Hey all, not sure if this is really the right place for this post, it's a more general comment on the concept of Inquisimunda as a whole, so might be more suited to a separate discussion? Mods, feel free to move it out if you think it's more appropriate.
Personally speaking, my feeling is that the core goal of Inquisimunda as a game is to enjoy the variety, character building and RPG fun of Inquisitor with the tabletop rules simplicity of Necromunda. With that in mind, the question I'm raising is: should our Inquisimunda ruleset focus more on character creation vs. character progression?
Firstly, I'll highlight my reasoning from a fluff perspective. Necromunda is entirely suited to a campaign based progression system, taking a group of young punks and exploring their adventures, all the good and bad experiences they go through, the skills they learn and the injuries they suffer as they grow to be legends of the Underhive.
Inquisitor (and by extension, Inquisimunda) is not like this. Here the fluff states that each Inquisitor (or Leader of whatever type) gathers what is essentially a group of specialists, typically highly trained/experienced veterans at the top of their respective fields. This means that these characters are already very good at what they do, but conversely means that it is probably harder for them to learn new abilities.
To my mind, this suggests that the options given at the warband creation stage should be more open and extensive - perhaps allowing players to purchase multiple increases/skills (within reason!) rather than just one or two - but that progression through the course of a campaign should be harder, or even not included at all.
I think this makes more sense from a balanced ruleset perspective too. By including options for species, skills, stat increases and expanded equipment at the warband creation stage (which, to be clear, I wholeheartedly agree should ALL be included for the fluff reasons above) we vastly increase the complexity of the 'standard' gangs. Then when you add in the campaign progression system, that complexity gets even harder to predict or balance. But by leaving campaign rules out, or at least leaving them as a list of suggestions for individual GMs to create for their own campaigns/players, we would be able to simplify the whole process?
That follows the precedent set by Inquisitor. You're free to create whatever character/group you want, with whatever stats, guns, skills you want. Of course, if you then want to picture that same character/group at a later (or earlier) point in their lives, you can also do that by modifying them up or down when you design their profiles. This also does away with the problem of how to include Gang Ratings, Underdog bonuses, etc. Once you decide a TG limit, you should get a reasonably balanced game.
Of course, there are issues with this approach:
The Ready Reckoner used for points in the Inquisitor Rulebook is a little too simplistic and open to abuse, but that could perhaps be solved by having some form of scaling costs* for stats/skills to prevent players from building super-specialised-but-still-cheap unbeatable monsters.
*as an idea, something along the lines of: if you had purchased a BS upgrade, then you'd pay an additional premium if you wanted to buy a second BS upgrade/shooting skill, and a further, even higher premium if you then selected a third shooting-related upgrade.
Such a system also makes having a GM (or at very least, two players who are more interested in telling a story and having fun rather than winning at all cost) much more helpful. To be honest though, Necromunda, Inquisitor and Inquisimunda have - imho - always been the kind of games where that is true.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts on what Inquisimunda as a concept is all about, and how we could go about implementing that as a ruleset, and figured it was worth throwing out for discussion while we're at this early stage of adapting the N17 rules.
Tl;dr - Should we allow more freedom of options (stats, skills, etc) at warband creation and less at campaign progression?
Personally speaking, my feeling is that the core goal of Inquisimunda as a game is to enjoy the variety, character building and RPG fun of Inquisitor with the tabletop rules simplicity of Necromunda. With that in mind, the question I'm raising is: should our Inquisimunda ruleset focus more on character creation vs. character progression?
Firstly, I'll highlight my reasoning from a fluff perspective. Necromunda is entirely suited to a campaign based progression system, taking a group of young punks and exploring their adventures, all the good and bad experiences they go through, the skills they learn and the injuries they suffer as they grow to be legends of the Underhive.
Inquisitor (and by extension, Inquisimunda) is not like this. Here the fluff states that each Inquisitor (or Leader of whatever type) gathers what is essentially a group of specialists, typically highly trained/experienced veterans at the top of their respective fields. This means that these characters are already very good at what they do, but conversely means that it is probably harder for them to learn new abilities.
To my mind, this suggests that the options given at the warband creation stage should be more open and extensive - perhaps allowing players to purchase multiple increases/skills (within reason!) rather than just one or two - but that progression through the course of a campaign should be harder, or even not included at all.
I think this makes more sense from a balanced ruleset perspective too. By including options for species, skills, stat increases and expanded equipment at the warband creation stage (which, to be clear, I wholeheartedly agree should ALL be included for the fluff reasons above) we vastly increase the complexity of the 'standard' gangs. Then when you add in the campaign progression system, that complexity gets even harder to predict or balance. But by leaving campaign rules out, or at least leaving them as a list of suggestions for individual GMs to create for their own campaigns/players, we would be able to simplify the whole process?
That follows the precedent set by Inquisitor. You're free to create whatever character/group you want, with whatever stats, guns, skills you want. Of course, if you then want to picture that same character/group at a later (or earlier) point in their lives, you can also do that by modifying them up or down when you design their profiles. This also does away with the problem of how to include Gang Ratings, Underdog bonuses, etc. Once you decide a TG limit, you should get a reasonably balanced game.
Of course, there are issues with this approach:
The Ready Reckoner used for points in the Inquisitor Rulebook is a little too simplistic and open to abuse, but that could perhaps be solved by having some form of scaling costs* for stats/skills to prevent players from building super-specialised-but-still-cheap unbeatable monsters.
*as an idea, something along the lines of: if you had purchased a BS upgrade, then you'd pay an additional premium if you wanted to buy a second BS upgrade/shooting skill, and a further, even higher premium if you then selected a third shooting-related upgrade.
Such a system also makes having a GM (or at very least, two players who are more interested in telling a story and having fun rather than winning at all cost) much more helpful. To be honest though, Necromunda, Inquisitor and Inquisimunda have - imho - always been the kind of games where that is true.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts on what Inquisimunda as a concept is all about, and how we could go about implementing that as a ruleset, and figured it was worth throwing out for discussion while we're at this early stage of adapting the N17 rules.
Tl;dr - Should we allow more freedom of options (stats, skills, etc) at warband creation and less at campaign progression?
