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Post by Canuovea on Jul 7, 2015 6:14:23 GMT
I think that there is a valid reason to have those three steps. It is the same philosophy behind rolling for the same action over a series of obstacles. It builds tension. That being said, it suffers due to the simplicity of it all. That kind of tension that was there previously is diminished considerably by having the whole process so streamlined. I'm actually in the process of working on some maths that will show why.
I do think that a lot of this, though, is uncharacteristically generous of GW, but then again, generous with a product that is... less good.
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Post by RED_NED on Jul 7, 2015 10:08:27 GMT
I've spent a lot of time working on and thinking about dice mechanics, and I don't agree on needing 3 steps of dice rolling in a wargame like this, with two probably being the optimum. Although I can see the reasons why you do, it doesn't actually translate to games. I could write an entire thesis on this, so I will try to be concise (and I will fail).
Okay, so dice are purely number generators from a game mechanic point of view. A 6 sided dice is to generate 6 variable results. Except sometimes they aren't. When a single dice roll has massive consqeuences (Think the long roll at a Craps table and the investment of spectators) then the dice become something else, something physical.
This is also apparent in other ways too. Emotionally, lets take D&D for example, when an action takes a single dice to perform – an attack roll, players form a mental picture of the situation and the dice roll represents the swing of the sword. If I hit, then my sword has hit the monster, if I miss then I miss the monster. (FYI thats not what the dice roll in D&D is supposedly meant to represent, but thats how it feels).
In a mass wargame, the 'Buckets of dice' approach also has an emotional weight. It feels like you are making a large barrage of attacks. One of the best games I've played is Uncharted Seas, where you roll dozens of D6 looking for 4+ and it *feels* like you are unleashing a broadside from your ships when you do so.
Theres many more examples of course but my point is that even though a mere number generator, the way in which you roll dice really does add to the feel and theme of a game.
So onto Age of Sigmar. Firstly, each model makes a number of dice rolls to hit. This is usually a lot, and you roll seperately for different weapon attacks. This makes it feel like a mass wargame. If you are going to make the player roll a lot of dice, I would argue the results have to reflect this in some way.
20 Bretonnian bowmen can make a ranged attack with 80 dice. They hit on a 5+. This means that 27 will hit on average rounding up. They need a 4+ to wound. So 13 of those will wound. A Black orc has a save of 4+. so 7 of those wound. Black orcs have 2 wounds each, so 3 models die, and 1 is wounded.
From a purely logistical point of view that is a lot of effort for little results. 80+27+13 = 120 dice were rolled in total to remove 3 models. It doesn't feel particularly responsive in a dice rolled to results ratio.
Onto the rolling 3 sets of dice. I agree with you in the sense of wanting to feel like there is some interplay between models, and I have a few personal opinions on what is best, but theres a bunch of ways to do it. Firstly, for ranged attacks in particular, its generally considered that you make a dice roll to represent one character hitting another that is based on their own 'shooting' characteristic A lot of games will put put some modifiers here, say for range (to add reasons to be near/far to each other) or for obscured models, in cover or whatever. Once you start adding special rules you can add flavourful modifiers – deseased monsters an have a cloud of flies surrounding them that make them harder to hit etc. If you are making a system where model A rolls a dice to hit model B I quite like this method as it feels like what its trying to represent.
Age of Sigmar makes the attack just an unmodified "3+" to hit, which isnt in and of itself bad, it just doesnt have any of the nuance that modifiers can bring.
After this 'roll to hit' many games diverge in how they approach things. Many more streamlined games combine 'Hitting' and 'Damaging' into a single Roll. A better roll means you hit for more damage, a roll that does no damage is translated as a miss. Warhammer has always been a bit archaic, because it had the 'to wound' phase. This adds another set of dice rolling, which although I would remove it it did have some interaction beteween a bow being harder to wound an Ogre, and a Giant being really likely to crush a goblin due to their relative strengths.
Age of Sigmar has none of this interplay. It is merely, of the hits you got, roll the dice to see how many wound. Its a totally insular dice roll with no outside influence caring about models you are fighting etc. In game terms this means a player rolls dice to see how many dice he can roll to wound. There is no strategy or player input to engineer this in your favour. It has made Rolling to Hit and Rolling to Wound 2 steps that from a methematical and emotional point of view something that should be 1 dice roll. Also it bogs the game down, adding 33% time to the dice rolls. As an opponent it isn's particularly exciting to see after the 10th time. There is no 'Craps' feel to it, just a crap feel.
The Save roll im fine with. Some games have the attacking player make all the rolls and the defender takes it, his input being where he placed the model and whatever rules the game gives him to protect his models, but when the shots fire his opponent makes all the rolls. Having the attacked player make the saving rolls feels like interaction, and puts your destiny in your own hands.
It is after all one of the reasons we play dice games and dont just hit an iphone app to create results for us.
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Post by TempestFennac on Jul 7, 2015 11:26:36 GMT
What is the dice roll in D&D supposed to represent? I always thought it was like that for attack rolls.
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Post by RED_NED on Jul 7, 2015 11:51:17 GMT
If you have 72 hit points and a Goblin fires a bow at you doing 6 damage, it feels like the goblin fired 1 arrow and it hit your hero hurting them.
When this happens for the tenth time, either your character looks like a pin cushion or you have to extrapolate that some arrows graze you or whatever or you dodge out of the way and bang your head when the goblin rolls 1 damage. Its more to do with how an individual attacks feels as it is being made, and the amount of hit points you lose. Heroes can be stabbed many times by a monster and it follows that each time it isnt always the swing of a sword that pierces your armour, sometimes the monsters bite you, you get grazed by the haft of a glaive, you get savaged by multiple swipes of its claws etc.
Ultimately it does not matter, it feels good to play and is a narrative game so you can explain away anything that happens in the most appropriate way so doesn't have any negative impact on the game.
Its just that as a mechanic, it feels like you are rolling a dice to swing a sword then rolling dice to see how much damage the monster took from that sword hitting. All that matters is the mechanics reinforcing a good feeling, good gameplay/strategy and good narrative. That's the end result any game should be aiming for.
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Post by Harkovast on Jul 7, 2015 13:43:29 GMT
Canuovea I don't see how giving away useless, unplayable rules is generous. Frankly expecting anyone to pay money for a game that doesn't work would be offensive.
They gave away 4 pages of unfinished, poorly thought out rules that seem like someone wrote them in an afternoon. If they shit in a box and sent me that would I owe them a thankyou?
Every game of age of sigmar ends the exact same way. All the models must together in the middle and you take turns trying to roll 4+ till one person win or (more likely) you get bored and stop.
Still don't believe me? Watch these guys play it. The chaos players face by the end says it all...
Me and Red_Ned playeda smaller game so trying to blame the game size does not explain anything.
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Post by Harkovast on Jul 7, 2015 13:49:16 GMT
Canuovea I know you like Angry Joe. I am not such a fan but I will defer to the wisdom on his twitter feed on this one...
"So out of nowhere Games Workshop sends me Warhammer:Age of Sigmar. I'm sitting here reading the rules & I can't tell if I'm being trolled."
He continues- "Rules are 4 pages. No point values for any model. Bring as many units as u want from any faction. Basically whoever buys more GW models wins."
"I think Games Workshop has finally lost their friggin minds lol. Too funny. Are they trying to kill Fantasy on purpose for 40k or something?"
Yeah, I can relate to his emotions here.
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Post by Canuovea on Jul 7, 2015 15:01:05 GMT
I like the rolling to hit then rolling to wound part of how 40K and old Fantasy worked. Because it actually mattered who you were fighting so it made sense.
But this may be just too streamlined.
First number is to hit, second is to wound. The bit following the = is the chance to wound. My math may be more than a little off, but it gets the general idea.
6+/6+ = 1/36 6+/5+ = 1/18 6+/4+ = 1/12 6+/3+ = 1/9 6+/2+ = 5/36
5+/6+ = 1/18 5+/5+ = 1/9 5+/4+ = 1/6 5+/3+ = 2/9 5+/2+ = 5/18
4+/6+ = 1/12 4+/5+ = 1/6 4+/4+ = 1/2 4+/3+ = 1/4 4+/2+ = 5/12
3+/6+ = 1/9 3+/5+ = 2/9 3+/4+ = 1/4 3+/3+ = 4/9 3+/2+ = 5/9
2+/2+ = God knows what. 25/36 2+/3+ = 5/6 2+/4+ = 5/12 2+/5+ = 5/18 2+/6+ = 5/36
Now, some things... I must admit that this doesn't take into consideration things like "re-roll 1s to hit" which seems to happen a lot. Also, there is clearly no way you could get the same variation by combining them all into a single D6 roll. You could probably find a common denomenator and roll a dice of that number... but it seems messy. But that doesn't change the fact that I know the chances that each model is actually going to hit AND wound anything before something happens. It just seems tedious.
Now, I think there are some things that could actually be good with AoS. The idea of measuring not from bases but from the nearest point on the actual model, is cool. I think that having more skirmish based large units makes sense. Don't put them in those formations. That represents how, say, the Orks or Skaven would fight pretty well. Mob em! They're not organized. But it would be interesting to see different rules for the more organized groups who would still use the old formations. A large mob might wrap around a formation, but the formation might confer other advantages.
I see potential, but as it is... eh.
And I had seen that video before. And Angry Joe is sometimes interesting, but I'm not just going to bandwagon. If anything, at this point, it looks like AoS is based more on smaller battles, with fewer models, so bigger ones end up really bogged down.
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Post by Harkovast on Jul 7, 2015 15:16:05 GMT
Canuovea you are demonstrably wrong about the game size. Many units become super charged if they are larger units. If I take units of more than 10 I get a bravery bonus (all units get this) and many get extras as well.
For example, peasent bowmen can do an arrow storm once a game. They can fire treble the number of shots....unless there are more than 20 of them, then you get FOUR TIMES the number of shots! That is both insanely powerful and incredibly annoying to actually do (rolling 80 dice? Is that a joke?)
Giant rats get 3 attacks each and hit on a 2+ if there are more than thirty! That is INSANELY powerful! Why would you ever NOT take giant units of them?
Also there are no army lists or points values so if I have more models than you, I can put more on the table. Pay to win!
Everything in the game promotes putting as much on the table as possible and fielding giant monster units.
The game me and Red_Ned played was small and ran into all the same problems everyone else runs into. Small games actually work worse because small numbers of guys struggle to cause enough damage for battle shock so it turns into a boring stalemate where no one can end the combats.
I am not bullshitting you here! I play war games, and I have played THIS war game. It is total trash.
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Post by Harkovast on Jul 7, 2015 15:17:47 GMT
Also canuovea, some of your maths are wrong. 4+/4+ is 1/4. 50% miss, 50% fail to wound. Red Ned just pointed that out to me.
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Post by Harkovast on Jul 7, 2015 15:21:05 GMT
Here is a fun tactic. A powerful demon prince can use his magic to summon a demon prince...who can then act immediately to summon a third demon prince...who can then summon another demon prince....and so on. The demon prince can literally clone himself.
Keep successfully casting, keep adding super powered demon over lords to your army. You've got the models? You just payed to win my friend!
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Post by RED_NED on Jul 7, 2015 15:39:56 GMT
You can still have this level of interaction without a need for 'to wound' you can consolidate saving throws into this and have larger models have a better save/more 'wounds' and have more powerful weapons give a negative modifier to this save. Also, the 'roll to hit' 'roll to wound/save' concept is also only one (pretty basic) way to simulate combat in a wargame.
The 'math-hammer' bit, even though a bunch of your numbers may be off (I didn't check them that closely) the exact numbers aren't important – I assume your point is the amount of nuance that you get in terms of Attacks – Saves ratio compared to simply having a roll to hit.
Firstly I would argue that you dont particularly need that level of nuance in a game with this many models. If you are rolling a lot of dice, then that should be factored into the game mechanics rather than be a chore.
If for some particular reason you want to this large scale of differences (which will be more averaged out due to the number of dice rolled) then your best bet is a single percentile roll.
While commonly you roll 2 D10's to simulate this, rolling multiple D100's like this is impractical. In a game people generally can't differentiate between 72% and 70%, you just lump those together as being roughly the same chance. If you want to roll multiple d100's then your best bet is to use D20's. Each pip counts as 5%, which is perfectly fine for a wargame.
Then you get into the issue of rolling lots of dice – People generally have a lot of D6's and they are cheap to make so you can have people roll 20 D6 and its not THAT unusual. Rolling 20 D20's is a lot more of a hassle.
When making a game system, the main thing you should be aware of is the end gameplay. Rolling 100 dice for a 1/36 chance of wounding is a waste of everyone's time when you can get similar results by rolling 18 dice needing sixes as a singular roll.
Looking at old games and trying to recreate the exact percentage chances of convoluted systems is not usually the way to make a streamlined game.
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Post by Canuovea on Jul 7, 2015 15:45:03 GMT
Yeah, and 4+/3+ or 3+/4+ is 1/3. I messed up 4+/4+ because that is what I started with and was still working out the formula.
As for game size, maybe? But it seems to work better with smaller groups. Small is faster, generally, of course. And the one smaller game I saw played was neat, if somewhat unbalanced.
But yeah, you can summon super demon lords all the time if you're an asshole. This is definitely not a tournament game. It also seems like GW is making power gamers seem silly and ridiculous.
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Post by Canuovea on Jul 7, 2015 15:49:38 GMT
Red_Ned, you missed my point. My point was that it doesn't work even if it is still slightly more complex than an alternative. It lacks the actual variety and chance to change it up. I'm kind of agreeing with you.
I still like the old way for 40K and old Fantasy. To me it just makes sense and seems intuitive. But this? This is too bland to work with that same style. They could have tried something different.
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Post by RED_NED on Jul 7, 2015 15:50:54 GMT
The summon rules are literally "Roll a dice. If it is a 4+, put a unit onto the table" Units in the game are any number of models of anything. What are you meant to bring on? If you are just meant to bring a number of fair models depending on the situation, why roll the 4+ and not just put a unit of models on each turn if it would be fair to do so? As a rule its completely without merit and calling it a 'rule' is a joke. Aaah, sorry my bad The thing with any rule in a game, when you start really delving into it is Why is it in the game. Every rule has to serve a purpose, to add tactical depth, to be fun, to stop the game devolving into a mess etc. Whenever a rule doesn't do one of these things to the very best of its ability then the ruleset suffers as a result. You also very quickly get into a tug of war between 'Strategy', 'Elegance' and 'Fun'. Usually the inclusion, or lack of a rule strengthens one of these aspects at the cost of another.
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Post by Harkovast on Jul 7, 2015 16:22:21 GMT
I'm kind of agreeing with you. I still like the old way for 40K and old Fantasy. To me it just makes sense and seems intuitive. But this? This is too bland to work with that same style. They could have tried something different. Canuovea, you devlis advocate, you!
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