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I was in my local game store today, and noticed they had a set of Stormfront Eternal Warscroll Cards for sale, which is I think a fantastic idea, especially if they're anything like the ones from the Storm of Sigmar mini-starter box. Flipping through a codex to find unit rules is Tedious and Sucks, and i'd absolutely pay some bucks for the convenience of pre-made unit cards and tokens. They're something i'd hoped GW would get around to doing for a while, and I certainly hope it catches on and sticks around. It's these things, if you're wondering
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Mar 3, 2017 00:56
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 09:02 |
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TKIY posted:Fifty bucks though? /en-NZ/ It's New Zealand Monopoly Bucks (with bogus Shipping Tax) And, come on, this is not a hobby for people who make wise financial decisions.
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Mar 3, 2017 01:12
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Renfield posted:or wise gaming decisions. You're assuming that Tom Kirby was making A Factual Statement when he said that the hobby was Purchasing Jewel-Like Objects of Wonder (as opposed to assembling, painting, collecting, and playing dumb games with 'adult' toys, which is what most people mean when they refer to 'this hobby'), and believing Tom Kirby is a bit worrisome.
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Mar 3, 2017 03:05
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I've seen local people playing with these sort of movement trays, and simply taking models off the bases when appropriate, like for piling in to combat:
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Apr 4, 2017 03:01
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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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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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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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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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Atlas Hugged posted: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? Atlas Hugged posted: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. Atlas Hugged posted:Also please stop using words like "satisfaction" since they're meaningless in this context. Atlas Hugged posted: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. I think it's poor design to have one player to sit around and just lose models with no way to feel like they're defending. Even if it would has the same effect, there's an important psychological impact of the defender having some perceived agency in the defense of their little dudes. Atlas Hugged posted: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. I think that the kind of abstraction that you seem to be suggesting works in games where units are physically attached to a single base - epic, kings of war, warhammer fantasy - but not so much in a game where you have Individual Dudes moving about, even if they're doing so in a cohesive fashion.
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May 2, 2017 07:50
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Atlas Hugged posted:Again, it seems we're running into a design philosophy conflict. Nobody should be playing a game with 500 skeletons at 28mm scale. Atlas Hugged posted:You're also ignoring the main advantage: we can reduce dice pools. Atlas Hugged posted:It's not that I can't "appreciate" those things. It's that you can't measure them so they're not worth discussing in the context of game design. Atlas Hugged posted:Then you didn't read what I wrote. In Kings of War there are units that do extra damage based either on hits or wounds. And you have your narrative built into the mechanics of the game. "My mighty warriors with their perfect technique landed blows so vicious it was like landing ten blows." Or, "Our weapons were so much more powerful than your armor and hides that it was like wounding every man thrice!" The narrative element is there since there is more than one roll. The difference is that the two rolls are meaningful. Atlas Hugged posted:We're talking about buffs on three stages of rolling that need to be recorded across multiple units. "This unit has a +1 to hit modifier, and is doing an extra -2 against saving throws this turn while that unit is getting a +2 to hit, but a debuff gave it a -1 to wound, and then this unit..." etc etc. The potential for error is higher than if we reduce it to two rolls per unit. No difference in 'remembering the modifiers', but there is difference in 'more complicated math' Atlas Hugged posted:Dragon Rampant uses abstraction and there's zero issue with it (there are other issues with the game, but the abstraction is a huge advantage). Kings of War can be multibased or individual. Same with Warpath. The point is that there are groups moving together and there are mechanical advantages to treating those groups as single entities, especially when you have several such groupings on the board.
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May 2, 2017 09:20
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moths posted:Is there a photo of the undead-themed battlemat anywhere? yeah, it's up on the GW NZ page now https://www.games-workshop.com/en-NZ/Battle-Mat-Soulblight-Necropolis-2017 They really should have just cut to the chase and called it "Frozen Grave Battlemat"
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May 20, 2017 06:00
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richyp posted:- 1:1 Thousand Sons Blue and Temple Guard Blue highlight just have to chime in and say, have you tried using ahriman blue for this? from what I can see, it looks like it is in the middle of thousand sons and temple guard already. They're really awesome looking chaos warriors by the way, and you're making me want to paint some too
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Sep 12, 2017 08:56
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I'm pretty sure it was the constraint of having to make units rank up more than anything else which spearheaded warhammer fantasy's move to a round based skirmish format. GW have repeatedly said they design things miniatures-first, rules-second, and AoS totally seems like the miniature designers getting fed up with not being able to make dynamic poses.
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Sep 15, 2017 00:39
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 09:02 |
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I haven't seen GW actually confirm anywhere there'll be a new StormWizard vs NightHaunt starter box, it seems like assumptions because they're two upcoming releases announced near the start of a new edition. I both hope there is and isn't a new starter, because I'm a sucker for boxed sets, and haven't even started assembling Blightwar yet.
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May 16, 2018 00:51
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