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Squibsy posted:I hate that about Newcromunda too, I just found your framing of Mordheim as a human v human snoozefest to be kind of bizarre. But there is plenty to criticise Mordheim for even so, and you're absolutely right that a lot of the subsequent factions just threw balance out of the window. mordheim was simultaneously a humans vs humans snoozefest and a broken melange of crap, even in the base book. most of the factions are basic humans, who are differentiated by slightly different weapon and skill access. it's a game that wants you to care very much about the difference between marienbergers and reiklanders, or the difference between three different crazed cults. also in that same game are skaven and undead, who just break the game wide open. skaven wreck the game by going wide and taking slings or DW, and undead break the game by being a newcromunda elite/chaff team in a game where everyone else is all chaff. this wasn't an expansion problem, it was there basically day 1. these are not insurmountable problems. you can embrace the goofiness and make a game that doesn't really care about balance and this needs to be carefully refereed or rely on "honorable play" house rules, like newcromunda or mordheim with all the weird citadel journal crap, or nerf/ban the wacky teams (either outright or with soft social pressure to discourage people from taking them) and make a straitlaced human vs occasionally furry human snoozefest, like most online fan mordheim updates. GW can make a game where the design space is limited but it's still fun. I would not have believed it five years ago but KT is an tiny miracle. it wants me to care very much about the difference between two different kinds of breach-and-clear humans armed with carapace armor and shotguns, while simultaneously still working when space marines and demons show up. there are like five (arguably more) gangs that are just a squad of imperial guard guys and each of them is visually and mechanically distinct! that's wild! i did not believe it when people came out of the gate screencapping rules where distances are measured in • and 🔺but they somehow managed it. but even that game fundamentally stops hanging together when the 5-0 player gets a bunch of advantages over the 0-5 player above and beyond just being better at wargames. not just that but the nature of campaigns means people want more poo poo for their existing team, not new teams to try. i don't think GW is on track to solve any of these problems, looking at newcromunda and blood bowl. i would be skeptical that mordzwei would have any good solutions! Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Mar 21, 2023 |
# ? Mar 21, 2023 00:53 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:46 |
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We played our first game of Killteam today- I learned that you shouldn’t just charge your Melee Sarge through the middle of the board and that Stalkers are really fun when you get multiple cries. We need to get the printer up and running, we don’t have nearly enough terrain
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 01:00 |
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Gambrinus posted:Set up Man O War, I really need to tidy the attic so it can go up there. Had to temporarily blu-tac some of the masts on but looks like it's all there. I suspect this will be fun. That sounds like it'll be pretty drat fun. As a millennial who missed the golden age of GW, I loved playing Man O' War on TTS. Would love to run a combined Man O' War/5th edition WHFB territory campaign some day. Probably a pipe dream, even amongst friends who play WHFB anymore, 5th edition is sadly a hard sell.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 02:54 |
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mordheim is the best game gw ever made but it is not for competitive play
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 03:40 |
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All of history is a human on human snoozefest
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 03:46 |
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moths posted:All of history is a human on human snoozefest AT is the human on human snoozefest that started that and it's a fun game, and one of the games i mentioned felt like it came from this century. it just has a very limited design space and i get how that would limit its appeal. a lot of people are into GW games because they are weirder and wider than relatively buttoned-down, more-symmetrical historical wargames
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 03:58 |
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I like the concept of Mordheim and the aesthetic and it was amazing to play in the late 90s/early 00s, but I do not feel the mechanics have aged well.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 04:08 |
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Atlas Hugged posted:I like the concept of Mordheim and the aesthetic and it was amazing to play in the late 90s/early 00s, but I do not feel the mechanics have aged well. they pretty much started bad but the whole point is that you make a thematic war band and see how far they can make it. losing youngbloods down a well is one of the best things in any game ever. if you try and play it like a competitive skirmish wargame it's pretty frustrating and the first time you have to fight skaven with slings you will quit forever.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 04:14 |
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imo all the things that make warhammer quest 95 the all time great are the same sort of things that make mordheim great. the mechanics are definitely not on that list
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 04:15 |
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I don't mean the campaign mechanics or the brutality. I mean the igougo system, Strength Vs Defense on a table, the sheer number of dice rolls you make for very little to actually happen. That sort of thing. Deadzone really seems to have nailed the playability experience of a skirmish game and it's hard to go back to things designed with more archaic rules.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 05:21 |
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This makes me nostalgic to a time when I was a kid and could pick either mordheim or battlefleet gothic as my christmas gift. I never played BFG but mordheim sure made me regret my choices
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 08:15 |
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jarofpiss posted:mordheim is the best game gw ever made but it is not for competitive play I feel this is a fundamental truth of Necromunda as well. The issue you mention with Skaven/Necromancers in Mordheim is symptomatic. The designers never intended one player to use Skaven, another a human gang, and have a straight-up, equal chances competitive experience. Insofar as they were/are capable of balancing anything, they are fine with some options being 'overpowered' because that enables a narrative. moths posted:All of history is a human on human snoozefest Exactly! History is far more varied and complex than any of these fantasies, which all draw on history for the bulk of their inspiration. It bugs me so much when players of Total War Warhammer deride the historical titles in that series as 'boring' because there aren't any monstrous units or magic. The rich tapestry of the human experience, a snoozefest? Really?
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 10:43 |
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Some people are interested in different things, for example I find fantasy to be incredibly dull on the whole and I will never give a gently caress about it in any form really
Improbable Lobster fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Mar 21, 2023 |
# ? Mar 21, 2023 11:16 |
Dragons, goblins, and magic!? How dull. -Goons Joking, I know what you mean And i feel we have this newcromunda argument every month.so im chiming in to say, I get it. A little too much but drat its still fun. And when playing my games people dont seem to mind that we trim the fat of models and rules. Thats what the different campaign types are for after all.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 14:31 |
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moths posted:All of history is a human on human snoozefest sometimes it's human on emu
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:12 |
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Yeah, Mordheim (and NM) can be incredibly unbalanced - we had a Mordheim game where I played Defending Sisters of Sigmar, and a friend played Attacking O&G. "If at the end of the defender’s turn the attacker has more standing models within 6" of the objective than the defender, the attacker wins." He ran his gang up and at the end of turn three, won the game simply because he had more models in his gang. That's it. I think maybe there was a little combat? I mean, I love the game, but that's just bad design - anyone who actually just read that scenario, let alone played, could see how it's just unwinnable if the attacker has a large warband. The Crown of Command podcast just did an short interview with Tuomas Pirinen and he said that some of the inbalance of the game was very intentional - life in Mordheim is meant to be brutal and short. One thing that stuck out was the houseruling on making armor half price because it's too expensive and not super effective. He stated that armor is supposed to be expensive, because through history, only the rich had stuff like plate, and, as it turns out, it wasn't a very good defense against much anyway. He did also mention skaven sling spam and said something to the effect of "just don't be a dick." There's another interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnzwrRNf5p8, but I haven't watched it yet.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:26 |
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berzerkmonkey posted:Yeah, Mordheim (and NM) can be incredibly unbalanced - we had a Mordheim game where I played Defending Sisters of Sigmar, and a friend played Attacking O&G. "If at the end of the defender’s turn the attacker has more standing models within 6" of the objective than the defender, the attacker wins." He ran his gang up and at the end of turn three, won the game simply because he had more models in his gang. That's it. I think maybe there was a little combat? I mean, I love the game, but that's just bad design - anyone who actually just read that scenario, let alone played, could see how it's just unwinnable if the attacker has a large warband. for me, mordheim really shines with insanely overbuilt terrain boards and then basically the players rping what your warband should be doing thematically. i play campaign games closer to d&d as collective storytelling than i do a competitive rigid ruled game. like if i spend an hour buiilding out a badass table and we roll a mission that would suck on it, i just pick something different.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:39 |
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berzerkmonkey posted:He did also mention skaven sling spam and said something to the effect of "just don't be a dick." A wonderful ideal, but if I can just spam a winning attack and beat the game, you made a crummy game. Should I "break" the game and spam the winning option? Probably not, but if you created something with a degenerate strategy that allows that kind of abuse I say the game maker is more at fault than the person abusing the strategy. Obviously it is easier to remedy the issue if you game with friends, but games like MH are often played in a league at your flgs.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:40 |
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berzerkmonkey posted:Yeah, Mordheim (and NM) can be incredibly unbalanced - we had a Mordheim game where I played Defending Sisters of Sigmar, and a friend played Attacking O&G. "If at the end of the defender’s turn the attacker has more standing models within 6" of the objective than the defender, the attacker wins." He ran his gang up and at the end of turn three, won the game simply because he had more models in his gang. That's it. I think maybe there was a little combat? I mean, I love the game, but that's just bad design - anyone who actually just read that scenario, let alone played, could see how it's just unwinnable if the attacker has a large warband. all these are just excuses for why they didn't bother to make a better game. also plate armor is pretty effective in real life
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:43 |
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Indolent Bastard posted:A wonderful ideal, but if I can just spam a winning attack and beat the game, you made a crummy game. Should I "break" the game and spam the winning option? Probably not, but if you created something with a degenerate strategy that allows that kind of abuse I say the game maker is more at fault than the person abusing the strategy. i have never played a game of 40k beyond kill team with friends but are wargames actually competitive? like it seems there is a ton of good faith grey area with people measuring, LOS, etc and players have to cooperate? minmaxing that kind of game seems pretty unfun but maybe flgs leagues draw the line somewhere else im legit curious because i will happily stretch a rule along with my friends to allow something narratively cool to happen on the table whether it's bad for me or not
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:44 |
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Indolent Bastard posted:A wonderful ideal, but if I can just spam a winning attack and beat the game, you made a crummy game. Should I "break" the game and spam the winning option? Probably not, but if you created something with a degenerate strategy that allows that kind of abuse I say the game maker is more at fault than the person abusing the strategy.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:50 |
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The 'armour is supposed to be expensive and poo poo' line from Pirinen always annoys me. Like how can he think that's good game design
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:51 |
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berzerkmonkey posted:
This explains a lot about Mordheims design
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:54 |
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Indolent Bastard posted:A wonderful ideal, but if I can just spam a winning attack and beat the game, you made a crummy game. Should I "break" the game and spam the winning option? Probably not, but if you created something with a degenerate strategy that allows that kind of abuse I say the game maker is more at fault than the person abusing the strategy. Like was said previously, this is a big issue for GW games - unless you have a core group or gaming club (as seemed prevalent in the UK - not sure how much of a thing they are these days) you can't bypass the bad design by just agreeing to not be assholes to each other.
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 15:58 |
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Peyote Panda posted:I think that was an issue in general playtesting at GW at that the time. During roughly the same era GW had to update the fouling rules in Blood Bowl explicitly because they hadn't used fouling very often when they were playing in-studio by informal gentlemens' agreement but in practice players used fouls as frequently as possible and it gave the teams with higher average Strength/Toughness the advantage in campaigns because teams with more fragile players ended up with so many more wounded players. i'm willing to cut them a huge amount of slack on this because you're talking about the LRB era, which was ahead of its time. taking in public feedback and using it to iterate on the game without just repeating the fans' houserules back to them in 2001 was absolutely wild. blood bowl was and is jank stacked on top of jank but the LRB, rules committee, and the fact that they kept it going for years was incredible
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 16:12 |
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Cease to Hope posted:i'm willing to cut them a huge amount of slack on this because you're talking about the LRB era, which was ahead of its time. taking in public feedback and using it to iterate on the game without just repeating the fans' houserules back to them in 2001 was absolutely wild. blood bowl was and is jank stacked on top of jank but the LRB, rules committee, and the fact that they kept it going for years was incredible
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# ? Mar 21, 2023 16:40 |
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I've been working on redoing all my Epic Vostroyan infantry, here are some (bad) shots of a stand of snipers I just finished. And yes, I use snipers in epic. I know people don't like them, but they have scout, so they are great for garrisons, plus the ability to choose your target is so great. Forcing a -1 armour roll on their supreme commander rules. Plus, one stand fits into a mech company without need to buy another chimera. Edit: I only base three to a stand for specialists to help differentiate them from base infantry. My infantry are all 5 to a stand.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 06:40 |
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Virtual Russian posted:I've been working on redoing all my Epic Vostroyan infantry, here are some (bad) shots of a stand of snipers I just finished. And yes, I use snipers in epic. I know people don't like them, but they have scout, so they are great for garrisons, plus the ability to choose your target is so great. Forcing a -1 armour roll on their supreme commander rules. Plus, one stand fits into a mech company without need to buy another chimera. Looks great to me! Out of curiosity, what did you do to produce the 'fur' effect with their GS hats? prick it a bunch with a pin, or something? I'm highly new to GS, so I've got no idea
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 06:51 |
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Major Isoor posted:Looks great to me! Out of curiosity, what did you do to produce the 'fur' effect with their GS hats? prick it a bunch with a pin, or something? I'm highly new to GS, so I've got no idea You got it, I used a pin I dulled a bit. I mix green stuff and millipiut/magic sculpt together at ~ 50/50. I find it has far better working properties than either on their own. Especially when working very thin like the wrapping on the rifles. I rolled those in between parchment paper, let them stiffen up a little, then wrapped them around with fine tweezers and the same pin. I meant the photos are bad, I like the minis! I'm not that hard on myself.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 06:57 |
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Virtual Russian posted:You got it, I used a pin I dulled a bit. I mix green stuff and millipiut/magic sculpt together at ~ 50/50. I find it has far better working properties than either on their own. Especially when working very thin like the wrapping on the rifles. I rolled those in between parchment paper, let them stiffen up a little, then wrapped them around with fine tweezers and the same pin. Ah, interesting! Yeah, dulling it makes sense - I very much like the outcome, so that's a good idea. I'll have to keep it in mind Virtual Russian posted:I meant the photos are bad, I like the minis! I'm not that hard on myself. Oh yeah, sorry - I'm talking about both! Those photos are 100% fine - it's not like your thumb's blocking a chunk, after all (which has definitely never happened to me)
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 07:05 |
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berzerkmonkey posted:He stated that armor is supposed to be expensive, because through history, only the rich had stuff like plate, and, as it turns out, it wasn't a very good defense against much anyway. He is so loving wrong here it isn't even funny. As much as I find Tuomas a pleasant and nice guy, he's notably been full of poo poo whenever the shortcomings and failures of his game dev career come up.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 07:40 |
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Me and three friends have been playing a necromunda campaign. It's kind of funny, because for one guy, this is his introduction to GW. He's played tons of warmachine and Malifaux. He just cannot wrap his head around how poo poo the rules are. Like he will ask, incredulously, every week how something is supposed to be balanced, or how you can work out what the rules are supposed to mean, and every week we have to explain that, no, it isn't, and no, you can't. You have a DM to keep the game working because otherwise it all just fails apart. Its a poo poo, poo poo game, but it's still a really fun experience. I think we might have gotten to a critical mass of equipment / experience now though, where it just can't work as a game anymore. It's like a rock paper scissors scenario, where you can tell who wins any scenario before we play it. We're thinking of restarting the campaign, but haven't thought of a good way of doing it that wouldn't be too painful.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 11:48 |
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The Enforcers showed up and confiscated everyone’s gear.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 13:12 |
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Lumpy posted:The Enforcers showed up and confiscated everyone’s gear. I'm playing as the Enforcers, lol. Like, yeah, it's possible to do, for sure. But it's really hard. The Ogryn player has TONS of experience, but very little equipment. The Escher player just got hosed, so a restart would be great for them. The Orlock player has FUCKLOADS of money. I've (Enforcers) got pretty simple loadouts, but I've got them on a bunch of dudes. So, however you do it it's kind of a headache to balance all that. But the real problem is that, if we started again, we'd just buy the same poo poo again. For me, that would take very little time, since it's just the cheap basic stuff from my house equipment. (I'd take fewer concussion carbines I guess though, because they're super OP). It would mean the Escher dude is back in, but, inevitably he'd do the same thing and buy anti-ogryn toxic stuff, slam into them vindictively, and just lose all his dudes. For the third time. The Orlock player probably still wouldn't buy anything. (He's the new one who doesn't know what anything does, and is super mistake averse). I'm thinking what we do is we say that chaos has been detected in the hive, and a whole sector is undergoing some kind of limited exterminatus. We all have to play a mission where we need to get through a tiny door on the other side of the map, and anyone who doesn't make it is permanently killed. (With the idea being that it's so hard to get through the door that you might get one if you're super lucky about it, and everyone will gun you down as you make a break for it). That leaves the money problem on the table, but, like, who cares. !Klams fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Mar 22, 2023 |
# ? Mar 22, 2023 13:27 |
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Lumpy posted:The Enforcers showed up and confiscated everyone’s gear. Given that equipment/money scales a LOT faster in by-the-book Necromunda than experience, this sort of thing is a good idea if you're interested in a longer-running campaign that would preserve the narrative and characters. Perhaps your hideouts are all simultaneously raided by a Noble House force, everyone is knockout-gassed, and the gangs awake to find themselves in an unknown Underhive dome without (all or some of) their stuff. Maybe there are servo-skull cameras flitting around, and/or crates of weapons left, a la Battle Royale or the Hunger Games. Your fighters are being made to carry out this macabre play for some spireborn's entertainment, and have to break free while also fighting the other gangs. Or, as you say, there's a mass enforcer lockdown and everyone gets lifted, the macro-train heading to the penal mining colony gets derailed (think The Fugitive) and everyone escapes. Play an escape mission with no equipment and a few NPC Enforcer prison guards, any fighters that don't escape are recaptured and either never seen again, or can be attempted a rescue later in the campaign. Then gangers have to scrounge for credits (perhaps roll for INT or in some way pre-determine how much of a secret stash each Leader can draw on to re-equip their crew) and re-establish themselves.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 14:13 |
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!Klams posted:
Double posting, but LOL at not buying stuff. There is literally no weapons/armour that would be worse than going into games without spending your earnings. You're onto a problem with gear resets though - players are going to want mostly the same stuff, maybe tweak one or two loadouts they wish they had gone for earlier. Even worse, people have committed to painting models at this point. They're hardly going to build and paint a whole new gang with different weapons, so of course it just becomes a boring effort to rebuild what you had before.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 14:16 |
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Genghis Cohen posted:Given that equipment/money scales a LOT faster in by-the-book Necromunda than experience, this sort of thing is a good idea if you're interested in a longer-running campaign that would preserve the narrative and characters. I mean, again, I am playing as Enforcers, so none of that stuff works for us. I do actually really like "Getting knockout gassed, and waking up somewhere else" because it's a total deus ex machina that lets me just sort it out, DM style, but also adds an element of intrigue. Are the old gangers out there somewhere, that I can pick them back up? Why did THESE ones make the jump? What is this place? Etc. That can all be resolved through interesting missions. I think I'm gonna do that. (And, if it turns out that the Ogryn only getting one of his 200+ point models ends up being unfair, he can just 'come across' some of his old comrades, or whatever). Genghis Cohen posted:Double posting, but LOL at not buying stuff. There is literally no weapons/armour that would be worse than going into games without spending your earnings. Yeah, I know. It's just that he's not into the role play element at all, he still wants to see what he thinks will be best. He's thinking of it like a wargame, where the object is to win, and he hasn't necessarily 'needed' upgrades, so he's holding off. He's seen how good plasma is so he bought some of that, but then the arbitrator told him to go easy on it, and he was just so baffled that he didn't buy anything else in case he was getting it wrong.
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 14:26 |
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sounds like your friend is just really bad at necromunda
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 14:31 |
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A 50S RAYGUN posted:sounds like your friend is just really bad at necromunda You can't really be good or bad at necromunda. It's just dice rolls. I mean, he's not losing, so he's not wrong to not spend. /Edit: Unless you mean the Escher guy? He's exclusively rolled ones on all the rolls where he needs anything but one. He bought a plasma rifle and it did no damage and ran out of ammo immediately. Then the same with some melta gun, he's rolled death on every single out of action roll. It's really dumb, he's just had zero big rolls go his way. !Klams fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Mar 22, 2023 |
# ? Mar 22, 2023 15:15 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:46 |
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!Klams posted:Me and three friends have been playing a necromunda campaign. It's kind of funny, because for one guy, this is his introduction to GW. He's played tons of warmachine and Malifaux. Start again using the Goonhammer Lost Zone campaign rules. It limits the availability of the good gear so it slows the progression down considerably
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# ? Mar 22, 2023 15:58 |