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Let's sparkle a little bit of variety into this thread outside of RPGs and Magic. There is a board game named Panic Station that is basically trying to be John Carpenter's The Thing as a game. It's a 4-6 player game in which one player is secretly a host to a bunch of alien parasites. At the beginning of the game, each player receives a loyalty card claiming which side they are on. The winning conditions to the game are as follows: If you are human, you must play 3 Gas Can cards inside the alien hive randomly located in the tiles representing the game's modular map. If you are infected, you must either (A) infect all the humans, (B) infect all but 1 human and neither he nor the items deck have any gas cans, or (C) kill all non-androids belonging to all players. Simple enough, right? Except nearly every one of these scenarios is horribly broken. In the case of (A), being the last human to get infected is the losing condition (in the current version. the original version of the game didn't have this rule lmao), because otherwise all the infected players would win which at that point includes literally every player. So, rules as written, the easiest way to avoid losing under these circumstances is to get yourself purposely infected as quickly as possible. It should be noted that for the infected player, secrecy is almost a moot point, because players in the same room have to run an infection chance (so no human players want to risk it) and there are 4 exits from the starting room, making it impossible for an infected player to subtly "bump" into a human player in a 4-player game. So either everybody goes in separate directions because it's the optimal human (and much harder unless you do exactly this) playstyle, or everybody rushes into a huge pack because it's the optimal alien (and easier) playstyle. Okay, so say you forego attempting to actually achieve the game's objectives as declared in the rulebook (playing it more like an RPG than a game with, you know, loving victory conditions), alien victory condition (B) involves one side possibly achieving a win condition without ever knowing it. Since people are likely not being very forward about their infections, it's possible to not ever know how many players are infected through normal play. You have to run a heat scan of the base to trigger this condition, proving how many players are infected, but even that doesn't include information of where the gas can cards may be (especially since gas can cards are something you want to keep hidden from the opposing team). It's not uncommon for games to run several turns longer than necessary because the alien side doesn't actually know they won 15 minutes ago. So, how did the designers address the issue of the rules not encouraging people to play the game in a thematically appropriate way? Well, the first thing they did was try to change it so that only the Host player wins when the infected team wins. Now, instead of rushing to attempt to get infected, people just gave up playing altogether because they already lost and nothing could change that. They then redacted that and recommended that players use a scoring system and play sets of games. Winning as a human is 2 points, winning as host is 2, winning as infected is 1. First player to 5 points wins. Except the average play time for a game of Panic Station is 45 minutes. Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Feb 26, 2013 |
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Feb 26, 2013 14:01
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:07 |
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Oh man, the second edition of Betrayal is actually pretty awful. The opening phase is just as pointless and includes hilarious rules problems and misprints such as opening a door on the second floor of the house and finding an underground lake up there.
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Feb 26, 2013 17:06
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Splicer posted:Firstly, that's first edition. In second they put in the basement. Secondly, I liked it being on the second story I'm apparently crazy and you're right. Game is still bad, though.
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Feb 26, 2013 17:19
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Gau posted:Because they have the same name, the game treats them as the same card - meaning that even though you can have the USS Enterprise and the USS Enterprise-E on the board at the same time, you can't have their respective commanders. For an added bonus, the old Picard can't command the new Enterprise and vice versa. There was a huge rules argument over the game state - technically, each card is identified by its name, so this (and all of the other First Contact reissues) were both cards, at once, all the time. This was never addressed in any fashion. Well, to be fair, they are different ships (totally different classes, too).  If you want to split hairs, the only Enterprises impossible to coexist would be the TOS Connie and the TMP Refit, being literally the same ship (eventually destroyed in The Search for Spock and replaced by the virtually identical Enterprise-A, also a Refit Constitution).
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Feb 27, 2013 22:56
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PeterWeller posted:This came up recently in the 40K thread. In 6th edition Warhammer 40,000, the rules for night fighting are pretty simple. If the distance to your target is 12" or less, nothing happens. If it's from 12" to 24", your target gets stealth (improving their cover save by 1). If it's from 24"-36", your target gets shrouded (improving their cover save by 2). So far so good. But it gets weird when you start dealing with units who get stealth or shrouded from other sources. Stealth and shrouded stack together, but do not stack with themselves. Thus during night fighting, a model with built-in stealth is just as easy to hit as any other model from a distance of 12"-24", and a model with built-in shrouded is actually more difficult to hit from a distance of 13" than it is from a distance of 25". Christ. loving Warhammer 40,000. This game is in its 6th revision and each version is shitheap of arguments, broken rulebooks, and wacky abuses. 2nd Edition 40k I want you to know that this version of the game was notorious for being completely and totally loving unplayable. It was glorious. A single skirmish could last 4 or more hours simply due to the number of bizarre rules interactions and horrible resolution mechanisms (melee combat stands out as a particularly grevious example, where 2 armies had to dice off a single model at a time every loving turn there was combat). No, we'll save that for later. For now, my favorite wacky abuse of this generation. Warhammer 40,000, for those of you who don't know, is a wargame set in a "grapeshot fiction" universe where hundreds of authors mix hundreds of different random types of fiction and people mainly cherry pick their favorite bits from the lot. Imagine if the entirety of fanfiction.net became canon for a single universe. On the surface, it's an incredibly generic and over-the-top post-apocalyptic magic demon-summoning spacefaring future as depicted on heavy metal album covers. The Orkz serve as the comedy faction in the game. Their background is that they are literally a bunch of British soccer hooligans. Their "comedy" is that their rulebook is full of monkey cheese bullshit. Orkz have a transport vehicle called a Trukk. In the game, transport vehicles have unit cards with stats, dice tables, carrying capacity, and so on. The carrying capacity of a Trukk was, and I'm not loving joking, however many Orkz you could physically fit on the Trukk model. Any infantry that fell off during gameplay was mechanically considered a casualty. RESULTING WACKY ABUSES:
3rd Edition 40k Games Workshop did the only smart thing they'd ever do in history and wiped the slate clean to attempt creating a cohesive game from scratch. Games were faster, clearer, and less retarded as a result of removing all the vortex grenades, virus bomb, psychic power cards, spontaneous demon transformations, usage of virtually every type of polyhedric die, and nightmarish tables in favor of rules that were mostly coherent. Except the writing didn't actually get any better. Army books were still often full of errors and argument mines that caused nerds worldwide to spit vitriol over the intent of the writers in question. For example, the Black Templar Space Marine Terminator (a genetically enhanced superhuman in "terminator armor") had an extensive equipment list that didn't actually include said terminator armor, leaving them functionally useless as written. They didn't stop the abuse, either. Between the power creep of their "1 army at a time" release schedule and their inability to properly playtest, the most customizable rules were often the most broken. The Vehicle Design rules were a fantastic example of this. Players could use a series of tables to spend points like in traditional RPGs to create their own custom vehicles using models appropriate to their purchased abilities. So, players would purchase a high-capacity transport with minimal armor and no weapons and plunk a huge squad of dudes in there during deployment. Of course, the vehicle in question would be a goddamn limosine, 4 feet long and 3 inches wide, parked horizontally in their deployment area, and on the first turn of the game it would rotate 90 degrees (without moving its center) which would place the back door of it directly in the middle of the enemy army-- then all the soldiers inside would jump out because pivoting isn't moving and then bumrush the enemy side. Another good one was the 3rd Edition Tyranid army book, of which 60% was entirely dedicated to "make your own poo poo and promise not to break the game pretty please" rules. The Tyranids are a 6-legged race of ravenous, shape-changing, chitinous, psychic, genius, endless, unstoppable space lizards that are the perfect Mary Sue villain for a game with 19 different Mary Sue protagonist factions. The back half of the book allowed you to make your own species. How quaint! They even let you have mutants within your army of customized monsters! Normally, each species was restricted as to which weapons and "equipment" (biological modifications) they could wield, with mutants being unrestricted. To balance that, only a fraction of your models were allowed to be mutants, relative to (A) the total number of species in the army and (B) the number of HP each squad had total. Enter the Ripper. Rippers are snake-sized. They are represented ingame as swarms, where each model represents multiple rippers due to their being so tiny. So each model was basically 3 rippers at once, mechanically represented as a single Tyranid with 3 HP and taking triple damage from area-effect weapons. So, if you only had 3 species in your army, 1 out of every 3 "wounds" (HP) could be a mutant. This rounded up, so all your rippers could be mutants. There's more-- rippers composed half a legal army, requiring only a commanding unit, so you could just add 1 boss monster and still be within the requirements of 3 or fewer species to get all your rippers as mutants. But what could you do with them? Well, for starters, you could give them jetpacks. Well, wings, but that requires them no longer being Troops, but Leaping gives the same movement jetpacks (12" instead of 6") do on any turn in which you go into combat. And Rending Claws. Rending was a special rule that allowed a weapon to, on a natural roll of 6, bypass every following other roll in that combat including the enemy's armor save to automatically wound. You could add on stat boosters and stuff but who gives a poo poo? Those points could be spent on more leaping, rending ripper mutants! And did I mention that they're fearless? And get a buff to saves against ranged weapons because they're tiny? Fearless snakes that move as fast as a vehicle going max speed and can chew through anybody regardless of toughness or armor through sheer weight of dice and broken weapon properties. The Tyranid Mutable Genus rules were the only thing in 40k history to ever be banned. The Australian GT circuit disallowed their usage in 2003.
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Mar 7, 2013 00:12
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Nah, dog. The real way to abuse 5th edition cover saves? 1 = Members of Squad 1 2 = Members of Squad 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 A goddamn checkboard of assholes, with each squad blocking 50% of the other squad from incoming gunfire, granting both squads a 4+ save versus 95% of shooting weapons. This is coming from the same edition during which the entire first half was spent arguing whether or not the rulebook's abundantly clear statement "Ramming is a type of Tank Shock" meant that an Ork steamroller purely designed for ramming things and destroying them was actually allowed to do what it was described to do in the rules. Or that a gigantic subterranean snake monster whose primary attack was to burst from the ground and eat you alive couldn't actually burst from underneath models because it required attempting to deploy the model inside another model (which is normally an illegal deployment location), meaning it functionally did NOTHING despite costing more than most other army's heaviest tanks.
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Mar 9, 2013 12:12
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PeterWeller posted:They responded to this and the X formation in a FAQ, stating that only one unit, the one further away (or one chosen by the controlling player if it was hard to determine), would get the cover save. These are the same FAQ writers who claimed that an entire spacefaring fleet's ability to block out all communications and psychic transmissions within a light year didn't affect people inside cars. And that those people could roll down the window of their car, stick their head out, and shoot mind bullets at you without issue.
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Mar 11, 2013 22:36
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LightWarden, I want you to know that I'm taking notes on everything you say and using your Wizard build as the great antagonist in the next world I build. A world with Warforged Monk couriers running around everywhere and a broken commodities market from magical manipulation.
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Apr 3, 2013 05:47
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Mimir posted:All they need to do is figure out their stats using the method described a while back. If they had a Standard or Elite Array when they first started wizarding, it's time to fall into a pit of existential despair. If they have 18 in Intelligence, but clearly had a dump stat, or were built with 25 points then they are clearly the avatar of cosmic forces beyond comprehension. STOP GIVING ME AWESOME CAMPAIGN IDEAS
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Apr 10, 2013 23:11
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Victorkm posted:I bought the game based off of the posts in this thread and played it this weekend. Why would you do this? This is like buying Simcity 2013 after reading the Forbes article.
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Apr 24, 2013 15:50
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Ulta posted:I always find the part before the haunt to be somewhat extraneous, uninteresting and random. It does seem like you don't have any information, so you aren't making meaningful decisions. Are there house rules out there for a random setup at the beginning so you can actually get to the meat of the game? You're asking for a Wal-Mart oil technician to fix a seized engine. Get recommendations for a game that's not poo poo in the Board Game thread. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 24, 2013 16:06
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In 40k, you can keep units "in reserve" where they start off the board and come on from the edge later depending on die rolls. The White Scars player put his entire army in reserve. The Tau player covered the board edge the WS player would enter on, making it impossible for his units to ever arrive from that edge (because you cannot come within 1" of an enemy model outside of melee). The Tau player won by default. Not really appropriate for this thread, though. It's just an idiot losing with a poo poo army at a broken game.
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May 10, 2013 18:43
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:07 |
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Randalor posted:"The rules don't allow you to drive around the enemy and come in from the side" seems rather in-spirit of the original Murphy's Rules. Actually, they do. But the guy playing the army didn't take the White Scars character that let him do that because the tournament had house rules in place that banned special characters.
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May 10, 2013 19:01
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