d50 Shades of Grey(hawk)

The link is a delightful post from the Challenge Rating 25 blog about the survey yesterday for D&D Next asking about iconic spells.

The survey seemed a bit silly to me, but if it helps make D&D better, I'm for it. I was not a fan of 4e, and play Pathfinder now. But I am excited to see what they do with D&D Next, not all of 4e needs to go, minions are a good concept.

But here is the hilarity.

http://challengerating25.blogspot.com/2012/07/im-helping.html

Uncertain is the new normal.

Hey everyone, Bryce here, with some quick 6th edition thoughts.

 Jack and I are currently studying for the Texas bar exam, so here are a few of my precious moments with some thoughts on the new edition.

 Full disclosure I have not had the chance to play yet, though I have read through the rules and have an ok grasp on them for not having a chance to play.

 What I'm going to talk about today is what I feel is one of the biggest changes to the system. Uncertainty is a big part of the game now.

 Yep, I know we can premeasure and a few other things like hull points do make some things a little more certain. But the pervasive uncertainty is what I think a lot of people have a problem with.

 So the elephant in the uncertainty china shop, charging. Charge range has become 2d6. Yes "average" is 7, but if my dice always rolled average I would on Team America. But that is only a third of the uncertainty in charging. Since you roll charge range AFTER taking any casualties from the front for overwatch, that can really mess up any careful planning. Or it might not. Who knows?

The last part is the uncertainty of overwatch itself, it is fairly hard to hit a charging model, but if you can even get a few you can stop a whole charge and leave an assault unit out to dry.

Just this one example of charging into assault is indicative of the uncertainty I feel from reading the rules and as an under current in a lot of posts and comments. We can count on few things to come through for us anymore. I know that worries me.

So is it new rules, or is the the uncertainty of the new rules that is bothering people most?

Lords of Waterdeep: Review

Hey everyone,

Here at DissentingDice we do other things besides school work, miniatures games and drinking. We play board games and drink too!

Today I am going to be talking about the relativly new board game from Wizards of the Coast, Lords of Waterdeep. This is a Euro game (from what I can gather that means victory points, meeples and no dice), based upon vying for power in the Forgotten Realms metropolis of Waterdeep.

BOX PIC

This is a worker placement game similar to Stone Age, yes I am sure there are more common worker placement games but I have board game hipster friends. 

Each round players take turns assigning their agents (see it's still a law school blog after all!) to different buildings in Waterdeep to gain certain benefits. 

GAMEBOARD PIC

Here is the game board, this is a much better show than tell game. 

Alright this gives you an idea of what this all looks like. You have your meeple agents assigned to different buildings. You have quest cards, and the additional locations you can build and even some of the little adventurer cubes. 

So, the point of the game is to assign your agents to locations to get adventurers and gold so that you can finance sending them off to their doom on quests that gain you more power and influence. 

Here we have one of the buildings with an agent on it. 

BUILDING PIC

So in this example the blue player has put one of their agents onto The Grinning Lion Tavern, this space only has room for one agent, as shown by the little outline under him. When your agent is place on this spot you receive two black cubes, which are rogues in the game. You need these adventurers and gold to complete quests, which give you victory points and other resources.

CARDS PIC

As seen from these examples quests come in 5 flavors, those correspond to the two secret quest types each player gets bonus points from. This is where the game is won and lost, with end of game bonuses based on your secret goals.
On the quest cards you see little cubes and squares with holes. These represent the adventurers and money needed to complete the quest. Rewards are typically victory points but can be more resources or a plot quest which gives an ongoing benefit.
You get quests by putting an agent on one of three quest slots, you then choose from the 4 available quest cards. One slot gives a quest card and two gold, the second gives a quest and an intrigue card (we'll get to those in a minute) and the third resets the available quests and you choose from there.

Well, we have talked about worker placement and quests, now for intrigue cards.
Here is one:

INTRIGUE PIC

These cards can only be played if you put an agent on a certain slot. But there are three open slots at that location. So you put your agent on the slot, you then play an intrigue card, just do what it says on it. Then at the end of the round you can reassign the agent to an available slot. The spaces that allow intrigue cards to be played are labeled 1,2,3, so the order of this reassignment is resolved that way. Essentially you get two turns with one of your guys.

You can also use an agent to purchase a building, shown at the bottom of the picture with the whole board. This makes more slots to put people on and gives the players more options. It also has a Monopoly aspect, if someone else uses the building you own, you get some benefit too. Just like Monopoly but actually fun.

Speaking of actually fun, this game is a blast. I have played four times now, with people of various levels of gaming exposure, everyone has loved it. It only takes a turn maybe two before even non gamers start really getting into it. I have played with three and with the full five people. I really wish Wizards would release a 6 player expansion (there is an extra slot for it) so more people can play. Different numbers of players means different numbers of agents, so that everything balances and flows better.

I would highly recommend this game to anyone looking for a great way to spend time with friends.

Dystopian Wars, First Impression

Good morning ladies and gents, I'm coming to you live from the local Chick-fil-a's wifi. I do really wish they were a proud corporate sponsor of us here at DissentingDice. I didn't get into blogging for the money, but chicken sandwiches and waffle fries would be nice. 

So the local gamemonger Aaron of Stormcrow Games and I played out first game of Dystopian Wars yesterday. 

We had a blast, don;t know if we got everything correct, but it was fun. The thrills and spills of exploding dice make the game very swingy, but in a fun way.   The rules are simple on their face, but quite complex when things start interacting with each other. Though we really only had to keep going back again and again to the rulebook when tiny fliers were involved. Most other things were either easy to remember or on the cheat sheet. 

Though, the biggest lesson I learned was deploy your battle ship near the battle, I put mine on the flank and with out a kinetic generator I was well into the game before he started making much of a difference. 

Here is the only picture I managed to snap while we were playing. 

Aaron's fresh out of the box Empire of the Blazing Sun, and my more and more painted FSA. 

I put shield generators on everything that could take them, it did lead to some stupid durability on the cruisers. Having only two dice can mean the difference between 1 damage and a critical hit, or if you roll sixes just negate a huge attack. 

However, this increased durability was at the cost of offensive power, Aaron used his rockets to good effect by chipping away at my frigates or menacing my cruisers. Having the shield brings the cruisers down only the single forward gun (and an aft gun with a 90 degree arc) at least the battle ship still has it's broadsides.  I think having that long range firepower to soften the enemy or sink a few small ships on the way in would be a good idea. The battleship being all but immune to single digit dice rolls because of the shield sounds like a much better idea on it. 

Also bombers don't seem that cool to me, and it's  hard to use the bombs. They use fixed channels, and the bombs are out the back. So you would need to do the sort of hilarious turning maneuvers that Aaron did so that he could fire bombs out the back at my cruisers. Something we messed up on, bombs are only 4 inch range, not range band 1 i.e. 8 inches, so they are even more of something you don't try to use and just get lucky when you can. Lame.  However my bombers did finally sneak up obscured and throw a lot of torpedoes at his battleship, actually doing some damage to the monster. 

All in all this was a really fun game, the rules are very different from GW games or Warma/Hordes, there are a lot of moving parts and it will take some getting used to. Though after we figured our that we can pre-measure that would have made things easier. But driving into the middle of the enemy and unleashing guns all over the place was really cool, as Aaron showed me beating the crap out of my cruiser squadron with some frigates. 

So, yet another ringing endorsement of Dystopian Wars. 

Dystopian Wars, Part 2

Yesterday we talked about models, today we talk about the rules.

Alright, the name of the game in Dystopian Wars is rolling handfuls of dice while making explosion and gun noises. The basic mechanic is take a certain number of dice(Attack Dice AD), roll them and count the number of certain results. This is then compared to the amount of damage that a model can withstand(Damage/Critical Rating DR/ CR), if the number of hits equals or exceeds the damage rating, a hit (Hull Points HP) is done, if the number of hits equals or exceeds the critical rating a critical hit is done, and you roll on a critical table for bad stuff.

The fun part of all these handfuls of of dice is that except in a very few instances they explode on a 6, which counts as two hits and can be re-rolled. Allowing even the most puny frigate to get a lucky punch and sink a battleship. This is also consistent throughout all types of attacks, cannons, torpedoes, rockets, tesla coils and friggin lasers. Except to hit the tiny flyer tokens(various types of normal sized airplanes), those dice do not explode, though on a 6 one of the tiny flyer tokens is destroyed

Here is an example of a stat card to better illustrate these delightfully simple mechanics above.

Here you can see the attack and defense stats I just talked about.
You have a weapon grid that shows the number of dice that are rolled at certain "range bands" each of 8 inches. So range band one is from the ship to 8 inches, range band 2 is from 8 to 16 inches and so on. With the maximum of 32 inch range these little ships can hit a rather large territory. However most weapons roll more dice the closer they are, but some get more effective the farther you are away like the rockets the Americans and Japanese are fond of.

Also on this card you have the movement, Assault Points(AP), Anti Air (AA), Concussion Charges( CC), and Ram Rating(RR) of the ship. Assault Points are used to board other ships with rocket marines. Yes all infantry in the game (though they are much too small to see at the 1/1200 scale) have jet packs! These troops are resisted with the AA rating of the ship being attacked, with hits negating hits from the marines. Damage is then done to the AP score of the ship being attacked. If reduced to 0 the attacker captures the ship as a prize.

AA is also used against rockets and airplane attacks that are close enough. CC is used against torpedoes and submarines.
The back of the stat card lists the Model Assigned Rules, special rules that make the models more than just moving handfuls of dice to throw. The type and class of the model and what percentage of your force can be that type. As well as the firing arcs for all weapons and the number of models in a squadron.

Here are examples of the different firing arcs for different types of weapons. 

Copyright Spartan Games. 

The firing arcs look like a lot of where the game is played, your movement sets up the shots, you make turns and move so your guns can do their job. You can have a huge broadside and rockets and tesla coils, but none of it matters unless the enemy is in the firing arc for those guns. 

Rockets, tesla coils, and torpedos typically are in fixed arcs. So that means straight out from that facing of the model, it is the width of the model or base for land models. Turrets have more flexibility with targeting, but their firepower can be reduced as you take damage, whereas rockets and torpedoes aren't. 

Now for a little more on the combat mechanics now that we've talked about the exploding dice and firing arcs. Guns are also divided into Primary and Secondary weapons, this affects the roll to hit or 

The normal dice roll for an ordnance attack (guns, rockets, torpedoes etc.) hits on a 4, 5, or 6. A red six is rather cleverly used in the rules to denote that this type of roll explodes, if the to hit number does not include a 6, then the dice roll does not explode on a 6. 

There are certain situations that can affect the number needed to score a hit, such as various MAR's that add or subtract from a roll. Other ships and terrain can block or obscure line of sight, this reduces the number of attack dice that a ship uses. 

Alright everyone, that is it for now, there is a lot to this game, but it seems like it all meshes quite well. 

Dystopian Wars, Part 1

Long time no type my dear readers,

We have been quite busy with the whole law school portion of this blog.

But that didn't stop me from heading down to the wonderland that is Austin, TX. The State's mecca of culture, government and most importantly gaming. I was able to pick up the starter fleet for the Federated States of America faction in Dystopian Wars.

Today is about the models, I'll get into the game and the fluff later this week.

I love the look of the models, that is what drew me in the first place. I grew up on a lake where we used to have a paddle wheel river boat that did tour cruises, so those big armored wheels spoke to me.

Here is my first completed model, one of a squadron of cruisers, with either a shield or kinetic generator, there is no express differentiation in the book between the two visually, one of the few straight problems with the rules.

Holy crap the details on this little resin piece. Rivets, windows, doors, wood planking. The detail on this is beautiful. There was minimal flash, just on the corners between and along the edges. The only casting error on 13 ships, 10 flyer tokens with tiny airplanes and 2 metal bombers was a small bubble missing on one of the smoke stacks on a cruiser. That's it, ONE problem. Spartan games makes GW look like the resin amateurs that they are. All of the promises made about finecast are represented in Spartan stuff, this is what GW wishes they could do with resin. Also, the prices are not bad for this stuff at all, this starter box with a whole small fleet(about 725 points worth) was $54.99. 

Another shot to show the crazy detail on these things, check out the fucking stairs and catwalks! Also, door and windows, I've not decided how to paint the tiny windows yet. 

Here is a front on view, this is the same cannon as on the battleship, it's not as powerful but still delightfully huge. 

Finally we have the two other cruisers that I am working on, with the other two add on pieces, the other generator and the standard rocket battery. 

There we have it folks, a start on a Dystopian Wars fleet. Once you figure out the colors you want to use, and get used to to how small and detail packed these things are I feel like I could paint them up pretty rapidly. 

Too Little and Way Too Late.

Alright, so everyone has seen the Thunderwolf Cavalry models.

Oh, you haven't here they are via Ogre Stronghold.
Commentary after HUGE pictures.

So, if this is all they were going to do, why were these not released either day 1 or very soon afterwards? GW not making these specific models has created several small miniatures companies, who have then gone to make more things. Many many players have found non GW alternatives to use for TWC, people who would have bought these models if they had been available.

Hell, I don't particularly care for them, but I would have used them for my 9 Thunder Cavalry. Also, according to BoLS the TWC will be $54 for the three. I've spent much less than that on mine, using 2nd hand, or swapped models.
Though I am very glad that these look nothing like Canis. They did a good job, I just think quite a few of 3rd party ones have looked just as good. Or even captured the armored/ mechanical feel a lot better.

However, these are plastic. Which is a huge plus in my book.

Then we get to what I am most excited about, and going to actually purchase. The Fenrisian Wolves!

I think they look great, much more dynamic than the goblin wolves, and more wolf like than chaos hounds. The chaos hounds always felt too mutated even in my much more heavy metal chaosy looking Space Wolves. I'll be getting at least a box of these to be wolf lord escorts. I love it when a wolf takes a lascannon to the face.