the same time it makes gouging people with retarded rulebook prices less viable so gently caress that i guess.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 00:56 |
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Saint Drogo posted:Open betas like mantic's seem like the perfect way to turn that around. You know, I would not be surprised if an 8th playtest book was released and the 8th ruleset released for free. AoS was a testbed for a lot of the other changes they are announcing and this is already the most advance detail we've ever had on a ruleset. They proved that people will buy campaign and Army books even when the rules cost nothing.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 01:16 |
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TKIY posted:Honestly we didn't find that but historical gamers are way less worried about rules issues in my experience. But Jesus, can you imagine how loving awesome something like CoC's Command Dice activation system would be in 40K?
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 02:48 |
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What bothers me is that people assume that a game can only have a cool narrative if you go in with thematic armies and a particular story in mind to begin with. "Alright, today my grot rebellion is going to try and hold this fortress over four turns against this ork army. I don't expect to win, but we'll see what happens!" That's some cool poo poo and I strongly encourage people to play like that if they have a group that's into it. But emergent narratives are perfectly legitimate as well! "We alternated placing objective tokens before deployment, so this courtyard ended up being the most contested area on the board because of its location in relation to firing and movement lanes. Remember when my goblin horde had 20 damage markers on it, survived a Nerve test on snake eyes, passed its Yellow Bellied test in the following turn, and drove off your way more powerful Foot Guard because I cast Bane Chant on them to give them Crushing Strength for the round? I think I'll paint up a flayed human banner for the unit in the future because these guys are badasses." That's a great story that only happened because of the interaction between rules, dice rolls, and decisions made by the players. It didn't matter that it happened in a well balanced, homogeneous* tournament game. *Seriously I swear people still saying this have never played the game or actually thought about how the mechanics work
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 03:36 |
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Atlas Hugged posted:What bothers me is that people assume that a game can only have a cool narrative if you go in with thematic armies and a particular story in mind to begin with. "Alright, today my grot rebellion is going to try and hold this fortress over four turns against this ork army. I don't expect to win, but we'll see what happens!" That's some cool poo poo and I strongly encourage people to play like that if they have a group that's into it. But emergent narratives are perfectly legitimate as well! "We alternated placing objective tokens before deployment, so this courtyard ended up being the most contested area on the board because of its location in relation to firing and movement lanes. Remember when my goblin horde had 20 damage markers on it, survived a Nerve test on snake eyes, passed its Yellow Bellied test in the following turn, and drove off your way more powerful Foot Guard because I cast Bane Chant on them to give them Crushing Strength for the round? I think I'll paint up a flayed human banner for the unit in the future because these guys are badasses." Also by having a well structured and balanced interaction of rules in your system its a lot easier to play those thematic and asymmetrical games because you can actually tell straight up what the balance and power difference is.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 03:41 |
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kingcom posted:Also by having a well structured and balanced interaction of rules in your system its a lot easier to play those thematic and asymmetrical games because you can actually tell straight up what the balance and power difference is. It's almost like having solid mechanics has way more advantages than playing a game that's just flavorful. Seriously, it's not like I can't take my Space Marines and narrative and play a better game with the same models and background. Yes, it would be great to get both in the same package, but if I'm going to be playing a game for multiple hours and giving up a whole afternoon or evening to do so, I don't want it to be a torturous slog just so that I can have my Thatcher jokes in their native environment (and has this even been true since 1996?).
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 03:50 |
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Honestly, to play 2nd ed I could only play it as something to do dumb poo poo (stupid fun) with. But looking at the way rules have progressed, both in 40k and other games, I half wonder if a complete re-write using 2nd ed as the basis wouldn't be worth considering. Like, use the points values (not literally - just as a general point that things were more 'expensive' back then), the game sizes (roughly), and so on, but dump most of the extraneous dumb poo poo that bogs the game down, convert everything to a limited about of USRs that everything uses, so that those rules are the same, and only the localised unit flavour text is different (same rule, same name, same page in the rule book, but the flavour text on the unit is different), and start wholesale stealing good ideas from non-poo poo games (like Infinity. Or apparently CoC?) and recombining them into something actually fun and balanced to play. Probably start out by balancing everything around core "iconic" troop choices, so tac marines, ork boyz, eldar guardians, necron warriors, fire warriors, etc etc, and then slowly work up from there maintaining game balance as you go so that what you end up with isn't a massive shitpile, and you can balance armies at a reasonable level/pace so you're not skullfucking yourself silly with the sheer mess of bullshit units GW has made over the years. And then slowly build up one set of units at a time (each set being a single unit/type of unit taken from each race/army) so as to keep the balance/progression at an actually controllable level, rather than loving around trying to do it all at once and collapsing it under the sheer weight of how much stupid crap exists. For my part I would also be tempted to refuse to write rules for objectively dumb as poo poo models/units. Like marine Centurions. Godawful things, those are. Oh, and make all this army crap free, Infinity Army Builder style, with purchase of hardcopy of the army statlines being optional. Make the core rules themselves setting/agnostic also. And the armies (largely) system agnostic (to a degree). I mean, if GW really *wants* to be just another miniatures company, rather than a games company... And no, I wouldn't want to rely on GW to do this because GW at a professional rules writing level is clearly godawful (the majority of the time) if you're looking for something that has balanced fun, without the lolrandom cheese bullshit, or sheer weight of dumbass extra rolls, rules, and other bespoke GW bullshit. lolrandom cheese bullshit has its place. In the optional rules, or in games that are clearly marked as for dumbshit play, and "dumb as a box of rocks" types of fun. It's the terrible game you pull out for the gaming equivalent of "B-Movie night" knowing that what you're about to play is terrible, and going into it with that understanding and mindset. Not so much for games that are marketing themselves for tournament use in formal competition (or non-formal competition for that matter). And yes, I would want to (eventually) drop in optional campaign rules in the back for model-level campaigns, restricted to maybe only one or two squads max during this type of campaign to keep it manageable, and/or for squad level campaigns, generic army level, maybe with some sort of conversion between the model and squad level experience systems to allow for a range between killteam-level games, and combat patrol level games, with a hard upper limit on the games, and optional rules basically saying "if you go beyond this point, you are clearly insane, but godspeed you stupid crazy bastard, because these rules are not for *that* game", plus optional rules for the people who actually bought super heavies or whatever, again optional only, and on your own head be it, etc. Because honestly, the massive army battles and crazy insane bullshit would probably be better played using epic/AdeptusTitanicus/whatever the gently caress as a scale (and possibly as a system to a lesser or greater degree?). I mean, sure, it'll piss off the people who like to paint all these massive units or whatever, but from a purely gaming perspective, it would probably be better at that scale if you want massive sweeping armies and such, right?
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 09:42 |
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I don't think there are many, if any, rules GW could steal from Infinity. Infinity rules player with a game that has as many models as 40K would be an insane slog. As for cribbing the Infinity Army idea, GWs recent FREE army builder app was praised by GW fans. Despite the fact it was free to download, but you need as subscription for it to do literally anything it is intended to do.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 10:13 |
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Just play some card game for your dose of lolrandom. For God's sake; don't invest thousands of dollars and hours painting and collecting plastic crack to play a random lovely game.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 10:15 |
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Sir Teabag posted:I don't think there are many, if any, rules GW could steal from Infinity. Infinity rules player with a game that has as many models as 40K would be an insane slog. This would be why you should never ever rely on GW to do any of these things, especially in the current situation 40k is in.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 10:35 |
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mcjomar posted:Honestly, to play 2nd ed I could only play it as something to do dumb poo poo (stupid fun) with. The problem with this approach is that even if you managed to get balance between armies through USRs, points, and composition rules, even if you got the scope of the game to be an appropriate number of units and vehicles, and even if the random bullshit was tamped down or made optional, you're still basing your game on design concepts that are outdated. The basic resolution mechanic in 2e 40k is frustratingly slow. You're doing a 6 step process for every model engaged in melee. Why is the stat line still written so you have to cross reference the BS with a target number on a chart? Why are Toughness and Armor Save separate values and not combined into a single roll? But as soon as you start fixing those things, you basically just end up with Kings of War or Warpath or Firefight and those games already exist and don't need work done to them.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 10:40 |
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Atlas Hugged posted:But as soon as you start fixing those things, you basically just end up with Kings of War or Warpath or Firefight and those games already exist and don't need work done to them. I guess this circles back to "I really need to play firefight/warpath at my local club using my 40k stuff" with the added problem of "most of my local gamers are hams or infinity guys" Still, there's gotta be a way to get a mid-size 28mm game (or killteam size, but seriously gently caress the current 40k sized armies, and double gently caress the apocalypse scale 40k shite), which is streamlined, balanced, and has a campaign system at one or more of those game sizes. Most of the time I only seem to get two out of three.
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 10:49 |
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mcjomar posted:I guess this circles back to "I really need to play firefight/warpath at my local club using my 40k stuff" with the added problem of "most of my local gamers are hams or infinity guys" If Kings of War is anything to go by, then Warpath/Firefight will have campaign books released for it. I'm having a similar issue getting people to play Firefight with me. I've got 3 armies painted and ready to go and am happy to let people proxy with their 40k stuff if they want to use their own models, but so far I haven't had any takers and have been told by a guy with an ork army that he isn't interested in "mixing miniatures". But I've read the rules, have played Deadzone which shares some concepts, and I've played Kings of War so I have a pretty good idea of what Firefight will be like. I just haven't been able to take it from the page to the table yet! Seriously goons if you come through Bangkok on holiday, hit me up!
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# ? Mar 24, 2017 11:05 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 06:51 |
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Atlas Hugged posted:If Kings of War is anything to go by, then Warpath/Firefight will have campaign books released for it. I'd be absolutely up for a game but I'll probably never be able to afford the plane ticket, and my fiancee would probably try to kill me if I brought models along on a vacation. Still, I remember you mentioning "guy" in another thread, and I agree with the general sentiment that people responded with regarding "guy" which from my perspective generally boiled down to I mean, I still play Inquisitor (A Terrible Rule System - No Really Worse Than Normal 40k) but end up grabbing any other 54mm scale mini I can find and then altering it to fit the aesthetic (preferably without screwing up the original model), simply because I'd like to have some nice models to play it with at the larger scale. But I guess to some people RPG-type stuff is "different" to other miniatures games? I mean, maybe in an official, company run tournament, or for the sake of wysiwyg (but in this case if what the models are carrying is blatantly obvious anyway, then this isn't a 'defence'), but otherwise, what's the point? As an aside, while DH/DH2 are enjoyable, sometimes you want to play Intergalactic James Bond, as opposed to Intergalactic James Bond's secretary, or his informants that he pays to do stuff in areas he doesn't have time for. DH/DH2 are great (for a given value of "great") for that little guy in a gigantic pond approach, but there are times I'd much rather be Eisenhorn, rather than playing a random member of his distaff that got sent to investigate *thing*. But Inquisitor still sucks as a ruleset, and is another example of a GW game that needs outright replacement, or at least improvement as a mechanical system. The concept is interesting, but the execution is crap (worse than D&D, really, as it makes the same mistakes, but at a literally larger scale, and with even less thought given to game balance/control). We really need some kind of :gw: thing. I mean, exists, but it's not stupid enough to stand in for :gw: (yet). E: perhaps something like mcjomar fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Mar 24, 2017 |
# ? Mar 24, 2017 11:19 |