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Okay, I have no clue if anybody is going to read this but here goes nothing. Cover by Mike Rayhawk. Any illustrations that aren't explicity noted as such are done by him. BrikWars: RagnaBlok Edition Brikwars is part of my adolescence, for better or worse. For those new to Brikwars, it’s a Lego wargame penned by Illustrator Mike Rayhawk. There’s games that do this already - Mobile Frame Zero is probably the one you’ve heard about the most. But Brikwars is minifigure scale. That means minifigs running around, blowing each other up, punching each other, and generally having a bloody good time. It also dances around copyrights a little by referring to “blox” and “brix” and being as not-Lego as possible, which is kind of funny considering Mike now works for Lego! Looks like all those years of drawing not-Lego paid off. I had a ton of Lego when I was a kid. It was partly old sets, like Rock Raiders and Insectoids. It was partly an old castle and pirate ship my grandparents had. There were way too many Bionicles to be considered healthy. I spent a lot of time making things with them, and I also spent a lot of time playing with them. I have memories of having the Chamber of Secrets set and trying to recreate the scenes from the book, complete with giant-snake-eye-gouging action. Lego was kickass. Brikwars was probably my first taste of wargaming. It seemed to offer structured chaos - a reason to smash things and have Lego all over the floor, to pull apart minifigures and do death screams. It threw around a lot of red lego blood and rhetoric about rules and chaos. In retrospect, I didn’t need any reason to do any of that. I could have blown up my creations and simulated horrible minifig death at any time. But rolling dice and measuring and having rules seemed grown up somehow. It’s weird, because Brikwars has always tried to cultivate this image of being the wargame for “non-nerds,” making fun of traditional wargames. It maintains that creativity and “fun” are more important than following rules. One the one hand, it’s Lego, so of course that should be the attitude, right? But then you made it into a wargame, the nerdiest possible pastime besides model trains. And what’s with all these rules? Because there’s a shitload of rules. Also, as someone who witnessed the corporate suicide known as Age of Sigmar's first edition, I’m very sceptical of any game that claims that fun is better than solid rules. Let’s go and see how Brikwars does it. I've had this review bouncing around in my head for a while now, and I'm keen to give it a go at last. I’m going to have a look at the current 2021 "Ragnablok" edition of the game. We’ll see if the dream of organised plastic mayhem is real or not. If you’re interested in reading along, or peering at this tiny community dedicated to turning a family friendly toy into a plastic splatterfest (clatterfest?), then you can check it out at the website. The rules are free, so feel free to follow along with this review. I'm going to do its best to heavily abridge everything, point out what I like and what I don't... you know, a review! Let’s dive right in and get all the philosophy and what-you-needs and all of that out of the way first.  Brikwars 2020 Part 1 - Philosophy of the Brik The book is split into four sections - an Introduction, basic Core Rules, more complicated creation and combat rules for MOCs (My Own Creation, for those not up with the lingo), and a campaign system. Each section essentially adds onto the core rules, adding more rules and edge cases. Additionally, any non-numbered chapter is an optional set of rules that can be eliminated as you see fit. I'll admit I've cheated here and skipped to the chapter that actually explains this, because this isn't explained until we get into the actual gameplay, but it's worth talking about in case you're following along. This first part is going to get all of the introduction stuff out of the way. We're going to get a handle on the ethos of this game and what you should expect when playing Brikwars. There is, right up at the top, a disclaimer that says that BrikWars is NOT endorsed or acknowledged by the LEGO Group of companies. BrikWars is based on the much older Lego Wars, which was struck down for using the word Lego in the name. This disclaimer is needed, because the next page that isn't the table of contents introduces the Deadly Spaceman.  ...yeah. If you've seen the Lego Movie, you know what this guy is. Lego is the default brand used for both the aesthetic and any photos in the rulebook, and thus that legal disclaimer is absolutely necessary. The rulebook has TONS of photos of fan-made creations, by the way. If nothing else, you can browse through and see some sick as hell creations. The book goes into the weird story/canon that BrikWars has, which is maintained by the fanbase. It's too tedious to repeat in detail here, partly because there's a lot of it and partly because it's written by the kind of people who loving love Lego and do not like any other brand. The long and short of it is that BrikWars' "kanon", such as it is, is a deliberately messy universe that destroys and rebuilds itself over and over in perpetuity, with universal instances named after the numbering of notable Lego sets. This multiversal mess is threatened by the existence of dubious clones and forces that threaten to render all existence boring. It's the kind of story a heavily online community tends to create. I would also like to point out that this rulebook has, at this point, a weird image of a Megablocks-styled woman warrior with pigtails and high heels, and a reference to "Jaw-Jaws" and "Dimmies". There are going to be some, uh... jokes. For a given value of joke. Like, if your joke value is zero. This game's humor is trapped in the mid-2000's and has not escaped. It makes some jokes about gender that it is absolutely not equipped to make. And if you can't tell what "Jaw-Jaw" is a reference to, then you have lived a blessed life and I want your existance. At least the art is good? Mike got hired by Lego so they must have liked it. Anyway I don't think this book is very funny and we haven't even got into gameplay yet. Thankfully, we get out of that interminable poo poo and more into the point of the game itself in the next chapter. To summarize, BrikWars is about mayhem. The general feel of playing the game should tend towards an action movie or superhero comics. Attempting to play this as a serious wargame with serious tactics is missing the point. You play BrikWars to watch your Arnold Schwarzenegger minifig fail to lift a car and rip his own arms off, or a chef brain a pirate with a frying pan. There is also an expectation that the rules here will often be overturned or ignored if people agree or can't be bothered. Mike has admitted, in the 2005 version of the rules, that past versions of the game were deliberately written to be rules-heavy - to the point that it would be impossible to play. That's... not exactly great, in my opinion! Just write rules people wanna use! Also the game insists on spelling everything as if it's Mortal Kombat. Then there's a big legal block and a "Special Tanks" section, which is a thanks section with pictures of tanks in it. Really cool Lego tanks. It's worth going through just to look at those. There's also this which I found kind of amusing: Special Tanks posted:BrikWars' dice fetishism was greatly inspired by Lumpley Games' Mechaton (2006), later reworked as Mobile Frame Zero 001: Rapid Attack (2012) by Joshua A.C. Newman at the glyphpress. The Mobile Frame Zero community is morally and ethically superior to the BrikWars community, and their periodic callouts over the years when our satire misses the mark (or worse, hits marks it shouldn't have been aiming at in the first place) have been a source of unending mortification. They rightly approve of nothing we do here. This bodes well for future entries. Next Time: The Core Game aka "how many dice, exactly?"
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Oct 1, 2021 22:57
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Please stop trying to calculate my age based on a throwaway line in my review, you weirdos. Metagaming turns deadly as two heroes settle their differences in Nanobrikwars. Brikwars 2020 Part 2 - Core Rules So how do you manage to get your minifigs to brutally murder each other? With the core rules, of course! This leg of the review will cover, in brief, most of the first book of the Ragnablok edition rules. This is designed to get you up and running with the game. I'll be real - I've had to walk away from the screen and come back a few times whilst writing this. This first book presents some of BrikWars' best features but also its biggest flaws. I don't want to be too harsh on this game. It's in no way as awful as some of the things we've reviewed in this thread and it's clearly more functional as a game. The many many games played on the official forums are testament to that. But this game is deeply flawed, and its cleverest parts are not brought to the front. I'm going to do my best to point out where and when this game is good, and be honest about its failings.  Mike's art owns. Chapter 1 is an overview of the gameplay. Along with the list of stuff you’d need (dice, minifigs, etc), it also defines some of the abstract numbers, goes over setup and objectives and turn taking. The lowdown is:
A couple of extra things to note here - “victory” is an abstract and sides tend not to win so much as do more damage. “Rocks fall and everyone dies” is a valid way to end a game and has, in fact, been the way a substantial number of games have ended. There’s also a note that certain attributes are color coded - movement in green, damage in red, actions in yellow, and defenses in blue. We’ll get to those in a sec! The first real mechanical rule of note happens here - a roll of 1 is a Critical Failure and always fails, and a roll of the maximum on a die adds an additional d6 to the roll. Critical Failures can be used as an opportunity for slapstick if you want. Then we get into a section called Proper Observance of Rules, where Mike goes off on one. Mike, going off on one posted:Rules are for the small-minded and weak. Let some first-graders loose with a collection of bricks and watch the way they play. All the drama, death, and explosions anyone could want, and they won't have to crack open a rulebook even once. If you manage to get through this, you get the three most important rules of the game:
Anyway, let's loop back around. You may be wondering a) how do you use your turns and b) what on earth the color coding of dice earlier relates to. Well, let’s introduce our main actor - the mighty Minifig!  As you can see from this handy reference card, a Minifig has a movement and an armor stat, and an action die. Those first two are self-explanatory. The Action rating is part of a minifig’s aptitude - in this case, they roll a six-sided die to do things. It’s intrinsic to them, and different levels of specialist and hero roll bigger or smaller dice. I actually like this - it can get pretty swingy but that seems to be the nature of BrikWars anyway, and it easily defines how capable a unit is at tasks. Thankfully, this card also references the most basic way actions, movement and damage work, so I don’t have to reference those again in this review! Notably, in the chapter that defines a minifig, it also gives very basic versions of moving and the attack action, which is the action people actually care about. This also showcases how weapons work - they have a Use rating that the minifig needs to match or beat on their action die, and then they have a range and a damage die they roll. These are pretty functional and are the core of attacking, so it’s kind of nice that you theoretically could just play the game with the first two chapters of this book, but those basic rules should probably be in the actual section that governs them. Also, a note on army building here - you field equal amounts of minifigs, with “horses” counting as minifigs, and equal amounts of Heroes. We’ll get to Heroes and Horses next time. I think that the basic stats of a Minifig being simple is a good aspect of this game. There's no overhead or remembering what stats or effects are unique to a minifig. They are pretty much entirely defined by what weapons and items they are holding. This distinction becomes weaker when we get into the various specialists, but for the most part, this holds.  Speaking of weapons, Chapter 3 is just a huge list of weapons and armor. I think the game does a good job of condensing the many varied different plastic accessories into a broad list of weapons and armor, but it's difficult to say anything interesting about it. Melee weapons use the minifig’s action die for their damage and range weapons have a fixed damage die, to represent the difference between putting some effort into a swing and a bullet. Explosives do d10 damage (the first d10 in the game!) and an inch of knockback to whatever they hit. Armor and shields grants layers of Deflection, which subtract damage dice from the incoming attack. A note here - when attacking with a melee weapon, you’re actually hitting with the actual physical part of the tiny plastic sword that represents the blade. This means, when we get to the melee combat rules, it's possible to duck inside the reach of your foe and stab him. Also, you can’t hit with bare hands, only shove or grab. Minifigs are only worth what they’re holding! Chapter 4 describes the Player Turn. And look. This is kind of where Brikwars breaks down. Because there’s a LOT of rules. When we just get to how movement works, we are IMMEDIATELY met with...  BrikWars' main failing, to me, is that it hasn't considered which of its many rules it wants to keep, and what it wants you to ignore. It's incredibly simulationist due to its reliance on the physical nature of the medium (posable and buildable toys), which means it is a lot fiddlier, when played as written, than it has any right to be. Of course, the game expects you to ignore anything you don't like, but at that point, why even write the rule? I’m not going to go over every single possible action here. There’s too many, and I would be typing “there’s a table” over and over. I don’t have the patience. So here’s a summary - during their turn, each minifig can move up to 5”, and they get one action die to spend on actions. Actions have ratings like an rpg and there’s a table of difficulties like we’re playing D&D, but for the most part you won't reference this because attacks are the main way to do things. If a minifig rolls their maximum on their Action Die, they don’t do critical successes like damage, but can add 1d6 to any of the action’s associated stats (damage, range, sprint distance). If a minifig hasn’t spent their action on their turn, they can use it to react to events they can see (as in, measuring from the actual eyes of the minifig). If they can reasonably react to it in time, they can roll their action die to do an action in response or “bail” a number of inches to get out of the way. Aside from the crazy detail, this is basically... every wargame ever? It's very hard to summon enthusiasm for this engine. It just works. There's no real flair here, though I appreciate that keeping it simple when dealing with the humble minifig is probably for the best.  Now we hit combat! The fun bit! That minifig card above describes attacks and what happens when they take damage, so I'm not repeating it here. All seems well and good, huh? Well, for ranged weapons, it sure is. Rooty tooty etc etc. But for melee weapons, it’s a different story. Oh, at this point, the game pulls out dice modifiers for how much of the target you can see, or are aiming at. I'd drop these entirely. However, I'd keep combined attacks, where you have a group of minifigs attack at once and combine their damage results. A bunch of skeletons with spears can overwhelm a tank! So if minifigs get up close and start hitting each other, they leave the basic cycle of the turn and enter close combat. Their movement drops to 1 inch, and they trade blows with whoever has the active turn deciding the flow of combat. They can strike, shove, grab or try and disengage by just moving their full speed (which earns their foe a free attack on them). In response, an opponent can try and parry - they need a shield to parry attacks, but can parry grabs and shoves with their hands or any object. This basically turns into a weird simulationist duelling mechanic where minifigs with spears or long weapons have to dance around to keep minifigs with knives or shortswords within reach. This does seem kinda fun. Simulating that kind of duelling dance would be interesting to see in a tabletop wargame. I think it's a little much for every single instance of close combat, but depending on what your minifigs are armed with and how many you field, this may or may not be a problem. Additionally, the need to have a shield to parry deadly attacks does prevent things becoming too bogged down. Also, there are rules for charging where if a minifig moves four inches or more directly towards a target, they get a Momentum die, or a MOM, to add to damage or anything they think would benefit from the momentum. The rules writing then contorts itself to make as many references to “rolling your mom” or a minifig's mom as possible. All in all, the rules are… serviceable, in their basic form, but they could do with trimming. I don't think serving up a bevy of overcomplications and tables to ignore is good rules writing, but so far, the idea of simple stats and being defined by weapons works well with minifigures and how Lego physically works. Reviewing this has sort of put me off buying a few minifigs and trying it myself, which I was hoping to do for the review - but I think the issue is that BrikWars' best feature isn't showcased in this first book, and you're left with a very basic wargame to start with. I don't hate it, but we're not setting the world in fire here. Next time: Heroes and Horses, or “The game gets whacky!” The Deleter fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 09:25
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Oh poo poo, Tek levels! What a wild concept. Getting rid of that was a good move because it enables pirates and knights to hang with spacemen like they should do. That version also had different spacemen factions in, Iike the yellow guys getting cheap hoverboards and red guys getting giant robots. I was reconsidering doing the demo game for the Brikwars review and went looking for good ways to buy a handful of minifigs to fight with. And, uh, wow, Lego really doesn't want to give you minifigs. You can buy a replica of the café from Friends, or a tiny Tokyo skyline, but woe betide you if you want a guy with a sword without him coming with some massive construction for £90 or a tiny pile of useless accessories. It also barely tolerates you getting parts for Mobile Frame Zero but at least Pick A Brick exists. At this rate, I'm gonna bastardise some Lego City stuff and make a firefighter crew that sets fires. That'll be the gimmick. Or just Mad Max the poo poo out of it.
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Oct 3, 2021 23:41
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The Skeep posted:Now I'm imaging a brikwars tournament using MTG sealed draft rules and those $6 minifig blind bags. I know they basically sell those in supermarkets now so I might try this lol
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Oct 4, 2021 20:53
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Brikwars 2020 Part 3 – Heroes and Horses Bored of making regular minifigs slaughter each other? Want to spice things up a bit? Thankfully, the core rules allow for some additional units with different capabilities. Let’s go over Heroes and Horses! Heroes The Hero is defined as a minifig who’s better than everyone else not because of competence or anything inherent, but because they have sick armor and a cool cape. In the world of BrikWars, this is everything.  A Hero is more complicated than a minifig. Thankfully, the card above summarizes it – they have a better action die, move faster, and roll 2d6 for armor. Remember when I said minifigs that roll their maximum on an action can add an extra d6 to any related statistic? In reality, this is fixed on a roll of 6 or more, meaning Heroes have a 50% chance to get, say, an extra damage dice in close combat. They are blenders. The main thing worth unpacking here is the Heroic Ego speciality. This gives a Hero the ability to do a Heroic Feat according to a Cliché you give them. If your Hero is a shirtless brawny soldier, he should be doing things Arnie does. If they are a cool gunslinger or a secret agent, they should be doing stuff related to that. Once a turn, a Hero can declare they will do a Feat, and then roll a die. An opponent that would like the feat to fail rolls their own die. If the Hero ties or beats the opponent, they do the thing – otherwise, they suffer a Homer Simpson-esque consequence. Notably, the rules don’t say what happens if nobody wants to oppose. This is probably just an order of operations failure, and if nobody opposes then the Hero gets to do his Feat, and nobody should have to roll. This is the kind of rule that BrikWars needs to make the basic game more attractive, and to lean into the more rules-light mayhem that it’s claiming to promote. Making your hero do dumb stuff and seeing if it succeeds or fails is absolutely the kind of thing meant to generate laughs at the table – that, combined with their Redshirt ability and the possibility of rolling Snake Eyes on an armor roll, is a good way to create a center of weird events that you can enjoy without getting too invested in them. The nerd in me would like to turn that armor rating into a 7 and have less rolls in the game, but a) that might make them too tough with the Redshirt rule, and b) that’s kind of not the point. Additionally, if a piece of armor or a weapon is sufficiently cool, you can make it a Heroic Artifakt, which grants its wielder a Heroic Feat according to what it is. One of my favourite lines: Heroic Artifakts posted:“A Heroic Artifakt is limited to Feats that satisfy its Cliché, similar to that of a regular Hero, but Artifakt Clichés tend to be tautologies. Excalibur's Cliché, for example, is that it's Excalibur.” Horses You remember those one-piece horse figures that you could put a saddle or barding on? They have rules too!  Technically, in BrikWars, any single-seat vehicle that is roughly the size of a horse is a Horse. Motorbikes, dragons, buggies, chicken-legged walkers – these all make good Horses. Notably, Horses are faster even than Heroes, making them excellent transportation. However, Horses aren’t bright. If your Horse is a living creature and one of your minifigs isn’t around to attend it, one of your enemies controls it instead. This can result in the Horse turning on their masters! As an aside, “half-mind” isn’t a great name for that rule! I don’t like it very much! Additionally, a Horse can take an extra hit compared to a minifig (although being wounded makes its stats suffer). It moves faster and thus gains more momentum on charges, can be given armor, and is better at grabbing and shoving. Riding a Horse is a complicated affair. Unless your minifig is a Rider (which we’ll get to), a minifig must use his hands and his Action to control the horse. Both hands mean he has full control and can use any weapons affixed to it (like if the Horse is a sick attack bike). One hand means he can’t use its action but can attack with weapons or use objects in his other hand. No hands mean he can only move the horse in straight lines but can make it Sprint and use his hands freely. This is… a bit much. I would basically make this a binary check of if a minifig wanted to control the horse or not, and this check may as well not exist if you’re relying on weapons mounted on a bike or similar. Thankfully you can just ignore all of this.  The Rider is our second specialist. He’s the exact same as a regular minifig, except he doesn’t make any of these checks and can be treated as a single creature with the horse, including making combined attacks with them. There’s basically no reason not to do this so you can ignore the dumb riding control rules, since in the core rules a Rider is still worth 1 minifig. The next section is a very long explanation of how combat on horseback works. Combat from atop a horse works the exact same, but you can target a horse or rider separately and get a bonus on action rolls for targeting a horse. Minifigs can be knocked off horses, and if they were charging or fall at least four inches they take damage. There are very in-depth rules for jousting, which basically work like a weird mix of charging and reactions. Horses can do 1 point of damage by trampling on people, which doesn’t kill a minifig normally but might add up during a charge (e.g., if a minifig took 4 damage from a charge attack and the horse has movement left). I think this is a thing where you keep these rules handy and then look them up whenever the situation comes up, because there’s no way I’m remembering any of these. So, the Core Rules. This is the engine BrikWars 2020 runs on. And it’s… okay. Mostly. It’s far too fiddly and detailed in places for its own good and it has a very bad sense of humor. But the simplicity of the stats, the addition of Heroes and some of the more useful tables and explanations do a lot for me. It’s definitely not as wild or reactive as Mobile Frame Zero can be, but going for the intuitive nature of a minifig holding a sword makes sense. The presentation of the rules is bright, colorful and sometimes a bit all over the place. But I’ve been keeping something from you. This might be how turns and actions and damage works, but its not the real SOUL of BrikWars. Where do these stats come from? How does a Horse get more health? Is it all just arbitrary? The answers will be answered in the next book, although the answer for the last one is “yeah, sometimes it is”. Next Time: Brikwars is genius, actually? The Deleter fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Oct 5, 2021 |
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Oct 5, 2021 11:34
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 Seriously, the things people make for this game own. Photo by Kenny Bush. BrikWars 2020 Part 4: Don’t you MOC me! We’re getting into the second book now. This might go faster than the first book, because a lot of the core mechanics of how things work is front-loaded, whereas in the previous book everything was more spread out. You can more easily flick through book 2 and cherry-pick bits you need to use. Future Del Here: This is a lie, there's so loving much. But what is book 2 about? It’s about leveraging the power of the medium you’re working in to build custom units. War machines, mighty beasts, towering castles, or if you brought a Lego City coffee shop or something – now is the time to finally give them some stats and blow them up. And things are going to get maybe a little clever? I think it is, anyway. The book opens on another chapter talking about the game ethos. This isn’t as 2000’s edgy as the first ones we read – this is more focused on why you should be creative. Namely, that it makes awesome pictures, contributes to shared settings, and makes for funny stories. In short, it contributes to a force that BrikWars calls “Ossum”, which is both a real word and presumably the mangled way BrikWars minifigs pronounce “awesome”. I laughed at this, don't judge me posted:But in the larger sense, everything is Ossum. Then we get to an overview of how MOC combat works. The level of combat in the Core Rules could work for potentially any figure, but here we can plug in any brick creation we like. Theoretically this could also just be used for bigger models and toys as well, but that’s less fun. The game then reassures us that: quote:The easiest way to calculate a creation's core attributes is not to bother. And then it gives us a table that’s actually useful. Essentially, you first need to figure out the thing’s size in inches, and then using the table, you can quickly come up with the stats you need to get the model on the table and running. For example, a plane that’s about 3 inches long has d6 armor and moves 15” in a turn. (We’ll get to what Power is shortly). Now, how long is a minifig? An inch, would you say, from head to toe? What’s the default stats of a Size 1 Creature? Bingo. This is the core of how the engine works. This is finally here. Everything* in the game is created from these rules. This is where the magic happens, and it’s not overly complicated and can work for a lot of different toys – not just brick creations, but action figures and trucks and such! This, to me, is one of the great things about BrikWars. Not only can this accommodate any creation or toy, but the rules just give you what you need to play first before opening the engine and letting you tinker with it. *Well, almost everything. The Hero obviously doesn’t fit in this engine, but I can forgive it since in default games there’s only one of each and they’re meant to be weird and powerful. Let’s get away from gushing and into detail. This is going to summarize everything in this book, so we’re not going over each chapter in excruciating detail. Future Del Again: We actually fall short here, since there's still Squad Combat and field hazards, and I also wanna leave the miscellany in the Creatures section for next time since this is getting too long.  Size Matters, or, Matters About Size The core of any Creation is its Size. Size is measured along the longest part of the creation’s central structure (from skull to the bottom of a spine on a creature). It defines how many hits it can take (equal to its Size) and defines how many Enhancements it gets (also equal to its Size). By default, a creation has 1d6 armor and doesn’t move, and has 1d6 for an action die if it can do anything (the same as a minifig). Each Enhancement allows you to buy additional advantages:
You can also claim back Enhancements by adding Impairments from the following:
Let’s go over some of these real quick. Power is a limitation on how BIG your weapons can be. Larger weapons are also measured by their length, and derive their stats from that. The Power rating limits the total size of weapons that can be used in a turn. Unit costs are now measured in unit inches, which means if you have a 2” long speeder bike, that’s worth 2 inches. Heroes are worth 2 inches, by the way. It’s worth noting that structures only have enhancements at Size 1, 3 and 5. Presumably this stops everybody building death fortresses that people can’t break into, or fussing about with what is probably going to be scenery most of the time. So far, so good. Flexible, not too detailed, and essentially slots into the existing rules. Okay, now we need to go over the Half-Mind thing, but first we need to talk about Dice. BrikWars associates each active unit and certain kinds of effect with a die, depending on their strength. Rolling max on the Dice is a critical, and 6 or more is Over The Top. Regular minifgs have a D6 (six sides), specialists have a d8, heroes have a d10. Certain supernatural characters and effects use a d12. There’s a dumb gag where the d20 isn’t used by anyone except their Cthulhu knockoff, further rooting the dire humor of this game in the mid-2000's.  The four-sided dice, the d4, is associated with mindlessness and incompetence. It’s used for fire and other destructive forces of nature, and for any kinds of creature that are uniquely incompetent. The types of Half-Mind are:
When a creation takes damage, its Effective Size decreases by 1". Its Power and Momentum decrease proportionally, and if it would roll more dice in armor than its size that gets reduced too. This doesn't mean the creation gets smaller, only that it gets weaker. If the creation moves, its movement isn't affected, although you can target propulsion systems and blow them off to reduce their speed or force a crash. You can also specifically target small connection points to try and disassemble something, turning it into two separate "creations" that inherit the total damage taken (so small chunks can explode off entirely). I suppose it's worth noting at this point that Momentum, as you've guesses, scales with the Size of the creation, so a size 3 creation moving 15" generates 3d6 momentum. I couldn't find an organic way to bring that up. We're also introduced to the Mechanik:  The Mechanik is another specialist, and he has a weird but fun ability where he can built hasty constructions and repair damage on creations whilst your opponents are taking their turn. I like this, because a) it's Lego, duh, b) it gives you something to do whilst waiting for your turn and c) it makes your opponents hurry up. Weirdly, he has to build Patches when repairing, which have to be 1" bigger than the Effective Size of whatever he's repairing, so he can't just slap on any missing bricks that have been blown off - you have to jury-rig a little patch or band-aid or whatever. There's also a lot of weird sub-rules in here now. We get more suggestions for bad things happening, Overkill rules for large projectiles or attacks that can plough through multiple targets (although this is suggested as an optional rule rather than a must include), and we also get rules for weapons with firing arcs. This is done by holding your hand out, palm flat and fingers outstretched, and using the gap between your fingers as the arc. It's kinda cute. Presumably most of these weapons are supposed to be attached to creations of some kind, but there's no reason you can't make a little 2" flamethrower for a minifig to hold! A similarly kinetic rule is Thrust, where you can put thrusters on a vehicle or subject something and then.... quote:Fortunately, a BrikWars player's instinctive response to Thrust vector calculations turns out to be the correct one: Thrust is handled by giving it the finger. The player places a fingertip at the point of Thrust (either an active Thruster or a point of impact, usually), and pushes the object the appropriate number of inches in the appropriate direction. The model on the table will move and rotate appropriately on its own without any need for further calculation. (Wheeled models may need to be stopped manually at the end of each Thrust to keep them from rolling away forever.) Sigh. We're also introduced to Pilots and Gunners, who are just specialists but for piloting and firing guns. Pilots can use their d8 to attempt stunts and get subject to thrust if they fall short. Gunners use their d8 when firing weapons and can add +1 when helping another minifig fire a big weapon. The game suggests every vehicle gets a free Pilot, every Horse a free Rider, and every mounted weapon a free Gunner, and there's basically no reason not to, so sure.  You may notice that once again, I'm kind of glossing over a lot. I don't think a hugely detailed breakdown of everything is good for a review. It might be interesting to some, but I have to find things to say about them, and a lot of the nitty gritty that's printed here is basically "here's how the creations obey the same core rules as minifigs but more so". I don't think this is BAD necessarily, I just don't find it interesting to talk about and I don't want to copypaste the entire rulebook in here but with different language. I'm also nearing around 2k words on this thing. I think the core creation rules are clever in how universal they are, so they achieve their purpose. That said, BrikWar's attitude of flinging endless amounts of rules at you and then expecting you to give up in frustration is not good. If you don't believe large amount of detailed rules should be in your game, stop putting them in your game! A lot of the rules are just explaining edge cases and how things in the core rules scale up, which can probably be done much faster than how it's currently written. If you just treated creations as really big minifigs and kept in mind how things scaled with Size, then you'd basically have 90% of this book down pat. Next time: In which we're still not over Jar Jar, and also we talk about BASEPLATES The Deleter fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 14:01
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Speaking of overdue reviews, BrikWars part 5 is in the works. There's not too much left of Book 2, and I might digress and address some of the mechanical things and what I'd change. It's been delayed due to a few lovely weeks, but I'm getting in a bit of a better place to continue.
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Nov 3, 2021 17:27
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BrikWars 2020 Part 5 - Creatures, Squads and the Things that Kill Them I'm back from the dead and ready to talk about more BrikWars! We need to polish off creatures, and then we can end with Squads and Field Hazards. Creature Uncomforts (that's not a word probably) The Creatures chapter kind of doesn't go over anything we couldn't already figure out. It tells us about Minds again, and gives us a handy chart of Action Dice probabilities. It also gives a list of things a creature can do depending on if it has horns or arms or teeth or whatnot. It also says you can staple a second Mind onto a creature, giving it a second action dice. That's fun! You have to upgrade each mind separately though.  We also cover the Medik. Bringing creatures back to life is probably against the spirit of BrikWars. But the Medik's healing is random, with their patient having to have limbs amputated based on the roll (and a crit failure resulting in decapitation, which is death for most minifigs). There's also a table there for what amputations do to a creature. Mediks can also stick bandages on wounded creatures to recover size damage. Then we get a big list of creatures that one could field. These cover a wide range of stuff. There's Vermin, which are the little one piece creatures like the spiders and bats. They roll a d4 on everything and any amount of damage kills them. There's a handy table for any general kind of animal you might need that you can pull the stats from, which is pretty neat! And then we get to... Okay, look. The game was made in the mid 2000's. This, in nerd culture, was the age where the Star Wars prequels were committing the crime of being bad movies based on a property nerds had instead of having a personality. So in this list of premade "monsters", we have the Jaw-Jaw, a race of "Dungans" that eat poo poo. They have a move where they can regenerate limbs from eating poo poo. Jaw-Jaws have been around since the early days of Brikwars alongside Dimmies (an analogue of the Timmy minifig from the Time Cruisers sets - I'm not sure what thoughtcrime he's supposed to have committed). But the poo poo-eating ability is new. I don't have anything clever or insightful to say here. It kind of speaks for itself. I'd have linked an image but the image is of a Jaw-Jaw menacing a poo poo-splattered minifig and I don't want to. Also Brikthulhu is here but he has no stats because lol Cthulhu. Real wet fart for a chapter ending, huh?  Image by Azmi Timur No Fig Left Behind So what if you have a poo poo-ton of minifigs? What if you want to reenact Helm's Deep in Lego, but don't want to bother tracking every single soldier at once? Then my friends, Squad Combat is for you. To make Squads, you grab all the minifigs you want in a squad and stick them on a baseplate. The game recommends a 4 by 4 stud area for each minifig and a 4 by 8 area per horse, so a squad of 5 Deadly Spacemen would fit on 8 by 12 plate. Or a long conga-line. I don't know what you want to do. Maneuvering squads depends on who their slowest member is, and size bonuses, momentum and other size-derived stats depends on their biggest member. They can't end their movement in places where the baseplate can't fit, but they can take movement through any small gaps the squad members can fit through. Their big advantage is that it's much easier for them to take Combined Actions, where they all roll their dice in a big bucket together. Additionally, members can take individual actions or step off the baseplate if they need to. Damage done to a Squad is allocated by their controlling player, obeying all normal targeting rules, unless it's a single shot or comes from a specific location like an explosion.  This Combined Action becomes deadly if accompanied by an Officer. Whilst an Officer is an incompetent piece of poo poo, they have the terrifying ability to use their action to Coordinate the members of the squad they are in. This bump up their action die to a d8 maximum if they are doing the same thing. This means if the five Deadly Spacemen earlier are with an Officer, and they shoot at a target, they are rolling 5d8s and can potentially add a ton of bonus damage dice to their fusillade. Additionally, the Officer is carried along with the Squad if they Coordinate a sprint. There is NO REASON TO NEVER TAKE AN OFFICER if you're taking squads. That ability is bugnuts. Squad close combat is a little more involved than normal. If you stay back and out of the way, poking with spears, that's a skirmish, and only the attacking mini-figs roll. Anybody in the rear gets to stand there and do nothing. If the baseplate contacts the target, however, then a Full Engagement begins. There, every squad member gets a crack at the foe regardless of where they are on the baseplate. But they can't attack any other target unless they disengage, and ranged attacks from outside can hit anybody involved. There's not much else to go over here, except for a weird combat priority thing that wasn't present before. Grabs and Shoves resolve before any real attacks - with Grabs pulling people to the closest edge of the baseplate - allowing you to pick on any grabbed or prone minifigs. The thing that stands out to me is that, whilst Squads make the movement of many minifgures less of a chore, they don't abstract any of the interactions. The minifig is still the basic object of interaction, and putting them in a Squad doesn't abstract that away. You're still going to be throwing a bunch of dice around and making saves/etc at a minifig level. You've kind of turned the game into a much simpler Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I'm gonna save my thoughts on how to abstract some of this in a summary at the end of the review. This Mine is Mine Chapter F defines a way to do field hazards. Essentially, it's in two parts - a Field, which is of a certain size, and then Hazard dice, which represents the type and effect of the hazard. Everybody knows where Hazards are - they are open information, which is nice. Hazard options are:
There's a section on traps but it's nothing.  Then we end on the Scout, a specialist that can roll a d8 when interacting with Field Hazards and Traps, never sets off Concealed Hazards, and can mark targets. They seem like they'd be kinda cool to play with when playing with Field Hazards, and not really a big deal otherwise. In fact, their ability to know where anything in their field of view is might be terribly annoying if you've made some cool stealth minifigs. Book 2 really opens up the underlying engine and shows how everything works. That's the part I like the most - how universally and easily it covers every possible creation one could make. However, like Book 1, it's bogged down by math, by repeating ideas except "this is bigger so it gets more", and by deciding to emulate things in as much detail as possible rather than abstracting things away. Again, if you don't want people to get bogged down in rules, why write so many rules? Just skip the intermediate step! Anyway, that's BrikWars. Mostly. There'll be a brief intermission where I do the thing my stupid brain does and attempt to "fix" the problems, because I have Amateur Game Designer Syndrome, and then we'll go over the Campaign system. Next Time - like Lego, we can take it apart and build it different. The Deleter fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Nov 5, 2021 |
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Nov 4, 2021 17:46
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I also glossed over the fact that the Monsters section has an entry for "furfigs", which are any minifigs with animal heads.
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Nov 4, 2021 20:08
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:I'm kind of enamoured of this table. Sometimes, you try to dig a bullet out of someone's leg and end up removing their head. That's just a fact of medicine. It's one I would definitely keep. How do you expect minfigis to do precise surgery with those clip hands? They're doing their best!
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Nov 5, 2021 10:51
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What the description is missing is Khorne's house-sized plasma tv which he flicks between different fights going on and the occasional Blood Bowl match whilst just going 
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Nov 11, 2021 22:23
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Hey. I was supposed to keep doing the BrikWars F&F! But then my house's meter box caught fire so I've had no power and been in various accommodations for a while. So, naturally there's been a delay.  I will do my best to get a part 6 up soon as I've been ruminating on some things with it, and trying to cajole these into a coherent thesis about a game that's not actually terribly notable is difficult even at the best of times.
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Dec 7, 2021 16:49
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Brikwars 2020 Part 6 – In Which I Pull This Thing Apart Like The Lego It Loves So Much Okay, Brikwars. I guess this is a retrospective, since we’ve essentially covered everything we need to play the game and I’ve always found campaign systems to be superfluous in my enjoyment of things. This means we’re basically going over the entire thing and making a quick list of what I like and what I’d change. In true internet fashion, we can break this down into a Numbered List. 1. A unit’s base stats are very simple. There are some extra numbers that churn behind the scenes, but for the most part there’s not a lot to remember when it comes to how a unit works. 2. Likewise, weapons don’t have a ton of stats to remember and they’ve done a decent job condensing the possible variants into a simple list. 3. The system for statting up creations is quick and flexible. 4. The more detailed melee system for duels could potentially be interesting, although it bogs down combat if applied to every minifig. 5. Some of the randomness helps the tone of the game – the Medik’s Ker-triage table and the mechanics of Hero feats are the standouts. The big things dragging it down are: 1. Way too much detail in places. Systems like managing how to get fire to spread, momentum calculations, exacting tables for movement penalties and accuracy penalties… it’s nuts. 2. The above is made worse by a very busy layout full of pictures from battle reports. I don’t talk about layout much, but aside from the general outline of the rules I think reading this rulebook is tricky, especially compared to the 2005 version. 3. The game assigns different levels of dice for different competencies but doesn’t play with them very much. Minifigs don’t roll anything but a d6, for example. 4. Certain things that should enable more abstraction… don’t. Squads come to mind. 5. A very puerile sense of humor that hasn’t escaped the 2000’s or aged particularly well. I think some of the issues with complexity are genuine over-complication, and some are just an issue of presentation. Let’s look at the movement impediments table. If it went from this: And we shrunk it down to be like this:
What the game needs is an editor. Somebody needs to put a stop to the idea of picking and choosing rules as an excuse to write reams of tedium. Someone to pick out all the terrible jokes about Jar Jar Binks and put a big red line through them. Maybe the Mobile Frame Zero guys ought to come over and do some more shaming. The concept of “bog down your game with rules to force people to make a cogent game out of them” is so backwards. Wouldn’t it be better to have a good core and THEN allow people to choose additional detail? That said, I think there are some ways I would edit BrikWars if I had a chance to do so. Here’s what I’d do:
Agree? Disagree? Whatever you think I hope you've enjoyed the review so far. I'm going to review the campaign system next simply because it's kinda funny in it's premise, and also because there is a section on magic that I think might be 100% incomprehensible. Next time: Campaigns!
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Dec 15, 2021 14:28
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 BrikWars 2021 Part 7 – Heroic Escapades BrikWars’ campaign system is called Heroic Escapades, and the majority of this is contained in Book 3. This is the smallest of the three books by far, and two of the five chapters here are listed as optional rules. This is for the best, since one of those chapters is absolute nonsense. But let’s wait for that. A Heroic Escapade is focused on Heroes and their accompanying armies. It’s themed as the heroes conning their factions into giving them an army and budget to go grab some shiny loot, with the advancement of any strategic goals as a happy accident. In most respects, some concepts will be familiar to those who play wargames, but some of the differences are worth pointing out. Heroes are vital to escapades – each escapade is a battle instigated by a Hero going to grab some loot! Each player involved in the campaign takes turns to have their Hero(es) instigate an escapade, although the rules leave the precise order of this up to the players. Additionally, every force must be led by one or more Heroes, and Players can spend from their Budget to revive or recruit new Heroes if they must. Each Hero that participates gains levels of Irresponsibility, which determine the maximum size of any unit they bring into battle and how fancy the loot they target can be. A starting Hero at Irresponsibility 1 can basically only bring minifigs and horses along, but a Hero at Irresponsibility 10 can bring elaborate vehicles and planes with them! But what’s the Budget? Simply put, it’s the amount of Unit Inches of stuff a Hero can bring into his army before his overseers cotton on and put a stop to it. The goal of a campaign is to make the other players run out of budget before you do! This is obviously accomplished by tiny plastic murder. There’s a handy sidebar that helps you set a budget – how big do you want the battles to be, times by the number of fights you want to get in. An army size of twelve unit inches, times by five battles, is a budget of 60 unit inches. The Budget is used to replenish and upgrade units between Escapades, and players shouldn’t anticipate losing their whole army each fight “unless they’re playing extremely correctly”. Players can't scrap units to get inches back. Once Budget is spent, it's spent. This is a fun twist on the usual campaign structure. Instead of carefully managing and upgrading a developing army, like Warhammer 40,000’s Crusade system, you’re focused on doing as much damage as possible to the enemy. I haven't played any campaign systems in wargames personally, so if there's any flaws in how this works, I can't see them. My initial thought is that if one player gets unlucky and is wiped repeatedly, they will have to rebuild an army up to the allowance, revive their heroes, and miss out on upgrades or loot, but since the battle sizes are fixed for everyone they won't be so disadvantaged on a per-battle basis.  Photo: Dienekes22 Each Escapade in a campaign is centered around a piece of Loot, an item, object or person of interest to the factions involved. The piece of Loot must be:
There's a lot of extra rules about staging battles, which are boring and I'm not reading them. The most entertaining part is the rules for Final Battles - if a Hero's Irresponsibility is greater than an enemy faction's remaning Budget, they can attempt to wipe out their foes in a final fight. If the target agrees, any of their unspent Budget (that they don't use to summon reinforcements for this fight) becomes additional Loot, and all of the deployment rules are thrown out of the window to let the players just make up something awesome. A targeted player who wants to use this fight to bow out of the campaign can get the benefits of Fighting a Losing Battle - spendable Bennies (extra dice, if you recall) for either getting their own units killed, killing enemy units, or escaping from a table edge. Whilst I'm not 100% on the efficacy of this set-up, I think more campaigns should have rules for bowing out like this. If a player is suffering from a bad streak of luck, they should have the option to go out in a blaze of glory, or attempt some kind of suicide run to get back in the game. Something like Necromunda would definitely benefit from this kind of release valve - letting players choose to end their story on a high note and bow out of the campaign would reduce the bad feelings caused by death spirals. It's not a fix for the death spiral itself, but it would be a good band-aid. I don't have any strong thoughts on the Campaign play. It's the least interesting form of wargaming to me - I've heard too many horror stories of campaign mechanics plagued with snowballing issues and death spirals and needing D&D-style game masters. The only two things I've even thought about playing in are Age of Sigmar's Path to Glory, and this. The structure of this isn't balanced, but it's an acknowledgement that these campaigns should have a time limit and should last a certain amount of games. Sorry I don't have a bigger declarative statement about it! Next Time - Way Too Much Extra Content The Deleter fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 17:04
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One of the big pitfalls I see with Sentai/Kamen Rider styled rpgs is that they get too granular with weapon stats and form changes and things. In the shows it's all a) to sell toys, and b) to do stuntwork in suits the stunt actors can barely see out of. Any advancement or new toy usually accompanies some form of character growth (which can get weird when the protagonist vows to stop his evil dad with the power of Fighting Macaw or whatever). It's all fairly light and nerds tend to get too deep into power rankings. I'd run the fights in Panic at the Dojo and then figure out some system by which you unlock Fighting Macaw, but there's probably a better way to do it. This is only tangentially related to how the Power Rangers RPG is a very last 5e heartbreaker that doesn't care to emulate anything about the show.
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Jan 21, 2022 14:24
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Grunt/mook rules in RPGs are absolutely based on putties and other Sentai shows and the fact that the official power rangers RPG doesn't do this is wild.
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Jan 22, 2022 23:55
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BrikWars Part 8 - Miscellany and Wrapup I don't particularly want to write a lot about these last two sections - they're optional. But I'd feel bad for leaving this review unfinished. Guess we're going out with a whimper here. Chapter S covers Specialists. Rather, it adds a TON of extra Specialists - alongside things like the Medik or the Scout, they have rules concerning how to handle Civilians (they get a "turn" of their own at the end of the round where players take turns moving them around). A lot of this is enforced by... sigh. CAPITALISM - where a minifig's role is defined by their Career Assignment Piece (CAP). Which is just what they are holding. If they start the game with a syringe, they're a Medik, regardless of what else they grab during the battle. There's some jokes about libertarianism. I don't even know posted:The earliest CAPs were handed down from the Protofig forebears of the 1,977th Rekonstruktion: flat-topped POLICE hats, ten-gallon COWBOY hats, and pigtailed GIRL hair, corresponding to the three Protofig genders of sir, dude, and ma'am. I kind of don't want to do any more on this - there's too much here to really cover in an interesting way. There's specialists that can model phalanxes and riot police, specialties for snipers, specialties for cannon fodder for if you want to make endlessly kill-able mooks but don't actually want to make the game simpler to run... Basically anything you can think of. Look, I'm not Mors Rattus, I'm not good at rewording information to be more interesting. I can only tell you my feelings on what I'm reading, and my feeling is that this is loving boring. Gotta Roll Em All Chapter D is about the dice. More specifically, it's about purchasing magic abilities for your minifigs. We finally have a good mechanic here - each size of Supernatural die has a themed element and can be used to summon its own kind of "Diemon", a little demon. When I initially read this section, I couldn't parse any of this - and that's because it's written in a weird way where it explains what the magic dice do first, and then how to get a minifg to use these dice. SO I'm going to rewrite it in a way my brain can parse and you can tell me if it's better or worse. I think this is a Pokemon joke? posted:If your parents are worried about Diemonic influence, tell them it's actually pronounced Di-é-mon. Anyway, to make your minifig do magic, you need to purchase Supernatural Dice for them to use. Magic using minifigs need a Supernatural Cliche, working in the same way as a Heroic Cliche. The purchased Supernatural Dice must be shown physically on the minifig by a talisman or trinket, making them the target of avarice and violence. Minifigs with magic dice can then spend each Supernatural Die once per round, as per their Cliche, to make magic happen. You can purchase wands and staffs to add range, but by default it's all done with a minifig's bare hands. When a Supernatural Die is spent, it's rolled to augment a statistic - a magic dice can augment ANY statistic. You can subtract or add to Range, Movement, Damage, Armor or Action die rolls. Supernatural Dice return to their owner at the end of their turn unless their user decides to leave them there as a Lasting Effect, meaning whoever benefits from that augment can roll that dice again. Supernatural dice that roll their max earn an additional die of the same kind as bonus die, and ones that roll a 1 are "stolen" by the enemy and converted into Fumble dice to thwart the action in any way possible. Additionally, Supernatural Dice can be used to summon items - tot up the price of what you want, then roll and try and match/beat that budget. Finally, the dice can be simply spent to summon Diemons - the die remains tied up with the summoned Diemon until it dies. Diemons aren't quite as good as minifigs - they use the Supernatural Die that summoned them to either move or make an action, but not both. Since Diemons are cool and all the dice have unique functions, I might as well go through all of their effects and Diemons here.
See? This is a cool system! This ties back into the different die sizes and results in a cool little mini system. But I couldn't parse this at all. The writing of this game is just not comprehensible. Is it the layout? Is it the lackadaisical tone with which everything is written? Is it my brain? I don't know, but I mocked this system earlier for being obtuse and it's really not! It's told badly, but in practice its fine! And really that sums up BrikWars 2021. It's obtuse for no real gain. It has good ideas but doesn't play them to the full. For something that extols Lego so much, it's not really very playful. It's a blizzard of rules that aren't sure how detailed they need to be and keep telling you not to play with them anyway. It's pretty miss-able. My suggestion would be to take your mini-figures and use them to play a game that doesn't waste your time and isn't as unfunny. Which will be the next game I review, because I've been reading something that I would describe as basically the opposite of BrikWars. The Deleter fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Feb 8, 2022 |
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Feb 8, 2022 14:31
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This DOES make me want to run a Soulbound game where everyone was in one big fight and just wakes up Soulbound with only a vague idea of what to do next.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:33
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That's basically what's happening, yeah. I can't imagine hooking up a Kruleboy to a party though. At the very least the other Orc types exist to just punch stuff, if you're not going for the obvious fun hype man of the Bonesplitters and scapelling out the racism. Unless you play these guys as essentially Waluigi.
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Apr 5, 2022 19:29
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Writing down "escaping satan the space dragon by tricking him into flying too close to a neutron star" for use elsewhere because, as much as I wouldn't run this, that's power metal as gently caress.
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Aug 4, 2023 00:51
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MonsieurChoc posted:Jojo is good, actually, but the rest is correct.
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Aug 25, 2023 09:20
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I've got to say, absolutely wild choices of music quotes. Absolutely the sort of thing you'd expect from this product to the point where it blasts the flesh off my bones reading them.
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Sep 12, 2023 16:42
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