- Joined
- Mar 1, 2025
They're all so tinyyyyy!
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
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- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
Possibly the only time GW have ever gotten the balance right in one of their tabletop wargames.
It had a lovely system for army building where each core detatchment you bought allowed you a set number of supplementary and special cards. So buy an Eldar Defender detachment of guardians and their transports and you could get, iirc, four supplementary cards such as a squad of aspects and a special card like a Tempest heavy battle tank. Different factions had meaningfully different flavours such as orks having a maximum of six detachments representing the six different clans and orks belonging to that detachment had to stay within range of it, iirc. So orks played as up to six giant blobs and their moral functioned such that it was hard to break them when they were in numbers but once they passed a certain point you could get these catastrophic moral collapses spreading across their entire army. Eldar had these vibro-cannon that were phenomenal for levelling buildings, their Wave Serpants that were very hard to kill unless the player chose to detach their force fields to scatter any formations, which everybody did because it was just too tempting and then next round your defenceless wave serpent dies to the counter fire.
It's order system was excellent. You place the order face down next to each detachment and players take turns revealing them so the game isn't one giant mess of their side goes then my side goes. Added a dimension of tactics that their usual crap lacks.
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2015
That's the appeal imo. [True] 28mm, nevermind "heroic scale" 28mm, is too big for what a lot of players want a wargame to be. It's really best suited for skirmish games with very low model counts, otherwise there's no maneuvering and it's just a parking lot where the game is decided at the list building phase.
15mm is probably the smallest 40k would work at, because it's the smallest where you can reasonably do individual basing. However, I've been tending towards 6mm (the smallest you can reasonably identify individual weapons) or even smaller. Match that with historicals where the different suppliers have to compete, and I can fill a table for the price of one named character in 40k (I remember when 40k characters were $20-$35 and we thought it was outrageous then. I'm never paying more than $3/model ever again.)
Why yes, my knees hurt and I have to remember to take my vitamins in the morning, how did you know?
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
I've always wanted to try 6mm for domain play. Fantasy, historical, scifi, you can get armies and villages for maybe $50. Maybe that's why there's so little interest in it, no opportunity for consoomption when fighting with an army that fits on top of a playing card.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
That's one factor. The other however is legitimate and it's that you can't paint so well at that scale and this is part of the hobby. You can do helmets and maybe shoulder pads in a different colour, put a dab of metallic paint on gun but that's about as good as it gets. Beyond that you get some slightly bigger things - super heavy battle tanks could be a whole inch long! But beyond that, you have titans. Which okay, but the variety is a great deal more limited.
Tactically, as a game, Adeptus Titanicus / Space Marine / Epic was a big step forward over the standard scale. But artistically lacked a big part of the hobby. Sure, you can paint some banners and the aforementioned titans. But even if you break out a magnifying glass, clamps and manage to paint some kind of detail on a 6mm Astartes, are you going to do that for the next forty of them as well?
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
I was thinking of RPGs, no one is going to sweat if a platoon of pikemen are a little shaky, but in the GW community you're an asshole if you don't spend hours over every squaddie.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
Sure. For TTRPGs it's different. But Space Marine / Epic wasn't an RPG so I was speaking to that. I toyed with the idea of integrating a campaign with an RPG, though it wasn't WH40K. Ultimately though you run into problems with the scale because it's natural to want the player's represented on the field. If say you were playing Rogue Trader you'd want to see the player's vessel as part of the fleet. But the rule system is calibrated to those ships being vulnerable so if you integrated Battle Fleet Gothic with your Rogue Trader game or Star Wars Armada with your Star Wars game, you have to deal with the possibility that some bad rolls or poor strategy turns a one mini kill at the strategic layer into a TPK and end to the campaign at the RPG layer.
All this is solvable, but this is a problem that has to be addressed.
FFG Star Wars has these problems built into the system with another major issue.
Vehicle damage is scaled at 10x personal damage. So while some characters could survive a 1 damage hit from an anti vehicle weapon, a 2 damage hit is just killing anything. This is normally avoidable, but the moment a big battle breaks out with airspeeders, AT-ATs, gun positions on walls, etc. it can go to shit very quickly because all you can really do while running it is just avoid shooting some turbo lasers at the obvious badass squad of players that might as well be tactical spec ops within the star wars setting. It gets even worse if anyone ever wants to do any vehicle combat, because any players that aren't dex focused or otherwise stat'd to pilot or shoot guns, they've got practically nothing to do once they get into TIEs, x-wings, or any equivalent because they can't reasonably pilot the things and are left struggling in something with the defensive capability of a pepsi can.
In a larger ship, you get a different problem. Someone can be a decent pilot, maybe a decent gunner or two, but beyond that... a mechanic can hope the ship gets damaged so they can have their character running around between rounds to repair shit. A slicer is just sitting there every turn maybe hoping they can do something about enemy shields, a face is just sitting there bored rolling to give morale boosts. But even the piloting checks, the combat may as well be in a straight line since the pilot doesn't really have anything interactive to do.
You might be tempted to say "fuck it, lets just play x-wing for the space combat" which could work if everyone is in their own speeder/fighter but again you go back to it being hyper lethal dogfights in soda cans you've just decided to ignore everyone's crappy ability to pilot. So now a player that put together a PC that can pilot just has everyone stepping on their toes. You could decide that narratively instead of ships getting blown up, they just get disabled or everyone can use an escape pod. But then narratively that rarely happens in Star Wars to begin with, but you've also now really reduced the impact of any of these vehicle scale combats in the first place while introducing another problem of the players needing to get their 5th millennium falcon equivalent in a game. So it goes from a group of rebels or whatever doing rebellion things(or maybe a small group of imperials doing anti rebellion things?) to the party just back on the resource hunt again for ships constantly either having to buy/trade for them or just stealing them but that's time not spent doing what they were probably interested in doing in the first place.
And capital ships are also a thing in FFG Star Wars and would improve that survivability, escape pods, ships getting disabled in the middle of a skirmish and being left for more tempting targets, which could lead to players needing to fight their way out of such a ship finding some fighters to escape in or a shuttle or something... but now until that happens the players have even less agency in what's going on as it takes hundreds or even thousands of personnel to actually run those ships so they're just left barking orders except for maybe the PC stat'd out as a pilot again who could be a helmsman and the ones who can do gunnery being on turrets. And once they're in that shuttle or fighters now you're back to people either having little to do or being unable to do anything.
- Joined
- May 25, 2024
I think the best way to integrate mass battle is as either an abstracted mechanic that you task chain together with all the PCs doing stuff to add bonuses to the final roll; abstracted hordes clashing, like in Black Crusade; or individual clashes that set the tone of an otherwise narrative battle. I do wish there was a wholistic rpg-wargame system that Warhammer was SUPPOSED to be early on, especially with the Realms of Chaos books. Domain level play really should have been something they went with more in WH but never really did, though I suppose it has never been super popular, given it is a niche of roleplaying anyway.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Ringworld has ships like the General Products Hull #4 with a stasis field that can survive crashing into a planet at relativistic velocity. I had a campaign based around such an event (crashing into the Ringworld) and the ship was intact, but it was hopelessly embedded into the scrith the Ringworld is made of.
Sure? But does that resolve the issue of players who aren't setup to do anything ship/vehicle based just sitting on their hands while other players handle it?
Generally when you look at a piece of fiction with this kind of scenario, the focus shifts to characters relevant to what is happening. Star Trek doesn't try to involve Dr. Crusher as a main focus character when the ship is in active combat, other than that she's doing triage in sickbay or whatever. The botanist in the hydroponics lab isn't going to be doing anything at all, and even the mechanic in engineering is just going to be literally putting out fires that they can't really interact with because what they're doing and where they're at has zero bearing on what's currently happening. In a setting like Star Wars, 40k, and even Star Trek to an extent doing things involving ships/vehicles is bound to happen.
I'm not familiar with Ringworld. But this scenario of yours regarding the ship crashing. Could a face character actually be involved and do anything? Could a hacker/scientist character do anything? Or was it entirely up to the PCs that actually had some skills they could apply to do everything while the rest of their party sat on their hands? That's perfectly fine to do every once in a while, but you can't do it on a regular basis if the party is expected to be travelling around using vehicles. At the same time you wouldn't want vehicle travel in a setting like that to be so reliably safe that it becomes entirely irrelevant either.
It's the equivalent of having a fantasy TTRPG where every few sessions the players end up in a medieval jousting match so the couple of people that have enough skill to ride horses and participate in such a thing can actually do something, while everyone else is bored desperately thinking of something they can actually do while the epic duel they can't participate in is going on.
In a CRPG you can just ignore party members that aren't relevant to the current scenario. You can't constantly do that in a TTRPG without leaving people twiddling their thumbs and simultaneously avoid putting them in situations where they're just going to get killed the moment they fail a roll they were likely to never make(starfighter with a soda can for armor again).
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
As someone who entered the hobby at the low point of late 5th edition, there has never been a better time to enter the Warhammer hobby. The amount of official and unofficial resources for gaming, painting, lore, etc are extraordinary. There are groups online for playing every edition of Warhammer. Don't want to pay for GW models? Plenty of people are selling their old armies or make 3D printed models.
The first thing I would do is check around your local community and see what the local hobby scene is like. Search for Facebook groups or Discord channels. Get a sense of how the community operates. Do they play at a local hobby store, at a gaming club, or at players' homes?
Second thing; buy and make units and armies that you like. Fuck the competitive scene. If you like a model, use it even if their rules aren't as good as others. This is a hobby designed around making plastic models and playing dice games with them. One of my most memorable moments was a game were my Tomb Kings Hierophant got accidentally flattened by Dwarven artillery on Turn 1. It was a race against time to get my crumbling skeletons into the melee with the dwarves just to eke out petty vengeance. Stories like that are what this hobby is built for.
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2015
Nigger, are you high?
robobobo
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2014
Having something to do on a spaceship has always been a weakness for sci fi RPGs. Just look at Star Wars, in most scenes the cast is sitting on their asses while watching Han fly the ship. It's fine for a show, but boring for a game. Most RPGs have some busywork bullshit to give to players, but it tends to have little to zero impact on anything. Especially for more advanced sci fi settings where things like manually aiming weapons is pointless.
Star Wars does have something of a fix though: fighters. For every character flying around in a fighter you have one fewer person needing something to do on the party ship. They added fighter docking clamps as a pretty easy piece of ship equipment to get so you can just latch back onto the bigger ship and rejoin the party when there aren't space hijinks going on.
Star Wars does have something of a fix though: fighters. For every character flying around in a fighter you have one fewer person needing something to do on the party ship. They added fighter docking clamps as a pretty easy piece of ship equipment to get so you can just latch back onto the bigger ship and rejoin the party when there aren't space hijinks going on.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
In this case, everyone involved had something to do. The crash was an unavoidable incident, and I had a campaign and a fully set up set of things they were supposed to do involving a number of cultures and societies. Instead, the entire party stayed inside the ship because they were invulnerable there (something I did not expect) and split up into factions and conspired against each other.
Since the various tribes outside the ship viewed them as gods (considering their spectacular arrival), they waged proxy wars and it turned into a political RPG with no actual combat. The ship turned into a paranoid hellhole full of backstabbing and shifting alliances.
Of course, this wasn't really a vehicle combat situation, because the ship was no longer a vehicle at that point, just an invulnerable but completely immobile object.
Ok so then it's not the same sort of situation at all. It was a plot point, theme park ride, whatever you want to call it. Not a recurring scenario where half the table isn't doing anything while epic space battles or whatever are occurring.
But then you've still got the problem of the characters who can't fly a fighter worth a crap just being out in space with their asses in the wind to get shot and killed. Defensive maneuvers? Can't do it if they don't have the appropriate stats and skills. Shooting down enemies? Again, can't do it if they don't have the appropriate stats and skills.
Even in Star Wars like you said, there's examples of this. Luke, Han, and Chewie can fly or man the turrets on the Millennium Falcon. What would Leia be doing? Jack and shit. C-3PO? Again, nothing. R2 might be able to slice(hack) enemy systems if the game system itself allows for it but if not, then once again sitting there doing nothing. So that's between 1/3 and 1/2 of the party doing nothing. Is space travel safe enough that this isn't an issue? Then you never really need to bother doing much with the ship, and you turn piloting checks into a boring dice roll to see how quickly they can get somewhere and as a result end up leaving anyone who was interested in doing such things with nothing to do because the DM is avoiding the other half of the party being bored to death. At which point, why even have vehicles/ships and ship combat? If you rarely do it then when it does happen your big rare epic action combat scene is once again relegating PCs to sitting on their hands leaving nothing epic about it at all.
It's a similar issue in various Star Wars games when the jedi in the party gets their epic duel. At least in those scenarios you've hopefully had the sense to split up the party so the other people can be doing something else interesting while that's going on. Otherwise you just get a handful of PCs all jumping the one sith lord or whatever, which can be entertaining but you can't just do that repeatedly and usually having a party of sith lords/dark jedi/whatever running around doesn't make much sense outside of some rare circumstances. But that's still not as difficult as the ship combat problem is.
Again, same thing in a fantasy TTRPG. Players get a ship, go traveling. Encounter some pirates, not everyone is going to have the skills and stats to be able to participate. Fine to do once, annoying if it comes up repeatedly.
Lightning's Heraldry
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
Fellas, I am getting ready to run a Shadowdark campaign (which I expect to be rather short for a campaign) and upon looking around online I have been met with a single inescapable question.
Is the OSR community subtarded?
Is the OSR community subtarded?
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
As a person who runs B/X as often as he can:
Yes.
Lightning's Heraldry
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
Why are they so allergic to real rules in the core ruleset or houserules? These people are so obsessed with "stripped down clean rules" they act like reading a sentence risks giving them brain cancer. Genuinely word-phobic. I had 3 pages of houserules for AD&D when I used to run it because when I make a call I like to remember how I handled it so I can be consistent in the future. That can't possibly be that strange of a thing to be the case for others who ran older systems.
I was looking around online to see if I could find anyone who had done Dual Classing for Shadowdark because I had an idea of what I wanted to implement but wanted to see if someone else had done something similar first and what their results were. Instead all I found was "people" retching at the idea that somebody may wish to houserule something in, despite this same group of "people" squealing about muh heckin Rule 0 as justification for why the book doesn't have a given rule for something relatively common or simple, or why the book has references to things it then tells you don't exist; thieves having advantage on rolls to find traps but traps not requiring rolls to find.
- Joined
- May 25, 2024
It is really funny that for a community that was built upon personal and hacks interpretations of the original core rules of D&D they do this.