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mango sentinel posted:I dunno what WHFB rolls looked like but the Hit/Wound/Save thing seems core to the idea of Warhammer as a game these days and even though they blew up the setting people loved, they found that mechanic too precious to replace. Classic Warhammer and current 40k has typically followed these basic steps for working out combat: 1) The attacker compares his Weapon Skill to his opponent's Weapon Skill to work out a target to hit number and rolls against it 2) The attacker then compares his Strength against his opponent's Toughness to work out a target to wound number 3) The defender has a static save value that is modified by various factors including attacker's strength "It must have 3 rolls to be considered Warhammer" is classic cargo cult thinking.
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May 1, 2017 16:47
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mango sentinel posted:I dunno what WHFB rolls looked like but the Hit/Wound/Save thing seems core to the idea of Warhammer as a game these days and even though they blew up the setting people loved, they found that mechanic too precious to replace. Yes. I loved 4th edition D&D as the best edition ever made, but it had exactly the same problem. The designers understood they were jettisoning a lot of the garbage that had been carried along in previous editions entirely through tradition, but they failed to fully commit to that purpose and kept some things that they should have left out. For example, ability scores. All D&D 4E characters have piles of things that depend on the ability score modifier, but the base scores themselves are almost entirely for flavor - and they actually reduce rather than expand roleplaying opportunity whenever a player gets fixated on the flavorful meaning of an ability score. The game would have been better if you just had a list of modifiers. All those modifiers had to scale with character level anyway. Pawl posted:You're also not accounting for the massive amount of modifiers in the game like +bonuses and rerolls A massive amount of modifiers in the game is actually another problem. Even with the warscrolls, having to count up a bunch of different modifiers and remember all the sources of them is quite error-prone. It's too easy to forget a bonus, or forget that a particular bonus doesn't apply in this specific situation, and the more bonuses your opponent is applying to his own rolls, the harder it is for you to conveniently audit what he's doing. Not even because you think he's cheating, necessarily, just to keep track of why he's getting those bonuses so you can potentially interfere with your own units' capabilities.
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May 1, 2017 17:09
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Leperflesh posted:Yes. I loved 4th edition D&D as the best edition ever made, but it had exactly the same problem. The designers understood they were jettisoning a lot of the garbage that had been carried along in previous editions entirely through tradition, but they failed to fully commit to that purpose and kept some things that they should have left out. For example, ability scores. All D&D 4E characters have piles of things that depend on the ability score modifier, but the base scores themselves are almost entirely for flavor - and they actually reduce rather than expand roleplaying opportunity whenever a player gets fixated on the flavorful meaning of an ability score. The game would have been better if you just had a list of modifiers. All those modifiers had to scale with character level anyway.. When Skyrim was released, I remember having a ton of fun arguments with friends and others about the skill system vs. D&D. The ones who enjoyed Skyrim had a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea of it working in D&D and chalked it up to "video game vs RPG." I hate the D&D causes brain damage meme, but D&D is like Tolkien in the way it's poisoned any future progression of their respective genres.
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May 1, 2017 17:38
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Well, was, anyway. There are fantasy sword & sorcery RPGs with nothing relating to D&D available now. They're not super popular of course, but it's quite similar to the GW situation.
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May 1, 2017 17:43
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Leperflesh posted:I hope we don't have to belabor the point. It's a clear flaw in the game, but it's not a huge deal in play. To me, it's more interesting as a point of evidence on the heap that age of sigmar was designed by someone who didn't really understand game design, or at least, wasn't familiar with non-gw game designs. This is not a flaw. This is subjective. As shown by people arguing against you and saying its not a flaw. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 18:09 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 18:06
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Atlas Hugged posted:
Mortal wounds a different thing. Pretty much stuff coming from more powerful attacks. They don't even roll to hit in most cases. Lots don't even use d6's. So I don't get why this is a complaint.
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May 1, 2017 18:10
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MonsterEnvy posted:This is not a flaw. This is subjective. As shown by people arguing against you and saying its not a flaw. People disagreeing is not evidence of subjectivity.
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May 1, 2017 18:14
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Atlas Hugged posted:People disagreeing is not evidence of subjectivity. Then what is.
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May 1, 2017 18:19
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MonsterEnvy posted:Then what is. facts vs. opinions. Fact: all of the statistical probabilities of rolling a d6 and then on success rolling another d6 can be reasonably approximated with a single roll of some other die or set of dice. So rolling a d6 and then another d6 is an unnecessary inefficiency that adds no mechanical advantage to the game. Opinion: rolling loads of dice is fun If we disagree on a matter of fact, one or the other of us can present evidence to support our positions, but we are not having a subjective disagreement. If we disagree on a matter of opinion, one or the other of us can present persuasive arguments to support our positions, but ultimately the judgement is subjective.
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May 1, 2017 18:28
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Atlas Hugged posted:People disagreeing is not evidence of subjectivity. And at the same time, a single person posting isn't irrefutable. I love Leperflesh, and I see how he thinks the 20ish possible combinations of To-Hit/To-Wound with auto pass/fail on 6's/1's doesn't have enough granularity. There's also problems with his solutions. 8+ sided dice have issues with being cocked, they're too large to roll more than 10 of them at a time, they don't pack neatly storage, numerals take longer to parse than pips, determining at a glance what side is ontop on multiple d10+'s takes longer, etc. Going to multidice rolls or a d% system would be a complete structural change to the game itself; units would have to be the smallest division in the game. Rolling 2d6 for every Boyz attack is infeasible. You'd have to organize the game more like Warpath for that, and that doesn't even use multidice rolls. A big issue with his solutions is that the game isn't a d6 followed by a d6. It's d6x30 followed by more rolling.
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May 1, 2017 18:29
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MonsterEnvy posted:Then what is. I'm sure you can enroll in the local community college and they'll have an introduction to philosophy class that will cover it. I'm not trying to be glib, it's just a fairly complicated topic and a derail that is far outside the scope of this thread. But what you're unfortunately saying is that if one scientist presents evidence of climate change and another rejects it, then climate change must be subjective. The evidence collected may have been good, the rejection may or may not have been valid, but these are beside the point. The disagreement does not make the topic subjective. Likewise, you may dislike or disagree with our analysis of the mechanics of Age of Sigmar, but in doing so you do not make the quality or efficiency of those mechanics subjective. The mechanics are merely a tool and all tools can be evaluated by the metric of how good they are at doing what they are intended to do and the fact that it isn't difficult at all to offer improvements to the system demonstrates that they are not particularly good tools. That also isn't to say that they don't work or that you can't personally like them, just that they could objectively be better.
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May 1, 2017 18:31
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Atlas Hugged posted:I'm sure you can enroll in the local community college and they'll have an introduction to philosophy class that will cover it. I'm not trying to be glib, it's just a fairly complicated topic and a derail that is far outside the scope of this thread. But we disagreed they were improvements and Games tend to be subjective by nature. And they could objectively be simpler not better. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 18:42
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MasterSlowPoke posted:And at the same time, a single person posting isn't irrefutable. I love Leperflesh, and I see how he thinks the 20ish possible combinations of To-Hit/To-Wound with auto pass/fail on 6's/1's doesn't have enough granularity. There's also problems with his solutions. 8+ sided dice have issues with being cocked, they're too large to roll more than 10 of them at a time, they don't pack neatly storage, numerals take longer to parse than pips, determining at a glance what side is ontop on multiple d10+'s takes longer, etc. None of these complaints address the reasoning behind why he suggested those possible solutions. Those complaints are all about convenience which is easily addressed by making it an app. After all, these games are about decision making, right? Why should the dice have to be physical. It's 2017. As wellu "that would fundamentally change the game" arguments don't really hold water for me. Age of Sigmar is proof that they're willing to change the game and things being a tradition is a bad reason to keep bad mechanics. I should also point out the origin of this derail. I wasn't making a weekly reminder that Age of Sigmar is bad. I was specifically replying to an inquiry into the current state of the game and if things had really been improved. My response to that was no because it's still fundamentally a bad game. quote:A big issue with his solutions is that the game isn't a d6 followed by a d6. It's d6x30 followed by more rolling. Yes this is a huge problem especially since the game still uses the individual and not the squad or regiment as its basic unit.
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May 1, 2017 18:45
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MasterSlowPoke posted:And at the same time, a single person posting isn't irrefutable. I love Leperflesh, and I see how he thinks the 20ish possible combinations of To-Hit/To-Wound with auto pass/fail on 6's/1's doesn't have enough granularity. There's also problems with his solutions. 8+ sided dice have issues with being cocked, they're too large to roll more than 10 of them at a time, they don't pack neatly storage, numerals take longer to parse than pips, determining at a glance what side is ontop on multiple d10+'s takes longer, etc. Yeah I mean I also don't think it's great to approach a game with so many models on the board with mechanics where you roll for every model's interaction with every other model, e.g. the piles-o-dice solution. I don't think rolling piles of d8s or d20s or whatever would be that much harder to figure out, though: I know there's other games that do it. I think Age of Sigmar would benefit from that "complete structural change" you mention. But if you still wanted to use models-as-hitpoints for your units and still move every model individually and still have combats where not every model is attacking or defending etc., you could for example roll a single D20 or a couple of D6es or whatever, and add a modifier depending on how many models are still in the unit. Ex: your Bloodblood GoreGorers come in a unit of 12 or more guys. At full strength, roll 4d6, and add +1 for every two models beyond 12 in the unit. When the unit is at half its original strength, drop a D6. Now they only roll 2d6, +1 for each two models beyond 6 in the unit. When the unit is down to 1/4 strength, they only roll 1D6, no bonuses. So now you have a unit that starts with a very well defined bell curve, and you can buy extra models to both give it more resiliency and boost the numbers of that curve. You still lose some strength from the unit as it drops models, simulating the attrition that games like Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40k prefer, while avoiding the need to match up every single model with enemies, measure tons of fiddly 1" distances, or worry about getting every model in the unit into pile-in range in order to maximize their attacks. You can apply some general rule for units caught in combat with multiple other units (maybe drop a die for every unit beyond the first being fought, but roll against each enemy unit? Or maybe you can opt to apply however many of their total dice to a roll against each enemy unit... something like that?) and you can make a similar rule for their defense and how they take wounds/lose models. There's design room in between where skirmish games sit, where every figure on the table is making individual attacks, defenses, etc., and mass-battle games like Epic where the smallest unit is a squad and entire formations fight as one with mechanics aimed at whole-formation combats. I think Age of Sigmar is trying to sit in that design space, but the two different d6es for each model for each attack is an unnecessary anchor that is doing the game no favors. It's not a massive deal. As I said before, there are other places where I think Age of Sigmar has larger problems. It's just a noticeable one.
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May 1, 2017 18:52
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Atlas Hugged posted:
Which is subjective.
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May 1, 2017 18:52
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MonsterEnvy posted:Which is subjective. We've been over this. Whether or not you like a game is a distinct phenomenon from whether or not the mechanics are sound.
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May 1, 2017 18:58
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Also, subjectivity is not an end to debate. If it were, art reviews would not exist.
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May 1, 2017 19:02
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I agree that the combat mechanics part well-designed but they are functional. They're grossly inefficient and it slows the game down but the game is playable. Being aware of that flaw and discussing potential solutions for it is good and healthy. Getting all assed up on either side of discussing a clunky mechanic is dumb. I'd still recommend AoS in spite of a number of clunky mechanics, but I think they're just inelegant not straight up bad. Related, are there any other fantasy skirmish systems and do you guys like them better. All the other fantasy alternatives I know of are rank and flank.
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May 1, 2017 19:27
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Why is dice rolling bad and flawed? Well you see, climate change. Still don't get it? Maybe you should enroll in a community college philosophy class and educate yourself
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May 1, 2017 19:44
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Pawl posted:Why is dice rolling bad and flawed? Well you see, climate change. Still don't get it? Maybe you should enroll in a community college philosophy class and educate yourself I think that's pretty disingenuous, but I did laugh.
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May 1, 2017 20:28
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mango sentinel posted:Related, are there any other fantasy skirmish systems and do you guys like them better. All the other fantasy alternatives I know of are rank and flank. I quite like Wrath of Kings. It's kind of a Warmahordes/Guild Ball-lite style game. It's D10 based, and pretty quick and fun. The art direction leaves a bit to be desired with some of the female models, though I play Hadross (fish people) and avoid most of that mess.
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May 1, 2017 20:31
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I made this because I was bored and I like spreadsheets and I wanted to actually look at the odds and see how well the Age of Sigmar attack rolls can be represented by single dice: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Lvh9J89Oqv6atCfMuWwhXecSw1LRPfWAFnUulAIzBNk/edit?usp=sharing I only simulated a d8, d10, d12, and d20. Obviously D% would be even better, but as MasterSlowPoke pointed out, rolling 2d10 for each man in a unit would be awkward. There are also d14, d16, d18, and d24 available on the market, but they're much less common and sometimes more expensive than they should be, so I stuck to the very commonly found polyhedral dice.
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May 1, 2017 20:52
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mango sentinel posted:Need to clean up some flash and his knee some more but I like how these conversions are coming Wait, when did Slambo switch to tank spec? (This looks really good; sorry I'm late to the party here but the math was giving me a headache)
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May 1, 2017 21:07
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I think I am going to do a headswap on my second Mighty Lord of Khorne. Thanks for the inspiration. I am going to have to search my bits box for some 20 year old Chaos heads though. That one looks great.
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May 1, 2017 22:31
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Leperflesh posted:I made this because I was bored and I like spreadsheets and I wanted to actually look at the odds and see how well the Age of Sigmar attack rolls can be represented by single dice: Finally a game with d12 supremacy!
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May 1, 2017 23:26
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It's incorrect to imply that, since rolling D6x2 could be represented by a D12 or whatever, a D6 based system is a Flawed Design. Whether you prefer rolling lots of D6 or a single D213 is Your Opinion, not An Objective Flaw. I play tabletop wargames in large due to the tactile and visual aspects, so my preference is toward picking up a huge number of D6es, taking a moment to tell my opponent to prepare for all these attacks, and proceeding to roll a whole ton of 1's. Needing large amounts of RPG dice would be a major nuisance, and just using a single dice to represent all the attacks from one unit would feel very unsatisfying.
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May 1, 2017 23:49
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mango sentinel posted:I agree that the combat mechanics part well-designed but they are functional. They're grossly inefficient and it slows the game down but the game is playable. Being aware of that flaw and discussing potential solutions for it is good and healthy. Getting all assed up on either side of discussing a clunky mechanic is dumb. There's Lord of the Rings, but GW is legally prohibited from adapting the system to the Warhammer universe so even though it's a pretty good game, they'd never be able to draw from it. But it just shows when GW actually feels like it, they are totally capable of writing original rules that aren't garbage. Dragon Rampant had some good ideas and scale wise is pretty close to Age of Sigmar. The command system can be frustrating because it's like Blood Bowl where a failed command roll ends your turn. But there's a community set of rules that fixes that. Brink of Battle has a fantasy expansion that is worth checking out. The system can be daunting to approach because of how much stuff there is in it, so hopefully the professionally published Scrappers that uses the same core mechanics is easier to approach for learning purposes. Mantic should also have a skirmish level game on Kickstarter later this year but I'm not sure if that is going to be "Mordheim" skirmish (a dozen models moving individually) or "Age of Sigmar" skirmish (a few dozen models in loose formations). Speaking of Mantic, Firefight basically does what Age of Sigmar wants to when it comes to a skirmish game of squads fighting small engagements with an emphasis on individuals. A squad is the basic unit in the game, but individuals act as health points for the squad and are removed as the squad takes damage and line of sight is drawn between models. However, stats and rolls are still made for the squad as a single entity, which greatly improves the speed of play. There'd be nothing stopping GW from taking a similar approach to Age of Sigmar.
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May 2, 2017 01:17
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Texmo posted:It's incorrect to imply that, since rolling D6x2 could be represented by a D12 or whatever, a D6 based system is a Flawed Design. Now try reading the post again? The point of using 2 dices is that it creates a curve, ie you are more likely to pull one of the middle results than the extreme ones. It both gives you more room in stats between low and high, and make balancing things easier.
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May 2, 2017 02:12
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Texmo posted:It's incorrect to imply that, since rolling D6x2 could be represented by a D12 or whatever, a D6 based system is a Flawed Design. Dude, 2D6 is SUCH not the same thing as a D12. Dude. Just dude. MasterSlowPoke posted:I quite like Wrath of Kings. It's kind of a Warmahordes/Guild Ball-lite style game. It's D10 based, and pretty quick and fun. The art direction leaves a bit to be desired with some of the female models, though I play Hadross (fish people) and avoid most of that mess. It's a pretty darn great game. Though I mostly play Goritsi for the same issues you have.
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May 2, 2017 02:59
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Iceclaw posted:Now try reading the post again? The point of using 2 dices is that it creates a curve, ie you are more likely to pull one of the middle results than the extreme ones. It both gives you more room in stats between low and high, and make balancing things easier. You're analysis of the 2D6 is correct, but to be fair I don't think that's what he's addressing. He's saying that rolling a set of D6 (to hit) followed by a second set of D6 (to wound) isn't worse game design than making a single DX/% roll since using RPG dice potentially introduces its own problems and rolling buckets of dice for minimal results is "fun". To me, having to express a single percentage with multiple target values* is by definition less elegant and therefore necessarily worse design. Other games have managed to be based on specialty dice without it being burdensome so I don't really buy that argument either. If it's really truly impossible to roll non-D6, then just make it an app or reduce the need for so many dice**. "Fun" isn't something I ever like to discuss because it's purely subjective and we can't really have a meaningful discussion about it or its implications. *Remember, the crux of this complaint is that both values are generated by the attacker. This is not a problem in any other game and it wasn't an issue in classic Warhammer or in current 40k. To me this is the definition of a "sacred cow" and "cargo cult" design where they feel like they have to include certain core concepts that don't actually meaningfully improve the game. **This is the other big sacred cow of Age of Sigmar. Warhammer has always started at the individual level and your dice pools are based on the stats of individuals multiplied by the number in a squad/regiment. But other games, including other skirmish games, have come to the conclusion that if a squad is the basic unit of the game, then the squad should have shared stats and you shouldn't be rolling based on the number of individuals you have. This cuts down on the total dice you have to roll for any action and speeds up bookkeeping and gameplay significantly. What's interesting to me is that Age of Sigmar already has mechanics built into it that could make this switch. The degrading monsters are pretty neat and there's no reason why a unit of orruks (sigh) couldn't operate under the same principle. As you remove models, the unit gradually gets less dice to attack with and its target numbers might get worse. And since now a squad is the basic unit, you don't have to have 2-3 attacks multiplied by the number of models. You just say a full squad has "X" attacks, then a reduced squad has "Y' and a further reduced squad has "Z". One other thing I'll say. I'm making the assumption that we agree that elegance and simplicity of design is inherently better than solving the same problem with a more complex solution. I guess I take that for granted and I suppose it could be subjective. But as LeperFlesh said, just because something is subjective doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing. If something takes a less elegant approach, it needs to have a drat good reason for doing so and I don't think Age of Sigmar's "well Warhammer has always had 3 rolls" justification is good enough.
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May 2, 2017 03:04
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LordAba posted:Dude, 2D6 is SUCH not the same thing as a D12. Dude. Just dude. Yeah I know but I said D6x2, not 2D6. I didn't care to figure out DWhat would represent the range of probabilities of D6x2 so I just guessed at D12 Atlas Hugged posted:stuff I think there's a different sort of design elegance to using a single type of dice (also the second-most stable next to the D4, which crap anyway), and also to cutting down the amount of math players are required to do in order to play the game. Sure, being good still requires know How To Statistics, but the barrier to entry is a lot lower when you only have to add '+2 -1' to a D6 to resolve a particular step, which makes the game a lot less intimidating and more accessible to newcomers who might not be used to, or indeed want to put up with, more involved game resolution. The visual cue of A Lot Of Dice (probably) being better than Two Dice also makes the game intuitively easier to understand, as well as having the tactile satisfaction to it, and how a game 'feels' to play is an important aspect of it's overall design. Design Elegance is more to me than simply having the resolution of a combat expressed through a single formula (which you would need to calculate) and resolved through a single dice roll; it considers not just the math, but also the tactile nature of the format, as well as simplicity of understanding, and uniformity of accessories.
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May 2, 2017 03:38
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With a few notable exceptions (like Epic and similar-scale games), GW is married to the idea that the individual model is the basic "unit" of the game and that every die rolled represents an individual's contribution to a unit's pool, rather than abstracting things so that the basic unit of the game is a squad (in sci-fi settings) or regiment/troop (for fantasy or lower-tech), with individual models representing the hit points of that unit. This does mean you need to roll a giant pile of dice to represent a 20-man unit shooting at something, rather than rolling a 2d6 for the entire unit's attack with to-hit and to-damage bonuses based on the broad "size category" of the unit making the attack.
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May 2, 2017 03:41
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Xarbala posted:With a few notable exceptions (like Epic and similar-scale games), GW is married to the idea that the individual model is the basic "unit" of the game and that every die rolled represents an individual's contribution to a unit's pool, rather than abstracting things so that the basic unit of the game is a squad (in sci-fi settings) or regiment/troop (for fantasy or lower-tech), with individual models representing the hit points of that unit. Right, and my point is that this is a sacred cow and the root of a lot of problems and you could do a lot to improve the design by getting away from that. Texmo posted:Yeah I know but I said D6x2, not 2D6. I didn't care to figure out DWhat would represent the range of probabilities of D6x2 so I just guessed at D12 I think ultimately what we're saying isn't that you should take the existing target values and convert them (that was just a demonstration and there's nothing inherent about the current values) but that if you wanted an elegant way to get granularity, you'd pick a single dice type with a broader built in range. The players wouldn't have to do any math. There would still be a provided target value exactly like it is now. You'd just make a single roll on a D8 or something. Bookkeeping would be much simpler overall. And regardless of making the individual the basic unit or a squad, a more powerful unit would still usually start with a larger number of attack dice making it visually obvious how strong they are; it would just be less dice rolled overall. That is, unless you made all attacks on the same number of dice and damage was a set value based on unit or weapon type with a multiplier for unit size/model count, which is also a perfectly valid approach to resolution.
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May 2, 2017 04:00
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The sum of 2d6 starts to create a bell curve, but that doesn't mean it is somehow better than rolling N D6 and evaluating them individually. N d6 is a binomial distribution with parameters N for the number of dice, and P for the probability of success. The binomial is approximately normal when N x P >10 and N x P x (1 - P) > 10. Neither of these things is replicated by choosing a larger dice. 2D6 doesn't look like 2 D6 doesn't look like a d12. None of these approaches is better than the others. Warmachine is based off the 2D6, and it's great to pull out a clutch 11 to hit to win a game. However, this approach takes a lot more time than rolling a units worth of attacks at once. For a while there was a strategy of just bringing so many guys that your opponent would burn his clock time having to roll attacks. GWs approach doesn't have this issue. Buckets of dice to hit; a smaller bucket of dice to wound; a still smaller bucket of dice for armor saves is quintessential GW. I wish they had made alternating activations, but they didnt. I can tell that some people wish they had changed the dice system.
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May 2, 2017 04:16
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I certainly wouldn't want to roll 2D6 to replace the individual D6 being rolled. That would be a nightmare. If it switched to 2D6 it would be to condense every attack roll into a single roll. And I've said being "quintessential" isn't a good justification to keep a system.
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May 2, 2017 04:35
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I actually think attacks-per-model is a better design than unit abstraction. It's immediately obvious to a player that 6 dudes would get 6 times their attacks, but maybe not so obvious that, as an example, 6 dudes are still actually at 100% strength because they started at 10 and would only count as Reduced when they dropped to 5. In a tactile and narrative sense, it's also much more satisfying to know that five of your six dudes' shots hit, and then two of them only grazed the enemy, while a further two failed to pierce their armor to result in one casualty, as opposed to just knowing that they shot at a squad and killed one; it helps creating the little stories about your battles that make them more personal. Having multiple steps also allows different unique effects for each step - as an example, I can think of 40k's Necron Tesla weapons, where each to-hit of 6 explodes into two extra hits, which would be much more difficult to represent as D20 modifiers, and you'd also lose the tacit visual of the two extra dice representing the lightning forking off to hit two other chumps. I'll admit that I don't like AoS's static success numbers here, at least for wound rolls, and prefer the system proposed for new40k - having some interplay between the attacker and attackee adds important flavor; a dragon should really be harder to wound than a goblin. In an abstracted system, players would still have to do math to apply any modifiers from bonuses/maluses/squad abstractions, they'd just have to do it all in one step, which would likely either be more complicated than it ought to be, or sterile due to simplicity.
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May 2, 2017 04:47
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Texmo posted:I actually think attacks-per-model is a better design than unit abstraction. It's immediately obvious to a player that 6 dudes would get 6 times their attacks, but maybe not so obvious that, as an example, 6 dudes are still actually at 100% strength because they started at 10 and would only count as Reduced when they dropped to 5. In a tactile and narrative sense, it's also much more satisfying to know that five of your six dudes' shots hit, and then two of them only grazed the enemy, while a further two failed to pierce their armor to result in one casualty, as opposed to just knowing that they shot at a squad and killed one; it helps creating the little stories about your battles that make them more personal. I can't address "satisfying" or "sterile" because these are subjective words. But I can talk about things like "bookkeeping" and "potential user error" and "visually obvious". In your example of 6 orks get 6 attacks, that's not actually always true. The number of attacks a unit has is variable based on their attack stat, their equipment, conditional bespoke rules, and whatever other buffs might be on them. There's nothing there to explain why 6 orks would have more or less total attacks than 6 space lizard demons. If we're going be "visually obvious" than they should both just have 6 attacks, or maybe 2 each because they're the same size or have the same equipment. But that's not always the case and that's why units have stats that make those things clear in the first place. Very little about miniature games is "visually obvious" so it's not a gold standard I want to introduce as a metric for game design. Besides, you and I both know that having more or less attacks also serves both mechanical and narrative purposes. A unit of ogres might only have a few attacks, but each attack is incredibly powerful and has a high chance to do damage. A unit of rats might get dozens of attacks, but they have a low chance to hit or damage. Abstraction handles this system very well since you can then have fewer dice than the number of models. This allows you to have a decent range of "high number of attacks versus low number of attacks" while trying to keep the dice pool sizes from getting out of hand (sometimes literally!). As for your Necron example, it would work exactly the same, it just wouldn't be a D6 (assuming that was your solution to the granularity problem). There's nothing stopping you from having exploding hits. If you wanted to keep the percentages nearly identical, you'd just pick a range on a D8 or D10 or D20 or you'd increase the number of attack dice so there were more opportunities to roll the one exploding score (and again, you wouldn't have to keep the same percentages, there's nothing inherent about them). Either way, it's not a particularly hard obstacle to overcome and it's math the player doesn't have to worry about because it would be written in the rules. "These are your target numbers. This value/range of values causes exploding hits." Going back to bookkeeping and potential user error, every step you add gives the players another chance to make a mistake in their math or in tracking buffs. If I have three rolls to make and buffs can affect one or all of them, I'm going to have to do a lot of extra bookkeeping every turn to make sure that I remember everything that's active on the unit. Maybe that means I need three different colored tokens to represent buffs being on to hit, to wound, and to save rolls. Maybe I have notecards for each unit. I don't actually know how AoS recommends players track that stuff. Regardless, it can get messy. Going from 3 stages of rolling to 2 cuts out a lot of that potential to screw something up, and turning it into a single attack roll reduces things even further.
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May 2, 2017 05:54
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Atlas Hugged posted:In your example of 6 orks get 6 attacks, that's not actually always true. The number of attacks a unit has is variable based on their attack stat, their equipment, conditional bespoke rules, and whatever other buffs might be on them. Atlas Hugged posted:Besides, you and I both know that having more or less attacks also serves both mechanical and narrative purposes. A unit of ogres might only have a few attacks, but each attack is incredibly powerful and has a high chance to do damage. A unit of rats might get dozens of attacks, but they have a low chance to hit or damage. Abstraction handles this system very well since you can then have fewer dice than the number of models. This allows you to have a decent range of "high number of attacks versus low number of attacks" while trying to keep the dice pool sizes from getting out of hand (sometimes literally!). Atlas Hugged posted:As for your Necron example, it would work exactly the same, it just wouldn't be a D6 (assuming that was your solution to the granularity problem). There's nothing stopping you from having exploding hits. If you wanted to keep the percentages nearly identical, you'd just pick a range on a D8 or D10 or D20 or you'd increase the number of attack dice so there were more opportunities to roll the one exploding score (and again, you wouldn't have to keep the same percentages, there's nothing inherent about them). Either way, it's not a particularly hard obstacle to overcome and it's math the player doesn't have to worry about because it would be written in the rules. "These are your target numbers. This value/range of values causes exploding hits." Atlas Hugged posted:Going back to bookkeeping and potential user error, every step you add gives the players another chance to make a mistake in their math or in tracking buffs. If I have three rolls to make and buffs can affect one or all of them, I'm going to have to do a lot of extra bookkeeping every turn to make sure that I remember everything that's active on the unit. Maybe that means I need three different colored tokens to represent buffs being on to hit, to wound, and to save rolls. Maybe I have notecards for each unit. I don't actually know how AoS recommends players track that stuff. Regardless, it can get messy. Going from 3 stages of rolling to 2 cuts out a lot of that potential to screw something up, and turning it into a single attack roll reduces things even further.
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May 2, 2017 06:19
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The tactile experience becomes less of an advantage as the scope of the battle being depicted increases but as Age of Sigmar is supposed to be smaller-scale I can see why that would still be important.
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May 2, 2017 06:29
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Texmo posted:Which is why I said "6 times their attacks", and not "6 attacks" All you're really saying is that 6 models should have 6 times their attack stat plus their equipment and other bonuses. That doesn't really mean much though since it doesn't allow for a "visually obvious" comparison between two units of the same size. And we're neglecting to mention that we won't even always have the full unit in melee in AoS since it uses an effective range for close combat. So now your pile of 6 orks might only actually have 3 that can do anything. What's visually obvious about that? quote:Having dice-per-model (as opposed to dice-per-group) also handles these mechanics though, and it has the added benefits of simpler math and tactile satisfaction. It's literally not simpler math. Going by attacks per model in effective range requires math. Looking at a static attack value doesn't. The static value also allows for low starting ranges to reduce the overall number of dice rolled. Also please stop using words like "satisfaction" since they're meaningless in this context. quote:My point here is that it necessitates a multi-step system to achieve this effect - if the concepts of 'hitting your target' and 'doing damage' were combined into one percentage, you lose the effect of 'the lightning arced to do 3 hits instead, but only one of them caused damage' and instead simply get 'the shot(s) did more damage' We haven't said there should only be a roll to hit. I think most of us agree that there should be some roll to hit largely determined by the attacker's stats and a roll to damage/wound based on the defender's. You can still weave your narrative exploding dice into those two rolls. You're just now accomplishing the same thing with fewer stages of dice rolling. quote:I think multi-step dice rolling actually lowers the mental overhead of bookkeeping and calculation; since modifiers are segregated into different resolution steps of to-hit and to-wound, between which failed results are removed from the dice pool, it requires simpler calculation than if all active modifiers were applied to a single roll, and a smaller number of modifiers need to be remembered at each step. You might feel that having multiple steps lowers mental overhead but what it does is literally introduce additional bookkeeping because you now have more steps and each step can have its own floating values affecting it and each step now has potential user error. Less steps, less potential user error. Xarbala posted:The tactile experience becomes less of an advantage as the scope of the battle being depicted increases but as Age of Sigmar is supposed to be smaller-scale I can see why that would still be important. It's supposed to be skirmish but still organizes the game based on squads so you have a conflict in design concepts. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 06:40 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 06:37
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