Sunday 1 November 2015

A Shadow on the Table - Dreadball



I was originally going to talk about this game in a video, but I ditched that idea because I just wasn't satisfied with what sort of video it could end up as (no background music and with how I tend to ramble on god-knows how many images I'd have needed).  So, in light of that, I figured I'd start a new series of posts here looking at various tabletop games I play.  I'll still talk about tabletop games on the channel, this blog series is just a backup for the ones I can't do a good video for.  In any case; let's get onto the game.

Dreadball is a sci-fi sports board game from Mantic Games.  It was one of the first companies, alongside Reaper Miniatures, to use Kickstarter not to fund the game itself, but to expand and accelerate its development and release.  Dreadball was always going to come out, but it would've happened over a much longer schedule without Kickstarter and would have been missing a lot of stuff that it ended up with.

So; full disclosure before I go on - I did back this on Kickstarter for a fair amount.  I've tried to stay as impartial as I can, but I am very happy with how the game turned out and I encourage you to do your own research into the game after reading this before you go spending money on it.

Now, there was a concern when it was on Kickstarter a few years ago that it would just end up like a sci-fi copy of Blood Bowl, not an unwaranted concern I'll admit.  A fair few former Games Workshop employees are currently working at Mantic these days, but I figured that fact also meant it was less likely to be a copy of Blood Bowl - they'd already done a game based on American Football, why do another?  A fact that was confirmed in a making-of book the backers got a while after launch.  Perhaps the best summary of the game I've ever read came from a surprising place - the 1d4chan wiki.  The summary I read there (which you can find on the site's page for Warpath, Mantic's sci-fi wargame and the setting Dreadball occurs in) described it as "like Blood Bowl, but is set in space, uses aliens, is played on a hex grid, isn't based on American Football and has completely different game mechanics."  Gets the point across quite well, I think.

The game seems to draw elements from a lot of sports - basketball feels like the big one, but there's elements of hockey, lacrosse and probably a fair few others I'm not recognising (not a big sports guy myself).
That's the pitch there.  At the start of the game, you randomly decide which team is the Home team and which is the Away team.  Home team goes first, Away team goes second, pretty straight-forward.  They even colour-coded the turn counter along the bottom of the board for you.  There's no fancy restrictions on where players need to be; just place six of your players anywhere in your half of the pitch.  Can't be on the centre-line, though (the bit between the yellow lines), because that's where the ball's launched at the start of the match.  Gets launched on from the active team's left (so if it's launched on a Home team's turn, it would come from the top of the image) and you roll a d6 to see which of the hexes with the Dreadball logo it lands on - if you get a six you have to roll another die to see which of the two end-hexes it lands in after hitting the opposite wall.


The objective is simple; carry the ball into one of the highlighted areas in the opposing team's half and then throw it into that area's Strike Hex (the ones marked with a dot in the middle).  The two zones closer to the centre are each worth one point while the rear one is worth three.  The extra hex projecting from the front end of a Strike Zone is called the Bonus Hex, a throw from there is harder but will earn you an extra point ontop of whatever that zone is worth (so the bonus hex for the rear Strike Zones will net you four points).  You don't track score totals, just the difference, by sitting a token on the score tracker at the top of the pitch and sliding it back and forth as the score changes.  So if the home team has a 2-point lead and the away team gets a 3-pointer, the score becomes a 1-point lead for the away team.


Player stats and dice mechanics are pretty straight-forward - each dice test starts with three dice, modifiers that make the action easier or harder add and remove dice to this pool.  You're trying to get as many dice as you can to roll equal to or above the player's relevant stat.  So a Human Striker trying to pick up the ball would make a Skill test to do so - he'd get three dice as the starting point, a fourth because Strikers get a bonus to Skill tests and as his Skill stat is 4+, he needs at least one of the dice to come up a four or higher.  Most tests just need one success, most of the ones that don't are opposed tests you make against another player who has to make a dice test as well (ie; Slamming someone, you make a Strength Test to hit them, they get to make a Strength Test to slamback, whoever rolls the most successes wins).  There's plenty of quick-reference sheets out there; Board Game Geek have one I grabbed a while back, there'll be a link in the addendum at the bottom of the post.


Another clever side to this is that doubling the number of successes you needed (ie; getting two or more successes on an action that only needed one) will give that player extra actions.  So if a player doubles on picking up the ball, they get a free run or throw action.  Succeed on a slam and you push the target back a hex, double the number of successes they got when opposing it and you knock them down and force them to make an armour check which can take them out of the game for up to 3 turns or kill them outright.  The reason these actions are big are because a player cannot act unless you play an Action Token on them and you start each turn with 5 tokens (always the same number, no point hoarding them).  So there's always going to be at least one of your players on the pitch who won't be acting that turn (unless that sixth player is catching a pass and gets two or more successes on the catch, giving them a free run or throw action).

Combine all of that, plus that each coach (the game's term for the actual people playing the game, just to avoid confusion with the players on the pitch) only has seven turns over the course of the game and that the pitch never resets and you get a very fast, very fluid game.  If both players have a handle on the rules or have access to a reference sheet, you can bash out a game of Dreadball in about 40 minutes or so.

It also feels more forgiving than Blood Bowl; where GW's entry in the genre will end your turn with a single bad dice roll, Dreadball will only prematurely end your turn if you lose control of the ball (ie; the ball carrier failing to evade away from an opposing player).  Dodges and passes feel far more reliable unless you're playing a team who are purposefully bad in those areas (ie; Forge Fathers have a Speed stat of only 5+ thanks to their stunty, dwarven legs, so they'll have a harder time dodging away from anyone) and most of my games have come down to the wire, where one team was only one throw away from taking the lead on their last turn.  It's rare that you'll ever be truly out of the running in Dreadball.



Dreadball does have mechanics for league play, where you have a persistent team you try to improve over the course of several matches, and some of those mechanics I find quite interesting.  For one; the MVPs - these are named, freelance players, big stars in the Dreadball scene who you can hire for a round in a league.  Unlike Blood Bowl, where you simply pay their asking price and get them for that match, the MVPs are auctioned off at the start of each round of the league, after calculating the Underdog Bonuses (a balancing factor - if your team has the lower value than your opponent's for that round, you get extra money).  Even if a player won't play for your team, you can still bid on them to drive the price up or, if you win, are basically paying them to not play for that round.  It adds an extra layer of strategy to a league that I rather like.  There's also how Free Agents are handled - after the MVP auction, if you have at least 10 megacredits (the currency used for the game) left of your Underdog Bonus, you get to roll on a table in the book to see which Free Agent you get for that round.  You get one roll on the table for each whole 10mc of the bonus you have unspent.  But with how the table's designed, you could end up with a player from a totally different species - a slow Forge Father team, for example, could end up with a speedy and nimble Veer-myn Striker for a round.  This can make a Free Agent more valuable than just another player as it can give your team enough of an edge in one aspect that throws a wrench in your opponent's strategy.  Later seasons' expansion books have their own Free Agent tables and you get to pick which table you roll on.

I honestly don't have too many gripes about the game.  It's easy to learn without sacrificing strategic depth, it's fast, it's fluid, the teams feel and play very distinctly from each other.  The actual models are very good-quality and extensive use of L-shaped plugs and other irregular shapes for them mean you'll never end up gluing an arm on the wrong body or the wrong way around.  Actually that's it; the one complaint I can see people having with this game is it being harder to convert the models and give them a distinct pose of your own.  That and certain teams (I'm looking at you, Veer-myn) can sometimes project out beyond the edge of their hex base, making it difficult when they run adjacent to another model.  Personally, for those situations I'd suggest just holding the models to the base with a bit of blu-tac or the like and have a mark on the base showing which direction they're facing - if the model interferes with others, just pull it off the base until there's room for the model to go back.  In any case; as long as you take your time and dry-fit the pieces of a model before gluing them, you shouldn't have any issues.



Pricing-wise it's not too bad either, the basic set (pictured above) has everything you need, including ten models each for the Corporation and Marauder teams and a decent-sized pad of team rosters for league use (and you can always photocopy them to make more pages if you need to), and it will only run you £50 plus shipping if you buy direct off Mantic's website.  Expansion books are another £10 each while teams will cost you about £18 for a set of ten-to-fourteen models (most have a full roster of 12-14 models, but the newer teams from Seasons 4-6 are only in packs of ten).  MVPs are £5 each while you can get a pack of 3 or 4 for about £15-£18 depending on the pack.  If you want a higher-quality pitch than the one in the base set, I'd recommend the Gruba-tek VII Coliseum.  It's reasonably affordable and, if the Dreadball Ultimate pitch (which is used for 3-6 team games and that I'll talk about in a future post) is any indication, it'll be good-quality.  Don't have one myself because I bought the much-more-expensive acrylic plastic one before the Gruba-tek VII was released (and by a pretty small margin, too; been kicking myself about it, believe me).

Either way; if you like the idea of a fast-paced board game about a fictional sport involving a titanium ball launched at a couple hundred kilometres-per-hour (so, yes, you can throw the ball as a weapon) that you can learn to play in no time, check it out.  And if I had to compare it directly to Blood Bowl; I have no problems claiming that this is the superior game.  Your tastes may vary on that, of course, but in my personal opinion, Dreadball blows Blood Bowl out of the water without even trying.


Addendum

I've got a few links at the bottom of this article, one is a gameplay demonstration from Mantic Games, another is the first episode in a series on the game from Beasts of War called Dreadball Academy that goes into more detail on the game, though I do have to warn you that that one's about an hour and a half long (and Warren had a bad habit of interrupting guests back then which probably accounts for a chunk of the runtime).  I've also linked a post from another blog showing how to get a way to play the game online for free.  You will still need the rulebook for it, the program doesn't automate anything, but you can get a free copy of that from the Mantic Digital service (which I'll have a link to under the blog post's link).  It'll only have the rules for the Corporation and Marauder teams (so Humans and Orx) but it should be enough for you to get a feel for the game and see if it's worth picking up.  If I ever do any videos on Dreadball in the future, I'll have those linked down below as well.  I'm tempted to do a series of team summaries, but they'd be hitting the same issues as the ones that made this a blog post and not a video of its own.

Mantic Gameplay Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjlVrXSbEIE
Dreadball Academy Episode One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvTicCOehLw
Reference Sheet: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/100639/dreadball-seasons-1-3-quick-reference-sheet
-Small Error in Sheet - Judwan Strikers are Speed 4+ as of rules adjustments made in Season 3.  They were kinda OP with Speed 3+.
How to play Dreadball online through VASSAL: http://boardgamesminisandmore.blogspot.ca/2014/01/how-to-play-dreadball-online.html
Mantic Digital: https://www.manticdigital.com/

Wednesday 7 October 2015

Rant and Ramble About Games Workshop

I'm still trying to find background music for my next video (although odds are it may end up music-free), so in the meantime I thought I'd do this up to fulfil the "Ramble" half of the blog's title.

Now; I'm going to be blunt - I am not a fan of Games Workshop as a company.  I like their two main Warhammer settings (moreso 40k than Fantasy, but the latter is growing on me), I like many of the more recent video games based on those franchises and I'm keen to try out two that'll be coming later this year or something next year.  But GW themselves are screwing themselves faster than a Slaaneshi Cultist who mutated a bunch of rather-sensitive tentacles.

The Darkness Crawls Forth
Some of the earlier stuff had people disappointed, but in hindsight they were a sign of things to come - closing down the official forums is never a good sign from a company but people migrated to various fan and community sites like Warseer, it was annoying but nothing too bad in the overall scheme of things.  Support for the Specialist Games died off as well (these were a bit before my time, so to speak, so I'm not sure what order most of this occurred in); Mordheim, Inquisitor, Battlefleet Gothic, even Blood Bowl were now no longer directly supported by GW and that whole section of the website was eventually removed entirely.  Now this was a bigger thing; fans managed to keep Blood Bowl updating somewhat and websites like FUMBBL kept it alive.  How well the others were maintained varies; Inquisitor got a few fan-supplements I saw and I wouldn't be surprised if Mordheim and Necromunda got some of the same.

Then thing started going downhill in regards to their pricing.  Models were getting more expensive each year and when they claimed that they didn't raise the price on something they were only technically true - when they said that the Dire Avengers kit wouldn't change price, for example, they were telling the truth, they just glossed over the fact that they halved the number of models in the kit so you'd have to buy two of them to field a full ten-man unit of them.  They also had some aggressive changes to their trade agreements that raised the price even further, then ham-strung online retailers by forcing anyone wanting to sell their products to also sell them in a brick-and-mortar store.  Needless to say; most online retailers don't have physical stores and just work from home.  And a lot of their income at the time would have been from selling GW products.

But of course, things were going to get a lot worse.

Daemons of Intellectual Property Rise
Then there was Damnatus.  Now as annoying as this next bit was; I don't blame GW for this, I'd have done the same in their position, but explaining it is a bit of a pre-req for the next big mistake.  Now, Damnatus was going to be a live-action fan-movie of Warhammer 40k, dealing with a handful of people co-opted by the Inquisition to investigate rumours of heresy on a Hive World.  Production stills, trailers and behind-the-scenes photos all looked promising and I was a big fan of the Tech Priest character's costume (amazing what you can do with a bunch of old mobile phones, a VCR, a gas mask and a whole lot of glue and duct-tape - even if the poor guy using it nearly fainted from how damn hot the robes made it).  The film was all done and ready for release when a particular clause in German copyright law (which Damnatus fell under due to being a German creation) came up and GW had to do something fans hated, but that any company would have done the same thing.

The clause, basically, stated that an artist has irrevocable rights to their work.  Solves a fair few issues; makes it a damn-sight harder for someone to steal an artist's work but, as Damnatus unwittingly showed, raises hell for fan-works.  Had GW let the film be released, then the 40k intellectual property would've essentially become public domain in Germany, meaning anybody in Germany could make anything for it and wouldn't have to pay a cent in licensing.  Not sure how that would've affected the rulebooks for the tabletop but I wouldn't be surprised if it would let people print and publish their own copies of the rulebooks and codices for free.  Either way; GW canned the movie and added a clause to their IP that said people couldn't make any fan-movies of their work.

So how does that tie in with the next big screw-up by the wargaming behemoth?  Well, this issue got them to suddenly take a closer look at their IP regulations - going from relatively lax about it to outright draconian.  They started going after any and every website displaying their images (their logo, publicity photos of their models - I think photos of your own models got a pass since you'd have painted them yourself, and so-on), with many websites getting shutdown all together.  All this came to a head when they tried to get a book taken down from Amazon by claiming that it infringed on their trademark.  That book was Spots the Space Marine by M.C.A. Hogarth.  They claimed that the book infringed on their European trademark on 'space marine'.  GW appear to have dropped the claim as the book went back up on Amazon not long after and they may have dropped it due to the massive internet backlash against them for the move.  Figures like Cory Doctorow and the digital rights group, Electronic Frontier Federation, questioned GW's right to trademark a term as generic as 'space marine', something that dates back to a story published in an American sci-fi magazine from the early 1930s.  Wikipedia has a big list of where the term's been used and when a military unit in a story has fit the archetype but been called something else.

After that, GW's been somewhat less... zealous... when it comes to protecting their IPs (part of that could have been due to them getting ChapterHouse Studios shut down - which I'm not too familiar with so use that link to see what the hell I'm talking about).  And after THQ went under, they became a lot more free in who they let license the video game rights to their products.  TotalBiscuit did a video on this - The Codex Astartes Does Not Support This Game - and he explains it far better than I can.  But whatever benefits this might have is dwarfed by the absolute bone-headedness of their next decision.

The end of Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

The Death of an Ancient Land
This was their biggest mistake, in my book. Their oldest wargame, the giant that put their name on the map - if someone hears the name of their company they'll think of either 40k or Fantasy. Even their biggest spin-off game, Blood Bowl, uses the Fantasy setting. When they started releasing books for 8th Edition Fantasy under the heading The End Times, I don't think anyone actually thought they'd be the end of the setting.

Replacing a game with another one isn't too bad, but replacing a wargame with a framework for competitive play with one that both lacks that framework and adds a bunch of 'silly' rules is another thing entirely!  And the latter is exactly what GW's done - replacing Warhammer Fantasy with Age of Sigmar.  See; AoS doesn't have a point system for building your army.  This means there's no reason to take the cheaper, cannon-fodder units anymore.  See; in Warhammer Fantasy, a Skaven player would take units of Clanrats as cheap, expendable troops to bog down the enemy elite troops or otherwise act as a screen for their more expensive units.  In Age of Sigmar; there is now no reason to take Clanrats as everything they can do, Stormvermin can do better.  That's just one example, but it basically makes the cheap, rank-and-file troops you used to take only because they're cheap now serve absolutely no purpose.

As for what I meant by silly rules; here are the ones quoted on Wikipedia.
"If, during your entire hero phase, you can maintain a dignified (even arrogant) composure and not smile, smirk or laugh regardless of your opponent's antics, you may re-roll all hit rolls of 1 made for models in a Dragon Host until your next hero phase. (Dragon Host, High Elves, page 28)"
"You can re-roll any failed hit rolls when attacking with the Runefang so long as you have a bigger and more impressive moustache than your opponent. (Kurt Helborg, The Empire, page 4)"
And so-on.  Now I have nothing against this style of game (doubly-so if you can get a suitably-impressive false moustache and do your best General Melchett impression - BAAAAAHHH!), but I do have issue with them using such a style of game to replace one designed for competitive play and that could support balanced tournaments (whether the game itself was actually balanced or not is another story, of course).

Sadly; there is one more nail for GW's coffin - probably not the last but it's gotta be in the last handful - and its one that explains a hell of a lot of GW's business practices over the last several years.  A news post appeared on an investment website from someone who had shares in GW and attended their annual general meeting.  Over the course of the AGM, the person who posted it realised that GW's priorities are far from what tabletop gamers would want.  The article - Games Workshop AGM: A Relentless Profit Machine - can be boiled down to a few salient points.
  • GW does not conduct market research
  • They assume that just 20% of their customers are actually interested in playing their games and that the rest are just in it for the models
  • They won't go making games like X-Wing, with pre-built and pre-painted models because then they would be a toy company, not a hobby company.
  • Whatever they make from licensed products (mainly the video games but I expect that other games, like the RPGs from Fantasy Flight) is inconsequential because such gamers don't become modellers.
You can read the full article for more details, but I think those get the general point across.  They genuinely and quite literally no longer care about the people actually playing their games.  People have been joking and suspecting this of them for years but getting actual confirmation of it is... well let's just say that faith in the company is probably going to nosedive eventually.

My Predictions
Games Workshop's days are numbered.  Or at least; the days of them actually designing rules are numbered.  It would not surprise me at all if they suddenly change their name to Citadel or Forge World or the like and just become a pure model-making company and we'd have to rely on licensed products or the Black Library to keep their settings alive.

Some of the actual gamers (the speculated '20%', a number I personally call bullshit on, that GW is ignoring) are probably going to start migrating over to Mantic Games - it's basically becoming Games Workshop if it weren't run by profit-mongering assholes (a description that I think holds a lot more water after that article above).  Their two wargames - the fantasy-based Kings of War and the sci-fi Warpath - seem just as good from what I've heard, have some rather interesting gameplay mechanics and the models are a damn-sight cheaper.  Okay; they have a lot less gothic filigree, but that's a personal preference thing and nobody at Mantic's stupid enough to poke the copyright-and-trademark bear.  And Fantasy players can still use their models for Kings of War (40k players might be able to do the same for Warpath, but the factions don't line up as well).  Plus Warpath hasn't killed off its space-dwarves, so there's that.

Most of the other wargames on the market that I know of would be incompatible with the existing GW models.  Sure; you could use them, but in some cases it might feel off and in others they could mess with the gameplay mechanics (ie; Warmachine and Hordes have all of their movement, special attack and line-of-sight rules keyed off the size of the model's base and have four specific sizes - WFB's square bases just wouldn't cut it).  But for those willing to shell out money for a whole new game; there's no lack of them out there.  The aforementioned Warmachine and Hordes, Corvus Belli's Infinity, Malifaux from Wyrd Games, Dropship Commander from Hawk Wargames - those are all just off the top of my head, too.

And aside from that, there's always going to be those Warhammer veterans who keep WFB alive - still running games in their local clubs as long as they can still get models (which, worst-case scenario, they have to start buying off Mantic once GW fully stops production of their WFB minis).


So that's my view of the situation but the big thing that annoys me about AoS replacing Fantasy is that we're finally getting a Warhammer Fantasy video game people have been clamouring for for the last decade but only after the game it's based on has been discontinued.

Anyway; now that all that's out of the way, time to go back to my search for fitting background music for the next video.

Monday 28 September 2015

Blood Bowl 2 Addendum

So there's a few things about Blood Bowl 2 to touch on here that I didn't get to in the video.

Changes from the Living Rulebook 6
I had a link to the rulebook in the video description but BB2 has a few differences from it.  I found these in a forum thread on the Steam boards and I'll try to keep it up to date - and if I find a list from the devs, I'll have it linked here as well.  The bits in brackets is how they are in the LRB.
  • Human Catchers are AV8 (up from AV7)
  • Human Ogres cost 130k gold to hire (down from 140k)
  • Orc Blitzers cost 90k (up from 80k)
  • If you have more than 150,000 gold saved up, everything above that counts towards your Team Value since it's enough to let you buy some of the more expensive pre-match inducements.

cKnoor
cKnoor is a Blood Bowl YouTuber who's been around for a while.  There's a link to it in the forum thread I mentioned in the video description but he did a series of videos to help people get the hang of Blood Bowl.  Even if you're not exactly a newbie coach, it can still be useful to watch some of his matches to try and learn new strategies or tactics or even just to get an idea of how a certain team plays before you try it out.  You can find his channel through here.


Downloadable Content
As I mentioned in the video, other teams will be coming as paid DLC in the future and, while I think a lot of the arguments for having all 20+ teams in the initial launch are being pretty-damn optimistic, there is one that I agree with - namely that if it turns out you don't enjoy using a particular team you've bought, you're now out-of-pocket.  Sure; it may not be a huge amount of money (some of the more plausible guesstimates I've seen have been around the $5-$10 mark) but it would still be annoying.
One easy way around this, though, is if Cyanide implement a trio of pre-made teams of each race to the base game.  So if the Amazons get added, the core game gets three pre-made Amazon teams you can try out in friendly matches without having to buy the Amazon DLC.  The base game already has pre-made teams for the existing ones; three per species and each at different Team Values (1000, 1300 and 1600 for those curious) and you can still play against DLC teams you don't own so the files for them'll already be in the game.  For all I know, they've already done this but I have no way to check - don't know anyone who owns BB2 but doesn't also own the Wood Elves and Lizardmen.  I'll ask around on the forums and update this when I have an answer.

Cyans
These are an in-game currency that you earn independently of your teams.  There's nothing to use them on at the moment, but Cyanide have said that you'll be able to spend them on cosmetic stuff for your teams, like new jersey colours, stadiums and so-on.  Nothing that affects gameplay, though, purely cosmetic stuff.  I've heard some people say you'll be able to buy Cyans with real money, but nothing official.  It wouldn't surprise me, to be honest, especially since they'll only be used for cosmetic stuff.
I just hope that it'll let you change which stadium you picked for your team - the Hellborn Hooligans ended up with a Skaven-themed stadium since that was the closest to a Chaos-oriented one.  It'll still be named "The Elfblender", though, that's not gonna change.

The Hellborn Hooligans
This next section's just me raving about my Chaos team so if you're not interested in some of the narratives that can form from how your team progresses, you can skip it.
So these guys were the first real team I used in the original Blood Bowl game and, unlike the team's current incarnation, I just let the game name the players for me.  One of whom was a Beastman named Gnar'tigor.  As I took the team through the various cups in the single-player campaign, they kept growing and growing.  Gnar'tigor himself did plenty of growing as well, soon becoming the Hooligans' best player, both thanks to skills he'd picked up and a variety of mutations - a second head, a third arm, claws... he left piles of broken bodies in his wake as he scored touchdowns and even a smashed ankle didn't slow him down.
But then the Hooligans faced one particular Wood Elf team and partway through the match, one of the spindly tree-huggers got lucky.  Gnar'tigor got brain damage.

Between the two injuries and his own value as a player, I had no choice but to let him go; he was bloating the team value more than he was contributing.  But because I'm a big fan of narrative and story, I always imagined that Gnar'tigor took over as the team's PR representative and took to handling the team's publicity - appearing in various CabalVision ads for their sponsors, handling press conferences and so-on.  And while he's normally very polite and well-spoken, his second head would occasionally spout a stream of vulgar-yet-creative profanity towards anyone in the vicinity or on whatever the main head was talking about.  A lot of it aimed at wood elves, to no great surprise.  And during the matches, he'd be up there in the crowd alternately cheering the Hooligans on and beating the ever-loving crap out of the opposition's fans (and any wood elves regardless of who they supported).

With the team's current incarnation, I hired an assistant coach and always imagined him as being Gnar'tigor having shifted from publicity to helping the team train, lending his experience to the new lineup.  Either way; the team now has his son in the roster, Gnar'tigor the Second.  So far he hasn't been blessed by Tzeentch as much as his dad, but he's well on his way to being our premier ball carrier thanks to his first level-up getting him an Agility boost.  At the very least, his mutations'll be along more focussed lines; I was still learning the game when his father was on the team so I'll try to be turning him into a dedicated runner/thrower/catcher, etc.  He may not rack up his dad's body count, but he'll still be making a name for himself.

The Dice
Yes, I know I harped on about these in the video but I just want to re-iterate.  Every dice roll can fail, every dice still has a 1-in-six chance of coming up a 1 (or an Attacker Down on the Block Dice).  I don't care what stats are involved or how skilled you think the player is, they can always screw up.  If you don't get your head around this and accept it, you won't enjoy this game.  If you ever say the dice are being inconsistent (which is an actual complaint I've seen on the Steam forum for the game), I want you to stop and think back over that statement.  At what point are dice rolls supposed to be consistent?  That's why I tried to emphasise where the real strategy in the game is; minimising the risks your team takes while forcing the other team to take a lot of risks.



Anyway; got another video planned, just need some good background music.  We'll be trading in the grass and pigskin for neodurium and titanium and the digital for the physical.

Saturday 26 September 2015

Shadowrun Hong Kong: Addendum



As the blog's description says; this is stuff that didn't make it into my Shadowrun Hong Kong video, either due to a lack of time or just plain forgetting (or because I was worried it'd lead into a long-winded ramble).

Protagonist's Background
So HK has a slightly more defined background for your player-character than the last two games.  In Dead Man's Switch, the only things that were nailed down was that your character was betrayed on a run against Renraku that went south and you're returning to Seattle for the first time since that night, while in Dragonfall all that was nailed down was that your character was fluent in German and worked with Monica in the past, but never met her current team.

In Hong Kong, they defined things a bit more for your character.  Firstly; your character and Duncan both grew up in the Redmond Barrens in Seattle before being taken in by Raymond Black.  He got you and Duncan an education, got you out of the slums, then eight years ago you left, the reason is up to the player but it ended with you being thrown into a corporate-run prison, a full-on blacksite with no communication with the outside world.  You were only released because the company that owned the prison was bought out by someone else who decided to save some money by closing the place down and giving you some money to compensate for your incarceration.  You travel to Hong Kong because Raymond contacts you for the first time since your imprisonment and asks you to meet him at the Kowloon docks.

It was a surprise to me, as it makes Hong Kong the first time your character isn't actually a shadowrunner prior to the events of the story.  I've seen mixed opinions on that; some people are like me and are happy with it while others feel like it's restricting the narrative side of your character a bit too much.

Voiced Cutscenes
The game also has hand-drawn animatics with voice-overs.  If you've played any of the Homeworld games, they're much the same as the between-mission cutscenes there.  Otherwise you can just find a Let's Play of the game on YouTube - there's one right at the beginning of the campaign, actually plays before character creation so you shouldn't have to wait too long for it.  I'd actually suggest against watching a Let's Play too far unless you're happy with spoilers.  There's a moment in the first area that loses a lot of impact if you don't know it's coming.  Not gonna say any more or I'll ruin it in the exact way I'm wanting not to.

Goblinoid Character Models
Anyone who's played Returns or Dragonfall probably noticed that Gobbet and Duncan, the two ork companions, were both very slim compared to the orks in the earlier games.  This was one change I was very glad to see as I hated how top-heavy orks and trolls looked in Returns and Dragonfall, especially as the artwork from the tabletop game show them with much more human-like proportions.  This motivational poster actually uses artwork from the 4th edition core rulebook - one of the pre-gen example characters, an ork gunslinger adept - and that's how orks normally look in the Shadowrun artwork.  Well... okay; this one's a particularly-attractive one but you get my point.

Either way; I was glad to see that orks and trolls looked more like they did in the source's artwork.  Worst bit of the old models was how a lot of them had mouths that looked like their teeth were growing straight out of their lips, which is something I've never seen in any Shadowrun artwork.  Humanis would probably have more traction if all orks and trolls were that ugly!

Dialogue Quantity
I think I mentioned this in the video, but just re-iterating it here to be sure.  There is a lot of dialogue in SR: Hong Kong and there's even a long thread on the Steam forum for the game titled "Why is this an interactive novel?"  I don't think I need elaborate on the thread creator's opinion when he gave it a title like that.  Personally; I think it's got a decent amount, none of the conversations seem rushed and I always felt that the conversations you could have with your teammates in some other RPGs (like Mass Effect or the KOTOR games) ended just as I was getting into it.  That being said; I can see why some people might find it to be too much dialogue.  I'm quite a big reader so I actually like having this much stuff to read.

Funnily enough; I think I recall a thread making the exact same complaint about Shadowrun Returns - which had a hell of a lot less dialogue than Hong Kong - not long after that came out.

Conclusion
So I know I took a while to get this out after the last video and that it's taking me a while to get another video up and I'm sorry for that.  The issue is that my videos normally end up so long that it can take anywhere from six to ten hours to upload and I don't like leaving my computer on overnight if I can avoid it.  Combine that with the monthly cap on our downloads (and that I think uploads count to it as well) and you can see why I'm trying to stagger my uploads.  There's also only one day of the week that really works for uploads and that's Thursdays - it's the day I'm at home the least thanks to work and the local wargaming night so not having internet access at home doesn't really bother me.  Thankfully I've got other arrangements (which I won't go into here) that means I'm not leaving the computer on all day in an empty house but if I haven't got a video edited and ready to go by Wednesday night, then it'll be another week at the earliest before it's uploaded.

I'll make exceptions if the finished video file is only about 2.5GB - that can usually be uploaded in just six hours or so so I can start it before work and it should be done by the time I get home, but with how I ramble on sometimes that's not guaranteed.  Hopefully having this blog to fall back on'll help me keep video lengths reasonable so I can upload them any day.

The next one is planned, but thanks to discoveries I've made since I recorded it I'll have to do it over again.  Not too happy with how the commentary on the old version turned out anyway - kinda focused too much on the game's mechanics over how it plays and I left out some very important considerations you should take into account before buying it.

Anyway, see you guys in the next video.  Hopefully it'll be as bloody as the title'll imply.